From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Michig controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Nope, we several of us have been to the UK, right, correct? Have we all been? I have when I was very, very little, but I don't really recall it intermally. Okay, and Paul thumbs up, thumbs down. Have you been to London? He has not. Okay, Paul. We will go on an adventure soon, assuming we can get into the country after today's episode, which is kind of a question that we have to confront often. I had a I think we'll be fine as we what we will find out a little bit later. Yes, about the differences in m I hopefully, yes, Hopefully we will be fine. You know, if the Epstein episode didn't didn't finish us, hopefully this this one will be fine. So we have a lot of listeners in the United Kingdom. A lot of your fellow listeners as you are checking out the show today are located um often in the Anglo sphere where people speak English, right, But but there are listeners around the world. We just got an email from a guy in Uganda actually, which is very interesting. He was not a fan of the above majestic interview. By the way, you can check out our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy to see our response to this sort of stuff. But this this is a episode that will center on the Unite a Kingdom. If you're thinking to yourself, Matt Noel Ben Michion Control, why should I care about this? Why does it matter to me? I don't want to go to uh foggy London town and this is irrelevant. Well, let's just say before you get into your point, remember all the connections we've made between intelligence agencies across the world, especially those that speak English, right right, So this matters to you. If you can understand the language in which we are conducting this podcast, then this matters very much more so than you might assume. Like most countries, the United Kingdom has its own variety of intelligence services, and most people outside of the UK we're familiar with their intelligence operations through one very important portrayal in fiction, James Bond. Yes, right, yes, perfect Agent Double O seven himself. I mean, I I can't even I should have looked this up before we hopped in the booth here. I don't even remember how many James Bond films exist. I'm gonna have a shot in the dark and say twelve. That sounds like the title for James Bond film. It's not. It's more than five, Paul is nineteen, Paul says, I mean, that's amazing, and it also shows like, of course we would be most familiar with intelligence agencies through this James Bond thing. There's also an interesting study you can find if you just google it about James Bond's drinking habit. Somebody went through all the books and they counted every time he had a drink, and I'm like, well, this guy is clearly wasted the entire time, and he probably has a surotic liver. Have you ever had a Vesper martini? That's James Bond's martini of choice. Yeah, there's a there's there are a couple of great Vesper places here in town, not really really good it's like a lemon twist, and it uses lil a instead of vermouth, I believe, which is like a kind of dry white wine, A pair of teeth kind of thing, very citrusy, very refreshed. I have no idea most of the words that you just said, A pair of teeth, the brand, it's it's it's good, it's good. We've We also have a huge advocate for vespers in the form of our pal Josh Clark. He's a he's a vesper guy. Now nice. I don't know why I said it like that changes his that shakes his moral character to the core. I see a lot of people riding around on the vespers. Uh. That's cute, Matt, all right, big goof. But today we are taking a look behind the curtain, past the sexy James Bond portrayals. Right, today, we're looking at the real life inspiration for countless by thrillers. Aiming to answer a disturbing question. Let's just get it out of the way now. Is m I five a criminal organization? Oh? That's that's heavy. It's a good way to frame this discussion. It really absolutely is to get some clicks, right, It's it's a it's a big question. We're going to drill down into it. As they say in corporate speak, let's start drilling, let's get granulars. So what what is m I five? Well, am, I is the most important thing you need to know here, and that's military intelligences. Impossible. I wish that it was. I thought it was martian intuition. In this case, it is military intelligence. Specifically. That number afterwards is the section number, so Section five, and it's founded in nineteen o nine, and it wasn't called this at all times. It started out as just something that was called the Secret Service Bureau, because what better way to keep a secret than have the words secret in the title? That's right, I mean in that that secret Service in nineteen o nine, you can see it harken back then to the United States our own Secret Service, and it will. What we'll find is that they do very different things, and that's why you kind of have sections for all these different secret services that you have. In this case, m I five is directed by the Joint Intelligence Committee or j I C. And this service itself is bound by this thing that was created in nineteen eighty nine called the Security Service Acts. Right, the what we mean when we say bound is that the Security Service Act, essentially, I should say, ostensibly lays the groundwork for what m I five is supposed to do, how it does it, what it can do basically right right, right right, and what does it do The service is supposed to, Well, it's directed to we should say, protect British parliamentary democracy and Britain's economic interests and a counter terrorism and has been within the UK so counter intelligence. M I five was founded by Captain Vernon Kell. It's a very distinguished sounding name. Uh. The organization played a central role in the capture of most of Imperial Germany's intelligence agents in the UK at the beginning of World War One. It's a big deal. Um, m I five is not the same thing. It's important to note as m I six and MY five is the British Security Service, while am I six is the British Foreign Intelligence Service. So, Ben, how how should we how should we think about this? Yeah? I think of it as being similar in a way for our American listeners to the relationship between the FBI and the CIA just always kind of flum maxed me a little bit. If I'm being honest, I think it always flum makes the FBI and CIA themselves because they certainly overstep into one another encroach well and often, I mean when the CIA is dealing drugs and the FBI has to deal with it, things get messy. Whatever, It's true. Ultimately it's dealing with inward facing an outward facing counterintelligence and intelligence, right, perfect, Yeah, that's the perfect way to say it. Essentially, m I six is tasked to send British spies abroad and m I five is there to catch spies from other countries. So there that makes sense, right, and there are multiple military intelligence services. I really like they hit on this note because we need a lot of people have kind of this Hinz fifty seven problem. When we talked about m I five and m I six. You know, were you ever a kid looking at Hines fifty seven and wondering where the hell are the other fifty six? Yeah? I want to try some of those, at least catchups. It doesn't have to do with how any spices or in it or something. I don't know. I assumed it was like Baskin Robbins or they've got the flavors and they always exceeded their flavor. We should we should probably ask Lauren vogelbaumb or Annie Reese, there's a plug for savers the good side showing lifestyle. But yeah, So it turns out it was an historical advertising about the fifty seven different varieties of sikulls pickles. O, how do you have fifty seven different I guess you can pickle anything, right. So, so in the case of these multiple military intelligence services in the UK, we find that they go all the way up to m I nineteen and many have come and gone since the creation of the first military intelligence service m I one, which was created sometime during World War One, and they mainly focused on cryptography, code breaking, counter intelligence stuff, you know what I mean. So they were figuring out what Imperial Germany was up to, and as we mentioned, they were quite successful with some of this stuff, and over time various sections folded where they merged or they changed their area of focus. In these sections, m I one through nineteen ran ran all sorts of different I don't want to say hustles, but different process disease. Their activities included stuff like specialized geographical analysis. You know, we have a desk that just looks at Russia for instance, or one that just looks at South America, and then they would have things like map making, aerial photography. They would also have things that we would normally find objectionable in Western governments today, such as three different active propaganda and censorship bureaus. And they were they were blatant about it. That's what it's said on their label. But you know, a lot of that stuff spawned out of World War Two, when the propaganda had to be strong on all fronts, and including with that was m MY nineteen that you already mentioned, and that was the bureau specifically, or the I guess section specifically designed to interrogate prisoners of war during World War Two, which is kind of scary. That's it's like the Black Site section. And it's also it's interesting because the organization feels a little bit different in comparison too. Intelligence agencies in the US, like the CIA, handles a ton of this stuff with its own different subsections, you know what I mean. So what does m I five do. We've we've looked at just the broad I don't know the broad strokes of this, but when we ask what it actually does on the ground, we run and this is one of those million dollars or million pounds questions. Officially, m I five does what it says on the website, right, Yeah, it catches spies, that's what it does. It intercepts communications, it finds people, it conducts classified counter intelligence. I mean, come on, that's m I five for you. And um, what it does is it keeps the bear from the door, that whatever, whatever scary animal. Yeah, the coyotes can't get in because of us. Yeah, that's the I like that Cold War reference, right, because the UK had to reorganize a lot of their stuff and evolve their sophistication when the KGB came out guns blazing in the Cold War. Is interesting though, because to this day, many of these operations in my five operations remain classified. Yeah. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean a lot. It seems like in our country some of that stuff kind of eventually over time, when it ceases to be important for security, we get to get a little glimpse into, you know, some of the past covert operations, right, a little some of them. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're absolutely correct. One thing that's one thing that's tough for the British public is that without information about a lot of these operations, many of which were fairly recent in the nineteen eighties and stuff. Without that information, it's tough to gauge how successful or unsuccessful this organization is because if they're doing everything right, you never hear about them. You know, you only hear about them when something goes pear shaped, which I believe of his British slang, or something goes really right and another person leaks information right. And that's how we do know of some intelligence failures. For instance, one of m I five officers, a guy named Michael Bettany, was caught trying to sell information to the KGB and he got caught. He got convicted of espionage. The big question is what did he did? He successfully sell SUF some stuff beforehand? Yeah, did he get away with it before he got caught? And was he the only guy selling information? I certainly doubt it. YEA, probably not. And you know, these organizations you have to continually justify your the reason that you're getting so much money from the public, I guess tax dollars and all of that with any intelligence community or organization. And as a Cold War came to an end and they switched gears again because there were terrorist threats coming from Northern Ireland UH states such as Libya where Colonel Gaddafi was operating, and that was a threat, at least at the time it perceived threat. These were some of the major threats at least according to the m I five for a little while there. And then you know, like we said, the Cold War is coming to an end. Now we're in the nineties, and there were some major reforms went into place, and the service actually around this time gained its first female Director General, Yeah, Dame Stella Remington, who held the position from two to nineteen nineties six. And then the rise of Islamis terrorism at the end of the nineties, culminating in the nine eleven attacks in two thousand one, lad to massive changes in the way m I five operated. Yeah. Absolutely, And look, folks, it's no secret the counter intelligence is a murky murky business. Operations often edge in de morally and legally gray areas. Over the course of its existence, like many other intelligence agencies, m I five has conducted numerous secret operations, often without any look oversight, and often even without governmental oversight. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and many people would say that is the way it should be. Sure, Sure, sometimes even people who don't work for m I five, mostly people who work for m I five probaly say that. But yeah, I see the point about compartmentalized information, right, there's there's a need to have that sort of operational security. But critics don't buy this. Critics alleged that m I five is much more than a counter intelligence agency. In fact, they argue, while m I five functions as a spy service, it also effectively functions as a criminal empire. Whoa yeah, like hydro level, Well, what the hell are we talking about? Will tell you after a word from our sponsor, Here's where it gets crazy. While the m I five might not be a criminal organization at least to its parent government, ye old, let's just call it, what do we call it, the Parliamentary United Kingdom in their government and you know, perhaps the Queen and all of her subjects, um, but it certainly functions as a criminal organization at least at times. Uh, you know, and we're not again, we're not just throwing throwing a ninja stars? Is that okay to say we're not just throwing ninja stars at at Britain. We've seen this occur, as we said earlier, with many other intelligence services within many other countries. But it does function as a criminal organization sometimes. And we know this. This isn't a theory, This isn't some to boil Internet bloggery. Here. It turns out that in two thousand eighteen, declassified documents showed that the government of the United Kingdom allows m I fives agents and informants to carry out crime within the UK UH without consequence. They've been allowed to do this for at least thirty years. Seriously, it's a it's a license to kill, it's a license to torture, pillage. Did you just say a license to kill? Yes, I mean, come on, man, that's great. I can't believe I didn't think of that. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, I mean that. But really, the bit we did was awesome. But the fact that they can just go murder people is not cool. And and and as it turns out, which was a bummer to me or to my kid's self, they don't actually have a license. They can flash before they kill someone, letting them know that it's legit. It's more of an expression. Maybe we should just manufacture our own, not to use, but just to have just on a T shirt. Maybe we like, how would you feel if you stole someone's wallet and you're going through the wallet and you found like three different fake forms of identification right all the same phase, three different names, three different profiles, and then you saw like this mysterious license to kill? What would you do with that wallet? I would put it right back down, wipe. I'd first, I'd wipe my prints from it. There you go right back down on the ground. Clever, clever, alright, well, I know what you guys are getting for the holidays. You'd also have to check local security cameras in any CCTV that's around to make sure to destroy those tapes. And you probably want to drop your phone too, because that GPS record would be there. You know what were We might be taking this thought experiment a little too far right now, If you do have a license to kill, and you can tell us about it without killing us, we would love to hear your experiences. We will do our best to keep you anonymous. Just put it out there. What I guess You're right, No, it's as we'll see. They kind of did have not not a badge. They could wave around, but they did have documented proof that the government at all levels that were aware of it, approved of this. It was called a secret and concealed policy. This would allow the security service to authorize participation in murder, torture, sexual assault, or other grave criminality if just a few folks believed it was in the in the service of the greater good in the public interest. Uh, that is so creepy and discussing, and I wonder how many other intelligence organizations have an active policy like that, a secret and concealed policy. Okay, so this this was basically a criminal authorization, just literally that you can do crime and it's okay. But it's like a further greater good clause, right right, that's the implication here. Yeah. But yes, but this is something that has been around for thirty years and it was only first acknowledged in a British court when an alliance of human rights groups argued that it was unlawful to have this kind of policy, like maybe not, let's not do this, and it was completely secret like they were practicing omerta until two thousand and twelve, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to Sir Mark Waller, the Intelligence Service Commissioner at the time, asking him to keep the policy under review, which is, we've got a quote, it's very British in the way it's written, but we'll give it a shot. I'm gonna do a British accent. Let's see, in the discharge of their function to protect national security, the Security Services longstanding policy for the agent handless to agree to agents participating in crime in circumstances where it is considered such involvement is necessary and proportionate in providing on maintaining access to intelligence that will allow the disruption of most serious crimes or threats to national security. Oh wow, that was great. Firing like that. It sounds nice, but it sounds like he's describing marzipan. It sounds like he's reading like a Winnie the Poosh story or something. You know, it's totally um. It's a clause for undercover agents, right, that's all. That's what that is. Well, I mean that part is. But yeah, it's saying like, if you have an informant who is operating maybe in something like gun running or human trafficking circles, and you need to keep them embedded. Question in the States, you see it in the movies. I'm just one. Want to see what you guys think about this. Whenever an undercover agent is offered drugs, they they go to whatever lengths they can to not actually do the drugs. If they're like, you know, you know, like to prove you're not a cop, do the drugs or whatever, it's like, oops, oops, I dropped the drugs. You know. No, I'm wondering, like, do you think we have It does seem like it's not it's frowned upon for undercover cops to like get deep and start like doing drugs. It sounds like there's a order, there's a there's a boundary we that we would prefer not to cross. They probably would have avoid it, but it comes in. It comes into that idea the greater good right accomplishing the sting or the operation. So I am sure there are people who have, maybe in the d A or something, been forced to do cocaine or something like that, But I don't I don't know if there's a strict, a strict bright line policy wise. I don't think there can be. I think because all of its circumstantial, right, especially when you're dealing with this, if this is full on national security for the past thirty years. I can't even imagine the some of the terrible things that some of these agents have had to do, Like you're saying, in the human trafficking fields and drug fields and we're murder like in murder in order to then get a bigger fish essentially down the line. And you also have to wonder, Okay, let's put ourselves in that hypothetical position. Let's say Paul mission controlled decond is a big time like Narco's level Colombian drug cartel leader. Right, I can see it, and we're we're up and comers, We're gonna be lieutenants, and he's like, do this, uh, do this cocaine in front of me? It's cocaine, and we would we would look very suspicious if we just fumbled, just dropped it, because I don't know. I don't know a ton about um about that drug, but I do know about the general trends of addiction and people who are into that kind of stuff. Don't just drop it. Yeah, in that case, I think the fumble move would be to accidentally drop it on one of the guys that you know is not an undercover agent, so that it's oh well, we didn't waste it. It just it's all over that guy. Now, I don't know, man, I think you have to do it. If you're at that point, it's like that. It's it can't be like that scene in that Woody Allen movie where he sneezes the cocaine off the dish or whatever, and it's basically like a party foul. It's more like you're gonna get shot in the face foul. Yeah. But then if you're talking about the bigger operations, where you're actually out in the field doing things other than drugs, the actual criminal acts, that's where it gets a little, um, I don't know, it gets murky for me right right right, Like if you are embedded as an enforcer and you're sent to beat the crap out of someone, you know what I mean. And I'm sure there have been in the past undercover agents who have to performatively beat the snot out of one another just to make make sure they look like they're legit. So, yes, the informant stuff that that's part of it, and that doesn't seem that far out. But when Cameron is writing this letter to Sir Mark Waller, he essentially says, look, We're not going to ask you to tell us whether like, we don't want you to feel as if you have to report it to anybody if you get what I'm saying, anyone, and and you don't have to worry about whether or not it's legal at all. That's just crazy, man. Is that one of those things where it sort of exists in like an extra legal area, right, Yeah. And most people in the government had no idea what was happening, you know what I mean. I think most people in Parliament at that time would have said, you know, we should we should not give people these licensees for wanton destruction. Cameron to be fair, We're gonna try to be fair here, said he had considered making the letter public in uh in the interest of transparency, but decided against it because he thought it might be damaging to the national interest also known as his political career. That's what I think. I think. I think he was saying damaging to the national interests, but he meant damaging to his political career. Kind of a typo, maybe a welly flippan. I can see that. I can see that, man, I mean, I can see where you become prime minister. You get with of something like this, and as a citizen, it gives you pause just knowing that it's happening, right, no matter where what your beliefs are in what you're holding that office. And it does seem like he kind of rode the fence there a little bit of should I shouldn't I tell anybody about this? This is really left up but in the in the in the let's keep national security in public interest in order, and let's just balance it out and say, let's just keep it quiet. Like, wasn't it the whole idea that he basically just um he said he told this guy not to comment on the legality. That was the whole idea. Yeah, so it's the policy is under review. Doing air quotes here, I hope you can hear them. The policies under review. However, what that essentially means is provide cover for us and don't like, Okay, look, sometimes you gotta you gotta break a few innocent eggs if you really want to cook a terrorism omlet you know what I mean. Shee. So that's yeah, that's exactly what happens that don't comment on the legality, don't refer it to any prosecuting body. Don't refer to law enforcement. Let's keep this between us. Let's let's have a greater good. So the argument was essentially that for most of history, most of modern British history, they have been following one of two paths as just a nation. That was the rule of law and then there were criminal acts. Right. But they called this strategy the third direction. Great boy band right? Right? Do you guys remember Glee? Do you remember their band? Uh? One direction? What was direction? Was a real band? What am I thinking of? Well, there was that U plus me equals us? New direction, New direction, New direction. It's a pun new direction. I say, yeah, very body like boys soul from always Stunning Philodelphia. But they called this thing, seriously, the third direction. Nobody acknowledged it until this year in a British court when that alliance of human rights groups that Matt mentioned earlier, um Privacy International. Who are the other ones? Yeah? Those guys over at p I. Then we've got reprieved the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the Pat Finnickan Center. According to the legal team representing this alliance, the third Direction policy is likely to have enabled the Security Service to conceal wide ranging illegal activity, and they brought this case before an investigatory powers tribunal. The trial included as a bonus a the publication of a heavily redacted document, a guideline essentially for how to break the law and get away with it. This is how you do it. And like a lot of government documents, you can find copies of this published in a couple of different um places in British media, but tons of like the entire paragraphs are blacked out. They're not going to admit this stuff, right because it's still the great boogeyman of national security. And you know, the timing of the letter was also really strange here because just two weeks after this highly redacted document gets released, it's made public. Mr Cameron, our buddy, admitted that there was this thing called state collusion in the murder of Belfast Solicitor Patrick Finniken and UM state state collusion, what does that mean? That means essentially the camera is arguing some faction of the intelligence apparatus or the state apparatus of the United Kingdom may have aided aided in this guy's death, or may have at the very least been criminally negligent and protecting them, right, that's the most fair way to say it. They get into some very very very dirty things when they were attempting to retain Northern Ireland, you know. And we'll tell you more about the trial after a word from our sponsor. So, according to Sir James E. D q C, that stands for Queen's Counsel. Those are the guys who have the wigs. The name for those wigs is peruke. That's so Perukea salt, what was the one? What was the one you did off air? Perukea is on fire? Peruke I learned more about the history of peruke. You can check out me and Ben's other podcast, Ridiculous History, where we do an episode about what the heck's up with those crazy British lawyer wigs, which is yeah, which is one of our first episodes. To be kind or be brutal, it's up to you. We just want you to know. That's a great word, and that's going to do it then, and it's going to do then. That's true. That's true. So this guy, Sir James dy q C, is representing the intelligence agencies, the Home Office in the Foreign Office, and he told this Investigatory Powers Tribunal that details of m I five's conduct had to be kept secret even in the modern day and could not be aired in open court. He argued that the claim should be restricted to investigating over a sensible time period, at most six years. Wow, six years to keep all your secrets right? Interesting? So what did the Alliance of Human Rights organizations say to that? So in their argument, the claimants site Finnikin's murder as an illustration of the considerable public importance of the issues raised. It also refers to allegations that Freddie SCA great name, It's pretty good, was a former senior member of the I r A and a security service agent working under the code name Oh my god, I love this Steak Knife s T a k E. That's a good DJ name right there, DJ steake Knife. How about that? Huh oh wow, that's great. Yeah, that's so skep a k A. Steak Knife was we have to say, allegedly still but was involved in kidnap, torture and murder while working as an agent employed by m I five. So the roundabout way, the United the government of the United Kingdom was paying this guy to kidnap torture and murder people for the greater good, for the greater good right. M I five has refused to answer the claimants questions about the scoop of this third direction policy, including whether it could I Prince will authorize murder, torture, in humane and degrading treatment, UH, sexual assault, kidnapping, or false imprisonment. The Security Services lawyers also said to answer such questions would reveal the facts of conduct that they wished to keep secret. So it's kind of like a trust us we're doing the right thing. We can't tell you what we're doing, and we can't tell you why. Other than that, not very convincing argument, No, not at all. And we also have other examples of some strange things that ended up coming to light, or at least things that maybe never wanted to see the light of day. There were some papers released by the Irish state that showed um that there was this loyalist paramilitary group, or at least members of one of these groups, specifically the Ultier Volunteer Force. They're a paramilitary group out of Northern Ireland. They claimed that m I five asked them to assassinate the then Prime Minister of Ireland Charles High in nineteen eighty five, and um, we went to this BBC source to learn a little bit more about this. But it's very I don't know, it's very strange because it was it was a letter just kind of your standard letter sent to somebody, like a correspondence, and it just happened to include a couple of documents and um, a couple literally guys who just said, hey, by the way, m I five asked us to kill you one time. We didn't do it, yeah, but but you know, you should know it's crazy. It was sent two years after the alleged I guess assassination or of the hit was put on him. I guess um. It contained a long long list of collusion allegations against the British Intelligence Service. So are various services that the British intelligence has um this guy. It was addressed to Mr Hahi and it read we were approached by an m I five officer. He asked us to execut you you and it said that these this paramilitary group had been supplied with quote details that would have compromised this guy's personal security, including aerial photographs of his family home, his cars, and his private yacht. So for uh an imperfect comparison. It's similar to say, the CIA um taking over Newfoundland and the people of Newfoundland wanting to make a united Canada, and so the CIA contacts someone in Canada and says, kill whomever is in charge of this unity group in Newfoundland or killed the kill the prime minister of Canada so we can keep our part. Yeah, And I guess they didn't imagine that the people who were not necessarily the friends of the British Intelligence Service would They wouldn't just say, oh, yeah, okay, sure boss. Well maybe they just said, you know, killing prime ministers step too far. I guess that's what I'm saying. Yeah, like they didn't expect that to occur. That seems very strange to me. In two thousand ten, Benyam Mohammed al Abshi went to court to hold m I five accountable for collusion in his torture at the hands of Uncle Sam. And then there's the example of Shakiramir who said m I five watched him being tortured in two thousand and one that was really brutal too. Yeah. The guy he was in guantanamobile, right, and he he said, like several times British officers would be in the room while he's being beaten, just brutally beaten, his head slammed against the wall. Yeah, pretty pretty crazy stuff. It's truly disturbing because now with all this new information, this um admission on the part of the British government that that these sorts of things occur, many of those previous allegations of criminal activity on the part of m I five that were once dismissed as out and out conspiracy theory seem increasingly maybe not plausible, maybe well, maybe not probable, but certainly less impossible. They've been implicated in the murder of anti nuclear activists Hilda Worl. They've been accused of creating a far right neo Nazi group, Combat eighteen. Their profile peaked in February when they orchestrated a riot in Dublin that led to a cancelation of a football match between England and Ireland. One theory suggests that British intelligence wanted to create a magnet for the most extreme parts of these political parties. One member who was convicted of murder in nine guy named Charlie Sargent, has been accused of being an m I five informant with some pretty solid evidence, and then we did the death of Commander Buster Crab and a previous episodes a Crab where he never surfaced, and it seems that maybe someone on the inside was responsible. Weren't They're frogmen involved in that story? Yes, yeah, what about cra men? They never made it to Crab, mainly because the difficulty of making forward backward motion. That's hard, yeah, scuttling, scuttling. So Bett, you mentioned Colonel Muamar Gaddafi earlier as well, right, oh, yeah, And in ninety six, there was a bomb that was placed under a car that was I guess thought to be the vehicle that Gaddafi was going to be traveling in in his motorcade, but uh, well he wasn't in that vehicle. The car did explode, the bomb did explode, and several bodyguards were killed. There was an ensuing gun battle that killed several people, and there were even um there would be assassins, you know, the people that planted the bomb and everything. They had links style Quaeda, and it's thought that maybe maybe m I five had a little bit of a hand. Inness, right, the head of the Libyan desk for m I five at the time was a guy named David Shayler, and in seven he left the service, leaked this information at these accusations, these allegations to the press. He was forced to flee to France, and in he claimed that the plot to kill Gaddafi had been funded by m I six cooperation with m I five. There's you know, taking out ahead a leader like that of a country is no small deal. Well, and there's compelling it's night compelling evidence. There's proof that ultimately the French government was behind the assassination of Gaddafi to preserve financial hegemony because they wanted, you know Goodafi did many, many terrible things, but the thing France was most frightened of him doing was to create a continental African currency, a denoor. So mess with the money, right, That's what happens in the oil the new series Starry Matt Frederick's always money in the banana stand. So what does this all mean? This is, this is pretty strange because it's rare are for this kind of information to come out in such a blatant way. Break the law for the greater good. Most intelligence agencies, I would say, practice that, right. The problem is the goal post of that defines greater good is always moving who's good for whom exactly exactly, And at this point many of us listening to the show today will have a hard time being surprised. Some of us might even support this policy, you know what I mean. There are people who say that torture is a terrible thing, but ultimately it saves lives. We have an episode on why that is not true as well. Yeah, yeah, but but there are points to be made that if you it's not an easy task to stop the you know that, in your worldview, the worst people in the world from doing the worst things. That's not an easy task to prevent that from happening, and you do have to perhaps do some bad things. It's just I think in this case, it's that gray area of how bad is too bad for the thing for the good guys to do to prevent the bad guys. What's the idea that to like, counter to the bad guys, you gotta stoop to their level on some we gotta play by their rules otherwise you're gonna get stepped all over right in theory? Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a good point. Did they tell you, guys, we watched True Detective recently season two. Season one, thank god. Yeah, I have a friend that really says, revisit season two, give another chance. I I've heard that, I've heard that before, but I need to take a break. Season one was just so great. There's a quote that's not a spoiler, but this, this conversation reminds me of it. Um. The two main characters, Marty and Rust, are having a philosophical discussion about the nature of good and evil, and at some point the conversation, Marty says Marty asked if if they're good people, and Russ says, no, we're bad, but they need bad men like us to keep the others from the door. And that at a bear from the beginning of the show. Yeah, exactly or Jack Nicholson, right, not not as a not as a character, just him, he's keep I don't know. He's a creepy looking guy. I don't know. I wouldn't want him knock him. Yeah, I don't know well enough to remark on his door policy. I guess. I guess The big question is do we have to have the bad guys inside the door keeping the other bad guys from the door. Why can't we just build a giant wall and keep everybody out topical topical questions, so totally kidding him, totally. Well, it's a good question, though, because should m I five allow its agents and informants to break the law? Does it really does it really become a necessary evil on the way to achieving a greater good? Right? And if so, for who? What laws they break? How do we measure the success or the efficiency of something like this if it's conducted entirely in secret. What sort of oversight should the public and our government agencies have on this process? Because right now the answer is not, they have not. They have a letter from two thousand twelve that's like, don't send this to anybody. Basically, David Cameron sent a no snitching letter. That's exactly what happened, and that's where we are today, no snitching boys and girls. Snitches end up in stitches. Yeah, well, tell us what you think. Find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and let us know. Are these things necessary evils? Is allowing the collapse of the rule of law in one scenario really necessary to allow the enforcement of rule of law in another situation? Right? That's ultimately the question really is um And by the way, I was just gonna bring this up before we ended at the Tenderfoot holiday party thing that we were at the three of Us, I ran into a gentleman. Paul Dicken was there too, but we ran into a gentleman who truly truly believes and had a long discussion with me about it that the British government still controls the United States. Overheard that, and I didn't want to jump in he truly believed it. I should I talked to him. I know, well, I kind of. I didn't want to go any deeper than we already had in the conversation because it's one of those that doesn't really go anywhere. After you hit a certain wall. It's like, yeah, well, we can't prove anything, but that's an interesting idea. Did you tell me did an episode on it? I did. Did you tell him that he can contact us via a telephone call? We're just a phone call away. I did. I said call one eight three three. STD w t K brought the STD back for this one because it's not about awful things like the last one. Oh h. And I also also want to just in the interest of full transparency, I'm not at death's door, but I am in I am darn sure on like the sub basement of sickness right now. So that's why it's my voice sounds a little bad if you heard any any mucacy noises. Sorry, folks, that was me. Should be hale and hearty later. Are you down with the sickness? I'm always I'm always up to something. It's just extra deep. I like it. It's nice and gravelly. Thanks guys. Paul will surely snip out all the snot sounds. Thanks Paul. So yeah, let us let us know what you think and check in with your fellow listeners. We'd like to take this debate to the internet, and we mentioned earlier in the show, but you can find us at our Facebook site. Here's where it gets crazy. If you love all that but you don't want to do any of it, whatever your reasons, maybe we have some good news for you. You can write to us directly. We are conspiracy It How stuff Works dot com.

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Michig controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Nope, we several of us have been to the UK, right, correct? Have we all been? I have when I was very, very little, but I don't really recall it intermally. Okay, and Paul thumbs up, thumbs down. Have you been to London? He has not. Okay, Paul. We will go on an adventure soon, assuming we can get into the country after today's episode, which is kind of a question that we have to confront often. I had a I think we'll be fine as we what we will find out a little bit later. Yes, about the differences in m I hopefully, yes, Hopefully we will be fine. You know, if the Epstein episode didn't didn't finish us, hopefully this this one will be fine. So we have a lot of listeners in the United Kingdom. A lot of your fellow listeners as you are checking out the show today are located um often in the Anglo sphere where people speak English, right, But but there are listeners around the world. We just got an email from a guy in Uganda actually, which is very interesting. He was not a fan of the above majestic interview. By the way, you can check out our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy to see our response to this sort of stuff. But this this is a episode that will center on the Unite a Kingdom. If you're thinking to yourself, Matt Noel Ben Michion Control, why should I care about this? Why does it matter to me? I don't want to go to uh foggy London town and this is irrelevant. Well, let's just say before you get into your point, remember all the connections we've made between intelligence agencies across the world, especially those that speak English, right right, So this matters to you. If you can understand the language in which we are conducting this podcast, then this matters very much more so than you might assume. Like most countries, the United Kingdom has its own variety of intelligence services, and most people outside of the UK we're familiar with their intelligence operations through one very important portrayal in fiction, James Bond. Yes, right, yes, perfect Agent Double O seven himself. I mean, I I can't even I should have looked this up before we hopped in the booth here. I don't even remember how many James Bond films exist. I'm gonna have a shot in the dark and say twelve. That sounds like the title for James Bond film. It's not. It's more than five, Paul is nineteen, Paul says, I mean, that's amazing, and it also shows like, of course we would be most familiar with intelligence agencies through this James Bond thing. There's also an interesting study you can find if you just google it about James Bond's drinking habit. Somebody went through all the books and they counted every time he had a drink, and I'm like, well, this guy is clearly wasted the entire time, and he probably has a surotic liver. Have you ever had a Vesper martini? That's James Bond's martini of choice. Yeah, there's a there's there are a couple of great Vesper places here in town, not really really good it's like a lemon twist, and it uses lil a instead of vermouth, I believe, which is like a kind of dry white wine, A pair of teeth kind of thing, very citrusy, very refreshed. I have no idea most of the words that you just said, A pair of teeth, the brand, it's it's it's good, it's good. We've We also have a huge advocate for vespers in the form of our pal Josh Clark. He's a he's a vesper guy. Now nice. I don't know why I said it like that changes his that shakes his moral character to the core. I see a lot of people riding around on the vespers. Uh. That's cute, Matt, all right, big goof. But today we are taking a look behind the curtain, past the sexy James Bond portrayals. Right, today, we're looking at the real life inspiration for countless by thrillers. Aiming to answer a disturbing question. Let's just get it out of the way now. Is m I five a criminal organization? Oh? That's that's heavy. It's a good way to frame this discussion. It really absolutely is to get some clicks, right, It's it's a it's a big question. We're going to drill down into it. As they say in corporate speak, let's start drilling, let's get granulars. So what what is m I five? Well, am, I is the most important thing you need to know here, and that's military intelligences. Impossible. I wish that it was. I thought it was martian intuition. In this case, it is military intelligence. Specifically. That number afterwards is the section number, so Section five, and it's founded in nineteen o nine, and it wasn't called this at all times. It started out as just something that was called the Secret Service Bureau, because what better way to keep a secret than have the words secret in the title? That's right, I mean in that that secret Service in nineteen o nine, you can see it harken back then to the United States our own Secret Service, and it will. What we'll find is that they do very different things, and that's why you kind of have sections for all these different secret services that you have. In this case, m I five is directed by the Joint Intelligence Committee or j I C. And this service itself is bound by this thing that was created in nineteen eighty nine called the Security Service Acts. Right, the what we mean when we say bound is that the Security Service Act, essentially, I should say, ostensibly lays the groundwork for what m I five is supposed to do, how it does it, what it can do basically right right, right right, and what does it do The service is supposed to, Well, it's directed to we should say, protect British parliamentary democracy and Britain's economic interests and a counter terrorism and has been within the UK so counter intelligence. M I five was founded by Captain Vernon Kell. It's a very distinguished sounding name. Uh. The organization played a central role in the capture of most of Imperial Germany's intelligence agents in the UK at the beginning of World War One. It's a big deal. Um, m I five is not the same thing. It's important to note as m I six and MY five is the British Security Service, while am I six is the British Foreign Intelligence Service. So, Ben, how how should we how should we think about this? Yeah? I think of it as being similar in a way for our American listeners to the relationship between the FBI and the CIA just always kind of flum maxed me a little bit. If I'm being honest, I think it always flum makes the FBI and CIA themselves because they certainly overstep into one another encroach well and often, I mean when the CIA is dealing drugs and the FBI has to deal with it, things get messy. Whatever, It's true. Ultimately it's dealing with inward facing an outward facing counterintelligence and intelligence, right, perfect, Yeah, that's the perfect way to say it. Essentially, m I six is tasked to send British spies abroad and m I five is there to catch spies from other countries. So there that makes sense, right, and there are multiple military intelligence services. I really like they hit on this note because we need a lot of people have kind of this Hinz fifty seven problem. When we talked about m I five and m I six. You know, were you ever a kid looking at Hines fifty seven and wondering where the hell are the other fifty six? Yeah? I want to try some of those, at least catchups. It doesn't have to do with how any spices or in it or something. I don't know. I assumed it was like Baskin Robbins or they've got the flavors and they always exceeded their flavor. We should we should probably ask Lauren vogelbaumb or Annie Reese, there's a plug for savers the good side showing lifestyle. But yeah, So it turns out it was an historical advertising about the fifty seven different varieties of sikulls pickles. O, how do you have fifty seven different I guess you can pickle anything, right. So, so in the case of these multiple military intelligence services in the UK, we find that they go all the way up to m I nineteen and many have come and gone since the creation of the first military intelligence service m I one, which was created sometime during World War One, and they mainly focused on cryptography, code breaking, counter intelligence stuff, you know what I mean. So they were figuring out what Imperial Germany was up to, and as we mentioned, they were quite successful with some of this stuff, and over time various sections folded where they merged or they changed their area of focus. In these sections, m I one through nineteen ran ran all sorts of different I don't want to say hustles, but different process disease. Their activities included stuff like specialized geographical analysis. You know, we have a desk that just looks at Russia for instance, or one that just looks at South America, and then they would have things like map making, aerial photography. They would also have things that we would normally find objectionable in Western governments today, such as three different active propaganda and censorship bureaus. And they were they were blatant about it. That's what it's said on their label. But you know, a lot of that stuff spawned out of World War Two, when the propaganda had to be strong on all fronts, and including with that was m MY nineteen that you already mentioned, and that was the bureau specifically, or the I guess section specifically designed to interrogate prisoners of war during World War Two, which is kind of scary. That's it's like the Black Site section. And it's also it's interesting because the organization feels a little bit different in comparison too. Intelligence agencies in the US, like the CIA, handles a ton of this stuff with its own different subsections, you know what I mean. So what does m I five do. We've we've looked at just the broad I don't know the broad strokes of this, but when we ask what it actually does on the ground, we run and this is one of those million dollars or million pounds questions. Officially, m I five does what it says on the website, right, Yeah, it catches spies, that's what it does. It intercepts communications, it finds people, it conducts classified counter intelligence. I mean, come on, that's m I five for you. And um, what it does is it keeps the bear from the door, that whatever, whatever scary animal. Yeah, the coyotes can't get in because of us. Yeah, that's the I like that Cold War reference, right, because the UK had to reorganize a lot of their stuff and evolve their sophistication when the KGB came out guns blazing in the Cold War. Is interesting though, because to this day, many of these operations in my five operations remain classified. Yeah. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean a lot. It seems like in our country some of that stuff kind of eventually over time, when it ceases to be important for security, we get to get a little glimpse into, you know, some of the past covert operations, right, a little some of them. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're absolutely correct. One thing that's one thing that's tough for the British public is that without information about a lot of these operations, many of which were fairly recent in the nineteen eighties and stuff. Without that information, it's tough to gauge how successful or unsuccessful this organization is because if they're doing everything right, you never hear about them. You know, you only hear about them when something goes pear shaped, which I believe of his British slang, or something goes really right and another person leaks information right. And that's how we do know of some intelligence failures. For instance, one of m I five officers, a guy named Michael Bettany, was caught trying to sell information to the KGB and he got caught. He got convicted of espionage. The big question is what did he did? He successfully sell SUF some stuff beforehand? Yeah, did he get away with it before he got caught? And was he the only guy selling information? I certainly doubt it. YEA, probably not. And you know, these organizations you have to continually justify your the reason that you're getting so much money from the public, I guess tax dollars and all of that with any intelligence community or organization. And as a Cold War came to an end and they switched gears again because there were terrorist threats coming from Northern Ireland UH states such as Libya where Colonel Gaddafi was operating, and that was a threat, at least at the time it perceived threat. These were some of the major threats at least according to the m I five for a little while there. And then you know, like we said, the Cold War is coming to an end. Now we're in the nineties, and there were some major reforms went into place, and the service actually around this time gained its first female Director General, Yeah, Dame Stella Remington, who held the position from two to nineteen nineties six. And then the rise of Islamis terrorism at the end of the nineties, culminating in the nine eleven attacks in two thousand one, lad to massive changes in the way m I five operated. Yeah. Absolutely, And look, folks, it's no secret the counter intelligence is a murky murky business. Operations often edge in de morally and legally gray areas. Over the course of its existence, like many other intelligence agencies, m I five has conducted numerous secret operations, often without any look oversight, and often even without governmental oversight. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and many people would say that is the way it should be. Sure, Sure, sometimes even people who don't work for m I five, mostly people who work for m I five probaly say that. But yeah, I see the point about compartmentalized information, right, there's there's a need to have that sort of operational security. But critics don't buy this. Critics alleged that m I five is much more than a counter intelligence agency. In fact, they argue, while m I five functions as a spy service, it also effectively functions as a criminal empire. Whoa yeah, like hydro level, Well, what the hell are we talking about? Will tell you after a word from our sponsor, Here's where it gets crazy. While the m I five might not be a criminal organization at least to its parent government, ye old, let's just call it, what do we call it, the Parliamentary United Kingdom in their government and you know, perhaps the Queen and all of her subjects, um, but it certainly functions as a criminal organization at least at times. Uh, you know, and we're not again, we're not just throwing throwing a ninja stars? Is that okay to say we're not just throwing ninja stars at at Britain. We've seen this occur, as we said earlier, with many other intelligence services within many other countries. But it does function as a criminal organization sometimes. And we know this. This isn't a theory, This isn't some to boil Internet bloggery. Here. It turns out that in two thousand eighteen, declassified documents showed that the government of the United Kingdom allows m I fives agents and informants to carry out crime within the UK UH without consequence. They've been allowed to do this for at least thirty years. Seriously, it's a it's a license to kill, it's a license to torture, pillage. Did you just say a license to kill? Yes, I mean, come on, man, that's great. I can't believe I didn't think of that. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, I mean that. But really, the bit we did was awesome. But the fact that they can just go murder people is not cool. And and and as it turns out, which was a bummer to me or to my kid's self, they don't actually have a license. They can flash before they kill someone, letting them know that it's legit. It's more of an expression. Maybe we should just manufacture our own, not to use, but just to have just on a T shirt. Maybe we like, how would you feel if you stole someone's wallet and you're going through the wallet and you found like three different fake forms of identification right all the same phase, three different names, three different profiles, and then you saw like this mysterious license to kill? What would you do with that wallet? I would put it right back down, wipe. I'd first, I'd wipe my prints from it. There you go right back down on the ground. Clever, clever, alright, well, I know what you guys are getting for the holidays. You'd also have to check local security cameras in any CCTV that's around to make sure to destroy those tapes. And you probably want to drop your phone too, because that GPS record would be there. You know what were We might be taking this thought experiment a little too far right now, If you do have a license to kill, and you can tell us about it without killing us, we would love to hear your experiences. We will do our best to keep you anonymous. Just put it out there. What I guess You're right, No, it's as we'll see. They kind of did have not not a badge. They could wave around, but they did have documented proof that the government at all levels that were aware of it, approved of this. It was called a secret and concealed policy. This would allow the security service to authorize participation in murder, torture, sexual assault, or other grave criminality if just a few folks believed it was in the in the service of the greater good in the public interest. Uh, that is so creepy and discussing, and I wonder how many other intelligence organizations have an active policy like that, a secret and concealed policy. Okay, so this this was basically a criminal authorization, just literally that you can do crime and it's okay. But it's like a further greater good clause, right right, that's the implication here. Yeah. But yes, but this is something that has been around for thirty years and it was only first acknowledged in a British court when an alliance of human rights groups argued that it was unlawful to have this kind of policy, like maybe not, let's not do this, and it was completely secret like they were practicing omerta until two thousand and twelve, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to Sir Mark Waller, the Intelligence Service Commissioner at the time, asking him to keep the policy under review, which is, we've got a quote, it's very British in the way it's written, but we'll give it a shot. I'm gonna do a British accent. Let's see, in the discharge of their function to protect national security, the Security Services longstanding policy for the agent handless to agree to agents participating in crime in circumstances where it is considered such involvement is necessary and proportionate in providing on maintaining access to intelligence that will allow the disruption of most serious crimes or threats to national security. Oh wow, that was great. Firing like that. It sounds nice, but it sounds like he's describing marzipan. It sounds like he's reading like a Winnie the Poosh story or something. You know, it's totally um. It's a clause for undercover agents, right, that's all. That's what that is. Well, I mean that part is. But yeah, it's saying like, if you have an informant who is operating maybe in something like gun running or human trafficking circles, and you need to keep them embedded. Question in the States, you see it in the movies. I'm just one. Want to see what you guys think about this. Whenever an undercover agent is offered drugs, they they go to whatever lengths they can to not actually do the drugs. If they're like, you know, you know, like to prove you're not a cop, do the drugs or whatever, it's like, oops, oops, I dropped the drugs. You know. No, I'm wondering, like, do you think we have It does seem like it's not it's frowned upon for undercover cops to like get deep and start like doing drugs. It sounds like there's a order, there's a there's a boundary we that we would prefer not to cross. They probably would have avoid it, but it comes in. It comes into that idea the greater good right accomplishing the sting or the operation. So I am sure there are people who have, maybe in the d A or something, been forced to do cocaine or something like that, But I don't I don't know if there's a strict, a strict bright line policy wise. I don't think there can be. I think because all of its circumstantial, right, especially when you're dealing with this, if this is full on national security for the past thirty years. I can't even imagine the some of the terrible things that some of these agents have had to do, Like you're saying, in the human trafficking fields and drug fields and we're murder like in murder in order to then get a bigger fish essentially down the line. And you also have to wonder, Okay, let's put ourselves in that hypothetical position. Let's say Paul mission controlled decond is a big time like Narco's level Colombian drug cartel leader. Right, I can see it, and we're we're up and comers, We're gonna be lieutenants, and he's like, do this, uh, do this cocaine in front of me? It's cocaine, and we would we would look very suspicious if we just fumbled, just dropped it, because I don't know. I don't know a ton about um about that drug, but I do know about the general trends of addiction and people who are into that kind of stuff. Don't just drop it. Yeah, in that case, I think the fumble move would be to accidentally drop it on one of the guys that you know is not an undercover agent, so that it's oh well, we didn't waste it. It just it's all over that guy. Now, I don't know, man, I think you have to do it. If you're at that point, it's like that. It's it can't be like that scene in that Woody Allen movie where he sneezes the cocaine off the dish or whatever, and it's basically like a party foul. It's more like you're gonna get shot in the face foul. Yeah. But then if you're talking about the bigger operations, where you're actually out in the field doing things other than drugs, the actual criminal acts, that's where it gets a little, um, I don't know, it gets murky for me right right right, Like if you are embedded as an enforcer and you're sent to beat the crap out of someone, you know what I mean. And I'm sure there have been in the past undercover agents who have to performatively beat the snot out of one another just to make make sure they look like they're legit. So, yes, the informant stuff that that's part of it, and that doesn't seem that far out. But when Cameron is writing this letter to Sir Mark Waller, he essentially says, look, We're not going to ask you to tell us whether like, we don't want you to feel as if you have to report it to anybody if you get what I'm saying, anyone, and and you don't have to worry about whether or not it's legal at all. That's just crazy, man. Is that one of those things where it sort of exists in like an extra legal area, right, Yeah. And most people in the government had no idea what was happening, you know what I mean. I think most people in Parliament at that time would have said, you know, we should we should not give people these licensees for wanton destruction. Cameron to be fair, We're gonna try to be fair here, said he had considered making the letter public in uh in the interest of transparency, but decided against it because he thought it might be damaging to the national interest also known as his political career. That's what I think. I think. I think he was saying damaging to the national interests, but he meant damaging to his political career. Kind of a typo, maybe a welly flippan. I can see that. I can see that, man, I mean, I can see where you become prime minister. You get with of something like this, and as a citizen, it gives you pause just knowing that it's happening, right, no matter where what your beliefs are in what you're holding that office. And it does seem like he kind of rode the fence there a little bit of should I shouldn't I tell anybody about this? This is really left up but in the in the in the let's keep national security in public interest in order, and let's just balance it out and say, let's just keep it quiet. Like, wasn't it the whole idea that he basically just um he said he told this guy not to comment on the legality. That was the whole idea. Yeah, so it's the policy is under review. Doing air quotes here, I hope you can hear them. The policies under review. However, what that essentially means is provide cover for us and don't like, Okay, look, sometimes you gotta you gotta break a few innocent eggs if you really want to cook a terrorism omlet you know what I mean. Shee. So that's yeah, that's exactly what happens that don't comment on the legality, don't refer it to any prosecuting body. Don't refer to law enforcement. Let's keep this between us. Let's let's have a greater good. So the argument was essentially that for most of history, most of modern British history, they have been following one of two paths as just a nation. That was the rule of law and then there were criminal acts. Right. But they called this strategy the third direction. Great boy band right? Right? Do you guys remember Glee? Do you remember their band? Uh? One direction? What was direction? Was a real band? What am I thinking of? Well, there was that U plus me equals us? New direction, New direction, New direction. It's a pun new direction. I say, yeah, very body like boys soul from always Stunning Philodelphia. But they called this thing, seriously, the third direction. Nobody acknowledged it until this year in a British court when that alliance of human rights groups that Matt mentioned earlier, um Privacy International. Who are the other ones? Yeah? Those guys over at p I. Then we've got reprieved the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the Pat Finnickan Center. According to the legal team representing this alliance, the third Direction policy is likely to have enabled the Security Service to conceal wide ranging illegal activity, and they brought this case before an investigatory powers tribunal. The trial included as a bonus a the publication of a heavily redacted document, a guideline essentially for how to break the law and get away with it. This is how you do it. And like a lot of government documents, you can find copies of this published in a couple of different um places in British media, but tons of like the entire paragraphs are blacked out. They're not going to admit this stuff, right because it's still the great boogeyman of national security. And you know, the timing of the letter was also really strange here because just two weeks after this highly redacted document gets released, it's made public. Mr Cameron, our buddy, admitted that there was this thing called state collusion in the murder of Belfast Solicitor Patrick Finniken and UM state state collusion, what does that mean? That means essentially the camera is arguing some faction of the intelligence apparatus or the state apparatus of the United Kingdom may have aided aided in this guy's death, or may have at the very least been criminally negligent and protecting them, right, that's the most fair way to say it. They get into some very very very dirty things when they were attempting to retain Northern Ireland, you know. And we'll tell you more about the trial after a word from our sponsor. So, according to Sir James E. D q C, that stands for Queen's Counsel. Those are the guys who have the wigs. The name for those wigs is peruke. That's so Perukea salt, what was the one? What was the one you did off air? Perukea is on fire? Peruke I learned more about the history of peruke. You can check out me and Ben's other podcast, Ridiculous History, where we do an episode about what the heck's up with those crazy British lawyer wigs, which is yeah, which is one of our first episodes. To be kind or be brutal, it's up to you. We just want you to know. That's a great word, and that's going to do it then, and it's going to do then. That's true. That's true. So this guy, Sir James dy q C, is representing the intelligence agencies, the Home Office in the Foreign Office, and he told this Investigatory Powers Tribunal that details of m I five's conduct had to be kept secret even in the modern day and could not be aired in open court. He argued that the claim should be restricted to investigating over a sensible time period, at most six years. Wow, six years to keep all your secrets right? Interesting? So what did the Alliance of Human Rights organizations say to that? So in their argument, the claimants site Finnikin's murder as an illustration of the considerable public importance of the issues raised. It also refers to allegations that Freddie SCA great name, It's pretty good, was a former senior member of the I r A and a security service agent working under the code name Oh my god, I love this Steak Knife s T a k E. That's a good DJ name right there, DJ steake Knife. How about that? Huh oh wow, that's great. Yeah, that's so skep a k A. Steak Knife was we have to say, allegedly still but was involved in kidnap, torture and murder while working as an agent employed by m I five. So the roundabout way, the United the government of the United Kingdom was paying this guy to kidnap torture and murder people for the greater good, for the greater good right. M I five has refused to answer the claimants questions about the scoop of this third direction policy, including whether it could I Prince will authorize murder, torture, in humane and degrading treatment, UH, sexual assault, kidnapping, or false imprisonment. The Security Services lawyers also said to answer such questions would reveal the facts of conduct that they wished to keep secret. So it's kind of like a trust us we're doing the right thing. We can't tell you what we're doing, and we can't tell you why. Other than that, not very convincing argument, No, not at all. And we also have other examples of some strange things that ended up coming to light, or at least things that maybe never wanted to see the light of day. There were some papers released by the Irish state that showed um that there was this loyalist paramilitary group, or at least members of one of these groups, specifically the Ultier Volunteer Force. They're a paramilitary group out of Northern Ireland. They claimed that m I five asked them to assassinate the then Prime Minister of Ireland Charles High in nineteen eighty five, and um, we went to this BBC source to learn a little bit more about this. But it's very I don't know, it's very strange because it was it was a letter just kind of your standard letter sent to somebody, like a correspondence, and it just happened to include a couple of documents and um, a couple literally guys who just said, hey, by the way, m I five asked us to kill you one time. We didn't do it, yeah, but but you know, you should know it's crazy. It was sent two years after the alleged I guess assassination or of the hit was put on him. I guess um. It contained a long long list of collusion allegations against the British Intelligence Service. So are various services that the British intelligence has um this guy. It was addressed to Mr Hahi and it read we were approached by an m I five officer. He asked us to execut you you and it said that these this paramilitary group had been supplied with quote details that would have compromised this guy's personal security, including aerial photographs of his family home, his cars, and his private yacht. So for uh an imperfect comparison. It's similar to say, the CIA um taking over Newfoundland and the people of Newfoundland wanting to make a united Canada, and so the CIA contacts someone in Canada and says, kill whomever is in charge of this unity group in Newfoundland or killed the kill the prime minister of Canada so we can keep our part. Yeah, And I guess they didn't imagine that the people who were not necessarily the friends of the British Intelligence Service would They wouldn't just say, oh, yeah, okay, sure boss. Well maybe they just said, you know, killing prime ministers step too far. I guess that's what I'm saying. Yeah, like they didn't expect that to occur. That seems very strange to me. In two thousand ten, Benyam Mohammed al Abshi went to court to hold m I five accountable for collusion in his torture at the hands of Uncle Sam. And then there's the example of Shakiramir who said m I five watched him being tortured in two thousand and one that was really brutal too. Yeah. The guy he was in guantanamobile, right, and he he said, like several times British officers would be in the room while he's being beaten, just brutally beaten, his head slammed against the wall. Yeah, pretty pretty crazy stuff. It's truly disturbing because now with all this new information, this um admission on the part of the British government that that these sorts of things occur, many of those previous allegations of criminal activity on the part of m I five that were once dismissed as out and out conspiracy theory seem increasingly maybe not plausible, maybe well, maybe not probable, but certainly less impossible. They've been implicated in the murder of anti nuclear activists Hilda Worl. They've been accused of creating a far right neo Nazi group, Combat eighteen. Their profile peaked in February when they orchestrated a riot in Dublin that led to a cancelation of a football match between England and Ireland. One theory suggests that British intelligence wanted to create a magnet for the most extreme parts of these political parties. One member who was convicted of murder in nine guy named Charlie Sargent, has been accused of being an m I five informant with some pretty solid evidence, and then we did the death of Commander Buster Crab and a previous episodes a Crab where he never surfaced, and it seems that maybe someone on the inside was responsible. Weren't They're frogmen involved in that story? Yes, yeah, what about cra men? They never made it to Crab, mainly because the difficulty of making forward backward motion. That's hard, yeah, scuttling, scuttling. So Bett, you mentioned Colonel Muamar Gaddafi earlier as well, right, oh, yeah, And in ninety six, there was a bomb that was placed under a car that was I guess thought to be the vehicle that Gaddafi was going to be traveling in in his motorcade, but uh, well he wasn't in that vehicle. The car did explode, the bomb did explode, and several bodyguards were killed. There was an ensuing gun battle that killed several people, and there were even um there would be assassins, you know, the people that planted the bomb and everything. They had links style Quaeda, and it's thought that maybe maybe m I five had a little bit of a hand. Inness, right, the head of the Libyan desk for m I five at the time was a guy named David Shayler, and in seven he left the service, leaked this information at these accusations, these allegations to the press. He was forced to flee to France, and in he claimed that the plot to kill Gaddafi had been funded by m I six cooperation with m I five. There's you know, taking out ahead a leader like that of a country is no small deal. Well, and there's compelling it's night compelling evidence. There's proof that ultimately the French government was behind the assassination of Gaddafi to preserve financial hegemony because they wanted, you know Goodafi did many, many terrible things, but the thing France was most frightened of him doing was to create a continental African currency, a denoor. So mess with the money, right, That's what happens in the oil the new series Starry Matt Frederick's always money in the banana stand. So what does this all mean? This is, this is pretty strange because it's rare are for this kind of information to come out in such a blatant way. Break the law for the greater good. Most intelligence agencies, I would say, practice that, right. The problem is the goal post of that defines greater good is always moving who's good for whom exactly exactly, And at this point many of us listening to the show today will have a hard time being surprised. Some of us might even support this policy, you know what I mean. There are people who say that torture is a terrible thing, but ultimately it saves lives. We have an episode on why that is not true as well. Yeah, yeah, but but there are points to be made that if you it's not an easy task to stop the you know that, in your worldview, the worst people in the world from doing the worst things. That's not an easy task to prevent that from happening, and you do have to perhaps do some bad things. It's just I think in this case, it's that gray area of how bad is too bad for the thing for the good guys to do to prevent the bad guys. What's the idea that to like, counter to the bad guys, you gotta stoop to their level on some we gotta play by their rules otherwise you're gonna get stepped all over right in theory? Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a good point. Did they tell you, guys, we watched True Detective recently season two. Season one, thank god. Yeah, I have a friend that really says, revisit season two, give another chance. I I've heard that, I've heard that before, but I need to take a break. Season one was just so great. There's a quote that's not a spoiler, but this, this conversation reminds me of it. Um. The two main characters, Marty and Rust, are having a philosophical discussion about the nature of good and evil, and at some point the conversation, Marty says Marty asked if if they're good people, and Russ says, no, we're bad, but they need bad men like us to keep the others from the door. And that at a bear from the beginning of the show. Yeah, exactly or Jack Nicholson, right, not not as a not as a character, just him, he's keep I don't know. He's a creepy looking guy. I don't know. I wouldn't want him knock him. Yeah, I don't know well enough to remark on his door policy. I guess. I guess The big question is do we have to have the bad guys inside the door keeping the other bad guys from the door. Why can't we just build a giant wall and keep everybody out topical topical questions, so totally kidding him, totally. Well, it's a good question, though, because should m I five allow its agents and informants to break the law? Does it really does it really become a necessary evil on the way to achieving a greater good? Right? And if so, for who? What laws they break? How do we measure the success or the efficiency of something like this if it's conducted entirely in secret. What sort of oversight should the public and our government agencies have on this process? Because right now the answer is not, they have not. They have a letter from two thousand twelve that's like, don't send this to anybody. Basically, David Cameron sent a no snitching letter. That's exactly what happened, and that's where we are today, no snitching boys and girls. Snitches end up in stitches. Yeah, well, tell us what you think. Find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and let us know. Are these things necessary evils? Is allowing the collapse of the rule of law in one scenario really necessary to allow the enforcement of rule of law in another situation? Right? That's ultimately the question really is um And by the way, I was just gonna bring this up before we ended at the Tenderfoot holiday party thing that we were at the three of Us, I ran into a gentleman. Paul Dicken was there too, but we ran into a gentleman who truly truly believes and had a long discussion with me about it that the British government still controls the United States. Overheard that, and I didn't want to jump in he truly believed it. I should I talked to him. I know, well, I kind of. I didn't want to go any deeper than we already had in the conversation because it's one of those that doesn't really go anywhere. After you hit a certain wall. It's like, yeah, well, we can't prove anything, but that's an interesting idea. Did you tell me did an episode on it? I did. Did you tell him that he can contact us via a telephone call? We're just a phone call away. I did. I said call one eight three three. STD w t K brought the STD back for this one because it's not about awful things like the last one. Oh h. And I also also want to just in the interest of full transparency, I'm not at death's door, but I am in I am darn sure on like the sub basement of sickness right now. So that's why it's my voice sounds a little bad if you heard any any mucacy noises. Sorry, folks, that was me. Should be hale and hearty later. Are you down with the sickness? I'm always I'm always up to something. It's just extra deep. I like it. It's nice and gravelly. Thanks guys. Paul will surely snip out all the snot sounds. Thanks Paul. So yeah, let us let us know what you think and check in with your fellow listeners. We'd like to take this debate to the internet, and we mentioned earlier in the show, but you can find us at our Facebook site. Here's where it gets crazy. If you love all that but you don't want to do any of it, whatever your reasons, maybe we have some good news for you. You can write to us directly. We are conspiracy It How stuff Works dot com.