True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 447: Smiley’s Person
Aired: 2025-03-31
Duration: 02:18:12


=== British Accents and Faces (08:51) ===

[00:00:00]  British people are always like, join me for a bonbon at Raffles.
[00:00:05]  They, you know what?
[00:00:06]  I wish they were like that still.
[00:00:08]  They are not like that anymore.
[00:00:09]  No, you know what?
[00:00:10]  Now they are.
[00:00:12]  I mean, we shouldn't say too much to get our because we don't want to get our girls in trouble here.
[00:00:16]  But the faces are so strange on them.
[00:00:19]  Have you noticed that?
[00:00:20]  They're these sort of like moons with these bleached blonde.
[00:00:26]  I'm thinking of like photos of British women you see like for a narrow out.
[00:00:30]  Wait, are you thinking about women or men?
[00:00:32]  But there's kind of they're like the men are sort of like they look like a big thick piece of bread.
[00:00:38]  And the women kind of look soggy in a way.
[00:00:41]  I don't know if I don't know.
[00:00:43]  Really?
[00:00:44]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:00:47]  But what do you think?
[00:00:48]  What were you saying?
[00:00:50]  I don't know.
[00:00:50]  I feel like we're talking about two different.
[00:00:53]  I feel like we're talking about like different generations of Brits.
[00:00:56]  Yes.
[00:00:56]  No, that's that we are.
[00:00:57]  We are definitely.
[00:00:58]  I feel like the Brits of today are like, I've had a fucking, I've had some Chawn A's.
[00:01:02]  And they'll get like a fucking, you know, it's a little new different accent.
[00:01:06]  Maybe spent some years abroad.
[00:01:08]  But like they'll get, and they're like, it's more Chawn A's food.
[00:01:10]  And it's just like, it's just fucking French fries and some fucking chicky fingers.
[00:01:15]  Oh, man.
[00:01:16]  You're talking about the Commonwealth now.
[00:01:18]  Well, it's all, yeah, it's all, it's all brain.
[00:01:20]  And they're so drunk.
[00:01:31]  We should issue a warning that there's a lot of accent work in this episode when I didn't think there was going to be.
[00:01:53]  Well, it's, it's, we have like, we have, we do this occasion where we have like a guest who is like a real job.
[00:01:59]  And so I don't know if like I don't know if we can do accent work around people with real jobs.
[00:02:05]  You know what I mean?
[00:02:06]  His game.
[00:02:07]  He was, he was incredible at it.
[00:02:09]  Yeah, he did, he did, he does great accent work.
[00:02:12]  I feel like being a European, you're kind of it's like juicing.
[00:02:16]  It's like taking steroids for accent work because you're exposed to so many.
[00:02:21]  And mine are just like, you know, from like my view of British people is from absolutely fabulous.
[00:02:27]  Hello.
[00:02:27]  Oh, nice reference.
[00:02:28]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:29]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:31]  My name's Bryce.
[00:02:33]  Wait, Bryce.
[00:02:37]  A quick caning in singer, fresh off of caning in Singapore.
[00:02:42]  I would never cane a coolie.
[00:02:43]  My name is Bryce, and we are, of course, joined by producer.
[00:02:48]  Producer Young Chomsky.
[00:02:50]  There you go.
[00:02:51]  There you go.
[00:02:51]  And this is Truanan.
[00:02:53]  Hello.
[00:02:53]  Hello.
[00:02:54]  Those faulty towers.
[00:02:55]  That's we had a couple of those here in New York City.
[00:02:58]  How are you doing?
[00:02:59]  I'm good.
[00:03:00]  How are you doing?
[00:03:00]  I'm doing okay.
[00:03:02]  Can you hear the jackhammer outside my apartment?
[00:03:05]  I could during the interview.
[00:03:06]  And I was like, what is that?
[00:03:07]  Is someone jackhammering?
[00:03:09]  And then I realized my apartment.
[00:03:11]  We're doing a remote episode today.
[00:03:13]  And so the sort of like yin and yang energies of our rooms are kind of intermingling within the audio forms.
[00:03:21]  That's a nice way of putting it.
[00:03:23]  We had to because our guest is in right over right across.
[00:03:28]  You can't remember the fucking name of the country, can you?
[00:03:30]  You can't fucking remember the name of the country.
[00:03:32]  This is so you.
[00:03:34]  The UK.
[00:03:34]  It's the, it's, well, okay, so sometimes when we're talking to somebody, this is Emmanuel, just if you are sending this episode to anyone you're friends with, tell them to skip ahead.
[00:03:44]  But sometimes when we're talking to someone from the UK, right?
[00:03:48]  Oh, and you call it England?
[00:03:49]  You call it England?
[00:03:50]  They'll be like, oh, no.
[00:03:51]  But I'm like, it's all kind of England, right?
[00:03:54]  Like, I guess Wales is, you know, there's like Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland.
[00:03:58]  Nobody knows that.
[00:03:59]  I like that you're whispering when you're saying that.
[00:04:00]  Because I don't want them to get into a microphone.
[00:04:03]  Whispering.
[00:04:04]  Doesn't that sum up my whole life?
[00:04:06]  But it's like, it's all kind of England, right?
[00:04:09]  You know, it's like when you close.
[00:04:10]  You could run on that platform.
[00:04:12]  When I close my eyes and think of, I don't close my eyes and think of the UK.
[00:04:17]  I close my eyes and think of England.
[00:04:18]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:19]  That's, you know what?
[00:04:20]  That will be the campaign theme song for reform.
[00:04:24]  Oh, reform UK.
[00:04:25]  I feel like we could go.
[00:04:27]  I feel like the UK is so few people that we could go and become like major reform party politicians within like three months.
[00:04:34]  That's if the law doesn't get us there, though.
[00:04:36]  That's the tricky thing.
[00:04:37]  They are fucking crazy.
[00:04:38]  And this is a Commonwealth thing.
[00:04:40]  They are crazy about not letting people in the country.
[00:04:42]  They grill your ass.
[00:04:44]  I know.
[00:04:46]  Well, today we are talking about, I mean, I hope that people have seen Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy or have read the books.
[00:04:55]  Yes.
[00:04:56]  I don't know if people have read the books.
[00:04:57]  I feel like they should have seen the movies.
[00:04:59]  The books.
[00:05:00]  I should watch the BBC.
[00:05:01]  And of course, the Smiley's People.
[00:05:04]  I'm more of a Smiley's People gal.
[00:05:06]  Smiley's People is amazing.
[00:05:07]  Yeah.
[00:05:08]  But WT, Tinker Taylor Solar Solar Spy, you know, the words that I was trying to say.
[00:05:12]  Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, the movie, I will say, is very stylistically, it's like cool.
[00:05:19]  You mean the American one?
[00:05:20]  I was thinking of the BBC series, but yeah, the American, the movie, like the one where it's got all the guys.
[00:05:26]  What's his name?
[00:05:27]  Yeah, but you know what I'm talking about.
[00:05:29]  I think it's good.
[00:05:30]  Also, the 50s, like the black and white spy who came in from the cold is good too.
[00:05:35]  But Lucari is like a good writer too.
[00:05:37]  Like his writing's actually good.
[00:05:41]  If people are familiar with that, then they will know the total outline of this story because as we talk about it in this episode, it is insane how much it maps onto a classic British spy novel.
[00:05:51]  Yeah, I mean, it really is like tremendous In the way that it's just, it's so note for note in some places that it's almost like you can see.
[00:06:01]  I mean, even reading through the book, it's just, you know, it's a lot of tropes.
[00:06:05]  It's incredible.
[00:06:06]  There's a lot of tropes.
[00:06:07]  But you know what?
[00:06:07]  These are good tropes.
[00:06:09]  We love these kind of tropes.
[00:06:11]  And yeah, it's an incredible spy story.
[00:06:14]  We have today Emmanuel Medolo.
[00:06:18]  I don't know.
[00:06:19]  I can't, I shouldn't say our guest name in an accent, should I?
[00:06:23]  Emmanuel Medolo, an investigative reporter at the Sunday Times.
[00:06:26]  And we are talking about his investigation along with a retired colleague who had been investigating the case for decades and decades and decades, Peter Gilliman.
[00:06:37]  The case of the murder of Sunday Times journalist David Holden in Cairo in 1977.
[00:06:47]  It is an incredible story.
[00:06:49]  They got a book out, Murder in Cairo.
[00:06:50]  We'll link to it.
[00:06:51]  I think I probably mentioned it at the beginning of the episode too.
[00:06:54]  But yeah, it's fantastic.
[00:06:56]  Let's just fucking, let's just roll this telex.
[00:07:12]  Should I say something?
[00:07:13]  No, no, no, no.
[00:07:14]  You know what?
[00:07:15]  Emmanuel, I'm just going to be upfront with you.
[00:07:17]  Usually when we have guests, I do an incredibly rude introduction.
[00:07:20]  And I often play upon tropes from where they're from, which for you is Cecilia.
[00:07:27]  And I am going to not do that because you are in an isolation booth in your office.
[00:07:33]  And I don't want to embarrass you there.
[00:07:35]  I would feel quite badly for doing that.
[00:07:39]  But let me try.
[00:07:42]  Scoosy listeners.
[00:07:48]  Scoosy listeners.
[00:07:51]  We have an episode for you today with Emmanuel Medolo here.
[00:07:57]  I'm sorry.
[00:07:58]  I have to apologize, but I have to keep doing it.
[00:07:59]  I'm sorry.
[00:08:01]  I was not going to do it.
[00:08:02]  I was not.
[00:08:03]  I had to do it a little bit.
[00:08:04]  Please, you understand the business that we're in, it's humiliating.
[00:08:09]  And they demand these things from us.
[00:08:11]  They get angry at us if we don't do them.
[00:08:13]  But I'm just going to do it straight.
[00:08:14]  Emmanuel Medolo from the Sunday Times, an investigative journalist, is joining us here to talk about, well, talk about a bunch of stuff, but specifically the murder of David Holden, former Sunday Times investigative reporter.
[00:08:30]  I guess I should say former because he did die with foreign correspondent, if I can say.
[00:08:35]  Because he wasn't an investigator.
[00:08:37]  You're right.
[00:08:37]  Foreign correspondent.
[00:08:39]  I'm getting your title and his mixed up.
[00:08:42]  About your incredible article co-authored with Peter Gilman about this, but also your book, Murder in Cairo, which I guess you had a book launch for last night.

=== Sunday Times Traditions (03:59) ===

[00:08:52]  Yes.
[00:08:53]  It explains the half-unbuttered publication.
[00:08:56]  Didn't get too drunk, which is unusual for book launches in London.
[00:09:00]  I was about to say, yeah.
[00:09:03]  But as you said, I had to come to work today and I'm here in the office in an isolation booth.
[00:09:13]  I'm surprised.
[00:09:14]  I thought the US was very PC and prone to council culture and that kind of stuff.
[00:09:22]  Yes, but the racial status of the accent.
[00:09:24]  The racial status of the Italian has been up for debate.
[00:09:29]  It is truly up in the air right now.
[00:09:32]  And so we're sort of doing our part to kind of muddy the waters on exactly what is an Italian, if they are, you know, if they're white American, if they're not.
[00:09:40]  Regardless, though, you're in England now, or you're in the wonderful city of London.
[00:09:45]  You're not in the city of London, but you're in the city of London, which is near the city of London, which I've always just...
[00:09:50]  I can see the city of London from, yeah, from the window.
[00:09:56]  And it's sunny, so it's terrifying.
[00:09:59]  It's one of those days.
[00:10:00]  Doesn't happen very often.
[00:10:04]  Well, I want to ask you first, because I think this needs to kind of be said in order to have our listeners understand what the hell we're going to be talking about today.
[00:10:13]  What is the Sunday Times?
[00:10:16]  That's a very good question.
[00:10:17]  I ask myself that all the time.
[00:10:21]  Okay, so let's start from the beginning.
[00:10:23]  The oldest newspaper in England is the daily newspaper called The Times, which is the other newspaper that I work for.
[00:10:32]  Then there's a long tradition in England of Sunday papers, and that's where the Sunday Times comes in.
[00:10:39]  Initially, they were completely different papers, completely separate, separate ownership, separate management or anything like that.
[00:10:47]  It just happened to have the same title.
[00:10:49]  That's because the Times was so influential that lots of newspapers started to mimic the title, the Financial Times.
[00:10:59]  The New York Times, funny enough, comes after the Times of London.
[00:11:04]  Times of London was founded in 1765, I think.
[00:11:10]  Sunday Times comes about 50 years later.
[00:11:14]  And as I said, for a long time they were separate.
[00:11:16]  Now they are part of the same group and in the process of actually merging.
[00:11:25]  They're owned by Robert Murdoch.
[00:11:27]  Not sure if you ever heard of him.
[00:11:29]  Oh, we're very familiar.
[00:11:31]  Love the guy.
[00:11:33]  Anyway, so they're now under the same ownership, part of the same group, which is News Corp, and in the process, slow process of actually merging and eventually becoming the same newspaper.
[00:11:47]  At the moment the Sunday Times.
[00:11:48]  It's a separate entity, has separate management, different editor than the Times obviously comes out on on sunday, which is you know what says on the tin, and it's it's a different format to the Times, to the daily.
[00:12:03]  It's a broad sheet um, we know what's, it's the one you push over your face and cut little holes in to look at people on the track exactly, as opposed to the big yeah, it's supposed to say the big one that's like Diana Cheated, really big that they sell on the on the street there.
[00:12:18]  Yeah, tabloid is the other one, which is um, you know the small format.
[00:12:22]  Anyway, that's the Sunday Times.
[00:12:24]  It has a long tradition of investigative journalism.
[00:12:29]  We tend to publish longer articles than the daily.
[00:12:32]  Uh, the format also helps because, as you say, it's like a big, it's a big paper and uh, in the 1960s the Sunday Times was the first newspaper to have a dedicated investigations team which was called Insight, still called Insight.

=== Working Soviets, Betrayed Ones (12:28) ===

[00:12:51]  They're very famous for they broke the Kim Philby story.
[00:12:54]  Yeah, exactly so we were chatting earlier uh, about um tropes in in John Lecario's novels.
[00:13:03]  Well Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, which is the big, you know, the most famous, possibly most famous, John The Carrier's novel was actually a, a fictionalized version of the Kim Philby story.
[00:13:19]  Yeah, he included lots of different you know, elements from not just Kim Philby's life story but also, like some of the other Cambridge FIVE we were, we were.
[00:13:29]  We were talking about gay spies having affairs with you know older men and stuff like that.
[00:13:35]  The reason why that's so familiar is because it really happened.
[00:13:40]  You know the, the Philby stuff.
[00:13:43]  Um again, i'm not sure how familiar uh, Americans are, but Philby is a big deal in in in England he's considered the most damaging spy in in history, in British history at least.
[00:13:58]  Uh, which for the Brits is the only history that counts.
[00:14:02]  Asked them about anything else?
[00:14:04]  Um, Philby was this guy who was well, we used to work at the Times.
[00:14:11]  We, we've got him on our on our wall.
[00:14:14]  Yes, he was, he was, he was.
[00:14:16]  He was a long time journalist actually.
[00:14:18]  Yes, before Philby started working for MI6, aka SIS, he was a journalist at the time and he was reporting from um a number of country posts.
[00:14:30]  His most famous stuff was during the uh, the Spanish civil war in the 1930s.
[00:14:37]  He cozied up to the nationalists Yes, he was embedded with the Franco, Francisco Franco's militias, despite the fact that even already at that point, he was already working for the Soviets.
[00:14:52]  And that was a very nice, you know, very nice place to be.
[00:14:55]  You are embedded with the fascists, you're reporting on behalf of the Times.
[00:15:01]  But at the same time, you're feeding the Soviets with all the military information, all the intelligence stuff that Franco and his nice fascists are giving you.
[00:15:14]  So anyway, then after the war, he became a big shot in British intelligence, ultimately becoming the man in charge of the liaison between the Brits and the Americans, between MI6 and the CIA.
[00:15:35]  And he was working for the Soviets throughout that period.
[00:15:39]  So that's why it's considered so damaging, because we think we have no idea how many people got killed because of him.
[00:15:46]  But every single time the CIA and MI6 were doing some, you know, something some Belarusians to go blow up a dam or something, they would get picked up pretty quickly.
[00:16:01]  Yeah, or tried to, you know, get the president of Albania assassinated.
[00:16:07]  Then the Soviet Union already knew about that and people were just waiting for these freedom fighters to be parachuted to their deaths.
[00:16:15]  So that's, you know, that's the kind of, that's why it became such a damaging, like such a, it's a trauma in British, in the mindset of British culture or British intelligence.
[00:16:29]  There's also, I mean, there's some great books.
[00:16:31]  My colleague Ben McIntyre has written a couple of books about this stuff.
[00:16:36]  And the only reason we know about this is because in 1967, the Sunday Times under the editorship of this guy called Harold Devans decided to investigate what had happened with Philby.
[00:16:52]  Philby at that point was considered to be a journalist who had defected to the Soviet Union four years before.
[00:16:59]  It escaped from, he left Beirut and reappeared in Russia a few months later.
[00:17:08]  But no one seemed to know, you know, why was like he was a former diplomat.
[00:17:13]  He was a journalist.
[00:17:14]  Again, he'd gone back to journalism after he'd been exposed.
[00:17:18]  And he was reporting from Beirut for a couple of British newspapers.
[00:17:26]  But when he defected, when he went to the Soviet Union, you know, the British public had no idea who this guy was, essentially.
[00:17:33]  And it took, I think it was a year of investigating for the Sunday Times to eventually crack this case and reveal what I just said, i.e. that not only Kim Philby was a MI6 hotshot, he was in fact the guy in charge of a relationship with the CIA.
[00:17:55]  So it was a pretty big deal that he was actually working for the Soviets.
[00:18:01]  It's funny.
[00:18:01]  I mean, it's not funny, but for people who are not familiar with this story, your point about it being this kind of like trauma in the British psyche, I think is so important because the kind of scar tissue that this left either like, I mean, it completely frayed the relationship between the CIA and MI6 and MI5.
[00:18:23]  Like, you know, it was the Americans like fully spanked the British in every way that they could, like kind of humiliation, especially when the British, I mean, and you could speak to this better than I could, but my understanding is that like intelligence was like, that's the British thing.
[00:18:40]  This is like, we invented this.
[00:18:43]  This is our craft.
[00:18:44]  And they got got on in the most humiliating way possible, you know, for there to be this like Soviet mole in their mix for so long.
[00:18:56]  I think it was like a great national humiliation is a great way to put it.
[00:19:00]  Yeah, I mean, Philby was the third, you know, high-ranking MI6 official who'd been exposed as belonging to the Soviet Union.
[00:19:08]  Actually, defected to the Soviet Union.
[00:19:10]  There had been about 15 years before that, 10 years before that, there's been the case of these two missing diplomats, Anthony Burgess and Donald McLean.
[00:19:24]  Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[00:19:25]  Who had, again, they were in Washington, they were working for MI6, they were working closely with the CIA, and all of a sudden got tipped off.
[00:19:36]  You're about to be exposed.
[00:19:39]  And off they were.
[00:19:41]  They reappeared in Moscow shortly after that.
[00:19:44]  And famously, Anthony Blunt as well, who worked closely with the Queen.
[00:19:50]  The Soviet Union was more pictures.
[00:19:52]  Anthony Blunt was the fourth in this Cambridge spyring.
[00:19:55]  They were called the Cambridge Five because they were all being recruited at Cambridge by this Don who was working for the Soviets.
[00:20:05]  A lot of them were gay.
[00:20:07]  But yeah, no, as you were saying, you're completely right.
[00:20:11]  The British were the spy masters.
[00:20:13]  I mean, they were the ones who, as you said, invented this kind of intelligence gathering.
[00:20:21]  And so when this happened, the embarrassment was just, you know, beyond completely beyond anyone's imagination.
[00:20:31]  The other reason why this was such a trauma in British psyche is because they were all part of the establishment.
[00:20:40]  They were all part of this, what we call here the old boys club.
[00:20:45]  You know, pink earring, like Oxbridge, educated, posh.
[00:20:52]  Chortling while sort of spitting out biscuits at the club and having a cigar.
[00:20:57]  I think I heard you guys trying to do that accent as well.
[00:21:01]  We do a lot of accent work.
[00:21:03]  Yeah, we do.
[00:21:04]  Big accent workers.
[00:21:05]  It is difficult to do.
[00:21:07]  I can do.
[00:21:09]  No, I can do like a butler British accent, but it's very difficult for me to do like the chortling old boy.
[00:21:20]  The different registers that you have to hit when you're trying to, it's difficult.
[00:21:26]  It's down here.
[00:21:27]  I'm not going to attempt to do it because I'd be ridiculed by my colleagues.
[00:21:31]  But I can say that that was the reason why they just couldn't believe it.
[00:21:37]  I mean, there's a great TV series, which is taken from this book that my colleague at the time, Span McIntyre, has written, which is called A Spy Among Friends.
[00:21:47]  They made it into TV series here in England with Guy Pierce playing Philby and Damien Lewis playing this other guy, Nicholas Elliott, who was his best friend.
[00:21:59]  You know, they were best friends.
[00:22:01]  And Philby not only betrayed his country, he also betrayed his friends.
[00:22:07]  And for them, this is just such a big shock.
[00:22:10]  I mean, they are obsessed with that kind of stuff.
[00:22:13]  They're obsessed with not just, you know, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to be obsessed with loyalty or to be patriots or whatever it is, but the establishment.
[00:22:28]  So the fact that they were all coming from either Oxford or Cambridge, this is such a big deal for the Brits.
[00:22:38]  I can tell you a funny anecdote.
[00:22:40]  Mike Author is 83.
[00:22:42]  He started working for the Sunday Times in 1965, this chap called Peter Gilman.
[00:22:48]  And yet, when he was writing his bio for our book, the first thing that he mentioned was that he was the editor of the uni, the university newspaper at Oxford in 1961 or something.
[00:23:04]  Like that was his first line.
[00:23:07]  And I was like, what the fuck are you doing?
[00:23:12]  Listen, we have our version of that here.
[00:23:14]  I don't know if you guys do in Italy, but like we have like Ivy League people here who are like a little like that, but it's nothing, nothing compared.
[00:23:22]  Because it's like, as far as I know, there's two universities in the UK, Cambridge and Oxford.
[00:23:31]  Yeah.
[00:23:31]  And pretty much everything flows out of that.
[00:23:34]  I assume that there's other ones because other people must go to the university.
[00:23:39]  There's a lot of other ones, but those are the only ones that you hear these crazy stories about.
[00:23:44]  And it's like, I should not know the name of British fucking private high schools for boys, but I do.
[00:23:50]  I know many of them.
[00:23:52]  Like, there's no, there's, I shouldn't know any of that.
[00:23:55]  I'm an American in 2025, but yet I do.
[00:24:00]  And it's because of, because, yeah, they essentially like these, these, it was like this system in, in, in the UK just like produces the upper class.
[00:24:09]  It's very like, it's almost like a, like a factory system that just like everybody comes from this.
[00:24:14]  Absolutely.
[00:24:15]  I mean, it's, it's kind of changing now, maybe, question mark.
[00:24:21]  Like, how many former prime ministers didn't go to Eton College and then to Oxford or whatever?
[00:24:29]  It also probably is going to depend on the budget cuts.
[00:24:32]  Yeah.
[00:24:33]  But I mean, it's very much, it's very much like that.
[00:24:36]  That was the, that's the apex of these people's lives.
[00:24:39]  I mean, my, Michael Pizza is a great guy.
[00:24:41]  He's written like a dozen books or whatever.
[00:24:43]  Some of them won awards and, you know, and he's, he's been a staff writer for the Sunday Times on the investigations team for like 15 years or whatever.
[00:24:52]  But the fact that he was editing the newspaper at Oxford for him is, you know, that's it.
[00:24:59]  Anything else just, you know, doesn't, it's, it's not as good as that.
[00:25:05]  And this is just to tell you that, like, when I was, I mean, I'm obviously an outsider.
[00:25:11]  I was born in Sicily, studied in the north of Italy, then France.

=== Still Happening in Cambridge (03:28) ===

[00:25:20]  And I only moved to England about 10 years ago.
[00:25:22]  And all this stuff was completely alien to me.
[00:25:26]  I was struggling to really understand, to grasp this sort of weird, as you say, like factory of the ruling class in England.
[00:25:38]  These are the kinds of stories that you can only hear in England.
[00:25:43]  You can only hear about this shit at Oxford or Cambridge.
[00:25:48]  So it didn't really surprise me when I was looking into this that having lived in the UK for 10 years, that this kind of stuff was still happening.
[00:26:01]  Is still happening to a certain degree, but it was still happening when when, when my guy, David Holden, went to Cambridge uh, after the war uh, or actually he went, he went during the war uh, because Philby was, it belonged to a different, a different generation.
[00:26:16]  Philby was, it was before the war.
[00:26:21]  And crucially, I mean, all these people are so shocked by what happened in Spain, right?
[00:26:29]  The fascists taking power.
[00:26:31]  They were terrified, as you should be, of Hitler and the Nazis and, you know, the marching and the rest of the stuff.
[00:26:41]  And they genuinely thought that the only power that could stop them.
[00:26:47]  them was the Soviet Union.
[00:26:49]  Spoiler alert, they did win the war yes yeah yeah, so well, they didn't win.
[00:26:55]  They didn't win the Spanish one but yeah, they did.
[00:26:57]  No, they didn't win the Spanish one, despite Kimphilby, but they, they did effectively, you know, in the end they did um, defeat the Nazis and uh, but in the 1930s, I mean after the uh Guernica massacre like, there were all these moments that we now don't necessarily understand how big they were, like how, how much of a big deal that was um, what was surprising about Holden is that Holden was born in 1924,
[00:27:25]  so was younger than this generation, these Cambridge FIVE.
[00:27:29]  But this is a spoiler alert.
[00:27:34]  I mean how, how much are we going to say about this stuff?
[00:27:36]  Like I mean, I mean, let's, just what, if it, if you know, if it, if it makes sense to talk about, let's talk about it.
[00:27:42]  No because, obviously right.
[00:27:44]  So the how did a Sicilian, uh property journalist go onto this crazy spy story with all sorts of twists, twists and turns uh MI6 CIA KGB, the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian secret service, gay lovers and uh, you know, uh plots of um overthrowing regimes in faraway places?
[00:28:14]  Like, how the did I get myself into this?
[00:28:19]  The reason is because when I moved to this country, I wanted to become an investigative journalist.
[00:28:24]  I used to live in France, I was working for a French newspaper and I, uh I went to UNI.
[00:28:30]  I didn't go to Oxford, I didn't go to Cambridge, I I went to something called THE CITY University, which is considered the best journalism school uh in England, hence in the world not in the world, but after it's considered, you know, the best journalist school in Europe, which is crazy, because it was shit.

=== Inconsistencies Emerge (06:15) ===

[00:28:49]  It was really bad.
[00:28:51]  It was really really bad.
[00:28:53]  Um, I, during a session of training in investigative journalism, I met this guy, Peter Gilman, who was then in his 70s, I'd say.
[00:29:05]  And Peter would tell us these war stories about the glory days of the Insight team, the golden age of investigative journalism, and the legendary editor, Harry Evans.
[00:29:20]  This was the team that had cracked the Philby case and had been campaigning for years to get the victims of this pregnancy drug called thalidomide to get compensated by the government, by the state.
[00:29:41]  Plane disasters, like also, they were investigating the sexiest stuff out there, espionage, like plane crashes and, you know, all sorts of crazy things.
[00:29:55]  And then at the end of this training, Peter would say, you know, I told you about my successes.
[00:30:03]  Now let me tell you about the one time that we failed.
[00:30:06]  And he proceeded to tell us the story about David Holden, who was this guy, who was a foreign correspondent at the Sunday Times in the 1970s, who was sent to Cairo to report on a peace conference between Egypt and Israel.
[00:30:27]  He'd been on a 10-day swing across the Middle East, traveling through multiple countries.
[00:30:36]  Cairo was to be the last crucial step of his journey.
[00:30:39]  But as soon as he landed in Cairo, he disappeared.
[00:30:43]  He was found the next morning dead next to a busy road.
[00:30:52]  And the autopsy later revealed that he'd been shot once to the heart.
[00:31:00]  Now, as you can imagine, the shock at the Sunday Times was, as Harry Evans described, was profound.
[00:31:08]  This was the only guy who's been killed while reporting peace.
[00:31:13]  You know, he wasn't a war correspondent who had been blown up by a mine, like a guy called Nick Tomalin, Sunday Times foreign correspondent, had been killed three years before that on the Golden Heights during the war, between one of the wars between Egypt and Israel.
[00:31:32]  This guy was just there to cover a peace conference and somehow he was taken at the airport by someone, driven around in two cars that turned out to be stolen, and then shot, you know, close range, so much close range that the bullet was still found in his blazer.
[00:31:52]  Oh, wow.
[00:31:55]  So Harry Evans, the editor, sent a team of six journalists to the Middle East to retrace Holden's steps, try to find out what he did, what happened, and basically answer the two main question, you know, who killed Holden and why.
[00:32:17]  They spent a first week there.
[00:32:20]  They amassed a huge amount of information about Holden's travel plans and the people he met, but gaps and inconsistencies started to appear.
[00:32:32]  You know, they couldn't really figure out what Holden had been doing in at least a couple of afternoons during his trip.
[00:32:42]  And there were some people that were saying certain things that were disputed by others.
[00:32:47]  It sounded like someone was trying to either was lying or they were trying to provide an alibi for either for Holden or someone else.
[00:32:56]  All sorts of question marks started to emerge.
[00:32:59]  So Harry Evans got, the editor got a few people to work on this thing full time.
[00:33:08]  And Peter Gilman eventually was asked to expand the investigation to basically check this guy's entire life to try and find out.
[00:33:20]  Because the last week, his last trip to the Middle East didn't give the answer as to why he was killed and by whom.
[00:33:29]  And so that's when they decided we're going to try and find out as much as we can about this guy.
[00:33:36]  And then we're confident, this was the methods that they were using.
[00:33:40]  If we get all the facts, just put them in a, you know, in a timeline, the answers will emerge and, uh, you know, the mystery would be, I find it a little, if I could just interrupt real quick, I find it a little interesting that that was the immediate response.
[00:33:56]  I mean, obviously the immediate response is send people to the Middle East to retrace his last steps.
[00:33:59]  But I feel like at a certain level, you would assume if somebody was abducted off the street in Cairo or taken off the street in Cairo in some way and shot through the heart, that the murderer would likely be in some way related to what he was doing in Cairo or related to Cairo itself, some sort of criminal gang or something.
[00:34:21]  It's interesting that there must have been some suspicion that it could be larger than that if you're going over his entire life, because it's not like somebody from his Fleet Street tailor was going down there to smoke him for because he didn't pay his bills or whatever.
[00:34:39]  Well, yeah, initially, like this is interesting because the Egyptians, so they didn't allow these two investigators from Scotland Yard, from the British police to actually go to Egypt and investigate themselves, which in retrospect is probably telling.
[00:34:56]  They started saying, oh, you know, it could have been a robbery gone wrong.
[00:35:01]  Maybe it was hitting on a taxi driver.
[00:35:03]  Did you know if this guy was gay or not?

=== Egypt's Rejectionist Stance (02:56) ===

[00:35:04]  Like, which is a classic thing that the Egyptians always say when someone gets killed, shot in the back with a nine millimeter.
[00:35:14]  Yeah.
[00:35:15]  Maybe it was gay.
[00:35:18]  Are you sure he wasn't gay this guy?
[00:35:20]  Anyway, and yeah, then terrorists, maybe it was terrorists that were trying to interfere with the peace conference.
[00:35:32]  This, I have to say, and again, I mean, people in this country don't know very little about this shit, but this was after the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, had gone to Israel, had gone to Jerusalem for the first time.
[00:35:55]  This was the first official visit of an Arab leader to effectively to Israel.
[00:36:03]  He talked at the Nesset, the Israelites, yes.
[00:36:10]  And that implicitly recognized Israel's right to exist.
[00:36:16]  I mean, Israel and Egypt had been in a few wars throughout the year.
[00:36:22]  Most recently in 1972, what became what was called the Yom Kippur or the Ramadan War.
[00:36:29]  So the fact that the president of Egypt of all countries would decide to actually go there, do this symbolic visit was just something, it came as a massive shock to all these people.
[00:36:40]  And it created all sorts of problems in the Middle East because until then, there was this very united front of Arab states that did not recognize Israel as a legitimate state.
[00:36:57]  There was the Arab-Israeli war in the 40s and then another war in 1967.
[00:37:04]  But basically, all these countries were all together, all the Arab countries were all together against Israel, and Israel was just routinely kicking their asses on its own.
[00:37:18]  And the fact that Egypt was doing this was just was unprecedented and also caused all sorts of problems to the Italies in the region because they, you know, people like Gaddafi from Libya, Syria.
[00:37:37]  Assad, yeah.
[00:37:38]  Assad, Assad's father, yeah, Assad's father, not our guy.
[00:37:46]  They were shocked by this movement.
[00:37:47]  They were like, well, we're gonna we're gonna do a rejectionist peace rejectionist conference because we think this is a bad idea and you know, we oppose all this stuff.

=== Someone Stealing Telex Messages (07:22) ===

[00:38:00]  So basically, it was like, was he killed by Palestinian terrorists?
[00:38:06]  What did you feel about the Mossad?
[00:38:08]  Like, you know, did you do something that...
[00:38:10]  Yeah, because, I mean, that's something you guys mentioned because the Sunday Times had written about conditions in Israeli prisons sort of shortly, not so shortly, but before...
[00:38:20]  Six months before.
[00:38:21]  Six months before he was killed.
[00:38:23]  Holden had actually been named in the Israeli press as the author of that investigation, which he wasn't.
[00:38:33]  I mean, he had nothing to do with that investigation.
[00:38:36]  Actually, the guy who done that investigation was my co-author, Peter.
[00:38:40]  So the Sunday Times actually issued a correction and said it wasn't David Holden, it was this guy.
[00:38:44]  Peter's like, thank you very much, guys.
[00:38:46]  Great.
[00:38:47]  Yeah, wonderful.
[00:38:48]  Because Insight at that point didn't have bylaws, I have to say.
[00:38:51]  Which is the reason why when Harry Evans was dispatching Peter to the Middle East, he said to him, beware of Mossad.
[00:38:58]  They're the best intelligence agency in the world.
[00:39:01]  And Peter looked at him and was like, okay, thanks.
[00:39:07]  Yeah, okay, cool.
[00:39:08]  Thanks, man.
[00:39:10]  Very good.
[00:39:11]  Beware.
[00:39:12]  But also, like, how do you think?
[00:39:16]  Beware.
[00:39:17]  Well, it's, you know, beware stands for be aware.
[00:39:19]  So it's, you know, it's just awesome.
[00:39:20]  Beware Mossad might try to kill you.
[00:39:23]  Yeah, yeah, but you can figure it out.
[00:39:25]  To answer your question, why did they decide that maybe it had to do, it was something to do with something more complex than just him hit you on a taxi driver, as the Egyptians seem to suggest, or someone just stealing his wallet and decided to shoot him in the back.
[00:39:44]  The reason for that is because during the second trip that they made to the Middle East, so they made a number of trips.
[00:39:51]  I'm not going to go into the kind of, you know, PISA went at least three times, I think.
[00:39:56]  During the second trip, which was a crucial one, at the Sunday Times here in London, and it wasn't this office, it was a different office, but they realized that someone was stealing these messages that the team on the ground was sending back to the office.
[00:40:18]  And then upon more, you know, upon closer examination, they realized that also like Holden's messages had also been stolen.
[00:40:29]  So that was a shock.
[00:40:33]  It was like, what's going on here?
[00:40:35]  So these guys, David Holden and Peter Gilman, people, basically people dispatched to look into this and the subject of the investigation itself were sending these telex messages back to the office and somebody was stealing the telexes.
[00:40:51]  Yeah, so the telexes are this sort of, it's a bit more advanced than a telegram.
[00:40:55]  They are messages that are typed and then transmitted through a machine, like a fax, you know, like a like the grandpa of faxes, basically.
[00:41:06]  It seems like midway between the telegram and the fax.
[00:41:09]  Yes.
[00:41:09]  Hence the televax.
[00:41:11]  Now this is real George Smiley here.
[00:41:14]  Yeah, I gotta say.
[00:41:16]  I gotta say, dude.
[00:41:19]  I mean, just everything about this.
[00:41:21]  And first of all, the fact that even, and I know this is a tri point to make, just the fact that Peter Gilman, I mean, very close in name to a central character in Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, but the telex is being stolen is just like so, it's like almost on the nose kind of like spy novel of the time.
[00:41:45]  Well, they obviously at that point they didn't think it that way.
[00:41:49]  They just, you know, all they were concerned was that about was that someone was stealing their messages.
[00:41:55]  Were they trying to find out where they were going and what they were doing?
[00:41:58]  Like, are they actually going to meet the Holden's killer, you know, in the worst possible way?
[00:42:05]  As in, they were, were they going to get themselves killed as well, as well, you know, just like Holden?
[00:42:13]  And also the other question was, did Holden's killers knew when he was going to Cairo because they stolen the telexes from the Sunday Times office?
[00:42:26]  Like, that was a big question.
[00:42:27]  Like, because what became clear after a couple of weeks was that the timing of these thefts of these cars, these three, so there were three cars involved in the operation to kill Holden.
[00:42:46]  The first car was this, they were all battered Fiat.
[00:42:50]  I don't know why they decided to use an Italian car.
[00:42:53]  Probably because they're very reliable.
[00:42:56]  They were like, oh, we need to steal the best cars in Cairo.
[00:42:59]  The best cars in Cairo are fiat.
[00:43:03]  They stole these three cars.
[00:43:07]  They were reported stolen at crucial moments.
[00:43:11]  I can't remember exactly when, but the first car, which is the one in which he was abducted at the airport, was stolen the day after they confirmed that he was going to the Middle East.
[00:43:24]  Because initially Holden did not want to go to the Middle East.
[00:43:27]  So first car, Holden says yes, first car gets stolen.
[00:43:33]  Then a couple of weeks later, as he was approaching the end of his trip, 24 hours before he was getting to Cairo, car number two, which is the one in which he was shot, and car number three, which is the one in which the killers did the getaway, their getaway, were stolen.
[00:43:52]  So they knew exactly when he was going to, they knew exactly that he was going to the Middle East to begin with, and they knew precisely when he was going to Cairo.
[00:44:02]  And that was something that was baffling to the investigators.
[00:44:05]  They were like, how the fuck did these people know, like, what was happening?
[00:44:08]  So when the telexes were stolen, the guys at the Sunday Times were like, hang on a second, did they get this information from the horse's mouth?
[00:44:17]  Did they get it from us?
[00:44:19]  Like, were the people who stolen the telexes, the same people who killed Holden?
[00:44:24]  I mean, it was a terrifying thought, right?
[00:44:27]  Yeah.
[00:44:28]  And it's interesting because he disappears pretty much right after getting into the country, too.
[00:44:32]  Like, he flies into Cairo.
[00:44:35]  You know, obviously there's some confusion, which we can talk about in a sec, about what he was previously doing that day in Jordan, I think, right?
[00:44:43]  But he flies into Cairo and then instead of going to like the designated taxi area, just disappears.
[00:44:51]  He gets into this car with these other guys and is never seen again.
[00:44:54]  Well, next time he's seen, he's got a hole in his heart.
[00:44:57]  Yeah.
[00:44:58]  I mean, the autopsy revealed that he was killed at some point between 3, I think, in the morning.
[00:45:06]  I mean, he landed at 11, got out of the airport around midnight, was picked up by someone, driven around for a while, took it into the second car, then shot, then damped on the side of the road.

=== Peter's Disappearance (16:01) ===

[00:45:23]  So it was, you know, that quick.
[00:45:25]  I mean, the guy never even reached Cairo City, as far as we know.
[00:45:30]  So Peter is assigned this story, but how far does he actually get with it?
[00:45:39]  I mean, it seems like one of the big, I mean, what I found sort of touching about the book, especially, is that, you know, you kind of go to Peter and you're like, let's figure this out.
[00:45:49]  And he's just like raring to go.
[00:45:51]  You know, he talked to you about this about being in one of his failed investigations when he taught the course.
[00:45:56]  But it seems like he had this like giant, almost like dossier that he'd compiled for the Sunday editors, or excuse me, the Sunday, Sunday Times editorial staff that was never actually published, but it was almost like a dossier that Peter himself had made.
[00:46:12]  So this report, which he calls the Holden report, was actually for the editor's eyes only.
[00:46:18]  And Peter spent a year investigating this thing, right?
[00:46:23]  Investigating a guy's life.
[00:46:24]  Is why this is.
[00:46:25]  That was the moment when, after he came back from UM, from from the Middle East, the second time, that's when Harry Events said, look, this is very troubling, everything is happening, you know, doesn't?
[00:46:37]  It doesn't add up, it just is.
[00:46:38]  This is not just the journalist getting killed, like you know this, this stuff about the theft of the telexes and you know all these inconsistencies that you found, like this, there's something going on here.
[00:46:48]  So I want you to enlarge, you know, the scope of the investigation.
[00:46:52]  Try to find out as much as you can about who this guy was.
[00:46:55]  We thought we knew him, turns out we didn't like go out, talk to everyone.
[00:47:03]  Uh, find out as much as you can, no expense spare.
[00:47:06]  Those were the days he spent a year on the case on one investigation.
[00:47:11]  He wasn't doing anything else.
[00:47:13]  It was the longest he ever spent on investigation.
[00:47:15]  And then in november 1978, so Holding was killed.
[00:47:19]  December 1977.
[00:47:21]  In november 1978, Piser wrote this 30 000 word UM 110 page report for Harry Events eyes only.
[00:47:33]  It was inconclusive.
[00:47:36]  He had a number of theories and a number of suspicions uh, but the problem was that even if they wanted to publish something at that point, they they couldn't because the Sunday Times was closed literally the, the newspaper didn't literally just closed a few days before that uh, it didn't come out for a year because the the, the ownership of the Sunday Times, was engaged in this battle with the print unions.
[00:48:04]  Now this sounds very strange, but back in the day and again, this is where you might want to do like a 40 minutes introduction episode about what the print unions were like in in the 1960s and 70s in England.
[00:48:16]  But these print unions were so powerful because they, they were just going on on strike for, you know for, for whatever reason, like they wanted more pay, they wanted more hours, they wanted this, they wanted that they could just completely, you know they could stop uh newspapers from being printed, and it often happened like it was something that they would just like.
[00:48:39]  You know we're.
[00:48:40]  Not going to get the newspaper out today and you know you can get.
[00:48:44]  So that situation got to this, to this escalation, and the the the, the management of the Sunday Times, decided that they, they were not going to print any newspaper for a year unless they, they got onto some sort of agreement with the print unions.
[00:48:59]  Spoiler, all that they didn't.
[00:49:01]  That's when Rupert Murder comes in, crashes the unions, introduces new technology printing um printing new technology with computers and and effectively, you know, some people say saved British journalism, some other people say, you know, kind of crashed this social movement and, you know, took away all the rights of these people.
[00:49:28]  And anyway, we're not going to get into that.
[00:49:30]  But the main point is nothing could be published.
[00:49:34]  There was no newspaper.
[00:49:37]  And Harry Evans was then moved by Rupert Murdoch from the Sunday Times to The Times, which was the sister publication.
[00:49:47]  Peter was assigned to other duties.
[00:49:51]  But this case, I mean, it was just the one that, you know, the one that got away, the one that they couldn't do it.
[00:49:58]  And in 2020, when Harry Evans died, it was 92, I think it was.
[00:50:07]  By the way, for American listeners, you might not know who Harry Evans is, but Tina Brown, Harry Evans, Harry Evans' wife is Tina Brown.
[00:50:18]  I think it should be still pretty famous in America.
[00:50:22]  She is, yeah.
[00:50:24]  And so Harry Evans dies.
[00:50:27]  That's when I emailed Peter.
[00:50:29]  I joined the Sunday Times only a few months before.
[00:50:32]  I emailed Peter, expressed my condolences.
[00:50:34]  I knew that they were friends, you know, just other than colleagues.
[00:50:40]  And that's what Peter says.
[00:50:42]  Well, he starts reminiscing about the old times once again.
[00:50:45]  He loves doing that.
[00:50:48]  But then at the end of the email, he was like, the last two times I've seen Harry, he told me that he was still troubled by the Holden case and asked me to have another go at it, you know, try to see it through.
[00:51:02]  And Peter's like 80 himself at this point, right?
[00:51:04]  Yeah, at that point, it's like, yeah, pushing 80.
[00:51:07]  And he said, Harry told me we must solve the case.
[00:51:14]  So now you're doing the voice.
[00:51:16]  You're doing the accent.
[00:51:17]  I'm doing the accident.
[00:51:19]  But then now Peter, you know, Harry's dead and I'm old and, you know, it's the same.
[00:51:25]  It's a different time.
[00:51:26]  Yeah, it was a different time.
[00:51:29]  And I was like, whoa, this is just like I started doing a bit of research just by doing a bit of Googling.
[00:51:36]  By the way, the Wikipedia page for David Holden is shit.
[00:51:38]  It's like full of conspiracy theories.
[00:51:41]  So anyway, I started doing a bit of digging.
[00:51:45]  There wasn't much out there, really, about this.
[00:51:50]  Harry Evans had written about this in one of his memoirs.
[00:51:54]  He'd written a chapter about the Holden case, which was based on the report that Peter published.
[00:52:01]  But I did find some declassified files that were related to Holden.
[00:52:06]  And so I shared my findings with Peter.
[00:52:09]  And that's when Peter invited me to his house in South London.
[00:52:13]  And he literally handed me this 170-page report, which I had no idea existed.
[00:52:21]  I went home, read it in one sitting until like 2 a.m. in the morning or whatever.
[00:52:27]  And I was completely blown away by that because they read like a real John LeCaro's novels.
[00:52:36]  There were all sorts of twists and turns, like mistaken identities and dabbled dealings and characters.
[00:52:47]  If I read about those characters in a novel, I would have not believed them.
[00:52:50]  It was that far-fetched and that dramatic.
[00:52:54]  But it was all true.
[00:52:54]  And he had all this evidence.
[00:52:56]  He had all these boxes in his office, in his house office.
[00:53:01]  And he decided to share all this stuff with me.
[00:53:05]  And that's when I started reinvestigating the case, and first checking all the names, see if these people were alive.
[00:53:13]  And most of them sadly weren't.
[00:53:15]  A lot of them had actually died either as I got back onto the case or they died just before I could contact them.
[00:53:23]  It was that kind of generation, you know, people in their 80s and 90s, and especially during COVID.
[00:53:31]  Very frustrating experience.
[00:53:32]  Yeah, it's funny, actually.
[00:53:34]  You can kind of see that throughout the book because you'll mention somebody that it seems clear that you really want to talk to.
[00:53:41]  And then it'll like in parentheses, it'll be like, you know, such and such died in 2017 or such and such died in 2019.
[00:53:49]  You have no idea.
[00:53:50]  You have no idea how many times.
[00:53:53]  And then some people are like, so-and-so died age 100 in 2021.
[00:54:00]  And I'm like, anyway, the problem is sometimes we did get in touch with Peter.
[00:54:08]  Sorry, we did get in touch with people who were there, who knew the guy, etc.
[00:54:15]  And they were like, I don't know.
[00:54:19]  It was 60 years ago.
[00:54:22]  How do you want me to remember anything about this stuff?
[00:54:27]  That's a kind of theme in the book.
[00:54:29]  Memory plays such a big part.
[00:54:31]  We had this moment where we were like, we've been looking for this particular guy who was the MI6 chief in the Middle East.
[00:54:39]  He was the head of MI6 in the Middle East.
[00:54:42]  And we weren't sure whether this guy was still alive.
[00:54:44]  Someone said he was dead.
[00:54:46]  Eventually we found him.
[00:54:47]  He lived in Bath, which is a very nice city west of London.
[00:54:57]  And we managed to find a number for him.
[00:55:00]  And we were like, yeah, we're going to call him and see what maybe he doesn't want to talk to us.
[00:55:05]  And Peter talked to him and was like, and the guy was like, yeah, I'd be very, very happy to help you.
[00:55:11]  Except I have to warn you, I have dementia.
[00:55:20]  It's, it's been, you know, it's been one of those, like, this, this is, this is the problem.
[00:55:27]  Like the next.
[00:55:27]  The next thing I do, I'll make sure everyone is dead or, you know, everyone is 22 years old.
[00:55:35]  Oh, yeah.
[00:55:35]  Yeah.
[00:55:36]  Because this has been the most frustrating experience.
[00:55:38]  I mean, there is a certain point in the book, especially when you're sort of reconstructing his last days and you're kind of looking into some of the people that he's spending time with and realizing that a huge number of them who otherwise have relatively,
[00:55:55]  you know, inconspicuous or unremarkable kind of cover stories actually were either former and heavily implied, perhaps present members of intelligence services.
[00:56:09]  I mean, there's a gentleman whose name I wrote down, but unfortunately John Fistier, yeah, who he has a sort of mysterious lunch with or maybe just like a quick confab, who turns out to be like a former OSS agent and a Palestinian academic who kind of gives this alibi that like, oh, I saw him, we were in the West Bank together.
[00:56:33]  And then it comes to, you come to realize that he's maybe was not in the West Bank with him.
[00:56:38]  And in fact, the academic now lives in the United States with citizenship, which would be a little unusual for people of that caliber.
[00:56:47]  I mean, what point did things sort of start clicking for you in like a major way here?
[00:56:52]  Right.
[00:56:53]  So there's this, this is a recurring theme where Peter had suspicions about someone, but he couldn't prove them.
[00:57:03]  Right.
[00:57:03]  And at that point, obviously, these people were alive.
[00:57:05]  You know, they could have sued him, which is why that report that he written was for the editor's eyes only.
[00:57:12]  You know, it was confidential information because it was potentially liabilities to these people.
[00:57:18]  He didn't have a piece of paper that said, CII, yes, we employ this guy to keep an eye on Holden.
[00:57:25]  But he found it, you know, he found that there were so many coincidences, so many people seemed to be effectively trying to find out what Holden was up to, what he was doing, the people he was meeting.
[00:57:41]  And it's not necessarily something that, you know, as a foreign correspondent, like Peter was a foreign correspondent himself.
[00:57:49]  And it just seemed very odd.
[00:57:53]  Like the people that Holden was meeting, it wasn't just, yeah, yeah, of course, I mean, he was attending some press conferences and, you know, interviewing the British ambassador to blah blah blah.
[00:58:03]  But sometimes he was meeting this guy.
[00:58:05]  And it was like, this guy heavily smells CIA.
[00:58:09]  Like he's the first secretary to the US Embassy in Damascus.
[00:58:17]  What's this guy up to?
[00:58:18]  Like, what was going on?
[00:58:20]  And but as I said, like he had these suspicions.
[00:58:23]  He suspected, for example, Festival to be lying about his encounter with Holden on the day, on the day he died, you know, because Holden was flying from Amman to Cairo.
[00:58:37]  And Fistir was seen in Holden's company.
[00:58:42]  He did not volunteer the information.
[00:58:44]  He did not come across and say, came forward and say, yeah, I saw him.
[00:58:52]  Some people did.
[00:58:53]  There was this beautiful French journalist called Kenise Emurad.
[00:58:58]  She approached Peter in the reception of the hotel and said, are you with the Sunday Times?
[00:59:03]  You know, I met your colleague, David Olden.
[00:59:07]  He was a wonderful man.
[00:59:11]  I made an accident.
[00:59:12]  That's right, you're doing the accent.
[00:59:13]  Where you lived in France, so it's not too cool.
[00:59:15]  No, but that's exactly how she speaks, by the way.
[00:59:17]  I went to see her in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago, and that's exactly how she speaks.
[00:59:24]  So she volunteered this information.
[00:59:26]  She was told, you know, did you hear, Madame, like the Mr. Holden was killed in Cairo.
[00:59:31]  She didn't know anything about this stuff.
[00:59:33]  And then she went to Gilman and because they said this gentleman from the Sunday Times is here to investigate Holden's death.
[00:59:41]  And so she approached Gilman and she volunteered to tell him everything, you know, everything they'd done together to the point of even getting into details about, oh yeah, we had dinner twice and then he invited me up to his room and I stayed there until 1 a.m.
[00:59:59]  And it's like dot dot dot.
[01:00:00]  And Peter's being British, you know, it's not like, you know.
[01:00:03]  He's not like, so did you have sex with him?
[01:00:06]  Because that would be my question.
[01:00:09]  But obviously the British, the British man, they're like, oh, Johnny Good.
[01:00:14]  A Sherry, a Sherry, perhaps.
[01:00:16]  Although, from what we know about David Holden, it seems maybe likely they did not have sex.
[01:00:21]  Although, she said, well, this is the, can I see this?
[01:00:25]  This is the only thing that my editor wanted to know.
[01:00:27]  Like, he sent me to Istanbul two weeks ago and he's like, I want to know, did she sleep with him?
[01:00:36]  And I had to ask her the question, you know, did anything romantic happen?
[01:00:40]  And she said, no, no, I mean, he was old.
[01:00:44]  She was like, he wasn't literally like, well, he was 53.
[01:00:49]  She was like, you know, she was a stunner.
[01:00:51]  I've seen pictures of her as a young woman.
[01:00:53]  And, you know, she was like, yeah, no, I mean, I was just, I was just, you know, because he was such a, you know, respected figure.
[01:01:01]  You know, was called, you know, an old hand in foreign correspondent circles.
[01:01:10]  And then she went and she said, by the way, you're telling me now that I wasn't his type.
[01:01:16]  Yes, true, yeah.
[01:01:17]  Well, it could be, you know, he could be a biased person.
[01:01:21]  He could have been biased.
[01:01:22]  He was married to a woman, right?

=== Starmer's Sudan Mystery (15:16) ===

[01:01:24]  Yeah.
[01:01:24]  He was married to a woman.
[01:01:26]  Again, back in the United States, they started to find all sorts of strange things about the guy's sex life.
[01:01:37]  Like they found that he'd been in this relationship for 10 years with this older man, a guy called Leo Silberman.
[01:01:46]  And by what they heard from the guy's brother, the guy was dead.
[01:01:53]  Leo was dead.
[01:01:54]  But Leo's brother told Peter that it was a very passionate relationship.
[01:02:02]  And then what they found was that Holden was actually trying to follow Silberman around.
[01:02:11]  Silberman was an academic.
[01:02:15]  He was a bit of a con man.
[01:02:16]  He was telling people different stories about his background and where he was coming from.
[01:02:21]  He was born in Frankfurt in Germany in 1915, but sometimes he was telling people he was born in South Africa instead.
[01:02:30]  Sometimes he was faking the fact that he'd never been to Britain, despite the fact that he actually lived in Britain for many years, because his family, he was a Jewish, he was coming from a Jewish family.
[01:02:42]  And so Frankfurt in the 1930s wasn't exactly the best place to be for Jewish family.
[01:02:49]  So they actually, so the family scattered, they sent Leo to England to study.
[01:02:56]  They had a family house here in London.
[01:03:01]  Sorry, they first sent him to school in Switzerland, actually, but then they moved to London.
[01:03:08]  Anyway, they had this crazy passionate relationship with Holden.
[01:03:12]  And then when Holden was hired by the Times in the 1950s, they found from reconstructing Holden's movements, because he was already a foreign correspondent at that point, that he was trying to follow Silberman around.
[01:03:32]  Silberman was going to Sudan.
[01:03:35]  And all of a sudden, Holden started to become very interested in Sudan.
[01:03:39]  And he sends these letters to the foreign editor of the Times and say, I need to go to Sudan.
[01:03:44]  There's some interesting stuff going on there.
[01:03:47]  I was like, why the fuck should we care about Sudan?
[01:03:50]  Like, you are in whatever, Egypt, Beirut.
[01:03:53]  Like, just stay there.
[01:03:55]  Like, we've got a guy doing Africa, whatever.
[01:03:58]  Like, why do you want to go to Sudan?
[01:04:00]  But he was nagging that.
[01:04:01]  He was literally like, if you don't send me, I'm going to go on annual leave to Sudan.
[01:04:07]  It's like, I don't think Sudan in 1954 was such a great place for a holiday, to be fair.
[01:04:14]  Sudan in 2025 is the greatest place for a holiday either.
[01:04:17]  Yeah.
[01:04:18]  Probably worse place.
[01:04:20]  But yeah, so I mean, Leo is sort of, because Leo was doing a strange, I might be remembering this wrong, but I was reading this last night.
[01:04:29]  But like, Leo was there on some strange grants that he, or he claimed to be there on some grants.
[01:04:34]  So Leo was claiming, as I said, he was a bit of a con man.
[01:04:37]  He was claiming that he had been, he had a PhD from Oxford, which he didn't.
[01:04:42]  He started, then he dropped out, but he was still using the like the Oxford, what do you call it?
[01:04:51]  Like the masthead.
[01:04:53]  Yeah, letterhead.
[01:04:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:04:55]  I guess back then you could just say you were anything.
[01:04:57]  And it's like, it would take so long to check, you know, you could probably get away with a crime.
[01:05:01]  Yeah.
[01:05:01]  Well, funny enough, the CIA, spoiler alert, did check and they checked and found out that he was not associated with Oxford, with this particular college at Oxford that he was claiming that he was.
[01:05:17]  Now, why the question, the question is why the CIA wanted to know this.
[01:05:22]  That's a whole different matter.
[01:05:24]  But anyway, yeah, so Silberman was technically an academic.
[01:05:29]  He was writing these academic papers, but at some point he got this ridiculous grant of what in today's money is like £175,000 to study disputes between the border of, and again, Somalia and Ethiopia.
[01:05:49]  Ethiopia, yeah, yeah, Agaden.
[01:05:53]  Somalia was called Somaliland.
[01:05:54]  You know all about this stuff, obviously.
[01:05:58]  But it sounds like a lot of money to actually study some, you know, border disputes.
[01:06:04]  Definitely.
[01:06:05]  Anyway, rewind.
[01:06:06]  What was I saying?
[01:06:08]  Yes, the marriage.
[01:06:10]  Holden's wife was a journalist called Ruth.
[01:06:15]  She'd been working for Life magazine.
[01:06:19]  And well, I talked to a few people again, like some of the best, some of her best friends are actually dead, sadly.
[01:06:26]  I managed to talk to some extraordinary characters, including this 95-year-old neighbor of ours who said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, she was gay as well.
[01:06:39]  She was clearly doublebeard.
[01:06:42]  That's what we call a marriage of convenience.
[01:06:45]  Yes.
[01:06:46]  Back in the day, it was called a lavender marriage, which is a nice word I found.
[01:06:51]  And yeah, by all looks, it was a marriage of convenience.
[01:06:56]  They didn't have any kids.
[01:06:58]  They were both traveling for long periods of time.
[01:07:02]  They seemed to be very close, to be honest.
[01:07:05]  You know, they seemed to be caring and which I guess must have had some sort of complicity.
[01:07:15]  But I don't think Holden was by because we some of the things that Peter found during his research was that he was a good-looking bastard, David Holden.
[01:07:25]  I don't know if you've seen the pictures.
[01:07:29]  Roger Moore-esque.
[01:07:32]  I was going to say like Robert Redford, but British.
[01:07:35]  Like there's a kind of like British Robert Redford, but less hairy, maybe.
[01:07:40]  Yeah, a little.
[01:07:42]  Yeah.
[01:07:44]  All these women were falling for him.
[01:07:46]  were all falling in love with him and he never you know it again in a very british way they were all saying like they've never took the hint Like, you know, never.
[01:07:58]  In so many ways, it seems like Holden was like the picture of this almost stock character of like British establishment journalism, you know, somebody in a sham marriage who, you know, is a privately practicing homosexual who is rather conservative in his political beliefs.
[01:08:17]  I mean, you mentioned, and this is sort of a maddening aspect of this story.
[01:08:23]  Like, you know, he's gone, he goes to these sort of various countries on assignment, but he also is almost a polemicist in some ways and writes for Encounter magazine.
[01:08:34]  And I think that listeners of ours might be familiar with Encounter.
[01:08:37]  We've talked about it in a couple episodes.
[01:08:39]  They're sort of like one of the more famous magazines that the CIA funded during the Cold War period as part of their sort of soft power cultural battle with the Soviets.
[01:08:55]  And he had written an article in particular that was very unkind, one might even say unfair to Fidel Castro.
[01:09:04]  And, you know, so it's, it's, in many ways, he is like a typical like British conservative journalist.
[01:09:10]  Yeah, actually, the one about Castro is probably softer than the one he wrote about Allende, Salvador Allende of Chile.
[01:09:18]  And that's kind of telling because you were not allowed to write and publish that kind of shit.
[01:09:24]  And not even in the Times, which is not necessarily, you know, I wouldn't say it's necessarily conservative, but it's like it's very, it's the establishment paper.
[01:09:36]  And especially like back in the day, back in the 50s and 60s, it was like, you know, the voice of Britain and blah, blah, blah.
[01:09:46]  Reporters didn't have bylines because technically you're not allowed to have a voice.
[01:09:51]  Like it's the voice of the Times.
[01:09:53]  And, you know, he had this nickname, The Thunderer.
[01:09:56]  So it's like all this.
[01:09:58]  He couldn't write that kind of stuff for the Times, then later for The Guardian or The Sunday Times.
[01:10:04]  The fact that he was doing it for Encounter magazine is interesting.
[01:10:11]  The fact that he was like, the piece about Allende was just baffling.
[01:10:19]  Like it was a vitriolic attack on Allende, what he called a socialist experiment.
[01:10:28]  And I mean, it was almost like a, you know, like a fascist piece of writing because of the stuff that he was saying.
[01:10:38]  And some people were very surprised by that because they remember that Holden was quite left-wing, actually, when he was a young man.
[01:10:48]  So did he just become a bit more conservative as he was growing old?
[01:10:54]  Or was there something there?
[01:10:57]  I think he was perhaps a Starmer type.
[01:10:59]  He spent his youth in wild radicalism and is now getting Britain back in shape.
[01:11:06]  Do people in the US know who Starmer is?
[01:11:09]  We do.
[01:11:10]  We know him as the knife, as the, you know, the man.
[01:11:16]  Yeah, as of, as of yesterday.
[01:11:17]  But we find him fascinating as almost like a homunculus-like figure because we have some very odd-looking physically politicians.
[01:11:26]  Particularly, Elon has like a very large face.
[01:11:28]  And I think Starmer is your largest face politician.
[01:11:32]  So we sort of in our primitive republicanism here think of the British system as almost like you elect your biggest physical freak, which would account for a large number of former prime ministers.
[01:11:47]  Yeah, I mean, no, we've talked about Starmer at length just due to the nature of his dome.
[01:11:56]  And so I think that our listeners should be familiar.
[01:11:59]  But he was, for those who don't know, he was a Trotskyist as a youth and then is now charting an amazing course for British socialism.
[01:12:09]  Yeah, so to speak.
[01:12:14]  Yeah, so, well, okay, so Pisa, again, like had all sorts of suspicions about some of the people that Holden met during the trip.
[01:12:21]  You mentioned this guy, John Fistier, right?
[01:12:23]  So Fistir, as I said, did not volunteer any information.
[01:12:28]  He had been seen by someone.
[01:12:29]  And so they said, oh yeah, Mr. Fistier was with Mr. Holden.
[01:12:33]  You know, I want to speak with him.
[01:12:36]  Showed up stone drunk on both occasions when he was interviewed.
[01:12:42]  And he said that Holden, that he met Holden only for five minutes.
[01:12:47]  I mean, he knew Holden.
[01:12:49]  He said he knew Holden since the 1950s.
[01:12:52]  They were both in Beirut, which is interesting because you may remember who else was in Beirut in the 1950s.
[01:13:01]  Kim Philby.
[01:13:05]  And funny enough, Philby, Holden, and Fistia were part of a group of friends who would go on these, were having these great parties, you know, drinking themselves to death, essentially.
[01:13:19]  And anyway, that's...
[01:13:22]  Interesting.
[01:13:23]  Yeah.
[01:13:24]  So Fistir said, I only seen him for five minutes in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, but he was in a terrible hurry to catch his flight.
[01:13:33]  And he was going into the telex operator room to try to confirm the booking of his hotel in Cairo because he didn't know where he was going to stay.
[01:13:44]  It was, you know, kind of angry and in a rush.
[01:13:52]  And I only talked to him for a couple of minutes and that was it.
[01:13:56]  But then there's this guy called Bischarat who had a travel agency inside the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, who said, actually, I've seen Mr. Holden just after lunchtime walking away with Mr. Fistier.
[01:14:16]  So it wasn't at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. as Fistir was saying.
[01:14:22]  It was actually around maybe 2 p.m. or 3 p.m.
[01:14:26]  And I did not see them again.
[01:14:30]  No one had seen him in the telex room.
[01:14:33]  None of the operators remember him going and trying to desperately trying to confirm whether he had a booking at one of the hotels.
[01:14:43]  And strangely, had he done that, he would have found a telex that had been waiting for him for three or four days, which confirmed that he actually had two bookings in two different hotels.
[01:14:55]  So, you know, you could just pick and choose.
[01:14:58]  So what was going on there?
[01:15:01]  Like, Peter wondered, is this guy telling us pork is?
[01:15:06]  Is he misremembering?
[01:15:07]  I mean, maybe he's a drunk.
[01:15:09]  Like, what's going on?
[01:15:11]  But then talking to a few people, That's when they heard that Festir was rumored to have been sent to Beirut to keep an eye on Philby.
[01:15:24]  And it got very close to Kim Philby during that time in Beirut.
[01:15:30]  Now, at that point, what Peter didn't know is, of course, that John Festir had been a big shot in the Office for Strategic Services, the OSS, which was the forerunner of the CIA during World War II, and was doing all sorts of secret missions in Europe.
[01:15:51]  And someone was saying that this travel tourism board that he had in Jordan was actually just a front for the CIA.
[01:16:06]  Well, it does seem a bit odd that an American would move to Jordan and basically work at a tourism board.
[01:16:13]  I mean, it seems like there might be other opportunities for somebody who knew Europe so well.
[01:16:18]  He was essentially the way he was described, he was described as King Hussain's main publicist.
[01:16:27]  And King Hussein was very close to the CIA.
[01:16:31]  Yes.
[01:16:34]  To the point that the US at some point had to recall an ambassador to Jordan because the king wouldn't talk to this guy.

=== CIA's Secret Travel Agent (14:48) ===

[01:16:40]  He just wanted to talk to the, you know, the nice guys at the CIA station down in Amman.
[01:16:45]  He didn't even, he just like, I fucked it.
[01:16:47]  I don't like this guy.
[01:16:49]  Send you the CIA.
[01:16:51]  It's always good to cut out the middlemen.
[01:16:53]  You know, just like get in front of the guy.
[01:16:57]  And anyway, in one of the, there's this guy, John Connell, who was the CIA station chief in Amman, who at some point mentions this tourism board as one of the organizations that guess what the CIA was just using as a front.
[01:17:14]  And so now the question is, was Festir one of the people that, you know, like many ex-OSS officials, had he been recruited by the CIA?
[01:17:24]  I mean, crucial detail.
[01:17:26]  I talked to this guy who used to date Kim Philby's daughter.
[01:17:32]  Wow.
[01:17:35]  I'm not going to say it because he is kind of embarrassed by it.
[01:17:39]  But at some point, Kim Philby's daughter was hired by Festir.
[01:17:45]  She was 16, I think, to work for this tourist board that at that point was in Beirut.
[01:17:51]  So this was like the kind of they had an office in Beirut and this guy was working for this travel kind of travel agency slash tourist board in Beirut, as you do.
[01:18:02]  Sure.
[01:18:03]  And you know what?
[01:18:05]  Yeah, I might have some work for your daughter.
[01:18:08]  It's like, well, she's 16, she doesn't speak Arabic.
[01:18:14]  Philby was amazing.
[01:18:17]  I mean, you got to give him credit.
[01:18:19]  I mean, he really, I give him a lot of credit, but like, even, even his detractors got to tell you, I mean, the guy was really, I mean, he was a mission-first individual.
[01:18:28]  They call that today locked in.
[01:18:30]  I don't think there has been a guy as locked in as Kim Philby since Kim Philby.
[01:18:35]  Especially because this guy, I mean, all these people are alcoholics, right?
[01:18:39]  Yeah.
[01:18:40]  It was the 50s and 60s and great times.
[01:18:46]  They could drink you down to the table, but like to keep that kind of, you know, someone called Facebook.
[01:18:54]  One of my favorite anecdotes is coming from a memoir of a guy who used to work here as a foreign correspondent.
[01:19:04]  At some point, it was also in Beirut around the same time.
[01:19:09]  New Holden.
[01:19:11]  Anyway, they were preparing these massive parties in this house on the hills.
[01:19:17]  And Philby was there.
[01:19:19]  This cafester was there.
[01:19:20]  Douglas Copeland, who was this CIA guy who was the father.
[01:19:26]  Father of Stuart Copeland.
[01:19:28]  I'll be watching.
[01:19:30]  Police.
[01:19:30]  Yeah.
[01:19:31]  Trama.
[01:19:31]  Anyway, they were all getting drunk.
[01:19:34]  They, you know, kind of shagging around as well, as you do.
[01:19:38]  And at some point, Moira, who's the wife of this guy, this British foreign correspondent, said to Philby, said, Kim, so are you a Soviet agent?
[01:19:51]  Because that was, you know, that was the rumor.
[01:19:52]  At that point, the rumor was that Philby was the third man in the Cambridge spy ring and that he was the one who tipped off McLean and Burgess.
[01:20:03]  And that's the reason why they managed to escape from the US to the Soviet Union, which turned out to be exactly the case, by the way.
[01:20:13]  It was all true.
[01:20:14]  Like the rumors were all true.
[01:20:15]  Anyway, she was drunk and she was like, and she said that at that point, Philby was completely fucking wasted, like shit-faced.
[01:20:23]  And she was like, come on, Kim, you can tell me.
[01:20:26]  Are you a Soviet spy?
[01:20:29]  He sobered himself immediately, grabbed her from her wrist and said, you know, Moira, I always felt that loyalty to my friends is more important than loyalty to my country.
[01:20:42]  Which is, it's so funny because one of Philby's famous quotes is that like, I'm a, in fact, one that I believe he gave to the Sunday Times in 1967 is that I am a political person and a private person.
[01:20:56]  But when they come into conflict, the political person comes first, which is such a, I guess he really, he really, he wrestled with these concepts a lot.
[01:21:05]  I want to get back to Holden real quick because there is a certain whiff of intelligence about him with a lot of the descriptions that you sort of read, even just from like a cursory glance.
[01:21:19]  But it would certainly not be out of line with the intelligence agency's use of journalism both as a cover and then placing actual journalists in as or agents in as journalists and then also recruiting journalists as agents and assets.
[01:21:38]  And something that's that might sound very silly to people, in fact, that I think objectively does sound silly just in general because it is quite silly, is that the inventor of James Bond, Ian Fleming, was actually, he was the editor at the Sunday Times.
[01:21:54]  No?
[01:21:55]  Foreign editor.
[01:21:56]  Foreign editor.
[01:21:57]  He was in charge of the foreign correspondent.
[01:22:00]  He was in charge of this thing called the Mercury group.
[01:22:06]  And yeah, so Ian Fleming is obviously notoriously the father of James Bond.
[01:22:12]  He wrote the James Bond novels.
[01:22:14]  But before that, he was in naval intelligence in World War II.
[01:22:21]  And after that, he became the foreign editor of the Sunday Times.
[01:22:26]  And guess what?
[01:22:27]  He started hiring all these people that were working with him in either MI6 or naval intelligence to be foreign correspondent.
[01:22:37]  They all spoke whether or how many languages.
[01:22:42]  They could move around.
[01:22:44]  They knew how to write these reports.
[01:22:46]  And so he trained them to actually do, just to write stories as well.
[01:22:51]  But at the same time, what he was doing was also getting what they were called situation reports, cigarettes.
[01:22:59]  They were not for publication.
[01:23:01]  And you can guess where they were going.
[01:23:03]  Yes.
[01:23:04]  And he placed all these people, like there was this guy called Tony Terry, who was sent to Vienna and then Germany.
[01:23:17]  A lot of the stuff that this guy was actually doing back in those days, in the 1940s and 1950s, would end up feeding the James Bond novels.
[01:23:30]  Amazing.
[01:23:30]  In the latest films, you know, obviously the Cold War element has kind of gone out the window.
[01:23:37]  But in the James Bond novels, there's a lot of stuff about the Germans and East Germany.
[01:23:42]  It's like its proper Cold War shit.
[01:23:44]  And like, Spectre was not a thing until later on.
[01:23:49]  It was all about Smirsch, which was this.
[01:23:52]  Death to spies.
[01:23:53]  Death to spies, yeah.
[01:23:56]  Can't remember what.
[01:23:56]  There was something, Espeon, so which was the real um department within the KGB that was dealing with.
[01:24:10]  Well, at that point it wasn't a KGB, MVD or whatever the name was, which is it's a very smart idea of them to do they so Smash was actually, you know, the one who was actually killing people.
[01:24:23]  Um anyway, Fleming sends this guy to Austria and then this guy proceeds to work for the Sunday Times for 50 years.
[01:24:32]  This guy, Tony Terry, and guess what?
[01:24:34]  He's one of the six people that Harry Evans unknowingly sent to the Middle East to investigate Holden's life.
[01:24:44]  Harry Events said no idea.
[01:24:46]  Pisa had absolutely no idea.
[01:24:48]  There was some rumor in the office about oh yeah, that guy's a bit of a spook, like you know, there are some rumors in the office now, but they have.
[01:24:56]  They had absolutely no idea.
[01:24:57]  This guy, Tony Tagged, died in the early 90s and when he died, his stepdaughter found all these letters that he kept between him and Fleming and he and she.
[01:25:13]  Essentially she's, she's fantastic.
[01:25:14]  She lives in Australia, she's a school teacher, her name is Judith Lennard, but she's got this fantastic inquisitive mind and yeah, she found all these letters.
[01:25:22]  She was like holy shit, like what's going on here, like Stepdad is, was a you know, a real life James Bond, and uh, Fleming was just complimenting him and saying stuff like here's this guy that you can, you know, you can interview for one of your pieces in another.
[01:25:40]  On another note, you might want to keep an eye on this Russian bloke who has been suspected of doing this and that it's like well, you know it's it's, it's funny because, I mean, obviously too famously, there was Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times, the only foreign correspondent who was present in Dallas.
[01:26:00]  Uh, who and you mentioned this in the, in the, in the book uh, that you know is is, I don't know, I never can pronounce shit like this, but is Vetsia, but like, one of the main Russian newspapers basically published a list of like, British journalists who are spies.
[01:26:14]  Yeah, he's on it, that a list that's probably, you know in retrospect, fairly accurate, completely true.
[01:26:21]  Like in the b, like at that point they were all like oh, you're not nonsense, of course.
[01:26:27]  Well, we're not spies.
[01:26:29]  That's what the Soviets do.
[01:26:31]  They, you know, 50 years later or something like that, they found these memos inside the BBC, which was supposed to be the clean one.
[01:26:41]  You know, places like the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, people knew that, you know, kind of like there were people doing a bit of moonlighting at best.
[01:26:50]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:26:51]  But BBC wasn't supposed to be clean.
[01:26:54]  It's like this memo's going like, oh yeah, we should be sympathetic to these friends.
[01:26:58]  And friends is the, you know, friend is the keyword for spooks, for spies in England, caught in this scandal.
[01:27:08]  You know, we should do something about it.
[01:27:10]  You know, send them some flowers or something.
[01:27:12]  It's just like his festia was essentially just telling the truth.
[01:27:16]  It was not like a disinformation campaign.
[01:27:19]  And funnily enough, in 1977, as Holden was killed, the American press was stormed by these accusations that a lot of American journalists and a lot of foreign journalists have been working for the CIA.
[01:27:36]  There's been at least three major exposé.
[01:27:42]  There was one in, of all places, Penthouse.
[01:27:46]  But they used to publish some great investigations back in the day.
[01:27:51]  I don't know about now.
[01:27:52]  No.
[01:27:54]  I'll check into it after the episode.
[01:27:58]  Rolling Stone, Carl Bernstein published this, I don't know how long it was, like 45,000 word, massive fucking piece, which was titled The CIA and the Media.
[01:28:10]  And then a three-part series by the New York Times, which digitally came out a week after Holden was assassinated.
[01:28:18]  And well, funny enough, they were talking about British journalists working for the CIA.
[01:28:23]  They were talking about people doing this kind of the work that you mentioned, this kind of, you know, info-war, sort of like the fake news of its era.
[01:28:35]  Yeah, yeah, I mean, this happened.
[01:28:37]  We talked about this a lot in an episode we did on Chile many, many, many years ago.
[01:28:42]  But there were a number, especially in Chile, for example, of like journalists that were essentially given like marching orders by the CIA, like write about this, try to, you know, inflame tensions here, do this, do this, do that, et cetera.
[01:28:55]  And so like they might not be paid up employees, agents of the CIA, but they're functionally, they're willing assets, or in some cases, unknowing, if you're really stupid and an unknowing asset.
[01:29:07]  But yeah, who are on marching orders.
[01:29:08]  Well, there were some people like this guy, Stuart, also, who's, again, another one, like Close to Gay and the New York Times column, Mr. New York Times foreign correspondent, sorry.
[01:29:18]  And he was saying, oh, I'm a patriot.
[01:29:21]  If, you know, if they ask me to do something, I'd gladly do it.
[01:29:24]  Exactly.
[01:29:25]  deny of being in the pay of the CIA, so just doing it for free, essentially.
[01:29:31]  It's funny, in the JFK files that were released with the last few days, there's one memo which is a, I can't remember the name of the journalist now, but maybe we're able to check later.
[01:29:45]  But it was a CIA memo, which it was basically the green light for this woman to write for Encounter.
[01:29:56]  So, and I had never seen that before.
[01:29:58]  So essentially, the CIA was actually vetting people to write for the magazine.
[01:30:05]  And that's because, according to Jefferson Morley, James Hangerton, you know, James, Jesus Hangerton, this guy was in charge of Encounter.
[01:30:16]  It was his pet project.
[01:30:18]  You know, there's all this disinformation slash propaganda, whatever you want to call it.
[01:30:25]  Yeah.
[01:30:26]  He was behind all of that.
[01:30:29]  And so to me, that was such a fascinating moment when I was like, wow, so Angerton has got, like, he was somehow like at least involved with Encounter.
[01:30:45]  And like the idea that Angerton, the guy would be, I mean, we talked about the fact that the British were supposed to be the spy masters, right?
[01:30:53]  Angerton had been trained in the arts of the dark arts of counter-espionage by Kim Philby himself.
[01:31:02]  And the reason why Angerton went completely fucking batshit crazy was because of Philby's betrayal and the mole hunt, the defectives, like all that's crazy shit, the wilderness of mirrors.
[01:31:17]  I was like, I mean, I remember, I've still got goosebumps if I'm thinking about this, when I was like, wait, wait a second.
[01:31:24]  Holden was writing for Encounter.
[01:31:26]  Angerton was in charge of Encounter.

=== Holden's Literary Agent Mystery (02:01) ===

[01:31:29]  Holden was in Beirut at the same time as Philby.
[01:31:31]  I was like, my head went.
[01:31:35]  Yeah, who's playing who?
[01:31:36]  Who's through the looking glass?
[01:31:38]  Are they even aware of where they are in their own plot?
[01:31:43]  Exactly.
[01:31:45]  That's, you know, without maybe getting into the wheats, but that was one of the questions.
[01:31:52]  Did they know?
[01:31:53]  Like, what did Philby know?
[01:31:55]  What did Holden know?
[01:31:57]  Like, this guy was working for the CIA.
[01:31:59]  He'd probably been recruited by MI6 when he was at Cambridge.
[01:32:03]  He had the strange experience when he was supposed to be sent to Czechoslovakia to become a teacher at the British Institute or whatever, which is a way of, you know, again, like, you know, it's another cover for MI6 junior officers.
[01:32:19]  And Then all these connections to Philby, there was another guy called Patrick Seal, who was Philby's successor as the Middle Eastern correspondent from Beirut for the Observer.
[01:32:39]  So he was Philby's successor and according to some, had also been very close to the KGB.
[01:32:49]  He was rumored to have been recruited by the MI6 and then kicked out because he had an unproven KGB connection.
[01:32:59]  And then Peter had found out that Patrick Seal had told one of his girlfriends that he was Philby's Paris drop when he was in Paris, which basically means that whenever Philby was traveling to Paris to feed some stuff to the Soviet that was related to France, he would go to this guy and this guy would just pass it on to the Soviet Union.
[01:33:23]  Amazing.
[01:33:24]  This guy was Holden's agent for this book, literary agent for this, it's a strange word agent, eh?

=== Nasser's Succession And CIA Influence (08:29) ===

[01:33:30]  For this book that Holden was writing about Saudi Arabia.
[01:33:36]  And again, that was one of the things that when he was killed, there was a question mark.
[01:33:40]  It's like, wait, was it to do with the fact that he was writing a book about Saudi Arabia?
[01:33:45]  Because he told this French journalist that he'd found, he'd uncovered corruption in high places.
[01:33:51]  Was that one of the reasons?
[01:33:53]  Saudi Arabia at that point, it's very interesting, had become an ally of Egypt.
[01:34:01]  I don't know how much we want to get into geopolitics here, but I don't know when you have to go, but we can definitely talk about this.
[01:34:07]  Absolutely.
[01:34:08]  They will fire me at some point, but maybe not today.
[01:34:12]  I'm having a fucking blast talking about this, so I'm ready to rock as long as you are.
[01:34:17]  Thank you.
[01:34:19]  Saudi Arabia had been an enemy of Egypt for many years.
[01:34:24]  They were effectively fighting Egypt through proxies in Yemen.
[01:34:35]  Well, yeah, because Egypt under Nasser, you know, this sort of like Nasserism, Egypt had become sort of like a counterforce to these monarchies within the Middle East, which were in some places having sort of a tenuous, especially Yemen, having this sort of tenuous grip on their countries.
[01:34:56]  And so Nasser, with this, who had himself overthrown a monarchy, you know, as is sort of emerging as this sort of nationalist counterforce to them.
[01:35:05]  So yeah, I mean, the Saudis had to see this guy as like public enemy number one.
[01:35:09]  It was.
[01:35:09]  I mean, they were trying to assassinate him, you know, repeatedly, obviously the Brits were trying to assassinate him, the French were trying to assassinate him.
[01:35:17]  The Israelis was trying to.
[01:35:19]  I mean, Nasser was, you know uh, not liked, uh in in certain circles.
[01:35:27]  Because of this, because of because of Nasser, because of this idea of Pan-Arabism, and uh uh, and because he was such an inspiring figure for nationalist movements in their own countries, as you mentioned, I mean it's kind of crazy, like Americans who know this kind of shit history stuff, well it's.
[01:35:46]  I mean, I mean I'm impressed well it's well, it's we.
[01:35:49]  We certainly um, we had some, some dealings in the Middle East as America during uh, during Nasser's time, but especially after, with Sadat, I mean Kissinger and all that.
[01:36:00]  But but you know, if I, if I tell someone here, you know, if I talk about Nasser they, they ask me for some protein shake or something like that.
[01:36:07]  It does sound like one, you know, it does sound like one.
[01:36:10]  And Sadat does sound like an American film named Putty Tang, sort of what he says during that movie.
[01:36:15]  You know what Sadat always reminded me of, that guy um, from Street Fighter, one of the yes yeah yeah, anyway.
[01:36:26]  Well, he's a piece of.
[01:36:27]  We don't like Sad around here okay so, so the.
[01:36:31]  So this is the thing like.
[01:36:32]  I'm gonna try to make it very simple.
[01:36:34]  But Egypt and Saudi Arabia were enemies, mortal enemies, for many years.
[01:36:41]  When the president of Egypt was, this guy called Nasser Nasser dies of a heart attack, allegedly no no no no, he died of a heart attack.
[01:36:53]  Well, he died, he.
[01:36:54]  He died of a heart attack.
[01:36:57]  No, he died of a heart attack and his successor was supposed to be this sort of interim figure.
[01:37:03]  And War Sadat starts this process of actually completely shifting his country's allegiances from the Soviet Union, which had been Egypt's main ally.
[01:37:18]  I mean, Egypt was supposed to be like a, an independent country.
[01:37:22]  What was it called?
[01:37:23]  Like the, the third yeah yeah uh uh, non-aligned state, non-aligned state, but in reality uh the, the CIA had nicknamed Egypt the Soviet Republic Of Egypt because, which was a bit unfair, because I feel like the Soviets did.
[01:37:40]  It's funny Philby actually sort expresses this in a in a rather rude way in his in his interview with the Sunday Times, because he says he talks on Nakrumah there, but it gives a little in insight into, like this, this, the Soviets actually got very frustrated oftentimes with their third world allies I don't know if Egypt counts as third world, but like with their, with their peripheral allies, let's say because uh, you know, they would find these, these countries that were like you know.
[01:38:06]  They have a guy like you know, Nassa or something in there, or or um you know, the succession of leaders that there were in Syria until ending up with Assad.
[01:38:14]  And, you know, they would, they would kind of give him all these money.
[01:38:16]  They'd give him all these tanks.
[01:38:17]  They'd give him all these technical advisors.
[01:38:19]  And then they would just blow him by having the worst armies ever and fucking fighting against Israel and just like losing and lose all your airplanes or lose all your tanks.
[01:38:29]  And the Soviets would have to be like, I guess we have to send you fucking 500 more tanks, man.
[01:38:33]  Thank you.
[01:38:34]  Or planes like jet fighters or whatever.
[01:38:36]  Exactly.
[01:38:37]  All these MiGs.
[01:38:40]  Oh, we lost all our MiGs again.
[01:38:41]  It's like, all right, dude.
[01:38:44]  We spent billions of rubles of, you know, I mean, it's, you know, there's an excellent book by Patrick Seale about Assad that sort of goes into the minutiae of the Soviet and later Kissingers, the dealings with Assad.
[01:39:03]  Like, you know, like, okay, we got to send him these technicians or he's going to get really pissed at us, but he's being a bitch.
[01:39:08]  It's just, you can, there's a palpable sense of frustration from the Soviets there.
[01:39:12]  Yeah.
[01:39:13]  I mean, and what Sadat did very quickly.
[01:39:17]  So they were trying to topple him, you know, straight away.
[01:39:20]  Like there was this attempted coup and this plot to actually oust him.
[01:39:28]  And he managed to survive.
[01:39:34]  There's a question mark in terms of how he did it.
[01:39:37]  There's an official narrative.
[01:39:39]  And then, as is often the case in the Middle East, there's, you know, the actual, what really happened behind the scenes.
[01:39:49]  The unofficial thing is that actually the CIA was helping him because they wanted him to shift sides from the Soviet Union to the American camp.
[01:40:00]  And that's precisely what he did.
[01:40:03]  He decided to form this alliance with the Saudis.
[01:40:08]  There was this guy called Kamal Adam.
[01:40:11]  American people should know about this guy because he was involved in this massive fucking scandal.
[01:40:17]  I mean, you talked to Christian about the octopus burgers, right?
[01:40:21]  Yeah.
[01:40:21]  Oh, yeah.
[01:40:22]  The BC CI scandal, which is this massive banking, you know.
[01:40:29]  I mean, if I think about the dude, it touches everything.
[01:40:35]  I mean, that's a, that's it.
[01:40:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:40:37]  Anyway, Kamal Adam was one guy, he was the head of Saudi intelligence services.
[01:40:44]  He was an incredibly rich guy.
[01:40:47]  He was the brother of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia's favorite wife.
[01:40:57]  He had a mini wife, I guess.
[01:41:00]  Anyway, it was very close to Sadat to the point that Sadat had been a witness to his marriage.
[01:41:07]  And Kamal Adam was there when Sadat decided to expel all these thousands and thousands of Soviet advisors from Egypt and then went to war with Israel.
[01:41:25]  And then immediately after the war started doing this thing of, you know what, we got rid of the Soviets.
[01:41:31]  We might just, you know, turn towards the Americans because why not?
[01:41:38]  And in 1974, the American embassy is reopened officially in Cairo, which had been closed since 1967, because NASA had kicked them out.
[01:41:53]  And most importantly, a sizable CIA station.

=== 1974 Cairo Encounter (02:31) ===

[01:42:00]  And what I found in the new investigation is that 1974 was a crucial year within the Holden investigation.
[01:42:10]  Shall I say why?
[01:42:12]  Yes, you should say why, dude.
[01:42:15]  In 1974, a Canadian journalist named David Holton went to Cairo, landed at Cairo airport late at night, went out, came out, and he was approached by two men in scraffy suits who introduced themselves as Egyptian officials, who said, are you David Holt?
[01:42:41]  Yes.
[01:42:42]  Well, we're going to drive, we've got a car for you, it's a battered fiat, and we're going to drive you to your destination.
[01:42:50]  Oh, that's very kind of you, whatever.
[01:42:55]  He hadn't told anyone that he was coming, so he was a bit baffled, but he was like, I could do with a lift.
[01:43:00]  It's late at night.
[01:43:01]  I'm tired.
[01:43:02]  You got into the car.
[01:43:04]  And as the car drives off, these two gentlemen sitting in the back starts asking him questions.
[01:43:15]  And he's just like, he's a bit baffled by the questions.
[01:43:18]  Like, I don't know.
[01:43:19]  I'm sorry.
[01:43:19]  I don't know what you're talking about, naming names.
[01:43:22]  And then he's like, I decided to ask the question that you wanted to ask.
[01:43:26]  And it's like, how did you know that was coming, by the way?
[01:43:28]  Like, how did you know?
[01:43:30]  I haven't told anyone.
[01:43:32]  And the guy said, well, you were David Holden of the Sunday Times, aren't you?
[01:43:36]  No, I'm sorry.
[01:43:37]  You've got the wrong person.
[01:43:38]  I'm David Holton from CBC from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
[01:43:43]  So they start talking to each other.
[01:43:45]  These two Egyptian guys start talking Arabic.
[01:43:48]  It's like, oh, what the fuck?
[01:43:52]  These fucking Westerns all look the same.
[01:43:54]  They've got the same fucking names.
[01:43:58]  And then they're like, okay, well, you know what?
[01:44:00]  We're going to drive into Eurosale.
[01:44:01]  And thank you very much.
[01:44:02]  So I leave him there.
[01:44:04]  Sped up.
[01:44:05]  Didn't think about this.
[01:44:06]  Holton didn't think about this until three years later, he hears that David Holden of the Sunday Times had flown into Cairo, had been picked up at the airport, driven around in a battered car and shot to the heart.
[01:44:23]  And actually, that came quite graphically because someone in Canada did the same mistake as the Muka Bharat and said, David Holton from CBC has been killed in Cairo.

=== Compromat and Credentials (08:17) ===

[01:44:32]  Oh, Lord.
[01:44:33]  So it's like, this is what I'm saying.
[01:44:35]  Like, if I was writing a novel, I would go like, right, this shit is just like.
[01:44:40]  It's too much.
[01:44:42]  It's too much.
[01:44:43]  Yeah, you got to trim it down a bit.
[01:44:45]  Yeah.
[01:44:45]  It's like you need to at least make it a bit more credible.
[01:44:51]  Well, you know, you mentioned the Saudis here.
[01:44:56]  And, you know, we've mentioned the Mukbarat too.
[01:44:59]  You know what?
[01:45:01]  I can't pronounce it.
[01:45:03]  I've tried to say it Mukabarat.
[01:45:04]  You know, I've tried to, I've said, have I had to say it for years on this show?
[01:45:08]  I just kind of try to swallow it a little bit when I say it.
[01:45:11]  So people think I'm sort of misspeaking.
[01:45:13]  We talked about the CIA, talked about the KGB, and it just seems like Holden is kind of existing in this world like a nexus of these things.
[01:45:23]  And you even describe it, I think, at one point, or you mentioned, you know, you referenced the wilderness of mirrors.
[01:45:29]  And it really does seem like once you dig under the surface here, or once you literally start digging under the surface here, that he is kind of in this like strange, sort of reflective nether world where like there's sort of allegiances that are rather unclear and personal connections that might be political or intelligence or work connections here.
[01:45:48]  So personal.
[01:45:49]  Yeah.
[01:45:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:45:51]  Well, you know, I want to go back to Silberman real quick, because we've talked about a lot of his sort of other connections, these people who work for the OSS and people who work for the, you know, for the MI6.
[01:46:07]  Silberman, you discover, I mean, this is, this is, this is the most fascinating person in the book to me.
[01:46:15]  Not least because I love, spoiler alert, you find his letters, a trove of his letters, which seem incredible.
[01:46:23]  I mean, his writing style, I sent you this earlier, but I'm just going to read an excerpt from one.
[01:46:28]  And he's sort of talking about, he's writing to a friend about infiltrating the Labor Party in, I think, the 19, I don't know when.
[01:46:36]  30s in 1930s.
[01:46:38]  He says, as you know, I am an honorable member of the Labour Party in the parentheses.
[01:46:41]  Oh, no.
[01:46:42]  If you have any idea of a reformist party, multiply it by 10,001 and you will get an idea of the totally rotten, stagnating, crazy state.
[01:46:51]  Mold, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, fear of everything that smells slightly of communism, which is just an amazing sort of thing to write.
[01:46:58]  But he, I mean, let's call a spade a spade here.
[01:47:01]  He seems to have been a communist and not only a communist, a very dedicated communist.
[01:47:08]  And at the same time, he seems to have been seducing, you know, let's say open-minded younger men into not only his boudoir or luring them not only to his boudoir, but to the scarlet robe of communism.
[01:47:30]  And it is, I mean, again, if one were writing a novel, I mean, this would be a character that would be like, okay, well, this is a few too many tropes here, but he seems entirely real.
[01:47:41]  And it seems very clear at one point that, you know, he and David have a very close relationship.
[01:47:50]  Yeah, so what Peter had found is that by 1950, Holden and Silberman were already lovers.
[01:48:02]  They were lying about how they met and the kind of circumstance.
[01:48:07]  I mean, other than the fact that obviously being gay at that point was illegal.
[01:48:12]  So, you know, the affair itself.
[01:48:15]  But they were lying about the circumstances in which they met, about the stuff that they've been doing.
[01:48:19]  They've been to Mexico together, which is an interesting place.
[01:48:24]  Again, I don't want to talk about JFK here, but Mexico was a training ground for KGB people.
[01:48:34]  And they lied about, oh, yeah, no, we went to, I went to Mexico City and, you know, I was doing some charity work for X, but then Peter checked and they were like, no, it did, it did.
[01:48:46]  Yeah, it did do some charity work for like a week and then he was off.
[01:48:50]  Well, maybe they were doing remote work for like a B2B SaaS company.
[01:48:53]  Exactly.
[01:48:54]  Yeah, in 1952.
[01:48:58]  Not sure the Wi-Fi was great back then.
[01:49:01]  But yeah, so 1950, to me, when I saw this, so I found these letters.
[01:49:10]  At some point, by the way, Silberman is describing Holden as his young pet.
[01:49:15]  I mean, he describes lots of men, young men that he was shaggy.
[01:49:21]  Some descriptions are also pretty graphic.
[01:49:23]  Like I spared some of the some of the, but like in, at some point he was talking about like, oh yeah, I'm here in the flesh.
[01:49:33]  And when I say in the flesh, I mean it or something.
[01:49:37]  You should publish the erotic correspondences of Leo Soberman.
[01:49:41]  It was like too much info, Leo.
[01:49:44]  I didn't need to know about this.
[01:49:45]  But anyway, describes Holden as his young pet in this letter from 1950 or 1951.
[01:49:51]  It was undated.
[01:49:53]  And to me, that kind of made me reassess everything.
[01:50:02]  Like at the beginning, we had the suspicions that all these suspicions about Holden doing work for MI6 and the CIA, etc.
[01:50:10]  And then we had this idea that maybe like so many gay people at that point have been compromised.
[01:50:17]  there's this thing called Compromat, which is what the KGB was doing.
[01:50:23]  Brother, that is a word that every American knows from the fucking...
[01:50:28]  And Trump Trump Russia.
[01:50:30]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[01:50:33]  I'm not talking about Trump and his golden showers.
[01:50:35]  I'm talking about the fact that effectively, especially people in certain businesses and certain industries, the press, like British journalists abroad, gay British journalists abroad.
[01:50:47]  And again, Oxbridge is UK to like all fit the mold were exposed to this kind of stuff.
[01:50:54]  Like I got people here in the office who told me, oh yeah, in 1981, this beautiful young woman came to me while I was in Minsk and offered me a go to a hotel room.
[01:51:07]  And thank God I didn't because she was a, you know, she was a, what do you call her?
[01:51:13]  A swallow.
[01:51:15]  My advice.
[01:51:16]  The man equivalent was called a raven.
[01:51:21]  And they were doing it on with gay people, but especially with gay people, because that was much more damaging.
[01:51:29]  Exactly.
[01:51:29]  I mean, listen, it's first of all, my advice, if you're in Minsk in 1981 and a beautiful young lady comes up and be like, fancy a shag, have the shag, and then just be like, oh, no English.
[01:51:44]  I don't know.
[01:51:46]  I can't tell you.
[01:51:48]  Like, oh, yeah, send the pictures to my wife.
[01:51:50]  I don't care.
[01:51:50]  I'm cheating on her.
[01:51:51]  You know, what are you going to do?
[01:51:54]  But you're right.
[01:51:55]  Like, it was, it was, it was, I mean, this was also, funnily enough, kind of McCarthy's logic behind a lot of the lavender scare stuff here was that like, okay, well, you know, there's blackmail, but the gay blackmail is really how they're going to get you.
[01:52:12]  Which is funny because McCarthy was gay himself and the FBI had a dossier of him molesting young soldiers.
[01:52:22]  And then J. Edgar Uber notoriously.
[01:52:28]  I mean, and then there's a question mark.
[01:52:32]  There's a question mark about Angels and whether he was in love with Philby, for example, right?
[01:52:36]  I mean, you could dismiss that as, you know, rumor or whatever, but there are, there are.
[01:52:42]  Anyway, the point is, we thought Holden had been MI6 slash CIA.

=== Debriefing Holden (14:41) ===

[01:52:49]  He was right-wing, and then at some point he'd been compromised by the KGB because he was gay, because he was in, you know, working in the sensitive areas, and he would have been a great asset for the Soviets.
[01:53:04]  But the fact that his fucking lover, you know, the love of his life, the most important relationship of his career, sorry, the most important relationship of his life was a KGB recruiter since the 1930s,
[01:53:23]  and that he probably recruited him as a spy as early as 1949, 1950, completely changed the perspective of this whole thing.
[01:53:35]  Because at that point, Holden wasn't even a fucking journalist.
[01:53:38]  You see, like, it was before all of this.
[01:53:41]  It was before Cambridge, before the Times.
[01:53:48]  It was before, before he even, you know, decided that he wanted to become a journalist, before he was sent.
[01:53:54]  And by the way, this is the other thing that struck us when we were searching into this.
[01:53:59]  Suez, he was sent to Egypt in 1956.
[01:54:04]  It was in Congo in 1960 when Patrice Lumumba was assassinated.
[01:54:09]  He was in Yemen in 1962 at the time of the coup and counter-coup and whatever.
[01:54:15]  It was in God, Oman in 1970.
[01:54:21]  It was in Chile in 1973 when Allende killed himself.
[01:54:28]  And it was pretty much, I mean, this guy was a foreign correspondent, but he was there before this stuff happened.
[01:54:36]  He was there before Allende was deposed.
[01:54:39]  He was there before Patrice Lumumba was arrested and assassinated.
[01:54:43]  It was there before the fucking Suez crisis.
[01:54:46]  So it's like, either this guy is incredibly lucky or he's basically someone that needs to be on the scene when this stuff happens so that he can debrief his handlers about what's going on.
[01:55:02]  And the reason I think this is the most plausible explanation is because we found this diary of this other guy called John Slade Baker, who was Holden's predecessor as Sunday Times foreign correspondent from Cairo, who was doing exactly this.
[01:55:20]  He was there at the time of the Suez crisis, and he was working simultaneously for Sunday Times and MI6.
[01:55:31]  And he was writing it all in this, which we thought it was a diary.
[01:55:35]  It wasn't a diary.
[01:55:36]  This was the debrief that he was feeding to MI6.
[01:55:41]  And the only reason we got this fucking document is like 5,000 pages of either handwriting or typewritten, detailed notes about who he was beating and what he was doing.
[01:55:52]  I was like, this stuff, I was reading this stuff and I was like, who does this?
[01:55:56]  Like, this is not a diary.
[01:55:58]  This is like, you're getting into like, I met so and so at three.
[01:56:02]  And then in, you know, in the pages, you could see like met with head of station, he told me to do this, advised not to do that.
[01:56:12]  It's like very clear.
[01:56:14]  So the only reason we know like we got this document is because his wife, the guy died.
[01:56:20]  He had a heart attack as he was writing the fucking diary.
[01:56:23]  And his wife was like, I've got all these papers.
[01:56:26]  I don't know what to do.
[01:56:26]  I'm going to give them to an archive at Oxford, the Middle Eastern Archive at St. Antony's College in Oxford.
[01:56:34]  And it's just one debrief of one agent, which spans many, I can't remember how many years and how many thousands of pages.
[01:56:43]  Can you just imagine how many of these documents are in the MI6 archive?
[01:56:48]  Like, this is what blows my mind.
[01:56:50]  Like, this was the debrief that he was sending.
[01:56:52]  This is something that we realized because at some point he was actually talking about this.
[01:56:55]  It's like, oh yeah, the Mukabarat is telling me, I hope I have got time to burn some of these papers before I get arrested.
[01:57:05]  I don't know what's going to happen to me.
[01:57:07]  And I've passed these papers that I'm writing to the secretary at the British Embassy.
[01:57:14]  So she can send them by diplomatic pouch back to London.
[01:57:22]  So if I get arrested for my country, at least they know what's happening on the ground.
[01:57:30]  And I'm like, what the fuck?
[01:57:35]  I was absolutely stunned.
[01:57:37]  And this guy, by the way, talks about Holden, didn't trust him.
[01:57:42]  The funny thing is, instead, in the same paragraph, he's saying, oh, yeah, Holden is a bit of a twat.
[01:57:49]  But Kim Philby is such a gentleman.
[01:57:55]  This was in 1961, I think, before Philby had been exposed and defected to the Soviet Union.
[01:58:04]  And this guy, the guy that was writing this, this debrief was a, you know, he fought in the war, he was like a patriot.
[01:58:13]  He had absolutely no fucking clue who Philby was and what he was doing.
[01:58:18]  And to me, like that, that line was just priceless.
[01:58:22]  It was like, we see eye to eye, and I shall be glad to spend some time with him.
[01:58:30]  Of course.
[01:58:31]  We should say, before we wrap up, we should say that, I mean, in the original investigation, the Sunday Times sued the CIA trying to get records and got nowhere, right?
[01:58:44]  But you heard from them.
[01:58:46]  Yes, so I.
[01:58:50]  I feel like this is another, we're opening a big parenthesis.
[01:58:54]  I just want to know, like, how you, I mean, you briefly mentioned it, but like when you got the call.
[01:59:01]  Yes.
[01:59:02]  So I got to make it quick.
[01:59:04]  Sunday Times asked the CIA nicely, do you have anything about David Holden in 1978?
[01:59:11]  The CIA says, we haven't got anything about him.
[01:59:14]  And the Sunday Times is a bit puzzled.
[01:59:17]  It's like, you must have at least some files about this guy, right?
[01:59:20]  British journalists assassinated in Cairo.
[01:59:22]  You don't have anything about him?
[01:59:24]  And they go like, well, actually, yeah, we do have some files, but it's, you know, it's kind of sensitive.
[01:59:35]  So, you know, we're not going to release it.
[01:59:37]  You're not going to see it.
[01:59:38]  So the Sunday Times, Harold Downs was such a fucking legend.
[01:59:41]  He decided to sue the CIA to get these documents, which was unprecedented.
[01:59:47]  British newspaper sues the CIA was everywhere.
[01:59:50]  And by the way, if you search for Holden in the CIA archive, that's pretty much the only thing that now shows up and now pops up.
[01:59:58]  Sometimes, you know, the lack of information is more telling and more interesting.
[02:00:04]  Anyway, they appoint a judge to look at the files in camera.
[02:00:10]  The judge is going to go in, look at the documents in private and then decide whether anything can be disclosed.
[02:00:17]  And the judge was a fairly liberal judge who's been ruled in favor of the press before.
[02:00:23]  The judge went in, looked at the documents, came back and said, absolutely fucking not.
[02:00:27]  You're not going to get any of this stuff because it would endanger the security of the United States of America.
[02:00:33]  So they did have something in their files about Holden.
[02:00:37]  Anyway, fast forward to 2023, I think, 2022, instead of filing a fresh FOI request, a FOIA request, because it would take years to actually process, I decided to get, to ask them to re-release some files that they had released in 2002.
[02:00:59]  Someone had filed a FOIA request through the CIA for files about Holden and Leo Silberman.
[02:01:06]  And the request said, the log from the CIA said that the request had been partially granted.
[02:01:12]  So they must have released at least something, right?
[02:01:16]  But it wasn't in the CIA archive.
[02:01:18]  So, you know, in the reading room that you can...
[02:01:20]  Yeah, like the one you find online, whatever.
[02:01:22]  Yeah.
[02:01:23]  So I was like, can I just see these files, please?
[02:01:26]  I just filed, you know uh, not a a foyer request.
[02:01:29]  I just said, you know, can you please disclose the files that were released for with fy, bloody blah?
[02:01:35]  And that's when I got this phone call from someone.
[02:01:38]  Introduced themselves by their first name only and said i'm so-and-so from the agency.
[02:01:43]  And i'm like okay, which agency?
[02:01:46]  You know, it's like PR Agency, like a state agency.
[02:01:49]  I know I work, I write about property um, and they say Central Intelligence Agency.
[02:01:57]  So i'm like okay, i'm listening what um, what's this about?
[02:02:00]  And they said, can we talk off the record?
[02:02:04]  I said yes, and they said I just want to steer you off the idea that the CIA had anything to do with David Holden.
[02:02:12]  And I was completely thunderstruck by that, because that's not a question that I ask.
[02:02:17]  I didn't ask, you know, did David Holden work for the CIA or did you guys bump off this guy?
[02:02:23]  You know, back in uh, in 1977, like I didn't ask any of those questions.
[02:02:27]  So I just wanted the files that you guys had previously released about Holding.
[02:02:33]  And that's when this person says there's nothing in our files about Holding.
[02:02:39]  And i'm like that's impossible, like what you're telling me is just impossible.
[02:02:44]  It's completely odd with this case and what you know I explained.
[02:02:48]  There's nothing in there.
[02:02:49]  Yeah, there's nothing.
[02:02:50]  There's nothing in our files about David Holden.
[02:02:52]  I'm like I just I can't, it's, it's impossible.
[02:02:56]  And this person says, I can't.
[02:02:57]  I'm sorry I can't offer you no guidance, but I just want to steer you off the idea, except fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, after our the serialization of our book comes out and the CIA has gone on the record to say, I sent you the audio.
[02:03:15]  I can't remember exactly what this is like.
[02:03:17]  We would do it.
[02:03:18]  Can we play it here?
[02:03:19]  I think so.
[02:03:20]  Yeah, that was Peter Gilman.
[02:03:22]  He co-wrote the book Murder In Cairo with Emmanuel Midolo.
[02:03:25]  In a statement to the world, the CIA said it strongly denies the claim it was involved in or responsible for holding Step, which is a claim we never made.
[02:03:35]  Like we didn't make that claim, or at least not in the, you know, not in the newspaper and not not directly.
[02:03:42]  But if you read the book, what we kept, what we basically haven't included in any of the articles of the serialization, is um?
[02:03:52]  It's the name of this guy who was the CIA station chief in Cairo in 1977, and I guess, if you want to know more about him, you can read the book.
[02:04:07]  No, they're in Cairo.
[02:04:10]  Is that good enough for me?
[02:04:11]  Yeah, it's an excellent story.
[02:04:14]  I mean, let me tell you, there's so much from the book that we couldn't even get into.
[02:04:19]  There's so much from fucking the serialization we couldn't get into.
[02:04:22]  It is a insane fucking story.
[02:04:27]  And I think if you read the book, you'll understand why maybe we mentioned the Philby and the Philby stuff so much and the trauma from Philby so much.
[02:04:38]  Because it seems like perhaps, you know, Holden was murdered, you know, one could say as a form of like trauma release or trauma healing from Western intelligence.
[02:04:50]  Because there is, boy, a lot of shit that happens in this fucking book.
[02:04:55]  And the investigation is, it is also very touching that you were able to sort of bring this, do this with Peter Gilliman.
[02:05:02]  I mean, how is just kind of to end us off here?
[02:05:05]  I mean, he is, he is, you know, he's in his 80s.
[02:05:09]  Yeah, how is he feeling about all this?
[02:05:11]  Oh, he's very relieved.
[02:05:12]  And, you know, he made, he had made this promise to Harry Evans and the fact that he could finally, you know, fulfill the promise and also that crack the case has been knocking on him for so long.
[02:05:22]  It's just a fantastic feeling.
[02:05:25]  That's what he's saying.
[02:05:26]  He was saying yesterday during the book party.
[02:05:29]  It's like it's the best feeling.
[02:05:30]  And to me, the crucial quote of this whole thing, it's a line that this Sunday Times writer, Sunday Times journalist called Sir Connolly had written back in the 1950s.
[02:05:43]  He was obsessed with the case of the two missing diplomats who turned out to be KGB spies.
[02:05:49]  And he wrote this beautiful line.
[02:05:52]  You know, this was back when journalists can actually write.
[02:05:56]  He said, those who become obsessed with a mystery are likely not to solve it.
[02:06:03]  And I just love that line because it's so many people have been trying to solve the Holden case throughout the years, including people here in my newspaper, but nothing was published.
[02:06:17]  You know, it just ruined some people's life.
[02:06:21]  I mean, if you read the book, you'll see so many of Holden's friends, for example, became obsessed with it.
[02:06:29]  And they started asking everyone about, you know, who killed David?
[02:06:34]  And one of the crucial pieces of the jigsaw puzzle was actually coming from one of these obsessive people.
[02:06:42]  But he just didn't do anything with that information.
[02:06:45]  He just, you know, went back home, told his wife, and he just couldn't prove it, you know, despite all this obsession.
[02:06:56]  So there's something poetic to me about the fact that, you know, there's this old guy who's been working on the Sunday Times 50 years ago.
[02:07:06]  I'm working on the Sunday Times now and we've been trying to solve the murder of the Sunday Times guy.
[02:07:12]  Like, it's been a privilege for me to work on, you know, such a story.

=== People Ready to Do Whatever (02:42) ===

[02:07:30]  What did we learn, Brace?
[02:07:34]  I think I don't know.
[02:07:36]  I learned that.
[02:07:39]  So did the KGB, like you ever think about, they just had like 50 gay dudes.
[02:07:42]  They're like, you got to go fuck a guy in Warsaw tonight.
[02:07:46]  They had like a twink farm somewhere?
[02:07:49]  That's a good question.
[02:07:50]  I think about that sometimes.
[02:07:52]  I mean, you know, maybe a lot of people that are ready to do whatever they needed to do for the cause.
[02:07:57]  Yeah.
[02:07:58]  Like, listen, I need you to fuck like a 75-year-old like cultural attache.
[02:08:03]  So question, Brace.
[02:08:05]  If you were in that position as a God-fearing communist.
[02:08:11]  No kissing.
[02:08:12]  I wouldn't kiss.
[02:08:12]  You were not on the mouth.
[02:08:15]  But you were, you know, you were given instructions that for your country, your country needs you to go to Minx and meet with, you know, a foreign attache at a bar.
[02:08:39]  Well, I would say this.
[02:08:40]  I'd be like, listen, I mean no disrespect to my superiors.
[02:08:44]  You just saluted.
[02:08:45]  Say this.
[02:08:45]  I'm saluting while I'm doing it.
[02:08:47]  Well, I'm saluting to show that I mean no disrespect, but no disrespect to my superiors.
[02:08:52]  But I think that my talents, which are at the absolute, you know, full disposal of our socialist motherland here, I don't know if seduction or like, I don't know, I don't know.
[02:09:07]  Sort of like, I don't know if I'm, you might have to refuse the premise of the question.
[02:09:11]  Yeah, I'm just like, do you think I will do whatever you guys want for me, me to do, you know, gay for pay, whatever.
[02:09:20]  But do you think this is a good idea?
[02:09:22]  Like, that's my question.
[02:09:23]  Did you run out of guys?
[02:09:25]  Because I just don't think that I am.
[02:09:28]  Like, maybe you're more suited for like the art of annoyance.
[02:09:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:09:33]  Or like if you're trying to stir up like anti-Semitism somewhere or something like that, like if you want to deploy me, if you want, if you want just like someone to be annoying somewhere, I can do it.
[02:09:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:09:44]  You know, but I don't know if seduction is really to be now.
[02:09:49]  Now, this is, I mentioned this when we were talking to Monsieur Medolo.
[02:09:55]  If I am a cultural attache in Minsk in 1981 and some, you know, some bird comes and puts on my windowseal, yeah, I'm going up to the nest.
[02:10:06]  But like, you just, here's the thing: is people understand is they're like, oh, I got seduced by this fucking spy.

=== Why Share Secrets? (06:44) ===

[02:10:12]  Well, just don't tell them anything.
[02:10:17]  That is a good question, which is sort of like, how, why are you telling all these people things?
[02:10:22]  Don't tell anybody anything.
[02:10:23]  That's why, did anyone think to train their spies on not telling secrets?
[02:10:30]  It's just that seems to be like the number one, like, because if you get that out of the way, you're kind of good on everything else.
[02:10:36]  You didn't have to be like, don't fuck anybody, don't blah, blah, blah.
[02:10:38]  You just be like, don't tell anybody anything.
[02:10:40]  Yeah.
[02:10:41]  Well, it sounds like Philby was pretty well trained.
[02:10:44]  I know.
[02:10:44]  Dude, I love, I love Philby.
[02:10:46]  Yeah.
[02:10:47]  I mean, it's just like, here's my question.
[02:10:49]  Do guys like this still exist?
[02:10:52]  Like a Philby kind of guy?
[02:10:54]  I don't know.
[02:10:55]  There's something so like when we were talking about how all these guys getting so lost in their own sauce and like you don't know if you're a character driving the plot or writing the plot or even if when you wrote the plot, if you're still in charge of writing the plot, but you're in it and all this stuff.
[02:11:13]  And I wonder if like there's something very romantic about the obviously this whole you know the 60s, 70s, 80s kind of this like height of, especially as we're saying in the newsrooms at all of these places.
[02:11:28]  It's, it's just so fascinating.
[02:11:30]  And I feel like, does, does, is there the swirl of the romanticism in spy world, is it still there?
[02:11:39]  I would, I would say, like, I, cause I think about this too, sometimes it's like, occasionally there will be like busts of spy rings, right?
[02:11:45]  Or like, there'll be some stuff that they're like, I don't know what's going on.
[02:11:48]  Like when they, they just like, I think the U.S. just ejected like three Chinese dudes who had been in the army here.
[02:11:54]  Right.
[02:11:54]  Like kind of accused them of being spies.
[02:11:56]  But like, that's not like a Philby type.
[02:11:59]  You know what I mean?
[02:12:01]  And it's like, I feel like now, I mean, obviously China has like a different ideology than the U.S., but like there isn't sort of this like global clash of ideologies where like in the same way, I think that's fairly uncontroversial to say.
[02:12:18]  And so I don't know if there is like, because I feel like a type of this caliber of the Philby caliber has to be like a true believer.
[02:12:25]  Yeah, absolutely.
[02:12:26]  Whereas like you're not going to get that with like the money or blackmail or whatever else kind of shit that you can do.
[02:12:31]  And like you need somebody who is like believes in their heart in the cause.
[02:12:35]  And so like, I'm assuming someone somewhere that there is someone like this, but there really hasn't really been anything like this kind of since Engleton's days.
[02:12:44]  Yeah.
[02:12:45]  Of course, Jonathan Pollard.
[02:12:47]  Oh my God.
[02:12:48]  Stop it.
[02:12:49]  God, yeah.
[02:12:50]  He's amazing.
[02:12:51]  He really, yeah.
[02:12:52]  And he looks like the guy in that sort of video of like, if someone doesn't take your house, who's going to take you out?
[02:12:57]  You know, like that guy.
[02:12:58]  Pollard looks like that.
[02:12:59]  He looks like shit.
[02:13:01]  But and there was that chick who seduced Eric Swawell.
[02:13:05]  Remember?
[02:13:05]  Yeah.
[02:13:06]  I think some of the Huawei stuff gets a little interesting, but we've never really looked into it.
[02:13:11]  But that's a, that's an interesting story there.
[02:13:13]  Yeah.
[02:13:13]  Yeah.
[02:13:13]  I mean, I think it's like, and then there was that sort of period where China just like shut down all these CIA stations sort of like overnight.
[02:13:22]  That was kind of amazing.
[02:13:23]  I think the Chinese probably got some fucking, I mean, they had a two shooters.
[02:13:28]  I mean, allegedly.
[02:13:29]  I mean, the U.S. said they had a guy in like Feinstein's office and I think in Pelosi's office.
[02:13:33]  I fucking hope so.
[02:13:34]  Where's Nancy?
[02:13:35]  Where's Nancy?
[02:13:36]  I don't know.
[02:13:37]  However, you say that in Chinese.
[02:13:38]  The Chinese were probably spying on Feinstein and be like, this lady's fucking brained.
[02:13:41]  We need someone to help her.
[02:13:44]  We need to put a guy in there to do like, we need CPS, Chinese protection services.
[02:13:49]  We need somebody in there to help this lady down the fucking shit.
[02:13:52]  The Chinese are like, is this really what's going on here?
[02:13:55]  I feel like we should alert someone.
[02:13:57]  Well, the Chinese, of course, respect, you know, they respect the wisdom of the elderly.
[02:14:02]  And so they probably saw Feinstein sort of being.
[02:14:04]  They're like, she thinks in centuries.
[02:14:06]  Exactly.
[02:14:06]  Like, oh, she's been here for several centuries.
[02:14:08]  She knew Sun Yat-sen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[02:14:11]  So they're like, we have to protect this like venerable ancient.
[02:14:14]  And so when Feinstein was sort of being led around by these 30-year-old interns, which is crazy to be 30-year-old intern, but no disrespect to anyone who is.
[02:14:22]  And they were probably like, we need to send a Chinese guy over there to like care for her as we care for the elderly.
[02:14:27]  And to like understand her wisdom.
[02:14:28]  Her wisdom, exactly, because she's probably got wisdom.
[02:14:31]  She like knew, they probably were like, oh, she knows Washington.
[02:14:34]  You know what I'm saying?
[02:14:35]  She knew Washington.
[02:14:36]  Her eyeballs are falling out of her skull.
[02:14:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:14:39]  He's like, and so Ben Franklin, I mean, he really, I mean, he was such a polymer.
[02:14:44]  He had a kite.
[02:14:45]  But what was he like in person?
[02:14:46]  Like, what was Ben Franklin?
[02:14:47]  What did he do?
[02:14:48]  You know?
[02:14:50]  I don't know.
[02:14:51]  There has to be, but I feel like all like, there's so much of this stuff can be like, like something that you would have to necessarily use a journalist for, like even like a shitty kind of like stringer journalist for in the 60s can just be done by like a bot farm, you know, in Cambodia now.
[02:15:08]  That's so sad.
[02:15:09]  It's so sad.
[02:15:10]  I do think, I mean, not to name names, but you can go through and find out for yourself.
[02:15:17]  You know, there's a great tip in the story.
[02:15:20]  You know, look for the journalists who have rising careers real fast.
[02:15:26]  You know, there's, you know, rumors that swirl among them about being well-placed.
[02:15:31]  We, we have talked to a journalist who has encountered a later admitted black cube spy.
[02:15:37]  Yeah.
[02:15:39]  And it's just, you know, it's.
[02:15:41]  Yeah, I guess the private world does.
[02:15:42]  I know, but I think that there's a difference between that and like a fucking Philby.
[02:15:47]  You know what I'm saying?
[02:15:48]  Yeah.
[02:15:49]  Could you imagine Kash Patel dealing with Philby?
[02:15:53]  Dude, Kash Patel can't even sue straight.
[02:15:56]  He is fucked up looking, huh?
[02:15:58]  Is it?
[02:15:58]  But is you imagine like Heg Seth?
[02:16:02]  Sorry, I'm just brooding together.
[02:16:04]  There's the God, the fucking, like, the Russians send like a, like a, a beautiful woman to soothe Heg Seth.
[02:16:13]  He's just already cheating on his wife with another woman who's not interested.
[02:16:16]  And just like, you know, the Chinese send a guy, just brutally beats the guy up for being Chinese because he's in a drunken rage.
[02:16:22]  Yeah, I know.
[02:16:23]  I feel like our ophish, ogreish, like they could probably be seduced by like a battle pass or a Call of Duty.
[02:16:28]  Yeah, you just give them a fucking mirror and they jack off looking into it.
[02:16:32]  Yeah, I know.
[02:16:33]  Fucking freaks.
[02:16:34]  Yeah.
[02:16:35]  I'm like, I wish, I wish we knew more about it because China's probably got some good spy stuff.
[02:16:39]  But now there's so much electronic surveillance now that it's like, you don't need to like pump someone necessarily.
[02:16:45]  Like you can just look at their phone.
[02:16:48]  I know that's so boring.
[02:16:49]  I know.
[02:16:50]  That's why don't put anything interesting on your phone.
[02:16:53]  And maybe once we all start doing that, we'll get some good spies.

=== Freakish Seductions (01:14) ===

[02:16:57]  Exactly.
[02:16:57]  Or put something interesting on my phone.
[02:16:59]  Everything I look at sucks.
[02:17:00]  But it would be funny if they were just like blackmailing random people by like, you looks like you spent three hours looking at warts on TikTok and like wart removal surgery.
[02:17:10]  And would you like to is this?
[02:17:12]  Sorry, is this something that you want to mention?
[02:17:14]  No, you saw me burn my ward off.
[02:17:17]  When?
[02:17:17]  Three years ago on tour at a or two years ago, I had a ward on my hand.
[02:17:21]  Remember?
[02:17:22]  Oh, that's right.
[02:17:23]  I burned that fucking shit off.
[02:17:24]  Yeah, I didn't.
[02:17:25]  And then I got pneumonia.
[02:17:27]  Unrelated, I think.
[02:17:29]  You don't know that.
[02:17:30]  All right, everyone.
[02:17:31]  I'm Liz.
[02:17:32]  My name's Bryce.
[02:17:34]  I'm from, I'm from, I'm from the Lake District.
[02:17:37]  The Lake District.
[02:17:39]  People are seafaring people, like fair people.
[02:17:43]  The Lake District.
[02:17:44]  I'm from the Lake District.
[02:17:45]  And of course, we're joined by producer.
[02:17:47]  Jon Chomsky.
[02:17:48]  And this has been Truman.
[02:17:50]  We'll see you next time.
[02:17:51]  Bye-bye.
[02:18:11]  Come out.