The Rest Is Classified - 151. Why Do Russian Spies Interfere in Global Politics?

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

What does a Russian interference campaign look like? What did Russian spies get up to in Hungary recently? And are Chinese spies the next threat to international politics? Listen as David and Gordon are joined by novelist, screenwriter and journalist Tom Bradby, for this special bonus episode to discuss Russian interference in global politics and the murky world where politics and espionage intersect. ------------------- Secret Service starts Monday 27th of April, on ITV1 and ITVX. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Account Manager: Emma Densley Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the Rest isclassified.com. 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, dull, suspicion, and questions stop being asked. That's where systems fail. edges, but at the center.

And that is the fault line at the heart of Secret Service, a new drama on ITV. Jemma Ardardin 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 recognizes 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 attends Tom Bradby,

who were 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 U.S. 2016 presidential election, what was fact, what was. was fiction, what did the Russians actually done, had to 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. We'll come back to that 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. I recently reread actually Tom Shadow Dancer, which was drawn from your time in Northern Ireland as we were doing our steak knife series, which was running at the moment. And of course, also this

novel and now TV show Secret Service. Welcome, Tom, to the rest is classified. Thank you for being it. Well, I'm a listener, so it's a great privilege to be here. Thank you very much. And all the best people are novelists, aren't they, David? Because I've now gone. Gordon is surrounded. I'm surrounded. It just feels right. It just feels right, Gordon. What can I say? And we don't, we don't want to give too much away about Secret Service, but it is probably no spoiler to say that the novel, The show is all about Russia interfering in British politics, something that would obviously never happen, but it's great to happen in the world of fiction. Russia getting up to no good is, of course, it's one of our favorite themes on this program, I would say. So this is a perfect,

a perfect opportunity to speak more about it. And we thought that this would be a good opportunity to explore, I think, some of the ways that the Russians do this and how intelligent services have really coped with it. And so, I mean, Tom, I guess maybe to start, I'd love to know how much of your reporting in real life drove the idea for Secret Service. I think there's a direct connection. There are many things that have been written about the 2016 election in America and all the rest of it. And not to start all this by blowing smoke, but I do think the series, both the subscribers only one, which I thought was brilliant and the more general one that you guys did, was kind of the definitive take on, is Trump an agent? Obviously, you concluded no in the sense

of being a controlled agent, but also in terms of what Russia was trying to do and the operation they were trying to run, you draw very clear conclusions about what impact it didn't, didn't have. And I was, of course, thinking about all this in the mid-teens. And to sort of summarize, because I think one of the questions you have to address when you're talking about these issues is if you're seeking a mass audience, and we hope we'll have a mass audience for this, I guess people think, well, why does it, why does it matter? And as I was, I listened to your series a second time, and as I was going through it, I was trying to think, what, what could you say, you know, if I walked down the pub now and someone said, oh, I've just, I've heard so much about

this. Tell me what we can't argue about. I would say, well, unarguably, I think you would say the Russians at some point saw Donald Trump as a person of great interest, somebody who would be friendly to their interests, who like the oligarchal system of government, and all the other things that you outlined so well in your series. They did try to help him get elected. Again, you debate how much that did or didn't change the 2016 election. And unquestionably, and this was the conclusion of your series, it poisoned the well of democracy in America. And why does it matter? Well, where are we now? I think NATO's dead. I think if you're British or you're European, you're thinking if Vladimir Putin does a kind of false flag operational, some kind of thing

in Estonia, is Donald Trump coming to our aid? Answer, I would say very clearly no. Or more accurately, can we rely on him doing so very clearly, no. And so that's one that the kind of, that's the security umbrella I've grown up in, potentially gone. And of course, Russia would love to peel off a few other big countries in Europe from that kind of security umbrella, Britain amongst them. So that's the kind of thing I was wrestling with when I came up with the idea, but what if you were the MI6 officer who actually had credible intelligence that one of our politicians was in some way compromise with some kind of workable asset for the Russians. And that just absolutely intrigued me. And that really was how I got going with Secret Service.

Because it is interesting, isn't it? We are in a world in which politics is the kind of battleground for spies. Maybe in a way we didn't always appreciate, I think, in the past. And I mean, I think it's interesting reflecting because we've just seen this election in Hungary in the last few weeks where Viktor Orban, the nationalist prime minister, was outed. And, you know, very intriguingly, he was probably the favoured candidate of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, but not the rest of Europe. And, you know, there was this accusation that Russia was looking to interfere in that election in politics to support a particular candidate. I mean, there was 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, Luzi 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 I want to kind of get involved in 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. I mean, there was, you know, the suggestion, the fake incident, that they were saying that the Ukrainians were trying to bomb a pipeline. I mean, Peter Majjar, 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 know, you go back to that area of Europe. You go to the coup in Montenegro, you know, 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, it feels quite intense. And like 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. So it goes back to your point, which is NATO is under stress. I mean, you think it is close to dead, though. I mean, that's pretty, pretty worrying if you think it's that serious. I mean, David, what do you think? Where do you think we are on NATO? I just, 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? And 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 Ruby put through Congress. But, I mean, where do you feel we are on NATO? Yeah, I would tend to agree. I think it's a collective defense organization that is, even though at times we haven't wanted to be as directly. saying this that's directed at the Russians. And it seems implausible to me, given what we know about, we talked about this a little bit, Gordon, in our series on Russia and, you know, the Trump connection.

I think Trump is not a controlled Russian agent. It's really more that there's a convergence between the interests and priorities and worldview of Donald Trump and the interests and priorities and worldview of Putin and the Kremlin. There's a shared, I think, sense of the world and how power is exerted in the world. And I think it would be an unwise bet at this point in time to presume that Donald Trump would step in and would enforce Article 5 if a piece of the Baltics were sort of peeled off by the Russians. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you, David. Sitting where you are in Texas, do you think if next week Russia invaded Estonia or you know, Latvia or Lithuania, do you think, or, you know, just took a little piece of territory.

Do you think the mood would be amongst the American population? Yep, we need to kind of step up for this. Would it be, would it be that's Europe's problem? Absolutely not. I think that's Europe's problem. I mean, you know, it's interesting, Tom, when you're talking about how would you explain to someone at the pub the implications, the consequences of Russian interference in politics more broadly, like, why is that bad for them? What impact does it have on them? I think it's harder to explain that in the United States, even though we have. had direct instances of Russian interference in our politics, it is so geographically distant that I think for many Americans, you just roll your eyes and move on. And it's also the politics

around Russian active measures here in the States have gotten so poisoned and confused and political that it's very hard, it can be very hard to talk about Russia topics without it immediately signaling what tribe you belong to. It's ceased becoming an apolitical national security issue, which it, apolitical is the wrong word, but it was, you know, politics on Russia to some degree stopped at the, at the ocean during the Cold War, and they don't anymore. Can I ask you both a question which I've sort of been burning to ask someone who's, you know, his opinion I really value, and it's kind of just been on my mind. This is actually, you know, I think in Europe, we're very focused on Russia and Russia is the enemy. It's a sort of coin toss about if I'm talking

to my kids and there, I was at a school event the other day and some 15 year old put up his hand and said, am I going to be conscripted and have to fight in a war? And it was such a sort of sobering question and really made me think about it. And 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. And 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? And in that sense, America ought to be more invested in NATO than it sometimes seems to be.

Or is that just like too esoteric to? 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, what? 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 a 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 downplayed or ignored the benefits of these security relationships with allies 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. 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. But because we're not in a hot war with China, because the type of Russian conflict we're discussing, I mean, what we're discussing today in the show is so hard to get your mind around. I think that the value we place on those relationships has collectively diminished. I mean, I think the thing that freaks me out, as we're talking, having this conversation about three weeks ago, the front page story on the Times

on a Saturday morning was European leaders and officials now reconsidering worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is not that the US turns out not to be a reliable NATO ally, but that it actually potentially becomes a hostile force, or at least a neutral force in that it does a deal with Russia, perhaps to neutralize Russia in its ongoing. ongoing issues with China, I read that and I thought the tectonic plates are on the point of shifting so majorly here that none of us can get our heads around it, that I think, you know, and I know we're talking about the Russians interfering in Europe, which unquestionably they're doing, but it's happening in the context of these massive plate shifts that I don't think

anyone can get their head route. I think for security and intelligence agencies, it's hard. I mean, in some parts of life, you can hedge, you can reposition, you know, when it comes to trade if you're Europe or if you're Canada, you can think, right, let's diversify, let's not be so reliant on the US. But, you know, if you're in the intelligence space and you're locked in pretty tightly as the UK and US are, or GCHQ and NSA are, it's hard. And if you're in the defence space, it's hard.

I mean, our nuclear weapons are linked to the US, but also a lot of our military procurement, but also a lot of US bases are in the UK. I mean, there is an element in which it does go both ways. I mean, the US does need those bases in Europe. I mean, they're important for the US. I don't think, but I think Europe is quite nervous about being too transactional itself and saying to the US, well, okay, you know, goodbye to Ramstein, goodbye to kind of men with Hill, Filingdale, you know, all these big places in the UK.

Because if you start doing that, you know with Donald Trump, he'll go like, we'll screw you then. And I think a lot of people in Europe are thinking, well, we need to plan for a post-American relationship, but we also don't want to do it in a way which hastens it. and makes it more likely or even worse. So I think there's like a kind of difficult thing there if you're in the security world, which is how do you talk about it even? Because I think it's quite a hard thing to even talk about without actually accelerating it in a way you might not want because it's going to aggravate people.

Isn't there also an unanswered question in Europe about whether this is structurally the new normal or whether this is the outgrowth of Donald Trump's personality and politics? and even if you have a Trump, a Trumpian successor like Vance or Rubio, that you wouldn't have the same sort of highly volatile, aggressive transactional approach to U.S. relationships with European states that you would under Trump, right? So that's an unanswered question at this point as well, which maybe makes it makes you more likely if you're running MI6 to just stick your head in the sand and say, in four years, two years, it'll be better. Yeah. But, you know, I, I don't know what you both, you're much closer to it than me,

but I do keep hearing from people who I've dealt with in intelligence services that there is quite a lot of worry about, for example, on certain subjects sharing intelligence with America. You know, maybe it's against Russian assets. Maybe it's against, you know, MI5 does a lot of work against the right-wing extremism. I mean, what do you both make of the state of the cross-atlantic? intelligence relationships, which everyone always tells me is so critical. You know, on the intelligence sharing, there is definitely things which are not being shared,

which used to be shared. And we heard a little whispers of that about Venezuela, for instance, because the UK was a bit nervous about providing intelligence, which might be used for boat strikes. All that juicy British targeting information from the Caribbean was cut off. Ignore, David's. Ignore David's dismissive comments about British intelligence. I think there might have been a bit of signals intelligence on that. But okay, let me put a more serious one.

Would you, 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 like the Americans bring something to the table that 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. 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 happen in 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 where 9-11 happened. And I can remember to this day just watching the screens just canceled, 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. And I guess we've got to remember that Tony Blair's response in Afghanistan and Iraq came off the back of that. And it was, I think, went sour with Iraq. but Brits were with him for a long time in a way they just, no way would they be now. 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 kind of 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. So 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? 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, you know, as many would see at the invasion of Ukraine, saying, you know, 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 M.S. 6 chiefs have suggested that they've had an influx of people. And you could imagine that. You know, there was an influx, wasn't there after kind of the Prague spring of 1968? And 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, And I think that would have been significant, which in turn would be interesting because it would also help you know about Russian interference. Maybe you can get then some insight into what Russia is doing, you know, in the West

and against Western countries. The other piece to that is I think that's right that there's a internal Russia story there, which is Russians who want to get out, to 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 Sagan 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, all of that I think has probably dramatically increased both the quantity and quality of collection on Russia since 2014 and certainly since 2022. 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 of going to, you know, this story around Russian interference in, you know, 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, you know, all over, all over the world probably. 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. 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 Ardardin 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 bestselling 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 ITBX. 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 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 Rott. 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. 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, you'll be, both of you will be more than very familiar with.

And it's often struck me that there are some really big differences between journalists. and intelligence agents. But there are some similarities, and the bit that's similar is the process of, you know, you develop your contacts and your sources and, you know, all the rest of it, you get a piece of information. Then you try and assess, is it correct? Is it true? Is it right? And did someone have a vested interest in telling me, might they have had a reason to mislead me? So I found thinking about all that kind of fascinating. And then there was the question of how her bosses would respond. And, you know, obviously, the ultimate boss is of SIS is the Foreign Secretary, who, of course, is one of the chief suspects

in the story. So I just thought that was an intriguing idea. And 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. 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, you know, he is thinking to himself, hang on a sec, this is suggesting that, you know, 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 outfit, 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? And I think, you know, you can see that very him at that point. He's thinking to himself, there's intelligence which is so toxic and difficult that you can imagine your boss is thinking, I do not want to know that, 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. 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. You know, I would think in particular.

obviously the higher up the politician and maybe the less certainty you have over, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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. Yeah, Putin went to her wedding. And then, yeah, she's now in Russia, you know, living in Russia, you know, for Russian foreign minister said, 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. But 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 know, 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 to, in any walk of life, to go and tell their boss something that's really explosive. 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 kind of, you know, 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'll say, you know, this would be, I don't know, Theresa May, and you've just had this very divisive vote in the UK, 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 may have been it was quite minimal, or 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, you know, then they become,

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. You know, if you're MI5 or an organisation 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. 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 kind of effectively political groups and 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? 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 U.S. And I don't believe that any of them were prosecuted or, you know, as is

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. 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-D-O-J, 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 even look at a case like this. Tom, I guess, I mean, question for you is, I mean, how is 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 Eaton, 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 know, 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. 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, you know, get money for your local party. It's really difficult to fund national political campaigns. I just, I think our politicians are really quite

susceptible to that. And 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. And I really dug into that when it happened, because I sort of wanted to understand it. Like you, you were leading, you know, he was a Mormon, he gave interviews saying that he'd been most inspired growing up by his grandparents' stories. of World War II in the sacrifice. And then he's taking cash from the Russians to make pro-Russian speeches at the European Parliament.

I mean, 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, you know, talk to people in MI5, they seem pretty hard press 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, you know, 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 kind of sometimes get a grip on. And I think that Russian money has been flooded. 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 Scrippel, 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. 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, but, and I think we talked

a little bit about this, Gordon in our series on interference in the U.S. election, but it is a, 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, you know, has the same toolkit. 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, you know, still under investigation, in some cases been dropped, links to China. But not at the same scale. No. My impression I just wanted to put to you on that is the way someone characterized 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. If 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 and unreliable NATO ally, that 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. And who knows, maybe they're right. And I just think, well, if they could peel Britain off somehow, you know, 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'm going to, you know, build any. I mean, you could, you could write. I could write you the man of Hesto now. So I sort of 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, you know, maybe certain things on the agenda, not on the agenda. But with Russia, I think it really does want to do things like, you know, undermine NATO. And I think it's worked out that, you know, 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, you know, 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 in 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 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 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. 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 off British MPs to create division in the country and try to tilt British politics in a more pro-Russian manner. We'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 won series two now. So we've started work on series two and not to give anything away, but you know, you are in a world where a very populist political leader might have even more power than he had in series one. And I've sort of, I've sort of been trying to lock myself away and actually think that through. So imagine a really, a really, populist leader in Britain, sort of running the project 2025 playbook. What would that actually be like, well, you defund the BBC for a start. That'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. You might take a

very isolationist stand. You know, we don't want to get involved in Estonia. And like, imagine that and then a right-wing leader in Germany or even an ultra-left-wing leader, or France. You know, 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-Sk Scottish independence accounts went silent. Now, it's not to say there are lots of people who favour Scottish independence there are, but the study I read said that, you know, 4% of the posts in 2024 were

from those accounts that they identified when they were switched off. Well, if you think of 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? 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. 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 your, you know, a local person when in fact, a Russian, all of that just gives it these new weapons through which to kind of achieve its goals. And I think, I think they know what they're doing. Do you guys feel cheerful in Outlook, if that's not a stupid question? Because I, I start, We're always cheerful on this program. Could 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 ask the question is, is I started out in journalism in 1990. And the year before I came in, I was like mostly bunking off my studies to watch the Berlin Wall come down or the, you know, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, or the violent revolution in Romania,

or shortly afterwards, Mandela being released. And you felt like the world was on this arc of, you know, and then, of course, there were the Yugoslav wars and stuff that went wrong. But that felt like against the pattern of a broader art going in the right direction. And 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. And I don't want to feel not cheerful about the prospects, but I wonder what you both thought. I think I too am a kind of child of the 90s and of that era. And lots of bad things did happen in the 90s. I think it's always worth remembering that.

You had, you know, kind of Rwanda and as you said, the Balkans and these things. But there was still an optimism there, which I fear. 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 know, 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, something where we're all in. And I think that feels different. That feels different. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. should be doing in the world than, then we have today. So I think all those things together, for me, as an American who lives in Texas, are kind of, you know, 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, are not positive. So I would, I would share, share Gordon's gloomy view.

We can't, we can't, though. No, we can't. No, no, no. That's very cool. We should say, you know, 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 you, you should subscribe. It's a great show. Here I am doing your ad for you, but it's worth it. Well, thank you, Tom. I mean, what about, we often ask our guests, you know, any favorite spy thrillers, spy films, books, TV shows, you cannot plug McCloskey. That's one of the, where you can, if you want. Or you can plug your own stuff. When did we institute that rule, Gordon?

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 Dunstan. Yeah, I started writing. I came out with the idea wandering down the Falls Road in West Belfast in about late 1993. The 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. And I'd found myself just drilling in, as I often did with the special branch guy, into the business of running informers. And I know you're about to talk about this in State Knife. 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 know, you're running someone, and 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 have been some quite good shows. I did a try to dance to 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,

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 Dons together. And I've been trying to get him back to do something ever since. He's done an amazing job. 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.

It's on Disney Plus. Patrick, Redd and Keith. Yeah. We've had him on this about. Yeah. That was really good, actually. So yeah, that's probably the best. I mean, it's kind of not specifically about spying, but it's sort of that territory.

And I have to mention David, because I really, really, I'm about to start reading the Persian, but I really enjoyed his first book, and I'm not going to. And the reason I really enjoyed it is when you write thrillers, it's really difficult reading other thrillers. I don't know if you find this, David, 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. But I thought, obviously the authenticity goes without saying, but it was just, I thought it was really well constructed and that made it a pleasure to read.

Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. I appreciate that. You know what? This is a window into my own sex psychology is I almost appreciate Gordon's pain more than the compliment that you just gave me. Gordon's pain at hearing the compliment is more satisfied me.

But in all seriousness, thank you. Tom, would 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. It's been an absolute privilege. Maybe just one final point on the drama. I think, I mean, I really hope this succeeds. I sort of, I really believe in it, and I hope it's a great watch.

but we're trying to make something that is, you know, that is beltingly entertaining, but is trying to tackle some of these themes. And I feel like spy dramas have, which I enjoy tremendously, have got a bit heightened. And, you know, there's 27 people dead and we're only two minutes in. And I like those shows. I'm not knocking them. I really like them. But I was brought up on LeCarray 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. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's well put. I think the best spy dramas, whether they're films or books do that, right? They take the human drama and link it to some bigger piece of what's going on in the world today. That's, yeah, that's spot on.

Tom, thanks for being with us. Yeah, thank you, Tom. It's been great. I've loved it. Thank you for having me. This episode was brought to you by ITV. In this line of work, the real danger is rarely what you can see. It's what you stop questioning. 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. And that is what makes it so hard to detect. Secret Service on ITV is a fictional drama about what happens when trust outlived scrutiny. A high-octane political thriller based on the best-selling book by this episode's guest Tom Bradby and starring Gemma Ardardin and Raves Ball. It all comes back to one uncomfortable idea, the enemy's closer than you think.

Secret Service starts Monday 27th April on ITV1 and ITVX.