Inside this week's long reads

Support the Guardian Support us   Fund independent journalism Secret intelligence: hunting for spies and extraterrestrials In this week’s newsletter: how Shaun Walker found his bungling spy; why can’t we find alien life? Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images A bungled bomb plot in Poland exposed a spy – but whose spy was he? | Shaun Walker When exiled Russian opposition campaigner Igor Rogov was accused of working for the Kremlin, his friends were shocked. Could this young activist have really been an undercover agent? Photograph: VW Pics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? | Adam Kirsch Given the size and age of the universe, it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than our own. So where are they? In spite of decades of increasingly sophisticated research, it seems likely that there really is something unique about the conditions for life on Earth. Inside this week’s long read This week we published a long-awaited story of a Russian on trial for espionage. We asked Shaun Walker about the challenges of reporting on a shadow world How did you come across the crazy story of Igor Rogov? It’s been something I was fascinated by since his arrest two years ago, but initially details were hard to come by because the case was classified. However, late last year I was granted access to view the case files of a smaller character in the story, the Ukrainian model who brought an explosive package from Odesa to Poland and sent it to Rogov, and was amazed to find hundreds of pages of rich detail about Rogov and his wife copied into those files. They went a long way towards answering many of the questions I had about him. With the FSB’s reach so wide and deep, how hard was it to find sources for this story you could trust? I’ve been writing about spy cases for some years now and it’s always a problem: even if you can get to the sources, how do you know they’re telling you the truth and the whole truth? In this case it was even trickier because I could read Rogov’s interrogations but I couldn’t pose follow-up questions to him on things I wanted to clarify. I think the only way to get the final word on just what Rogov gave the FSB would be to get hold of his file in the FSB archive in Saransk, and that’s not likely to happen any time soon! But I hope that the picture I’ve been able to draw from a mix of the Polish files and people who knew Rogov well will answer a lot of the questions that have been hanging in the air about the case. I’m sure there are whole strands to this story you didn’t manage to fit in. Is there a subplot you would have liked to develop? I think all levels of the chain of couriers of the explosive package are fascinating and I would have loved to dig deeper into the stories of Diesel, Kristina and Emil. What I found fascinating about this story is how many different areas of the shadow world it touched on: Russia’s sabotage in Europe, Ukraine’s sabotage in Russia, how the FSB works in Russia and how it infiltrates dissident movements. But at its heart it’s a story about one young man – Igor Rogov – and his choices. I really hope that I’ll get to talk to him one day, when he gets out of prison. This week’s audio long reads The Dacre dynasty: how Britain’s rightwing press was radicalised 35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 560 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped? Endo dreams of sushi: a trip around Japan with one of the world’s greatest chefs Listen to the Audio Long Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or in the Guardian app From the archive <br> Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA ‘Drought is on the way to becoming the next pandemic’ | June 2023 While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach. Tim Smedley reports on our failure to tackle water shortages, even before this year’s rolling heatwaves. Photograph: Alamy/Guardian Design/Ersoy Emin/Phil Partridge Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island | May 2019 In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, Matthew Bremner reports, it is still feeling the effects. What else we’ve been reading How do our parents make us? James Wood’s memoir of growing up in Durham with a kind, capable, quiescent father and strikingly ambitious mother (“Mrs Thatcher just was mother”) in the LRB recalls the “touching, even painful” details of his parents’ struggles for respectability without rancour or scorn, and discovers, as an adult, his father’s unsung heroism. Clare Longrigg, deputy editor Willy Staley is a very funny and perceptive writer/editor at the New York Times Magazine: I enjoyed his account of what it was like to only eat steak and fermented foods for a week. (I’ll let him explain why.) Yohann Koshy, deputy editor   Our journalism is free to say what it wants… but worth paying for. From breaking news to huge investigative projects; from masterfully told features and long reads to reviews, podcasts, videos, lifestyle advice and much more. It’s an incredible amount of valuable journalism, and it costs a lot of money to produce. 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