Full Transcript for INTERVIEW: The Spies Churchill Tried to Hide

is kind of a rabbit hole, um, and just real quick for our audience that might not be familiar with the SOE, that is a, the Special Operations Executive, also called SOE, because it's kind of a mouthful if you say the whole thing, and it was, and the way that you described it was that, uh, in the early years of World War II, Winston Churchill put them on a mission to quote, set Europe ablaze, and they're basically, you know, Supposed to drum up revolts in enemy territory, gather intelligence, blow up things, basically anything to be a thorn in the side of the Nazis. Is that a Yeah, a very fair assessment. I think one of the reasons why fewer people particularly here don't really know about SOE is because it was very effective during the war, but he didn't survive it. And it was essentially shut down in the aftermath of the war. And that went over to SIS, uh, also known as MI6, but yeah. I think Americans frequently forget. how long the British stood alone, you know, before, uh, Pearl Harbor and before we entered the war and they're, you know, they're kicked out of Europe, you know, Dunkirk has happened and they're really backs against the wall and forming these, uh, special operations units that would allow them to punch above their weight was, you know, really one of their few options very early on. And so the British, you know, ironically enough, the British empire formed units of. Two of the things that have been fighting against quite desperately for a very long time, right, gorillas and saboteurs, uh, very intentionally, and they were dropped behind enemy lines, um, as both dangerous men in very dangerous situations, right? You didn't have an extraction plan when you got dropped into, to these places. Um, to essentially cause as much trouble for the Nazis as they could. Yeah, that's a, it was really reading your book and then kind of going down that rabbit hole myself. It was like, holy crap, the thing is that the SOE was doing really was 007. It really was, but, but like grittier almost, you know, um, and you mentioned Peter Kemp and I want to talk about him. He's so fascinating. So he's like a real life action figure, parachute drops and, and raids and anti communist and communists and captured by the Soviets at one point, this guy was like a war machine. And he, I wanted to ask you real quick about his time in Spain before World War II. So. There's a Spanish Civil War. Julian Amery runs into Peter Kemp. They meet in a ditch, sheltering from shelling. Exactly. So Julian's a bit younger, um, and becomes very well known as a, um, a conservative MP after the war and eventually joins this team of men in Albania. But yes, they meet in these men in a ditch. Um, Peter was, Peter Kemp was already there. Um, having joined this, this royalist unit well before Franco became kind of, you know, the, the head of everything. But yes, uh, Peter Kemp, I think I've, I've said was, uh, the, the combat instincts of a pirate and the manners of a Prince. He really was a lot of people who knew him said, you know, Peter was one of the last through night errands and he It definitely does seem like from a different era, different kind of person. And, um, almost. I don't want to say glorified, but like kind of this person that you really don't see anymore that you can really look to, to go, how did this person exist? How do they even put themselves in these situations? And then we're talking about the Spanish Foreign Legion, right? So you said their motto was Viva La Muerta, long live death. Like that's, that's a choice of Indeed. And ironically enough, it's called the Spanish, the Spanish Foreign Legion, and it is mostly full of Spaniards. He ended up transferring into that unit later in the war, and said later that he was, he was very lucky that he didn't go and, Uh, initially when he joined as a private because he eventually became an officer. Later, some of the toughest soldiers in Spain. But I think what also always, Peter Kemp was extremely severely wounded in Spain. He nearly died. He was hit by mortar. Um, and then, He blew out parts of his jaw and basically destroyed most of his teeth. And the medic who sent him off said, you know, when I sent you off in that ambulance to Saros, I never thought that you would live, but he did. He underwent multiple, um, operations to the back of his throat, essentially without anesthesia. There is no way at the time to essentially back him. Um, a very tough man, but also, uh, A sensitive soul. So when, when Kemp returned to, to England, you know, this is, this is 1938, 39, obviously could, everyone can see the writing on the wall in Europe, but the war hasn't started, obviously, formally until Hitler invades Poland in September. Um, but, By then, it was not very popular, obviously, to a font for Franco in Spain for obvious reasons. But when the war broke out, what Peter wrote, I won't get this quote exactly right? was, my only hope, knowing the reality of conflict and what it meant to fight one, was that the skills that I had gained, Um, and faced so much opprobrium for at home would not be of, you know, uh, completely lost to my country. And so he was relegated to postal censorship, uh, and then ultimately found his way into a commando unit and then eventually into SOE. So how did, how did that happen where, where the leading the Spanish, there was a platoon that he was Yeah. He was an, he was an officer, uh, the Alfarez. How did that, he, that's how did that even happen? Like this guy and then he gets blown up. Part of his fingers are gone. He's on opioids and Well, yeah, he's, well, at that point there's actually, there's very little, um, there's not a lot of very good pain medication, um, you know, which led a lot of people at the time to I mean, alcohol as your only, essentially your only option. He went into one of those, those operations with a bottle of brandy that apparently he shared with the surgeon. Um, but he spoke no Spanish when he arrived. He

learned it, um, and obviously continued to speak fluent Spanish. He eventually worked his way up to officer. I think he, he would have said that this was one of those situations in which, um, the British, uh, you know, the British Then, then respect for the British class system kind of worked in his favor because it was very common at university and in the, the, the public high schools and public in the British sense, right? So fancy private school, um, to give certificates in what we would call like an ROTC equivalent. So they get kind of like a cadet certificate. So he had those and when he showed up and he kind of gave them over, it allowed him to, um, I think have a little bit of an easier leg in, but he essentially just had to kind of learn on his own. Wow, this guy, he's so, be honest, is he just like maybe a little bit Terminator? Did you find any sort of thing about, you know, the T 1000 or anything? What he survived, I think, that Peter had more in lives than a cat, would have been, been more, uh, he was, as you pointed out, uh, so he, he, he fights with Franco against, obviously, uh, both the Spanish Republic and, and with their, their Soviet backers in Spain. And when he was eventually dropped into occupying Albania, they're actually sent to a unit of, of communists. Um, and so here you have a man who's obviously brave enough to be sent to the men that he had been fighting against. One of the Albanians who was kind of right hand man to Enver Hoxha, who eventually became dictator of Albania until his death in the mid eighties. Um, Had fought in Spain on the other side. Right. Um, bizarre this guy. So he's after the war, he ends up running guns in Laos. He's over in Bali, Thailand. Do you think he just kind of thrived on chaos? Like, I think he had a very particular skill set. Um, and I think it always, so he left Cambridge and graduated from Cambridge just as, as the war in Spain was starting. This is always in 36. And then he went straight into the Second World War. He fought in Albania. He went to Poland. This is where he was uh, rounded up by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. They were supposed to be, you know, handing themselves over to allies as the, the Red Army moves, uh, moves westward, uh, and were promptly thrown into jail that had been taken over from the Gestapo two days before. Uh, fought in, um, then occupied, you know, Thailand just before the end of the war was, became military governor of Bali, as you'd pointed out. Um, by the time he was sent home from the war, it was 1946, he had spent 10 years fighting. And I think, um, All four of them, um, Peter Kemp, Julian Amery, David Smiley, and Billy McLean, uh, I think, unfortunately, got to see just kind of how quickly what, what looked like a war just against Hitler was really a war against totalitarianism more broadly, and they had, unfortunately, a front row seat, um, to the Soviet version of that, and he just never stopped, never stopped fighting, though Peter, um, um, Peter Kemp had a very unofficial role, um, in much of the Cold War that was always very deniable, I think it's fair to say. He had a role. Maybe, maybe not. Um, and then he, at the end, he was selling life insurance and writing books. And do you think that was kind of like some catharsis for him to finally sit down and be like, I'm going to write about everything. I think there was a wonderful habit amongst, I think, this generation more broadly, um, of publishing memoirs and making sure that those stories got told. There was a richness to that in Britain after the war. Um, and several of them had published memoirs, which was obviously selfishly very helpful to me. Though what I found most interesting about, you know, Kemp in that particular instance. So, um, Obviously, there's, there are things that you can't say, um, partially that's a British libel law, um, issue and also partially these are, um, uh, operational security issues, but the little Breadcrumbs that he left, um. You know, so Peter Kemp, for example, was in Budapest in, in 1956 during, you know, the rising against the Soviets, it was brutally repressed. And, um, he was nominally there working as a journalist, um, but did kind of leave these clues in his memoir of, he never filed those stories because, you They never got published, but somehow someone was paying for the gas, for the car that he used to evacuate these, um, three, you know, student dissidents who'd been, you know, fighting the secret police. So, breadcrumbs. You just We'll piece it together. eventually, Yeah. All right. So I wanted to ask you next about, uh, David Smiley. This guy, these guys are all similar in a way, but this guy had his own kind of slick, like, feels like he could parachute into Albania playing the violin in a tuxedo. I don't know. And he like owned a private jet at one point. I mean, and this guy. This guy was like James Bond, okay? And, uh, he, he came from a military family where his father had fought in World War I and his grandfather was also a soldier. Do you think that that influenced the kind of man that he became? for certain. So David Smiley was, you know, came, it was absolutely like the soldier, soldier, soldier. So, uh, just like really kind of the best at it. Um, and, and did all sorts of incredibly dangerous things, including, you know, he was, he was their demolitions expert, you know, shaping their own, you know, charges to blow bridges, like it's the guns of Navarone. At the rank of major. Um, uh, but, and he also, there are some stories that I wasn't able to expand upon enough. You know, he would go undercover in German uniform to do reconnaissance while they were in Albania, uh, and got into some pretty hairy situations. He was from, A very, um, very well regarded and aristocratic British family. Um, he did indeed, uh, have his pilot's license, which came in handy in Thailand later in the war. Um, And he was part of a very, um, storied cavalry regiment. Uh, you know, the,

um, The Royal Horse Guards, known as the Blues, like if you've ever seen any formal, uh, British processions down the mall with the, you know, those, those very shiny boots and the hats, you know, that, that is that unit. They also happen to be extremely serious soldiers and he really took to, to war like a fish to water. He was incredibly impressive. And he did ride behind the queen during her And the coronation Yes. procession. Which, you know, for me, maybe that would even be more nerve wracking than going to war. You're like, everybody's looking at you! You have to be Uh, he was once punished. So he and, and Billy McLean were slightly older, and so they had both taken up their commissions before the war had started. They'd both been to Sandhurst. And, um, he was once severely admonished because he had, his stirrups had been too long in a procession on the mall and he had lost his stirrup. And, um, but, but yes, I, I noticed when I was, um, Um, his, his son, uh, Zan very kindly let me, you know, come to his house and go through David's papers that he had saved and, um, and, um, David Smiley was very good at keeping all of his records in order and whatnot, but I did notice that, you know, there, there's the Albania section and everything else about, uh, World War II and his service after the war and, and, you know, and Oman and Yemen and whatnot, but there was a very large section on the coronation. This is a very, you, you, you really, you. Queen and country was incredibly important. And at that point, everyone is, you're, you're kind of on a stage yourself. And you kind of, like you were saying, the stirrups and, you know, you have to. Whereas like his, you know, bread and butter is like blowing up this bridge. Um, so. There was, uh, one, one other question I had about him was that there was speculation that, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, that the main character was based off of maybe subconsciously based off of David Uh, of, of George Smiley. of the name. Um, I do know my understanding, um, from, uh, David Smiley's biographer was that I guess he had written to Leque at one point, you know, asking, you know, because it's also the same spelling, um, Smiley with an E. Um, and I think? he'd written at one point to, to inquire, you know, if there was some link here because he, he rose quite high in the British military and, you know, became, you know, uh, you just, you would have seen that name kind of printed and whatnot. But, um, I think Le Carré said that he, he honestly didn't remember, um, and that he thought he might have gotten off of a school list or whatnot. I mean, I had always kind of thought. Subconsciously, um, I mean, George Smiley is a very different character. It seemed to me that both David Smiley, um, and Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming's older brother, you know, were both excellent models, quite frankly, as you pointed out for, for James Bond. Um, though, though David Smiley, I would, I would like to point out was a true gentleman. Unlike James Bond, Unlike James Bond, yeah, definitely. So, okay, so, the next, the next major character is, uh, McLean. So, Billy McLean. So, he was another one, like you're saying, He's plucked out of a spy novel. This guy was larger than life. This, he's in Albania, Yemen, China, just, uh, he was a secret soldier like the other guys. And I, I kind of was curious some of the things that we'll kind of get into in a minute here. Do you think that he was an idealist or was it just something he was really good I think it may have been both. I mean, I think it's certainly true to say that Billy McLean had an honest to goodness international rolodex of not just contacts, but friends that would have put foreign ministries and the State Department to shame. Uh, so he was, you know, kind of, again, born of a very well regarded, you know, Scottish, you know, family. Um, he was an officer in the Royal Scots Greys, had also gone to Sandhurst. You could also very much, you know, took to war like a fish to water. Um, he and David Smiley had actually met on a troop ship, um, early in the war when they were trying to join the, of all things, the Somaliland Camel Corps. Uh, because they'd been sent to the Middle East. Um, and, you know, they, they were, honestly, they felt like they weren't getting enough of the war quite yet. And so they were trying to, to transfer over. But it, that one didn't quite work out. Um, David Smiley ended up in a commando unit and Billy McLean ended up, uh, uh, fighting with the rather infamous Ord Wingate, then a major, um, in what was then called Abyssinia, Ethiopia. Um, and it was almost instantly obvious that he was one of those born guerrilla leaders. He could pick up language, enough of a language rather quickly, very good at relating to other people, was very good at kind of, you know, being able to draw an army to himself, which he did repeatedly in Albania, they had one of the I thought one of the stranger more interesting moments of the second World War, uh, when we think about how global it is, uh, they managed to, to form almost a company size unit of, uh deserters from then, the Germans, who were called the Turkestan Legion, um, these were Central Asian men who had been essentially conscripted by the Soviet Union, obviously, which is always occupying countries that are now, you know, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, et cetera. Um, they had been captured at the Battle of Kharkov, now Kharkiv, in Ukraine, um, in 1942, I want to say. Um, and, uh, Whether they were captured or whether they had got tired of being used as, as cannon fodder and had, uh, removed themselves from their officers as an open question. Um, but then they decided they no longer liked the way they were treated by the Germans. Um, and one, one group that came over thought to provide useful evidence of how they had handled this by a green ef in which they were six years. So they went over to Billy McLean who was leading this unit in Albania. Um, and

they used them to, um a fight against the Germans and some, uh, very interesting paramilitary operations towards the ends of their time there in 1944. He was sent to What we now call Shenzhen, Xinjiang was the pronunciation at the time, which is the part of China, uh, Western China where the Uyghurs live. Um, and so he spent 1945 and 46 there making friends and being in interesting places. And He had friends across, across the Middle East, um, and himself was also involved in some interesting things interesting moments of the Cold War period, including in Yemen, who really could, it was a really, really tremendous, uh, talent that kind of the end of the generation of, um, as Julian Amery, um, who went to Eaton, um, with Billy, uh, or they overlap very briefly, um, called a Beausébure, uh, the beautiful swordsman. Okay. So the fact that he could, he was doing all of that. And now also there was early ish in the war, maybe mid war, 1943. You have him in Albania and he's supposed to get, Okay. It's kind of an odd mission, like, get the communists and the anti communists to work together and form this kind of cohesive unit to fight the Nazis. And then he left for a little bit of time, was evacuated, and then he came back, and shocker, surprise, surprise, they didn't get along. And Britain had to choose one side, the communists or the anti communists, and they chose the communists. Why do you think that was? Was it just there was more manpower or was one of these obviously tremendously complicated situations, even more complicated by the fact that when the first two to go into occupied Albania are Billy McLean and David Smiley with a small group of a couple of other officers, these NCOs, who are absolutely crucial at paramilitary experts, radio operators. They have to walk in from occupied Greece because they have no intelligence on the ground. They have no reception committee because it's been busted by, you know, kind of the Italian and then eventually the German invasion of the Balkans more broadly. So the, the instructions going in, um, as a brigadier who was eventually sent in was say it was, it sounded deceptively simple, you know, arm anyone who will fight the Germans because the purpose is to tie down as many German units in the Balkans as you can. Because at this point in the war, uh, The Soviets have survived Stalingrad, Hitler's given up his whole army here and they're starting to move west. And so what, what the allies don't want to do is have all these thought was at the time there's about, you know, nearly 30 divisions, 26 divisions in the Balkans broadly, not they won't all fit in Albania to be clear. Um, and you're trying to pin them down so that they can't go north and, and become more useful to Hitler's war effort. Um, that said, and what they find in Albania is. Uh, not the Second World War, but multiple Second World Wars. There are essentially a series of civil wars going on between, uh, the communists, as you mentioned. Um, a, a

royalist unit called Zoggists, who are supporters of the kind of self made King Zog, um, who are very anti communist, and another group of anti communists who are Republican nationalists, who don't want the communists. But also don't want King Zog, so there are all three of them. Um, so it's a, it's a very complicated situation. And I think the ultimate ally choice to go with the communists is for a variety of reasons. One, that choice had already been made in Yugoslavia and obviously Yugoslavia is far larger. Um, the kind of the, the greater, the greater moon of Balkan communism. Um, but there was a complicating factor, um, you know, in addition to. the choices that were made, which was that there was a Soviet mole in their staff office, um, who hadn't, hadn't ultimately had relationships with the, the other men, eventually known as the Cambridge Five, which Kim Philby is probably most famous, um, who, who really felt that it was his, his, entire purpose was to execute exactly what you're talking about to, to shift, um, Allied support to the communists, not necessarily for the purpose of the war itself, but for the post war. And so there were, there were more of them. Um, they, um, there were some other intentional military and political choices, but there was also this compounding factor of, uh, called James Klugman. Yeah. And you go into that a little bit in the book and I'm going to give away any spoilers. So, but, um, for anybody interested in that, that the book does cover that. Um, so on that note, several years later, um, in the 1950s, maybe a decade later, he's, uh, Billy McLean is now in Parliament. He's elected as a member of Parliament, and he does this whole thing where he convinces the British government not to ally with the Communist Party in the Northern Yemen territory. And he said that that was like his greatest accomplishment. And why was that, of all things, the biggest accomplishment, do you Yeah, so this is, this is the 60s at this point, uh, and I mean, you kind of think, it's, it's the 60s. Um, so Yemen, um, and what is just south of Yemen, right, so we're, we're now on the Western kind of corner, obviously of the, uh, Arabian peninsula, which again, so many places that Billy was, um, specifically remain in the news today for a whole variety of reasons. Um, but Yemen was a complicated place, um, that is obviously crucial to international shipping, uh, even with India being independent, the role of the Suez Canal is, remains crucial in, in global shipping. Uh, Yemen was rather strange because it was, it was then called the Yemen, um, legally in the formal names. That's what you'll see in the book. Um, there were what were called royalists, um, who were, uh, being challenged by essentially communist groups who are trying to take over, uh, it was part of a, uh, kind of an almost imperial project on the part of the ruler of Egypt at the time, Nasser. Right. Uh, who is obviously allied with the Soviets in a strange moment. This

is again, one of these strange moments in which, uh, the Americans are, are partially involved actually on the Egyptians sign because there's, you know, there's, uh, obviously tensions between, you know, um, royalists aren't for a variety of reasons, our favorite. Um, but there's also some kind of misunderstanding that this isn't really kind of the popular uprising that you think it is. Uh, and it was a, it's a kind of a, a crucial part of the world and I think Billy's, uh, Billy McLean's point that, uh, knowing exactly who you're dealing with is the important thing here rather than kind of following what is the more fashionable tide. So I think that's, uh, what he was going for with that. Okay, so I did want to make sure we talk about Julian Amery a little bit more, uh, before we go here. So he was another one of the four main characters in the book. Um, and he was, he came from this long line of, you know, impressive military heritage, so to speak, where his father was the secretary of state for India, Burma, the colonies, and he was the first lord of the Admiralty, which for Americans, he basically was in charge of the British Navy for a while. Um, and, uh, after the war, Amery himself became a member of parliament and his stepfather was like the prime minister at one point of the UK. So he's kind of born into this thing and do you ever think he just wanted to just run a coffee shop instead or just was born to it. Um, Yeah. Julian Amery is a younger son of, of Leo Amery, um, who, uh, was an incredibly impressive, as you pointed out, uh, you know, statesman in his own right, though really, uh, not from a long lineage of it, you know, um, Leo Amery really could, was very self made in and of himself. But, um, Julian Amery, his son, was a true intellectual, I would argue, and just a natural born politician of a different era, right? More of a natural statesman, I think, than we would say kind of a politician the way that we talk about politicians today. So kind of very interested in, um, in policy and in, you know, Britain's place in the world from a very early age, he eventually became a conservative MP, though his, his hero growing up was, was David Lloyd George, the liberal radical, actually. And so, uh, he, he was probably the most thought out in, in very technical, sophisticated political terms, you know, of, of the four of them and, um, was essentially their intelligence officer in Albania, uh, became, becomes a conservative MP eventually after the war. His, his wife was one of, one of the children of Harold Macmillan, who eventually became the prime minister. Uh, and Julian Amery after the war had a long and, and rather illustrious career in British politics, you know, like the formal version, kind of alongside Billy McLean, who had his very informal version. Uh, he never rose in, um, official position. Excuse me, to the same level as his father, though, um, his, his father in law once said, uh, you know, Julian Amery eventually did not become, uh, the foreign minister. He said, I wouldn't worry about Julian Julian has his own foreign office. Oh, interesting. That's intriguing. Um, yeah. So no coffee shop. He did. He was just like born and this is what he wanted to do. And he seemed very good at it. So it, it, he ended up retiring and it's, but he's after all of this and coming from the family that he came from and fighting in the war. And it's really hard to imagine him retired, just sitting in his backyard, cutting roses or something. How do you, I don't think that he wrote a lot of books or anything like the others. How do you think he handled I think he was just very busy and involved to the end. I think, uh. One of the things I found most interesting, uh, about him was from a very young age, he understood where, where, was most valuable to learn. Um, and so actually very early on in the war when he was essentially posted to, to Belgrade, um, and then later to Cairo essentially as an intelligence officer. Um, he realized that one of the most valuable things to do is to learn from actually older retired men who may no longer have an official position and they will be a little bit more candid with you. And he would just listen. Um, you know, he, he, like Billy McLean, had, had real relationships, not just contacts. And I, um, I don't know that those people ever really retired. Yeah. That's kind of the, kind of the thing I was thinking, like, I don't think that he just sat there and that was the end of it, you know? Um, I wanted to ask you, is there any book that you have in the future that we can I do. So actually I have a book coming out, um, in, uh, it comes out in late February in the UK and, uh, it is technically an April release. So I'm told it ships in March 15th in North America. It is called To Die With Such Men. Um, and it is actually about, I would argue, the successors of these men. It follows a unit of International Legion soldiers who volunteered to fight in Ukraine. To fight, arguably, the same totalitarian fight that Peter Kemp, David Smiley, Billy McLean, and Julian Amery did. It is a Black Hawk Down style account of one, one unit fighting in Ukraine. So if that's of interest of you, to you rather, um, Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about the book. Um, I would love to read that book and maybe have you back on in the future if you're available. So yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. so much.