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Welcome. 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?

I'm Vanessa Kirby and this is True Spies, Russia's laundromat.

Part two, a godfather.

This story begins in a darkened concert hall in Moscow.

A 20-something investigative journalist is moments away from revealing the details of a bombshell report.

At its center, one of the very musicians she's paid good money to see.

He's a man who claims little to his name, but in fact, he's one of President Putin's closest companions.

So close, in fact, that the journalist and her colleagues will later call him Putin's secret caretaker.

But for now, nobody knows the scale of his fortunes or the scope of his corruption.

Nobody but our young journalist and her colleague sitting in the dark, waiting and wondering what will happen when the truth comes out.

You're not always filled in your because basically you don't know. You might try to talk about something less important than Putin.

And you get screwed. And you might try to talk about the whole career of very high corruption.

And you will be safe. The problem is that you never know. And there are no indicators that you can predict.

In last week's true spies, we introduced you to Roman Barisovitch, a financier who went undercover to expose Britain's complicity in laundering dirty Russian money.

He posed as a health minister and told five different real estate agents that he intended to use stolen money to purchase a London flat.

Roman had all sorts of worries about the outcome of that operation, that he'd be caught in the act, that the police might be called a lawsuit filed.

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