All language subtitles for Spymasters.The.Great.Spy.Writers.S01E04.Len.Deighton.To.Mick.Herron.1080p.NOW.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-RAWR_track3_[eng]

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

had to act to prevent nuclear war.

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

at the heart
of Russian intelligence.

That Russian double agent
was Oleg Gordievsky.

Gordievsky became aware

that Russia had mistaken
US and British nuclear war exercises

as preparations
for a nuclear first strike.

Gordievsky also knew
that in reaction,

Russia would launch
its own nuclear first strike first.

He also knew
that his own cover was blown,

that he'd been recalled
to Moscow for interrogation,

and unless he could leave,
he would be executed.

British intelligence got him
out of Russia into Finland,

in the boot of a car.

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

when, suddenly,
one of the British agents' wives

tore off her baby's nappy,

thereby distracting
the tracker dogs,

who could not resist the smell.

The car was waved through.

Gordievsky's escape
was signalled to him

by the playing
of Sibelius' Finlandia

on the car cassette player.

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

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

Gordievsky's escape
also could be said

to have led to the Geneva summit
in November 1985,

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

The world - and Oleg Gordievsky -
were saved.

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

in Surrey, England.

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

and it's still a threat,

even the military
of the new Russia,

which is still
a nuclear superpower.

And the KGB was a threat.

The KGB was less efficient than
the Western intelligence services,

but the KGB was huge.

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

about 2,500 active officers
in the West.

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

looking for the weaknesses
in one another's systems.

I can see through Eastern values,

just as you can see through
our Western ones.

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

the technical satisfactions
of this wretched war.

But now your own side
is going to shoot you.

Don't you think
it's time to recognise

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

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

The film The Lives Of Others
strikingly portrays

the surveillance by the communist
East European government

of its own population.

The Stasi were
unflinchingly portrayed

in this Academy Award-winning film.

And gradually, it dawned on him...

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

that his life had consisted
of a run of rehearsals

for a play he had failed
to take part in.

And that what he needed to do
from now on,

if there was going to be a now on,

was abandon
his morbid quest for order

and treat himself
to a little chaos,

on the grounds that
while order was demonstrably

no substitute for happiness,

chaos might open the way to it.

But I think
what we're seeing today,

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

is disinformation
on an industrial scale.

And now, with the rise of AI,

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

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

this is only going to accelerate

the tempo of propaganda
and disinformation

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

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

and no amount of wishful dreaming
will produce one.

The demon won't go back
in its bottle.

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

and the toys cleverer
with every generation.

Not for the main players...

not for the nasty little newcomers,

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

We get tired of believing that.

Because we're human,

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

It never will, never, never, never.

The Russian view of the Cold War
is rarely heard.

The deep resentment

of first the Soviet Union
and now Russia

has not gone away.

Stalin and Khruschev both resented
Russia not being seen

as an equal partner
of the United States,

both at the end
of the Second World War

and subsequently.

On the invasion of Ukraine
on February 24th 2022,

President Putin expressed this view
in extreme form.

Where does this insolent manner
of speaking come from?

Where does this exceptionalism,
infallibility

and all permissiveness
come from?

Wherefrom comes that condescending,
arrogant attitude

towards our interests
and absolutely legitimate demands?

In contrast, George Robertson,

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

said Putin, at their first meeting,

told him that he wanted Russia
to join NATO,

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

But he did not want
to stand in line

with a lot of countries
that don't matter.

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

Putin expected to change NATO
to take account of Russian interests

and reflect Russia
being part of European culture.

This was obviously
unlikely to happen.

Thucydides wrote
in the fifth century

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

and the fear this produced
in Sparta.

Vladislav Zubok remarks
that 25 centuries after Thucydides

that war has countless causes:

seeing the other as the enemy,

a need for moral superiority,

ideological delusions.

All the varied
traditionalist, revisionist

or post-revisionist interpretations
of the Cold War

remain simply interpretations.

Feature films like Argo,
Munich, Bridge of Spies,

Enemy of the State,
and The Good Shepherd

tackled controversial
political themes,

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

So, another way
to think of intelligence

is through what we call
the dirty hands dilemma,

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

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

And one of the things
that you see

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

is actually these people
carrying the burden

of doing all sorts of
immoral things.

And you, as a spectator,
might experience

all sorts of extremely
problematic feelings

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

Look at me.

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

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

to see people
doing the sort of things

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

Someone just tried to blow up...

Zero Dark Thirty
was an interesting one,

because the CIA actually agreed
to give sensitive information

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

Start working
on the American Al Qaeda cells.

Protect the homeland.

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

One of the main messages
of that film was,

enhanced interrogation worked.

Torture worked,

when it came to the hunt
for Bin Laden.

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

they would never have found
Osama bin Laden.

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

essentially to justify
some of the...

to justify the kind of
gloves-off approach

to the war on terror
that it took.

There is debate as to whether
information derived from torture

actually led to the capture
of Osama Bin Laden.

Kathryn Bigelow wrote,

"Torture was however,
as we all know,

employed in the early years
of the hunt.

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

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

The Guardian reported,

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

it may not have been
part of the story

of finding Osama Bin Laden."

Everyone will have
their own moral compass.

For instance,
when officers are running sources,

one of the dilemmas could be,
you know,

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

Should we be running sources
who are conducting, perhaps,

illegal or various violent acts?

Oleg Penkovsky
was a high-ranking Soviet official

providing key intelligence
to the West.

He was arrested by the Soviets
in 1962,

tried and executed
in the following year.

Penkovsky is providing
a whole range of information,

not just on the Soviet order
of battle

when it comes
to nuclear information -

so the nuclear stockpile
of the Soviet Union

and its nuclear capability -

but Penkovsky is also providing
a range of information

on Soviet military intelligence,

the types of strategies that
the Soviets are going to employ

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

But he's also,
like other defectors

and other individuals
further down the line,

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

He's providing information on,

who are their leading
intelligence officers

being sent overseas?

And it's the mundane information

that really is the building blocks
of good intelligence.

♪ SOMBRE MUSIC

Everything passes.

Everything wears out.

Everything breaks.

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

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

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

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

They aren't words
to be clever with.

They are too vital.

We live by them,

or else we make
everything meaningless.

While some recent practitioners

have maintained the sombre view
of espionage

that often characterised
the fiction and films

inspired by the Cold War,

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

appearing from to 1997 to 2002,

have seen the potential
for satirical comedy in spy stories.

That really hurt!

Who throws a shoe?

Spy is a spoof film from Paul Feig,

the director or Bridesmaids,

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

Susie, get Rayna to safety now!

I've got her!

Get away!

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

The Bridge Of Spies,
made in 2015,

is based on historical reality,
on a real story.

But it explores
the ambivalence

around the contention
between different ideologies,

the motives behind
those who are entangled

with those confrontations.

But there is in The Bridge Of Spies
a compelling sequence

when the handover is to take place.

Waiting for the arrival
of a second American figure.

I acted honourably,
I think they know that.

But sometimes people think wrong.
People are people.

Let's see how they greet me.

What can I look for?

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

Perhaps hell is like that,

a discordant confusion
of anxious souls.

Some argued, some slept,

some shouted, some wept,

some wrote, some sketched,

and many conspired
about their coming interrogation.

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

eyes unfocused as they tried
to see tomorrow.

Insubordinate.

Insolent.

A trickster.

Perhaps with criminal tendencies.

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

Good.

Social class
has always been a prominent feature

within spy novels
and indeed in spy film.

Mr Grantby?

Mr Grantby, we are looking
for an important piece

of scientific equipment.

It was lost on a train.

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

Shh.

Later writers react against this,

and here it's worth mentioning
Len Deighton.

Who came from
a very different background

from that that we would encounter

in say, Graham Greene
or Ian Fleming.

The image of Harry Palmer...

...is a fascinating one
at a time when

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

I haven't seen you here before, sir.

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

really care for these American
shopping methods.

One has to move with the times,
I suppose.

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

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

Yes, sir.

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

Excuse me.
Sorry.

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

Oh, men!

...button mushrooms and birds.

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

and something that people
would like to live up to

in terms of his lifestyle.

Champignon.

Nothing but the best
for our Palmer.

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

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

The room was silent,

except for the hum
of the fluorescent lights.

I sat at my desk,
reviewing the report.

Another one of those routine cases.

But something about it
nagged at me.

There were no big names,
no major intelligence,

but still,
something didn't add up.

The problem with this job...

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

We do see a complacent acceptance

of older ideas about gender
and the role of women,

which Deighton is quite happy
to accept.

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

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

Tell Ross, er...

...I'll be late.

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

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

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

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

"But I've stayed alive,
sweetheart."

"And that means a lot to me."

One of the striking features
about spy fiction and spy films

is that it is
a very male-dominated genre.

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

That it often involves

international travel,
exotic location,

all things that were
not so immediately accessible

to women writers.

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

we have Helen MacInnes,
a very accomplished novelist

who was writing on the basis
of personal experience.

Von Aschenhausen sat on the edge
of a large desk.

His eyes were fixed
on the man standing

over the girl roped to a chair.

He spoke again,

"You fool,
you stupid little fool."

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

Her novel Above Suspicion
was based

on a honeymoon journey
through Europe,

with her husband,
who was a classical scholar.

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

She was
a very politically engaged writer,

always pushing back
against what seemed to her

the dangerous self-deceptions
of Europe

in the context of poisonous,
political ideologies.

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

and when a nation indulges
in that luxury,

it finds itself with a dictator.

The Bond girl,

whose role in the early Bond films

was always to be gorgeous

and, broadly speaking,
sexually available,

that role has been superseded

by the formidably active figure,

who is as capable
of inflicting damage in a fight

as any of her male colleagues.

And is fully involved in the plot,

rather than just
a kind of passive vehicle.

In a recent television series,
Black Doves,

you see a complex spy narrative

which is dominated by women.

This isn't a complaint.
This is vengeance.

What are you talking about?

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

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

so take it.
Helen. This is NOT you.

Who do you think I am, Sam?

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

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

Even with the founding
of MI5 and MI6,

there were women
who played key roles.

Breaking the Enigma code
was hugely important

to Allied success in the war.

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

couldn't have operated
without that input.

And there were women
at very senior levels,

language experts and mathematicians
working on the codebreaking.

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

came from 13 different nations.
And Eisenhower said

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

and made a very considerable
contribution

to ultimate Allied victory.

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

like Odette
and Carve Her Name With Pride,

that showed the role
that women had played

with the SOE or behind enemy lines.

My name is Maurice Buckmaster.

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

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

I knew intimately
all the volunteers

who formed the French section
of Special Forces.

It was in September 1942
that Odette Sansom,

alias Madame Odette Metayer,

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

completed her training.

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

Odette was awarded the George Cross,

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

This is her story.

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

Perhaps one of the ironies is that

it's because women
tend to be overlooked

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

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

it's not because
they were seductresses,

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

arguably still today,

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

and that gave them
perfect opportunity

to serve in intelligence gathering.

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

and many of them lost their lives.

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

because we actually
had real female

Special Operations Executive
agents out there

who were playing that role.

They weren't Bond girls,
they were Bond.

Better than Bond,
because they were real,

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

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

There had been earlier explorations
of race and ethnicity

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

The Spook Who Sat By The Door.

Sam Greenlee's deeply challenging
book and film

present a fictional scenario
and a realistic fictional apocalypse

based on a Black ex-CIA agent

becoming a CIA-trained
and revolutionary Black Power leader

and fomenting an insurrection

to overturn White power
in the United States,

based on the very techniques
learned by Sam Greenlee himself,

when he was himself a spook
trained by the CIA.

The book,
initially published in Britain,

and the film that Sam Greenlee
co-produced

show a young Black CIA agent
turning against the state

and the institution
that trained him

in the intelligence methods
and techniques

to be used against foreign powers.

He uses them to marshal
a Black Power insurrection

in the United States.

Created at the time
of the assassination

of Martin Luther King
and Robert Kennedy,

with a background of accompanying
demonstrations and riots

throughout the United States,

the book and film
represent one of,

and perhaps the only,
full dramatisation

of the radical aims
of an extreme incarnation

of the Black Power movement.

Released by United Artist,
Sam Greenlee, and others,

believe that the FBI removed

all prints from cinemas
showing them,

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

Negatives were lost or destroyed.

One was eventually rediscovered
for the DVD release in 2004.

Sam Greenlee never recanted on,
or changed his views,

on the need for a revolutionary
freedom for Black Americans.

The book and the film
are a powerful account

of the frustrations and injustices

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

It is a remarkable creative assault

on the more usual personal fictions
and representations

of intelligence and espionage.

The American writer Aya De Leon

writes from the perspective
of a Black woman,

in A Spy In The Struggle
in the 2020s,

where she is thinking
about divided loyalties,

as so many spy writers do.

Loyalty between national interests
and the interests of Black people,

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

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

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

they wanted to show
they could run the game

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

They had the skills,
the knowledge and the ambition.

But ambition wasn't enough.

It was the willingness
to break the rules,

to bend them so far they snapped.

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

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

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

change as the years go by.

Bourne waited in the Renault,

two hundred yards east
of the restaurant entrance,

the motor running,
prepared to race ahead

the instant he saw Villiers
drive out.

Several others had already left,
all in separate cars.

Conspirators did not advertise
their association

and these old men were conspirators
in the truest sense.

They had traded
whatever honours they'd earned

for the lethal convenience
of an assassin's gun

and an assassin's organisation.

Age and bias
had robbed them of reason,

as they had spent
their lives robbing life

from the young
and the very young.

The easiest thing in the world

is to convince yourself
that you're right.

As one grows older,
this is easier still.

You see it reflected
in a different light,

in Robert Ludlum's
The Bourne Identity.

Where the story turns
on the central character's

having lost his identity.

What was it?

Why won't it leave me?

Some terrible thing
is deep inside me

trying to break out.

Trying, I think, to kill me.

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

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

Aren't we?

So, the image of the CIA

throughout the Bourne films,
the Bourne books

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

but Bourne himself is fighting
rogue elements within the CIA.

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

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

The CIA is involved
in extraordinary rendition.

It's involved in torture.

It's involved in drone strikes
and extrajudicial killing.

Jason Bourne had no memory
of who he was.

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

fighting for his life.

All he knew was that
he was being hunted

and that the people after him
would stop at nothing

to make sure he was dead.

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

They weren't just hunting HIM.

They were hunting
what he'd become.

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

and a man with no hope of escape.

There are certain things that
secret intelligence agencies can do,

that the everyday citizen
and corporations cannot do.

So, in the case of the UK,

only the UK's
intelligence security community,

MI5, GCHQ and SIS,

and can break law.

They are given express permission

by a Secretary of State
or a senior civil servant

to breach the legal frameworks
that are in place.

So, we know that
the US intelligence community

is really interested
in social media.

They're interested
in the power of social media

for what they're calling
"anticipatory intelligence".

So, can a computer,
can an algorithm

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

to gauge the temperature
of a population?

To gauge how close a group
or a certain population

is close to protesting,
is close to rioting.

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

One London hedge fund

has successfully used these
kinds of ideas

to outperform financial markets
by a considerable margin.

The US intelligence community
was completely blindsided

by the Arab Spring back in 2013.

Some intelligence professionals
and some computer scientists

would have you to believe
that, when perfected,

AI and computers will mean
that the intelligence community

will never be blindsided
by an Arab Spring event again.

Standing on the tube,

Coe was studying
his fellow passengers,

gauging their identities.

There was a checklist
he'd memorised,

a crib sheet
on how to spot a terrorist.

And there was another checklist,
allowing for the possibility

that terrorists might have
got hold of the first checklist

and adapted their behaviour
accordingly.

And Coe had memorised this too.

And he was mentally
running through them,

scoring his fellow travellers,

when it struck him
there was conceivably a checklist

for spotting members
of the security services.

He was doubtless ticking
all the right boxes himself.

The thought made him want to giggle,

which was itself
on one of the checklists.

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

perhaps primarily because
of the brilliant adaptations

of his work for television.

This was the blissful break,

when the world seemed
a safer place,

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

The office was as bleak
as its inhabitants.

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

watching the rain pour down.

The city outside was alive,

but inside
the walls were closing in.

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

was no place for hope.

Lamb had long given up on it,

but there was always
one last job,

always a reason
to keep pushing forward.

Even if that reason
was just to spite the people

who had left him here.

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

they don't invent discontent
within society.

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

But what they do
is they exploit it.

They exploit
already existing discontent.

They exploit and amplify
and weaponise

existing divisions within society.

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

we should always
think to ourselves,

you know, how is this going
to be exploited

by people who would do us harm?

Get your own house in order,

that in itself
is a tool of resilience,

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

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

Intelligence agencies
are only responding

to the demands
of the government themselves,

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

they're not a rogue elephant.

They are responding
to specific tasking by a government,

and they are following through

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

And that's the great
sort of divide

between the popular depictions
of intelligence and reality.

For decades to come,

the spy world will continue
to be the collective couch

where the subconscious
of each nation is confessed.

Other novelists have looked at
differing approaches to espionage.

Like Stella Rimington,

Charles Beaumont
has personal experience of MI6.

His A Spy Alone is based on
the fictional premise

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

with members
who have different reasons

of being prepared
to work for Putin's Russia.

Some recent spy fiction,

including Adam Brookes's
Night Heron trilogy,

have turned their attention
to China as a global threat.

"The greatest long-term threat

to our nation's information
and intellectual property

and to our economic vitality

is the counter-intelligence
and economic espionage threat

from China."

It's the oldest question of all,
George.

Who can spy on the spies?

The idea that, somehow,
the CIA and the British

are behind everything
and they're the evil enemy

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

like the Russian state.

And I think that
it comes back to this idea

of weaponisation of history,
and also weaponisation of image

is key in shaping propaganda
hearts and minds.

He betrayed his country, yes.

Perhaps he did.

But who among us
has not committed treason

to something or someone
more important than a country?

They never understand it, do they?

They never know what it costs.

The sordid tricks
of lying and deceiving.

The isolation
from ordinary people.

They think you can run
on their kind of fuel,

the flag-waving and the music.

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

When you're alone.

You've got to hate.

And it needs strength
to hate all the time.

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

when you're not a part of it.

What I worry about is
the Americans weaponising

American intelligence access
for political ends.

Back in 1973,

the Nixon administration
and Henry Kissinger

were becoming increasingly alarmed
by their perception

that the Brits were getting
too friendly with Europe.

And Kissinger and Nixon
had been saying to Heath,

"You know, just slow down
on European integration,

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

Kissinger picked up the phone
to the NSA and said,

"Can you just stop sharing
priceless NSA intelligence

with the Brits until
these people in Downing Street

start singing from our hymnal."

My worry is that Trump
will say to NSA,

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

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

by saying to the director of NSA,

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

Ukraine's successful
intelligence-led drone attack

on a large section
of Russia's bomber fleet,

previously bombing the Ukraine,

both may change the nature
of defence, armaments of warfare

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

to make
brilliantly conceived gadgets,

combined with total intelligence,

more effective than
billion-pound aircraft carriers,

wings of attack
aircraft and big armies.

Intelligence and the nature
of warfare are changing.

Israeli intelligence created
5,000 exploding pagers

with deadly effect.

Ukraine's president,
Zelensky's father

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

It is hard not to wonder if,

with the possible help of MI6

and President Biden's
intelligence-fed information,

that the Zelenskys
created an extraordinary

intelligence-led military coup

when Ukraine successfully attacked
Russia's bomber fleet.

World events
and personal political opinions

are being weaponised by both
benign and malevolent state actors.

In the real geopolitical world

of increasing
international conflict,

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

an apparent new Cold War,

continuing conflict and destruction
in the Middle East,

the rise of China,

the real world of intelligence
becomes increasingly important.

There is the possibility in the West
of the Five Eyes

intelligence-sharing arrangements
breaking down.

In short,
all the familiar patterns of spying

and secret intelligence
are changing.

The worlds
of appearance and reality,

of public and private,

of the fiction and the real
geopolitical world are merging.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services
www.skyaccessibility.sky