Josh Ireland

And this is the other sort of strand that runs across the story.

So the terror...

seems to be, in Russia, it seems to be directed almost indiscriminately, except the people that it really goes for are the people in the secret services, the spies, the agents.

You know, they're wiped out.

I mean, there's so many wiped out across Europe that basically it ceases to function for a while.

But what that means is that anyone who has a job, anyone who's given a job, knows that the price of failure is death.

And they also know that they're trapped because Stalin's clever.

He knows that if you give these people who are the only people that are allowed to leave the Soviet Union who have access to networks and money, if they feel threatened, they might try and escape.

So what he does is he issues a directive which says that if any of these agents defect or leave, their entire family will be liquidated.

So he has this sort of bargaining power.

They all live in this constant... No, this terror is just...

it's not trickling down, it's sort of coursing down from the top.

Everybody in the entire Soviet Union must have spent the 30s existing in a state of permanent terror waiting for a knock on the door or the phone call.

And the people charged with Shkotsky's assassination are no different.

they know that if they fail, they're, you know, they'll be poisoned or they'll just have the sort of bullet in the back of the head or, you know, one of those terrible accidents that are such a sort of regular feature.

Fall out a window.

So Aitingon turns to Ramon and says, so this is the second sort of, there are two significant meetings and there were two encounters in their life.

You know, there's this first time when,

Ramon is first recruited, and there's the second time when he goes to him and says, I need you to do this thing.

I need you.