Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language.

APPLAUSE

BAND PLAYS CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Russian spies are treated as heroes.

You see Anna Chapman,

this huge sort of Russian personality,

that then goes on television.

She was the crown jewel of the Russian intelligence service.

She was a very savvy individual.

She was a real threat.

We'd been on Anna for 24/7.

Our undercover agent met her at a Starbucks

down in Hanover Square,

near her home in Lower Manhattan.

That foot right there? That's one of my guys.

He had a concealed video camera there.

Just sitting there with a cup of coffee,

like anybody else in a Starbucks,

like she's done to us several times, just sitting there,

minding her own business.

But, you know, she was doing nefarious intelligence work,

and we're now turning the tables on her.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is on his first trip to America...

President Obama has welcomed Russia's president to Washington.

It's the start of a new charm offensive.

Good afternoon, everybody. Please be seated.

Dobry den.

There was a conceit in a lot of politicians, they thought,

if only they could bring their magic to this relationship.

They could create a proper alliance and an understanding.

After many meetings around the world,

I am delighted to welcome my friend and partner,

President Medvedev, to the White House.

Obama had been elected president...

...and tries to reset

America's relations with Russia.

Putin hands the presidency over to Medvedev.

Medvedev represented kind of a new face.

He had the ability to be able

to communicate

not only with presidents, but with other leaders,

and conveyed the impression that...

...that Russia was entering the 21st century.

We have done a lot to build confidence

between our countries.

And, to a certain extent, we made our world safer.

Russia obviously was a country that had a lot of nuclear bombs.

The United States had a lot of nuclear bombs,

even though we did not feel Russia was the same kind of superpower

it was when it was the old Soviet Union.

We just concluded some excellent discussions.

There was a lot of hope that built on some of the past treaties

that we had begun to have with Russia,

that we could break some new ground

with regards to nuclear limitations.

But there were a lot of old hardliners in the CIA

who kept saying to me...

..."Don't hold your breath."

Russia may appear to be more friendly...

...but they always urged me to remember

that Russia was still an enemy.

Hurrah!

Putin remains as Prime Minister.

And he's basically the puppet master.

And Medvedev is a puppet.

Putin and his associates,

they'd been brought up in the Cold War

and steeped in it.

The Cold War had not completely gone away.

The Russians were constantly trying to find ways of keeping tabs on,

particularly the United States of America.

Hurrah!

CAR HORNS HONKING

The Russians started to recruit younger individuals.

They could be students.

They could be, in the case of Anna Chapman,

a young entrepreneur.

This is somebody that they could develop and train over time

to provide intelligence back

to the Russian Intelligence Service.

We really didn't have much knowledge,

other than the fact that we knew that she was the daughter of

a Russian Intel officer.

She's extrovert, outgoing.

She was really, you know, in a very short period of time,

able to make a connection with people, develop a relationship,

and then, more importantly, maintain that relationship.

And if you're in this business, that's what you want.

And she had that in spades.

But it wasn't just Anna Chapman.

It became clear that this was a network.

We uncovered the fact that there was this elaborate, elaborate scheme

of officers here operating in the United States...

...for a number of years, if not decades...

...trying to develop and steal America's closest secrets.

The person you might bump into at an academic conference.

The person you might bump into who you think

is your investment adviser.

The person you might run into at a children's, you know,

soccer or football match...

...who are in fact officers of the Russian Intelligence Service.

I can't tell you that.

The beginning is something that

the United States has never spoken about - and consequently,

I can't speak about it either.

The thing they won't tell you is

that the crucial figure is Aleksandr Poteyev.

The FBI often refer to him as The Source.

He is a Russian intelligence officer and was a KGB man.

He'd worked in Russian special forces.

He's based in Moscow,

and he's recruited by the FBI as their agent.

It's a very rare event that an officer from

Russian Foreign Intelligence defects,

and he would have had knowledge of

the most precious secrets of Russian intelligence -

which was the identity of its illegal operatives

working in Western countries.

I mean, there are dozens and dozens,

and dozens of Russian deep-cover spies who are identified

because of Aleksandr Poteyev.

I committed to resetting the relationship

between our two nations.

And in President Medvedev,

I've found a solid and reliable partner.

At the same time Barack Obama and his White House were engaged

in discussions with Medvedev and the Russians,

there's this massive group of deep-cover officers

within the United States.

When you look at a network that large,

always in the back of everyone's mind was,

"Well, if you have this many that we know about,

"what's out there that we don't know?

"And what are they doing, and who are they,

"and where are they, and what are we missing?

"And what might be causing far greater damage to

"the United States' national security

"that we simply just aren't even aware of?"

This is huge, you know? It's much bigger than us.

Illegals.

This is the creme de la creme of the Russian Intelligence Service.

It is a programme that dates back to the '40s.

Their purpose was to establish themselves here inside

the United States as legitimate US citizens.

You'd have them over for dinner.

Your kids go to the same schools.

They're just like anybody else.

But they've been highly trained to be sleeper agents, if you will,

here in the United States, and collect information

and feed it all back to Moscow.

We had opened investigations

to really start digging into these people.

And so I, along with the team,

had to come up with evidence to show that,

beyond a reasonable doubt, these were Russian agents here,

deep cover Russian agents.

This was an incredible operation.

The code name for the entire case was Ghost Stories.

My first assignment on this case was to work a couple.

Their code names were Dead Silence and Sweet Temper -

who I learned were Richard Murphy and Cynthia Murphy.

When we first saw them, I'm like,

"OK, yeah, just normal-looking people,"

like me and you.

They lived in an apartment in New Jersey.

They had two daughters here in the United States,

and they were a typical, you know, American family.

Our team did a covert entry into the Murphys' residence.

They spent a couple hours going through the apartment,

specifically drawers, closets.

In the case of Richard Murphy,

he was OCD.

Very, like, obsessive compulsive

about things being in the right place.

And, as luck would have it,

all of the tradecraft that he needed to be a Russian illegal here

was in a nice box in his closet.

All the spy paraphernalia was there.

A covert communications system that they use to communicate

back and forth to their handlers in Russia.

Also invisible ink.

This is not something that a normal person is going to have.

That was really, you know, proof beyond a reasonable doubt

that they are Russian spies.

We started to find these types of indicators across the US,

These small clues and missteps.

We had Richard Murphy and Cynthia in Montclair.

Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley in Boston.

Michael Zottoli and his wife, Patricia Mills,

and then, Mikhail Semenko in the Washington, DC area.

And then, you had Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez...

...and Anna Chapman in New York.

Through their own hard work, Anna Chapman and the Illegals

are making a lot of headway into gaining access to information

that would be of interest to the Russians.

Cynthia Murphy, she was a financial planner,

advising some high-net-worth individuals, but also individuals

close in and around Hillary Clinton.

When you look at Zottoli, he presented himself as involved

in banking issues around communications.

When you look at Heathfield and the company he founded,

he certainly had some success not only in developing contacts

within the US government,

but also somebody who had some relationship and interaction with

the US nuclear weapons programme.

My first business was in London.

Anna became very good at networking.

I really know what they look for.

She had many friends who were men.

And she was able to use her sex appeal to, you know,

get within the circles that she needed to.

So, she definitely worked that angle.

She was, in fact, quite literally in bed with, you know,

some of the top, you know, Wall Street financial people,

people who had influence in political circles in,

you know, city planning and finance.

We would follow her to different locations, and clearly,

it was the who's who of Manhattan.

We needed to arrest these folks.

If we faltered in any way to alert them,

it would be game over.

No-one knows they're here.

We didn't want to be the ones to mess this up.

The FBI briefers come over

and sit down in my office.

My reaction to the information

that had been presented to me about Ghost Stories...

...was, in many ways, a wake-up call.

All right. Thank you very much, everybody.

Spasibo.

On one side, we've got the president meeting with Medvedev.

And on the other side, we got ten Russian spies

that are prepared to cut our guts out.

That conflict had to be presented at the highest levels.

Joe Biden was Vice President. He was in the room.

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

Tom Donilon was National Security Adviser.

First reaction from the National Security Adviser

and the Vice President was, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.

"We've got - the president's meeting with Medvedev.

"If suddenly, we're arresting a bunch of Russian spies,

"you're going to basically torpedo the efforts of the president

"to try to work out some kind of agreement."

They said, "No, no, no, we can't go ahead with the arrests

"until we've completed the relationship with Medvedev."

I was very concerned that, if we waited a few days,

that we could lose the opportunity.

That was critical towards stopping

all of these Soviet spies from leaving the country.

I called Tom Donilon back into the room, and I said,

"Tom, I want you to think about the headlines

"in the Washington Post that say,

"'President fails to arrest Russian spies.'

"That headline could be very damaging."

You could see that he was worried.

And what we agreed on was that we would go ahead

and put the FBI in place, be prepared to make the arrests -

but that those arrests would not take place until Medvedev was

on a plane and out of our United States airspace.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

Presidents Obama and Medvedev bonded over hamburgers

and looked to press the reset button on US-Russian relations

after a meeting at the White House.

Medvedev knows the vast amount of effort that

the Russian Intelligence Services are putting into clandestinely

trying to steal American secrets.

But Obama knows full well about what Russia is doing,

including this network of Illegals.

So, while they're having a cheeseburger together,

unbeknown to Medvedev,

the arrests were already in play.

It wasn't just going out to a townhouse in Boston,

to Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley.

It was the Murphys in New Jersey.

Mikhail Semenko,

Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills,

in the Washington, DC area.

You had Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez,

and Anna Chapman in New York -

all of which had to be coordinated at the same moment.

At the same time that this was happening, The Source,

the core of their knowledge about this Illegals programme,

was getting jumpy.

Aleksandr Poteyev had done ten years as a spy

within Russian Intelligence.

He was worried the Russians were onto him,

that his own side was suspicious about there potentially being

a leak from the programme.

And he told the Americans he wanted out.

Alexander Petrov says goodbye to his colleagues

at Russian Foreign Intelligence headquarters, heads home,

and then, gets on a train to Belarus,

sends a message to his wife, telling her he's not coming back -

because at this point, he knows he's either getting caught

or he's getting out.

He goes from Belarus, crosses the border into western Ukraine,

using false identity papers,

a name and a passport supplied by the CIA.

And then, from there, he goes from Ukraine to Germany.

And then, from Germany, he's flown to the United States.

In the case of the Illegals,

we have ten years' worth of investigation that clearly shows

that they are Russian spies -

the covert communication system, the messages back and forth.

But when it comes to Anna Chapman,

we don't have that corpus of evidence.

We needed Anna to acknowledge the relationship that she had

with the Russian Intelligence Service

to be able to arrest her.

We concocted a false flag, in order to be able to do this.

A sting.

SIREN BLARES

We had surveillance set up outside of the Starbucks,

and then, inside the Starbucks, as well.

Our undercover agent then meets her in a Starbucks cafe...

...saying just pleasantries with her,

and has a conversation with her.

She, without prompting,

then takes out this operational laptop

that we've been tracking,

and then, proceeds to hand it to our undercover agent...

...explaining the difficulties that she's been having getting

messages back to her handlers.

We think, "This is fantastic," right?

"This is everything that we need," right?

What normal person would just hand over a laptop?

So, he gladly takes the laptop,

and then, you know,

he proceeds to tell her that we need her assistance.

After Anna Chapman meets our undercover agent,

she then proceeds to go to a store in Brooklyn.

Our surveillance followed her.

So, she buys this burner phone

and the surveillance is thinking,

"Who is she calling?"

We've never seen her act this way.

Why won't she use her own phone?

We're waiting, as per the ops order,

for Medvedev to clear North American airspace.

And she's buying a burner phone to what?

You know, what the heck is going on?

Did...? Are we blown?

Anna discarded the receipt.

We retrieved it.

And on there is details of the transaction that she just made,

and the address that she had given for herself

was 99 Fake Street.

So, we're quickly able to get coverage on that phone, as well,

and also, who she's potentially calling, texting.

She called her father and tells him,

"I met this guy, and he thinks I gotta do this,

"and, you know, I gave him my laptop."

She was freaked out about that.

So, her father, for some reason,

tells her to go to the police.

And she goes to a police station

right here in downtown Manhattan.

We sent one of our senior agents down there.

And Anna says, you know,

"I had this interaction with an individual.

"I felt threatened, which is why I gave them the laptop."

My only guess is that they were trying to essentially

lay the groundwork for an alibi,

in the event that she, you know,

did face some legal trouble or was arrested, right?

Our senior agent had a conversation with the PD there and said,

"Look, we need to keep Anna here as long as we can.

"Keep her occupied."

While she thought she was talking to the police department,

it was a couple of FBI agents that were, you know,

posing as detectives.

They said, "Oh, my God, we can't believe that this happened to you.

"Let us show you a line-up of people,

"and let's see if maybe you can identify them."

And so they spent another like hour or two literally just showing her

pictures of people, random people.

When it came to the actual arrest,

my team all met near the residence of

Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley.

My team was on arrest day at the Murphys'.

It was eerily quiet,

and it was a really humid afternoon.

We were across the street outside, waiting for direction.

People were excited.

There's always a level of sort of adrenaline.

Could the Cold War hotline between the White House and the Kremlin

finally become a thing of the past?

Finally, Medvedev was wheels up and out of North American airspace.

SIRENS WAIL

It's happening fast and furious.

And what you don't want to do is make sure that

you drop any of these balls, that something goes wrong.

Here we are, raid jackets on, weapons and arrest warrant,

search warrant in hand.

As we approached the house,

I see Don and Ann on the side,

with the two agents who are arresting them.

Richard Murphy came out first.

Orange T-shirt.

Then Cynthia came out, blue top.

The Zottolis...

...and Mikhail Semenko were arrested in Washington, DC.

Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez arrested in New York.

And then, Anna Chapman arrested in the police precinct.

This is the first time I'd met Anna.

She very quickly, you know, lawyered up.

In fact, you know, the person that she was dating and staying with

at the time was a lawyer.

...Want to begin with breaking news.

There is a wave of arrests in several cities,

as an alleged Russian Intelligence ring

carrying out deep-cover assignments

in the United States is now busted.

That word coming from the Justice Department.

I was in Malta at the time,

and I was on my way back from

a nightclub at 4am in the morning.

We were listening to the radio while we were driving to an afterparty,

and there was a breaking news broadcast.

Raids on Sunday in New York, Boston, New Jersey, and Virginia...

They said that Anna Chapman was the Russian spy.

I was shocked.

And the next day, outside my apartment on Grosvenor Square,

there were a dozen news channels,

a dozen reporters, maybe more.

I couldn't believe that was true.

I wasn't aware of her doing any spying in London.

She was just a socialiser.

The British man who was married to the suspected Russian spy,

Anna Chapman, said tonight that she told him today that she's innocent.

Tonight, 30-year-old Alex Chapman arrived in central London,

stepping into the middle of an international spy saga

worthy of the Cold War.

Alex Chapman is being advised by the PR consultant Max Clifford,

who joins me now.

What's his reaction been?

Well, obviously, it's been total shock.

They became more and more distant.

She was becoming more and more secretive,

and she was going off to various events where

there were a lot of rich and powerful people on her own.

But now this has all come out. obviously, he's starting to think,

"Well, maybe that's what was going on."

HE CHUCKLES

You know, we see this, you know, all this news come up about Adam,

and we're like, "Oh, my God, it's Anya."

And the general consensus was, "Oh, it had to be Alex, didn't it?

"You know, it had to be Alex,"

because that was the kind of character he was, you know,

the sort of young, naive, enthusiastic, gregarious, open...

All those aspects could potentially make him a target.

So, I've got this random call from my best friend saying,

"You're not going to believe me,

"but I've just had MI5 phone me up,

"and they want to meet me. They're looking for you."

There's something about Anya Chapman.

Erm, I was questioning, I said, "What are you talking about?

"I haven't done anything. What's going on?"

Er, he said, "Well, put the news on, you'll see."

Erm, so put the phone down, put the news on...

...and suddenly, Anya's all over the news.

Ten people have been arrested, accused of being Russian spies.

Anna Chapman, a 28-year-old, is among them.

Anna Chapman... ..Anna Chapman...

...Anna Chapman... ...Anna Chapman... ..Anna Chapman...

I was, like, a bit surprised.

I'm like, "Well, what's going on with her? I know her."

Suddenly, I'm faced with my friend telling me I've got MI5 looking

for me, and my ex-girlfriend is being accused

of being a Russian spy.

HE CHUCKLES

So, I-I'm suddenly in shock mode.

You know, we've got ten spies,

we're going to have ten trials.

And this is... it's going to be complicated.

So, we set up this conversation with Mikhail Fradkov.

Mikhail Fradkov was the head of the Intelligence Agency in Russia,

and was my counterpart.

And I said, "Mikhail,

"we just arrested ten of your people."

And, interestingly enough, I think the initial reaction

among my CIA officers was that he's going to deny it.

He's not going to admit it.

Strangely enough, Fradkov said,

"Yes, they're our people."

I said, "We're thinking about the possibility of establishing a trade

"where we can return all ten of your people, plus their families,

"to Russia in exchange for getting back some people that you have."

And I said, "What do you think about that?"

He said... "Er, I have to talk to Putin."

Fradkov always felt he had to talk to Putin.

And that told me a lot about Putin's continuing influence

on what was happening in Russia.

I got a call back from him.

He said, "We're willing to go ahead with that kind of trade."

CIA chief Leon Panetta personally worked out the deal

with Russia's top spy master.

The sense I got from Fradkov is, "That's the business we're in.

"That's the business we're in.

"That we spy on you, you spy on us.

"And every once in a while,

"we get the spies."

We agreed that the exchange would take place in Vienna.

The only glimpse that we've had of the spies at the centre of this saga

was as they boarded a chartered jet yesterday evening.

Their destination, Vienna.

And at that point, they would deliver four people.

We would deliver all ten families to the same airport,

and that there would be an exchange.

It was...

It was right out of a spy movie.

'Vienna airport. Two planes arrive -

'one from Moscow, and one from New York.'

It was this remarkable scene.

And then, you see an old-fashioned Cold War spy swap.

'The moment when ten Russian agents captured in America

'are swapped for four Russian prisoners

'accused of spying for the West.'

I remember these grainy pictures,

and you could see ten going one way back to Russia,

and four coming out of Russia.

Who were they? That was the question we all wanted to know.

'This afternoon, the plane carrying four men released from Russia

'arrived at RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire.'

And we soon got the names.

They were Gennadiy Vasilenko and Alexander Zaporozhsky,

And Igor Sutyagin,

who'd been accused of spying for the Americans,

but then, also Sergei Skripal.

'Sergei Skripal, a colonel in military intelligence

'accused of spying for Britain's MI6,

'also likely to remain here.'

Sergei Skripal. I don't think any of us really knew him

or knew much about his case

until he was on that plane and coming out.

'One of the ten, Anna Chapman, has a British passport,

'thanks to a former marriage.'

We were all asking MI5,

"Had she stolen secrets here while she was based in London?"

Officials from here at the Home Office have said

they're urgently considering whether the Home Secretary

should use special powers

to deprive Anna Chapman of her British citizenship

and stop her coming to this country.

A carefully-choreographed swap brings a quick end to

a scandal that threatened to derail

recently-improving US-Russia relations.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin

says he's met with ten spies who were recently kicked out of the US.

Upon their return, the Illegals were treated as heroes, were feted -

certainly Vladimir Putin personally met them.

Putin wouldn't say when or where the meeting happened,

but he says they talked about life.

He also told reporters they sang a patriotic tune

called What Motherland Begins With,

a song apparently popular in Soviet intelligence circles.

Putin, a former KGB colonel,

says the agents had a very difficult fate,

but he promised them bright lives and decent jobs in Russia.

Rather than presenting this as some sort of failure,

the best spin would be to laud them and to talk about what a great set

of achievements they had,

you know, gone through as part of this long line of the excellence

of the Illegals programme.

Don Heathfield - Andrei Bezrukov -

goes on to get a very lucrative job

within a government energy industry.

And then, Anna Chapman sort of model,

goes on television.

Of course, everybody remembers Anna Chapman.

She was very attractive with this red hair...

...and Russian propaganda started to use it immediately.

I always joke, she ended up better than I did.

It sounds like she's doing just fine. Right?

ANNA LAUGHS APPLAUSE

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

BELLS RING

Putin was very angry about the swap.

Never really accepted or bought into it.

He is a man with a vengeance when it comes to betrayal

by intelligence officers.

So, when he came back into office,

it was open season again on some of the people

that had been swapped.

PHONE LINE RINGS

Suddenly, I had a call to somebody's phone

from a friend of mine who called me saying,

"Marina, do you know the news?" I said, "No, what happened?"

"Boris Berezovsky." I said, "What?"

The 67-year-old tycoon was found dead on the bathroom floor

in his ex-wife's home in Ascot.

"Died? How?"

"Nobody knows."

My name is Richard Holmes,

and I'm an investigative journalist.

BuzzFeed set up investigations team,

and I was part of it.

I spent a month in a closed-off office on the outskirts of London,

scanning 250 boxes of documents,

page by page, into the inner workings of...

...this fixer in London.

Scott Young, who had been working for some of the most

notorious Russian oligarchs,

including Boris Berezovsky.

Having read through all this material

and going through all these boxes,

I formulated a memo to the editor basically saying,

"I think Russia was linked to the death of Scott Young."

And I thought, "What are you doing? Are you completely nuts?

"Have you lost your mind?"

We slowly realised that we hadn't lost our mind,

and there was a string of deaths in London...

...some friends and associates of Boris Berezovsky that just

had been completely ignored.

British police say they have

no evidence of Russian involvement in these cases,

but many of these deaths happened in suspicious circumstances.

In every case, there seemed to be a connection going back to Russia.

There are 14 in total.

I want to get the names and the dates right,

so I'm going to read them out from my from my notebook.

We had Scott Young in 2014,

Boris Berezovsky's main fixer.

...Was found impaled on the railings at this penthouse apartment.

He's one of half a dozen apparently healthy British men,

associates of rich Russian exiles, to die here.

Yuri Gabulov in 2007.

Badri Patarkatsishvili in 2008, who died of a heart attack.

He died at his mansion in Surrey last night.

Stephen Moss in 2003, who also died of a heart attack.

Steven Curtis in 2004, who died in a helicopter crash.

He said, "If anything happens to me, it won't be an accident."

Paul Cassell, 2010, who jumped in front of a tube train.

Johnny Elichaoff in 2014,

who rolled off the top of a London shopping centre.

Igor Ponomarev in 2006,

who collapsed after an evening at the opera.

Gareth Williams, a code-breaker at GCHQ

who was found folded up inside a North Face bag in his bath.

...Unexplained DNA had been found on the locked holdall...

Daniel McGrory, who died of a heart attack in 2007.

Robbie Curtis, who died by jumping in front of a tube in 2012.

Alexander Perepilichnyy, who collapsed in Surrey.

...Died suddenly jogging...

Matthew Puncher, a British nuclear scientist,

instrumental in finding the polonium

which poisoned Alexander Litvinenko...

...who in 2016 stabbed himself to death with two knives.

And then, Boris Berezovsky in 2013, who was found hanged.

This evening, his house in Ascot was cordoned off after one of

his security team found his body,

with unconfirmed reports suggesting he may have taken his own life.

When I heard he committed suicide,

I couldn't believe.

And I still don't believe it.

I think he was killed.

Some of these individuals were surveilled by Russian Intelligence.

There's no suggestion that Anna Chapman was involved

in Boris' death,

or the deaths of his associates.

She wasn't in the UK at the time that they happened.

But the way in which she moved up the hierarchy in British society...

...is very suspicious to me.

She arrives in the UK and meets this guy in Brighton,

who she quickly ditches for a public school boy

and marries after five months.

She then quickly becomes estranged to him and starts hanging out

with these Russian friends -

Boris Berezovsky included.

I don't think that happens by coincidence,

and I don't think someone using their charm and looks

in the way that Anna Chapman did

does that without an underlying cause.

Maybe her dad did say to her,

"We need you to go to England

"to, you know, connect with certain people."

I-I can't say any of that would be true.

If somebody like Anya can be a spy,

it shows me that, really, anybody could be a spy.

Erm, it's really as simple as that.

You just don't know.

BAND PLAYS NATIONAL ANTHEM OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Putin is very personal.

You know, he will look at the world

through personal ties...

...whether he can trust somebody or not.

We're dealing with a completely different creature.

It's much more like the leader of an organised crime group.

Does the long arm of the Kremlin

reach all the way from Moscow

to Salisbury, in Wiltshire?

Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found collapsed

on a park bench in their hometown of Salisbury,

in southern England.

After being released from jail,

Skripal had spent the last eight years

living quietly in Salisbury.

Sergei had come to the UK in 2010

as part of the notorious spy swap with the US -

with Anna Chapman going one way,

and Skripal coming the other way.

Skripal was the most significant one.

He'd been a Russian Intelligence officer who had worked

for the British, for us.

The idea that someone who had been involved in a spy swap

and had effectively retired from service would be attacked

in that way was quite shocking.

It's a good lesson in... the lengths in Putin's memory,

and especially when it comes to traitors,

the lengths he'll go to send his message.

Blueberry Hill

♪ I found my thrill

♪ On Blueberry Hill

♪ On Blueberry Hill... ♪

MUSIC ECHOES

Neither we nor, above all,

the Russian political class,

the people very close to Putin

thought that he was going to turn into this dictatorial,

ruthless, psychopathic killer that he has become.

And how gloriously wrong they and we were.

Our societies, our institutions have never been more at threat

from Putin's spies.

Sending sanctioned tankers through our seas,

flying drones around our military bases,

having low-skilled criminals set fire to businesses.

♪ But all of those vows you made... ♪

He's not going to stop.

He's not going to stop spying.

He's not going to stop being an aggressor.

He's not going to stop being KGB.

♪ For you were my thrill

♪ On Blueberry Hill... ♪

Subtitles by Red Bee Media