David

and you miss the right one.

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.

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?

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 in the upper management of MI6 or the CIA.

I mean, it's not an unprecedented...

thing for the Russians to turn a senior politician of a foreign state.

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.

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 from 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, you know,

kind of very right-wing conservative commentators and podcasters.