The Ultimate Cold War Spy Story

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

A Soviet double agent at the top of his game, a deadly game of cat and mouse with the KGB and one of the most daring escapes of the Cold War from the very heart of Moscow. In this archive episode, Dan talks to author Ben Macintyre about the life of Oleg Gordievsky and what might be the ultimate Cold War Spy story. Appalled by the brutality of the Soviet regime Gordievsky was recruited by MI6 whilst stationed in Copenhagen during the 1970s. For more than ten years he fed precious secrets to western intelligence agencies whilst rising up the ranks of the KGB eventually become the London station chief. Having been suddenly recalled to Moscow and following his drugging and interrogation it was time for Gordievsky to escape and so operation Operation Pimlico was launched.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I've really welcomed Dan Snow's history. We have got an episode from the archive for you today.
0:05.3	It's one of the classics, one of the classic episodes in the archive. We've got Ben Macintosh,
0:10.0	one of the biggest best-selling writers of history anywhere in the world. He came on the podcast,
0:15.2	talked about the Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky. He got to know Oleg, he researched and wrote
0:21.1	his story, became a best-seller, absolutely extraordinary. His extraction from the Soviet Union to
0:26.3	the West is James Bond stuff. That's what I'm saying. It's a best-selling James Bond unbelievable.
0:31.5	You can absolutely love it. This is a cold, war story like no other. Greats have been Macintosh
0:37.5	on the podcast. He's been on several times. He's a great friend to everything we're doing over here.
0:41.3	So hope you enjoy this rerun of the podcast. Hope you're also subscribing to historyhit.tv. It's
0:47.6	our new digital history channel. It is the place to listen to all these podcasts without any ads,
0:52.3	which is good. And also watch loads of history documentaries, which is really fun as well. So thank
0:56.4	you. It's growing all the time. So I head over to historyhit.tv as soon as you finish this,
1:00.0	but in the meantime, enjoy your Ben Macintosh talking about Gordievsky.
1:09.9	Ben, I'm feeling old. This is your coming back on the podcast. We're getting all the authors now.
1:14.3	It's second, third time around. We've been around for a while. Fantastic. It's a side of
1:17.9	enormous success, Dan. You should not feel bad about it at all. I'm thrilled to be back.
1:21.6	Well, I'm thrilled to have you because this is one of the most excited and anticipated books of the
1:26.8	year. What, first of all, why do you keep getting all these amazing access? I think without
1:33.7	false modesty, it's just luck, really. I mean, these stories, many of them have been around for
1:38.9	a long time. And people think they know them, but the truth is they don't really know them,
1:43.4	because they know the original sort of news breaking story. So you can go back to some of these
1:47.9	Cold War stories and actually tell them with real hope, granular detail. You can go right deep into
	...

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