All language subtitles for Secrets.Of.The.Spies.S01E01 Eng

We've all seen James Bond.

The question is,
what will it be like?

Will I be asked to kill people?
How dangerous will it be?

Most people live
in blissful ignorance

of what goes on around them.

It's a spy's job
to keep it that way.

I believe till last moment
he will recover.

But his heart stopped at the end.

When an intelligence officer
is recruiting a spy,

they think of the acronym MICE:

money, ideology, coercion, ego.

Other members of MI6 just don't
believe he could possibly be a spy.

Were you, in fact, the third man?
No, I was not.

Can you imagine waking up
and worrying you might have

said something that would
give you away as a traitor?

I heard the voice menacingly
uttering these words,

"We know who you are. We know
who you're working for. It's over."

The world of espionage
is all around us.

It's an unseen world. Operations
are playing out all the time.

Narratives we never see or hear.

Deceit and manipulation are...
are hard-wired into the profession.

If you can persuade the enemy

that you're approaching
from the right flank

rather than the left flank,

then you're going to
be able to achieve surprise.

We have to maintain
the deceit, because typically,

you're operating
in hostile environments.

If you are caught, then
the results could be catastrophic.

The absolute bedrock of any
intelligence service is deception.

If you're going to work secretly,

you've got to mislead the other
side. They mustn't see you coming.

What you need to do is to feed
your story to the adversary

through as many channels
as possible.

So they begin to believe,
"Well, it must be true."

AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES

MORSE CODE MACHINE BLEEPS

My father was a German double agent,

sending information
to the German secret services.

He actually worked for the
American Army as a liaison officer,

just outside west London.
And so he was on the radio,

supplying information
to the Germans.

As we got closer and closer
to the D-Day landings,

he was reporting on
gatherings of troops

and gatherings
of senior military officials.

Really detailed, er, war plans
about the build-up of troops

that were clearly gonna be
landing at Calais.

These troops were assembling,

in anticipation of a major move
across the English Channel.

The extraordinary fact is that
that was completely fictitious.

The job never existed.

And my father was giving
created information

as part of a bigger picture
to divert attention away

from the real landings that were
gonna take place in Normandy.

With Double Cross,
the idea was to run double agents

against Nazi Germany,

and in many cases,
for the Germans to think

that they were really
their own agents.

It took a particular kind of
fiendish intelligence, I think,

to feed material back to the Germans
in order to deceive them.

It's about persuading the Germans
that we're going to attack

not in Normandy, but in Calais.

It's a long, slow deception

of gradually feeding
pieces of intelligence, information,

to the Germans ahead of the landing
on the beaches of D-Day.

My father was a case officer,

which meant that he had
charge of the double agent,

and was responsible for coordinating
the information

that they sent back to Germany.

There were some ground rules.

All of the messages sent out
by the double agents

were coordinated

because it was vital that not one
agent tripped another agent.

The people running this operation

are effectively conducting
an orchestra,

and there are different instruments
in this orchestra.

In some cases, it's spies who
are sending back false information.

In other cases, it's physical
things. It's entire phoney armies.

WEST: You'll be able to look
and see aircraft and gliders,

landing craft, in river estuaries.

What they weren't aware of

were the tanks
were dummy rubber, blow-up tanks.

The landing craft
were made of balsa wood.

And many of the aircraft
were dummy aircraft

concentrated on airfields
in the southeast of England

and East Anglia.

Because that would clearly be
the launch point for an attack

across to the Pas de Calais.

It's difficult these days to imagine
anything so complex working.

There's great risk with deception

that if the adversary
sees through it,

then you've actually given them
the one thing

that you were trying to avoid,
which is your true intentions.

GERRY: It was desperately important

that the potential build-up
of German troops

were diverted away from Normandy,

because otherwise D-Day would stop
pretty much dead in its tracks.

MORSE CODE MACHINE BEEPS

And so, agents like my father

carried on sending
and transmitting information

that the invasion of Calais
was to take place.

SUSTAINED GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

The German High Command

was convinced
by clever multiple deceptions.

They held back a whole
German armoured division.

And that may well have
saved the Normandy landings,

cos if that armoured division
had been opposing the landings,

then it could all have ended
very, very badly.

ALDRICH: So this is deception
on a massive scale,

and it's so effective

that even after the Allies
have landed in Normandy,

the Germans believe
that the real attack is a fake.

They believe the deception
story so completely.

CHUCKLING: They even continue
to believe it

once the allies have landed
after D-Day.

It's a remarkable achievement.

Double Cross is not just
one of the great operations

of the Second World War,

but it was one of the greatest
deception successes in history.

I'm proud of my father.
It's an extraordinary achievement.

It's what intelligence has
morphed into in the 21st century,

is by and large is the offspring

of the success of the Double Cross
system in the Second World War.

There will be thousands
of my father's equivalents

wandering the streets
of London or Kabul.

So it's kind of, yeah,
the game goes on.

MI6 isn't a building full of spies.

It's a building
full of intelligence officers.

Intelligence officers
recruit agents.

Those agents are the spies
that are in their organisations.

An agent is a person who's outside
of an intelligence agency.

They're a normal person
going about their normal lives,

and they would be approached
and recruited

by someone who works
for an intelligence agency.

In the UK,
we call this person an officer.

And the idea is that every officer
should have a range of agents.

A web of agents, if you like,
who report on their various targets.

If you can recruit somebody
in the enemy organization,

you are effectively
crippling your enemy.

And that's what really does damage.

That's the really big win
in intelligence circles.

I remember, as a senior
military intelligence officer,

reading reports
that had come from MI6.

And it was clear from what was
being said in those reports

that they had someone
inside Al-Qaeda.

One thing you should know about
espionage, as well as bomb-making,

the first mistake
is your last mistake.

You're not going to live
to make another mistake.

RAPID GUNFIRE

He realised that Al-Qaeda
were targeting non-combatants,

civilian targets, targeting other
Muslims, and killing more Muslims.

That was when it was
very clear in his mind,

that's not what he signed up for.

I made the conscious decision
to leave, and through some...

you know,
some incredible circumstances,

I ended up in the lap
of the British intelligence.

That is probably one of
the bravest things that he has done,

and it's a mark
of how he was trusted

within the Al-Qaeda organisation
that he managed to do that.

When you're a spy,
you have to really convince yourself

that you are a genuine West-hating,
bloodthirsty jihadist,

and you have no qualms whatsoever

about killing
all of those who stand in our way.

Every time Aimen
will have come out to be debriefed,

they'll have had to make sure
that he wasn't compromised.

So that when they do
put him back in again,

he won't be arrested by them,
tortured, and then killed.

Your task is to absorb
everything around you.

You are learning about the camps,
locations,

the number of people attending,
the names, aliases.

You spend literally, you know,
hundreds of hours

reconstructing it again

for the benefit
of the intelligence services.

MI6 would provide training
to an agent it recruits

about how to be aware of any
risk or danger to themselves,

but a lot of times, these agents
have to rely on their own wits.

I remember in 1999, in one of
the camps, I was in the kitchen.

I distinctly felt the end
of a pistol against my spine.

I heard the voice of one of our
fellow jihadists in the camp.

"We know who you are, we know
who you're working for. It's over."

One wrong word and you are
a head shorter and six feet under.

So I told him, in no uncertain
terms, "Lower your weapon.

"It is explicitly forbidden to
point a gun at a fellow jihadist.

"And I won't tolerate this joke."

It's not an uncommon practice
among different organisations

whenever they know
they've got a mole somewhere.

They'll do things to shock people
and watch what their reaction is,

and this was clearly
designed to shock him.

After he left the kitchen,

even though it was November,
in Afghanistan,

it was starting to snow,

you know, I was sweating buckets.

It's a mark
of the strength of his character

that in that sort of situation,
he didn't panic

and give away indicators

to suggest that he was the mole,
he was the agent.

Life in the University of Cambridge
in the 1930s was very exclusive,

publicly-educated men would be
part of a quite intimate circle

that was also quite arrogant.

These are clever people. They can
see what's happening in Germany.

They can see what's happening
in Italy. And they don't like it.

Who are the people who are resisting
fascism in the mid-1930s?

It's the communists.

Communism is seen as the answer,

but it's not necessarily
seen as in conflict, surprisingly,

with being British.

The Soviet Union had decided on
a new policy

that they would target
undergraduates

at the best universities

who were likely
to go on to good jobs.

They're saying to their recruits
"Just stay in the background,

"go into Whitehall, go into
Westminster, go into politics.

"In the future,
you're going to be useful to us."

He was won over by the cause,
not as a concept or an ideology,

but as an action
that he could take.

He was young and he was impassioned

and he felt like
he could change the world.

Kim went to Westminster,
he went to Cambridge,

he was part of that upper-class,
British, stiff-upper-lip,

"don't dwell too much
on your emotions,

"certain things
we never talk about."

So you sort of compartmentalise.

And it sort of breeds
an ability to keep secrets.

I think he walked between these two
worlds. There was this secret life.

You learn to hide your feelings to,
in a sense, play the game,

and you become a chameleon.

NEWSREEL: 'The government's final
warning to Hitler has been ignored

'and a state of war once more exists
between Great Britain and Germany.'

The Russians were very keen
for their recruits

to take a whole variety of jobs.

They clearly targeted
all sorts of organisations,

but of course, intelligence services
were part of that.

There wasn't time to do checks.

And in those days, it was assumed
if you'd been to the right school,

that you would be fine.

Mr Lyubimov, could you give
your full name please?

Well,
it's Lyubimov Mikhail Petrovic.

I entered the KGB in 1959.

I was sent to Great Britain in 1961,

and worked there until '65.

Kim Philby was a very charming man.

To discover such a person
is not so easy.

He was from the establishment.

He was a son of a very
important man, a scientist,

and he was closely connected
to the British high circles.

And of course, he was trusted.

Philby was, I think,
the most successful

at leading that double life,

working his way inside
the British Secret Service.

It's sort of a bit of a boys' club.

They all had parents
who knew one another,

they all were part of
the same elite establishment.

Philby climbs higher
and higher within MI6.

And he's ultimately where he wanted
to be, head of Section IX.

Ironically,
in charge of the Russian desk.

The Russians
couldn't believe their luck.

It would've given them a very,
very clear advantage

in this crucial moment
in the Cold War.

CHARLOTTE PHILBY: It was him who was
responsible for keeping tabs

on what they had on the Soviets.

It's something that
if you did write it in a novel,

people would think
that it was too far-fetched.

When I was operating under alias,
I was that person,

there was no question about it.
I was not Matthew Dunn.

It is like acting.

Obviously the difference being
at the end of a performance,

the actor takes his or her
costume off and that's it.

Whereas as intelligence officer,
you're living that role

for however long
the operation lasts.

HARRY FERGUSON: If you were
an officer who was going abroad

as a businessman, you would spend
some time shadowing a salesman,

learning the lingo. You've got to be
convincing in that role.

And you've actually got to do
some of that work.

You are out there undercover,
fake identity.

And having to be eternally vigilant
does take its wear and tear.

It takes its toll.

At peak, I had 14 aliases.

It's not just a case of having
a passport, a credit card...

One has to have a whole life
behind that name.

So that would include things like

knowing which schools you've been
to, the names of your teachers,

what beer is on draft
in your local pub,

what your local cinema is.

The whole backstory. So you have to
have answers ready to hand,

in case you get caught out.

Peter and Helen Kroger ran
an antiquarian book shop in London,

they lived at Cranley Drive
in Ruislip.

They had slightly unusual accents.
But to all intents and purposes,

they looked like entirely normal
people in the suburbs.

They had a car, they made friends
with all the neighbours.

Helen Kroger made a point of having
children's parties

and inviting
the local neighbours around.

They seemed like an ordinary,
if foreign couple

living in that suburban
environment.

But there was much more to Peter and
Helen Kroger than first met the eye.

NEWSREEL: Ready for her launching
and to be given a famous name

at Barrow-in-Furness,
a revolutionary ship.

The Royal Navy's first
nuclear-powered submarine.

In 1960, Britain was launching
the first nuclear submarine

which the United Kingdom had.

I name this ship Dreadnought.

May God bless her
and all who sail in her.

Now, Britain was developing
a world-beating sonar

for this submarine down at Portland,

the centre of all Britain's,
and a lot of NATO research,

into everything secret
about underwater warfare.

The KGB had two spies
operating inside Portland.

One was a man called Harry Houghton,

and the other was his mistress,
called Ethel Gee.

PHONE RINGS

My father
was in counter-intelligence.

He had a lot of charm,
managed to get people to cooperate

by sympathising
with their position, you know,

not just simply telling them
they jolly well had to cooperate.

One of the things that my father
really didn't like

was he didn't like people pretending
to be something they weren't.

MI5 set a surveillance team
onto Harry Houghton.

And he came up to London
with his girlfriend, Ethel Gee.

And he met, outside
the Old Vic, a mysterious man.

And MI5 discovered
his name was Gordon Lonsdale.

And the early evidence suggested
he was a Canadian businessman.

NEWSREEL: They found
that he was certainly in business,

associated with some
small companies

operating from the second floor

of number 19 Wardour Street
in the West End.

The seedy characters
of Harry Houghton

and then Gordon Lonsdale,
who lived in Soho in the '60s.

These were, kind of, characters

which you almost
couldn't make up now,

but were very much of their time.

Elwell took the top off and
discovered, hidden in the bottom,

one-time encoding pads,
which were the trademark of the KGB.

There was this moment of realisation
by MI5 that they had on their hands

a top KGB spy.

He clearly was
a very sophisticated operator.

I mean, brilliant, actually,
when you think about it.

My father did have great sensitivity
as an investigator.

He had this ability to put himself
into Gordon Lonsdale's mind.

Peter and Helen Kroger weren't
Peter and Helen Kroger at all.

Their real identity
was Lona and Morris Cohen,

and these were top KGB spies

who were recruited by the KGB
at the end of the 1930s.

Gordon Lonsdale was their
controller, and he, on the one hand,

dealt with Harry Houghton
and Ethel Gee

and collected the material
from them.

And then he took it over
to the Krogers.

The Krogers would send the material
to Moscow by means of microdots.

So this is about using sophisticated
filming to reduce documents down,

really, to the size of a pinhead.

This is 1960s
advanced spy technology.

And because Peter Kroger
was an antiquarian book seller,

he would replace the full stops...
Think of it, just the full stop,

with a photograph
of a secret document.

So when the trial took place,

there was massive
international publicity about it.

People could not believe the idea

that antiquarian book sellers
living in Ruislip

might have been running a spy base
out of their home,

and it did give rise
to that question,

"Well, who else might be a spy?
Who else next door might be a spy?"

And so this kind of spy fever
certainly takes hold in the '60s,

and there's talk of spies and
traitors and deception everywhere.

It sounds like fiction,
but it's fact. It happened here.

NEWSREEL: The Brandenburg Gate in
Berlin was once as proud a landmark

as the Arc de Triomphe.

Now it marks the dividing line
between East and West.

Between the two parts of Berlin.

A lot of the spy fiction
that we love mirrors reality,

and often written by those
that were intelligence officers.

They've inhabited that world,
they understand it,

so that fact and fiction just blurs.

I had an obsession with
authenticity,

or the search for authenticity,

and that made me, well, frankly,

travel to almost all the places
I mentioned in the books.

That derived, really,
from The Day Of The Jackal.

I wanted to see the real thing.

If you're going into that world
at all, absolutely vital

that you have a cover story,

and the best cover story
of them all is true.

I was a foreign correspondent
in East Germany,

who legitimately asks questions
and reports back,

supposedly to his editor,

but maybe to someone else,
apart from the editor.

I knew my office was bugged.
My bedroom was bugged.

My sitting room was bugged.

And whenever I went out onto the
street, there they were behind me.

I could just stay in East Germany

for three, four, five,
six days at a time.

And while there,
I could do whatever was wanted,

deliver a message, pick up
a message, observe and report back.

Because David Cornwell was
a serving intelligence officer,

he decided that he needed
a pseudonym.

So he adopted the pseudonym
John Le Carre.

John Le Carre, of course,

specialised in books
about deception, dissimulation.

Um, pretending not to be what
you are and to be what you're not,

and getting away it.

He made occasional trips
into Berlin,

which was then an island
inside East Germany,

and he found out
that the East Germans

were erecting a wall
dividing the city in half.

And it became the dominant symbol of
John Le Carre's breakthrough novel,

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

It was one of the last major feature
films made in black and white,

and it was deliberately done

in order to give a sense of the,
kind of, bleakness of the Cold War.

Everything was grey and dark.

SIREN BLARES

Halt! Halt!

GUNFIRE

Prior to that, it was assumed that
all espionage was just gentlemen,

all public school,
all jolly good chaps.

John Le Carre was the first to say,
"No, it's not like that at all.

"It's down there, dark and devious
and mucky,

"and involving treachery
and betrayal."

What the hell
do you think spies are?

Moral philosophers measuring
everything they do

against the word of God
or Karl Marx?

They're not. They're just a bunch
of seedy, squalid bastards like me.

But the real world of espionage
is about deception,

and sometimes the horrible penalties
of failure to deceive -

being
caught.

You bury your nervousness so deep

in order to make sure
that it doesn't show.

From dawn all the way
until mid-afternoon,

that is where we are experimenting

and blowing up
new kind of explosives,

or testing,
you know, the latest batch

of poisons or chemical weapons.

Al-Qaeda were very interested
in particularly chemical weapons

and did a lot of work
in Afghanistan

trying to produce a small, compact,
viable, chemical

improvised explosive device

that could be used
to kill and maim people.

These are bombs,
or chemical gas devices

to be left on trains,
insides cinemas, nightclubs.

There are no civilians
as far as our enemies are concerned.

A chemical bomb or a biological bomb
going off on the New York Subway

or the UK Underground
would have a devastating impact.

Whenever agents come across nuggets
of information, like Aimen did,

that's when you get something
that is so important to get out,

especially if it's... if there's
a timeliness attached to it,

the agent will take additional
risks to get the information out

so they can try and stop the attack.

If you are nervous, it'll show.

The first mistake
is your last mistake.

You're not going to live to
make another mistake,

and therefore,
you have to be absolutely careful.

If he got caught,
he would've been tortured

for as long as they could have
tortured him for,

and then killed in a very, very
painful and extreme way.

We're looking at a rucksack-sized
device, you know,

maybe a couple of kilos.

Now, in the confines
of an underground train,

we're talking five or six people
may be killed by the explosion.

But hundreds killed by the panic.

If you've got a thousand people
on a Tube train

and everybody's trying to get out at
the same time, at the full sprint,

one can imagine
how horrific that would be.

Aimen was lucky.

He didn't blow his cover, and
managed to get the information out

in a timely way that allowed
the attack to be intercepted.

The role of double agents,
the role of people like Aimen,

was fundamental.

Without people who are prepared
to do the most dangerous things,

and take the most heinous risks,

we would be a lot less safe
in our beds here in the UK.

When Philby was posted
to Washington,

it expanded his access dramatically.

Cos it gives you access to the FBI
and the CIA.

He's a star
British intelligence officer.

He's at the height of his game.

He's being groomed
to be head of MI6.

He's at the centre
of this whole operation,

whilst passing not only
British intelligence,

but intelligence which the Americans
are sharing with us.

That's also being sent
to the Russians.

He was obviously calculating,
but he was also opportunistic.

And I think
that's to do with personality.

That's just fundamentally
about being able to charm

and persuade people that
you are the version of yourself

that you want them to see.

The Cambridge Five were in the
Cabinet Office in Bletchley Park,

in MI6, MI5,
they had agents everywhere.

It was so lax, the security,

that they were able to just,
with impunity, go in and out

and remove literally thousands
and thousands of documents.

LYUBIMOV: These Magnificent Five,

they're unique
in the history of espionage.

They supplied the information
about all the talks in the Cabinet,

all the Cabinet papers.

So it was such an amount
of information.

CORERA: This was a cosy
establishment club

of people who were friends
and knew each other,

and who covered for each other.

LOWNIE: There were suspicions
about them.

The problem was
they were never really followed up.

No-one wanted people
to report on each other,

because it was sort of like school.
It was telling tales.

So there were
a lot of close calls.

Very gradually, very slowly,

Western code breakers
start to make some inroads.

Not very much, but enough
to identify some of these agents.

Suspicion starts to fall

on the fact that there might be
a spy in Washington.

And they point to the fact
that there'd been a spy

in the British Embassy
in Washington,

and suspicion eventually falls
on Donald Maclean,

one of the Cambridge Five.

They were worried,
they were under surveillance,

they were being bugged. And the
escape plan was put into operation.

It captured people's imagination.

I mean, people love spy films,
and this wilderness of mirrors,

of trying to work out
what's really going on.

There was a real worry that we were
on the point of another war.

Now the cracks are beginning
to appear, and for Philby,

the attention turns to him
as a possible third man.

If there was a third man,
were you, in fact, the third man?

No, I was not.

Do you think there was one?
No comment.

Why didn't he run?
In the 1950s, he's accused.

And he brasses it out.

CHARLOTTE PHILBY: At that stage,
there aren't many options open.

He'd first become embroiled
in this world aged 19 or 20.

He was used to it.

He knew no other way of being,

other than living
as two separate characters

and having to do so
with a great sense of conviction.

CORERA: Kim Philby, I think, had
a unique hardness of his character,

an ability to deceive
and maintain deception,

in the way he was able
to betray his colleagues.

"Is he the third man?", they ask.

There've been these questions
in Parliament about him.

And he just brazenly lies
and denies it all.

INTERVIEWER: The Foreign Secretary
has said that, in the past,

you had communist associations.

Is that why you were asked
to resign?

I was asked to resign
because of an imprudent association.

That was your association
with Burgess. Correct.

What about these alleged
communist associations?

Can you say anything about that?

The last time
I spoke to a communist,

knowing him to be a communist,
was some time in 1934.

The man is clearly lying.
He's got a smirk on his face,

you know, when he's denying it.
I don't find it very convincing.

Other members of MI6 just don't
believe he could possibly be a spy.

They almost don't want to confront
the possibility

that their friend, Kim Philby,

a person many looked up to
as the future of MI6,

could possibly be a traitor.
They just do not want to believe it.

Of the Cambridge Five,
Philby is the star.

Perhaps Philby is the greatest spy
of the 20th century.

Anna Chapman
is the glamorous daughter

of a high-ranking
intelligence officer

who was sent to New York
to glean secrets

which she would then
send back to Moscow.

It sounds like something
out of Ian Fleming

because it basically was.

The KGB have had
two types of spies.

They've had the legal ones
that operate out of embassies,

and then they've had
what are known as the illegal spies.

CORERA: An illegal doesn't have
diplomatic immunity.

They are pretending, for instance,
to be a businessman or a book seller

or something like that.

And that means if they're arrested,
they can go to jail.

You pass them in the street,
they look like your fellow citizens,

but they're not.

Anna Chapman comes over
as a teenager to the UK

and she falls in love
and marries a young British man

and gets a British passport.

It's not clear exactly
when she becomes an active agent.

And at one point, she goes back to
Russia and she comes back to the UK,

and starts expressing
an interest in going to America.

And it does seem suspicious,
as if it might have been an order

from Russian intelligence.

Now I know a lot of people
introduce me to someone else,

and those introduce me
to someone else.

So now I know where to go
if I have something to solve.

She has the ability of someone

to engage with influencers
in Washington,

and to gain the ear of individuals.

So there's often deception
in different elements of spying.

It's not necessarily about
trying to steal secrets

from people in government in the way
that, for instance, Kim Philby did.

It's about spotting people
who are influential,

who are on their way up,
who know the gossip,

who know the inside track.

It's about reporting back
on those people to Moscow.

We do know that the US had sources
within Russian intelligence

who were able to tip off
the United States

about the presence of ten illegals
living in the United States.

So while she was doing her spying,
they were watching her,

they were surveilling her.

The FBI and CIA decide
to move towards arresting

those Russian spies in America.

They round up the illegals,
including Anna Chapman.

And so she was busted

and repatriated back to Russia
in a spy swap.

IN RUSSIAN:

I did what I did not to make money,

but to help prevent
the defeat of a new system.

It came as an enormous surprise

to the then-ministers
in the government.

They'd no idea that this
individual had been identified

as being a Soviet spy.

I thought that perhaps
some of what I had access to

might be useful in helping Russia

to keep abreast of Britain,
America, and Germany.

And it's a remarkable moment
because people are asking questions.

Well, firstly, "Why did she do it?"

Secondly, "Why was she not caught?"

Her mother had been recruited
into Soviet intelligence,

had been active
in the 1920s as a spy.

So in a way, Melita Norwood
had been radicalised

from a very, very early age.

She was recruited in 1934,

and, of course,
then she was only 22 years of age.

Her position is working
as a secretary

for a company engaged
on Tube Alloys, on nuclear research.

This is a top-secret project.
It's the atomic bomb.

Not even... You know, the Cabinet
doesn't know about it.

She's sitting in the back room
taking notes,

nobody really suspected her.

Her lowly position means that she is
often underestimated

in the information
she could collect.

Actually, she's in a key position
as the secretary

who can see all the information
and provide it to the Russians.

NEWSREEL: Melita Norwood, now
87 years old, great grandmother.

Yet it is claimed she was the
most important British female agent

ever recruited by the KGB.

In 1999, I telephone her
and she said,

"Oh! I've been
a very, very naughty girl.

"I'm afraid I've got the world's
press camped in my front garden

"wanting to interview me
about my past."

Which seems to have been
a bit colourful.

When it emerged
that she had been a spy,

there was this question
about what to do about it.

And I think in MI5,
they clearly thought,

"Well, she's old,
she's not active any more,

"there's no risk,"
so nothing is done.

The Soviet Union, the KGB,
were masters of using illegals.

They really hold up these spies as,
if you like, the pinnacle of spying.

Those people who are able
and willing to go under deep cover

into the west or other countries,
potentially for decades.

It is the undercover spy,
that sleeper,

who the Soviets were very,
very good at putting in place,

who were the most successful.

And I wouldn't be surprised if
they were still capable of doing it.

And still do so.

HARRY FERGUSON: I would say the most
dangerous time is when your agent

is trying to communicate
their intelligence.

They may be photographing a document
or taking a sample.

But the point where they have to
communicate that intelligence to you

as the officer, so that you can
get it back, that's tricky

because you might be being watched.

If something goes wrong
and that person is discovered,

it is the agent, really,
who's gonna face the consequences.

What they often need to rely on
is their own wit and imagination

in order to deal with the threats
that they face.

If you're in a very hostile
environment and your cover is blown,

you get out as quickly as possible

and you will have
an exfiltration plan,

which has been worked out
before the operation.

It might be as simple as jump
in your car, drive to the border,

just head straight over it.

INGRAM: You'll have rehearsed it
on tabletops and all the rest of it,

just to go through
all of the different stages.

It happens with all of
the high-grade agents that are there

that may be in a position where you
need to extract them.

AIMEN: I received a text message
form an Al-Qaeda associate of mine.

He was telling me, you know,
"Go to the Times Magazine website."

It says, "Human intelligence source
uncover a plot

"to attack a New York subway
using chemical weapons."

And I realised, basically,
that I was the source.

Aimen was, luckily,
out of Afghanistan,

and out of Al-Qaeda's
immediate control.

He was named in an article
that got published.

It contained leaked intelligence
from the CIA

and stupidly,
they used my first real name.

There were clear suspicions
in Al-Qaeda,

so they knew there was
a mole there somewhere.

A group like Al-Qaeda is aware

of the danger of infiltrators
in its ranks.

And if Aimen Dean
had been discovered,

he'd have almost certainly
been killed.

There will have been contingency
plans put in place

that he will have known
very little about,

but they'll have all been
worked out beforehand

as to how to potentially
get him out of there.

I immediately called my handlers
back in London,

even though it was Sunday,
and I was told basically that,

"Sorry to tell you,
but your spying days are over."

When you're sharing intelligence,
the intelligence comes out,

you've got no indication
as to who the individual is,

or the individuals are
that's supplying that intelligence.

National agencies,
when they get jealous,

will task some of their team
to find out who it is.

And I think that's how Aimen's name
then got into discussion.

And it's very dangerous, and that's
almost certainly what happened here.

Given the fact that I caused
the death of at least one or two

of their senior leaders
in Saudi Arabia, I would say yes,

they are angry,
enough to try to kill me twice.

Betraying them is an act of honour,
not an act of dishonour.

CORERA: The evidence
is strong enough that MI6

can no longer really resist

the thing that they've been trying
to deny for so long,

that this man who'd worked
at the very heart of MI6

is actually a spy.

And one of Philby's friends,
Nicholas Elliott,

is sent out to Beirut, where
Philby is living, to confront him.

WEST: Nicholas Elliott said that
when he knocked on the door,

Philby had said the equivalent of,
"What took you so long?"

He was offered an immunity
from prosecution

by the Attorney General,
which he accepted.

And he then made a confession.

It does look like Philby

still manages to pull the wool
over his friend's eyes

and convinces him
that he's willing to talk

and that perhaps there's some kind
of deal to be done.

But a few days after having
handed that confession,

he simply disappeared.

QUESTIONER: Do you think MI6 wanted
Philby to escape from Beirut?

No, I don't think so,

because they wanted him
to collaborate with them again.

And therefore, we decided to
take him away from Beirut by boat.

He collected his things,
he didn't say goodbye to his wife.

CHARLOTTE: I've spent a lot of time
trying to imagine

how he must have felt boarding
that freight liner in Beirut

to Moscow, knowing that he could
never come back.

Knowing that his children
and his friends and everyone

would soon know the truth.

He was reserving a whole part
of himself and his life

and keeping that secret
from his wife and his children.

And the mental impact that
must have, I just think is huge.

Can you imagine waking up
every morning and...

and just having that moment
of worrying

that you might have said something

that would give you away
as a traitor?

Deception has always been
at the heart of spying

because spies work by hiding
who they really are.

Is it intelligence?
Is it covert action?

It's a little bit
of all those things,

which is why deception is such
a challenging area of spy artistry.

If you think of the stakes,
you'll tighten up.

You've got to act naturally,
while at the same time,

doing one of the most
unnatural things in the world.

The profession exists to intrude
covertly into other people's lives,

to collect information about them,

to understand the risk that
that person might pose.

This is a crucial part of the job
which has remained unchanged.

Assassination is something
that any service could do,

but doesn't necessarily have to do.

There was enough Novichok there

to kill tens, if not hundreds
of thousands of people.

Putin and Litvinenko themselves
are personal enemies.

The order is kill Litvinenko.

Subtitles by accessibility@itv.com