5:6 - Mandate to kill

In this bonus episode of Cold Front, we talk to the foreign correspondent at the Guardian Luke Harding. He will comment on some of the biggest revelations presented in this podcast series, and he will tell about his experiences with the Russian intelligence service FSB.

Out in the sea between Sweden and Denmark, Niels is chasing a Russian spy ship. And what he soon realises is, that the ship has been sailing close to several windfarms. Apparently mapping out critical infrastructure.

In Sweden a famous Chechen-blogger, Tumso Abdurakhmanov, is attacked with a hammer while he is asleep. The attack turns out to be part of a much bigger story about how Russian services have been given a mandate to kill.

In the midst of a diplomatic crisis a forged letter appears online. It turns out that it was made to create conflict between Denmark, the US and Greenland. But who made it?

Niels is in a small house at the countryside somewhere in the UK. He is here to meet up with a source, who claims to know something about suspicious activity at sea very close to the locations that later become the Nord Stream explosion sites. The source also claims that no one else is aware of this information. Now he's willing to share it with the team.

In a hotel by a lake, Niels, Maria and Ali meet up with a source from the organization Dossier Center who is able to help them name possible Russian spies. This will lead them to a story about how a scientist in Denmark was recruited by a Russian intelligence officers - and exactly what he was tasked to spy on.

Dressed in unobtrusive dark clothes, the Swedish journalists Ali and Maria drive towards a secret location to meet with a source. This source will hand the team one of their first major leads - a list with names on suspected Russian intelligence officers on the Russian embassy in Sweden. In Norway the team starts to look into two mysterious and still unsolved cable cuts at the bottom of the sea in the north of Norway.