True Spies Debriefs: Tim Tate on the Spycatcher Scandal
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Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to The Debrief. Here on The Debrief, we catch up with some of our favorite guests from the True Spies archive for a deeper look at the themes, events, and insights that fascinate them. If you like what you hear, subscribe to Spyscape Plus for more exclusive debriefs at plus.spyscape.com.

Last week on True Spies, you heard from Tim Tate, author of the new book To Catch a Spy, and two-time True Spies guest. This week, True Spies producer Morgan Childs is going behind the scenes to untangle the connections between Tim's two episodes. You'll learn how KGB mole Michal Golianewski and MI5 spy catcher Peter Wright intersected.

You'll also hear how, in the process of reporting his 19th book, Tim learned that he was considered a threat to national security. And if you haven't heard Tim's first True Spies episode yet, pause this episode and search for Agent Sniper in your podcast player. It's an extraordinary story and, fair warning, there are spoilers ahead.

I think the last time we spoke, it was like on the eve of your book release, or it was a couple of weeks before the book came out. I'm curious how you're feeling now, how the reception has been. It's been busy. We've had some really positive responses to the book. It's been covered in the national press here in the UK and any number of interviews for it. And

Sadly, there has been a resounding silence from the government, which I would hope might have responded to the criticisms in the book. But there is time, I guess. You might hope, but it doesn't seem like that's something you would expect at this point. No, one lives in hope rather than expectation, I think.

Well, I wanted to speak about your dealings with the British government. But first, let's go back a little bit and speak about the first episode of True Spies that you appeared on. I think the first time we talked, it was to tell the story of Agent Sniper, who's the Polish KGB agent who was working for the CIA, although he believed he was working for the FBI. Yeah.

And you've said that when you were writing Agent Sniper, your research piqued your interest to go back and look at the spycatcher saga. And I'm curious if you could tell us a bit about how one thing led to another. Sure. Agent Sniper, whose real name was Lieutenant Colonel Michal Golianewski, was a very senior Polish intelligence officer.

in the Cold War era in the 1950s, who simultaneously worked for the KGB as its point man, essentially, in Warsaw. The KGB in Moscow liked to keep an eye on what its satraps in Soviet bloc countries were up to. So Golianewski double-dated, if you want to put it that way. He worked for both Polish intelligence and simultaneously for the KGB in Moscow. And to add to the...

Slight confusion. From the mid to late 1950s onwards, he began working for American intelligence. He approached them, believing, as you say, that he was talking to the FBI at all times, and offered to work as an agent in place for US intelligence. An agent in place is probably the most dangerous person

risky type of spying because you're working for one intelligence agency while simultaneously betraying that intelligence agency or in Golianewski's case those intelligence agencies, Polish and Soviet, to the West. Nonetheless, Golianewski did this for about three and a bit years working undercover

and feeding an absolutely extraordinary amount of unprecedentedly detailed intelligence to the West. In total, more than 1,600 Soviet bloc agents, spies, working in the West. He gave those names to his American intelligence handlers, always believing, as you say, that he was...

Dealing with the FBI because he knew the CIA to have been penetrated by Soviet bloc intelligence. The FBI didn't know who it was dealing with. All they knew was that this mysterious benefactor signed his letters. Sniper, or in German, Heckenschutz. But it was ever so grateful for the information and continued to work with him until...

he defected in January 1961. How does this intersect with Spycatcher and Peter Wright and my new book? Well, in April 1959, and this is at a time when Golianewski was still working undercover as an agent in place in Warsaw, he alerted his American intelligence handlers to the existence of a spy ring in London.

This was the Portland spy ring, as it would eventually become known. And American intelligence, which was in fact the CIA, because they had intercepted Golianewski's communications without telling him, the CIA contacted and flew over to meet with MI5.

in London, and MI6, and said, look, we've got this really strange but thoroughly important agent in place somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. He's identified a spy ring at the heart of the Admiralty, which is betraying very important British naval secrets to the Soviets. We think you ought to know.

One of the officers, the British intelligence officers, who was in on that meeting, that first alarming meeting, was Peter Wright. He was then four years into his career with MI5.

He was, technically, he was their principal scientific officer, but he was just getting started, or about to get started, on his subsequent career with MI5 as a mole hunter, as a man searching for Soviet spies inside British intelligence, politics, the government, the civil service, the establishment, if you want to put it that way.

And when I was doing researching and writing the Golianewski book, Agent Sniper, I was struck by this because Wright was clearly, as he wrote about in his own book, Spycatcher, was clearly impressed and deeply concerned by Golianewski's revelations. And it got me wondering, well, whatever happened to Peter Wright and whatever happened to Spycatcher?

And I was a journalist at the time of what became known as the Spycatcher Saga. I was a youngish reporter on newspapers and on radio. And I remember the absolute farcical nature of the trials, because they went to trial in Australia, as they played out. And the British government's utterly absurd behavior

to try and stop Peter Wright from publishing his memoirs, Spycatcher. And I thought, well, that's what actually happened next. And I think I should explore that. Always bearing in mind Wright's very early involvement in the hunt for Soviet block moles inside British intelligence and British law.

the British establishment. Had you read Spycatcher when it first came to the UK? Sure. I mean, yes, I had. Spycatcher was, new readers start here, Spycatcher, Peter Wright's memoirs. He wrote them in 1985. When the British government got wind of this, it launched a

legal proceedings in Australia where Wright lived in retirement to ban the book. And it followed that with legal proceedings in Hong Kong, in New Zealand and in London. And all of these court battles were aimed at having the book banned.

The British government was absolutely determined that Peter Wright should not publish his memoirs. Somewhere in the middle of this labyrinthine tsunami of litigation which the British government launched, a US edition of the book was published. Now, American courts were beyond the reach of the British government, so they were free to publish memoirs.

And it was an absolutely instant blockbuster. It would go on to sell four million copies worldwide. Most of those, the majority of those, in North America. The American edition was imported in huge quantities to the United Kingdom. And the British government, although it toyed with the idea of trying to ban the import...

realised it simply couldn't. People, and I was one of them, were bringing copies in in suitcases...

from their travels inside the US. So I read it almost as soon as it was published in the US and brought my copy home and read it again. Aha. So, I mean, this is because Tim Tate, the young journalist and truth seeker, you know, his interest was piqued in this idea that there was something out there that the government didn't want widely distributed? Or what was it about the story that so attracted you at the time?

I mean, I was hardly unique. And it's very kind of you to say young. I think youngish is probably the most just. That was a time, the 1980s were a time when Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government was simultaneously...

both humongously popular with sections of the British public and absolutely reviled by other sections. And journalists throughout Britain were deeply, deeply sceptical of Thatcher and what her government was doing. She launched protests.

it's fair to say, a political revolution when she came into office. And she shifted pretty much everything in not just politics, but in the shape of the country. And part of the...

Obsession, I suppose, that journalists like me, and I was merely one of many, had with the Thatcher government, was Thatcher's absolute obsessive control or determination to control information, particularly news.

about what Britain's spies got up to. And so that's why my interest was piqued. Here was, and as I say, I was very far from alone. Here was my government, the British government, trying to suppress the memoirs of a very senior former MI5 officer. And those memoirs told a story which was...

Deeply alarming, Wright revealed habitual, routine law-breaking by MI5. As he put it, we bugged and burgled our way across London at the state's behest while pompous, bowler-hatted civil servants pretended to look the other way. And they did. I mean, they...

They tapped into the telephone lines of foreign embassies, both friendly and hostile. They broke into people's houses. They broke into offices. They stole keys to do this. They copied, they stole documents. They behaved as if, MI5 behaved as if the law didn't apply. And the reason for that was that

It probably didn't. MI5 didn't officially exist and therefore it had no actual controls on its behaviour. So my interest at the time was, here's this man blowing the whistle on what he and his colleagues had got up to and here's the British government absolutely determined to silence him and any journalist. And there were scores of us.

would have taken that as a challenge. Sure, yes, that makes sense.

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Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, socializing,

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. I'm curious how consequential...

a character you see Golianovsky being in Wright's life? I mean, what does Wright's career look like without Golianovsky? That's a complicated question with a complicated answer, but I'll do my best.

Golianewski was a vitally important spy for the West in the early to mid Cold War period. I mean, if you look at the case, the Soviet bloc spies he helped expose, they were some of the most serious spies.

cases of penetration throughout the West, not just in Britain, not just in the US, but in the West's European allies and in NATO itself. Golianevsky's very brave revelations work on behalf of the West put a severe dent in Moscow's determination and efforts to penetrate Britain and

America, the West, and NATO. What he provided to Wright was immensely important in Wright's burgeoning career as a mole hunter. What he gave to Wright, particularly relating to the Portland spy ring, and again, for listeners who don't know, the Portland spy ring was a group of Soviet illegals,

Soviet citizens working under false names, under deep cover in Britain, who controlled a handful of British disaffected personnel inside the Admiralty and got them to hand over details of some of Britain's most sensitive naval and military secrets. Why it

intersects with Wright's mole hunting is because although Golianewski gave Wright and MI5 the evidence which led to the breaking of the Portland spy ring, the arrest of the British traitors, if you want to put it that way, and the apprehension of the four Soviet illegals, the spy masters, those people working under deep cover. What

troubled Wright, and it was a thread he began to pull at, was that the key figure in this, the spymaster, a man called Conan Melody, who operated under a pseudonym, was caught surprisingly easily. And Wright said...

This is odd. Why would such a very important spy-runner, working under such well-established deep cover,

be caught so easily by us. And he went back to what Golianewski had warned. And one of the things Golianewski had said was, you need to be careful. I know this from my dealings with the KGB, that they are prepared to sacrifice an agent, a senior agent, a senior spy runner, if they believe that would protect them.

a more senior, a more important spy. So in other words, they'll sacrifice a pawn to protect a king. And the more right look... And he came to the conclusion that all MI5's operations against Soviet bloc targets in the mid to late 50s had failed. He said, this looks to me as though...

Conan Malody was sacrificed deliberately by Soviet bloc intelligence to protect another far more senior Soviet bloc penetration agent. And that, amongst numerous other similar leads, led Wright to start pulling at the threads of evidence of penetration of MI5.

And that is where things got very interesting. I understand you've had a little bit of trouble dealing with MI5 and requesting information from them. I wonder if you could talk about their response to your request for information about Golinovsky specifically. Sure. Again, new readers start here. We have in this country and have had for some 20 odd years a Freedom of Information Act.

And that Freedom of Information Act, in theory, means that all public body government files and documents are notionally available to the public which paid for them. You can request them under the Freedom of Information Act. It doesn't work like that in practice, but that's another story. However, the Freedom of Information Act has an exclusion, and that one of those exclusions...

is MI5. MI5 is specifically insulated from FOIA, as the Act is known. You cannot, I cannot, no journalist or researcher can submit a Freedom of Information Act request to MI5. That's very different to the way the equivalent Act operates in the US.

In the US, MI5's equivalent is, crudely, the FBI. You can, and I do, routinely, FOIA the FBI. MI6's equivalent, and MI6 is similarly insulated here, in the US is the CIA. You can, and I did, FOIA the CIA and get their documents. I asked MI5 on Golianewski...

I know you have documents, I know you have files relating to Koliunovsky. Would you consider releasing them, please? And MI5, to its credit, although it doesn't have to by law, sometimes does release its files after they reach the age of 50, so...

When they get to their 50th birthday, MI5, in its own inscrutable fashion, decides some of these files can be released to the National Archives. So I asked MI5, I know you have files on Golianewski. I know because I've got excerpts from them from the CIA. Would you please release them?

And eventually, several months later, I got a brief note back from MI5 saying, yeah, yeah, we do have a number of files on Golianewski, but you can't have them. We're not releasing them because it would not be safe or appropriate to do so. Now, there's nothing I can do to make it change its mind.

I think it's a great sadness because were those files to be released, a great number of the mysteries which affect still both the Golianewski saga and the Peter Wright saga would suddenly come into rather clearer focus. Keep going. What are you thinking of when you say that? Well, Golianewski warned, and this is where...

the intersection becomes more concrete, if you like, between him and Wright. Golianovsky warned that there was inside MI5, quotes, a middle-ranking officer who was a spy for the Soviet Union, a spy for Moscow. And Golianovsky

Very little was done by MI5 with that information. It managed to get itself entangled in its own weeds, if you like, by examining just about every other possible allegation than that for several years. And then when that all fell apart, it did begin to look for the middle-ranking agent. But quite what happened...

as a result of that, has never emerged. Now, I think that if Golianevsky was right, and he was right on many, many things, that the existence of a middle-ranking officer inside MI5 who was busy feeding Britain's secrets to Moscow...

In the 1950s and early 1960s, I think the investigation into that is important. And I think what happened is important. And I think, rightly or wrongly, that the British public, which pays for these investigations and pays for its security service, has a right to know.

There's also the fact that Golianovsky, and this is a spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't heard Tim Tate's first episode, which is utterly remarkable. One detail after another is just hard to get your head around, I feel like, in Golianovsky's story. But the fact that he turned out to claim that he was a Romanov, that he was Alexei Romanov...

I have to wonder if part of MI5's unwillingness to own up to parts of its relationship with this man can be attributed to embarrassment about the way that Golianovsky's story ended up. It would be a guess on my part. I mean, and I'm always kind of reluctant to speculate because, you know, I'm an old school journalist. It was slapped into us in our training decades ago. You don't speculate if you don't know.

Others have speculated exactly that. MI5 most assuredly had a relationship with Mikhail Goyenevsky. In the years before and indeed after, he issued his very public, very bizarre and utterly untruthful claim to be the miraculously surviving son of the last Tsar of Imperial Russia.

I mean, I know it had its relationship, that relationship, because again, from the CIA files I found and others and Golianewski's own files, I found letters to and from Golianewski from MI5, including one account of it delivering unto him as a thank you present,

an antique silver tankard, to say thank you for all his wonderful work. I think that MI5's files on Golianevsky should be public. Yes, there is potential embarrassment in that it continued to deal with Golianevsky long after he proclaimed himself the rightful heir to the Russian imperial throne. But I'm not sure that embarrassment...

Is good enough reason to keep things secret. Say more about this, because you said in Agent Sniper that the CIA slowly sort of began to distance itself from this man and then sort of wash its hands of him. But MI5 continued that relationship significantly longer? For several years afterwards.

All of this period, and roughly speaking, we're talking 1955 to the mid to late 1960s, is the most murky and simultaneously fascinating period of Cold War intelligence. You know, this is the absolute winter depth.

of the Cold War. Cuban Missile Crisis, 1963. This is a time when Moscow and the West were squaring off against each other. Not just...

threatening each other and threatening to bring the world to nuclear annihilation. But both sides were spying on each other as long and as hard and as deep as they could do. And they did this, both sides, in secrecy. If you go public then...

The other side's going to know. It is a fascinating period, and it's a fascinating period because it's a period in which counter-espionage and counter-intelligence, which are two particularly thorny branches of intelligence work, are the most important elements of each side's espionage arsenal.

And very famously, a former CIA head of counterintelligence coined the phrase that counterintelligence is a wilderness of mirrors. If you think of a fun house, the old traditional fun fair, fun house hall of mirrors, where what you see reflected back to you is a distortion of reality. And counterintelligence, particularly in that period, was plagued.

by this, the distorting effect of the wilderness of mirrors. I have a slightly different take on it for what it's worth. I think counterintelligence and counterespionage more accurately can be described as a Rorschach test. You know, a Rorschach test, the ink blot, and you put it in front of someone and say, what do you see? Mm-hmm.

Almost everybody reacts to the raw satch test differently. They each see different things in this odd ink blot in front of them.

Counterintelligence officers, particularly when examining a counterintelligence Rorsach block, will all see different things. And they do so on the basis of their own prejudices, their own experiences, and their own beliefs. So it's an incredibly complex rat's nest of a period. And what made it even more complicated was fake defectors.

fake defectors from the Soviet Union whom Moscow sent over both to the UK and primarily to the US, who muddied the waters and tied both British and American intelligence in knots for a decade. And this is, we're talking, we spoke about Golitsyn at great length in the first episode. Yes, the wretched Anatoly Golitsyn, who, and again,

You'll find some spy writers. I don't consider myself a spy writer, by the way. I'm just an old journalist. I'm afraid your body of work is beginning to say something different, but go on. Well, I like to think of myself as a journalist who tries to find out the truth about stories that should be told rather than someone who's obsessed with spying because I'm not.

Depending on who you talk to, some people will say Anatoly Golitsyn was the bee's knees. He was the greatest asset who the West ever had. Others, and that now includes the CIA and MI5, who were initially taken in by Golitsyn, have concluded that the man was a conman, a fraud, and quite possibly a fake defector. And he screwed up.

counterintelligence operations. He entangled the CIA and MI5 in false...

leads and false mole hunts at a time when they should have been looking for real moles and real traitors. And he did so for a decade. And it not just ruined careers, but it absolutely derailed the investigations into very much more serious evidence.

of Soviet penetration. Yes, it's interesting that you bring up that phrase, wilderness of mirrors, because it was James Jesus Angleton who fell into Galitzin's trap. He sort of fell for him and his narratives, right? Angleton bought Galitzin, swallowed him, hook, line, and sinker. And he gave Galitzin access to

to the CIA's files, the most sensitive counterintelligence files. Galitsin said, yeah, if you let me have a look at those, I can analyse them for you and tell you what they mean on the basis of my experience as a Soviet bloc intelligence officer. I mean, his experience was minimal.

And his access, even when he worked for Soviet bloc intelligence, was limited. But, as you say, Angleton swallowed this and said, sure, you go ahead and do this. And Golitsyn did this, first of all, to denounce anyone else who was a defector. So, Goliathsky, who had provided this treasure trove.

of material proven material material which led to prosecutions material which led to the breaking of spy rings gallitzin said the man's an impostor only i anatoly gallitzin am the real deal and beyond that he then spun a succession of ever wilder and more fantastic theories

in which just about every aspect of politics, government and the intelligence services in the West were controlled by Moscow. Now, was there some evidence that this is true? Yes, but it wasn't provided by Galitsin. Was his, quote, evidence accurate or well-founded? God, no. I mean, the man was a fantasist.

That's where we can intersect again with Peter Wright and MI5 and the spycatcher story. Galitzin and Angleton, and this truly is bizarre, have a meeting with the head of the CIA and with the White House, in which they tell President John Kennedy at the time, yes, the incoming leader, the man who's about to become the Prime Minister of the UK, Harold Wilson...

is a Soviet spy. And I give Kennedy his due, his credit. He said, evidence, please? If you've got some evidence,

provide it and Galitzin couldn't. That didn't stop him and Angleton turning up in London to peddle exactly the same theory inside MI5 and MI5 sort of asked for evidence but didn't get any but nonetheless opened files on Harold Wilson.

under the belief that he was not just a Soviet agent, but that he had been put in place as leader of the Labour Party after the KGB had assassinated his predecessor, the former Labour leader, Hugh Gateskill. It was bonkers. It was utter madness.

It all stemmed from Galitzin, but it didn't stop MI5 from pursuing this and Peter Wright from pursuing this until in the early 70s, Wright and a cabal of rogue MI5 officers conspired to blackmail Wilson with the files that MI5 had been busy accumulating for the last decade.

They conspired to blackmail Wilson into residing from office. Now, that's treason. And it all stems back to Galitzin primarily. I'd like to shift our conversation back to Tim Tate, the journalist, not the spy writer. You know, to paraphrase something that our narrator says in the new episode, there's the story of Peter Wright and then there's the story of Tim Tate researching Peter Wright.

And I know that you applied for a subject access review from the cabinet office to see what files they had on you. For listeners who aren't familiar and for people like me from the States, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what that means and why someone would submit a request like that and why you were inclined to do so.

A subject access review is, it does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a provision of the Data Protection Act here. Anyone, any citizen can apply to any public body, government, national or local, or any other public body and say, I believe you hold information about me. Personal data is how it's defined.

And I have a right under the Act to see this. Please, would you now provide it? And they have a 20-day time limit to respond. I had spent three years asking the Cabinet Office, and again, for listeners who aren't familiar with this, the Cabinet Office is the seat.

of how the British government works. It's the central, main, big office inside Number 10 Downing Street that services the Prime Minister and also controls policy across all departments, including information policy. I spent three years asking the Cabinet Office to release its files

and the Prime Minister's files on the Spycatcher saga. By law, those files should have been released to the National Archives here in London at the very latest in December 2019. So come the middle of 2023, when they still haven't been released,

and I was being given a succession of excuses, delays, obfuscation, and in some cases downright lies by the Cabinet Office as to why we couldn't actually let those files go, I got to the point where I said,

Enough. There is an absolute mountain of correspondence between me and the Cabinet Office. I want to know what it did with that. I want to know who it talked to about me. I want to know what discussions it had with other departments and other agencies. And I have a right to know this. That's the point of a subject access review. And I submitted one. Initially, they sent me back

A small handful of essentially headlines of saying, yeah, you contacted the Cabinet Office here on this date with nothing more. It was meaningless. So I went back and said, no, the law says you have to tell me more. Would you please provide me with information?

It came back after that eventually and said, yeah, we found a bit more. Here's a few more snippets, headlines, nothing substantive, nothing which said what it had done or who it had talked to. Can I ask sort of what sort of things are you seeing? I'm...

Sure. I mean, when I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, there is a lengthy and labyrinthine process where you engage in this dance with the British government and they say,

No, you can't have it because you've asked for too much. Yes, you can have a bit. No, you can't. Well, we've now decided that even the bit we said you could have, you can't have because of this or because of that. So when I asked for the subject access review, what they essentially sent me was a record of me applying for Freedom of Information at Request. It was by no means the full set of

And it didn't say what they had done. And that's what the law requires. That's what the Data Protection Act requires. It requires them to disclose who they talk to and how they decided what they decided. So I'd get a one-liner back saying, yeah, letter from Tim Tate, dated such and such, and then nothing. That's it. So on my second trial,

nudge to them saying, no, you haven't supplied what you need to supply, please supply it. They came back and gave me a few more snippets and then said, we do hold more personal data on you, but we cannot release that to you. And they cited a provision, an exemption in the Data Protection Act. And that exemption, when I looked it up, was odd because what it said in bold terms was that

That to give this information, this personal data it holds about me, to me, would endanger national security. I'm a 68-year-old journalist. My only interaction with the Cabinet Office has been to ask it to release files which, by law, it should have released. How on earth this could possibly happen?

endanger national security, or as it implied that I was a danger to national security, is just absurd. But it's over keeping with everything the British government did during the spycatcher trials, the spycatcher affair, and has done since.

And is it of a keeping with what happens for other journalists and filmmakers and authors? I mean, have you encountered other people with the same? God, yes. I am very far from alone. There is a, I suppose there's a small, smallish group of journalists and researchers, historians in some cases, academic historians who like me, I think,

The Cabinet Office, the British government, views as members of the awkward squad. You know, we're people who ask it to do what the law requires and it doesn't want to. And their experiences are just as bad as mine. I mean, just as bizarre, just as absurd. There was a...

of a parliamentary committee a couple of years ago, which I gave evidence to and many other people gave evidence to, which monitored and is charged with scrutinising the way the Cabinet Office behaves in response to Freedom of Information Act and data protection issues. And it came to the conclusion that the Cabinet Office was failing dramatically, was misbehaving properly

appallingly, and that the Cabinet Office needed to sort itself out. Did it do so? No, not at all. I'm curious if you've grown frustrated with these sorts of events and if they've changed the path for you. I'm curious if book 20 looks like a completely different work because you're just tired of dealing with all of this.

I mean, amusingly, and at least I find it amusing, Book 20, assuming a publisher buys this, is an investigation into what I think is one of the worst untold scandals of the immediate post-war period. And it is that

British intelligence initially, and then followed by American intelligence, U.S. intelligence, knowingly recruited Nazi war criminals, mass murderers, men who had huge volumes of blood on their hands.

as spies against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And beyond that, the British and American intelligence protected these known war criminals from war crimes investigation and prosecution. Why? That doesn't sound amusing, I grant you. LAUGHTER

We, the British, started this process. Oddly, we started it in 1943, two years before the war's end. But very few files are available here in the UK. The National Archives has a very small smattering of files and documents which deal with this. Oddly, a much greater range of British and American documents

and files relating to this, exposing this, are freely available in the US National Archives just outside Washington DC. And so I've spent the past three years photographing

literally tens of thousands of pages of individual documents and files which document this appalling scandal. In the UK, you can't get these files. We keep them secret. The absurdity is that all you have to do is get on a plane to Washington DC, nip up to the archives at College Park, and you can photograph them to your heart's content.

Well, I'm curious to see the results of this. You're doing amazing work and you've had such an extraordinary career. It's really it's such a treat to be able to speak with you and really an honor to get to hear about your experience. I'm just an old school journalist. No more and no less.

But like every good old school journalist, journalists of my generation, we have an instinctive revulsion for official secrecy. And we have a particular revulsion for genuine scandals being covered up by governments which would rather not face the embarrassment and or the prosecution for what they did. And that's all I do.

And I try and present them as stories which people find interesting enough to read. Well, government secrecy isn't the only reason that there are fewer and fewer old school journalists. So I'm glad a few of you are still out there. Still breathing. Thank you, Tim. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Morgan. And thank you for having me back.

Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief. We hope you enjoyed that conversation between our producer Morgan Childs and Tim Tate.

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My partner and I, Steve, worked on the search of infamous narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar. You know, we use the term in ILG, you want to cut the head off the snake.

Still, there are perks to hunting notorious drug dealers.

As Javier quickly found out. It was 25% for danger pay and 25% for hazardous pay. So it was basically 50% above your salary. So the danger pay is because of the car bombs, the assassinations that Pablo Escobar had paid. True Spies, the classics from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.