Sheeple Chase 3 - Da, Minister

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Speaker 9 Hello and welcome to another episode of Sheeple Chase, the podcast where we question everything, including our life choices.

Speaker 12 I'm Georgie Barker.

Speaker 13 And I'm Celia Ripley.

Speaker 9 So, how are you doing today, Celia?

Speaker 14 I'm okay.

Speaker 13 Not much on outside of family stuff.

Speaker 15 Yeah?

Speaker 12 You look like you need a rest.

Speaker 14 Wow.

Speaker 13 I skipped mascara one time and suddenly I'm the walking dead.

Speaker 11 In a hot twilight way, not a night of the living dead zombie way. I just

Speaker 11 meant maybe don't run any marathons today.

Speaker 13 But what if I have to, Georgie?

Speaker 15 Why would you have to run a marathon?

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 15 God, could you imagine?

Speaker 16 You wouldn't even get to stop for lunch.

Speaker 17 You'd have to run right through lunch.

Speaker 13 I feel like you might have other priorities than lunch at that point.

Speaker 18 Hard disagree.

Speaker 13 You know what? I retract my statement. You absolutely would still be obsessed with food.

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Speaker 17 So, Celia, now I'm all dressed to flee from any government agents.

Speaker 20 Which conspiracy theory have you brought for us today?

Speaker 13 I think you're going to like this one.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 11 Harold Wilson?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 22 Spoilers?

Speaker 14 Probably not.

Speaker 18 So, what, the Tories had just hired John McCarrey as their new spin doctor or something?

Speaker 13 Interestingly, at first glance, it does seem as if the story comes from a legitimate source.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 17 And Harold Wilson was one of them.

Speaker 14 Apparently.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 11 Sorry, is that like an innuendo thing?

Speaker 24 Does he, you know, wear Lithuanian raincoats?

Speaker 13 The raincoats weren't even Lithuanian, like, they were made in Leeds.

Speaker 16 Notorious hotbed of international communist conspiracy.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Huh.

Speaker 11 What was the real reason?

Speaker 13 No, that's the actual real reason. At least, according to Peter Wright, the MI5 agent assigned to the case.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 13 Yeah, you'd have thought so, but it sounds like they didn't really consider it that big a deal.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 18 Apparently, I'd be a terrible spy because I definitely would have taken that more seriously than the whole communist raincoat thing.

Speaker 13 Well, don't write off your future career just yet. There were a couple of mitigating circumstances.

Speaker 13 One was that the CIA counterintelligence chief Angleton was was a known bullshitter, with one agent describing him as not above exaggeration.

Speaker 20 Brutal put down for a spy.

Speaker 13 And Wright said he was known to manufacture evidence where none existed.

Speaker 9 Devastating.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 19 And I'm guessing MI5 didn't go for it.

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 15 Even with Raincoat Gate?

Speaker 13 I mean, they thought he was dodgy, but not like sliding into Khrushchev's DMs dodgy.

Speaker 11 So, do we know now what evidence Angleton had?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 11 I'm sorry, what kind of job is official MI5 historian?

Speaker 9 All your sources are classified, so do all your footnotes just say trust me?

Speaker 13 Pretty much.

Speaker 13 Galitsin was claiming some wild stuff, like that Hugh Gates girl was assassinated by the KGB to make way for Wilson.

Speaker 17 Oh wow, was he?

Speaker 13 Not unless the KGB invented lupus.

Speaker 15 But wasn't this Galitsin guy the one who identified the Cambridge 5 spy ring?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 24 Hmm.

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Speaker 13 So, where were we?

Speaker 13 Unreliable conspiracy theorist.

Speaker 19 My kind of guy.

Speaker 17 So, Given who else was named by this informant, could Harold Wilson have been a Soviet asset? Did MI5 miss something?

Speaker 13 Doubtful. They were already looking into him, remember?

Speaker 18 Because of the raincoats?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 12 So, if he had been directly in touch with Russia, they'd definitely have known.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 19 What about indirect contact?

Speaker 12 Could he have used some sort of code word when he bought raincoats or something?

Speaker 13 I mean, it's possible, but you kind of hope MI5 would notice. Codes are kind of their thing.

Speaker 16 I thought their thing was suspecting entrepreneurial Lithuanians.

Speaker 13 They can have two things.

Speaker 21 So, if they didn't think he was a Soviet spy, what were they bugging him for?

Speaker 13 Apparently, they were concerned he might not be aware of the risk of being compromised.

Speaker 9 So, they decided to secretly compromise his privacy?

Speaker 13 Pretty much.

Speaker 15 Irony?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 20 Oh, so he did have spy instincts after all.

Speaker 13 I mean, everybody close to him thought it was just paranoia.

Speaker 12 But it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Speaker 23 Well, quite.

Speaker 9 So do you think this is what was really going on with the ghost thing?

Speaker 14 The what?

Speaker 13 The g what's the ghost thing?

Speaker 14 You don't know? Know what?

Speaker 18 Harold Wilson was absolutely convinced that Downing Street was haunted.

Speaker 14 Really?

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 20 And there was this constant mechanical whirring just on the edge of his hearing. It sounds like all that might actually have been real.

Speaker 18 No wonder he resigned so suddenly.

Speaker 13 He actually resigned because he was ill, though, right?

Speaker 19 Sure, but a doubt being haunted by MI5 helped.

Speaker 14 Suppose not.

Speaker 12 So, do you want to talk about the plotting as well?

Speaker 23 The

Speaker 23 plotting?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 Well, that's the weird thing about this conspiracy theory. The rumours themselves resulted in three actual real-life conspiracies against him.

Speaker 18 Three?

Speaker 23 How does something like this happen three times?

Speaker 13 I mean, they might not all have been real, but the first one probably was.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 17 Classic Daily Mirror.

Speaker 14 It didn't go brilliantly.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 12 Hmm, that name doesn't exactly scream political mastermind, does it?

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 23 So that was the whole plot?

Speaker 11 A meeting that could have been a fax?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Then Wilson was re-elected in 1974, and allegedly history repeated itself.

Speaker 17 How far did they get this time?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 22 I mean, that is pretty rude.

Speaker 24 And I could see how Wilson would get a bee in his already bugged bonnet over it.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 21 Ah, again, I think I might be Team Wilson on this one.

Speaker 13 It gets worse. At the time, a pair of journalists were secretly recording him with a bugged briefcase.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 23 Good grief.

Speaker 13 Oh, and you know the raincoat guy? Apparently, he bought the secretary a house. So...

Speaker 17 Right, new conspiracy theory.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 13 Makes about as much sense, doesn't it? So, what's the verdict? Was Harold Wilson a Soviet spy?

Speaker 14 Not a chance.

Speaker 18 The KGB would have to queue for days behind all the other plots just to get near him.

Speaker 13 Even though he did try to open up trade with the Soviet Union at one point?

Speaker 17 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...

Speaker 13 You can't catch Lupus, right?

Speaker 16 I think it's quite clear that I did not know that, no.

Speaker 14 Cool.

Speaker 13 And what about the other plots against him?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 What about you?

Speaker 13 I mean, there definitely were some plots against him, even if he did take a couple of things personally.

Speaker 13 And he can be forgiven for being twitchy, given all the journalists, politicians, and civil servants that have admitted to sabotaging his career.

Speaker 22 But was he a spy?

Speaker 10 Our very own Mancunian candidate?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 I think 1960s Conservatives just didn't know the difference between wanting a slightly higher tax rate rate and full-on militaristic communism.

Speaker 17 Pleus a change.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 16 We might actually have a special guest for an episode soon.

Speaker 14 Might we? Who?

Speaker 17 I don't want to say too much right now because it's not confirmed yet, but I'm pretty excited.

Speaker 13 Well, there's another mystery already. We didn't even have to wait till next week after all.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 Sheeple Chase was created by Sasha Sienna, directed by April Sumner, and based on the works of Jonathan Sims and Alexander J. Mule.

Speaker 25 This episode was written by Sasha Sienna and edited with additional materials by Jonathan Sims and and Alexander J.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 To subscribe, explore exclusive extras, and enjoy early access, ad-free episodes, visit members.rustyquill.com or join our Patreon.

Speaker 25 Rate and review us online, follow us on social media, or email us at mail at rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening.

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