Catch Me If You Can | BRIXMIS
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. In the heat of the moment, picture yourself rushing through a wood, doing about 60 miles an hour down a woody track. You're trying to map read, telling the driver when to turn left, when to turn... It was a bit like rally driving in really close proximity. If we had have been shot at, we probably wouldn't have heard it anyway. I mean, you never hear the bullet that kills you. This is True Spies. Episode 63, Catch Me If You Can.

East Germany, February 1987. The man being chased through dense forest is the British former Cold War spy, Dave Butler. I served in Bricksmith, the British commander-in-chief's mission to a group of Soviet forces in Germany from 1986 to 1989. And chasing him

as Soviet troops. Our immediate concern then was them finding us with cameras and recording equipment and we would be almost banged to rights as spies. He's trying to get reconnaissance on what kind of firepower and technology the Russians have ahead of the anticipated Third World War. This was the mission of Bricksmiths, a virtually unknown clandestine faction operating behind enemy lines in the years after the Berlin Wall went up.

So in East Germany during the Cold War, there were the Soviet Army and there were the East German, the National Volksarmee, or the NVA as they were called. In the three years I was there, there were 386,000 soldiers

troops based in that eastern half of Germany and 280,000 National Volks Army or East German soldiers with all their equipment, whether it was artillery, ground-based equipment. And although East Germany is quite a big area, to have that amount of concentrated military equipment

In that area, almost everywhere you went, every corner you turned around, you bumped into something military. So from an intelligence gathering perspective, it was like a real honeypot for us to swirl around in. Bricksmith was a deliberately boring name, disguising a bizarre arrangement. That arrangement allowed both East and West to gather military intelligence in each other's territory by pretending.

for more than 40 years that the Second World War had only just finished. The British government basically didn't recognise the East German

So therefore, that meant that us in a sort of a diplomatic role could basically go where we want, do what we want in our vehicles. And we could basically break all the speed limits, ignore police, never stop for an East German, anybody in authority. And so, yes, it was a rather unique position in that we could actually, you know, break all the laws. We could steal things with Her Majesty's Government's blessing.

Sounds like fun. We weren't just a load of hooligans out there just, you know, stealing everything in sight because we could. Everything was targeted and it was all to do with gathering intelligence. So it was all thoroughly military orientated. Although they were technically allowed to be there under a diplomatic agreement, that didn't necessarily mean the Soviet soldiers wanted them snooping around.

So they'd keep close watch on the Bricksmith vehicles, chasing them down. The other aim, of course, of the Soviet forces was not only to detain vehicles, but actually to get inside them. And of course, under law, our vehicles were a little mini UK. And so we had sort of all the diplomatic status. As long as the doors were locked on the vehicle, the Soviets were not allowed to attempt to open it.

So a technique that they developed was, of course, to ram the vehicle and turn it over. If they managed to ram the vehicle and turn it over, they would then justifiably say afterwards, and they smashed all the windows, that they were reaching in to recover the crew and give them first aid.

But of course, they very much ignored the crew and tried to recover all of the intelligence gathering equipment, cameras, recording devices, anything else we were carrying. And so when it came before the authorities, they would justify and say, well, we're very sorry, we were chasing them at high speed, the vehicle couldn't brake in time, they brake suddenly and we knocked them off the road. And then, of course, we were concerned about the crew. It was a dangerous game of cat and mouse behind the Iron Curtain.

You had to be able to keep a cool head. Our drivers were extremely skilled and they all did fast driving courses. They knew how to, like you see in the films, you know, you could reverse at 50 miles an hour and do what we call a J-turn using a handbrake. And so it was all real good James Bond stuff on the driving side to avoid being rammed. And that's all the more impressive when you consider what they were driving. There were no nippy sports cars for the boys in Bricksmiths.

Our latest vehicles back then was the Mercedes G-Wagon, Glendervagen, which I have to say is an outstanding piece of equipment and I would own one now if I could afford it. Each Bricksmith Mission vehicle, a Matt Olive heavy car, had a team of three –

A driver at the wheel and two tour officers. Out of the three of us, one of us spoke German and the other spoke Russian. But you needed more than language skills to be selected for Bricksmith. There was a six-week course called a special duties course. The main thrust of that was learning how to identify every single piece of Soviet and East German military equipment.

And not just recognise it as you see it, you know, up close and personal, but maybe just being able to recognise a front headlamp or a road wheel or something. There were like more than 5,000 different pieces of equipment. But then there were some other things, anti-surveillance techniques, what we used to call lovingly in the mission, de-narking. Because whenever we went about in East Germany, we would be followed by the state security team.

Anti-surveillance training, photography was the other thing that we spent a lot of time learning and how to pick locks and other sort of things that, you know, you would never normally would have done. A job breaking into enemy bunkers and stealing secret documents and equipment was the kind of job that appealed to the then 35-year-old Dave.

When he was assigned the Bricksmith mission in 1986, he and his wife and children relocated from the UK to Berlin. The German capital was the epicenter of the Cold War, divided by a four-meter-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire, watchtowers and guards.

To the west of the wall, where Dave lived, was a cosmopolitan city of bars, cafes, theatres and restaurants, administered by France, the UK and the US. West Berlin was very much the showpiece of the West, deep inside, behind the Iron Curtain.

And so the Western powers, the Americans, the French and the British who occupied Berlin, did their very best to show peace what life was like to be in the West. Knowing full well that, of course, Berlin was like a sieve. It was riddled with spies watching everything, you know, and seeing how life was and doing their very best to stop anybody in the rest of East Germany seeing what it was like.

And so it was very much a showcase. And so the Western powers pumped enormous amounts of money into West Berlin. Allied spies and soldiers made the most of the capitalist playground. But to the east of the wall, the frontline of the Soviet bloc, life was very different. People who remember life in East Germany under a communist regime recall shortages of almost everything. Personal freedoms were restricted, as well as freedom of movement,

Those who tried to escape over the wall were shot. The other thing they distinctly remember is surveillance. East Germany had an infamously oppressive state security system. The secret police, the Stasi, prided themselves on knowing everything that was going on. They had spies all over.

It was very much a surreal atmosphere. Like turning the clock back 70 years, I was going into East Germany because part of what the Soviets had done to punish the Germans after the Second World War for the amount of Soviet soldiers that were killed, I mean, they lost over a million just trying to take Berlin itself. And so they did very little restoration at all.

In the 1980s, Germany was a powder keg waiting to explode into a third world war between the communist regime to the east and the allied forces to the west. The world waited on tent hooks for the first shots to be fired and the first bombs to be dropped. It was Dave's mission to find out what the allies would be up against.

They were sent deep into East Germany on missions to collect photographs, recordings, documents and artifacts to give the Allies some insight into what technology the Russians had. If you've seen any Cold War movie, you'll be familiar with the Glienicke Bridge. Crossing the Havel River, it connects the Wannsee district of Berlin with Potsdam, the capital of Brandenburg, and takes you out into what was then East Germany.

It was the location at which captured spies were exchanged during the Cold War. It was given the moniker the Bridge of Spies. Dave knew this crossing very well. Our exit and entry into Berlin was different than for normal military units or anybody else leaving Berlin. You know, they either went out through Checkpoint Charlie or Checkpoint Alpha to go down the corridor to go back to the west.

But we were specifically the only ones allowed to cross the Glienicke Bridge or the Bridge of Spies where the famous Gary Powers was exchanged back in the 60s. It wasn't just the Soviets keeping track of Bricksmith's movements. The Stasi became like shadows, moving with them. But you can't really steal intelligence when you've got the enemy on your tail.

Luckily, Bricksmas agents had a few techniques up their sleeves. It was not uncommon for one tour vehicle to have up to 10 Stasi vehicles tailing it. In their mind, this was how surveillance was done.

What we started to do of course was to record all their number plates and we had actually what we call a narc list. So if we were being followed or we passed a vehicle and the best way of de-narcing as we used to call it was to drive down a road for a couple of kilometers and then turn around for no reason and just drive straight back up the road again. They wouldn't have a chance then to do anything

But they always put their hands up to their faces because they thought you were going to photograph them. And it was the worst thing you could do to a narc would be to take his picture or her picture because what that basically did at a stroke was struck them off from then ever working undercover in the West.

Because they would consider that we would pass those photographs back to our own intelligence communities. You know, if they tried to come into West Germany or wherever, their covers were blown. And it was always a favourite trick of ours to point a camera at a vehicle and see them going to panic mode. And even if you were on foot, they would just absolutely panic if you pointed a camera at them. But what if you really can't shake them?

The vehicles were very well set up in that we could isolate the brake lights or the indicators at any time by flicking the switch. So if we were being chased at high speed by the SOVs or by the NARCs and you went round a particular hairpin bend, then what we'd do is flick the brake light switches. Our driver would brake hard, but of course the vehicle following us wouldn't see any brake lights coming on, so we'd think that they could take the corner at the same speed because they couldn't judge.

And very often you'd see the NARC vehicle go flying off into the undergrowth, you know, because... Because the corners they should have braked on they didn't because they couldn't see our brake lights working. I suppose that was a fun thing to do as well. But it wasn't all fun and games. There was real work to be done. One mission saw Dave assigned to break into a Russian military bunker to see what he could find inside. Step one, check the coast is clear. Step two, pick the lock.

If you've ever seen on the television, crooks have a little set of like prongs. They stick into locks and that. Well, it's illegal, unless you're a locksmith, to own a set of this kit. But we had sets of them available to us should we need to use them. You're inside. Step three, grab what you can. You and your comrade need to be in and out as fast as possible. You start searching for secret technology, confidential documents,

Then you spot it. Inside was a brand spanking new piece of equipment that was about to be installed in the bunker. And this was basically to make the bunker nuclear proof and chemical and biological proof. It basically filtered the air. And anything to do with chemical, biological or nuclear was always a high collection priority, intelligence wise. So I said to the tour officer,

we're going to have this away because it was brand new, hadn't been used. He looked at me rather amused as to how I was going to get this huge thing inside the vehicle. And I not only took the filter, I took all the accompanying pipe work and everything.

And he said to me as we were leaving, do you not think they'll miss this, Dave? And I said to him, no, my estimate is that when the Soviet quartermaster who would have delivered it there comes back and sees it missing, he'll be so frightened of retribution from his own people for losing it, he'll just put another one in its place.

And it wasn't until many years later, talking to an ex-Soviet intelligence guy, that my estimate was absolutely right. He said that's exactly what they would have done. So we were able to steal this piece of equipment, which was very immense intelligence. Soviet fear of their own authorities played into the hands of the Allied spies. But his kind of trespass was still dangerous.

Intelligence gathering activities in East Germany were part of an authorised and reciprocal military liaison mission between the British and the Soviet forces. But mutual distrust and constant fear of a nuclear war led to paranoia and suspicion. If you were seen by them, they would do their utmost to detain you by one means or another. And of course, the Soviets, as opposed to us,

always carried live ammunition around with them. So if you couple that with the fact that they really wanted to get hold of you because it would get them a brownie point with their masters if they caught a mission. So they were really determined and we were just as determined not to be caught

So in those situations, things get very tense very quickly. Only a couple of years earlier, an American spy, Arthur Nicholson, who was working for the American equivalent of Bricksmith, had been shot dead by a Soviet soldier. Two of our Allied mission comrades were actually killed. One was shot and the other was crushed, you know. And so that sort of brought it all home to you.

Bricksmith spies worked round the clock, 365 days a year. And missions could last for days at a time. The Bricksmith spies weren't allowed to have any written information or classified material on them.

Everything they needed had to be memorized in case their car was detained and ransacked. One of the biggest risk elements to the whole touring aspect of the mission was that when we deployed into East Germany, we had no communications. So we were out there for three to five days on our own, making our own decisions, which again in itself was not only was a high stress thing, we were basically living on our wits.

and making, in some cases, life or death decisions on the spot without being able to run it past anybody else. As Dave said, it all sounds very James Bond, the car chasers and the secrecy. But in truth, the day-to-day realities of clandestine spy missions is somewhat less glamorous. Sometimes, you know, you'd get a bit dirty and filthy. The three men literally ate, slept and lived inside this vehicle.

and they never left a trace. We always had hot water on the vehicle as well and if you needed to go into the woods for a poo then you had to pick it up and bring it back because again if you buried it the animals would come and dig it up. It's a well-known fact that pigs and wild animals they can smell that sort of thing a mile away.

And of course, we used toilet paper and the Easties didn't. And so if we buried it and it got dug up, then the Stasi, the secret police, would know where we'd been sleeping and being creatures of habit, we might come back. So therefore, they could actually then wire that area for sound or whatever so that if a tour came back to that area, they could gather intelligence on us.

Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work...

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And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Generally speaking, missions run pretty smoothly for Dave. That is until... What we call the Elster Galeen incident.

It was February 1987 in the forest surrounding the Elbe River that runs through the heart of East Germany. One of the particular missions that I was tasked with was to do with a piece of Soviet equipment, which was a high intelligence collection priority. Dave and his tour partner were trying to get reconnaissance on a Soviet aqua vehicle. You see, most Soviet vehicles could swim,

Because obviously at some point, if they were coming west, they would have to cross the Rhine. So they used to practice quite intensely how to cross the river Rhine. But obviously a 70 tonne tank can't swim and you're going to need some of those if you're starting an invasion. So this vehicle would scan the bottom of the river to see if it was possible for a tank to drive across. They would fit their snorkel tubes and then they would physically drive in and drive across the riverbeds.

We knew that the Soviets were there and they were doing driver training around the wooded areas. So we decided to go in and set up an OP, an observation post, in order to have a look. The driver took them into the woods and parked in the thicket. Dave and his partner jumped out to get a little closer to the river on foot so as not to draw attention to themselves.

They would crawl over to the river's edge, get some photographs and recordings and hot foot it back to their waiting car. That was the plan. Except things didn't go to plan. They rarely do. We went and found a spot on the edge of the woods overlooking this thing and lo and behold a couple of vehicles came round and then sure enough this vehicle, this IPR as we used to call it, came along.

So we took some pictures of it and the commander of the vehicle was stood up. And I don't know what it is about people when you're looking at somebody, for some unknown reason, known only to them, they seem to stare right at you. And he seemed to look at us and we thought he'd seen us, but he actually hadn't. But he had seen something. Their getaway car waiting in the woods. He shouted something and drove on at speed.

What then appeared was what we call a Waz 469, which was a Soviet equivalent of a Land Rover Jeep, came smashing through the woods along the tracks. He was going for our vehicle. We then heard our vehicle do a high reverse down the wooded area, a J-turn at the end, and drive off. And of course, all the Soviet vehicles chased him. So there was me and the tour officer then alone.

We felt sure that they'd seen us. So our immediate concern then was them finding us with cameras and recording equipment and we would be almost banged to rights as spies. Remember, everyone knows that Allies are spying in the East and that Communists are spying in the West. It's part of the game, but the rules of engagement change if they get caught.

had Soviet troops come in and captured us, there was all sorts of examples. Tie you to a tree, bound you. In some instances, mission people were assaulted. Because again, as I say, at that moment, the blood is up. And, you know, meeting some guy from the steppes in Russia, there

There was like 27 dialects of Russian being spoken, so half of them couldn't even understand what each other was saying, let alone the dialects our tour officers were taught sometimes meant that they couldn't understand. So in all of this, we were sort of expecting that might be what might happen. Stop. Imagine you're stuck in the middle of a forest behind enemy lines. It's deep winter, three feet of snow, and you're surrounded by Russian soldiers. And these guys are tough.

They were extremely hardy because, as an example, they never wore socks. They just used to wear like pull-on nylon stockings in their boots. They never had a sleeping bag and sometimes the temperatures would get down to as low as minus 25, minus 30. So they would have been a formidable adversary.

Your only ticket out of there is long gone. There's nowhere to hide, and you have incriminating evidence on you that proves you're a spy. Your adversaries are just meters away, and they know you're out there somewhere. What are you going to do? Think fast. Three, two, one.

We took the film out of the camera, unexposed, and put it into our underpants because it was very rarely that mission people... You might be beaten up, but very rarely stripped you. It was actually February, and so heavy snow was on the ground, and after we'd put the film inside our underpants, we then buried the cameras and the recording device in the snow because it was fairly deep, even inside the wood. If you're thinking like a spy...

You might be thinking that snow means footprints that your enemy could follow, but Dave had a plan for that too. We always wore East German boots so that if anybody was trying to look at our footprints, they couldn't distinguish them because Western military boots have a very familiar pattern.

And so we always wore East German boots and then we immediately moved away from the area using twigs and that to conceal our footprints so that anybody who came in, if we were then captured, they wouldn't necessarily go back and find the camera equipment. The film was the important bit anyway. But you're not out of the woods yet and you're starting to get cold.

at that time of the year and it was not uncommon for temperatures to fall below minus 25 and below. And so in those sorts of conditions you had to take other measures to protect your health.

In particular, at those sort of temperatures, you wouldn't dream of drinking a hot cup of coffee or tea because if you've been sleeping outside all night, where your body temperature got lowered, drinking a hot cup of coffee at that moment could actually shatter your teeth. But of course, we expected to be reunited with our vehicle very shortly afterwards or within a couple of hours. But one hour turns into two and then three.

There's a rustling in the thicket ahead of you. You remember you've got no gun, no weapons.

If it's the Soviet soldiers, what training have you been given to protect yourself? We would immediately put our hands up, you know, in the I surrender mode, and we would smile. Is that what you were thinking? We always were taught that that was a great way of disarming people, because even if somebody's pointing a gun at you, if you smile at them, it's an uncommon thing to do. Most people would be trembling, but we were taught to smile. False alarm. It's just a bird. BIRDS CHIRP

But the Soviets aren't the only ones to watch out for. We had to be very careful because it was still daylight, although it was getting in towards early evening at that stage, but it was still daylight. We still couldn't move very freely because the local population were all around and of course they would have told the Stasi immediately if they saw two Westerns, you know, military people walking about.

Unbeknownst to Dave at the time, during the chase, their driver had crashed into a ditch and burst the tyres. He'd been shot at as he tried to escape and he'd been detained. The local Soviet commander was brought to question the Bricksmith's driver and he was eventually escorted back to Potsdam to ensure that the rest of the team, Dave and the other tour officer, were left behind. In the meantime, it had got dark.

Darkness had fallen on Elster Gilleen area. So myself and the tour officer then thought, okay, he's not coming back anytime soon. It got to about, I don't know, eight o'clock, nine o'clock in the evening.

So we thought, okay, we better make a phone call. Part of the preparation for going out into these was intense map appreciation, as we used to call it. So both myself and the tour officer knew the area in our minds. We didn't have any maps with us. So we knew that if we went out onto the road in the dark, and most of the roads in Germany have like monster drainage ditches by the side.

So as we were walking from village to village, any vehicles that came along the road, we were able to dive into the ditch and not be seen. And of course the stars were out because it was a clear night because it was so cold. And so we were able to navigate. We knew where north was, south-east and all the rest of it. So we were able to navigate quite easily and we knew where all the RV points were. That's the rendezvous points. The designated places for Bricksmith spies to go if they get separated from their driver and need to get picked up again.

After a while navigating the dark roads,

They came across a village with a designated RV point. It was a bit like something out of a movie, because again, in East Germany, everything died at about nine o'clock in the evening. Once darkness fell, you know, there weren't discotheques or things like that. The East German population all did everything behind closed doors. And so we saw a pub and we knocked on the door and it was very much like the old...

You know, open came the slit. And we said in our very best German, you know, that we were military liaison officers and that we needed to make a phone call. This was a risky move. We were not banking on anybody letting us into anywhere. And we knew damn well that in all probability they would report us because they had a Stasi hotline. They would ring a bit like 999.

The local population wouldn't try to detain you. Their main task was to just report you. It was the Stasi and others who would come along and do the strong-arm stuff. They waited. Then the door unbolted and a rush of warmth hit. The landlord let them in, but it was risky for him too.

Bear in mind, he was under severe penalty of not reporting us. You know, imprisonment, hard interrogation. So against this backdrop, he very much let us into his pub and let us make a phone call. So we phoned the British Embassy in East Berlin and said that we were two Bricksmiths officers and we'd become separated from our vehicle and could they ring the mission house in Potsdam and alert them.

And again, something else we found out categorically was that within 30 minutes of us making that phone call,

The village that we were in was completely swarming with narcs, the Stasi. And so clearly, you know, they had been monitoring the British Embassy calls. They had alerted that a phone call had come from this particular area, the Elster Galeen area, and get down there and try to find these two men. In the midst of all this, the German landlord showed them even more kindness. After we'd made the call...

He did give us a drink and we gratefully accepted a drink. The landlord and his family were taking immense risks in helping. It's funny, human beings always seem to go for the underdogs. I guess when he undid that door and he saw our eyes, he sort of took pity on us. The Stasi were crawling outside, so to avoid putting the pub in danger, Dave and his tour officer snuck out and hid in a bus shelter on the outskirts of the village.

where eventually a rescue vehicle came and picked them up. Oh, hang on, what about the camera you buried? We kept the film in our underpants and then three months later I was tasked with going back to the area to recover the camera equipment and the recording device. And of course three months later, it was March, April time, May time, of course all the snow had gone.

And so when I went back into the wooded area to the point, there, sitting for everybody to see, was two Nikon cameras as large as life. I took it back and, you know, if ever there was an advert for Nikon cameras, our special section, who were responsible for looking after the mates of the cameras, he just took it where it had been buried in snow for three months and exposed the elements.

put a film in it and it worked perfectly. And we did get some good imagery of different parts of this particular vehicle. So yeah, happy ending. Dave stayed in Germany until the summer of 1989. He remembers when the Iron Curtain collapsed, the communist regime falling with it. In the months after the Berlin Wall came down on the 9th of November...

He went back to Berlin with his family to see what was left. The wall was still up, but it had been broken in pieces. And I remember walking through into what we used to call the death zone, because there were two walls. There was one on the west side and then there was another one on the east side. And I remember walking through to collect my pieces of Berlin wall, which I wanted to keep as a souvenir, and meeting face to face with an East German soldier

national vaults army soldier in the death zone and uh and we just looked at each other and he had a pistol and i was just in completely in civilian clothes um and we just looked at each other and and suddenly i remembered my my bricsmith training so i i smiled and he was a bit unsure about that and then i put my hand out to shake his hand and um

And he thought about it for what seemed like an eternity, but it was only like a few seconds. And then he shook my hand and we both shook hands in the death zone. And then I then walked back with my piece of Berlin Wall, which I wanted to recover. And that was it. But it was a very surreal moment that, you know, for 40 odd years, you know, we've been arch enemies and here we were in no man's land shaking hands. You know, it was very good.

After his days in Brixmas, Dave continued his career in the military. In 2019, he retraced his steps in Ulster Galleen, where they'd been stranded, and found his way back to the pub that had taken him in on that cold February night in 1987. It turned out the same family still owned the pub over 30 years on. The landlord had sadly passed away, but his wife greeted Dave with open arms.

What she'd done, she had preserved the front room exactly the same as the pub was all those years ago. And I have to say, there's not many times in my life when I've walked into somewhere, a room or whatever, and had one of those what you call flashbacks.

And it was laid out exactly the same with the trestle table, the chairs. And I even went through into the room where the phone was in the corner where we made the call from. And so it was a very emotional reunion. Today, Dave's life is as enigmatic as it was 30 years ago. He's a specialist dealing with chemical, biological and nuclear threats.

But his days in Bricksmith remain the best of his career. The idea of roaming around behind enemy lines, basically having free will to do whatever you want, you know, steal, photograph, break all the rules in the name of gathering intelligence, was just a fantastic opportunity. Dave Butler. I'm Vanessa Kirby.

Join us next week for another liaison with True Spies.