Sheeple Chase 3 - Da, Minister

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Sheeple Chase, the podcast where we question everything, including our life choices.

I'm Georgie Barker.

And I'm Celia Ripley.

So, how are you doing today, Celia?

I'm okay.

Not much on outside of family stuff.

Yeah?

You look like you need a rest.

Wow.

I skipped mascara one time and suddenly I'm the walking dead.

In a hot twilight way, not a night of the living dead zombie way.

I just

meant maybe don't run any marathons today.

But what if I have to, Georgie?

Why would you have to run a marathon?

I don't know.

What if some disaster knocked out all the world's infrastructure and I had to send a really urgent message to someone 26 miles away?

God, could you imagine?

You wouldn't even get to stop for lunch.

You'd have to run right through lunch.

I feel like you might have other priorities than lunch at that point.

Hard disagree.

You know what?

I retract my statement.

You absolutely would still be obsessed with food.

Damn right.

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So, Celia, now I'm all dressed to flee from any government agents.

Which conspiracy theory have you brought for us today?

I think you're going to like this one.

The year is 1964.

Rock and roll rules the airwaves.

Lead paint is everywhere.

And the Cold War is getting hot.

What a time for the UK to elect a KGB spy as Prime Minister.

Harold Wilson?

Yeah.

Today we are looking at UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson and whether he was a Soviet puppet planted in Downing Street through a combination of manipulation, assassination and good old-fashioned corruption.

Spoilers?

Probably not.

So, what, the Tories had just hired John McCarrey as their new spin doctor or something?

Interestingly, at first glance, it does seem as if the story comes from a legitimate source.

In 1963, a KGB agent named Anatoly Golitsyn defected to the CIA and gave them a list naming Soviet agents in the US and UK.

And Harold Wilson was one of them.

Apparently.

Now, obviously, when a KGB agent wanders into the CIA offices and starts naming British politicians like he's hosting Newsnight, MI5 don't immediately assume they're all spies, but they do start asking questions, like why he wore so many Lithuanian-designed raincoats?

Sorry, is that like an innuendo thing?

Does he, you know, wear Lithuanian raincoats?

The raincoats weren't even Lithuanian, like, they were made in Leeds.

Notorious hotbed of international communist conspiracy.

You say that, but the guy who owned the factory was a Lithuanian immigrant, and someone had already told someone who worked at MI5 that that guy had played chess with a guy who might have talked to a different guy who was in the KGB.

Huh.

What was the real reason?

No, that's the actual real reason.

At least, according to Peter Wright, the MI5 agent assigned to the case.

Wow, okay, so if they were already investigating him for the Raincoat chess connection, they must have been totally psyched when someone actually named Wilson as a double agent.

Yeah, you'd have thought so, but it sounds like they didn't really consider it that big a deal.

In his memoirs, Peter Wright said that they thought it was rubbish, but because it came from the head of the CIA's counterintelligence division, they had no choice but to file it somewhere.

Huh.

Apparently, I'd be a terrible spy because I definitely would have taken that more seriously than the whole communist raincoat thing.

Well, don't write off your future career just yet.

There were a couple of mitigating circumstances.

One was that the CIA counterintelligence chief Angleton was was a known bullshitter, with one agent describing him as not above exaggeration.

Brutal put down for a spy.

And Wright said he was known to manufacture evidence where none existed.

Devastating.

And Angleton said he definitely had evidence, but would only share it if MI5 pinky promised not to tell its government it was being run by a Soviet agent.

And I'm guessing MI5 didn't go for it.

No.

Even with Raincoat Gate?

I mean, they thought he was dodgy, but not like sliding into Khrushchev's DMs dodgy.

So, do we know now what evidence Angleton had?

He had the Russian de factor, Golitsyn.

Which sounds bad at first, but let's just say the official historian for MI5 described him as an unreliable conspiracy theorist.

I'm sorry, what kind of job is official MI5 historian?

All your sources are classified, so do all your footnotes just say trust me?

Pretty much.

Galitsin was claiming some wild stuff, like that Hugh Gates girl was assassinated by the KGB to make way for Wilson.

Oh wow, was he?

Not unless the KGB invented lupus.

But wasn't this Galitsin guy the one who identified the Cambridge 5 spy ring?

Look, I'm not saying none of his info panned out, just that MI5 didn't trust him as far as they could throw him.

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So, where were we?

Unreliable conspiracy theorist.

My kind of guy.

So, Given who else was named by this informant, could Harold Wilson have been a Soviet asset?

Did MI5 miss something?

Doubtful.

They were already looking into him, remember?

Because of the raincoats?

Because of the raincoats.

And jokes aside, they already had him under constant surveillance because of that.

Bugs in his offices, his house, his car.

So, if he had been directly in touch with Russia, they'd definitely have known.

Oh, yeah.

What about indirect contact?

Could he have used some sort of code word when he bought raincoats or something?

I mean, it's possible, but you kind of hope MI5 would notice.

Codes are kind of their thing.

I thought their thing was suspecting entrepreneurial Lithuanians.

They can have two things.

So, if they didn't think he was a Soviet spy, what were they bugging him for?

Apparently, they were concerned he might not be aware of the risk of being compromised.

So, they decided to secretly compromise his privacy?

Pretty much.

Irony?

Yeah.

So, it turns out that as a person, Harold Wilson might have been the most boring Prime Minister ever.

Plus, it backfired because Wilson figured out he was being bugged.

Oh, so he did have spy instincts after all.

I mean, everybody close to him thought it was just paranoia.

But it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Well, quite.

So do you think this is what was really going on with the ghost thing?

The what?

The g what's the ghost thing?

You don't know?

Know what?

Harold Wilson was absolutely convinced that Downing Street was haunted.

Really?

I mean, bear in mind, this is 50-year-old gossip from the Oxford University Labour Club, but they say that he'd hear people whispering about him behind his back, but when he turned around, there'd be no one there.

And there was this constant mechanical whirring just on the edge of his hearing.

It sounds like all that might actually have been real.

No wonder he resigned so suddenly.

He actually resigned because he was ill, though, right?

Sure, but a doubt being haunted by MI5 helped.

Suppose not.

So, do you want to talk about the plotting as well?

The

plotting?

You know, the scheme to oust him as PM.

I know there was a proper coup planned at some point, which I guess makes a bit more sense if people thought he was a paranoid, ghost-obsessed Soviet spy.

Well, that's the weird thing about this conspiracy theory.

The rumours themselves resulted in three actual real-life conspiracies against him.

Three?

How does something like this happen three times?

I mean, they might not all have been real, but the first one probably was.

That was in 1968 and was orchestrated by the head of the International Publishing Corporation, Cecil King, who was also the chairman of the Daily Mirror.

Classic Daily Mirror.

It didn't go brilliantly.

Apparently, one of King's journalists, Kudlip, happened to have met the head head of the armed forces, Lord Mountbatten, so they arranged a visit between Kudlip, King, Lord Mountbatten, and one of Mountbatten's mates, who was some random called Sir Solly.

Hmm, that name doesn't exactly scream political mastermind, does it?

So King turns up and says, Lads, the country's on the brink of ruin, the government's about to collapse, there's going to be blood in the streets, and the army will need to take over.

You up to it?

Mountbatten thinks about it, but then this solly guy says Mountbatten is no traitor, so that's the end of it, and King is kicked out.

So that was the whole plot?

A meeting that could have been a fax?

I mean, King did publish a front-page call for Wilson to be removed from office by any means necessary, but he was fired from the mirror for it.

Then Wilson was re-elected in 1974, and allegedly history repeated itself.

How far did they get this time?

Well, we don't really know if they were plotting at all.

Mostly it was just Mountbatten holding training exercise in really public places without any warning.

Like a show of strength, maybe.

I mean, that is pretty rude.

And I could see how Wilson would get a bee in his already bugged bonnet over it.

Especially since a BBC documentary revealed multiple ex-military personnel were building up private armies to march against him if he was outed as a Soviet plant.

Ah, again, I think I might be Team Wilson on this one.

It gets worse.

At the time, a pair of journalists were secretly recording him with a bugged briefcase.

And MI5 were feeding information on him to the Tories so they could undermine him before the election.

And his private secretary was doing the same thing for Thatcher directly.

Good grief.

Oh, and you know the raincoat guy?

Apparently, he bought the secretary a house.

So...

Right, new conspiracy theory.

Harold Wilson wasn't a Soviet spy, but he was being cursed by a vengeful Tory wizard, disguising himself as a Lithuanian chess-playing raincoat seller who magically convinced everyone that the biggest threat to national security was a boring lefty whose main passions were council housing and widows' pensions.

Makes about as much sense, doesn't it?

So, what's the verdict?

Was Harold Wilson a Soviet spy?

Not a chance.

The KGB would have to queue for days behind all the other plots just to get near him.

Even though he did try to open up trade with the Soviet Union at one point?

I reckon that might be why the KGB assassinated Hugh Gateskill.

They reckon Wilson will be a bit better for them, so they just nudge a few germs towards Gateskill when he's over in Russia and they...

You can't catch Lupus, right?

I think it's quite clear that I did not know that, no.

Cool.

And what about the other plots against him?

Let's just say if even a tenth of them were real, the poor guy must have been weeding through hidden cameras just to get to the loo at night.

What about you?

I mean, there definitely were some plots against him, even if he did take a couple of things personally.

And he can be forgiven for being twitchy, given all the journalists, politicians, and civil servants that have admitted to sabotaging his career.

But was he a spy?

Our very own Mancunian candidate?

No.

I think 1960s Conservatives just didn't know the difference between wanting a slightly higher tax rate rate and full-on militaristic communism.

Pleus a change.

That's it for this week, folks.

Thank you for listening.

Please don't forget to rate, review us, compliment us however you like.

Georgie and I will be back with a new mystery every week.

We might actually have a special guest for an episode soon.

Might we?

Who?

I don't want to say too much right now because it's not confirmed yet, but I'm pretty excited.

Well, there's another mystery already.

We didn't even have to wait till next week after all.

Sheeple Chase and the Magnus Protocol are podcasts distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 international license.

Sheeple Chase was created by Sasha Sienna, directed by April Sumner, and based on the works of Jonathan Sims and Alexander J.

Mule.

This episode was written by Sasha Sienna and edited with additional materials by Jonathan Sims and and Alexander J.

Newell, with audio edits by Nico Vitese, mastering by Meg McKellar, and music by Nico Vitese.

It featured Sasha Sienna as Georgie Barker and Laurie Ann Davies as Celia Ripley.

To subscribe, explore exclusive extras, and enjoy early access, ad-free episodes, visit members.rustyquill.com or join our Patreon.

Rate and review us online, follow us on social media, or email us at mail at rustyquill.com.

Thanks for listening.

Hi, this is Joe from Vanta.

In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more.

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