#451 – Rick Spence: CIA, KGB, Illuminati, Secret Societies, Cults & Conspiracies
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The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG 1 for nutrition, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, masterclass for learning, and Shopify for selling stuff online. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a bunch of different kinds of reasons, go to lexfreedman.com/cont
The most powerful intelligence agency in history. I mean, it's an interesting question. I'd say probably in terms of historical longevity and consistency of performance that the Russian intelligence services notice I didn't say the KGB specifically, but the Russian intelligence services, going back to the czarist period, are consistently pretty good. Not infallible. None of them are. Of course, there's a common Western way of looking at anything Russian. Very often, I think it's still the case, Russians are viewed in 1 of 2 ways. Either they are bumbling idiots, or they are diabolically clever
So the scale of the infiltration, the number of people, and, the skill of it. Is there a case to be made that the Okhrana and the Cheka orchestrated both the components of the Russian revolution as you describe them?
Well, there's an interesting question for me. I mean, there are all kinds of questions about this. I mean, one of the questions is whether or not Lennon was an Ocrona agent. Okay. I've just said heresy. Some people I'll do that quite often because I am a heretic and proud of it. Great. Why, why would you possibly say that Lennon could have been an O'Connor agent? Well, let's look what he managed to do. So you had coming into the 20th century, a a single well, nominally, a single Marxist movement, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. And Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, majorityites and minorit
I always wonder how much deliberate planning there is within an organization like ACRANA, or if there's kind of a distributed intelligence that happens.
Well, one of the key elements in any kind of intelligence organization or operation is compartmentalization, need to know. So rarely do you have an occasion where everybody, everybody in an executive position are all brought into a big corporate meeting and we discuss all of the secret operations that are going on. No, no, you never do that. Only a very limited number of people should know about that. If you have a person who is a a case officer or his controlling agent, he's the only one that should know who those people are, possibly his immediate superiors. But in no way do you want that to
Well, that's a fascinating question. I mean, you could see this with NKVD. It's obviously an extremely powerful organization that starts to eat itself where everybody's pointing fingers internally also as a as a way to gain more power. This is the question is in organizations like that that are so compartmentalized, where's the power? Where's the center of power? Because you would think given that much power, some individual or a group of individuals will start accumulating that power. But it seems like that's not always a trivial thing. Because if you get too powerful, the snake eats that per
Well, if we go back again to the, the founder of Soviet secret police, Felix Derzhinsky. Derzhinsky dies in 1926, heels over after giving a heated speech to a party meeting. Now the common view, what you usually read, which is was k
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