Why Do Russian Spies Interfere in Global Politics?

19:37Gordon:There would be more incentive now to not share that than there would have been in the past. I think that the product is probably still being shared. And I suppose if you're in MI6 and you're thinking about an area where the Americans bring something to the table that you don't have and you want to work on something on Russia, you'd probably still do that because you'd want the help. And it also probably depends a lot on the nature of the interpersonal relationships between the two services, Russia components, and whether there's ongoing trust there. But yeah, I think overall, you'd have to say, if we put things into the American system that would allow people in the White House to know who, or frankly, even at upper echelons at CIA to know who our sources are, you'd probably give that a second thought in this environment in a way that you wouldn't have in years past.

20:40Gordon:I'm backing into that just by context clues and just thinking through the problem. I don't know if we have any examples of that or any instances of that actually happening yet though. Do you know, Gordon?

20:51David:I mean, I think it's hard to know for sure about that kind of stuff, but I think there would be a little bit more caution on some of these things. I mean, it was a big deal, wasn't it, Tom? The idea that the UK was not going to let the US use some of its bases for those initial offensive strikes on Iran. We've just been recording a series on Iraq, WMD, and you go back to that period 25 years ago, when the instinctive thing would be, we must cleave as close as possible to the US. And now you have a prime minister who actually sees advantage in not doing that. That's a shift, isn't it? Yeah, it definitely is a shift.

21:27Although I think, I'm sure this will be a key part of your series, but I was in Heathrow when 9-11 happened. And I can remember to this day, just watching the screens just cancelled, cancelled, cancelled, cancelled. And everyone went to the BA ticket desk behind me because it was the only place with the TV. And after a bit, there were just hundreds of people watching this horror unfold. And And if you were listening to this and you're only 20, it's hard to capture, isn't it, for those of us who were alive at the time, the sheer seismic impact of that. And I guess we've got to remember that Tony Blair's response in Afghanistan and Iraq came off the back of that.

22:07And it was, I think, went sour with Iraq, but Brits were with him for a long time. In a way, there just no way would they be now.

22:16David:Yeah, there is a structural shift there, I think. which is going on with the populations. Sorry to ask questions, but it's too tempting to be here with you guys. One thing I wanted to ask is that when I was doing the TV drama and stuff, a lot of my thoughts were about the money. Russian money flooded into London, as you all know, from 2010 onwards. I've always thought British politics is quite susceptible to money, almost more susceptible, I think, than American politics because there's less of a tradition of rich people giving to political parties in Britain. And so it's really hard to get money.

22:51So I think British politics has always been very vulnerable to money and remains so. But do you think going the other way that Ukraine has made it easier for British and American intelligence to pick up assets inside Russia? Or is that just exaggerated?

23:06David:I mean, it was interesting, isn't it, that both Britain and America, so both MI6 and CIA have been running these little advert campaigns, which are very interesting, in Russian, basically telling people how to contact them on the dark web. And the point being, they're very clearly targeted at Russian officials, saying to Russian officials who may be disillusioned with what Putin is doing to their country and the stupidity, as many would see it, at the invasion of Ukraine, saying, come and talk to us. And if you speak to both British and American officials, they're obviously not going to tell you exactly who they've recruited, but both CIA directors and MS6 chiefs have suggested that they've had an influx of people.

23:48David:And you could imagine that. There was an influx, wasn't there, after the Prague spring of 1968, when a whole load of people were like, I don't want to serve this kind of communist regime, which is invading Czechoslovakia. And I think there has been a kind of influx post-Ukraine. I mean, we don't know the exact details of how many, but I think that would have been significant, which in turn would be interesting, because it would also help you know that know about Russian interference, maybe you can get then some insight into what Russia is doing in the West and against Western countries.

24:22Gordon:The other piece to that is that I think that's right, that there's an internal Russia story there, which is Russians who want to get out, who disagree with the decision, and who would thus be more susceptible to a pitch. But there's also the fact that, I mean, you go back, this obviously predates 2022 and it starts in 2014, but the development of the Ukrainian intelligence services as essentially forward operating bases for Western intelligence from both a SIGIN standpoint with a lot of those facilities along the sort of line of control and frankly, helping train and fund an organization that has native Russian speakers who can conduct human intelligence operations against the Russian services.

25:09Gordon:All of that, I think, has probably dramatically increased both the quantity and quality of collection on Russia since 2014

25:18David:and certainly since 2022.

25:21Gordon:I don't know, but I'm going to guess that we're probably collecting a lot more on Russia now than we were prior to the war in Ukraine. And I think that probably spreads. I mean, going to this story around Russian interference in Ukraine, the UK or across Europe, I'm going to guess that a lot of that intelligence is not just about Ukraine also, that it's spread its tentacles into other parts of the Russian security apparatus and given us insight into what they're doing all over the world probably.

25:48David:Should we take a quick break there? And when we come back afterwards, we'll look a bit more deeply at how well-equipped our security and intelligence services are to get to the bottom of this Russian interference and how they might react when some of that intelligence comes in. So see you after the break.

26:10Gordon:This episode is brought to you by ITV. In intelligence work, you don't act on suspicion, you act on facts, on what you can prove. And the closer someone is to power, the harder that becomes.

26:23David:Because you're not just weighing evidence, you're weighing the consequences. Act too early, you ruin the wrong person. Act too late, and you miss the right one.

26:33Gordon:That's The Fault Line at the heart of Secret Service, a new drama on ITV. Gemma Arterton plays a senior MI6 officer trying to identify a threat inside her own system, where access can obscure the truth and institutions close ranks.

26:49David:It's a fictional drama, but the tension is real. When are you certain enough to act? It stars Rafe Spall and is based on the best-selling novel by this episode's special guest, Tom Bradby.

27:01Gordon:It all comes back to a question intelligence services never can quite answer comfortably. When do you move if you're not sure who you can trust?

27:10David:Secret Service starts Monday, 27th of April on ITV1 and ITVX. Well, welcome back. We are with Tom Bradby looking at Russian spies interfering in political life. We talked a little bit about how the intelligence community might be dealing with this, trying to recruit Russian agents and the like, and whether they might have got more. But I guess one of the questions is, what are the political sensitivities for intelligence agencies when they get that hot piece of intelligence saying that there's Russian interference going on in political life? I mean, that's part of the drama, isn't it, Tom? Is that one of the things that interested you, which was how would MI6 react to something suggesting there was Russian interference?

27:55Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was actually walking past. I don't live that far from the MI6 building. I was walking past it when I had the idea of secret service. Part of it was about getting the intelligence, the nuclear bombshell intelligence that one of our leading politicians is some kind of demonstrable Russian asset. It's not clear which one. The second piece that I immediately went on to think about is, wow, how would that actually play out? Kate, the character played by Gemma Rott. Gemma did a really brilliant job of playing the character. I have to say she was so convincing to me. She comes back, she's got this intelligence.

28:34There's immediately the question of whether it's false. Has the operation been rumbled? Is the conversation they've overheard been effectively staged for their benefit? Is this a hook that's going to reel MI6 in and have them chasing their tail for months and months on end? This is all stuff, David, both of you will be more than very familiar with. It's often struck me that there are some really big differences between journalists and intelligence agents, but there are some similarities. The bit that's similar is the process of, you develop your contacts and your sources and all the rest of it.

29:10You get a piece of information, then you try and assess, is it correct? Is it true? Is it right? Did someone have a vested interest in telling me? Might they have had a reason to mislead me? I found thinking about all that kind of fascinating. Then there was the question of how her bosses would respond. Obviously, the ultimate boss of SIS is the Foreign Secretary, who of course is one of the chief suspects in the story. I just thought that was an intriguing idea. You guys are the experts on this, but I'm interested to know how you think it would play out if you came back with that bit of intel.

29:49David:The closest one is some of the Trump-Russia intelligence, isn't it, which comes in. I mean, the Chris Steele dossier, which remains a very controversial thing. But when that comes in, he is thinking to himself, hang on a sec, this is suggesting that someone who's a candidate has been compromised in some way. What do I do with it? And it's certainly the case. It's interesting because in that case, it was a Brit who got it, although he'd been contracted by an American investigative outfit to look for it, ultimately paid for by other political candidates. but he's even thinking in that case, how will they feel about this because of the special relationship?

30:28David:And I think, you know, you can see that for him at that point, he's thinking to himself that there's intelligence which is so toxic and difficult that you can imagine your boss is thinking, I do not want to know that, you know, which is not your job if you're an intelligence agency. Or I don't want to believe it. Or I don't want to believe it. Or yeah, let's find a reason to discredit it or to not believe it because it is too complicated for relationships to think it might be true. And I don't know, David, what do you think? I mean, that stuff must come in in a case.

30:58Gordon:Yeah, I would think in particular, obviously the higher up the politician and maybe the less certainty you have over, as in secret service, the less certainty you have over who it actually might be, would create all kinds of problems for a spy service and how you disseminate that information, how much credibility you give it, all these big questions that normally you don't have to ask if you're a spy service and you're disseminating product to your customers. But in this case, you absolutely would. And I imagine it would create all kinds of political problems, you know, in the upper management of MI6 or the CIA.

31:35Gordon:I mean, it's not an unprecedented thing for the Russians to turn a senior politician of a foreign state, right? But there was the case, I don't know, how many years ago was it, of Austria's former foreign minister? Putin had, I guess gone to his wedding.

31:52David:Yeah, Putin went to her wedding. And then, yeah, she's now in Russia, you know, living in Russia, you know, a former foreign foreign minister. So I guess it is interesting, isn't it? Because it is entirely plausible that you could have a senior politician, you know, even at the level of a foreign minister who has a, at the very least, murky relationship with the Russians. I mean, that is entirely plausible. The other thing now is that we all have the experience of America. I mean, what ultimately happens in secret service, not to give it away, is that Kate's a sort of relentless truth seeker. That's the sort of core of her character.

32:28But when they ultimately take it to the prime minister, he says, if I allow this to go forward and it leaks out, it's going to poison this election leadership race. And he's not wrong about that because it did in America. And you guys dug into that in a really clear way, I thought, in your series and demonstrated beyond any doubt that that was one of the principal outcomes of that operation. So I think there are things to really think deeply about, and that's quite apart from no one wanting in any walk of life to go and tell their boss something that's really explosive.

33:07David:Yeah, the interesting parallel, other parallel here, I think, is not a politician, but it's the question of whether Russia interfered in Brexit. And this is a charge some people have and some people believe it. I know Alistair Campbell, our co-host, is a big proponent of this idea. But one of the interesting things that came out in an intelligence oversight report, the so-called Russia report, was that MI5 hadn't really looked at it and also hadn't been asked to look at it by the politicians. And it was interesting because you can imagine what's going through politicians' minds. If you're saying, you know, this would be, I don't know, Theresa May, and you've just had this very divisive vote in the UK.

33:48David:Do you want to open up the question and start even looking at whether there was foreign interference in it? I mean, the answer may have been no, or it may have been it was quite minimal, or it might have been it didn't make any difference. But once you inject that idea of Russian interference, as you say, you poison the well of politics, because it becomes an accusation people throw around, and it immediately politicizes the intelligence agencies and draws them in to something which I think they're very uncomfortable doing. I mean, I think the British agencies, having watched them closely, they do not like going near politics.

34:24You know, if you're MI5 or an organization like that or MI6, you've just got this instinctive, you know, kind of fear of being drawn into it because you just know that it's dangerous.

34:35David:And there have been times in the past, I think, in the 80s, MI5 got drawn into, you know, investigating whether left-wing groups were infiltrated by communists or backed by KGB or Soviet funds. But it meant investigating effectively political groups, whether it was CND or others. And people were uncomfortable at that extent of being used politically or being embroiled in politics. So I think it's a real tension, isn't it, David?

35:02Gordon:It makes me think of the, I guess I say recent, but I want to say it was well over a year ago. There was the case of a handful of conservative commentators and podcasters who were being unwittingly, it seems, paid by the Russians and supported by the Russians in the US. And I don't believe that any of them were prosecuted as unregistered foreign agents. And I don't think you could make the case. I'm not even sure the DOJ tried to make the case that they were sort of taking tasking for the Russians. But you end up with this very murky, hard to pin down method of influence in which the Russians were financially backing a bunch of kind of very right wing conservative commentators and podcasters.

35:53Gordon:And yet, just by virtue to your point, Gordon, of anyone even trying to investigate it or bringing it up, it becomes instantly political. Really, you end up having debates around, well, you know, because I think at the time it was the Biden DOJ. It's like, well, is this a political witch hunt? You're just going after some conservative commentators. You're not actually trying to go after the Russians. And so it becomes instantly sensitive to even look at a case like this. Tom, I guess, I mean, question for you is, I mean, as a journalist, political editor now, you know, writing these novels, I mean, how much have you seen Russian influence in British public and kind of political life?

36:33Gordon:Like, is this, are you seeing it more and more? I know it's hard to quantify, but how common are these kinds of stories in British politics? Well, Russian influence came with Russian money, which just flooded in after 2010. I mean, they were buying up Knightsbridge, they were sending their sons to Eton, and they were occasionally donating money to political parties if they were British citizens, nothing wrong with that. But there just was this massive change. And as I've said, the thing that's always bothered me, and I guess it's part of the idea for the novel and the TV drama, was you have to be really careful in Britain by saying that British MPs aren't well paid.

37:14Because of course, by the standards of the average salary, they are well paid. But I think most people living professional lives in London would certainly not say that MPs are overpaid. And as I said, it's really, really difficult to get money for your local party. It's really difficult to fund national political campaigns. I think our politicians are really quite susceptible to that. There was obviously the case of Nathan Gill, which, let's be honest, came from an FBI tip-off, the former leader of reform in Wales at one time, very close to Nigel Farage. I really dug into that when it happened because I wanted to understand it.

37:50He was a Mormon. He gave interviews saying that he'd been most inspired growing up by his grandparents' stories of World War II and the sacrifice.

38:02David:Then he's taking cash from the Russians to make pro-Russian speeches at the European Parliament. It's just wild to me that it happens. I think the truth of the matter is there's probably a bit less Russian influence here than there was 10 years ago, but there's more danger that what there is is potentially pernicious. And when I talk to people in MI5, they seem pretty hard pressed to me. I mean, they don't say, yeah, we've got it all under control. They're like, no, it's hard. It's tough. And we're under the gun a bit. Yeah. And I think it is part of the problem that if you're MI5, catching a Russian spy doing spying, passing over classified documents, that's one set of actions.

38:45David:But trying to deal with money, politics, social media influence, it's just subtler. it's harder to kind of sometimes get a grip on and i think that russian money has been flooding in for a long time and for a long time people did i think turn a blind eye to it i think that has changed now and i think you know we've had skripal we've had the invasion of ukraine so there's been a shift in the uk but some of it's quite deeply embedded and i think as you said mi5 have got a lot on their plate and actually investigating politics investigating candidates investigating where the money is coming from to candidates, I think they're still both for resource reasons, but also for a kind of slight squeamishness that they don't want to be kind of checking every donation to a political party if you're MI5 and be investigating everything.

39:34Gordon:Why do we think we're having a long conversation about Russian interference and not, for example, Chinese interference? Now, obviously, they both do it to some degree. And I think we talked a little bit about this, Gordon, in our series on interference in the US election, but it is a fascinating kind of fundamental piece of this that we're not talking about another country doing this stuff. We're talking about the Russians and we're talking about instances all over Europe and the United States and frankly the globe where the Russians do this. And it doesn't seem like anybody else quite has the same toolkit.

40:13David:Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think the Chinese do it. We've had some cases in the UK in Parliament of alleged, still under investigation, some cases being dropped, links to China.

40:24Gordon:But not at the same scale. No. My impression, I guess I wanted to put to you on that, is the way someone characterised it to me not very long ago is the Chinese are basically engaged in stealing everything. They're hacking everything. They're stealing everything, data, information, intellectual capital, because they've got volume. just huge numbers of people working for them. Half the time, they don't know what they want with it or what they're going to do with it or even what value it has, but they want to have it. Whereas it seems to me that Russia is a sort of more actively hostile force. Go back to the very start of the conversation.

41:03If you make the argument that by having Donald Trump in the White House, somebody who's essentially quite pro-Russian, you have potentially peeled off America from NATO or made America an unreliable NATO ally. If the Russian intelligence services were to claim credit for that outcome, you might say, well, they don't deserve it. It was just one of those things that just happened anyway. But they would probably say if they were sitting here, well, that's the most successful intelligence operation of the last 50 years. Who knows, maybe they're right. And I just think, well, if they could peel Britain off somehow, I could imagine a British populist leader who says, do you know what, Estonia, I'm not sending British lads to die in Estonia.

41:46Do you know what? I don't want to spend tens of billions of pounds on a nuclear deterrent. We're a small Northern European country. What the hell do we want that for? You know what? I'm not increasing defense spending. I'm going to build any... I mean, you could write, I could write you the man of Estonia now. So I sort of feel like we talk about Russia? I think they're both doing it, but Russia feels like a more imminent threat.

42:10David:Yeah, I think that's right. With China, it wants a certain degree of influence. It wants maybe certain things on the agenda, not on the agenda. But with Russia, I think it really does want to do things like undermine NATO. I think it's worked out that if you want to destroy NATO, it's actually going to be easier for it to do that through political interference and poisoning debates and shaping political attitudes and pushing certain narratives than through military action. And it can achieve a lot of its aims, quite hostile aims, quite direct, tangible aims, but it can do those through a kind of mix of great different gray zone activities, whether it's some sabotage as well and cyber attacks, but also through political interference as part of its toolkit.

42:57David:So I think it is just a much more kind of directed, immediately hostile activity than maybe the Chinese more general influence. That would be my sense of it.

43:07Gordon:Well, I guess also, I mean, this is a point that John Seifer, former CIA officer and also friend of the show, we did a live stream with a while back on Epstein and the Russia connection. He has made the case in writing for many years now that Russia is effectively an intelligence state and its foreign policy is conducted primarily by its intelligence services. And those intelligence services, going back even to sort of czarist times, had embedded in them this concept of active measures of not necessarily going out and just stealing plans and intentions, secrets around capabilities, but in actually shaping the environment around Russia politically to make it more amenable to Russian interests.

43:55Gordon:And so I think that is different from the way the Chinese have used their intelligence services. I mean, to your point, Tom, it's the Chinese are engaged in a massive, you know, sort of generational wealth transfer program back to China of all kinds of IP and commercial secrets and all of that. The Russians, I'm sure, do that. But the Russian services bureaucratically just seem much more focused on kind of trying to shape the environment around them. Hence why it would make sense to be paying paying off British MPs to create division in the country and try to tilt British politics in a more pro-Russian manner.

44:31We're obviously hoping our series catches a wave and we've obviously tried to make it very sort of gripping and entertaining. So hopefully people will romp through to the end and go, okay, we want series two now. So we've started work on series two and not to give anything away, but you are in a world where a very populist political leader might have even more power than he had in series one. I've been trying to lock myself away and actually think that through. Imagine a really populist leader in Britain running the Project 2025 playbook. What would that actually be like? Well, you defund the BBC for a start.

45:14That'd be like day one. You would probably have a go at ITV. I mean, you would do some easy stuff very early and you might take a very isolationist stand. We don't want to get involved in Estonia. And imagine that and then a right-wing leader in Germany or even an ultra left-wing leader, or France. You pick off a couple of big European countries and not only is NATO not meaningful, But European collective defence isn't either. Now, I'm not saying those things are going to happen, but you will have seen that when we had the 12-day war with Iran and then the latest war and the internet was shut off, there was reporting that a whole bunch of pro-Scottish independence accounts went silent.

46:02Now, that's not to say there aren't lots of people who favour Scottish independence. There are, but the study I read said that 4 % of the posts in 2024 were from those accounts that they identified when they were switched off. Well, if you think if Iran's doing that, isn't Russia doing it times 10? So I don't want to be paranoid about it, but I think the risk is there, wouldn't you say?

46:19David:No, I absolutely do think it's there. And I think if you're Russia, political interference allows you to kind of shortcut. It's a shortcut to get your foreign policy goals. And the higher in politics you can get someone, or the more political influence you have, the more you can shortcut the other process of trying to manage public opinion or trying to persuade it or do other things, because you can have someone who, if you like, is in politics and can shape public opinion themselves. Or now you can do it remotely through social media. You know, Russia's in its toolkit got these ways of trying to shape decision making and political thinking in our countries through either, you know, funneling money to candidates or, you know, having its own agents there, or through remote social media and claiming you're, you know, a local person when in fact, you're Russian.

47:06David:All of that just gives it these new weapons through which to achieve its goals. I think they know what they're doing. Do you guys feel cheerful in Outlook, if that's not a stupid question? We're always cheerful on this program. Can you not tell? Well, you're always entertaining and informative. I don't know. Is that the same as cheerful? I don't know. Maybe not. Well, the reason I asked the question is, I started out in journalism in 1990. The year before I came in, I was mostly bunking off my studies to watch the Berlin Wall come down, or the Velvet Revolution in Prague, or the Violent Revolution in Romania, or shortly afterwards, Mandela being released.

47:51And you felt like the world was on this arc. And then, of course, with Yugoslav wars and stuff that went wrong, but that felt like against the pattern of a broader arc going in the right direction. I can't quite shake at the moment the sense that the world is broadly going in a less positive direction on a quite steady arc the other way. I don't want to feel not cheerful about the prospects, but I wonder what you both thought.

48:19David:I think I too am a kind of child of the 90s, of that era. And lots of bad things did happen in the 90s. I think it's always worth remembering that. You had kind of Rwanda and, as you said, the Balkans and these things, but there was still an optimism there, which I fear. And I mean, going back to where we started, I think you can imagine what they would have called in the past a general war. You could imagine these scenarios in a way that I don't think we would have thought plausible 20 years ago, 30 years ago, even maybe 10 or 15 years ago, the idea either with China or with Russia or some combination of that.

48:52David:Something where we're all in. And I think that feels different. That feels different.

48:58Gordon:Yeah, I would agree. I think there has been a revenge of geopolitics. There has been a failure of whatever multilateral institutions and machinery we had designed to try to control these impulses. That is clearly not helping to solve big transnational problems. And I also think in the States, we've had a, you know, we've obviously we've had a collapse of our own political consensus on our on the US role in the world. I mean, there was always debate, but there was far more uniformity in opinion across both sides of the aisle, you know, 30 years ago about what the US should be doing in the world than than we have today.

49:40Gordon:So I think all those things together, for me, as an American who lives in Texas, that makes me a little gloomy. That's not a cheerful outlook, I think. It's not going to be – the implications of those are not positive. So I would share Gordon's gloomy view. We can't end this show on such a bad – No, we can't. No, we can't. No, no, no. That's very cool. We should say – Reasons to be cheerful. Yeah. This show is good listening. I mean, not this one per se, but your show is great listening. If you're listening to this and you're enjoying it, you should subscribe. It's a great show. Here I am doing your ad for you, but it's worth it.

50:21David:Well, thank you, Tom. We often ask our guests, any favourite spy thrillers, spy films, books, TV shows, you cannot plug McCloskey. That's one of the rules. Well, you can if you want. You can plug your own stuff. When did we institute that rule, Corden? No, we've never had that rule. You can go somewhere else with it. Go somewhere else with it. We'll take that as a given. But, you know, because you've been writing about this stuff, when did your first novel come out, Tom? My first novel came out... Was that Shadow Dancer? Yeah, Shadow Dancer, in 1998. I started writing, I came up with the idea of wandering down the Falls Road in West Belfast in about late 1993.

51:02The thing that really fascinated me then, so I will answer your question, but the thing that really just gripped me, and it's never stopped gripping me, is I walked from lunch with a senior member of the special branch and I walked up to basically a press conference at the Sinn Féin headquarters, which was full of known IRA people. I'd found myself just drilling in, as I often did with the special branch guy, into the business of running informers. I know you're about to talk about this in Statenife, but I just found it so fascinating because these are people who speak the same language, who often live only a couple of miles apart and you're running someone.

51:38And if you make a tiny mistake, that person is going to be killed by their own organization. So I found that fascinating and I found it fascinating from that day to this. So there've been some quite good shows. I did a Shadow Dance of the Book and then the film, which was directed by the same guy. We got very lucky with Secret Service, the TV drama. We've been talking about this out on Monday the 27th of April, but part of the reason I think it's come out as such what I hope is a very, very high quality product is because we had basically an Oscar winning film director. And the reason we got that is because he and I made Shadow Dancer together and I've been trying to get him back to do something ever since.

52:18He's done an amazing job, but, and there weren't good things made about Northern Ireland, but there've been a couple of really good. Say Nothing is very good. I don't know if you've seen that. on Disney plus. Yeah.

52:29David:And it's, we've had him on this about. Yeah, it was, that was, that was really good actually. Um, so yeah, that's probably the best, I mean, it's kind of not specifically about spying, but it's, it's sort of that territory. And I have to mention David, because I really, really, uh, I'm about to start reading the Persian, but I really enjoyed his first book and I'm not gonna. And the reason I really enjoyed it is when you write thrillers, you it's really difficult reading other thrillers. I don't know if you find this, David, you, you, you've sweated away on your own structural engine so much. When someone else doesn't get theirs right, you're like, oh, I can see the cracks in this.

53:05But I thought, obviously, the authenticity goes without saying, but I thought it was really well constructed, and that made it a pleasure to read. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

53:14Gordon:I appreciate that. You know what? This is a window into my own sick psychology. I almost appreciate Gordon's pain more than the compliment that you just gave me. Gordon's pain at hearing the compliment is more satisfying. But in all seriousness, thank you.

53:31David:Tom, thank you very much for joining us. It's been a great discussion and a really great chance to kind of, you know, kick around these really important issues about Russian political interference, not just in the context of Secret Service and the drama, but also more generally and just how important they are, you know, given your experience as a journalist. So thank you, Tom, for joining us. Well, it's been... Come back. Well, I'd love to. Come back sometime. It's been an absolute privilege. and maybe just one final point on the drama. I really hope this succeeds. I really believe in it and I hope it's a great watch, but we're trying to make something that is beltingly entertaining, but is trying to tackle some of these themes.

54:10I feel like spy dramas, which I enjoy tremendously, have got a bit heightened. There's 27 people dead and we're only two minutes in. I like those shows. I'm not knocking them. I really like them. But I was brought up on Le Carre and Data. And I'm not trying to compare myself to those because that would be obscene. But it would be really nice if we can make a show that is hopefully tackling more complex themes that really lands because then we'll be able to do some more.

54:39Gordon:yeah yeah i think that's that's well put i think i think the best spy dramas whether they're films or you know books do that right they they take the human drama and link it to some bigger you know piece of what's going on in in the world today uh that's yeah that's that's spot on so tom thanks for being with us this is yeah thank you tom it's been great i've loved it thank you for having me.

55:08David:This episode was brought to you by ITV.

55:11Gordon:In this line of work, the real danger is rarely what you can see. It's what you stop questioning.

55:16David:The people you trust, the systems you rely on, the assumptions that start to feel fixed. Because once something is inside the system, it no longer looks out of place. It looks like it belongs.

55:29Gordon:And that is what makes it so hard to detect. Secret Service on ITV is a fictional drama about what happens when trust outlives scrutiny. A high-octane political thriller based on the best-selling book by this episode's guest, Tom Bradby, and starring Gemma Arterton and Rafe Spall.

55:47David:It all comes back to one uncomfortable idea, the enemies closer than you think.

55:52Gordon:Secret Service starts Monday, 27th April on ITV1 and ITVX. mer giờ Thank you.