- 6 hours ago
Spymasters The Great Spy Writers S01E04
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:17British intelligence, at one critical moment in the 1980s, had to act to prevent nuclear war.
00:24He was able to do so because it had its own mole at the heart of Russian intelligence.
00:31That Russian double agent was Oleg Gordievsky.
00:36Gordievsky became aware that Russia had mistaken US and British nuclear war exercises as preparations
00:43for a nuclear first strike.
00:46Gordievsky also knew that in reaction, Russia would launch its own nuclear first strike
00:54first.
00:55He also knew that his own cover was blown, that he had been recalled to Moscow for interrogation
01:02and unless he could leave, he would be executed.
01:06British intelligence got him out of Russia into Finland in the boot of a car.
01:13The car was searched.
01:15The car boot was about to be opened when suddenly one of the British agent's wives tore off her
01:21baby's nappy, thereby distracting the tracker dogs who could not resist the smell.
01:27The car was waved through.
01:30Gordievsky's escape was signalled to him by the playing of Sibelius' Finlandia on the car
01:35cassette player.
01:37Nuclear oblivion for the world turned on a baby's nappy in the presence of mind of a
01:43small child's mother.
01:45Gordievsky's escape also could be said to have led to the Geneva summit of November 1985 and
01:51the beginnings of a real end to the Cold War.
01:56The world and Oleg Gordievsky was saved.
02:01He lived for the rest of his life in secret and in disguise in Surrey, England.
02:07It was a threat.
02:08It was a huge military threat and it's still a threat.
02:11Even the military of the new Russia, which is still a nuclear superpower, and the KGB was
02:18a threat.
02:19The KGB was less efficient than Western intelligence services, but the KGB was huge.
02:23The KGB used to have, and still, they still have about 2,500 active officers in the West.
02:36Look, we're getting to be old men, and we spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one
02:43another's systems.
02:45I can see through Eastern values, just as you can see through our Western ones.
02:52Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this
02:59wretched war.
03:03But now, your own side is going to shoot you.
03:07Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there
03:14is on mine.
03:25The Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
03:30The film, The Lives of Others, strikingly portrays the surveillance by the communist East German
03:36government of its own population.
03:39The Stasi were unflinchingly portrayed in this Academy Award-winning film.
03:45Are you really in the Stasi?
03:49Are you really in the Stasi?
03:53Do you know what that is, the Stasi?
03:56Yes, the men who might threaten others to make it, my dad.
04:04What's your name?
04:20And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his
04:28life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in.
04:35And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was
04:41abandon
04:41his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos on the grounds that while
04:48order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.
05:02But I think what we're seeing today, and what we started seeing especially in the 2010s,
05:09is disinformation on an industrial scale.
05:12And now with the rise of AI, we don't know very much about how many states are using AI
05:17to carry out disinformation.
05:18But based on what we know about AI, this is only going to accelerate the tempo of propaganda
05:24and disinformation carried out by states such as Iran or such as Russia.
05:33There's no way out, he announced with satisfaction.
05:37And no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one.
05:40The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face off is forever, the embrace gets tighter,
05:46and the toys cleverer with every generation.
05:51Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers, who each year run themselves
05:58up a suitcase bomb and join the club.
06:01We get tired of believing that, because we're human.
06:05We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away.
06:11Never will, never, never, never.
06:19The Russian view of the Cold War is rarely heard.
06:22The deep resentment of first the Soviet Union and now Russia has not gone away.
06:29Stalin and Khrushchev both resented Russia not being seen as an equal partner of the United
06:35States, both at the end of the Second World War and subsequently.
06:43On the invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022, President Putin expressed this
06:50view in extreme form.
06:53Where does this insolent manner of speaking come from?
06:57Where does this exceptionalism, infallibility and all permissiveness come from?
07:02Where from comes that condescending, arrogant attitude towards our interests and absolutely
07:09legitimate demands?
07:11In contrast, George Robertson, who was Secretary General of NATO between 1999 and 2004, said
07:20Putin at their first meeting told him that he wanted Russia to join NATO and for Russia
07:25and Russian culture to be part of Western Europe, but he did not want to stand in line with
07:31a lot of countries that don't matter.
07:35He said the same thing to David Frost in a BBC interview.
07:40Putin expected to change NATO to take account of Russian interests and reflect Russia being
07:46part of European culture.
07:47Putin.
07:47This was obviously unlikely to happen.
07:51Thucydides wrote in the 5th century that the Greek wars were the result of the rise of
07:58the power of Athens and the fear this produced in Sparta.
08:02Vladislav Zadok remarks that 25 centuries after Thucydides that war has countless causes.
08:09seeing the other as the enemy, the need for moral superiority, ideological delusions.
08:17All the varied traditionalist, revisionist or post-revisionist interpretations of the Cold
08:24War remain simply interpretations.
08:33Feature films like Argo, Munich, Bridge of Spies, Enemy of the State and The Good Shepherd tackled controversial
08:41political themes, though some facts were changed for the benefit of dramatic effect.
09:02So another way to think of intelligence is through what we call the dirty hands dilemma, which
09:08is essentially who is willing to carry the burden of doing, you know, immoral things in
09:15order to protect the realm.
09:17And one of the things that you see when you watch a spy film or a spy TV series is
09:23actually
09:23these people carrying the burden of doing all sorts of immoral things.
09:29And you as a spectator might experience all sorts of extremely problematic feelings when
09:36you watch, you know, a scene of torture, waterboarding and so on.
09:41Look at me.
09:45If you don't look at me when I talk to you, I hurt you.
09:48And so, in a way, there is a sort of conflictual pleasure to see people doing the sort of things
09:56that you're not ready to do as an individual.
10:01Someone just tried to blow up.
10:02Zero Dark Thirty was an interesting one because the CIA actually agreed to give sensitive information
10:12about the Bin Laden raid to the filmmaker, Catherine Bigelow.
10:17You're going to start working on the American Al-Qaeda cells.
10:20Protect the homeland.
10:21Bin Laden is the one who keeps telling them to attack the homeland.
10:24One of the main messages of that film was enhanced interrogation worked.
10:31Torture worked when it came to the hunt for Bin Laden.
10:34Had it not have been for enhanced interrogation of certain terrorist suspects, they would never
10:39have found Osama Bin Laden.
10:41There was an anger that the CIA had given this material to Bigelow, essentially to justify
10:47some of the, to justify the kind of gloves off approach to the war on terror that it took.
10:53There is debate as to whether information derived from torture actually led to the capture
10:58of Osama Bin Laden.
11:00Captain Bigelow wrote,
11:02Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt.
11:07That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden.
11:10It means it is a part of the story we couldn't ignore.
11:14The Guardian reported, though torture was used by the CIA in the early 2000s.
11:20It may not have been part of the story of finding Osama Bin Laden.
11:25Everyone will have their own moral compass.
11:28For instance, when officers are running sources, one of the dilemmas could be, you know, how
11:33long am I going to ask this source to stay in place?
11:36Should we be running sources who are conducting perhaps illegal or various violent acts?
11:44Oleg Penkovsky was a high-ranking Soviet official providing key intelligence to the West.
11:50He was arrested by the Soviets in 1962, tried and executed in the following year.
11:57Penkovsky is providing a whole range of information, not just on the Soviet order of battle when
12:03it comes to nuclear information, so the nuclear stockpile of the Soviet Union and its nuclear capability.
12:09Penkovsky is also providing a range of information on Soviet military intelligence, types of strategies
12:17that the Soviets are going to employ in their war against the West should the Cold War break
12:23out.
12:24But he's also, like other defectors and other individuals further down the line, he's providing
12:30information on Soviet intelligence as order of battle.
12:33He's providing information on who are their leading intelligence officers being sent over
12:39at sea.
12:39And it's the mundane information that really is the building blocks of good intelligence.
12:54Everything passes.
12:57Everything wears out.
13:00Everything breaks.
13:06It's just that I'm tired of being told I look at life too simply.
13:11It isn't naive to believe that good exists, that evil exists.
13:15I've known both of them.
13:17I've seen them.
13:19I've felt them.
13:21They aren't just ideas that you can twist into neat phrases.
13:25They aren't words to be clever with.
13:27They are too vital.
13:29We live by them, or else we make everything meaningless.
13:41While some recent practitioners have maintained the sombre view of espionage that often characterised
13:48the fiction and films inspired by the Cold War, others, as for instance the Austin Powers
13:55first series of films appearing from 1997 to 2002 have seen the potential for satirical
14:02comedy in spy stories.
14:04They really hurt.
14:06Who throws a shoe?
14:08Spy is a spoof film from Paul Feig, the director of Bridesmaids.
14:13It is full of affection for the conventions of the spy film.
14:17So you think you're ready to safety now?
14:20I've got her!
14:31Put your roof on a scooter, what are you, the Pope?
14:38The Bridge of Spies, made in 2015, is based on historical reality, on a real story.
14:47But it explores the ambivalence around the contention between different ideologies, the motives behind
15:01those who are entangled with those confrontations.
15:06But there is, in The Bridge of Spies, a compelling sequence, when the handover is to take place, waiting
15:18for the arrival of a second American figure.
15:24I acted honorably, I think they know that.
15:28But sometimes people think wrong, people are people.
15:33Let's see how they greet me.
15:36What can I look for?
15:40If I'm embraced, or just shown the back seat.
15:54Perhaps hell is like that, a discordant confusion of anxious souls.
16:01Some argued, some slept, some shouted, some wept, some wrote, some sketched,
16:09and many conspired about their coming interrogation.
16:14But mostly, they did no more than stare into space, eyes unfocused as they tried to see tomorrow.
16:30Insubordinate.
16:33Insolent.
16:36A trickster.
16:40Perhaps with criminal tendencies.
16:43Yes, that's a pretty fair appraisal, sir.
16:47Good.
16:48Social class has always been a prominent feature within spy novels and, indeed, in spy film.
17:06Mr. Grantby.
17:12Mr. Grantby, we are looking for an important piece of scientific equipment.
17:19It was lost on a train.
17:24We think that you might be able to help us get it back.
17:38Later writers react against this, and here it's worth mentioning Len Datum,
17:47who came from a very different background from what we would encounter in, say, Graham Greene or Ian Fleming.
17:58The image of Harry Palmer is a fascinating one at a time when you're thinking about class in post-war
18:09Britain.
18:10I haven't seen you here before, sir.
18:12No, well, I don't, um, really care for these American shopping methods.
18:18One has to move with the times, I suppose.
18:20He is very much the anti-Bond and the working-class hero and his mannerisms towards superiors and how he
18:28treats them.
18:30Yes, sir.
18:32And the girl, Courtney, too.
18:34You didn't come here...
18:35Excuse me.
18:36Sorry.
18:37You didn't come here to talk to me about button mushrooms and birds.
18:43But I also think there's still an element here of, you know, the bourgeois and something that people would like
18:49to live up to in terms of his lifestyle.
18:54Champignon.
18:56Nothing but the best for our Palmer.
18:59And in terms of, you know, the presentation of intelligence, very much, you know, forward thinking.
19:05The room was silent except for the hum of the fluorescent lights.
19:11I sat at my desk reviewing the report.
19:15Another one of those routine cases.
19:19But something about it nagged at me.
19:22There were no big names, no major intelligence.
19:25But still, something didn't add up.
19:30The problem with this job is that you never know who to trust.
19:35We do see a complacent acceptance of older ideas about gender and the role of women, which Dayton is quite
19:49happy to accept.
19:51Hello.
19:52Bald Eagle wants to see you urgently at his place.
19:58He's expecting you at 1200 Isles.
20:03Tell Ross...
20:07I'll be late.
20:09Really work on the insubordinate bit, don't you?
20:12You're useless in the kitchen. Why don't you go back to bed?
20:18I've been taking things too seriously for years, I said.
20:23I'm afraid it makes me a difficult man to live with.
20:27But I've stayed alive, sweetheart.
20:31And that means a lot to me.
20:35One of the striking features about spy fiction and spy films is that it is a very male-dominated genre.
20:46It is partly because it's an action-based genre.
20:52It often involves international travel, exotic location.
20:59All things that were not so immediately accessible to women writers.
21:06In the middle of the 20th century, in the context of World War II,
21:11we have Helen McInnes, a very accomplished novelist,
21:18who was writing on the basis of personal experience.
21:23Von Aschenhausen sat on the edge of a large desk.
21:28His eyes were fixed on the man standing over the girl roped to a chair.
21:33He spoke again.
21:34He said, you fool, you stupid little fool.
21:39Can't you see I must?
21:41I will find out.
21:46Her novel Above Suspicion was based on a honeymoon journey through Europe
21:52with her husband, who was a classical scholar.
21:57So she was writing about a world that she knew.
22:03She's a very politically engaged writer,
22:07always pushing back against what seemed to her the dangerous self-deceptions
22:15of Europe in the context of poisonous political ideologies.
22:24There's nothing like self-pity for thoroughly dissipating a man.
22:29And when a nation indulges in that luxury,
22:32it finds itself with a dictator.
22:43The Bond girl, whose role in the early Bond films
22:49was always to be gorgeous
22:53and, broadly speaking, sexually available.
22:56That role has been superseded by the formidably active figure
23:04who is as capable of inflicting damage in a fight
23:09as any of her male colleagues
23:11and is fully involved in the plot
23:15rather than just a kind of passive vehicle.
23:18In a recent television series, Black Doves,
23:24you see a complex spy narrative
23:28which is dominated by women.
23:32This isn't a complaint. This is vengeance.
23:35What are you talking about?
23:37We can't undo what's done.
23:39We can't bring people back.
23:41This here is as good an ending as you're gonna get.
23:44So take it.
23:45Helen, this is not you.
23:48Who do you think I am, Sam?
23:50Women have always been at the heart of Britain's history of espionage
23:55and I think what we tend to miss is how effective these women were.
24:00Even with the founding of MI5 and MI6,
24:03there were women who played key roles.
24:06Breaking the Enigma Code was hugely important
24:09to Allied success in the war.
24:13Bletchley Park, 75% of the staff there were female,
24:16couldn't have operated without that input
24:19and there were women at very senior levels,
24:21language experts and mathematicians working on the code breaking.
24:25The women who joined the SOE, the Special Operations Executive,
24:28came from 13 different nations
24:31and Eisenhower said that they probably shortened the course of the war by some months
24:35and made a very considerable contribution to ultimate Allied victory.
24:40It was only in the 1950s that Britain started making films like Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride.
24:47That showed the role that women had played with the SOE or behind enemy lines.
24:52My name is Boris Backmaster.
24:54I've been asked to say a foreword to this story.
24:57My only claim to do so is that as their commanding officer,
25:01I knew intimately all the volunteers who formed the French section of Special Forces.
25:05It was in September 1942 that Odette Sansom, alias Madame Odette Metailler,
25:12number S23, known to us as Lise, completed her training.
25:17For her bravery and bearing when in the hands of the enemy,
25:21Odette was awarded the George Cross, the highest British honour that can be bestowed on any woman.
25:26This is her story.
25:28All values, good luck.
25:30Well, merci.
25:31Perhaps one of the ironies is that it's because women tend to be overlooked
25:36that made them so useful in many roles in the war.
25:39And why it is relevant to be a woman, it's not because they were beautiful,
25:44it's not because they were seductresses,
25:46it's because women do have a superpower in the 1940s, arguably still today,
25:51and that is that they are overlooked and they are underestimated,
25:55and that gave them the perfect opportunity to serve in intelligence gathering.
26:00The women faced exactly the same fundamental threat as the men,
26:03and many of them lost their lives.
26:06We don't need to have a female James Bond because we actually had real female
26:11special operations executive agents out there who were playing that role.
26:15They weren't Bond girls, they were Bond.
26:17They're better than Bond because they were real, they were in place, in the role, in the war.
26:21So these are the stories that we still need to tell accurately.
26:26There had been earlier explorations of race and ethnicity,
26:33and here we might mention Sam Greenlee's really seminal book,
26:40The Spook Who Sat By The Door.
26:43Sam Greenlee's deeply challenging book and film present a fictional scenario
26:49and a realistic fictional apocalypse based on a black ex-CIA agent
26:55becoming a CIA-trained and revolutionary black power leader
27:00and fomenting an insurrection to overturn white power in the United States
27:06based on the very techniques learnt by Sam Greenlee himself
27:11when he was himself a spook trained by the CIA.
27:15The book, initially published in Britain and the film that Sam Greenlee co-produced,
27:21show a young black CIA agent turning against the state and the institution that trained him
27:28and the intelligence methods and techniques to be used against foreign powers.
27:34He uses them to marshal a black power insurrection in the United States.
27:43Created at the time of the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy,
27:48with a background of accompanying demonstrations and riots throughout the United States,
27:55the book and film represent one of, or perhaps the only, full dramatisation
28:01of the radical aims of an extreme incarnation of the black power movement.
28:07Released by United Artists, Sam Greenlee and others believed that the FBI removed all prints from cinemas showing them
28:17when it became clear that the film was going to be a great success.
28:22Negatives were lost or destroyed.
28:25One was eventually rediscovered for the DVD release in 2004.
28:34Sam Greenlee never recanted on or changed his views on the need for a revolutionary freedom for black Americans.
28:42The book and the film are a powerful account of the frustrations and injustices powering the black power movement in
28:51the United States in the 1970s.
28:53It is a remarkable creative assault on the more usual personal fictions and representations of intelligence and espionage.
29:04The American writer Aya de Leon writes from the perspective of a black woman in A Spy in the Struggle
29:13in the 2020s,
29:15where she is thinking about divided loyalties, as so many spy writers do,
29:22the loyalty between national interests and the interests of black people,
29:30which in that novel are quite often in conflict.
29:36The deal wasn't just about money, it was about power.
29:40The women at the table didn't just want the cash,
29:44they wanted to show they could run the game better than the men who'd been in charge for years.
29:49They had the skills, the knowledge and the ambition.
29:54But ambition wasn't enough.
29:56It was the willingness to break the rules.
30:00To bend them so far they snapped.
30:03If they wanted to win, they had to play dirty.
30:07And she wasn't afraid to get her hands bloody.
30:12The central points of concern in spy novels and in spy films change as the years go by.
30:23Bourne waited in the Renault, 200 yards east of the restaurant entrance,
30:29the motor running, prepared to race ahead the instant he saw Villiers drive out.
30:34Several others had already left, all in separate cars.
30:39Conspirators did not advertise their association.
30:42These old men were conspirators in the truest sense.
30:47They had traded whatever honours they had earned for the lethal convenience
30:51of an assassin's gun and an assassin's organisation.
30:56Age and bias had robbed them of reason, as they had spent their lives robbing life,
31:03from the young and the very young.
31:09The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right.
31:15As one grows older, this is easier still.
31:20You see it reflected in a different light in Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity,
31:29where the story turns on the central characters having lost his identity.
31:39What was it?
31:40Why won't it leave me?
31:43Some terrible thing is deep inside me, trying to break out.
31:49Trying, I think, to kill me.
31:52Help me, Marie.
31:54For God's sake, help me.
31:59I mean, we're all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren't we?
32:09So the image of the CIA throughout the Bourne, the Bourne films, the Bourne books,
32:15is really of an agency that, yes, is attacking individuals overseas,
32:20but Bourne himself is fighting rogue elements within the CIA.
32:24And this is, you know, plays into that broader idea that, post-911,
32:29the CIA can get up to whatever it wants.
32:32You know, the CIA is involved in extraordinary rendition,
32:36it's involved in torture, it's involved in drone strikes and extrajudicial killing.
32:43Jason Bourne had no memory of who he was.
32:47He had no idea how he'd ended up in a hospital in Paris,
32:52fighting for his life.
32:54All he knew was that he was being hunted,
32:57and the people after him would stop at nothing to make sure he was dead.
33:03But as his mind began to clear, he realised something else.
33:08They weren't just hunting him, they were hunting what he'd become.
33:13A man with a past, a man with no future, and a man with no hope of escape.
33:25There are certain things that secret intelligence agencies can do
33:31that the everyday citizen and corporations cannot do.
33:34So in the case of the UK,
33:37only the UK's intelligence security community, MI5, GCHQ and SIS,
33:42can break law.
33:45They are given express permission by a secretary of state or a senior civil servant
33:51to breach the legal frameworks that are in place.
33:55So we know that the US intelligence community is really interested in social media.
34:01They're interested in the power of social media
34:04for what they're calling anticipatory intelligence.
34:07So can a computer, can an algorithm be made
34:10to scan the world's social media in real time
34:16to gauge the temperature of a population,
34:20to gauge how close a group or a certain population
34:25is close to protesting, is close to rioting.
34:29That's the kind of Brave New World thinking.
34:31One London hedge fund has successfully used these kinds of ideas
34:36to outperform financial markets by a considerable margin.
34:40The US intelligence community was completely blindsided
34:43by the Arab Spring back in 2013.
34:46There are some intelligence professionals and some computer scientists
34:49who would have you to believe that when perfected,
34:53AI and computers will mean that the intelligence community
34:57will never be blindsided by an Arab Spring event again.
35:03Standing on the tube, Coe was studying his fellow passengers,
35:07gauging their identities.
35:09There was a checklist he'd memorised,
35:12a crib sheet on how to spot a terrorist.
35:15And there was another checklist,
35:17allowing for the possibility that terrorists
35:19might have got hold of the first checklist
35:21and adapted their behaviour accordingly.
35:24And Coe had memorised this too.
35:27And he was mentally running through them,
35:30scoring his fellow travellers.
35:31When it struck him, it was conceivably a checklist
35:35for spotting members of the security services.
35:38And he was doubtless ticking all the right boxes himself.
35:41The thought made him want to giggle,
35:44which was itself on one of the checklists.
35:51Mick Herron has been a hugely popular writer in recent years,
35:56perhaps primarily because of the brilliant adaptations
36:00of his work for television.
36:04This was the blissful break
36:06when the world seemed a safer place
36:09between the end of the Cold War
36:11and about ten minutes later.
36:21The office was as bleak as its inhabitants.
36:27Jackson Lamb stood by the window,
36:29a cigarette dangling from his lips,
36:32watching the rain pour down.
36:38The city outside was alive,
36:40but inside the walls were closing in.
36:45Slough House, the graveyard for MI5's failed agents,
36:50was no place for hope.
36:52Lamb had long given up on it.
36:54But there was always one last job,
36:57always a reason to keep pushing forward.
37:00Even if that reason was just to spite the people
37:03who had left him here.
37:08I think I'd put to you that hostile intelligence agencies,
37:13they don't invent discontent within society.
37:17They don't invent angst, hostility, division within society.
37:22But what they do is they exploit it.
37:25They exploit already existing discontent.
37:28They exploit and amplify and weaponise existing divisions within society.
37:34So whenever we see things in the news, protests, riots,
37:39we should always think to ourselves,
37:42you know, how is this going to be exploited by people who would do us harm?
37:47Get your own house in order.
37:49That in itself is a tool of resilience.
37:52That in itself is a barrier to hostile acts by your enemies.
37:55They take their instructions of tasking from government.
38:00Intelligence agencies are only responding to the demands of the government themselves.
38:05So they're not, to borrow the criticism of the CIA in the 1970s,
38:10they're not a rogue elephant.
38:11They are responding to specific tasking by a government
38:16and they are following through on what they're told to go out there and collect.
38:21And that's the great sort of divide between the popular depictions of intelligence and reality.
38:28For decades to come,
38:30the spy world will continue to be the collective couch
38:35where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.
38:50Other novelists have looked at differing approaches to espionage.
38:55Like Stella Rivington, Charles Beaumont has personal experience of MI6.
39:00His A Spy Alone is based on the fictional premise of an Oxford spy ring,
39:06in an echo of the Cambridge ring,
39:08with members who have different reasons for being prepared to work for Putin's Russia.
39:14Some recent spy fiction, including Adam Brooks's Night Heron trilogy,
39:20have turned their attention to China as a global threat.
39:23The greatest long-term threat to our nation's information and intellectual property,
39:30and to our economic vitality,
39:32is the counter-intelligence and economic espionage threat from China.
39:41It's the oldest question of all, George.
39:48Who can spy on the spies?
39:55The idea that somehow the CIA and the British are behind everything,
40:00and they're the evil enemy,
40:02is something that's pushed forward by other external actors like the Russian state.
40:06And I think that it comes back to this idea of weaponisation of history,
40:10and also weaponisation of image,
40:13is key in shaping propaganda hearts and minds.
40:19He betrayed his country.
40:21Yes, perhaps he did.
40:24But who among us has not committed treason
40:28to something or someone more important than a country?
40:39They never understand it, do they?
40:42They never know what it costs.
40:45The sordid tricks of lying and deceiving.
40:49The isolation from ordinary people.
40:53They think you can run on their kind of fuel.
40:56The flag-waving and the music.
41:00But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you?
41:03When you're alone,
41:06you've got to hate.
41:08And it needs strength to hate all the time.
41:12And what you must love is so remote,
41:15so vague,
41:17when you're not a part of it.
41:23What I worry about is the Americans weaponising American intelligence
41:29access for political ends.
41:32Back in 1973,
41:34the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger
41:37were becoming increasingly alarmed by their perception
41:41that the Brits were getting too friendly with Europe.
41:43And Kissinger and Nixon had been saying to Heath,
41:46you know, just slow down on European integration, European project,
41:49and Heath wasn't listening.
41:51Kissinger picked up the phone to the NSA and said,
41:54can you just stop sharing priceless NSA intelligence with the Brits
41:59until these people in Downing Street
42:02start singing from our hymnal?
42:04My worry is that Trump will say to NSA,
42:08maybe Britain is doing something that Trump is not happy about.
42:12My worry is that he will try to whip us into shape
42:15by saying to the director of NSA,
42:17let's just turn the tap off.
42:23Ukraine's successful intelligence-led drone attack
42:26on a large section of Russia's bomber fleet,
42:30previously bombing Ukraine,
42:32both may change the nature of defence, armaments and warfare,
42:36and present an almost Bond and Q-like ability
42:40to make brilliantly conceived gadgets,
42:43combined with total intelligence,
42:45more effective than billion-pound aircraft carriers,
42:49wings of attack aircraft and big armies.
42:55Intelligence and the nature of warfare are changing.
42:58Israeli intelligence created 5,000 exploding pages
43:02with deadly effect.
43:04Ukraine President Zelensky's father
43:07is one of Europe's leading experts in computing and cybernetics.
43:12It is hard not to wonder if, with the possible help of MI6
43:16and President Biden's intelligence-fed information,
43:20that the Zelensky's created an extraordinary intelligence-led military coup
43:25when Ukraine successfully attacked Russia's bomber fleet.
43:29World events and personal political opinions
43:33are being weaponised by both benign and malevolent state actors.
43:39In the real geopolitical world,
43:42an increasing international conflict,
43:45the break-up of the post-war settlement and NATO consensus,
43:49an apparent new Cold War,
43:51continuing conflict and destruction in the Middle East,
43:55the rise of China,
43:56the real world of intelligence,
43:59becomes increasingly important.
44:01There is the possibility in the West
44:04of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements breaking down.
44:08In short, all the familiar patterns of spying
44:12and secret intelligence are changing.
44:15The worlds of appearance and reality,
44:19of public and private,
44:21of fiction and the real geopolitical world are merging.
44:27In the West,
44:43in 8 aż,
44:47a few years in 2016,
44:47the side of the story is going to be great.
44:47A few years in the West in the West
44:52of the West,
44:52a few years in the West's,
44:54the global脳 of faith,
45:23Transcription by CastingWords
45:26CastingWords
Comments