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Chapter 1: What does Russian interference in global politics look like?
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This episode is brought to you by ITV. Now, David, in intelligence work, the real failures rarely begin out in the field. They begin closer to power, where access dulls suspicion and questions stop being asked. That's where systems fail, not at the edges, but at the centre.
And that is the fault line at the heart of Secret Service, a new drama on ITV. Gemma Arterton plays a senior MI6 officer working on the Russia desk, uncovering evidence that a high-ranking UK politician may in fact be a Russian asset.
And what begins in Malta moves quickly into Whitehall, where influence matters, reputations provide protection, and trust can be badly misplaced. It's a fictional story, but it recognises a familiar pattern, how easily the line between public duty and private allegiance can blur.
Also starring Rafe Spall, it's based on the best-selling novel by ITV News at 10's Tom Bradby, who we're delighted to have joining us on today's episode. It comes back to one uncomfortable idea, the enemy's closer than you think. Secret Service starts Monday the 27th of April on ITV1 and ITVX.
Well, welcome to this special extra episode of The Rest is Classified, in which we are going to have a deep look at the very murky and very interesting world of Russian interference in politics. Now, listeners will... Doubtless, remember, Gordon, that we did a series on this earlier in the year where we took a hard look at Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election. What was fact?
What was fiction? What did the Russians actually done? Had a look at that active measure. And today, I think it's fair to say we're going to widen the aperture a bit and have a look at Russian interference in politics more broadly, in particular, in Europe. And also have a look at really whether security and intelligence services have a handle on that. And I'll offer an initial hypothesis.
The answer is no, but we'll have a deeper look as we go. And we're joined by a very special guest today, aren't we, Gordon?
Yeah, that's right. With us, we do have a special guest, none other than Tom Bradby, presenter of the ITV News at 10, also a former political editor and foreign correspondent, author of a series of great thrillers and spy novels.
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Chapter 2: How are Russian spies influencing elections in Europe?
I mean, there's this amazing piece that The Washington Post did where it said that the Russian spies from the SVR, so their foreign intelligence service, were so worried about him losing, as he did though, that they actually considered something called Operation Game Changer, which was staging a fake assassination attempt on him to boost his popularity.
I mean, that is the stuff of novels, isn't it, Tom? I mean, it is the idea that they can have favoured candidates, but want to kind of get involved and sway elections. That is the reality, isn't it, that we're looking at in Europe now?
The stuff going on in Hungary is absolutely wild, really. There was the fake incident that they were saying that the Ukrainians were trying to bomb a pipeline Peter, Madjar, a few months before the election, said he was going to be probably blackmailed with a sex tape. I mean, in my TV drama, there is a sex tape. So I'm reading this in the news and thinking, oh, wow, this is weird.
I mean, you go back to that area of Europe, you go to the coup in Montenegro, where they tried to assassinate the prime minister, potentially. But when you look at what went on in Hungary, I mean, it's quite heavy duty. It's not one or two things. They were really involved on any number of levels and they really, really wanted Orban to win.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that was a classic example of how far they're prepared to go.
Yeah, it was interesting, actually, because... There was also some leaks of, I think, phone calls or transcripts of phone calls between the Hungarian government and some Russian government officials, I think even between Putin and Orban. And you could kind of sense we're in a world in which stuff is getting leaked by different intelligence services and different sides to play into an election.
So I think it definitely feels quite intense. The stakes are quite high because of the importance of the country, because it's been blocking aid from the EU to go to NATO. it matters. It goes back to your point, which is NATO is under stress. You think it is close to dead though. That's pretty worrying if you think it's that serious.
David, what do you think? Where do you think we are on NATO? As a British person who's covered politics my whole life, I just think if you're the prime minister, you've got to assume that if something were to happen in Eastern Europe, would Donald Trump be there for us? I think the only answer you can conclude is In terms of something we can rely on, no, sure, America's not going to leave NATO.
Donald Trump can't do that because of the act that Marco Rubio put through Congress. But I mean, where do you feel we are on NATO?
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Chapter 3: What recent events highlight Russian espionage in Hungary?
Obviously, in Europe, it's Russia we're worried about. But you could make the argument that the most likely prospect of a world war in the next 50 years is America against China. One thing that I'm always amazed that Americans don't seem to spend more time talking about is, if you're America in that fight, wouldn't you rather have Europe on your side than be doing it alone?
In that sense, America ought to be more invested in NATO than it sometimes seems to be, or is that just too esoteric to say?
No, I think it's a good challenge because I think alliances should be reciprocal. Because I do think the risk is that if people in Europe don't feel that the US, Donald Trump, has got their back when it comes to confronting Russia, then when it does come to a crisis over China and Taiwan... I mean, I do think if you went down the pub here and said to people, should we go to war over Taiwan?
They'd be like... You know, there's very little kind of relevance or salience, even though I'm sure there are trade issues around the Taiwan Straits and global economy. All those things matter. But it's a long, long way away. from us here in the UK.
So the only way in which if the US did want to kind of alliance would be on the kind of goodwill basis where you felt like, well, this is an alliance of common interests, common values. And that's the bit which is breaking down, isn't it?
And I think that that's the problem is that then if you don't have that feeling, then people won't come to each other's help when it might be less in their direct interests.
I also think American politicians have
in some cases willfully um downplayed or ignored the the benefits of these security relationships with allies um or are just ignorant of them themselves and so the american population broadly i think has been i think more and more convinced that we need to take a transactional approach to these relationships and we don't we don't see the longer term strategic value in having
A peaceful and largely friendly European continent is not something that the United States of America has tended to enjoy throughout much of its history. And given that Europe is one of our borders, it's obviously hugely advantageous to us.
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Chapter 4: How do intelligence agencies respond to Russian interference?
But okay, let me put a more serious one. If you were the Brits, David, would you share details about a new Russian asset you'd recruited, which might attract the attention of the White House? Or would you kind of mask some of those details?
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 probably still do that because you you'd want the help and it also probably depends a lot on the nature of the interpersonal relationships between the two services uh 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. I'm backing into that just by, you know, sort of 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?
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. Although 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 cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel. 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 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. I guess we've got to remember that Tony Blair's response in Afghanistan and Iraq came off the back of that.
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Chapter 5: What implications does Russian influence have on NATO?
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.
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. 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'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.
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?
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?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was actually walking past. I don't live that far from the MI6 building. So I was walking past it when I had the idea of Secret Service. And part of it was about getting the intelligence, the sort of nuclear bombshell intelligence that one of our leading politicians is some kind of. demonstrable Russian asset. It's not clear which one.
But the second piece that I immediately went on to think about is, wow, how would that actually play out? I mean, like Kate, the character played by Gemma Roth, and Gemma did a really brilliant job, I think, of playing the character, I have to say. She was so convincing to me. But She comes back. She's got this intelligence. There's immediately the question of whether it's false.
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Chapter 6: Why is there less focus on Chinese interference compared to Russian?
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
and of other political candidates but he's he's even thinking in that case how will they feel about this because of the special relationship 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.
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.
Yeah, Putin went to a wedding and then, yeah, she's now in Russia, living in Russia, former Austrian foreign minister said. So I guess it is interesting, isn't it? Because it is entirely plausible that you could have a senior politician, 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. But when they ultimately take it to the 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
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Chapter 7: How do financial interests affect British politics?
It's like, well, is this a political witch hunt? You're just going after some conservative commentators. You know, you're not actually trying to go after the Russians. And so it becomes instantly sensitive to 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? Like, is this, are you seeing it more and more? I know it's hard to quantify, but how common are these kind 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 because, of course, by the standards of the average salary, they are well paid. I think most people living professional lives in London would certainly not say that MPs are overpaid.
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 sort of wanted to understand it. He 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. And 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.
So 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. But trying to deal with money, politics, social media influence, it's just subtler. It's harder to 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.
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Chapter 8: What future threats do Russian spies pose to global security?
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 ever. of the last 50 years. And 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. Do 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 could write you the manifesto now. I feel like we talk about Russia because it's more I think they're both doing it, but Russia feels like a more imminent threat.
Yeah, I think that's right. Because I think 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. And I think it's worked out
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. It can achieve a lot of its aims, quite hostile aims, quite direct aims.
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. 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.
Well, I guess also, I mean, this is a point that John Cipher, 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 Tsarist 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.
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.
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