Rick Spence — A historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult, and military history. He is known for heretical interpretations of well-known historical events.
The gist
Rick Spence joins Lex Fridman to trace the deep history of espionage, from the Tsarist Okhrana through the Cheka, KGB, CIA, and FBI, arguing that intelligence services tend to accumulate power and play their own games. He explores how agents are recruited via the MICE framework (money, ideology, coercion, ego), how agent provocateurs infiltrated revolutionary movements, and whether figures like Lenin may have served the secret police. The conversation moves into the occult roots of Nazi ideology through the Thule Society, the origins of anti-Semitism and the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the psychology of cults, rituals, and secret societies like the Bohemian Club. It closes with a revisionist account of the Manson family murders, casting Manson as a likely confidential informant and the killings as drug-world copycat crimes rather than a Helter Skelter race-war plot.
Big reveals
- By the early 20th century the Okhrana had so thoroughly infiltrated every Russian radical party that Spence argues it could largely dictate what those parties did.
- Spence's heretical claim: the Tsar was not overthrown by revolutionaries but by politicians in a parliamentary coup in 1917; Lenin overthrew the provisional government eight months later.
- He suggests Lenin may have been a witting or unwitting Okhrana agent, since splitting the Marxist movement into warring factions served the secret police's interests perfectly.
- MK Ultra grew from a 1949 CIA meeting (revealed in an FBI memo) where they discussed erasing memories and implanting false ones via hypnotic suggestion, years before the program officially began in 1953.
- Spence argues Epstein was either running his own blackmail business or fronting for someone, drawing a direct parallel to a 1930s pre-Nazi Berlin occultist who filmed prominent people for blackmail.
- Nazism began as an Army-financed 'counter-communist' movement: the German Workers Party was a Thule Society offshoot, and corporal Adolf Hitler was sent in by the Army as a trained propagandist to take it over.
- Spence dismantles the standard origin story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, dating its first appearance to a 1903 obscure St. Petersburg newspaper and proposing French writer Maurice Joly as the original author.
- He argues Charles Manson was a confidential informant (likely for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics) which explains his 'get out of jail free' treatment, and that the murders were drug-world copycat killings to free Bobby Beausoleil.
Things worth remembering
- Agent recruitment follows the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego, with Spence arguing ego was the strongest motive for Cambridge spy Kim Philby.
- The Okhrana once had its own agents assassinate the Minister of the Interior, their nominal boss, because he was an imperial bureaucrat and not truly part of their organization.
- The Okhrana planted multiple agents in the same group who didn't know each other, cross-checking reports; they once exposed their own agent Yevno Azef, head of the SR terror brigade, to sow paranoia.
- John le Carre recalled being told on recruitment into British intelligence that he had to be willing to lie and to kill, since deception is a virtue in that realm.
- The Bohemian Grove's central ritual is the 'Cremation of Care,' performed before a giant owl effigy; Nixon's 1968 Lakeside talk there effectively vetted and launched his presidential comeback.
- Aleister Crowley defined magic (spelled magick) as 'the Art and Science of causing change to occur in conformity with Will,' which Spence compares to a high school pep rally as a magic ritual.
- The Thule Society took its name from a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race, and grew out of Ariosophy, a racist offshoot of Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy.
- The term 'anti-Semitism' was coined in the 1870s by German journalist Wilhelm Marr, who was himself part Jewish, as a more 'scientific'-sounding replacement for 'Jew hate.'
- The idea of Jews as a hostile, distinct people dates back to roughly 300 BC with the Greco-Egyptian historian Manetho, predating Christianity.
- Reeve Whitson, a figure who hovered around the Manson prosecution, later surfaced as a CIA officer in Central America and may have known of the Tate murders before the bodies were officially discovered.