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Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both, there's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times. These conversations have been a lifeline for me.

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And now I hope they will be for you to please listen to you and me both on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, are you ready to vote? I am, we are partnering with Head Count Dawg to get you all the non-partisan election information you need, whether you're voting by mail, voting early or on Election Day. Visit head count, dawg, today. Seriously, do it.

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Hey, everybody. You may not know this yet. And if you don't prepare to be blown away, we are creating right now the first ever stuff you should know book. It's called Stuff You Should Know. Colen an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things and you can preorder it now. That's right. And if you preorder everyone, there is an incentive because you get a free gift. And don't worry if you've already preordered because you can just head on over to stuff.

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You should read books, dotcom, very beautiful little Web page, and it's got all the information. And if you already preordered, can you just, like, upload your receipt and get that preorder gift? Yep, you can.

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And they will mail it off to you and you will get it in the mail. You say, oh, thank you. I don't mind if I do. And it's a poster that you will love and cherish and possibly pass on down to your children as an heirloom.

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That's right, everyone. We couldn't be more excited about this book. It's really coming together. Well, it's us through and through. And you can go check out some excerpts at stuff. You should read books.

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Dotcom, welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of IPART radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are comrades in arms here. It? S why české stuff you should know. Let me ask you something, OK? When you were researching this and thinking in your brain about talking about it, did you get nervous? No.

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OK, I guess you did a little bit. What were you nervous about?

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Talking about the friggin KGB. Yeah. And how they just kill anyone that they don't like. OK, now, you know, I got the most nervous ever when we we recorded I wrote on and we recorded on Delta Force.

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Really I was really nervous. We think they're going to come kill you. I don't know, I mean, they're supposedly they're not supposed to exist and we were talking about how they do exist. So I was like, surely not. But now I know what you're talking about. It didn't happen in this one.

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So maybe this is the one that'll get me, because KGB, you know, those are the and even says in this article, like when you think about the knock on your door in the middle of the night, come with us. That's KGB ops right there.

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Right. But that was if you were a Russian a Soviet citizen, which is true. It's something it's weird because like you know all about the KGB just having been raised as a Cold War kid, you know. But I never really put two and two together that it was a really all encompassing secret police kind of thing that they had going on, because not only were they big on spying and getting their hands on advanced weapon technology and running disinformation campaigns around the world and trying to destabilize the United States and its its reach around the world, they also were really focused internally and domestically as well, so that they were a secret police force that would come and get dissenters and send them off to prison camps in the middle of the night.

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They basically did it all in. All of it was geared toward keeping the Soviet Communist Party in power. And they were successful for several decades, actually.

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Yeah.

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And I mean, from reading this research, it seems like I mean, they did do all the things, but their main charge was squashing from within.

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It seems like squishing your head from within. So KGB stands for and I'm going to try and read this and lay it on me.

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Russian comment it. That's easy with a K. Yeah. Go through Daas Vinni be so nasty.

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It sounds like you just raised like Aramic demon Klaatu Barada. So that means an English committee for state security. They were headquartered and we're going to say were a lot because technically the KGB itself is not around anymore. It's just been renamed though so same stuff going on, same place they were and are and are now headquartered under the FSB at Lubyanka Square in Moscow, which is where the KGB was, right. Yeah. So I'm saying that's where the headquarters was and still is.

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Right. And this is big, you know, beautiful, sort of intimidating building right there in the square.

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And I mean, that's just par for the course. The KGB is basically been this entity that's changed names in official titles multiple times since the very beginning of the USSR. But it's still the same thing. And it's it's actually really instructive to to study it because it seems that they are still very much up to the exact same things that they've been doing for decades now. And everybody very famously is well aware of the GRU, which is military intelligence. But it seems that the GRU, the FSB and another group called the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, are all basically like the KGB.

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They're just it's just now been divided into separate entities, but they're all working together. But after the 2016 election, everybody got a pretty, pretty obvious taste of what the KGB has long been up to, which is trying to to meddle in American politics and trying to sow discord among Americans ourselves. And this is nothing new. Apparently, they've been doing it since the outset. Well, actually, since after World War two, at least.

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Yeah, I mean, they've been doing this. If you talk about sowing discord, there was Operation Pandor in the 1960s, which was basically the Soviets trying to start a race war within the US. Yeah, infiltrating groups like the Klan, the Jewish Defense League and the African-American militants posing as them, making fake pamphlets from the different organizations and and blasting those out to basically try and start a race war. It didn't work, but it did create discord.

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They've also posed as people from Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and they're still doing the same thing today.

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Yeah, except now they're doing it in this hyper accelerated manner because things can spread so much more quickly on social media and you can turn so many people's opinions on social media so much more quickly as well. So there doesn't seem to be officially any any disagreement that the that the Russians meddle in American affairs. And I have long been like, well, you know, it doesn't excuse it, but, you know, we can't ignore the fact that America medals in other countries affairs, too, and has for a long time, too.

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And that is definitely instructive also and something to pay attention to. But first of all, it's a what about ism. But secondly, from what I read, there's this scholar who wrote this really, really interesting article in the Brown Journal of Public Affairs, I believe is what it was called. Yeah. The Brown Journal of. World affairs guy Caulder Walton wrote this this this article on the KGB and its disinformation campaign, super readable, really exciting kind of, but he basically says, yes, America has done some very, very shady stuff in the affairs of other countries and in its own affairs, too, like, you know, the CIA dosing Americans with LSD to see what happens kind of thing.

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But the Americans and the Brits operations just pale in scope and breadth compared to what the KGB has done and what it seems like the FSB is now still doing right now. Yeah, not not nice guys, so I just want to shout out that that that article is called Spies Election Meddling and Disinformation Past and Present. You should check it out. Yeah.

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I mean, if you want to look into the KGB and spying and espionage, there are so many great articles and documentaries on YouTube that you can watch some a little more fun than others are some very dry. The BBC has a two parter on the KGB that's very dry, but very instructive. So the KGB, if you want to talk about that organisation, you've got to go back to pre KGB. In December 1917, when Lenin created a secret police agency called the Checa CI a.

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they were the punishing sword of the revolution, is what they were known as. And this was this was basically the bit like you said, it's gone under many names. It was the KGB before it was called the KGB. It was there to keep leadership in power, imprisoning, killing opponents both abroad and within the country, keeping people under surveillance, censoring news and basically starting the espionage program on foreign soils.

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Yeah, the Cheka was followed by the EU, then the KGB, then the FSB, SVR. But from that moment, the Cheka was formed until today, there has been a steady, continuous, basically unbroken security apparatus that has been charged with domestic and external spying, surveillance, espionage, all that. JAMM Yeah.

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From from the get go the today they might still call themselves Chekists within the organisation. It's a it's a name, the Checa that that original name is kind of stuck around if you're sort of on the inside and they, you know, there are many ways that they can get what they want. This one was a pretty interesting example here. At one point there was a group early on in the Soviet Union's existence where they had some socialists, some anti-communist that basically got together.

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And they said, we're an organisation now called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia. And what they didn't know is that the Monarchists Union of Central Russia was actually infiltrated by so many moles. It was a fake organisation that real people joined that were socialist and anti-communist. But it was all a big setup to get them all in one place, basically root out who they were. You know, you got to know your enemy, know who your resistance is.

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And they found who they were and they killed them. Yeah.

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Isn't that nuts? Men like think about the effect that it has not just in in getting rid of your opposition by forming a group where they all show themselves, but also like that becomes legendary. Like, that's one of the things that this group, this security group did. And it basically sends a pretty clear message like don't you can't even trust your own the people you think that that are your allies, you know. Right. Talk about sowing discord among, you know, opposition.

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That's just and like that was one hundred years ago. And it's still I can give you chills just to think about that. Yeah.

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I mean, you start a group that you think is going to be battling your oppressor, and it turns out that group is so infiltrated that it's not even a real group.

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Well, I got the impression that it wasn't even that they were infiltrated, but that the check, I should say, that you actually started that group to they did attract people, you know what I mean? Now it's what I'm saying.

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They infiltrated that circle. Yeah. Oh, you started this fake organization. Yeah.

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That's so nuts, man. So one thing that a lot of people forget and our younger listeners might not realize is that back in World War two, the U.S. and the USSR were allies. We weren't like BFC or anything like that. But we were we had a common enemy in the Nazis, US, the UK, the US and the Soviets. And I I read that from this time of basically working with the US and the UK. The USSR saw how good we were at disinformation campaigns and it had two effects.

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It taught Soviets how to do these things. It basically said, hey, this is a really good way to sow discord and to get in for fake information out like with your enemy. So it taught the Soviets how to do that. But it also made the Soviets think that they just presume that the US and the UK were were creating the same operations in the USSR, too. So it really kind of hardened the Soviets enemy ship of American. It really kind of predisposed the USSR to be enemies with the US and with the U.K. and with the West in general, and it it's kind of took off from there.

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And just to be clear, I saw a good distinction definition between misinformation and disinformation, where misinformation is clear, where the source of the information is coming from. It's just the information is faulty. So the government, the US government is giving out like bad info about coronavirus or something like that. That's misinformation. Disinformation is where the information is faulty, but it's it's not clear where this information is coming from or where it came from originally. It just popped up is like a rumor or something on social media.

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But the information is faulty either way. It's just whether the source is clear who the source is or not. That's that's what disinformation is.

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So the Cheka are operating in World War Two. They are spying on our Manhattan Project such that there's one quote in here that said they knew more about the creation of the atomic bomb than Truman did. Yeah, they've really infiltrated things. This gave them a huge leg up in making their own bomb and their efforts to welcome themselves into the atomic age like they would have been way, way behind had it not been for their espionage efforts in there in America.

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There are ways that they did this. There were spies who were sort of the tried and true ways to pose as a diplomat and actually get in an embassy in a different country. But you're really a spy, right?

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You could also, if you've seen the movie The America or the TV show The Americans, that's called an illegal when you basically pass yourself off as someone of that nation's origin.

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After World War Two in Finland, they would find records of infants who died at birth, take that identity and then basically become a Finnish person is called the legend. And you are essentially living in that country as an American or as a Finnish individual.

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But you are really a secret agent for the Soviets. Right.

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And I mean, like super duper deep cover. So much so that you can expect to go live like a pretty mundane, everyday existence for years or decades as an American or as a fan or something like that. Whatever your background, wherever it says you're from. And then you might be called on to assassinate somebody one day or to start working sources. And it's not flagrant. It's not obvious. The point is, is that they make kind of contacts and friends with low level people at the edges of power is how I saw it described.

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But I also saw that same person describe who described illegals like that as saying that there's probably more of them in the world today than there was even during the Cold War. That's so scary, isn't it?

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Scary. But here's the thing. This is one thing that I've learned about studying the KGB. It's possible there are far fewer illegals in the world today. Maybe there's zero in the U.S. But the fact is, somebody said that and the KGB's track record is enough that it's possible that's the case. Right. And that's when that's all it takes. Now, all of a sudden, people are paranoid and like, wait a minute, you, Tulsi Gabbard, are you actually a tool of the Kremlin?

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Are you a plant by the KGB? Are you a sleeper agent who's running for president? Like, people start to get accusatory and you can't trust anything anymore, and now you're starting to see your enemies all over the place. And all it took was a rumor that there's more sleeper agents that are associated with the KGB today than there were in the Cold War. Now everybody's paranoid in the KGB, work is done for the day and that could simply be disinformation.

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Exactly. Exactly. Because disinformation can it takes on a life of its own. That's the point of disinformation, that it makes people behave differently than they would if they had not heard that rumor and started to believe. Yeah, because the other fact about disinformation we should do an entire episode on it, I think, is there has to have a kernel of truth like like the Black Panthers have to suspect that the Jewish Defense League is or was prejudiced against them secretly.

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And so like these documents that that were found or sent to the Black Panther headquarters just proved this suspicion that they already have or something like that or vice versa.

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So it has to have like this kernel of truth for somebody to be like, no, here's the proof. And then it just takes off from there because people love urban legends. I wonder if there's ever been an Army colonel named Colonel Truth? I don't know. All right. I think we should take a break and ponder that and we'll come back and talk about when the KGB was born right after this stuff.

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You should know. Gosh, shocking stuff. You should know her with.

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So the KGB, I promise to tell you, it's when that little baby was born, that little baby was born in 1954 when the intelligence agency did it. Like I said, I've long been operating, was reorganized officially, finally as a KGB with that same mission in hand. They were known as the this time as the sword and the shield of the Communist Party. And if you're talking about the structure of the agency itself, it depends on I mean, there's a lot that we don't know, but it depends on who you're asking.

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I've seen anywhere from a quarter of a million to 700000 people on staff. If you count the whole extended network of, like foreign border guards and stuff like that.

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Yeah, I think 700000 is the most I've I've seen, which is an enormous, huge.

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Yeah, huge. Huge compared to any kind of like CIA or any other country's intelligence organizations. The KGB is just massive. Right.

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The other thing that I saw about the KGB is that you can make a pretty good assumption that just especially during the Cold War, that every single one of those agents were loyal to the Communist Party. And one way that they made sure that every single agent was loyal to the Communist Party was to basically let them know that the other other members of the KGB were spying on them. There was entire sections that were dedicated to spying just on the armed forces, just on the military alone.

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And that was one of, I think, 20 different directorates, little divisions that were responsible for different kinds of tasks or different specializations.

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Yeah, the official like if you want to look at the official sort of charge of the KGB, it is four areas in size. It is the struggle or an organization, I guess, the struggle against foreign spies and agents, the exposure and investigation of political and economic crimes by citizens. That certainly comes as a lot of protection of state borders. That's what I was talking about, like the border guards and stuff like that. And then this is the big one, protection of state secrets.

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Right.

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And then so, like, those are the big four. But they're like there was another about 16 of them dedicated to everything, like making sure that the phone and radio systems were encrypted to making sure the transportation sector wasn't infiltrated like the KGB had its fingers in absolutely everything. There was one directorate that was specifically tasked with surveilling and monitoring foreigners and people who the KGB suspected were were potentially dissidents who were Soviet citizens. And they they mostly hung around like Leningrad and Moscow because that's where most of the tourists were.

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But that was like a whole KGB division. That's how many people they had and how many resources they threw at keeping tabs on the power structure and making sure that any challenges to the power structure were squashed in the cradle that even strangled in the cradle. Squashed in the cradle.

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Yeah. And, you know, they recruited the the best the smartest people, the brightest people. But like you sort of mentioned, it's not like like the KGB was something to be feared by every citizen of the Soviet Union, I think. Oh, yeah. But joining the KGB to thwart that was not it's not like that. Got you out of any sort of surveillance or and in fact, it may have even put you under a bigger microscope.

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Who knows? Yeah.

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I mean, they had every level of the military infiltrated with KGB agents, like every platoon, every detachment. If you were in a group with the military, with the military, somebody was a KGB officer posing as a soldier.

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That's right. In their own military. It's amazing. Yeah. But I mean, I think it started, like I said, in nineteen fifty four by the end of the 1960s, it was firmly, firmly in place as as the watchdog of everybody in the Soviet Union.

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Right.

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And I mean again with the like people tend to say like, well the KGB was the counterpart of the CIA, but I mean in the CIA did some shady stuff, including domestically, but from from basically all sources.

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The main point of the KGB was domestic surveillance and domestic control of domestic challenges or dissent toward the Communist Party.

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That's right. Spying on people, tapping phone lines, harassing people, arresting people, exiling people. If you were a religious activist, good luck. If you were a human rights advocate, good luck if you were an. Intellectual, if you were just, you know, part of the intellectual sort of university system of the Soviet Union, you better watch what you say because you are definitely being watched and every word that comes out of your mouth, even in a classroom, is being recorded.

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Yeah. And I mean, some if you were super high profile, you might make it out with your life and your family might get out alive, but you would be exiled for criticizing the government. A writer named Alexander Souls, souls that mess and even practice that souls that souls that innocent. Yeah, I think that's kind of close. He he was actually, I think, a science teacher who started writing books about how bad things were in the Soviet Union and eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature.

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But he was eventually exiled. If you were less of a well-known person and you were critical of the government, you were more likely to find yourself in the gulag, which is a system of prison camps that we referenced earlier and souls and Solzhenitsyn. I think I said it right that time. I think that's right. He estimated that about 60 million people were sent to those camps over the course of the 20th century. Yeah, I mean, it's impossible, literally impossible to put a number on the amount of human lives lost due to the KGB, but there are people that have estimated, like perhaps tens of millions of people taken out by the KGB ever since its history, which is.

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Yeah, I mean, I'm no CIA apologist, but I don't think the CIA has that tens of millions, you know, which again, I mean, we on the outside tend to think of the KGB mostly as like the spy agency.

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But, yeah, they they kept people in mind by killing them or sending them to secret prisons and making them leave in the middle of the night from their homes and never be seen again. It's just it's just completely nuts. And the effect that that has on a society is.

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Yeah, just oh, I can't imagine. I can sadly, but I can't imagine I've never lived through anything like that. Yeah.

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And if, you know, if you run an organisation or a or a country or a nation from fear tactics from the top down, that eventually is going to bite you in the behind. Because what that does is everyone's paranoid against each other. Right? No one, like in the case of Stalin, let's say if Stalin didn't like what you told him, he would literally shoot the messenger. He would execute anyone who told him anything that didn't basically support what he thought should be going on.

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Like it wasn't like, hey, Stalin, we found out some pretty bad stuff that's going on. Like, that's a good thing. That means we can root these people out. It got to a point where they wouldn't want to go to Stalin with bad news.

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And that's that's not good either.

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No. And if they had to go to him with some news, so what they would do, it would just kind of naturally inclined toward intelligence that supported their their view rather than, you know, something that said, hey, there's your really unpopular and there's there's an uprising potentially coming. They managed to squash anything like that. But in the end, this what's called sycophantic intelligence, where it's just basically feeding you, telling you what you want to hear, that eventually will run afoul of reality.

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And that's what people credit with the KGB dropping the ball on the fall of the Soviet Union back in 1991, although, as we'll see, there's actually a lot of direct influence that the KGB had on that. But there's this idea that throughout its history, there was Stalin kind of kicked off that thing where just tell me what I want to hear or else I'm right. Literally going to kill you or two in that it was carried on even long after Stalin was gone.

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I'm sure that's sycophantic kind of intelligence, which is really surprising because there was a really successful organisation externally. It was that they think that potentially for as good as they were at espionage and stealing secrets, the Soviets were apparently not. And I have to preface this. Let me just caveat this. This is reading American sources about the KGB. Right? The KGB was really good at keeping a code of silence. There were especially toward the end of the USSR, more and more KGB agent started to defect.

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But even when they defected, we weren't sure if they were plants. So there was still like what they said was taken with a grain of salt. But that the idea that that the KGB was was very successful in stealing secrets supports this idea now that the Soviet Union would not have been a superpower, part of this two two superpower polarity that ran the world during the Cold War, had it not been for stealing secrets, which I'm sure doesn't explicitly say it, but suggests that they were they did not have the best and brightest as far as technology and science is concerned, which is kind of surprise to me, because I'd always heard that the Soviets had really, really smart scientists in their own programs, too.

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But this researching the KGB made it sound like they wouldn't have been able to keep up had they not stolen advanced weapon technology and built their own versions of it. I'm confused. I have no idea what's true anymore. Yeah, the twenty twenty.

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I think it's definitely true that their spying efforts in the Cold War, especially when it comes to nuclear armament, were very much ramped up because they were spying with us.

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Yeah, but I think they were saying. They were saying there was.

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Just getting the atomic bomb, but basically, like all their advanced weapons technology was the result of stealing it. And the point is, is kind of a two handed compliment backside, a compliment that they they were really good at stealing secrets, but that they wouldn't have been able to be a nuclear superpower without stealing secrets. I think that was that was what I was what I found.

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Well, and it also could have been and I'm just speculating it could have been a thing or that was such a part of the system was that is, hey, we don't need to put resources for steps one through five because we can steal that stuff. Right. Exactly. And we can just start on step number six or whatever once we have whatever intelligence we need. Sure. But what do I know, I'm just a dumb podcast. Do you want to take another break?

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Yeah, let's do it. OK, we're going to take another break, everybody.

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That's no secret stuff you should know. Gosh, shocking stuff you should know.

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Hi, this is Hillary Clinton, host of the new podcast, You and Me both. There's a lot to be anxious and worried about right now, and it's made so much worse by the fact that we can't be together. So I find myself on the phone a lot, talking with friends, experts, really anyone who can help make some sense of these challenging times. These conversations have been a lifeline for me.

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And now I hope they will be for you to please listen to you and me both on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. A ravenous pandemic, a ruinous recession, protest, riots, racial strife, police brutality and yes, Donald Trump America in 2020 feels like Apocalypse Now.

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Again, I'm John Heilemann and in hell and high water.

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I'll explore this moment in a series of raw and real conversations with the people who shape our culture. Hell and High Water is a podcast from the recount.

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Listen to Hell and High Water on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And what is going on is wrong. I'm making puns left and right, it's terrible. Can we talk about spies? Sure, yeah, let's do it.

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So, uh, I think we did a we did an espionage podcast's years and years ago, I think.

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Yes. Spies, how spies work. Was it just spies or was it espionage as well? Well, they go so closely together, basically the same thing.

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Yeah. The Soviets were really good at well, I don't know, but really good because who knows how many times it happened. But they had some very effective moments of turning Americans into double agents, a few notable people over the years, a man named Aldrich Ames. He was a 31 year CIA officer and for about nine years was feeding the Russians, or I guess it was the Soviet Union at that time, highly classified information from the CIA. His big thing, it seemed like, was outing CIA sources and and stuff like that, like turned KGB agents.

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Yeah. So, I mean, there's all kinds of ways. There are other people that fed documents. We'll get to them in a minute. But he was outing sources and I think his actions directly led to at least that we know of 10 CIA sources being compromised and killed. And then, you know, in the hundreds of intelligence operations that he was, he was kind of dropping the dime on.

[00:36:18]

And that's I mean, in addition to the like the loss of life as far as the intelligence community's concerned, when you when you kill somebody like that, you're killing like decades worth of information that the person has walking around in their head and contacts and just general knowledge of how things work. So it's a really big deal. In addition to, again, killing somebody, you're wiping out like the institutional memory that they carry with them, too. That's been helping out the other side.

[00:36:48]

Yeah, he is in a medium security prison in Indiana today, serving a life sentence, as is Robert Hanssen. He's one that is a little more I mean, he worked up until the I think 2001.

[00:37:02]

And they said that his espionage was possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.

[00:37:09]

He made about one point four million dollars in cash and diamonds over the years, selling classified documents to the KGB total double agent cut in two thousand one after the FBI paid seven million bucks to a KGB agent to oust him as a mole.

[00:37:30]

Very famous case. Yeah, I remember that as well, I remember Aldrich Ames, who made it really easy on people like he was like spending lavishly and was not that well off to begin with and was just just being very flagrant about it. I feel like Robert Hanssen was a little smarter about it, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:37:50]

Yeah. Who was the other guy? There was one other guy that basically was spilling secrets about our submarine program.

[00:37:58]

I don't I don't know. There was a there was a naval captain after World War Two, somebody St John was there in the 60s. That was. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:10]

I can't remember his first name, but somewhere in St. John, he was a naval a naval captain. Yeah. There was a trove of KGB files from an operation from the 60s that basically confirmed he was indeed a Russian spy. Both of the Rosenbergs were indeed Russian spies. Alger Hiss, who I think went to his grave denying that he was a spy, was, in fact a spy for the for the Soviets. So they did have a pretty good success of turning Americans into informants.

[00:38:39]

So did the CIA and the KGB, apparently. But this the the stuff that they got was was pretty useful. And again, it was not limited to advanced weapon designs, but also industrial technology stuff that we were saying. There's embargoes on this. You can't export this. They still managed to get their hands on this because of their contacts that they turned in the US. Just basically anything you would want to keep your your economy humming along just from from stealing.

[00:39:10]

That's how you could how you could do that. Yeah.

[00:39:12]

The Navy guy, his was he he's the one that volunteered himself, basically because he wanted money. It's like it all came down to greed. He walked into. Oh yeah. No, I'm talking about John Anthony Walker Jr. That's who I'm talking about to not St. John's, not St John. He was known as the patron saint of hipsters. I don't know. Yeah.

[00:39:36]

John Anthony Walker Jr. is the one that wanted money. And he he volunteered by because it's not like he was anti-American. He wanted to see the Communist Party thrive. It was all motivated by greed. And he walked into an embassy in the United States with like a a code card or something and said, hey, I'll sell you this for three thousand dollars. And they bought it. And he was like, and you know what? That went well.

[00:40:03]

So just put me on the payroll. And he got his family involved. He had his I think he tried to get his father involved, his daughter, his son, his wife, his son's baseball coach, everybody.

[00:40:15]

Well, at one point, the Russians basically knew where all of our submarines were at all times because. That's right.

[00:40:21]

Yeah. And his wife was apparently a really bad alcoholic, probably, you know, in no small part due to this and eventually outed him after. I mean, he was way too Lucy Goosey with who he tried to get involved. Like, you can't try and get your whole family involved and then have them say, no, I'm not into it. And then just be like, all right, well, I'm going to keep doing it. What's for dinner?

[00:40:45]

Yeah, she ratted him out, though. She would call a bunch of times, apparently, and either chicken out or she was really blitzed and couldn't get across what she wanted to say. But eventually she did to an office in Boston and they thought, well, this is just some drunk wife trying to get her husband in trouble for ignoring it.

[00:41:04]

And then eventually, though, they did look into it and they you know, they searched the guy's house and they found like briefcases full of classified documents. And it was just I mean, this this went on for 20 something years.

[00:41:20]

I think I think from what I understand, the most damning evidence was he had one of those Russian fur hats. Yeah.

[00:41:27]

Earflaps that did so the as good as they were turning people, creating illegals, those sleeper agents, which may or may not be all over the world right now. One of the things the KGB has long been known for disinformation campaigns and from reading that, that that guy's article spies election meddling and disinformation past and present, the Walton's article, basically every every conspiracy theory that I believed as a teenager apparently was a KGB rumor, disinformation campaign.

[00:42:07]

I could not believe this is I was reading it was like a trip through my my, you know, formative years. Basically, the idea that the US government created AIDS. Yeah. Target developing countries. The idea that that American tourists used to go down to South America and Central America and adopt kids so that they could harvest. Them for body parts KGB. Get this, Chuck, there's a poll I don't remember when it was conducted, but it was sometime after the Kennedy assassination where more Americans believed that the CIA killed JFK than what the Warren Commission concluded, which was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

[00:42:51]

More Americans believed what turned out to be a KGB disinformation campaign than what the Warren Commission came up with, that they came up with the one that the CIA killed JFK, that there was the KGB that did that.

[00:43:06]

And, you know, the friend of your friend's mom who was on the elevator with Eddie Murphy, KGB. That's right. Everything I mean, all that stuff flagellated somebody in the gang comes and kills you, KGB. But it's just so bizarre to think, like, why?

[00:43:22]

Like, no, I thought that I talked to people about that, like late at night, like we had conversations about this stuff. And when you see that and when you read it and realize that like this has been going on for years, it really puts things into focus now, like the 2016 election meddling. Sure. The idea that there's like like Jiahu agents, military intelligence agents who are posing as members of Black Lives Matter or who posed as like Tea Party members during the 2016 election like that, they that they were actually working for the for Russia.

[00:44:02]

The idea that that's still going on just becomes all the all the more clear when you look at some of their past campaigns, something I do occasionally.

[00:44:12]

I don't know why I torture myself, but sometimes I will read comments on a Fox News.com article and someone will say something. And then you can leave a comment about the comment and someone will comment like, OK, thanks a lot, Dmitri.

[00:44:27]

And it's funny, but you don't know, man. That's what they do.

[00:44:31]

They infiltrate message boards and they infiltrate social media and like, you never know, like, yeah, it's just it's really staggering that this kind of stuff still goes on to this degree. Yeah. And there's nothing we can do about it. Yeah.

[00:44:48]

For real. So so let's let's step back for a second because we kind of hopped ahead.

[00:44:55]

But I want to go back into KGB history.

[00:44:57]

KGB was around from 1954 to 1991 and we said earlier that the KGB had a direct role in the fall of the USSR and they did because there was a KGB head who was appointed by Gorbachev because they thought that he was an intelligent, moderate person who was open to new ideas. And it turned out he wasn't he was part of that same old KGB establishment who wanted things to stay the way that they were. And he actually led a coup against Gorbachev.

[00:45:31]

I was too young to know what was going on, but there is a coup against Gorbachev where he was under house arrest for a minute. Yeah. And the coup finally failed because it became clear that the military wasn't wasn't in on it or wasn't going to take part in it. But it eventually led directly within months to the downfall of the USSR, the breakup of the USSR, because in the meantime, they had elected for the first time a democratically elected president.

[00:45:58]

And when Gorbachev saw that basically this coup was a vote of no confidence in him, he stepped aside, separated the Communist Party from the presidency, and all of a sudden the USSR wasn't there anymore. It was just Russia because the satellite states started saying, hey, we're independent now. We'll see you later. Soviet Union and the USSR fell apart, kicked off by this coup that the KGB initiated.

[00:46:25]

Yeah, and I think Yeltsin or Yeltsin excuse me, officially split it up, right? Yeah.

[00:46:31]

Yeah. He said KGB, your dissolved. We're going to break you up into the FSB. And the CIA did the same stuff. Right, exactly. But just do it separately. I figure if I separate you guys, you might be less evil. And apparently that was not the case.

[00:46:46]

Yeah, and apparently not, apparently. But very famously, Putin came straight out of the KGB. He was a KGB agent in the mid 1970s, supposedly because he saw a movie about Russian spies and I guess thought it was awesome and said, I want to do that. There's a picture of him in one of these articles where he's in the 70s wearing like this newsie cap and just look in super 70s. Yeah, but he also looks like Putin, man, just complete pokerface.

[00:47:17]

He's staring off camera at something. Who knows what he's taken in. It's it's a really cool picture. There's another picture, too, supposedly of him posing as a tourist standing next to Ronald Reagan like. Have you ever seen that picture? No. Oh, it's nuts. It's just so great. But then you're like, is that Putin? And I went and looked and it turned out that there is still disagreement of whether it's him or not.

[00:47:40]

But most people say that that's not him, that he would have been in Dresden at the time, he wouldn't have been in the Soviet Union.

[00:47:49]

I'm looking now at oh, my God, that certainly looks like Putin, doesn't it? But the official line is that is not Putin with his little camera around his neck.

[00:47:58]

Right.

[00:47:59]

And so Putin was not just in the KGB. He became the head of the FSB. And this is a real testimony to just how powerful the KGB and the KGB remnants or successors remain.

[00:48:12]

He went from head of the FSB to the president of Russia. That was the step that he took. And he was not the first person to do that. Other KGB heads had worked their way up to become the head of the Communist Party and the de facto head of the Soviet Union at the time. So all of this kind of goes to show you that that nothing, even the fall of the USSR really did anything to slow down the KGB. And the advent of technology helped kind of actually speed things up quite a bit.

[00:48:40]

Yeah. And if you think those murders are a thing of the past, that is certainly not the case.

[00:48:46]

I remember, as I'm sure you do in 2006, Alexander Litner, Vinko Litvinenko, Litvinenko, he was the one that was killed by the radioactive polonium 210 that was dropped in his beverage. And they they have a history of doing like that's a really awful way to die. And they have a history of killing people and really awful ways because it sends that message that, you know, not only can you die, but you're going to die in a really awful, awful way.

[00:49:20]

And everyone's going to know dating back to Trotsky, who went to Mexico City and someone came up behind him, Ramon Mercader, with an ice ax and sunk it three inches into his brain.

[00:49:36]

He said, how do you like this projection? Oh, my God, that was actually so bad. I think that was brilliant. Thank you. I was hoping you come around to that. It was really good. I got you Mercator projection, this lovely show. But yeah, he killed him with an ice ax, but he lived for a day. I thought I'd always heard the story and I always thought that he just like, planted him in the brain and that was it.

[00:50:03]

But Trotsky got up and was like fighting him off and people came in and kick this guy's butt and he survived in the hospital for like a full day after this. Wow.

[00:50:12]

Well, yeah, Litvinenko, he survived long enough that he helped solve his own murder. There's a really great guardian right on it called Alexander Litvinenko, the man who sold his own murder. And it's definitely worth reading for sure. Yeah, I mean, just a couple of years ago, what's that guy's name? Skripal. Sergei Skripal. Mm hmm.

[00:50:35]

He was he was the one with the nerve poison. He wasn't killed. There was an attempt on his life, though.

[00:50:39]

Yeah, but it was just it's just like every time you think, man, this is Cold War stuff, it just pops up in the news again, you know, like, man, it's still happening. Yeah.

[00:50:48]

And I mean, we should say both of those attacks were in London, like this wasn't in Russia or Moscow or anything like that. This was in London. These guys lived in London in exile and they were still murdered in London through like radioactive material and nerve gas that was smuggled into the country. And that actually kind of goes to stand as evidence that there still are these illegals, these deep cover sleeper agents that are working for what used to be the KGB and is now the FSB.

[00:51:19]

Yeah, and that's why it's a really big deal that a president of the United States would want to cozy up to somebody like Putin who is making great efforts to put who he wants in office.

[00:51:31]

Yeah, I mean, that's just pure and simple like this. It's unbelievable. Absolutely. Chuck, well said. You got anything else?

[00:51:40]

I got nothing else but rage.

[00:51:43]

So if this floated your vote, go check out spies, election meddling and disinformation, past and present. Great article. Check out Alexander Litvinenko, the spy who sold his own murder, the man who solved the summer. Check out the big think they had a good one called the history of the KGB and its legendary methods. So I think you'll like all three of those. And since I said I think you'll like all three of those, it's time for listen to me.

[00:52:09]

Uh, this is about the heroin lozenges. Remember that when I wondered if they were still around. So this is from Martin. Hey, guys. In the heroin episode, Chuck was wondering if there are any still heroin lozenges lying around somewhere, and Josh quickly refuted. But, Chuck, you have been vindicated. I work in an unnamed museum and an unnamed unnamed location in Canada. How am I going to say where in Canada, even though he does.

[00:52:37]

And we have four different packages for heroin lozenges from Bayer, they're under lock and key. Of course, we receive them in a donation from a local pharmacy to close down in the 30s.

[00:52:48]

And they gave the museum a wide array of drugs to add to the collection along with the heroin.

[00:52:54]

We also have a bottle of arsenic in two packets of amphetamines. One package has two pills missing. Oh, man. Uh, love the show.

[00:53:04]

You guys are keeping me sane during quarantine. I steadily make my way through your back catalogue. That is for Martin.

[00:53:10]

Nice, Martin. Um, that was much appreciated. Thanks for shining some light on that one. And if you want to shine some light for us, we'd love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to Stuff podcast that I heart radio dotcom. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart radio, because the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's no secret that in Washington, D.C., corruption is everywhere, and I should know my mom's the speaker of the House, my friends are all in the same boat, daughters of the D.C. elite.

[00:53:55]

When you're this close to power, there's nowhere to hide.

[00:53:59]

But in here, no one knows me as James Parker. They only know me as storm alloy. You see, I'm a bit of a hacker. Join me and my friends. Four daughters in D.C., a new 12 part scripted podcast, political thriller from the team that brought you Lethal It Einhorn's Epic Productions and I Heart Radio. Listen to Dogs for Free and I heart radio, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine this, you've been playing football for years, dreaming of going pro, and then it happens, life as you know, it changes with a phone call.

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I finally got because it's the real. I'm ready. Go, go, go. This is Keegan Michael Key and welcome to Drafted.

[00:54:43]

This podcast series follows eight players as they enter the twenty 20 NFL draft. This is their real life as it unfolds in real time. And each player tells his own story unfiltered. I'm not a first rounder. I'm not in the top three rounder. This is something I've been dreaming about. I've been doing this for my son.

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We go behind the scenes before, during and after one of the biggest days of their lives, and we relive every detail from the players perspective. Please join me on the first step in their journey to greatness. Welcome to Drafted to Drafted on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.