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July 6, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
53:46
Edition 556 - Tim Tate
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
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Without whom, I couldn't do any of this.
The guest on this edition is a very accomplished investigative journalist and author.
His name is Tim Tate.
We first spoke when he wrote a book about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, which was 53 years ago, a couple of weeks ago, I believe.
That was a great book, and so is the one that we're going to be talking about here.
It's about a man called Mikhail Goliniewski, and he was probably the greatest super spy of the Cold War era, a man who delivered from his position as a senior officer in the Polish security service with strong ties to Russia.
He delivered information that was used by Washington and London to make hundreds of arrests in different places.
I mean, this man was prolific.
He was for the security services in the US and UK and other countries, including Israel and Sweden.
He was a gift that kept on giving.
And his story sounds like fiction.
The man lived with constant fear of discovery, but is a real story.
And it's worth just getting a cup of coffee, whatever you like to drink, sitting back and listening to this.
So that's the guest on this edition, investigative reporter and author Tim Tate.
And the story of a super spy will tell you all about it and the title of the book during the conversation, which I hope you'll enjoy.
Please stay in touch with me.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and send me an email from there.
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Please tell me when you get in touch, who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
It's lovely to see the spread around the globe of people.
You know, just to know that people in places that I may never see or visit are consuming and enjoying this show.
That's a great feeling, and it keeps me going.
Thank you.
All right, this is my conversation with investigative reporter and journalist and author Tim Tate about a remarkable super spy.
This man was what we would call today a super spy in the era when spying was the thing, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall being constructed separating East from West, animosity between Moscow and Washington, mutual suspicion everywhere, everybody on the lookout for data.
We are going to talk about a man who was at the very core of this, but to an extent I've never seen or heard of before.
Now, the case that is part of this story, the Portland spy ring, is something that we've talked about before from that angle, from the people involved in that very British conspiracy, if you could call it that.
This is the man who facilitated the apprehension of those people and many, many others by providing data from behind the Iron Curtain.
His name, Michal Golonievsky.
I'm sure I've mispronounced that, but we'll check with Tim Tate, who's written a book about him called The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold.
And Tim, thank you for joining me.
There is a subtitle to that title for the book, isn't there?
Yep, The Secret History of Agent Golanewski, because this has been for 60-odd years a secret history.
But governments on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to suppress this extraordinary story.
You are an investigative journalist and author.
You've written many fine books, one of which we've spoken about quite some years ago on this show, about Robert Kennedy's assassination and the background of that.
What was the appeal of this story?
I'd heard about Mikhail Golanevsky many, many, in fact, several decades ago.
And I'd heard about him because he in the early 90s or the mid-1960s claimed, completely falsely, I should stress, to be the surviving Tsarevich, the son of the last Tsar of Russia.
And he was a pretender to the Russian throne.
And that's what for many years people knew about Golenewski.
He had made this bizarre claim that he was Alexei Romanov.
And I should stress he wasn't.
So I'd heard about this several decades ago, but had gradually been trying to collect information because I also knew that he had been a really important spy for the West.
He had been, frankly, the West's most important spy behind the Iron Curtain, working as what was called an agent in place.
And that's probably the most dangerous spying of all, because you work for your employer, in his case, the Polish intelligence service and the Soviet KGB, and you secretly feed, as he did, information to the West to help Britain and the United States and numerous Western countries uncover Soviet bloc Spies in their midst.
In other words, you are permanently living a double or sometimes triple life.
Absolutely right.
And he was doing this for at least three years.
Well, he worked behind the Iron Curtain on the West's behalf for three years, sending just the most extraordinary volume of detail about Soviet bloc spies, including, as you mentioned, the Portland spy ring in the UK, but also George Blake in the UK, senior figures in NATO, Israel, the United States.
What he provided was quite simply the best intelligence the West had ever had in the Cold War.
A fascinating character, a man who clearly lived life on the edge and kind of enjoyed it.
And that, I think, will come out from the story here.
You know, he was constantly living a soap opera cliffhanger, it seemed to me, reading through the book.
What I want to do, and tell me if this works for you, is I want to talk about the background, because a lot of people listening to this will not understand this post-World War II Cold War developing era and the tensions that existed at that time.
So I wanted to try and talk about the background, and then we'll introduce the man, and maybe in the second segment, we'll talk in depth about the particular cases that he was involved in.
And then at the end of it, this man has a downfall.
So we'll talk about that.
Does that work for you?
Absolutely fine.
Okay.
So the background.
World War II has come to an end.
And after it, as we know if we've studied history, Europe was passed up between the East and the West.
Eventually, there was a thing called East Germany and West Germany with a wall dividing the two, which was very much the frontier in espionage terms.
You know, people and information would cross back and forth between that divide.
But there were many other points at which data would cross.
And, you know, spying had been a thing during the war.
In fact, spying is what helped us to win World War II.
And, you know, the Germans got a lot of information from us.
We got a lot of information about them.
But spying became an art, didn't it?
It became refined after World War II.
I suppose you could say, and it's true, that the Cold War, the era from the end of World War II through to the mid or the end of the 1960s and a bit beyond, this is the classic era of spying.
It's what we all recognize.
It's the third man.
It's smoky bars.
It's cold streets in Berlin.
It's people risking their lives.
I mean, it is, particularly at the moment, it seems, an era which has endless fascination.
And I can understand that because researching this book was extraordinary.
Just the mentality on both sides of the Iron Curtain, East and West, which ensured that vast efforts and quantities of personnel and resources were devoted to spying on each other.
And this is why it is the classic spy era, I suppose, because the Cold War was largely fought out in espionage terms.
And there seemed to me, looking at the era, and of course at school, I had to study some of this as well and at university, this was not the sort of thing that was done using recruitment posters, your country needs you with a pointed finger.
Every agent in this era on both sides appeared to be recruited in different ways.
Yeah, I mean, certainly from the West's point of view, it was chaotic.
I don't think we quite realize how almost amateurish the United States was in intelligence and espionage terms at the end of World War II.
I mean, the CIA didn't exist at that point.
There was no American intelligence or espionage service per se.
It relied a lot on Britain's MI5 and MI6, but it was learning on the job almost.
And it started in this, what was known as the great game of espionage.
It started at a huge disadvantage to Moscow, which had been in the game for decades and was very, very, very good at it.
So the Americans were particularly trying anything they could, and they were desperate for intelligence and desperate for spies, and they were largely unsuccessful.
At the same time, we should say that Britain, although we had been quite good at spying and quite good at intelligence, we were retrenching.
You know, Britain was largely bankrupted by the Second World War, and we were pulling back into our shell because we didn't have the money.
So it's an era in which the West is at a huge disadvantage.
There's a huge intelligence gap between the East and the West, and the East is very good at it, and the West is learning and trying very hard to catch up.
That's what comes out of your book.
And I was shocked.
I'd never heard this before.
I didn't know enough about this, that the Americans were very amateur and almost clueless going into all of this.
On our side, we didn't have the money.
We didn't have the resources.
So sometimes when we knew that we had enemies within, that we had spies operating here in the UK, sometimes we looked the other way.
Yeah, I mean, there was we're going to come, I know, to the Portland spy ring, and I know you've talked about that before, but going through the files, and this book is based on British and American and Polish intelligence service files.
I mean, it's all primary source material.
Going through the files, on Portland, for example, and or on Blake, it was absolutely shocking how complacent Britain and British intelligence was about what were plainly spies, Soviet moles inside some of its most important, strategically important institutions like the Admiralty, like MI6.
Astonishing to hear that.
But it goes back, you know, you paint a picture, I think, of a United Kingdom that we wouldn't recognize anymore.
You know, there was the old boys network running to the nth degree and a lot of people who'd been in position right the way through World War II.
And they just, they were not, they're not on the case.
I think that's a modern way of putting it.
Yeah, I mean, I should say I was born in the mid-1950s.
So to some extent, I can recognize this era and these attitudes, which didn't really begin to change, I don't think, until, well, the classic phrase, you know, after the Lady Chatterley trial in the early 1960s, that's when Britain began to change and the old order and the old complacency began to erode.
But we were strangely lackadaisical.
And we had been, and this was the subject of one of my previous books about the traitors, British traitors who worked for Germany during the Second World War and tried to bring about a victory for Hitler.
British intelligence and particularly the Foreign Office and the Home Office or Home Department as it was called were extraordinarily laid-back and lackadaisical.
And there was an old boys network and there was a sense of, well, this is how we've done things always and this is how we will carry on doing things.
But it wasn't fit for purpose in the era.
Okay, it was absolutely not fit for purpose.
As is very clear in the book, which is a remarkable read, and I definitely recommend it to anybody listening to this who's interested in this era and these machinations.
Let's give in the minutes remaining in this segment then a quick thumbnail sketch of who Mikhail Goloniewski is.
Mikhail Goliniewski was a lieutenant colonel in the Polish intelligence service, and he was really one of the most senior men inside Polish spying.
Simultaneously, he was working for the KGB in Moscow, and he was doing so as its sort of point man in Warsaw and also keeping an eye on the Polish intelligence service for the KGB.
So he's got this double job very high up in Soviet bloc intelligence and that gives him access to some of Moscow's the most sensitive military and intelligence secrets.
And in 1958, having spent most of his adult life being nurtured and protected by the communist system, he has a Damascene conversion and he decides he's going to work for democracy and the West.
Right.
Was there any sign, other than his pretensions to the throne of Russia, any sign of that in the years leading up to this?
Or did this come out, as you say, Damascene conversion happens out of the blue?
Well, it depends on whose account you believe.
As with all good spy stories, there are any number of slightly different accounts.
What I think is the most reliable emerges from something that I managed to get hold of two years ago, which was his Polish intelligence service file.
Now, this is 1,100 pages and it's unredacted.
And it gives a very clear indication of who Golianewski was in his youth, in his adolescence, and then in his career with Polish intelligence.
And really that shows that he may have been having slight doubts about the communist system from around 1955 onwards, but that they crystallized in late 57, early 58.
Just a word about his service for Russia and Poland, Tim Tate.
Why did they trust him to that degree?
There must have been something about him that made him trustworthy for them.
Yeah, he was very, very, very good at his job.
And we know this because in his Polish intelligence file, I find a series or a number of performance reviews for his work as a spy.
And they praise him.
They say, this man, he's really very good.
He's dedicated.
He's driven.
He's ruthless.
He's exactly what they wanted.
And he did a very good job for them up until the point where he loses his faith in communism and decides to work for the West.
How does he achieve that then?
You know, you can't just pick up the phone and say, put me through to the United States president.
I have something to give you.
And this is where the story starts becoming, I think, stranger than any spy novel I've ever read.
Golinevsky smuggles his first letter offering to work for the West out to the U.S. Embassy in Switzerland, and he addresses It personally to the ambassador there, and he encloses in this note a letter to be sent to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, and only J. Edgar Hoover.
And he does this because he says and knows that all other American intelligence agencies and government departments have been penetrated by the KGB.
He knows this because he works for the KGB.
So he sends this letter to via the ambassador in Switzerland, but he doesn't give his name.
He gives himself a cover name, and that cover name was in German.
It was Heckenschutz, which is the German word for sniper.
So henceforth, he was known as Agent Sniper.
And he offers this extraordinary access and says, if you want to take me up on this, please put an advert in the personal columns of a Frankfurt newspaper and I will respond to that if you could tell me where to send stuff.
That offer, that letter, gets forwarded by the ambassador in Switzerland, not to the FBI, but he sends it to the CIA, the very agency that Agent Sniper Golianewski has warned is penetrated.
Thereby increasing the level of danger for Golianewski enormously.
He deliberately contacted Hoover.
And of course, we have to say that the FBI is not the agency that deals with international spying, espionage, is it?
So that wasn't Hoover's remit.
But in the 50s and the 60s, to some extent, Hoover had an enormous presence.
He was portrayed in American movies and newsreels as some kind of hero.
Yeah, and the FBI had a stellar reputation for integrity and for not being penetrated.
And that's the key point.
Golionevsky, sniper as he called himself, knew that there were Soviet moles, KGB moles, inside the CIA and US government departments.
And that's why he said, I will only deal with the FBI.
And from the start of its relationship with this extraordinarily brave man, the US government deceives him.
And they con him into believing he is dealing with Hoover and the FBI.
But all the while he's dealing with the CIA.
And for the next 33 months, he sends every month phenomenal amounts of material through dead letter drops in Berlin.
There was one in the gent's toilet in Zoo Station in Berlin.
And it all feeds into the CIA.
And all of it is anonymous.
The CIA has no idea who this man is.
All they know is his cover name.
And indeed, there are those on the Western side, I think the Americans principally, who are concerned about this man's bona fides, his credentials.
There are those who are asking the question, who is this guy?
Well, yeah, if you're running a spy agency like the CIA and someone comes to you from the other side of the Iron Curtain and said, would you like some really good secrets?
You should be suspicious, should you not?
And one of the things which you as an intelligence agency and intelligence service do to discover whether you're being fed disinformation is to establish the identity of your benefactor.
And they set him a bit of a test, didn't they?
They set him a number of tests.
I mean, they said they tested all the material.
I mean, they went to extraordinary lengths to analyze the typewriter face of the material he sent and to test the paper.
Was this paper actually coming from, or where was it coming from?
What was it made up of?
They go through all of this and they send him instructions.
This is how you send us material via dead letter drops.
And somehow he gets hold of a spy camera, you know, one of those little Minox spy cameras you see in Cold War movies.
And he starts sending them frames, hundreds of frames of Soviet military and intelligence documents.
And the CIA works and works and works and works away on this.
And for the most part, it becomes convinced this man is not just genuine.
He's absolutely the best thing we've ever had.
For the United Kingdom, the greatest achievement of this man is cracking the Portland spy ring.
And it's very, the Portland spy ring is enormously complex, I know, because I did a whole hour about it, and that wasn't enough.
But essentially, we're talking about a turncoat in the Admiralty, you know, the heart of the defense establishment, backed up by others here, including a husband and wife team who were sending messages back to the United States, who had a remarkable tangle of identities.
It was very deeply embedded.
And, you know, when we were given the information that this thing was operating, here in the UK, we made a very bad job of dealing with it, didn't we?
Well, I think we have to remember the position in the UK at the time.
Burgess and Maclean had defected.
There were constant suspicions about Philby.
British intelligence had a pretty lousy reputation in the West at this point.
And suddenly, the CIA sends its man to London, this is in 1959, and says, he turns up at a meeting of MI5 and MI6 and says, look guys, you've got a problem.
We've got a new and sensitive source, Agent Sniper, who's told us that you've got a spy working at the heart of the Admiralty and that he's feeding the KGB Britain's most sensitive military secrets.
And, you know, this is the last thing that British intelligence needs.
For the next year, British intelligence works slowly, patiently, and they managed to identify the man who is the spy, this low, mid-level bureaucrat Harry Houghton, working at the underwater defense establishment.
A man who's disgruntled, it seems, with both his employers and with the system here.
Oh, yes.
I mean, he felt cheated.
He was greedy.
He was a drunk.
And he had been a perfect recruit for Polish intelligence and the KGB in the mid-1950s when he worked in the embassy in Warsaw.
And that had carried on when he'd been sent back home to the UK.
And what he fed, I mean, he fed the East some of our most sensitive secrets, including, you know, submarine details of our newest submarines and Polaris.
It was very, very serious stuff.
MI5, using Kogianewski's information, tugs and tugs and tugs at the threads of this, comes up with Houghton's name, discovers that he's got a mistress who's helping him, a woman called Bunty G, but also discovers that he's handing over material to someone they don't know and they can't identify who appears to be a Canadian businessman.
And it takes a long while for them to discover he isn't a Canadian businessman.
He's somebody else using bogus documents.
And this man, Gordon Lonsdale, as they knew him then, Conan Malodi, as his real name was, we'll see, long-term deep undercover Soviet agent runner in London at the time.
But that wasn't the end of it.
They then found that he had two more, that Malodi had two more people, a husband and wife team, who appeared to be antiquarian booksellers from New Zealand, who were in fact Soviet spice on the run from America, who Britain had been warned about and asked to find some years previously, and we hadn't.
And they had been happily running this spy ring ever since.
And transmitting secrets by radio from a suburban house, an astonishing story about the Krugers, which is a name that I can just dimly remember from my childhood, because it was such a shock that such a thing could happen under our very noses.
So Golianovsky proved his worth there.
Give me an example of what he did for America.
Well, what he did for America was to provide, and this is according to the CIA's own documents, I had to put a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to get these CIA documents.
And I didn't get all of them that I wanted, but I got a lot.
And its own documents show that he exposed 1,693 Soviet bloc agents.
I mean, no one before or since has ever identified, exposed quite such an enormous volume of Soviet spies.
Surely, though, all of this information that was coming out, leading to all sorts of discoveries and shocks, that must have pointed the finger straight at Golenevsky, surely for the people who employed him.
Well, the arrests didn't happen until after Golienevsky defected.
At the time when Golenevsky is sending all this information for 33 months, bear in mind, no one in the West knows who he is.
All they know is his cover name is Sniper.
And for that reason, the CIA tells MI5, MI6, and all the other Western services who are getting this information, don't arrest any of the spies he's identified.
Keep them under wraps, keep them under observation.
But you can't arrest them because if you do, it will lead to Agent Sniper being exposed.
And we know, he knows, he'll get a bullet in the back of the head for his pains.
It's only after Golianevsky defects to the West, just after New Year in 1961, that all these arrests start happening because Golianevsky is smuggled out of Berlin and into the States.
And there's quite a story behind that, isn't there?
I mean, sadly, we don't have time to tell it, but, you know, he ends up on a flight that I think was only for him and one other person.
Yeah, the story of his defection is, and this comes through, and this is from the CIA documents as well as Golianevsky's own writings.
I got hold of a vast trove of Golionewski's own affidavits and writings.
The story of his defection is farcical.
I mean, it is low farce.
He's meant to be turning up alone.
He manages to escape surveillance long enough in Berlin to get to the US consulate, which is expecting him.
But he turns up with an unexpected woman in tow who turns out initially he says she's his wife.
Then it turns out she's his mistress.
She doesn't know any of his real names.
There's a long and involved and truly farcical Procedure.
And in the end, it takes a week before they can exfiltrate in spy jargon Kolenewski and his mistress to the United States.
So they get him out of there before the impact of his revelations becomes clear, before people start getting arrested, before people start getting found out.
But was there no indication to the Soviet side, the Polish side, that there was somebody sending information?
Surely there must have been things that would make any organization of that kind, especially if they're as good as you said they are, suspicious?
There was indeed.
And it's one of the reasons why Goldinevsky had to defect in a hurry.
Having sworn the US intelligence services to secrecy and to be careful, they managed to allow news of what he was doing to leak back to Poland and then to Moscow.
And both the Polish intelligence service and the KGB began looking for the mole in their own midst.
And that's Golianewski.
No one knew his name at that point.
So come December 1960, he realizes he's not just under suspicion, he's living on borrowed time.
And it's only a matter of days or at most weeks before he's caught and before he's taken to a cellar in the Lubianca and gets a bullet in the back of the neck.
He must have had nerves.
Sorry to interrupt him.
He must have had nerves of steel.
I think the man, I mean, the man is a mass of contradictions, but I think the man was extraordinarily brave.
I don't think I know I could not live the sort of life he lived at that point.
I mean the sheer nerve to do that, the sheer courage it takes and the strain and the stress must have been enormous.
And I've got one of his reports too that he sent in this period and he warns the United States.
He says, you've got to be careful.
They're onto me and I know what's going to happen.
I'm going to get stood up against a wall.
So please be careful.
He's aware of what he's risking.
So yeah, it's, I don't, I cannot imagine the strain, the mental strain he was under at that point.
And yet the man who had served the United States in particular so well, and also us here in the UK, arrives in America, is fated as a hero for a long period.
A lot of people believe quite rightly that they owe him a great deal as the arrests are being made and the holes are being plugged.
But it comes unstuck for him.
And I want to talk about that next, if I can, Tim Tate.
We're talking about Mikhail Goliniewski, a super spy in the era when spying was all the thing.
It's probably been there forever.
It's there now, we know.
But, you know, in terms of popular fiction and what we understand, the Cold War was it.
Tim Tate talking about this super spy who eventually realizes that they're onto him.
He's got to get out quickly.
And so he gets out and is got out in a semi-farcical way, not alone as we heard.
Tim Tate, he arrives in the United States.
And for a while, it seems to me he is almost fated like one of the returning Apollo astronauts.
You know, he seems to be, quite rightly, a bit of a hero.
Is that right?
Absolutely right.
I mean, the CIA, to its credit, realized what it had got.
It had got a man who had smuggled thousands of pages of Soviet bloc intelligence and military secrets, exposed 1,600-plus Eastern bloc spies throughout the West, and was continuing to give them more and more and more information.
Reading the CIA's own internal documents, as well as Golenewski's own accounts of these things, you see the not frustration, but the realization inside the CIA's spy hunters' minds, my God, this is going to take us years.
We've got so much.
So they are, at that point, incredibly grateful.
And they sponsor his marriage to his mistress, not realizing that it's actually a bigamous marriage, but there you go.
And they begin the process, the CIA begins the process of getting a private bill in Congress passed to grant Kolenewski the right to apply for American citizenship.
So for the first two and a bit years of his time in the United States, everything is going swimmingly.
They give him a contract, they give him money, they set him up with a safe house flat.
It's all going really well.
But there were bumps on the road, though, weren't there?
Because when he discovered that he wasn't actually working for J. Edgar Hoover and Hoover wasn't actually the first recipient of what he was sending, he was angry.
Oh, yeah, and so he should have been.
He found that out in what was called the defector reception center in Germany, where he was taken from Berlin.
And it's only this is several days after he's defected.
And remember, three years after he's been sending all this material, the CIA finally fess up and say, actually, yeah, okay, we aren't FBI.
We're not FBI agents, and you haven't been dealing with the FBI.
You're dealing with the CIA.
And at that point, Golanevsky's inner bind, isn't he?
He's dependent on his American hosts for everything.
And yet he knows his American hosts have lied to him and put his life in danger.
What does he do?
And he takes a day or so To have a think about what he's going to do.
And finally, he realizes he has no choice.
He has to carry on, go through with this.
But he is absolutely furious.
And he was right to be furious.
There is a period for him where he is extensively debriefed, isn't there?
Oh, the debriefings were constant and they were exhausting.
Defectors, the CIA has a procedure for dealing with defectors.
And I got hold of its manual, which was the instruction book for this is how you deal with a defector.
This is what you do.
And it talks about achieving psychological superiority over the defector by stressing how dependent he is on the West for everything.
Golinevsky was having none of that.
From the word go, he took control.
He took charge.
He said, this is going to happen.
This is what I want to do, and this is how this...
And the CIA found itself facing this force of nature.
It was...
And it found dealing with Golanewski both extraordinarily rewarding and bloody exhausting.
Meanwhile, back in Poland, which we haven't mentioned a great deal, but of course it's key to what this man is and what he did, there was a trial.
He was tried in absentia.
The Polish intelligence service, once they realise Mogolinevsky's gone and has defected, begins an inquest into what the hell has gone on and what he's stolen, what he's taken with him.
And he's taken with him hundreds upon hundreds of pages of documents.
And this internal examination, which is detailed in the Polish intelligence service files that I got hold of, is very painful.
And it's put everything they've done for the last five years, it's ruined it.
And so they decide we're going to hold a trial.
We're going to try this man, Mikhail Golanewski, for treason.
Now, they can't get hold of him.
He's in the United States at that point.
But they try him in absentia and in secret.
This isn't a show trial.
This isn't publicized.
No one knew it had happened.
And within it, it's very, within the confines of that secrecy, Polish intelligence was completely frank with the court.
This man has ruined us and not just ruined us, but ruined the KGB's efforts as well.
We're in a complete mess.
And unsurprisingly, at the end of a day's evidence, the judges of the Polish military court sentence Gogianewski to death.
And the Polish intelligence service will spend the next several years trying to find him so that its agents can kill him.
How come they didn't succeed in that?
You've got to remember the world we have today where everything's interconnected and we can look things up online or there are phone books, internationally available phone directories.
None of that existed in the 1960s.
When Golionovsky goes, is taken to the United States, he is kept secret.
He's kept in safe houses.
He's given the first of a number of different cover names.
No one knows where he is, much less what name he's using.
And although Polish intelligence tasks its agents, and I got hold of the orders which were sent out to its agents in the States, saying, tap every one of your contacts, find out where this man has gone, they couldn't do it.
And the world was a very different place then.
It was very much less easy to find people.
Nevertheless, he was continuing, as he had for his entire professional life, to live on the edge.
Just before we talk about how it started to come unstuck for him and why he was eventually left out in the cold and abandoned, effectively.
Just to, your book is notable for the fact that you talk about a lot of cases that we, I hadn't heard about and I'm sure readers won't have heard about, where Golinevsky scored hits in places like Scandinavia and Israel.
He was, you know, he was capable of causing the same kind of shockwaves in those countries and others.
Absolutely.
Golinevsky's whore of spies he exposed stretches all across the West.
All of the major Western powers and NATO, Sweden, as you say, Israel, West Germany, Britain, the United States, France.
There's barely a country which he doesn't expose a Soviet bloc spy in.
Including Sweden, which is a surprise.
A man called Venestrom, who had a long track record in this field that started in World War II.
He outed him too, didn't he?
Yeah, and the Stig Venestom story was just, I mean, that in itself could be a screenplay or a movie in its own right, because it is bizarre and it is exemplary of the fact that, frankly, the US was in the early days really very, very amateurish.
Stig Wenerstrom was a Swedish Air Force officer who was an intelligence service, Swedish intelligence service officer as well.
But he also worked for variously and often at the same time, Nazi intelligence, Soviet intelligence, and US intelligence.
And each of them knew that they were dealing with a man who would sell anything to anybody.
He was doing it for the money.
Oh, and he accumulated an enormous amount of money.
And yet, despite this, I mean, US intelligence hired him and paid him, despite knowing that he had worked and or was working for Swedish intelligence, had worked for Nazi intelligence and the GRU, Soviet military intelligence.
Why it would do that and why it would open doors to US military contractors for him is beyond belief.
But it did.
And it was only, as with all of these cases, it's only Golanevsky saying, that man there, that guy there is leaking all your secrets.
And NATO secrets flew from Venoskrom's desk to Moscow.
It's only Golianevsky that causes this man to be stopped.
There are so many wonderful stories in this book.
We have about five minutes left.
Let's talk about how and why it came unstuck for him, why he was abandoned in the United States.
And again, this is one of those things.
There are two different versions of this, two different explanations for this.
The official explanation is that Golenewski went mad and that he started claiming to be the son of the last Tsar of Russia, who hadn't, in Golenewski's telling, been assassinated in a cellar in Ekaterinburg in 1918, but had survived and had been in hiding for decades.
That's the official version, insofar as there is an official version ever publicized.
The unofficial version, which I think is closer to the truth, is that the CIA tore itself apart.
Another defector arrived, another Soviet defector arrived just under a year after Golianevsky defected.
And this man, a man called Golitsyn, was a con man, was a liar, and I think quite probably was a plant from Moscow, someone, a dangle in spy violence, someone sent to mislead.
And he said to the most senior figure in the CIA, I'm the only true defector.
I am the only one you should believe.
And anyone else who came before me or came after me is a fake.
And the man, the most senior figure in the CIA, a man called James Angleton, who handled this new defector, swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.
And as a result, Golianewski began finding himself frozen out.
And that starts in mid-1963.
I have Golienewski's telegrams and letters, which he sends to the CIA and other US government departments saying, what's going on?
Why am I being treated like this?
Why has my contract not been renewed?
Why is my money being stopped?
It's only after that, it's six months or so after that, that he makes his first public and bogus claim to be Alexei Romanov.
So I think the initial, the main reason is that the CIA got taken in by a rival defector and decided to kick Goginevsky to the curb.
That sounds like real ingratitude.
It's astonishingly ungrateful, but it's also astonishingly stupid.
What this other defector, Gerlitsin, was bringing and peddling and selling was so threadbare and so thin and that even at the time, inside the CIA and inside MI5, because he did the same thing to MI5, there were those who were saying, this is mad.
We have to stop this.
But the head of the CIA, the most senior figure in the CIA, Angleton, who's in charge, says, no, no, no, we're going to believe Golitsyn.
And the result of it is that for a decade, the CIA tore itself apart, searching for moles that Golitsyn said existed and ignoring all the leads which Golianewski had given.
And the same thing happened here in Britain with MI5.
The damage that this did to Western intelligence was phenomenal.
And the damage it did to Golionevsky's already fragile mental state was devastating.
What became of him?
He went genuinely, genuinely, he went mad.
And again, I have the CIA's own documents in which they say this guy's gone completely insane.
And I think that's true.
He did go insane.
Looking at Golianevsky's writings from the mid-60s onwards, I mean, they are seriously disturbed.
The question which the agency, the CIA, doesn't seem ever to have asked itself is, how and why did he go mad?
And the answer which emerges from the research and I hope from the book is that the CIA drove him mad.
We don't have a lot of time in what way?
In the way that they gave him the run around?
They constantly, yeah.
I mean, they knew they were dealing with a man who's, like most effectors, has a fairly fragile mental state.
As you yourself said, he's been living on the edge under immense strain for so long.
And they exploit that.
They constantly change his cover names.
They constantly cancel or don't fulfill their contracts.
They'd start slow walking his material.
They start harassing him.
They Remove the protection.
He arranged that he should have a pistol for protection.
Under those circumstances, anybody would crack.
Did he die peacefully somewhere in the suburbs in America?
That's a very good question.
Golenovsky published his own, after he went mad, he published his own monthly newsletter for a while, but largely disappeared from sight.
And even his death is shrouded in some mystery.
There are at least two or three different dates for his death in 1993.
The records of his death are secret because they're reserved for his family.
But there is no trace of his death or a grave in any of the numerous names he used anywhere in the United States.
What an astonishing story.
I'm sorry that we're out of time.
I have to say that your book is, by me and many, many others much more qualified than me, highly recommended.
It's called The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold, and he certainly was the story of Mikhail Golionevsky.
Super spy, Tim Tate, thank you very much for telling it.
Thank you very much for having me.
I can't recommend that book highly enough, and Tim Tate is such a great writer.
I was completely, even though I was only able to read it very, very quickly, I was totally immersed in it.
And you can tell quality when you see it, and that is quality.
Let me know what you think.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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