Francis Pym

I mean...

Whether this meeting was clearly authorized, Francis Pym signed off on it as foreign secretary.

There's a note in the margin of his submission to Thatcher saying, we've got to do this.

Whether Reagan formally signed off on it is not clear because Bill Casey was the kind of guy who liked to do stuff off the books.

And the plan was that they would, between them, the two of them would try and bluff their way.

through the Turkish border into Turkey because that was thought to be really the only border that was reasonably porous and from there they could get out.

But at the last moment, McCready was told by Francis Pym, this was Pym's decision, you can't go.

You, McCready, cannot go.

And if I were a Labour PM, I might want to get rid of some of them, as he joked in the Downing Street party, or may or may not have joked at Downing Street.

Of course, it was Francis Pym, I think, 43 years ago, who joked about, said that... landslides on the whole don't tend to produce successful governments.

And that was in relation to the Thatcher predictions at the time in 83.

And I think it's been borne out by events.

Well, that clearly is not clearly the fulfillment of the resolution.

Mr. Francis Pym.

And now for the family messages.

And we're starting with a few on tape.

They have to get authority to do this.

And the foreign secretary at this point is, is Francis Pym.

It's -- The Falklands War is raging, by the way.

It's, it's at its height, so the, the MI6 is not really focused on this, on this issue.

And the first thing that, that Francis Pym says is, "Okay, we can get him out, but you, Ian McCreedy, you can't go." Because I think he calcu- he clearly calculated that the diplomatic fallout from having, you know, having an MI6 officer intercepted at the border would be just too great.

So if Kozitskin was gonna do this, okay, but he'd have to go out pretending to be a British diplomat on his own.

And so that is what they tried to do.