Original subtitles

British intelligence, at one critical moment in the 1980s,

had to act to prevent nuclear war.

It was able to do so because it had its own mole

at the heart of Russian intelligence.

That Russian double agent was Oleg Gordievsky.

Gordievsky became aware

that Russia had mistaken US and British nuclear war exercises

as preparations for a nuclear first strike.

Gordievsky also knew that in reaction,

Russia would launch its own nuclear first strike first.

He also knew that his own cover was blown,

that he'd been recalled to Moscow for interrogation,

and unless he could leave, he would be executed.

British intelligence got him out of Russia into Finland,

in the boot of a car.

The car was searched. The car boot was about to be opened,

when, suddenly, one of the British agents' wives

tore off her baby's nappy,

thereby distracting the tracker dogs,

who could not resist the smell.

The car was waved through.

Gordievsky's escape was signalled to him

by the playing of Sibelius' Finlandia

on the car cassette player.

Nuclear oblivion for the world turned on a baby's nappy

and the presence of mind of a small child's mother.

Gordievsky's escape also could be said

to have led to the Geneva summit in November 1985,

and the beginnings of a real end to the Cold War.

The world - and Oleg Gordievsky - were saved.

He lived for the rest of his life in secret and in disguise

in Surrey, England.

It was a threat. It was a huge military threat,

and it's still a threat,

even the military of the new Russia,

which is still a nuclear superpower.

And the KGB was a threat.

The KGB was less efficient than the Western intelligence services,

but the KGB was huge.

The KGB used to have, and still, they still have

about 2,500 active officers in the West.

Look, we're getting to be old men, and we spent our lives

looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems.

I can see through Eastern values,

just as you can see through our Western ones.

Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseum

the technical satisfactions of this wretched war.

But now your own side is going to shoot you.

Don't you think it's time to recognise

that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?

The Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The film The Lives Of Others strikingly portrays

the surveillance by the communist East European government

of its own population.

The Stasi were unflinchingly portrayed

in this Academy Award-winning film.

And gradually, it dawned on him...

...if a dawning can take place in total blackness...

that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals

for a play he had failed to take part in.

And that what he needed to do from now on,

if there was going to be a now on,

was abandon his morbid quest for order

and treat himself to a little chaos,

on the grounds that while order was demonstrably

no substitute for happiness,

chaos might open the way to it.

But I think what we're seeing today,

and what we started seeing, especially in the 2010s,

is disinformation on an industrial scale.

And now, with the rise of AI,

we don't know very much about how many states are using AI

to carry out disinformation, but based on what we know about AI,

this is only going to accelerate

the tempo of propaganda and disinformation

carried out by states such as Iran or such as Russia.

There's no way out, he announced with satisfaction,

and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one.

The demon won't go back in its bottle.

The face-off is forever, the embrace gets tighter,

and the toys cleverer with every generation.

Not for the main players...

not for the nasty little newcomers,

who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club.

We get tired of believing that.

Because we're human,

we may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away,

It never will, never, never, never.

The Russian view of the Cold War is rarely heard.

The deep resentment

of first the Soviet Union and now Russia

has not gone away.

Stalin and Khruschev both resented Russia not being seen

as an equal partner of the United States,

both at the end of the Second World War

and subsequently.

On the invasion of Ukraine on February 24th 2022,

President Putin expressed this view in extreme form.

Where does this insolent manner of speaking come from?

Where does this exceptionalism, infallibility

and all permissiveness come from?

Wherefrom comes that condescending, arrogant attitude

towards our interests and absolutely legitimate demands?

In contrast, George Robertson,

who was Secretary-General of Nato between 1999 and 2004,

said Putin, at their first meeting,

told him that he wanted Russia to join NATO,

and for Russia and Russian culture to be part of western Europe.

But he did not want to stand in line

with a lot of countries that don't matter.

He said the same thing to David Frost in a BBC interview.

Putin expected to change NATO to take account of Russian interests

and reflect Russia being part of European culture.

This was obviously unlikely to happen.

Thucydides wrote in the fifth century

that the Greek wars were the result of the rise of the power of Athens

and the fear this produced in Sparta.

Vladislav Zubok remarks that 25 centuries after Thucydides

that war has countless causes:

seeing the other as the enemy,

a need for moral superiority,

ideological delusions.

All the varied traditionalist, revisionist

or post-revisionist interpretations of the Cold War

remain simply interpretations.

Feature films like Argo, Munich, Bridge of Spies,

Enemy of the State, and The Good Shepherd

tackled controversial political themes,

though some facts were changed for the benefit of dramatic effect.

So, another way to think of intelligence

is through what we call the dirty hands dilemma,

which is, essentially, who is willing to carry the burden

of doing, you know, immoral things in order to protect the realm?

And one of the things that you see

when you watch a spy film, or a spy TV series,

is actually these people carrying the burden

of doing all sorts of immoral things.

And you, as a spectator, might experience

all sorts of extremely problematic feelings

when you watch a scene of torture, water-boarding and so on.

Look at me.

You don't look at me when I talk to you, I hurt you!

And, so, in a way, there is a sort of conflictual pleasure

to see people doing the sort of things

that you're not ready to do as an individual.

Someone just tried to blow up...

Zero Dark Thirty was an interesting one,

because the CIA actually agreed to give sensitive information

about the Bin Laden raid to the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow.

Start working on the American Al Qaeda cells.

Protect the homeland.

Bin Laden is the one who keeps telling them to attack the homeland!

One of the main messages of that film was,

enhanced interrogation worked.

Torture worked,

when it came to the hunt for Bin Laden.

Had it not have been for enhanced interrogation of terrorist suspects,

they would never have found Osama bin Laden.

There was an anger that the CIA had given this material to Bigelow,

essentially to justify some of the...

to justify the kind of gloves-off approach

to the war on terror that it took.

There is debate as to whether information derived from torture

actually led to the capture of Osama Bin Laden.

Kathryn Bigelow wrote,

"Torture was however, as we all know,

employed in the early years of the hunt.

That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden.

It means it is a part of the story we couldn't ignore."

The Guardian reported,

"Though torture was used by CIA the in the early 2000s,

it may not have been part of the story

of finding Osama Bin Laden."

Everyone will have their own moral compass.

For instance, when officers are running sources,

one of the dilemmas could be, you know,

how long am I going to ask the source to stay in place?

Should we be running sources who are conducting, perhaps,

illegal or various violent acts?

Oleg Penkovsky was a high-ranking Soviet official

providing key intelligence to the West.

He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962,

tried and executed in the following year.

Penkovsky is providing a whole range of information,

not just on the Soviet order of battle

when it comes to nuclear information -

so the nuclear stockpile of the Soviet Union

and its nuclear capability -

but Penkovsky is also providing a range of information

on Soviet military intelligence,

the types of strategies that the Soviets are going to employ

in their war against the West, should the Cold War break out.

But he's also, like other defectors

and other individuals further down the line,

he's providing information on Soviet intelligence's order of battle.

He's providing information on,

who are their leading intelligence officers

being sent overseas?

And it's the mundane information

that really is the building blocks of good intelligence.

♪ SOMBRE MUSIC

Everything passes.

Everything wears out.

Everything breaks.

It's just that I'm tired of being told I look at life too simply.

It isn't naive to believe that good exists, that evil exists.

I have known both of them - I've seen them, I've felt them.

They aren't just ideas that you can twist into deep phrases.

They aren't words to be clever with.

They are too vital.

We live by them,

or else we make everything meaningless.

While some recent practitioners

have maintained the sombre view of espionage

that often characterised the fiction and films

inspired by the Cold War,

others, as, for instance, the Austin Powers series of films,

appearing from to 1997 to 2002,

have seen the potential for satirical comedy in spy stories.

That really hurt!

Who throws a shoe?

Spy is a spoof film from Paul Feig,

the director or Bridesmaids,

that is full of affection for the conventions of the spy film.

Susie, get Rayna to safety now!

I've got her!

Get away!

Who puts a roof on a scooter? What are you, the Pope?

The Bridge Of Spies, made in 2015,

is based on historical reality, on a real story.

But it explores the ambivalence

around the contention between different ideologies,

the motives behind those who are entangled

with those confrontations.

But there is in The Bridge Of Spies a compelling sequence

when the handover is to take place.

Waiting for the arrival of a second American figure.

I acted honourably, I think they know that.

But sometimes people think wrong. People are people.

Let's see how they greet me.

What can I look for?

If I'm embraced or just shown the back seat.

Perhaps hell is like that,

a discordant confusion of anxious souls.

Some argued, some slept,

some shouted, some wept,

some wrote, some sketched,

and many conspired about their coming interrogation.

But mostly, they did no more than stare into space,

eyes unfocused as they tried to see tomorrow.

Insubordinate.

Insolent.

A trickster.

Perhaps with criminal tendencies.

Yes, that's a pretty fair appraisal. Sir.

Good.

Social class has always been a prominent feature

within spy novels and indeed in spy film.

Mr Grantby?

Mr Grantby, we are looking for an important piece

of scientific equipment.

It was lost on a train.

We think that you might be able to help us get it back.

Shh.

Later writers react against this,

and here it's worth mentioning Len Deighton.

Who came from a very different background

from that that we would encounter

in say, Graham Greene or Ian Fleming.

The image of Harry Palmer...

...is a fascinating one at a time when

you're thinking about class in post-war Britain.

I haven't seen you here before, sir.

No, well I don't, erm...

really care for these American shopping methods.

One has to move with the times, I suppose.

He is very much the anti-Bond and the working-class hero,

and his mannerisms towards superiors and how he how he treats them.

Yes, sir.

And the girl Courtney too. You didn't come here...

Excuse me. Sorry.

You didn't come here to talk to me about...

Oh, men!

...button mushrooms and birds.

But I also think there's still an element here of the bourgeois

and something that people would like to live up to

in terms of his lifestyle.

Champignon.

Nothing but the best for our Palmer.

And in terms of, you know, the presentation of intelligence,

very much... you know, forward-thinking.

The room was silent,

except for the hum of the fluorescent lights.

I sat at my desk, reviewing the report.

Another one of those routine cases.

But something about it nagged at me.

There were no big names, no major intelligence,

but still, something didn't add up.

The problem with this job...

...is that you never know who to trust.

We do see a complacent acceptance

of older ideas about gender and the role of women,

which Deighton is quite happy to accept.

- Hello? - Bald Eagle wants to see you urgently at his place.

Look, he's expecting you at at 1200 hours.

Tell Ross, er...

...I'll be late.

Really work on the insubordinate bit, don't you?

You're useless in the kitchen. Go back to bed.

"I've been taking things too seriously for years," I said.

"I'm afraid it makes me a difficult man to live with."

"But I've stayed alive, sweetheart."

"And that means a lot to me."

One of the striking features about spy fiction and spy films

is that it is a very male-dominated genre.

It is partly because it's an action-based genre.

That it often involves

international travel, exotic location,

all things that were not so immediately accessible

to women writers.

In the middle of the 20th century, in the context of World War Two,

we have Helen MacInnes, a very accomplished novelist

who was writing on the basis of personal experience.

Von Aschenhausen sat on the edge of a large desk.

His eyes were fixed on the man standing

over the girl roped to a chair.

He spoke again,

"You fool, you stupid little fool."

"Can't you see I must, I will find out."

Her novel Above Suspicion was based

on a honeymoon journey through Europe,

with her husband, who was a classical scholar.

So, she was writing about a world that she knew.

She was a very politically engaged writer,

always pushing back against what seemed to her

the dangerous self-deceptions of Europe

in the context of poisonous, political ideologies.

There's nothing like self-pity for thoroughly dissipating a man,

and when a nation indulges in that luxury,

it finds itself with a dictator.

The Bond girl,

whose role in the early Bond films

was always to be gorgeous

and, broadly speaking, sexually available,

that role has been superseded

by the formidably active figure,

who is as capable of inflicting damage in a fight

as any of her male colleagues.

And is fully involved in the plot,

rather than just a kind of passive vehicle.

In a recent television series, Black Doves,

you see a complex spy narrative

which is dominated by women.

This isn't a complaint. This is vengeance.

What are you talking about?

We can't undo what's done. We can't bring people back.

This here is a good an ending as you're gonna get,

so take it. Helen. This is NOT you.

Who do you think I am, Sam?

Women have always been at the heart of Britain's history of espionage

and I think what we tend to miss is how effective these women were.

Even with the founding of MI5 and MI6,

there were women who played key roles.

Breaking the Enigma code was hugely important

to Allied success in the war.

Bletchley Park, 75% of the staff there were female,

couldn't have operated without that input.

And there were women at very senior levels,

language experts and mathematicians working on the codebreaking.

The women who joined the SOE, the Special Operations Executive,

came from 13 different nations. And Eisenhower said

that they probably shortened the course of the war by some months

and made a very considerable contribution

to ultimate Allied victory.

It was only in the 1950s that Britain started making films

like Odette and Carve Her Name With Pride,

that showed the role that women had played

with the SOE or behind enemy lines.

My name is Maurice Buckmaster.

I have been asked to say a forward to this story.

My only claim to do so is that, as their commanding officer,

I knew intimately all the volunteers

who formed the French section of Special Forces.

It was in September 1942 that Odette Sansom,

alias Madame Odette Metayer,

number S-23, known to us as "Lise",

completed her training.

For her bravery and bearing, when in the hands of the enemy,

Odette was awarded the George Cross,

the highest British honour that can be bestowed on any woman.

This is her story.

Au revoir, Lise. Good luck. Au revoir. Merci.

Perhaps one of the ironies is that

it's because women tend to be overlooked

that made them so useful in many roles in the war.

And why it is relevant to be a woman is not because they were beautiful,

it's not because they were seductresses,

it's because women do have a superpower in the 1940s,

arguably still today,

and that is that they are overlooked and they are underestimated,

and that gave them perfect opportunity

to serve in intelligence gathering.

The women faced exactly the same fundamental threat as the men,

and many of them lost their lives.

We don't need to have a female James Bond,

because we actually had real female

Special Operations Executive agents out there

who were playing that role.

They weren't Bond girls, they were Bond.

Better than Bond, because they were real,

they were in place, in the role, in the war.

So, these are the stories that we still need to tell accurately.

There had been earlier explorations of race and ethnicity

and here we might mention Sam Greenlee's really seminal book,

The Spook Who Sat By The Door.

Sam Greenlee's deeply challenging book and film

present a fictional scenario and a realistic fictional apocalypse

based on a Black ex-CIA agent

becoming a CIA-trained and revolutionary Black Power leader

and fomenting an insurrection

to overturn White power in the United States,

based on the very techniques learned by Sam Greenlee himself,

when he was himself a spook trained by the CIA.

The book, initially published in Britain,

and the film that Sam Greenlee co-produced

show a young Black CIA agent turning against the state

and the institution that trained him

in the intelligence methods and techniques

to be used against foreign powers.

He uses them to marshal a Black Power insurrection

in the United States.

Created at the time of the assassination

of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy,

with a background of accompanying demonstrations and riots

throughout the United States,

the book and film represent one of,

and perhaps the only, full dramatisation

of the radical aims of an extreme incarnation

of the Black Power movement.

Released by United Artist, Sam Greenlee, and others,

believe that the FBI removed

all prints from cinemas showing them,

when it became clear that the film was going to be a great success.

Negatives were lost or destroyed.

One was eventually rediscovered for the DVD release in 2004.

Sam Greenlee never recanted on, or changed his views,

on the need for a revolutionary freedom for Black Americans.

The book and the film are a powerful account

of the frustrations and injustices

powering the Black Power movement in the United States in the 1970s.

It is a remarkable creative assault

on the more usual personal fictions and representations

of intelligence and espionage.

The American writer Aya De Leon

writes from the perspective of a Black woman,

in A Spy In The Struggle in the 2020s,

where she is thinking about divided loyalties,

as so many spy writers do.

Loyalty between national interests and the interests of Black people,

which, in that novel, are quite often in conflict.

The deal wasn't just about money, it was about power.

The women at the table didn't just want the cash,

they wanted to show they could run the game

better than the men who'd been in charge for years.

They had the skills, the knowledge and the ambition.

But ambition wasn't enough.

It was the willingness to break the rules,

to bend them so far they snapped.

If they wanted to win, they had to play dirty...

...and she wasn't afraid to get her hands bloody.

The central points of concern in spy novels and in spy films

change as the years go by.

Bourne waited in the Renault,

two hundred yards east of the restaurant entrance,

the motor running, prepared to race ahead

the instant he saw Villiers drive out.

Several others had already left, all in separate cars.

Conspirators did not advertise their association

and these old men were conspirators in the truest sense.

They had traded whatever honours they'd earned

for the lethal convenience of an assassin's gun

and an assassin's organisation.

Age and bias had robbed them of reason,

as they had spent their lives robbing life

from the young and the very young.

The easiest thing in the world

is to convince yourself that you're right.

As one grows older, this is easier still.

You see it reflected in a different light,

in Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity.

Where the story turns on the central character's

having lost his identity.

What was it?

Why won't it leave me?

Some terrible thing is deep inside me

trying to break out.

Trying, I think, to kill me.

Help me, Marie. For God's sake, help me.

I mean, we're all trying to find out who the hell we are.

Aren't we?

So, the image of the CIA

throughout the Bourne films, the Bourne books

is really of an agency that, yes, is attacking individuals overseas,

but Bourne himself is fighting rogue elements within the CIA.

And this is, you know, plays into that broader idea

that post-911, the CIA can get up to whatever it wants.

The CIA is involved in extraordinary rendition.

It's involved in torture.

It's involved in drone strikes and extrajudicial killing.

Jason Bourne had no memory of who he was.

He had no idea how he'd ended up in a hospital in Paris

fighting for his life.

All he knew was that he was being hunted

and that the people after him would stop at nothing

to make sure he was dead.

But as his mind began to clear, he realised something else.

They weren't just hunting HIM.

They were hunting what he'd become.

A man with a past, a man with no future...

and a man with no hope of escape.

There are certain things that secret intelligence agencies can do,

that the everyday citizen and corporations cannot do.

So, in the case of the UK,

only the UK's intelligence security community,

MI5, GCHQ and SIS,

and can break law.

They are given express permission

by a Secretary of State or a senior civil servant

to breach the legal frameworks that are in place.

So, we know that the US intelligence community

is really interested in social media.

They're interested in the power of social media

for what they're calling "anticipatory intelligence".

So, can a computer, can an algorithm

be made to scan the world's social media in real time,

to gauge the temperature of a population?

To gauge how close a group or a certain population

is close to protesting, is close to rioting.

That's the kind of "Brave New World" thinking.

One London hedge fund

has successfully used these kinds of ideas

to outperform financial markets by a considerable margin.

The US intelligence community was completely blindsided

by the Arab Spring back in 2013.

Some intelligence professionals and some computer scientists

would have you to believe that, when perfected,

AI and computers will mean that the intelligence community

will never be blindsided by an Arab Spring event again.

Standing on the tube,

Coe was studying his fellow passengers,

gauging their identities.

There was a checklist he'd memorised,

a crib sheet on how to spot a terrorist.

And there was another checklist, allowing for the possibility

that terrorists might have got hold of the first checklist

and adapted their behaviour accordingly.

And Coe had memorised this too.

And he was mentally running through them,

scoring his fellow travellers,

when it struck him there was conceivably a checklist

for spotting members of the security services.

He was doubtless ticking all the right boxes himself.

The thought made him want to giggle,

which was itself on one of the checklists.

Mick Heron has been a hugely popular writer in recent years,

perhaps primarily because of the brilliant adaptations

of his work for television.

This was the blissful break,

when the world seemed a safer place,

between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.

The office was as bleak as its inhabitants.

Jackson Lamb stood by the window, a cigarette dangling from his lips,

watching the rain pour down.

The city outside was alive,

but inside the walls were closing in.

Slough House, the graveyard for MI5's failed agents,

was no place for hope.

Lamb had long given up on it,

but there was always one last job,

always a reason to keep pushing forward.

Even if that reason was just to spite the people

who had left him here.

I think I'd put to you that hostile intelligence agencies,

they don't invent discontent within society.

They don't invent angst, hostility, division within society.

But what they do is they exploit it.

They exploit already existing discontent.

They exploit and amplify and weaponise

existing divisions within society.

So, whenever we see things in the news, protest, riots,

we should always think to ourselves,

you know, how is this going to be exploited

by people who would do us harm?

Get your own house in order,

that in itself is a tool of resilience,

that in itself is a barrier to hostile acts by your enemies.

They take their instructions, or tasking, from the government.

Intelligence agencies are only responding

to the demands of the government themselves,

so, to borrow the criticism of the CIA in the 1970s,

they're not a rogue elephant.

They are responding to specific tasking by a government,

and they are following through

on what they're told to go out there and collect.

And that's the great sort of divide

between the popular depictions of intelligence and reality.

For decades to come,

the spy world will continue to be the collective couch

where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

Other novelists have looked at differing approaches to espionage.

Like Stella Rimington,

Charles Beaumont has personal experience of MI6.

His A Spy Alone is based on the fictional premise

of an Oxford spy ring, in an echo of the Cambridge ring,

with members who have different reasons

of being prepared to work for Putin's Russia.

Some recent spy fiction,

including Adam Brookes's Night Heron trilogy,

have turned their attention to China as a global threat.

"The greatest long-term threat

to our nation's information and intellectual property

and to our economic vitality

is the counter-intelligence and economic espionage threat

from China."

It's the oldest question of all, George.

Who can spy on the spies?

The idea that, somehow, the CIA and the British

are behind everything and they're the evil enemy

is something that's pushed forward by other external actors,

like the Russian state.

And I think that it comes back to this idea

of weaponisation of history, and also weaponisation of image

is key in shaping propaganda hearts and minds.

He betrayed his country, yes.

Perhaps he did.

But who among us has not committed treason

to something or someone more important than a country?

They never understand it, do they?

They never know what it costs.

The sordid tricks of lying and deceiving.

The isolation from ordinary people.

They think you can run on their kind of fuel,

the flag-waving and the music.

But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you?

When you're alone.

You've got to hate.

And it needs strength to hate all the time.

And what you must love is so remote, so vague...

when you're not a part of it.

What I worry about is the Americans weaponising

American intelligence access for political ends.

Back in 1973,

the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger

were becoming increasingly alarmed by their perception

that the Brits were getting too friendly with Europe.

And Kissinger and Nixon had been saying to Heath,

"You know, just slow down on European integration,

the European project," and Heath wasn't listening.

Kissinger picked up the phone to the NSA and said,

"Can you just stop sharing priceless NSA intelligence

with the Brits until these people in Downing Street

start singing from our hymnal."

My worry is that Trump will say to NSA,

maybe Britain is doing something that Trump is not happy about,

my worry is that he will try to whip us into shape

by saying to the director of NSA,

"Yeah, let's, um... let's just turn the tap off."

Ukraine's successful intelligence-led drone attack

on a large section of Russia's bomber fleet,

previously bombing the Ukraine,

both may change the nature of defence, armaments of warfare

and present an almost Bond- and Q-like ability,

to make brilliantly conceived gadgets,

combined with total intelligence,

more effective than billion-pound aircraft carriers,

wings of attack aircraft and big armies.

Intelligence and the nature of warfare are changing.

Israeli intelligence created 5,000 exploding pagers

with deadly effect.

Ukraine's president, Zelensky's father

is one of Europe's leading experts in computing and cybernetics.

It is hard not to wonder if,

with the possible help of MI6

and President Biden's intelligence-fed information,

that the Zelenskys created an extraordinary

intelligence-led military coup

when Ukraine successfully attacked Russia's bomber fleet.

World events and personal political opinions

are being weaponised by both benign and malevolent state actors.

In the real geopolitical world

of increasing international conflict,

the breakup of the post-war settlement and NATO consensus,

an apparent new Cold War,

continuing conflict and destruction in the Middle East,

the rise of China,

the real world of intelligence becomes increasingly important.

There is the possibility in the West of the Five Eyes

intelligence-sharing arrangements breaking down.

In short, all the familiar patterns of spying

and secret intelligence are changing.

The worlds of appearance and reality,

of public and private,

of the fiction and the real geopolitical world are merging.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky