Gabriel Gatehouse

Hello.

Good to be with you again.

Yeah, I mean, look, when I first heard it, Gordon, I thought this is palpable nonsense.

It's got to be nonsense, right?

It's got the whiff of conspiracy theory all over it.

The thing that first made me think, hold on a second, maybe there is something to this, is the alleged source of the story, right?

So as you know, Gordon, especially when you're dealing with the world of intelligentsia,

Most of the time you don't get to documentary evidence and really the quality of your sourcing is everything.

So my first question when I started looking into this, I was like, let's see if this is even credible enough to investigate.

My first question was, who is the source?

So Ed, Gordon Banks' grandson who brought it to me, had heard it from a guy who was a family friend who had read it.

It's a chain that goes, he heard it from him, you heard it from him, you heard it from him.

But it ends up, after four links in the chain...

with a very senior serving US senator for the state of Missouri, who was on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, and who, in the 1960s and 70s, not only received briefings from the CIA, but was also personally close to successive CIA directors, but particularly Richard Helms.

who was director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973, so at the time of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

When I saw that, I was like, OK, this is more than just some bloke heard it in a pub, right?

And could be true, could not be true.

The problem is the source is dead, right?

The name of the senator is Stuart Symington, senator from Missouri from 1952 to 1976.

24 years.