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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 that position?

This is True Spies trade craft.

That was sort of one of them most intense moments of my life where I'd be like walk out into the middle of a bombing campaign.

You'd see the rockets hitting the airport.

We also knew that if a rocket hit our facility directly, we don't really have a defense against it.

This is your second installment of True Spies trade craft.

Ask any of the operatives you've heard on this series.

They'll tell you there are limits to the lessons that can be learned in training.

For a spy, so much of the trade craft that defines the make or break moments of your career is learnt on the job.

And much of that comes from the unlikeliest of places.

Which is why we're beginning the next chapter of your instructional guide to the ins and outs of spy craft.

Not with a spy, but out in the civilian world with a newspaper reporter.

In some ways, what a reporter does is quite similar to what a spy working for an intelligence agency does.

As an investigative journalist at the Guardian, Nick Davis had a hand at some of the most explosive news stories of our time.

In episode 29 of True Spies, he recounted his investigation into the deliberate, sustained, and illegal hacking of mobile phones by reporters on Britain's largest Sunday newspaper.

It was a piece of reporting that saw him assume the status of a legend in his field.

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