Documentary maker Robert Mulhern writes about this weekend's extraordinary Documentary On One production, Ireland and the KGB.

We all grew up on James Bond. Repeats of Moonraker, A View to a Kill and The Spy Who Loved Me were a pillar of pop culture in the 1980s. But never did I imagine working on a real life spy story. That, earlier this year, I’d be told to wait at the particular exit of a particular London Tube Station, at a particular time to meet a former KGB agent who could help explain scarcely believable spy stories that played out in Stillorgan, Shannon and Donegal.

Listen to Documentary On One: Ireland and the KGB here.

So, I stood waiting outside South Harrow Tube Station in North West London for a former schoolmate of Vladimir Putin to arrive.

‘He wasn’t known as Putin in the college’ said Alexander Vassiliev after arriving.

‘He was called Platov. That was his cover name. We all had cover names!’

It had taken months to track the former agent down as part of trying to tell the story of the KGB and Ireland. This began last December with an email to a female archivist of Soviet history who lived in America who I’d googled on the internet. 

Then there's the middle-aged Dubliner who was poisoned by the same radioactive material that former Russian agents used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in London’s Millennium hotel in 2006.

Alleged Russian interference in the US elections was all over the news and I had wondered whether the KGB ever figured in Ireland? If so, why? And who would know?

Christmas came and went, weeks of emails travelled back and forth between Dublin and America and eventually the female archivist I'd met online helped set up of a meeting for me with a real life former KGB handler, and Soviet defector, now living in Cambridge. He himself was a former visitor to The White House, but when I arrived we drank black tea in the damp sitting room of his house where he talked freely about the KGB, the IRA and how the Russians could have the shallows off the coast of Donegal to intercept intelligence cables being sent by KGB officers working in Ireland. 

"So the KGB *were* actually in Ireland?"

"Of course," he replied. "The KGB were on every continent except Antarctica". 

After leaving his home in Cambridge, England, I followed a trail which led to a quiet country lane in West Cork and the home of a one-time solicitor who found himself at the centre of a Soviet espionage story in 1983. Then, the Irish Government claimed to have exposed a KGB spy ring who were using the cover of Stillorgan Shopping Centre, of all places, to pass information about the US military. 

Cork solicitor Jim O’Keefe was then the Minister of State in Garret Fitzgerald’s government. 

And it was down to Jim to expel three Soviet Diplomats from the country after the spy ring was exposed. But relations between Ireland and Russian spies didn't end there...

There’s the Dublin lecturer and anti-racism campaigner who managed to work his way into the power centre of the KGB in Moscow, where he saw NATO map movements and the course they plotted through Irish waters. 

Then there's the middle-aged Dubliner who was poisoned by the same radioactive material that former Russian agents used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in London’s Millennium hotel in 2006.

He survived and has been living a quieter life in the Caribbean since the attack, but still reports into London for regular health checks. 

He talked freely about the KGB, the IRA and how the Russians could have the shallows off the coast of Donegal to intercept intelligence cables being sent by KGB officers working in Ireland. 

Now, with the project all but finished, perhaps the most memorable meet was with the former KGB agent who once worked with for the highly respected ‘First Directorate’ gathering intelligence on the US during the time of Ronald Reagan. 

That meeting took more months to line-up and not to disappoint minutes after meeting Alexander Vassiliev, he was able to tell me some details of what work I’d actually done in the past!’

"I don’t know what the Russian Secret Service is like now," he said. "But we were the crème de la crème!" 

Documentary On One: Ireland and the KGB, Saturday September 23rd @ 2pm, RTÉ Radio 1, with a repeat on Sunday September 24th @ 7pm. Listen to more from Documentary On One here.