Original subtitles

A good spy has to be comfortable with the idea of lying

and with the idea of manipulating someone.

It is one of the peculiarities of the profession.

'They would need to be ethically flexible,

'I think that was the phrase.'

The need to be manipulative is there for both MI5 and MI6.

It's the core role of an MI6 officer to go out and manipulate others,

to hand over information,

I.e., become a traitor to their own country or their own corporation,

or whatever it is.

There's an acronym that's used in previous generations to describe

the various motivations that someone might have to act as an agent.

The acronym was MICE.

And that stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego.

And these are the four key levers that you can use

to bend someone to your will, to recruit them to do your bidding.

'The idea of, erm, compromise, it's sinking to a certain level.'

It's not about winning someone round,

it's about coercion, which is nasty.

There are certainly intelligence services around the world

who do pressure people into working for them, blackmail them.

In Russia, the term they use for this is "kompromat".

PRODUCER: OK, 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.

What is kompromat?

Compromising material.

Well, it was effective when people were recruited here.

And I must tell you that abroad, we never used it

because it's dangerous.

We are surrounded by the British counterintelligence.

We're being followed.

We've been under control sometimes, and it's a very risky operation.

But here in Russia, we did it.

John Vassall was a clerk in the Admiralty.

Formerly, he worked here in Moscow at the embassy.

He was our agent too. He was our man.

He'd been a photographer in the Air Force in the 1940s.

And he was appointed Secretary to the Naval Attache

in the British Embassy in Moscow,

arguably one of the worst appointments of all time.

Whilst in Moscow, Vassall experiences

what a lot of Western officials experience.

A sense of loneliness, a sense of isolation,

and is reaching out to people for friendship,

but also sexual gratification.

John Vassall was identified, talent-spotted, by the Soviets

as a likely target for a honey trap.

Vassall is gay at the time when it's illegal,

both in the UK and other countries, to be gay.

It's this, really, that leads to his... his downfall.

He was invited to a dinner party.

He was treated like, er, a good man.

Eating caviar, drinking champagne.

Vassall really fell prey to it.

He was a gay bachelor.

He had no boyfriend in his life, no partner,

and that must have been terrible

and it made him very, very vulnerable to manipulation.

He was homosexual and we had a man in the Embassy,

an agent, who was also homosexual.

Vassall is essentially compromised by being invited to

a KGB-organised orgy where he's photographed.

CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS

Vassall was kind of aware that something had certainly happened

that evening, but tried to think,

"Well, that's an evening to be forgotten."

After our recruiters came to meet him

and showed him the photographs...

..he nearly collapsed and he wanted to commit suicide

and to report everything to the ambassador.

But this man who was at the Embassy,

our agent, to soothe him, said,

"Oh, my dear, the KGB is rubbish, you may work for them."

He was told by the man who became his case officer,

that there were other people, unpleasant people,

who wanted to use this information against him,

and that he, the KGB officer, would act as an intermediary

and would keep the bad guys off his back

if he could just feed them

the occasional snippet of information that was useful.

And Vassall did exactly that.

Vassall knows that to fess up to what he's been up to

would mean the end of his career

and potentially criminal charges being brought against him.

And therefore he is... he is blackmailed

into providing information to Soviet intelligence.

At the root of it was a bad attitude towards homosexuality.

It should have been legal and accepted

and the people should have been protected,

not pushed under the carpet

and therefore left for the KGB to exploit.

Vassall's stint at the British Embassy in Moscow came to an end

and he was looking forward to getting back to London

and hopefully being free from all this terrible business

with the KGB.

But just before he was due to go back,

he again met his Russian masters

and they introduced him to a man called Gregory.

And they said to him,

"We've arranged for Gregory to meet you once you're back in London."

His career as a spy develops further when he's recalled back to London,

when he joins the Naval Intelligence Division.

And then later on, he becomes a clerk

in the office of a Conservative minister called Tom Galbraith.

And it's at this point, really, that his career kicks off

and he provides a lot of information on British Naval technology,

information about individuals

working within the Ministry of Defence with him.

They supplied him with a camera and he took photographs.

In the Cold War, these cameras were absolutely vital

because you might have only a few minutes

with documents in a safe at a lunch break,

and you might not be able to take those documents out of your office.

So the ability to snap picture after picture after picture,

and then hand over a tiny roll of film to your handler

gave you much more opportunity to collect secrets.

If, for any reason, there was an emergency cropped up

and Vassall could not meet his contact the next day,

the protocol was, using pink chalk, he would draw a circle

at a very specific location, a fence

in the Duchess of Bedford Walk in Kensington,

in front of Plane Tree House.

And this was a sign of danger, "We need to put off our meeting."

He worked for years, I suppose, and plenty of material

about the military questions, Naval questions, mainly.

Giving them most important documents of the Admiralty,

he was considered to be a valuable agent.

It was a gift to the KGB, the KGB seized the gift,

and obtained good intelligence from Vassall for the next seven years.

It seems pretty clear that

there was a financial element to it as well.

He lived a far more comfortable life

with money from the Russians than he would've done

just on his civil servants wage.

He takes a flat in the rather illustrious Dolphin Square.

He would've been earning about £700 a year.

This flat was costing something like £500 a year.

It looks as if Vassall was paying for this

from the money given to him by his Russian masters.

He gradually became a subject of suspicion.

The only way you catch a spy is by another spy denouncing them

and that's a defector.

The detection of John Vassall really came about

through information supplied by a defector from the Soviet Union.

It's believed he was betrayed by the Soviet defector, Anatoly Golitzin,

who defected to the CIA and the United States in 1961.

Who gave various clues saying, you know,

"There's somebody working in Naval intelligence

"who is passing secrets."

And he was arrested in 1962. Imprisoned.

CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS

And ironically, when he was arrested

the one person that he wanted to protect more than anybody else

was the KGB case officer who had been blackmailing him,

because he thought that he was a true friend

who was preventing him from doing serious damage

under the control of the rest of the KGB.

The punishment suffered by Vassall was the destruction of his life.

He was the son of a vicar.

He had tried to conceal his sexuality

but he was humiliated by the exposure, by his imprisonment.

He was never sorry for what he has done because he enjoyed life.

And he, for the first time in his life,

he was treated like an equal

over there by the creams of our intelligentsia.

He was very religious to the end of his life

and immensely trustworthy,

just realised that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

It seemingly emphasised the vulnerability

of gay people in secret positions.

And it's taken a long time to correct that.

Everybody has secrets. Everybody has needs.

Everybody has weaknesses, no matter who you are.

The honey trap technique is something that

the Soviet Union used to use a lot, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.

And even today, I think it can be a bit of an issue.

PRODUCER: Does this sort of blackmail

and the use of sex to manipulate

still get used today by the FSB?

I can only suppose they do.

I hope so.

Blackmail is a very bad approach or indeed honey traps

because the individuals will deeply resent the position you put them in,

you can't necessarily trust the information,

they may well betray their case officer to their authorities.

Things like extortion and blackmail

and honey traps are just not used in the UK.

I don't think they would want a person who felt able to go out

and blackmail and manipulate someone to the degree that...

that you were destroying their life.

In many ways the version of spying that you see in a James Bond film

is about as far away from the reality as it's possible to get.

They meet tonight. Why?

To choose a replacement. Where?

The Palazzo Carteza, midnight. Sounds like fun, I might drop by.

SHE GASPS

I'm not saying it would never be considered

if there was an absolute emergency situation

and no other way of doing something.

It is conceivable as a last resort.

Betty Pack was an American socialite.

She was born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe,

but she was known to her family as Betty.

She married Arthur Pack and became Betty Pack.

Betty Pack was the wife of my uncle, Arthur.

She could have been very persuasive and incredibly charming

and amazingly beautiful.

Betty's way into the world of espionage

was not a conventional one.

In Poland, she began to have an affair with a Polish diplomat...

..and after one encounter, he let slip a vital piece of intelligence.

Betty thought it best to pass this on to the British Embassy

and very soon after that,

she was taken on formally as a spy for Britain's MI6.

It wasn't usual for MI6 to take on female agents,

and it certainly wasn't usual for MI6 to expect their agents

to sleep with their targets.

But Betty seemed to have good access to a good source,

it seemed to be reliable, so they were prepared to use it.

She was able to engage anybody in conversation

and this was noticed by her spy master.

Next, she began to have an affair

with someone who was part of the Polish Foreign Ministers office.

And from him, she found out some details of the work

being done by brilliant Polish cryptanalysts

on the German Enigma machine

and this helped to flesh out Britain's understanding

of exactly what this machine was being used for.

By the start of 1941, Britain is at war with Nazi Germany,

but America is very much not.

Betty arrived in America and there she was put in touch with

a representative of MI6,

was given the codename "Cynthia"

and was told to put herself about in diplomatic society,

which is exactly what she did.

She saw her opportunity in this man

who knew the movements of the Italian navy.

Admiral Alberto Lais.

They began to have a romantic relationship

and eventually Betty asked him

for the crucial Italian Naval cypher codes.

Whether or not Lais agreed to pass these on,

we know that she found a way to then get her hands on them,

they were passed to the British

and it's alleged that these played a crucial part

in the battle of Cape Matapan,

which was won by the Royal Navy in 1941.

She was not interested in the people she got the information from,

as long as she got the information.

There was something a bit... cool about it.

She was one of the most famous female spies

during the Second World War,

she seduced a number of brilliant diplomats.

But as Betty herself once put it, sex between two consenting adults

is surely a better way to extract intelligence than torture.

Information is power,

so it can be used in many different ways.

One of the other aspects to... to finding out your enemy secrets

is misleading them about your own.

To turn around and feed false information.

The really interesting places is in the psychology,

is in the aspect of spying

that makes it a little bit like a chess game.

I think there's huge drama here on an international scale.

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

through as many channels as possible.

Misdirection.

So, er, if something important is gonna happen,

it might be some military initiative,

you want the enemy's eyes to be focused somewhere else.

The allies were making a steady encroachment upon Nazi Germany

or occupied Europe.

The intention was to attack one of the axis powers, Italy,

by invading Sicily and ultimately moving into the mainland.

And if the Germans knew about this

and the Germans were waiting for them,

this had the potential to turn into a massacre.

They had to find a way to disguise the fact that this was their target.

There were some very imaginative and creative people

actually at work in some of the intelligence

and security organisations in Britain at this time.

Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley

was seconded to MI5.

He worked very closely with Ewan Montagu.

Ewen Montagu was my father.

He joined the RNVR in order to go to sea.

And having enjoyed sailing tremendously before the war,

this was... his time in the Navy was the only time

he didn't set foot on sea.

Operation Mincemeat was a fantastic plan,

which was to fool the Germans into thinking

that we were going to mount an invasion around Greece, Sardinia,

rather than the real target, Sicily.

So, with Operation Mincemeat, essentially a dead body is obtained.

They found a corpse,

a Welshman who tragically ended his life, and they used it.

They turned him into a fake British officer.

Royal Marine Major William Martin never actually existed.

He was really a homeless person from Wales

called Glyndwr Michael.

He was a 34-year-old man.

He'd managed to eat a piece of bread with rat poison on it.

Probably suicide, a very, very sad case,

and his body was lying in St Pancras mortuary.

And he's that body, he is used and dressed up as Major Martin

of the Royal Marines.

There is something almost quite odd and challenging

about the fact that the men at the centre of this, Glyndwr Michael,

was a real person, he is at the centrepoint of the whole thing,

but he somehow doesn't have any real identity.

The only photograph we really have of his face is of him as a corpse.

And he would be carrying some highly top-secret documents.

Of course, the letters that they wanted him to have,

the letters that pointed to an Allied invasion of Greece

and Sardinia, rather than Sicily.

As well as some personal effects, and those were all faked.

Was almost like a novelist, but creating a character,

and my father did it with the utmost detail

and he felt himself really into the... character of this man

that he was creating.

He signed his identity card.

His fingerprints, my father's fingerprints,

were on everything that would take a fingerprint,

and he did begin to feel he almost was him.

There were various items of pocket litter, if you like,

planted on him.

So, a photograph of his girlfriend, Pam,

who was actually an MI5... female MI5 officer.

And so she was the fictitious girlfriend.

But there was also a banker's draft

and, you know, "We need you to pay your debt of X amount."

Mincemeat is utterly enthralling

precisely because of these details,

because of the faked photographs, the pocket litter,

the attention to detail.

But every one of those things is a potential weakness.

Every one of those things is something that can go wrong.

There was a briefcase strapped to him with these secret documents,

and there were three letters from a senior commander

to another senior commander.

We make the Germans think, through these letters,

that the next landings are actually not Sicily,

but are going to be Greece.

What we're doing is, we're giving the Germans

bits of the jigsaw puzzle, getting them to put it together,

because if the Germans

put the jigsaw puzzle together themselves,

they're much more likely to believe it.

When they were driving the corpse, actually, from the cold storage,

they passed these people queueing for a spy film,

and they all thought, if they really knew that just outside

was a spy story much more interesting and actually true...

And they all burst out laughing and almost crashed the car.

And, of course, one of the problems was,

if we're going to drop this body at sea

off the Spanish coast so that it's washed up on the shore,

how exactly are we gonna transport this dead body

to this location, er, to drop it into the sea

without it deteriorating rapidly?

Famously, Fleming's character, Q, the gadget man,

is actually an inspiration of two characters

who worked for a branch of military intelligence, MI9.

Charles Fraser-Smith and Christopher Clayton Hutton.

So, Charles Fraser-Smith's task

was to make a casket,

a watertight, airtight casket,

so the body wouldn't disintegrate either.

And then it would be packed with dry ice.

The submarine released it into the sea off the Spanish coast,

where it was found by a Spanish fisherman.

It was handed over to the Spanish authorities.

And the Spanish authorities took the briefcase,

refused to give it over to the British,

and sent it to Madrid.

And that's where they secretly opened those three letters,

copied them, re-sealed the letters, back in the briefcase.

They then passed the briefcase to the British.

But the letters they'd copied

they passed to the German authorities.

It's no surprise that this brilliant story

has been turned into a film.

It's full of espionage, intrigue, ingenious deception.

We have to convince Germany that our target is Greece.

The plan begins in Spain,

where a corpse will wash up on shore bearing classified letters.

A corpse carrying fake documents?

The hardest part was monitoring whether or not

the Germans had fallen for it.

You need to know if your enemy has taken the bait,

and to some extent, that's the most important thing.

And that's where Bletchley Park came to the fore.

We knew from the intercepts

that the Germans had believed Major Martin's story.

NEWSREEL: 'The defeat of Rommel, the clearing of the Mediterranean,

'led to the swift follow-through into Europe.

'The invasion and conquest of Sicily and the invasion of Italy.'

They saw the Germans' response,

and the response was to strengthen their forces

in Greece and Sardinia, and not Sicily,

so that was the extraordinary coup.

There's no doubt that Operation Mincemeat

enabled the successful landings on Sicily.

'As Britain enters 1944,

'the people of Britain can look back with pardonable satisfaction on 1943

'as a year of victory.'

I had a German friend of my father's age

who once told me, "Your father saved my life."

Because he'd been moved from Sicily to Greece.

So, one tends to forget that not only did we win the war

and we saved so many British and Allied lives,

it also saved a lot of German lives.

This was a perfect example

of being able to deceive the enemy

and to manipulate material information

to achieve an outcome.

I mean, quite brilliant.

It was bold, it was risky, it was primitive,

but incredibly romantic.

There's all kinds of ways

in which false information can be planted and used

by intelligence agencies to try and mislead their adversaries.

In terms of manipulating whole societies,

the scaling is vastly different, but it is, again,

psychological manipulation and profiling.

The ability to influence events unseen,

the so-called hidden hand,

is really useful.

Whether that's the spread of misinformation,

passing documents to one another,

or whether that's cultivating networks of individuals

behind the scenes - journalists, politicians, media types.

For instance, if a government wanted to put out particular stories,

it might be that the intelligence service

is able to provide the contacts, the editors,

the agents of influence, as they are known in the business.

In the 1990s, in MI6,

there was a section called Information Operations, I-Ops,

which was there specifically to plant fake stories,

or to manipulate stories to fit the spies' agenda.

It might be that in particular operational situations,

you might want a particular story released to the press.

So, suppose, for instance,

you were trying to undermine a terrorist group

and trying to convince the terrorists

they can't trust each other,

it might be that a story appeared in the press

which gave support to that.

So, that is a very easy way

of what is effectively psychological manipulation of people.

I would argue that intelligence and propaganda go hand in hand.

Winning hearts and minds is often talked about

in the context of counter-insurgency,

but it's even more important

in the context of espionage.

If you look at the issue more broadly,

what you are doing with propaganda activities, the Cold War,

for example, was this ideological struggle

between East and West.

In the immediate post-war years,

a new kind of conflict had begun almost immediately,

and this was the Cold War, and it was very much a battle

to do with trying to win hearts and minds.

The Information Research Department

was a foreign office unit created in 1948.

But it actually did something very, very interesting.

It was the British Government's unattributable propaganda wing.

Its job was to slip articles into newspapers,

in order to manipulate public opinion.

Generally, they engaged in what is called "Grey Propaganda".

Information that is essentially true,

but we don't know the origins of this information.

Those stories would be planted

in newspapers around the world by MI6,

using their journalistic contacts.

So, essentially, this was a synergy

between the propagandists and the secret agents,

and the people that MI6 were running.

There's an interesting aspect here,

in connection with the celebrated journalist and author George Orwell.

George Orwell was enormously popular with the IRD,

because every propaganda organisation

wants to find someone

who's already pushing in the right direction.

Like many individuals,

Orwell was someone who was on the left of British politics.

However, who was horrified by events taking place in the Soviet Union.

He was totally opposed, Orwell,

to the form of communism

that had been established under Joseph Stalin.

George Orwell was perfect because he was an anti-Communist socialist.

He wrote Animal Farm.

It's the story of a gang of animals,

and they rise up, and install a new regime

where all animals are meant to be equal.

But, unfortunately, what happens is

that they end up in a state of slavery

which is really worse than the former regime.

The Information Research Department particularly wanted

the Soviet population to read Animal Farm,

because they wanted to hammer home this message

that some were more equal than others.

Typically, they bought up the rights to all his books

and they gave those foreign rights away for free,

and they translated those books for free.

The IRD soon grasped how significant Animal Farm was

as a potential instrument in the Cold War.

They thought this would be ideal

if it could be reduced to a cartoon strip,

which could be then published in newspapers all over the world.

The IRD, we've recently learned, was so much more,

it wasn't just getting Orwell's books to Soviet people,

and it wasn't just inserting articles into the press,

they also forged Soviet documents, forged Muslim Brotherhood documents,

created entirely fake national liberation movements.

This is going out there and doing stuff,

and shaping things, and changing things,

and manipulating, dividing, discrediting.

You see this as a tactic which is not just from the Cold War,

but is still happening today.

Intelligence agencies have always been involved in stealing secrets,

getting hold of information,

but also in covert action, in manipulation,

in doing things where the hand of the state is hidden.

And what you can see

is the shift towards doing this in the online space.

I'm David Omand.

My last job was Security and Intelligence Coordinator

in the Cabinet office.

Before that, I was Permanent Secretary at the Home Office.

And before that, Director of GCHQ.

The government Communications headquarters, based in Cheltenham,

has been, for the last 100 years, or slightly more than 100 years,

providing the British government with signals intelligence,

and today, digital intelligence.

It turns out that there's not much honour among thieves.

The GCHQ spies on everybody.

The spying around G7, G20, is fascinating,

because it blends the world of Bletchley Park and James Bond.

When world leaders,

including the leaders of Russia and other countries,

were coming to the UK for a G20 summit,

apparently, they were being bugged and intercepted.

Allegedly, GCHQ set up false Internet cafes,

which delegates dropped in on,

and they entered their login details, which were recorded,

and of course, those login details

will now be known to British intelligence,

and so wherever they login anywhere in the world,

they can be monitored, and so on.

What they were doing was technologically

very, very sophisticated.

So, they were tapping phones,

they could intercept and read emails

as the recipient of the email read them,

it was technologically, sort of, very, very sophisticated.

Politicians were angry,

and a lot of it maybe was confected.

They know there's stuff going on,

but they don't want it to be publicly discussed,

they don't want to be publicly avowed.

Well, it was a very easy opportunity.

Britain has long done it, done it for many decades.

It was in no way new

and will have in no way come as a surprise

to those who were being listened in on.

But at the same time, they will make a very public fuss,

because one rule of intelligence is "Never get caught".

Few people had really thought much about what GCHQ did.

Or what spying meant in the digital age.

Until Snowden came along.

And that suited the intelligence agencies just fine.

I was based in New York for The Guardian at the time.

To me, it was just another day in the office.

The US editor, Janine Gibson,

shouted across the newsroom and said,

"I want you to go to Hong Kong tomorrow."

And I said, "Why?" And she said,

"There's someone in Hong Kong claiming to be a spy

"that's gonna leak lots of information to us."

Ewen was a very experienced, completely unflappable,

Scottish reporter.

If anybody was gonna sort of have a real bullshit detector,

it would be Ewen.

I didn't seriously think there was gonna be a spy at the other end.

So, I only took enough clothes for two or three days.

There are three of them - Glenn Greenwald,

columnist and blogger Laura Poitras, a film-maker,

and a colleague of mine from The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill.

We flew into Hong Kong on the Sunday night,

and Glenn and Laura went to see Snowden immediately next day.

And they'd arranged to meet at The Mira.

And he said, "Look, I'll be carrying a Rubik's Cube."

You were expecting somebody senior, who's disgruntled,

you know, passed over for a promotion,

you know, somebody of that calibre.

You weren't expecting this sort of callow youth.

Edward Snowden was a geek.

He was doing technical work

for America's human intelligence organisation,

the James Bonds, if you like,

and then he became a contractor for the National Security Agency,

which is, if you like, America's modern-day Bletchley Park.

He viewed himself as a whistle-blower,

as someone who wanted to bring to light, what he saw,

as the mass surveillance of people by the secret state.

Edward Snowden had access

to tens of thousands of British secrets.

He must have known that his life, as he lived it, was over,

as he had headed out with

a huge trove of incredibly sensitive information.

Oliver Stone did a movie about Snowden.

In it, he pasted the thumb drive onto the Rubik's Cube.

And then as he approached security, threw it to one of the guards,

then picked it up on the other side.

You ever play with one of these?

Yeah, when I was a kid.

Yeah. You should try it. It's hard.

I asked Stone about this last time I saw him,

he just sort of smiled and said, "That's Hollywood."

Hey, have a good weekend, man. You too, buddy. All right.

REPORTER: 'Three weeks ago,

'he walked out the door of his home in Hawaii,

'telling his girlfriend he was off on a trip.

'He told his bosses he was off for epilepsy treatment.

'For three weeks, he's been staying at this hotel,

'sorting out and publishing top-secret documents,

'copied from his years of working for US intelligence.'

Once we're in his room,

there were all sorts of strange things,

like, he had pillows up the jam of door,

to sort of muffle the sound.

And he said this was to prevent

anybody in the corridor listening in.

Whenever he went out, which didn't happen often,

he basically lived off room service,

he would put a glass of water

and a napkin with a bit of soy sauce on it.

So if somebody came in the door,

we'd spill the soya sauce onto the napkin.

They said, at any point, that door can be kicked in,

and it'll be the CIA, or they might have recruited...

some local hoods from one of the Triad gangs

to do the work for them.

It's not an easy decision.

It's a lot of heart-searching that always goes on

for anyone who goes public about the intelligence agencies,

because of the extremely high price you have to pay.

Paranoia levels are off the scale,

because you know exactly the tools they can deploy

to track you and to hunt you down.

For Snowden, it must have been crippling,

in terms of the paranoia.

Edward Snowden started off as a believer,

but, but, but, as the years went on, became increasingly disillusioned

with what he regarded as out-of-control surveillance

by the US Government and its British allies.

What Snowden did was to reveal to the world

the extent of the powers that...

not just America, but Britain,

had taken upon themselves to collect at scale

and examine and delve into

the most private details of our lives.

Edward Snowden revealed

the extraordinary technical capability of digital surveillance.

What they're dealing with is probably

the biggest leak of secret intelligence ever.

INTERVIEWER: Why should people care about surveillance?

Because even if you're not doing anything wrong,

you're being watched and recorded.

You don't have to have done anything wrong.

You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody,

even by a wrong call,

and then they can use this system to go back in time

and scrutinise every decision you've ever made,

every friend you've ever discussed something with,

and attack you on that basis,

to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life

and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

WILLIAM HAGUE: It has been suggested

that GCHQ uses our partnership with the United States

to get around UK law, obtaining information

that they cannot legally obtain in the United Kingdom.

I wish to be absolutely clear that this accusation is baseless.

People leapt on it and said,

"NSA, GCHQ is reading all your emails,"

which of course they're not.

That's not what's happening.

You get access to the raw data in motion,

and then you apply very smart algorithms

to try and pick out the small bits of information,

tiny bits of information,

which you think will help you solve the jigsaw puzzle.

So while they may, uh... be intending to target

someone associated with a foreign government,

or someone that they suspect of terrorism,

they're collecting your communications to do so.

We may think our intelligence services

are run by well-meaning James Bond lookalikes,

but the potential is there for something bad.

It opens us up to manipulation of various kinds.

When the, sort of, the powder keg went off,

the more thoughtful intelligence operatives I spoke to said, "Look...

"We knew this was bound to happen.

"We knew we... we couldn't go on like this."

Even the Stasi could only dream

of the scale of the powers that the spies now have -

through the Internet.

So we have to rely on the goodwill of the spies.

Because the legislation in this country was so out of date,

it didn't cover the Internet and that level of communications.

So they might not have been breaking the letter of the law,

but the law was so vague and so full of holes at that point,

they could do basically what they wanted.

The good news is that the democracies,

whether in Europe or in North America,

have added new safeguards

to make sure that these powerful tools can't be misused.

But just because it's law,

doesn't mean it's ethically or morally justified or correct

to impose these sort of massive nationwide spying powers.

Individual, ordinary people become pawns in this information war.

America has tonight urged Hong Kong to act quickly

to extradite the whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

Things were hotting up for Snowden.

He was the most wanted man on the planet.

And so he was trying to find a way out.

His plan was to go to Latin America.

That involved flying via Moscow.

Didn't work out like that.

When he was in the air, the Americans revoked his passport.

So when he landed in Moscow,

he no longer had the right to fly on to Cuba.

That was a lucky break for him,

because Russia was the only place in the world he's probably safe.

Edward Snowden is now an exile in Russia.

He's gradually rebuilt a life.

He'd rather be in America. That's probably not feasible.

If not, he'd rather be in Berlin or Scandinavia.

But they don't have the courage to take him.

The reality is that Snowden will stay in Russia,

because obviously if he goes back to America, which he would like to do,

he would immediately be charged with espionage

and faces the prospect of life in jail.

GCHQ was now becoming an actor in the covert action sphere.

It wasn't just a silent sentinel,

sitting back and listening, hoovering stuff up.

Protecting us.

It was now getting out and doing stuff,

and hacking and meddling and manipulating

and being much more active.

This was a top-secret unit within GCHQ.

JTRIG is a unit inside GCHQ

which did what we might call online covert action,

or dirty tricks.

A really good example of JTRIG's online communication techniques

is denying communications to Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan.

GCHQ, working closely with MI6 and the Ministry of Defence,

were targeting Taliban fighters

with offensive cyber, as it's called in the jargon.

And it involved spamming them, for example, with text messages,

every ten seconds,

to try to make their phones completely unworkable.

The use of offensive cyber is now commonplace.

The Government has admitted it.

Anything you can do which makes it less likely

that the adversary is going to be able

to organise an attack on a patrol, for example, is to be welcomed.

There are very dangerous individuals and very dangerous groups out there,

and if GCHQ has tools

in which to disrupt or manipulate them,

then that is fine.

The problem is, it's very easy for the spies to cover up stuff

and lie to their political master.

So that once they've got a tool

and something else comes up which might interest them,

which would be slightly greyer,

then they can use it against that other target too.

I think certainly the Snowden disclosures

revealed a massive shift to technology.

Things get quite interesting in cyberspace.

You can do forms of manipulation.

You can get inside people's systems.

You can try and make them mistrust their own data

and their own information.

There's a long tradition of sting operations

and interference operations -

against terrorist groups, for example -

in the three dimensions of the old world.

This is simply, as it were,

translating this into the digital world.

LEON PANETTA: Despite our significant gains against Al-Qaeda,

we continue to face the threat of terrorism.

NEWSREADER: ..a possible terror attack in Europe.

THERESA MAY: The threat we face from terrorism

has grown more serious.

So, Operation Cupcake was a very interesting early example

of a kind of cyber interference operation by British intelligence,

it looks like by GCHQ,

in which an Al Qaeda-based group

was putting up bomb-making instructions on the Internet,

in a kind of online magazine.

Particularly a website called Inspire.

And the article was called How To Make A Bomb In Your Mum's Kitchen.

And instead was replaced with some text about making a cupcake.

This kind of information substitution

is absolutely standard,

and all major intelligence services are doing it, round the world.

Going to Jihadist publications,

or Jihadist donation websites,

and making them harmless.

But it was a way of at least causing friction for these groups,

about making their life harder,

about showing that they didn't have free rein in the online space

to be able to put out things like bomb-making instructions,

and to just make life harder for them.

If there is something dangerous, dangerous information out there,

you replace it with innocuous information.

That is a standard information operation.

Remember, you're talking about intelligence,

which is just an old word for information.

It sows the seeds of doubt, really.

They're doing much more sophisticated things

than Cupcake, in reality.

There's a huge dimension to that Cupcake.

Cupcake is one part of a huge picture.

Sitting at my desk at home,

you can understand a lot about your intended target.

The Internet age, technology,

married to traditional spying methods,

mean that the age of the spy

is perhaps more valid today than it has ever been.

The whole point of spying is to remain unseen and unnoticed

and to blend in.

All the good work they do is largely unreported,

and you do get a sense of pride when something goes right.

An operation goes well, or you stop something.

You can't see the secret intelligence

that MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ are producing.

The only way to judge how good they are

is the decisions the Government is able to make.

All of us knew that we were making Britain and her allies

considerably safer.

I think our intelligence services

are actually somewhere in the middle.

We've had our successes, but we've also had our mistakes.

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.

Most people live in blissful ignorance

of what goes on around them.

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

Subtitles by accessibility@itv.com