SECRETS OF THE SPIES

9PM, ITV

The second episode of this fascinating series looks at the deadliest form of covert operation: the targeted elimination of the enemy. Perhaps the most iconic British crime story took place in 1978 on Waterloo Bridge, when Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov (above) was spiked with the poisoned tip of an umbrella and died shortly afterwards. Although the details read like something out of a John le Carre novel, assassination attempts on British soil are only too real, as the case of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018 and the poisoning of the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko show only too well. Here, experts reveal how these attacks were carried out

– and by whom.