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Whaddya know?
'World War II provided the setting for many novels and films
that appeared after the war.'
Come on. Come on.
'They were significant as a means of exploring commercially
some of the struggles that lay behind the battlefields
of Europe and beyond. The British war movies made of these novels
achieved great success in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Formulaic" in Roger Ebert's account,
they nevertheless attracted large and appreciative audiences.'
Halt! Halt!
Halt!
'These books and films include Alistair MacLean,
who combines both the Second World War and the Cold War.
His key espionage novel is Where Eagles Dare,
exploring themes of patriotism,
courage and the cost of espionage.'
Broadsword calling Danny Boy,
Broadsword calling Danny boy, over.
"Broadsword calling Danny Boy, Broadsword calling Danny boy, over.
Broadsword, sir.
Danny Boy calling Broadsword, come in Broadsword, over.
MacPherson murdered, Thomas Christiansen and Berkeley captured.
I'm affecting entrance within the hour.
"Please have transport standing by, over."
Pull out now, Broadsword, save yourselves, over.
You must be joking, over and out.
That is an order Broadsword, over.
Broadsword. Broadsword!
'His theme of the secret traitor is seen again in the Guns of Navarone.
And in all Maclean's espionage novels, it features prominently.
Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle, tells of the thwarted plans of
a ruthless Nazi spy whose downfall is brought about by his falling in love.
The wind howled against the windows as the storm intensified.
In the dim light of the study the radio crackled to life,
a voice steady but urgent,
spoke of an impending invasion.
The war was coming closer and for the first time
Faber realised just how much was riding on him.
The Nazis needed him to get a message through,
the allies needed him to fail.
But in the end it would be his own choice,
his own survival that would determine the course of the war
and the stakes had never been higher.
Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975,
was made into a film starring Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland in 1976.'
By the way, have you found out who Stalin is yet?
Of course I have.
Why? Because I am hoping it is not him.
It isn't.
I want him buried right away.
'The causes of the Cold War, or, more importantly,
who caused the Cold War, the subject of continuing controversy,
was it the Americans, or was it the Russians?
Espionage was not really something exclusive, and clandestine,
it was actually the currency of the Cold War.
Spies were the poor, bloody infantry of the Cold War.
For the West, notwithstanding the debate,
the Truman Doctrine of 1947 was a prime cause.
The Truman Doctrine was designed to prevent the spread
of aggressive communism in Europe.
It was created from the long telegram
by American diplomat George Kennan in 1946.
Kennan wrote that the battle between these two centres
for command of world economy will decide the fate of capitalism
and of communism in the entire world.
George Kennan argued for a form of warfare through espionage,
and in particular through adversarial spying.
The atmosphere of this world of partition and division and conflict
is evoked in Carol Reed's film of Graham Greene's novella
The Third Man.'
Who are you looking for now?
Stop, just please don't.
Silly looking bunch.
Spies moved centre stage during the Cold War,
where everything was concealed, where those hostilities
between nations and ideologies moved underground
and the period of the Cold War
was where the development of spy fiction,
spy films begins, I think,
to exhibit a certain kind of coherence.
'From the anarchist of Tsarist Russia,
to the IRA of 1916.
From the Ergun and the Stern Gang
to the EOKA in Cyprus,
from the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium,
the Action Direct in France, the Red Brigades in Italy,
the Red Army Faction again in Germany,
the Rengo Sekigun in Japan,
through to the Shining Path in Peru,
to the modern IRA in Ulster...
...or the ETA in Spain,
terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised,
well educated, middle-class theorists
with a truly staggering personal vanity
and a developed taste for self-indulgence.'
Frederick Forsyth was among that group of writers
who had some direct experience of the world of espionage
and that feeds in to his fiction.
There is a sense of felt detail
in the intricacies of his plots,
that arise from experiences that he had had.
'The man in the grey suit walked into the hotel lobby, calm and unhurried.
He had done this a thousand times before.
He wasn't just any assassin, he was a ghost, a shadow in the night.
He didn't have a name, only a number.
His past was a blank slate,
erased for his own safety.
His future? A single mission. To kill a man.
He'd been trained for this, honed like a blade,
and now, the time had come.
As he approached the desk to check in, the bellboy didn't look up.
He didn't need to.
The Jackal was already a ghost in his mind.
There would be no trace left, no sign of his passing.'
If we take The Odessa File as an example,
this is a novel that describes the relentless pursuit
of an SS officer
after the end of the war by a young German.
It turns out that this officer has been central to the development
of the Odessa Organisation,
those who had not abandoned Nazi ideology
and were working for the overthrow of the State of Israel.
The Odessa Organisation was described in such detail
that many readers thought
that Forsyth was talking about something that had
historical existence, that it was real.
So the organisation is dismantled, but the villain escapes.
There's an interesting contrast between that escape
and what happens in the film version.
In the film version, there is a dramatic confrontation between
Miller and the villain Roschmann, at the end of the film,
and the villain is shot dead.
The SS officer does not escape
and does not survive.
I didn't do it. I couldn't even shoot straight.
If you kill me, you'd be killing - the wrong man. - You're disgusting.
But I tell you, it was Kurt Krause.
You can tell that to the German people, Roschmann.
I will, I will tell them.
You're not even worth a bullet.
I even have letters to prove what I say.
A woman wrote to me from New York.
I was only 11 months there in charge. There was not one hanging
or shooting during that time, I was really considered a joke!
So both book and film are raising difficult moral questions
about what it means to forgive or to forget betrayal
in a historical perspective.
'To understand everything is to forgive everything.
When one can understand the people,
their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power,
their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest,
one can forgive.
Yes, one can forgive even what they did,
but one can never forget.'
Whether we can forgive, whether we can forget,
but they do so in a different cultural context.
And I think you see that repeatedly
in film versions of spy stories.
'It is cold at 6:40 in the morning on a March day in Paris,
and seems even colder
when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.'
Robert Harris's Fatherland, made into a film in 1994,
is set in post-war Europe and imagines what the consequences
of a Nazi victory might have been.
It was an influential example of alternative history.
The room was oppressive,
the air thick with the smell of old paper and dust.
Xavier March stared at the files in front of him,
chilling realisation dawning on him with each page he turned,
the world was not what he'd thought it was.
History had been rewritten,
and now it was up to him to uncover the truth.
As a member of the Nazi Party, March had always followed orders,
but now, as he dug deeper,
he realised that the very foundation of his beliefs
were built on lies.
The Cold War shifted the focus of spy fiction
from resistance to Nazi Germany,
to the conflict between communist powers - primarily the Soviet Union -
and the capitalist West in the decades following World War II.
Anthony Horowitz's long-running television series Foyle's War,
which began with episodes featuring Christopher Foyle
as a high-minded police detective,
uncovering various crimes during World War II,
ends with a much darker series of plots,
based on his involvement with ethically questionable MI5 operations
after the end of the war.
It's a telling illustration of a cultural shift.'
If there was a traitor in SOE... SOE is finished, disbanded.
The traitor could have moved on,
could be in intelligence, could be in government.
Sir Ian Woodhead is my counterpart at MI6,
Eric Caplin is a member of the Gen 75 Committee,
it is inconceivable that either of them could have divided loyalties.
'Graham Greene's Catholicism led to him consistently interpreting...
...international affairs within an ethical framework.
Every novelist has something in common with a spy.'
White Hart Hotel.
Yes, Colonel White is staying here.
I'm afraid he's fast asleep at this time, sir.
Very good. I will.
'He watches.'
White here. You're through, sir.
Oh, hello, David.
This is a hell of a time to ring up. I'm sorry, sir, but it's urgent.
'He overhears.'
You're going to be inspected on Friday by
a very important personage, about as important as anybody can be
in this country.
'He seeks motives and analyses character.'
'His The Quiet American, written in 1955,
had film versions in 1958 and 2002.
They address American policy in Indochina,
rather than the communist block,
and predict the later destructive tangles
of American involvement in Vietnam.'
It's not like you can really help - these people. - You have a gun,
either of you? No.
They shall attack again tonight.
You don't want to be taken alive, believe me.
Shoot yourselves. - Thank you. - Thanks.
'It was a dangerous belief,
and it would be his undoing.
He didn't understand the complexities of the world,
nor the true cost of his interference.
I had tried to warn him,
but like all the others, he wouldn't listen.
He thought he could control things,
but the world didn't work that way.
In the end, he would learn the hard way,
if he lived to learn it at all.
Graham Greene's introduction to Kim Philby's memoirs
was regarded as worse than equivocal by some.
No place here for the importance of the defence of the realm,
an unanswered question that runs through the history of spies
and spy masters alike, is heard also in E M Forster's comment,
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,
I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."'
Old man, you never should've gone to the police, you know?
You oughta leave this thing alone.
Have you ever seen any of your victims?
You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things.
Victims, they can be melodramatic.
Look down there.
Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots
stopped moving forever?
If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped,
would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?
Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend,
free of income tax, you know?
Free of income tax. Well, you can save money now.
Lot of good your money'll do you in - jail. - That jail's in another zone.
There's no proof against me. Besides you.
'Our Man in Havana, set in Cuba,
mocks some of the absurdities of MI6,
absurdities that Greene had experienced personally.
The film version in 1959, though set as a comedy,
had serious undertones.'
Perhaps they're using us as bait. Of course, if the bait's no good,
you throw it away.
'The film of The Third Man, caught in its visual styling
of a shadowy Vienna,
the threat and menace of the pervasive atmosphere of the Cold War.
The Third Man was a masterpiece
based on a screenplay by Graham Greene,
directed by Carol Reed,
shot by cinematographer Robert Krasker,
and underlain by the zither music of Anton Karas,
a surprise number one hit in 1950
and was on the Billboard chart for 11 weeks in the USA.
We had a day and a night unit.
We worked from 8pm until 5am,
then went to bed, got up at 10am, worked with the day unit until four,
and then went back to bed until eight.
It's a bit of a rush, but it's better to rush than not get it all.'
When people think of the Cold War,
they think of it as a struggle between East and West.
What wave after wave of declassification
over the last ten to 20 years
has really shown, is that there was a global Cold War going on.
When we think of the Cold War, we think of the, you know,
the snowy windswept streets of Berlin and Vienna and Prague,
but actually the clandestine Caribbean, Africa, Latin America.
These were all places that saw a lot of intelligence activity.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,
was the most dangerous moment in British history
and in world history, but because we're a small offshore island,
if nuclear warfare had broken out,
we would by now simply be a hole in the North Sea...
...whereas there would be bits of the United States
and bits of Russia surviving.
Acting, therefore, in the defence of our own security
and of the entire Western Hemisphere,
and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution,
as endorsed by the resolution of the Congress,
I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately.
All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, from whatever nation or port,
were they found to contain cargos of offensive weapons be turned back.
In terms of an intelligence collection,
I think the biggest single success of Stalin's Russia
was getting the secrets of the atomic bomb.
The biggest British intelligence failure that we know about
in the 21st century, is without doubt the belief that
Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,
which was a terrible, but I think understandable error.
It is absolutely essential
that we ensure that Saddam Hussein
cannot go back to developing weapons of mass destruction,
weapons of nuclear, chemical, biological warfare.
What was he saying in public?
We don't have any weapons of mass destruction.
What was he saying in private? Of course we have weapons
of mass destruction. But why was he saying that?
Not because it was true, but he knew that if he told it to his advisors,
it would get through to Iran.
What about the Israelis?
He was afraid the Israelis might attack him,
but he thought they would be deterred if they thought he had
weapons of mass destruction. So there we are.
It was an understandable, but nonetheless a humiliating failure
on the part of British intelligence.
'But the upfront reason is that he was reclaiming
rightful Iraqi territory.
Look, it happens all over the world.
India took Goa, China took Tibet,
Indonesia has taken East Timor, Argentina tried for the Falklands.
Each time the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory.
It's very popular with the home crowd, you know."'
Knowing about one's successes and failures is quite fundamental
for any intelligence and security service,
and I think it's also important for people to know,
because based on that, they can judge the capability
of their governments and their government spies.
When we look at 20th-century history,
there's quite a lot of intelligence failures
that governments have been learning from.
One of them was the failure to see the fall of the Shah of Iran
in 1979. That was a big one.
Then it was also the failure to see the fall of the Soviet Union.
In some ways an intelligence failure was also not really seeing that
the Arab Spring will kick off in 2011.
And then there's other failures that have occurred,
such as the invasion of the Falkland Islands.
But also other types of failures, analytical failures, for instance,
in the run-up to the Iraq War.
There was clearly a failure in the West to understand
that Saddam Hussein did not have the WMD capability
that many Western services, not all, but many, did think he have.
'The CIA, in accounts like Hugo Wilford's
The CIA: An Imperial History,
is described as a quasi imperial organisation,
following the policies of the empires of Britain and France,
engaging in everything from regime change to having thoroughly mistaken
the assessment of many political situations,
not least that of the intentions of Saddam Hussein,
though they were not alone in that.
Steve Coll in his book The Achilles Trap,
additionally writes,
"Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere,
Saddam thought of the CIA as all-knowing.
Saddam Hussein assumed that the US was fully aware of his plans
to invade Kuwait. He mistook President Bush's lack of objection
for permission."
Cole further writes, "Years later while imprisoned
Saddam confronted a CIA officer about this."
"If you didn't want me to go in,"
the officer recalls Saddam asking, "why didn't you tell me?"'
When it comes to thinking about the war on terror,
and it comes to thinking about the 911,
what I'll call the 911 wars, the period after September 2001
where you see Western intervention across the globe,
these are stories,
framing stories, that perhaps offer
a more conflicted, ethical dimension.
Whereas in the Cold War, MI6 is,
you know, often for individuals on the side of the good guys.
So there is clear good guys, bad guys element to framing here.
When you get to the post 911 wars, there is, in the real world,
this morally ambiguous area when it comes to real world episodes
such as hostile interrogation, rendition.
The Iraq War creates this politically divisive period
of British political history,
where there are those for the conflict and those against.
It's really interesting to see how this understanding of
intelligence being a secret business has changed
in the past 20 years or so.
When you think of the way the Iraq war was sort of built on
this amount of classified information
and justified on very secret information,
which were, of course, a lie.
But then you have the events leading up to this,
Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
where you have an extraordinary amount of information
being declassified by President Biden,
in order to deter Russia's action,
and it says a lot about this sort of tension of how much information
should remain classified,
because secrecy is about temporality.
Having a secret, having a state secret is a question of time,
because this is what gives you the strategic advantage.
John le Carre was the most successful spy writer
and indeed author of books which have also been the best spy films
of the last 50 years.
One of the unusual things about his novels,
derived from the fact that he was the only example I can think of,
of a major spy novelist,
who worked at different times for both MI5,
the British security service,
and MI6, the Foreign Intelligence Service.
'John le Carre redefined the literary ambitions of the genre.'
I was immediately charmed by him.
I mean, he was the most delightful company.
He rapidly became to me, not John le Carre,
as he's, as he had been up until that point,
but David Cornwell, his real name.
'He had lived through all these lies, these betrayals,
and yet there was nothing but a kind of tired cynicism left.
He had forgotten how to be shocked,
how to be outraged.
The game was the game and in the end, it would swallow them all.
He had been a soldier once, fighting in a war he didn't believe in
and now he was a spy,
trying to fight a battle no one had ever explained.'
But what does he do in his novels?
He amalgamates MI5 and MI6
into a single British Intelligence Service,
which he calls The Circus.
'"Why spy?
For as long as rogues become leaders we shall spy.
For as long as there are bullies and liars and madmen in the world,
we shall spy.
For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive,
tyrants launch conquest
and consumers need resources,
and the homeless look for land,
and the hungry for food,
and the rich for excess,
your chosen profession is perfectly secure,
I can assure you."
And from time to time, you suddenly realised that this,
beneath this relaxed, charming exterior,
there was an interior which was bubbling with raw emotion,
with unhappiness, with... with rage, even.
So you knew the names of British agents all over the world.
I signed a blank cheque. The name of the payee was secret.
Who knew then? Who kept the notes?
Special dispatch, they added the name and mailed the cheque.
So you just provided a signature. A false signature.
After 18 years in the service, my sole contribution.
Shall we continue indoors? Want to write it down, don't you?
Don't know what you're looking for. Scratching around in the dust.
I think one of the things about him is that he was an actor.
I think he could have been a very successful actor
had he chosen to take that path and he took on roles.
I mean, as a spy, as most people know,
he worked for, first of all,
for British intelligence as a civilian, but then later on,
joined MI5 and then transferred to MI6.
He did have these different identities,
and he did have different identities, for example,
as loyal husband but as serial adulterer,
as affectionate friend
and as betrayer. He spied on his friends.
As a devoted father,
but someone who leaves his children behind.
In John Le Carre's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
and you also see this too in the television version
and in the film version,
there is a close approach between the mechanisms of
the classic espionage novel,
story, and those of the classic detective story.
But it also functions as detective fiction.
As in fact, a classic piece of detective fiction,
where the investigator, Smiley, George Smiley,
in this case, is not looking for a murderer,
though there is murder within this world, he's looking for a mole.
David was fascinated by Kim Philby and wrote a very interesting piece
about Philby, when Philby's memoirs were published,
and always thought that he recognised some kind of bond
with Philby, that he could have been Philby himself.
When Philby defected, you know, there was an attempt to minimise
his role and to suggest that he hadn't been very important.
And it was only considerably later
that it was revealed that he really had been at the top level
and could have risen to the very top itself.
Alleline.
Tinker.
N.
Tailor.
Bland.
Soldier.
Esterhase.
Poor man.
'Obscurity was his nature as well as his profession.
The byways of espionage are not populated
by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction.
A man who, like Smiley,
has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies
learns only one prayer,
that he may never, never be noticed.'
I think one of the things about David's great success
is it does conceal the nature of his art.
I think because his book sold so many copies
and they were made into big feature films,
people assumed that he was a genre writer, perhaps a pulp writer.
I think he's better than that. I think he's a major writer.
So if we think of John le Carre as a central example,
his mother left the family
when he was five years old,
that I think left a permanent mark on his nature, on his imagination,
his sense of the world.
He was on poor terms with his father,
so it really was a difficult relationship
and le Carre's persistent preoccupation with betrayal,
abandonment and isolation
in difficult circumstances,
does, I think, bear a very close relation
with those experiences. As is so often the case
with those who have been abandoned,
in his later life,
he himself turned into someone who abandoned others.
'Though John le Carre did not go to his father's funeral,
he nevertheless paid for it.'
He doesn't trust human relations.
He's cynical. He's often really quite bitter.
'John le Carre's life is at the heart of his narrative.
The sheer human power at le Carre's disposal
evokes the desperate insecurity of individuals
caught up in in-state secrets.
"Today, I don't remember feeling any affection in childhood
except for my elder brother,
who for a time was my only parent."'
If there remains one great conundrum in my life, it is my father.
Who seems to me to inspire also some of the worst or best characters
in me. He had a wonderful brain,
everybody who worked for him was in awe of his intellect,
but if there was a bent way of doing something, he took it.
Wonderful, wonderful, rich vein of material and very painful.
He had done quite a lot of jail
and he spent some years of his life on the run,
in late middle age, so it was a mess, just a bloody mess.
But, surviving it, it was also a privilege to be part of it
in some strange way, it taught you a lot about life,
lowered your expectations, raised them in other ways.
'It was Ronnie who did the hugging, never Olive.
She was the mother who had no smell,
whereas Ronnie smelt of fine cigars and pear-droppy hair oil
from Taylor of Old Bond Street, the court hairdressers.
John le Carre evokes the presence of his father,
the effect of a sometimes cruel presence,
of surviving in a world where he was abandoned by his mother
but remained fond and admiring of the father
who sometimes seemed to love him - yet beat him.
"Ronnie's violence was not news to me because he'd made a habit of
beating up his second wife as well."
Walter Isaacson in his review of le Carre's memoir The Pigeon Tunnel
captures the poignant essence
of such haunting by quoting Barack Obama.
"Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to
his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes."
Richard Nixon put it more succinctly.
"I was born in a house my father built."
Le Carre remembers his father gambling in Monte Carlo.
Beneath the lawn of the sporting club were small tunnels
from which trapped pigeons were ejected over the sea as targets.
The ones that survived returned to the place of their birth
where the same traps awaited them.'
There's hundreds of policeman in the garden, thousands of them.
I saw them through the window.
What are you doing?
What are you doing? What are you doing?!
I don't think you can understand John le Carre without understanding
the childhood of David Cornwall.
David's father was a serial con man
who spent two terms in prison
and who cheated people out of large sums of money.
David's mother had left the family home.
She left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to her sons
when David was only five years old.
As a little boy, he used to go up to women who arrived at the house,
and quite a number of women did arrive at the house,
because his father, Ronnie, Ronnie Cornwall was, um,
had many, many girlfriends.
David would sidle up to these women and say, "Are you my mother?"
He learned to spy, because no one told him what was going on.
When his father was taken off to prison,
no one explained where his father was.
No one explained where his mother was, these things just happened.
He wanted to have a normal family life.
He wanted to be a good father to his children
and he used this curious expression. He said, "I am the bridge that
my children must walk across in order to have normal lives."
We know from recent biographical research
that during his second marriage,
he had, as a minimum, 11 affairs.
John le Carre's interpretation of the world of espionage
is very personal and it is in part
a reaction against what he thought
was a dangerous falsification of the world of espionage,
really through the power of the image
of James Bond.
So in novel after novel,
you see him challenging that glamorisation
and you certainly see it in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
which was his breakthrough novel.
Come, come.
Jump, Alec! Jump, man!
Jump, man!
In both the book and the film the way in which those operatives
out in the field are exposed to injury or death.
You see that particularly in the devastating final sequence
in the film, that is not something that you would witness
in a Bond film.
David was working as...
...his cover role was working as a second secretary
in the British Embassy in Bonn.
But The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
just hit a nerve at the right moment.
It was the moment when the Berlin Wall went up,
when Kennedy came to Berlin,
when suddenly that seemed the centre of the world.
I think also he is the writer
about the post colonial experience,
about Britain trying to come to terms
with its much diminished role. After The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
he wrote a book called The Looking Glass War.
It upset a lot of people in the intelligence world,
because it made them appear incompetent,
and that was the thing that they didn't like.
Perhaps, if you're looking at SIS through the le Carre prism,
a lot of le Carre's post Cold War writing is often about
how the Secret Intelligence Service are doing things
that are not ethically good.
So for example, the backdrop to The Constant Gardener is
the SIS are, along with the British government,
supporting big pharma in post colonial Africa.
"My continent, Africa, is staggering under the weight of not one,
but three plagues. Yet still the governments of the USA and Europe,
at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies
that seem to control them, drag their feet and continue to give us
endless reasons why we should buy your branded drugs
at five, ten, 20 times the price."
Sweetheart, don't bother to see us off, it could be ages.
OK, well, if you're sure. Mwah!
'John le Carre's close friend Yvette Pierpaoli
was a French humanitarian who lived in Cambodia and throughout the world.
He dedicated his novel The Constant Gardener to her
and based his main character, Tessa Quale, upon her.
"Yvette, like almost no one else, had opened my eyes
to constructive compassion,
to putting your money and your life where your heart was
and I was not alone in this."'
When you look at the backdrop to some other le Carre novels,
SIS are involved and complicit in illegal arms trafficking.
So in the story of The Night Manager,
SIS is an organisation that is breaching arms embargoes
and supporting international military trade.
So there's a variance here between popular perceptions and reality.
What led you to believe that British arms are being exported
under the counter, through trade pass?
I was shown fake MOD end user certificates
for seven different arms companies, UK and US.
Do you mean these?
Yes.
Those are genuine MOD export certificates for Bulgaria and Italy.
That's not true.
I have signed letters from both Italian and Bulgarian governments
confirming the sales. This is a cover-up.
Angela, are you accusing me of lying?
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