SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS PART 2: THE LISBON CONNECTION

True Spies, Special Relationships, Part II: The Lisbon Connection 

NARRATOR: Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Vanessa Kirby, and this is True Spies Special Relationships, Part II: The Lisbon Connection.

ANTHONY WELLS: Lisbon was probably the most intensive intelligence place on the planet during these crucial years of the war - before the tide turned against the Germans. 

NARRATOR: The year is 1940, and if you throw a rock in Lisbon chances are you’ll hit a spy. But we wouldn’t recommend it. You’d draw far too much attention to yourself. You see, Portugal is in the grip of a dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, and the streets are crawling with the secret police. 

ANTHONY WELLS: It was a state that was run by people looking over their shoulder and wondering whether they’d end up in jail or not because they hadn't said the right things, or done the right things, to support the Salazar government. It was a fascist state.

NARRATOR: Fascist maybe, but Salazar’s Portugal is proud of the position of neutrality it’s taken in the war. As the Nazi war machine tears through the great powers of Europe, Salazar sells crucial materials, like iron ore and tungsten metal, to the Allies and the Axis. Control of the Iberian Peninsula would be a valuable prize for both sides. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And it was a huge, huge game of manipulation, if you like, to ensure that he really was on the right side and that he didn't fall into the Nazi camp and just give up and be paid off in gold for the iron ore and tungsten. 

NARRATOR: Intelligence officers and their assets team the streets under cover of darkness, each of them tasked with gathering crucial intelligence that would allow them to stay one step ahead of the enemy. In the cafes, back-alleys, grand hotels, and brothels of Lisbon, a shadow war is waged for Salazar’s soul. And at this point in the War, the British government can scarcely afford another strategic challenge from the south. The stakes are simple - and punishingly high. Nobody knows it yet, but America will join the war in December 1941. In the meantime, to stand any chance of survival, the British must ensure that Portugal remains neutral. From inside the cloistered walls of the Admiralty Building on Whitehall, the UK prepares to do just that, which is where we’ll begin this episode. Welcome to the second part of a True Spies anthology about the Special Relationship between Britain and America. Meet the man who’s going to guide you through it. 

ANTHONY WELLS: My name is Anthony Wells. I'm a 50-year veteran of the Five Eyes intelligence community of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And I have worked for both British intelligence as a British citizen and United States intelligence as an American citizen. 

NARRATOR: Last time, 50-year intelligence veteran Anthony Wells revealed the crucial role that British Naval Intelligence played in bringing the US into the First World War - forging the first link in a chain of collaboration that defined 20th-century geopolitics, and continues to do so to this day. In this episode, Anthony returns to fill another chapter in that long and meaningful history - the deep cover operation in the Iberian Peninsula that inspired the forerunner of the CIA. The Portuguese aspect of this mission is little-known - most historians make little or no mention of it. But Anthony assures us that, during his long Naval and Academic career, he’s had access to first-hand accounts and declassified documents that support this version of events. It’s an operation that begins in one very important room. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Room 39 was the center of British naval intelligence in the Admiralty building in London. 

NARRATOR: And for the duration of the war, that room is home to one of the most illustrious names in spy fiction. He’s a commander in the Naval Intelligence Division. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Room 39 is headed by Admiral Godfrey and, of course, his personal assistant that most people don't realize is a gentleman called Ian Fleming. 

NARRATOR: Yes, that Ian Fleming. Rear Admiral John Godfrey, his boss, was mentored by Blinker Hall - the World War One hero we met in the first installment of this anthology. Godfrey is one of a couple of possible inspirations for ‘M’, James Bond’s fictional superior at MI6. Together, they worked tirelessly to preserve Portugal’s neutrality. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And Room 39 had to come up with plans to make sure that Portugal did not fall into the Nazis' hands. And if the Nazis continued to do nasty operational intelligence-related things to corrupt and control the Portuguese government and the flow of materials, that had to be stopped. And so, Room 39 came up with various clandestine means to do that. And of course, Ian Fleming played a critical role in that. Ian Fleming is a very interesting man. He came from an extraordinarily wealthy family. That's critical to know. His grandfather had been a very successful banker. Owned banks. His father inherited the business and his father had two sons. Fleming had a brother. 

NARRATOR: When Fleming’s father died, he had little interest in following in the older man’s footsteps. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Ian Fleming decided in the 1920s and then into the 30s that he would live a life of a) first getting highly educated, which he did, and; b) trained militarily, which he did.

NARRATOR: Living off a generous trust fund, the young Fleming attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst at 19 years old. He lasted a year before leaving. Some sources allege that he was struck down with venereal disease - an experience that, unsurprisingly, never found its way into his literary work. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Then after that, because he was so wealthy, he essentially became a European. He went to Europe. He was a big skier. He lived the life in Switzerland and Austria, skiing and socializing, living the life of - not a playboy because I think that's an unfair description of him - but certainly a well-to-do English gentleman with lots of money, lots of resources.

NARRATOR: He became a journalist after a failed application to the Foreign Office. Historians have speculated that his application was rejected in case the intelligence services wished to recruit Fleming at a later date - that way, he would be ‘clean’ of any affiliation with the British government. 

ANTHONY WELLS: He learned multiple languages and traveled extensively throughout Europe and particularly in Germany. 

NARRATOR: Which is where he found himself at the start of the 1930s. Fleming witnessed Hitler’s rise to power first-hand. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And then the beginning of the pogroms against the Jewish population. 

NARRATOR: These experiences, combined with his upper-class background, made him a prime candidate for the British intelligence services at the time. So he was a very knowledgeable, on-the-ground guy and very smart, very athletic, and intellectually able. Many spies were recruited from Britain’s top universities. But Fleming - who’d skipped that route - was in his 30s before he got the tap on the shoulder. It came at the dawn of war. 

ANTHONY WELLS: 1939 comes along and Admiral Godfrey feels that he needs a personal assistant, a right-hand man, someone that he can trust and talk to and tell him, “What I'm thinking, what I'm going to do, and go out and tell my deputies,” -  of which he had several deputies, heads of his various sections and things - and be the interface.

NARRATOR: Rear Admiral John Godfrey had a reputation for abruptness. He did not suffer fools gladly, and his parameters for foolishness were famously broad. So he needed a people-person - somebody who could smooth the relationships between himself and his subordinates. British Naval officers are, as a rule, straight talkers. So Godfrey had to look outside his particular corner of the establishment.

ANTHONY WELLS: He interviews several people, takes them out to lunch - and blah, blah, blah - and then he meets Ian Fleming.

NARRATOR: Who, remember, is suave, sophisticated - continental, even. By 1939, Ian Fleming had returned to London and was working in the finance industry. He’d enjoyed his time in journalism, but writing had failed to keep him in the lifestyle he was accustomed to. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Someone said, “Oh, there's this guy in the city who is a stockbroker. He'd come out of Europe, he'd ended his years there because things are deteriorating.” Wants something to do, so he goes and becomes a stockbroker. He's still living this very high-end life. And he's interviewed by Admiral Godfrey. 

NARRATOR: Fleming had been recommended by a Room 39 contact inside the City of London, the capital’s financial district. Over lunch, the two men got to know one another. Godfrey was taken by Fleming’s broad range of skills, his language abilities - German, in particular - and his natural charm. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Godfrey comes back to his office and tells his deputy, “I've found the right guy. He's my man. These other people, they're good but not as good as this fellow, Ian Fleming.”

NARRATOR: Fleming, never one to miss out on a new experience, took Godfrey up on the offer. He was brought into the fold via the RNVR - the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And he came in as a very quickly promoted Lieutenant Commander. 

NARRATOR: This rank allowed Fleming access to the secrets of Room 39 despite never having served any time in the regular Navy. 

ANTHONY WELLS: But for the duration of the war, he was a Lieutenant Commander and then Commander Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and he was the personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence. 

NARRATOR: At this point in time, most senior positions in the British establishment - including the civil service and the financial services industry - were held by a narrow band of ex-public schoolboys. As a result, the hiring process for top jobs was fairly informal. If your face fit, and you were semi-competent, doors would always be open to you. But regardless of his formal qualifications, or lack of, Fleming was eager to get to work. And his contribution to the war effort, through Room 39, justified his slightly controversial hiring many times over. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Room 39 was very critical in figuring out how to address the post-invasion of France and occupation of the whole of Europe - other than Spain and Portugal. What are we going to do? 

NARRATOR: By the middle of 1940, France has fallen to the Nazis. Britain is scrambling to establish intelligence networks in the rubble. The Special Operations Executive - a familiar name to long-term listeners of this podcast - is in its infancy. 

ANTHONY WELLS: We have certain connections in France. SOE is just getting going. MI6 is basically not playing much of a role. It doesn't have a big underground movement in France or anywhere.

NARRATOR: Emboldened by their victories thus far, the Nazis begin a mass bombing campaign of the British Isles - the Blitz. Tens of thousands of British civilians are killed or injured. Over the English channel. Allied pilots square off against the Luftwaffe in a series of punishing dogfights, in which both sides take heavy losses. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic Ocean, German U-boats prowl the waves, threatening to cut off vital supplies to the UK. 

ANTHONY WELLS: So this period from the summer of 1940, after the occupation of France until the entry of America into the war in December 1941 is a hugely stressful time for Winston Churchill, the chiefs of staff, Anthony Eden, and the whole leadership. 

NARRATOR: ‘Stressful’ doesn’t really cover it because if the Germans take Portugal, they also take the Azores, a Portuguese island colony in the middle of the Atlantic. And if they take the Azores, then trade routes from America would be interrupted with disastrous consequences. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Without the Azores to keep Britain alive, Britain would have literally starved to death. They were critical for the Transatlantic flow of materials; in terms of positioning, later on, aircraft; for attacking U-boats from the various islands in the Azores. So there were multiple reasons why Winston Churchill was absolutely, really deeply concerned about what would happen in Portugal and the role of - possibly even if they didn't invade - the role of the German services, namely the Abwehr, SD, SS, and Gestapo, in both controlling and manipulating Salazar and all of his friends - and influence through bribery and corruption and intimidation to support the Nazis and decrease any hope of of of using the ports, particularly Lisbon and Oporto, which were the two main critical ports with deep water harbors for allied shipping and so on and so forth. 

NARRATOR: Churchill looks to Room 39, the Naval Intelligence Division, to provide solutions. Rear Admiral John Godfrey looks to Ian Fleming. Fleming proposes that a network of British spies in Portugal could be instrumental in maintaining Antonio Salazar’s neutrality. On the ground in Lisbon, deep undercover, they would work against the Germans who were trying to sway the Portuguese dictator towards the Axis. 

ANTHONY WELLS: He was inspired by the fact that special ops couldn't be done by conventional military forces. They didn't have the structure, communications, organization, or training to do this kind of undercover, deep penetration work, speak the language, get into Portugal, look like a Portuguese, act like one, but be covert, have weapons stashed away places, to be ready to go do their thing if things deteriorate. And you get the order to go out and destroy a lot of facilities and kill a lot of very bad people on the German side.

NARRATOR: So, first things first, Room 39 needed a crack team of operatives to infiltrate Lisbon and they weren’t going to come from the Royal Navy. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Fleming essentially went out and put together,  initially, a collection of hugely capable people that were easily adaptable to the quasi-military environment - undercover environment, spoke languages - and would quickly pick up the use of explosives and all of that, and other odd people.

NARRATOR: And Fleming himself was not averse to unorthodox hiring practices. 

ANTHONY WELLS: I mean, one of the guys he curated was a guy who served time in His Majesty's Prison for being a safe breaker. And he hired him because he wanted someone he could have in Portugal who could break into anything surreptitiously and get whatever was inside someone's safe or whatever. Or wherever you needed to go to break in somewhere, not just a safe.

NARRATOR: Unlike the top brass at the Ministry of Defense, Fleming’s organization was fairly egalitarian. Regardless of your background, if you had the right skills, you were in. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And so, he had people like that, a lot of very distinguished sportsmen and athletes, linguists, people who were good at explosives, divers who could do the underwater detonation work who were good underwater and knew how to use limpet mines, and all that. 

NARRATOR: Most importantly, Fleming was looking for communicators - people who could pass on intelligence as efficiently as possible. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Communications were critical. How do you clandestinely communicate without being intercepted by the Gestapo, the SS, or the SD? 

NARRATOR: The team was assembled quickly, but it’s unclear exactly when Fleming first arrived in Portugal. Some sources have it as early as June 1940, around the time of the fall of France. His remit also extended to the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. He ran parallel operations in Spain and Gibraltar. These plans came under one iconic codename - ‘Operation Goldeneye’. In Lisbon, Goldeneye had two main objectives. Number One: Interference. German military intelligence - the Abwehr- had a number of undercover operatives active in the Portuguese capital. Likewise, the SS intelligence service, the SD, and the Nazi secret police - the Gestapo - maintained an insidious presence. Fleming's teams needed to find out who these operatives were, and foil them at every turn. Number Two: Sabotage. This is the worst-case scenario. If Salazar capitulated to the Germans, then Room 39’s operatives would cause havoc at Portugal’s crucial ports. If Churchill couldn’t have them, they’d make sure that Hitler couldn’t either.

ANTHONY WELLS: Those are the two strategic objectives, no question about it. And then if you want a third, it was really continuing the free flow of trade.

NARRATOR: Neutral or ‘non-aligned’ ships carried essential materials to British ports from Lisbon. That needed to be protected.

ANTHONY WELLS: So it's a very complex scenario of undercover work to be done and also to ensure that the shipping, the trade side of things, kept flowing. 

NARRATOR: It was one of these neutral boats that carried Ian Fleming into the port of Lisbon in 1940. Although naturally, in Lisbon, he was not Ian Fleming at all. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Cover story was he was a banker, European banker. 

NARRATOR: Any overt ties to British naval or merchant ships would have blown that cover before he had a chance to explore its potential. You see, all the best lies contain a grain of truth. Flemings’ stint in the City of London, as well as his time as a younger man on the slopes of Austria and Switzerland, made his cover extremely convincing. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Connections to the banking network with official credentials, official recognition. The right connections. Right cards. Right cufflinks. Right tie. Right phone calls. 

NARRATOR: And yes, any phone call made in Lisbon was likely to be intercepted by Nazi networks. Those faultless German language skills really came into their own there. 

ANTHONY WELLS: They were assuming they were always intercepted when he called the banks in Austria and Switzerland. So he knew all that. He played the game very successfully and got away with it.

NARRATOR: All told, Fleming had a very particular set of skills that made him a highly effective spymaster. 

ANTHONY WELLS: No typical British Naval officer could have done what Ian Fleming did. I'm sure there are other people, but they weren't that obvious and they didn't necessarily have his suave manner, his athleticism, his ability to look and act like he was pro-German and anti-British. 

NARRATOR: And what was this well-heeled banker character’s reason for being in Lisbon, so far from the counting houses of central Europe? A booming property market, of course. Thousands of refugees had flooded into neutral Portugal as the Nazis marched west. 

ANTHONY WELLS: It was all part of this thing that was going on in Portugal, particularly Lisbon, where there are a lot of people buying property. Many of whom, by the way, were actually fleeing the Nazis. Or people who just wanted to get away from the war who were wealthy Europeans, not necessarily Jewish. 

NARRATOR: The properties Fleming bought gave his banker character a legitimate reason to be in Lisbon. It was crucial that he remained above suspicion. Those properties also doubled as buildings that his agents could use for various purposes. They were weapons stashes, safehouses, and private venues for secret meetings and covert transmissions. 

ANTHONY WELLS: The communication side was very, very, very important. How do you communicate in a country where everyone's looking over their shoulder? 

NARRATOR: Remember, it’s not just the Germans themselves that Fleming’s agents have to contend with. Salazar’s own secret police are everywhere, some of whom also report to the Nazis. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Secret encrypted communications were very important. So the way in which that was transported and stashed away and hidden and used was a huge secret. Because that was the name of the game, if you can't communicate, you're in trouble.

NARRATOR: Yes, it’s important to communicate securely. But just as important is the ability to know what your enemies are communicating to each other. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And then there was the counterintelligence, deception side of things - of playing games with the Germans, the whole business of the whorehouse plot. 

NARRATOR: As we’ve established, Lisbon is a port city. And where there’s a port, there are sailors. Where there are sailors - and we hate to generalize - there are brothels. 

ANTHONY WELLS: What happened was the Germans figured out that they could learn a lot of information because, remember, it's a neutral port. So you had foreign ships coming in there, including British ships.

NARRATOR: Those ships were full of sailors with knowledge of British shipping movements. The Germans saw an irresistible opportunity to collect intelligence from them. We’ll apologize in advance for some outdated terminology here. 

ANTHONY WELLS: So you could, in a whorehouse, have paid off Portuguese whores who spoke English, who could extract information from sailors, whether they were British or foreign or whatever, and give information about where you've come from, what you're carrying, where you're going next. What are you doing, basically? 

NARRATOR: Many sailors, grateful to be on dry land and in good company, would think nothing of divulging their next destination. But skillful German spymasters could use that data to extrapolate strategic, big picture intelligence on the movement of shipping and the contents of ships. Portugal was an exporter of iron ore and tungsten, both of which were crucial to the British arms industry. If the Nazis knew where a ship would be, they’d be able to disrupt shipping from Lisbon to the UK, leaving the British Army without raw materials for shells, armor-piercing rounds, and other weapons of war. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And sailors are very vulnerable like that. They certainly were in this period. I mean, they're better trained now not to a) go to whorehouses and b) not to ever talk about where they're going, what they're doing. But it wasn't like that. 

NARRATOR: Through their sources, the Room 39 operatives who reported to Ian Fleming uncovered the Nazi ruse. But rather than stop it outright, they decided to flip the script. The Germans had tapped a rich trickle of intelligence. The British needed to poison the well. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And so there was a game played by implanting, if you like, false information through well-disposed, well-trained, friendly - dare I say it - Portuguese prostitutes, a game that was very successfully played. 

NARRATOR: In fact, Fleming’s banker persona came into play yet again. It allowed him to buy his own gentleman’s club on the dock near the waterfront, without raising suspicion. The man he chooses to manage it - native Portuguese - is soon pleased to report that he has poached two women from a rival establishment. Both of them are known to be assets of German military intelligence. A small unit of Room 39 agents are instructed to pose as customers. During their engagements with the women, they pass on false information about ship movements in the Atlantic. Back in England, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park - another Navy-led organization - are able to track the reactions of German U-boats. By understanding how the Kriegsmarine responds to the fake intel, they can learn more about Germany’s marine tactics. It’s a serious intelligence coup - and not a drop of blood is spilled. It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in this most unique of locations - the city of spies. But that’s just one success. Until Portugal’s neutrality could be guaranteed, the men of Operation Goldeneye existed in a kind of operational limbo - waiting for either victory or disaster. Until then, the game of Spy vs Spy would wear on, practically at a stalemate. 

ANTHONY WELLS: What they were doing was, essentially, watching and looking and listening and following and tracking and deciding who was doing what to whom and how far it was going.

NARRATOR: You can bet that the Germans were doing the same thing. But in truth, Salazar was, personally, always more disposed towards the British. Portugal had historically close relations with the UK dating back over 500 years. He disliked the racial component of the Nazi ideology and feared that his Spanish counterpart, General Franco, would welcome the Germans with open arms. But in politics, you can never take an old alliance for granted. Had his hand been forced by economic or military pressure, it’s very possible that Salazar would have folded too. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Salazar wanted gold. He didn't want Deutschmarks, he wanted gold, and so he was paid in gold. So that's why, at the end of the war, there was some controversy over the amount of money that Salazar got from the Nazis for payments for tungsten and iron ore.

NARRATOR: Fortunately, the world never learned the price that Salazar might have put on Portugal’s neutrality. If you listened to the first episode in this series, you’ll remember that by the middle of 1941, secret meetings were taking place between the British and American governments. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Well, the special relationship - I always give the date in August 1941. 

NARRATOR: That’s four months before the USA officially entered the war. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And Winston Churchill sailed across the Atlantic under escort and met the president off of Newfoundland in a bay there.

NARRATOR: It’s here, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, that the tide of the war in Europe begins, silently, to turn. There is no paper record of this meeting. That’s deliberate. The hand of the US, as it has been in so many 20th-century conflicts, remained hidden. Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there was little appetite for war among the American public. Even so, this was the first semi-formal, intelligence-sharing agreement between the two nations. 

ANTHONY WELLS: So they had this grand strategy meeting and planned how to tackle the Nazi problem on the assumption that at some point the United States would enter the war, given that the US was, at that point, transferring weapons and things often through Canada fairly surreptitiously to the United Kingdom because of the political situation in the United States.

NARRATOR: Weapons shipments - another very good reason to keep the Atlantic open, by the way. But the historic meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt wasn’t the only shadowy rendezvous to take place in 1941. Earlier in the year, Rear-Admiral John Godfrey of Room 39 had flown to New York to coordinate with Sir William Stephenson, Britain’s highest-ranking intelligence officer in the United States. 

ANTHONY WELLS: He was a Canadian, came from an interesting background, very successful businessman, very rich, very, very well established, and very, very loyal to the United Kingdom.

NARRATOR: Naturally, Godfrey had brought his second-in-command along for the ride. On the day of the meeting, the two men entered a nondescript, official building on New York’s Rockefeller Plaza. 

ANTHONY WELLS: The cover was a building, which is a sort of low, pretty low consular place doing passport stuff and all of that. And in the back area was another area where William Stephenson operated and was the interface between Churchill and directly with Franklin Roosevelt. 

NARRATOR: When they arrive, there’s a fourth man at the meeting, an American. 

ANTHONY WELLS: Admiral Godfrey goes over and Ian Fleming's come out of Portugal. He wants him at that meeting because this is the meeting at which Wild Bill Donovan comes up to New York from Washington.

NARRATOR: Wild Bill Donovan - an American hero, no less. He’s the US Army’s most decorated veteran of World War One. He’s also an experienced spy. Godrey and Fleming talk. Donovan listens. 

ANTHONY WELLS: So the meeting that takes place there in New York is the beginning of the genesis of the Office of Strategic Services because he gets the ideas from the discussions with the British and particularly Admiral Godfrey and Fleming, about how we can create for America when they go into the war - remember, this is before Pearl Harbor - a clandestine organization to do subversive activities in Europe. 

NARRATOR: Operation Goldeneye - an early example of the kind of hybrid intelligence-cum-paramilitary work that will come to define resistance efforts in Europe - fascinated Wild Bill Donovan. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And he goes eventually to England, sees how they organize the training, the logistics, the communications, and all of that, 

NARRATOR: In 1942, once America had formally entered the war, Donovan became the first director of the Office of Strategic Services - a quaint name for a very important organization. 

ANTHONY WELLS: And of course, after the war, OSS was the founding organization for the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

NARRATOR: Without Ian Fleming, the landscape of spy fiction would look very different indeed. But it’s also true that, without Fleming's real-life intelligence work, the real world of espionage might look very different too.

ANTHONY WELLS: Donovan modeled a lot of what he got up to in OSS on Fleming's organization that he created in order to do the things he did in Portugal and obviously other places during the rest of the war. It all got put in stone in terms of legislation - covertly and overtly - and all of that. But it was all about those special relationships that were built at the darkest time of the war. 

NARRATOR: In the next episode of this anthology, we’ll leap into another fascinating chapter in the life of the Special Relationship with returning expert Michael Smith and former CIA officer Jim Lawler. 

JIM LAWLER: We like to say, as I talk to my British colleagues, that perhaps we hadn't had that close cooperation since World War Two when we were running joint MI6 and OSS operations. 

NARRATOR: I’m Vanessa Kirby. Join us next time for a top-secret joint operation in Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya. Or, if you’re a subscriber to *Spyscape Plus* on Apple Podcasts, there’s no need to wait: you can listen to the first episode right now.