apparently used to hack into phones, computers, even smart tvs, to gather intelligence. the us government has been trying to reassure china that its deployment of a missile defence shield in south korea is not a threat to beijing, but meant to prevent an attack from north korea. the chinese strongly oppose the thaad system, fearing its powerful radar can monitor far into chinese territory. a un official has called on north korea and malaysia to deal with their differences calmly. the two governments have banned each other‘s citizens from leaving their countries. malaysia wants to interview two north korean diplomats over the killing of their leader's half—brother at kuala lumpur airport. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. it's the job of the journalist to speak truth to power but it can

be a lonely place, defying conventional wisdom and the powers that be. my guest today has known that loneliness. irish journalist david walsh was convinced that cycling's untouchable champion lance armstrong was a drugs cheat long before the sport revealed the scale of his deceit. armstrong is now history of course but doping continues to devalue elite sport. maybe it's a problem that no amount of truth telling journalism can fix. david walsh, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. i wonder if you could cast your mind back to starting as a young journalist in ireland, working on sports. you memorably described yourself then as a fan with a typewriter. do you still regard yourself as a fan? in certain respects, yes, but in a general sense, no. i think a journalist has to leave that behind. i think the predominant reason why people want to be sports writers is because they love sport. in my case, i knew from a very early stage i wanted to be a sports writer and it's because i liked writing essays when i was in english class as a kid and i loved sport and i put the two together and it equalled sports reporter. before we get to the state of sport today, we must talk about lance armstrong and your pursuit, and i think that's the right word, you used it

as the subtitle of your book about him, the seven deadly sins. you talked about your pursuit of lance armstrong. why did you turn it into a crusade, a mission, you against him? well, that is how it turned out. i don't know if i consciously decided, i'm going to dedicate all this time to pursuing one guy. i mean, the sport was dirty at the time. lance was one of many riders who doped, but they all didn't, there were plenty of guys who were clean and who got completely betrayed by their sport. the reason why lance became such an important figure was because he was an emblem on what we were told was to change sport. he was this fantastically feelgood story. the guy that came back from cancer. yeah, he almost died from testicular cancer. then in 1999, he rode the tour again, he'd never won it before, but he rode it in 1999, he went on to reel off seven victories. it was perhaps the most heroic victory in sport that anybody of my generation can ever remember. yes. and you, more than anyone

else, burst that bubble. greg lemond, an american man who had won the tour de france three times, said to me at the very early stage of this investigation i was conducting into armstrong, he said, "if this comeback from cancer is true, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport, and it is not true, it's the greatest fraud." as a journalist, you are thinking that if this is the greatest fraud and you believe it is so, you have an absolute responsibility to go after it and reveal it to be a fraud. you came up against an extremely powerful set of interests who did not want that story, your story, to be written. i don't just talk about lance armstrong and his entourage and the us postal team that he represented but i'm also thinking about the authorities in the sport because lance armstrong brought to cycling a sort of profile, a standing in the world of sport which they couldn't find anywhere else so to trash his reputation was to trash the sport as a whole. yes, it was.

it was to trash a global icon as well. this is a guy who went on mountain bike rides with president george w bush. this is a guy who was best friends with matthew mcconaughey, the hollywood actor. this is a man who went way beyond his sport and who people around the world looked up to as some kind of saviour. he had come back from cancer, life—threatening cancer, and every single person, no matter where you live, you knew somebody with cancer, family, a relative, you were going out and you are buying lance's book and saying read this and find inspiration. how apprehensive were you about, and let's use this word again, pursuit. the lawyers representing armstrong were consistently on your case and the case of your newspaper, the sunday times. that went for about three years, 2004, 2005, 2006. they were dominated by meetings with lawyers and discussing the case. a case that we were always going to lose because of the uk's

draconian libel laws. armstrong could never sue us in america, he could never sue us in france because in those countries the burden of proof would have been on armstrong, to prove that i was lying, and i was never lying. but in this country, we had to prove that armstrong was doping and that was close to impossible. you got other cyclists to talk and we now know that as you said, the systematic doping was rife in many different teams, many top cyclist were doing it. how did you break down the sort of wall of silence, the 0merta, that there was at the top of elite cycling? because i tried and when you try to do, and i believe it was the right thing, i exposed one key bit of information, that armstrong worked with a doping doctor. a simple question, why would a so—called clean rider work with a doping doctor? armstrong said he believed

the doctor was in a honest man and people accepted that. the doctor was due to stand trial two months after armstrong said that, for doping. he was convicted and eventually got off on appeal, statute of limitation again. but when people see you trying to do the right thing, they come forward. i had betsy andreu, wife of frankie, lance's long—time teammate, i had emma 0'reilly who had been a personal masseuse to lance when he won his first tour de france. they came to me and told their story. steven swart from new zealand who rode with lance. he said that lance was the biggest advocate of doping in his team. three witnesses with first—hand evidence of lance's doping. i put it all in a book and i thought that was it but armstrong was too powerful, even with all the evidence in the world, you couldn't bring him down. and it wasn't until five years ago that actually the us cycling authorities, and then it moved on to the world doping authorities,

but they finally revealed the truth of the scale of the doping that armstrong had been involved in and in the end he was banned from cycling. in fact, banned from all professional sport. he's finished and now he is way beyond the age where he could be a cyclist, but if you were to meet lance armstrong today, what would you say to him? it's a question i have often considered. i think i would want the conversation to be incredibly private. i wouldn't want it to be in any way used by lance or anyone else for pr purposes. i would like to ask him about the people who knew, the people who still have never been revealed as conspiratories in what was a huge sporting fraud. because he's never told the full story. no, he's always said he's not going to be a rat. he's not going to rat out the people around him. the relationship between you and him

and goodness knows, it is even a hollywood movie, the relationship between you and him is fascinating. when did you actually last see him and swap words with him? the 2004 tour de france at a press conference and the book had just come out. i am sitting in the front row. he was asked about the book and looks down at me and says, "seeing as the esteemed author was here, i will answer this question". he said the extraordinary allegations as mr walsh has made must be followed with extraordinary proof. it was a simple question, why should it be extraordinary proof for lance armstrong? but lance was absolutely right. 0rdinary proof didn't touch him. in the end, the united states anti—doping agency got 26 witnesses. ii of them were former team—mates , all with first—hand accounts of lance's doping. do you in any way resent... in a sense, it made your career, journalist longed to have that defining story that will win them awards, make hollywood movies, and you have that. but this is important,

you also found your life consumed by this and at one point, your daughter made a comment when she saw interviewed on tv about lance and she said, "there you go again, i'm watching you on telly while the rest of the family are having dinner, same old, same old." you sacrificed a lot for this. was it worth it? it totally was worth it and i never saw it as a sacrifice. this was the most fun i was ever going to have as a journalist. people are always astounded when i say that. they say, "you were sued, this guy won, he cost your newspaper a million, that must have been horrible!" "and your family." and i said actually, it wasn't horrible. i really had a good time. i never felt more journalistically alive as i was during those years. i know it is a preposterous kind of comparison because what happened with carl bernstein and bob woodward and watergate was vastly bigger than armstrong but if you look at that movie, all the president's men,

what you see are two journalists on the case, having the time of their lives, knowing there will be another story like this. on a much smaller scale, i had that feeling with armstrong. i can see the excitement shining in your eyes right now. it forces me then to move the clock forward and talk about how you have conducted some of yourjournalism in more recent years. you haven't left sport and certainly you haven't left a cycling. you are still a very influential cycling journalist. why oh why, having learnt the lessons learned from the armstrong case, did you decide in more recent years to vouch for, in a really significant way, the honesty, the credibility, of the dominant cycling team of recent years team sky, when otherjournalists are saying that you can't be sure they are clean when the industry is still full of drugs. why did you do that? i was offered the opportunity

to spend 13 weeks inside team sky. almost like a militaryjournalists go with the army during a war. you went to team sky and you lived with them, ate with them, but frankly they were using them as a tool because they wanted to convince you that they were the new clean team. i think it is right to say that they used to but in fairness to all the good people in team sky, because i believe that i think about 70 or 80 people are working in the team. i believe if you took four people out of that team and one of them is already gone, that you would have very clean team. i was invited to go into that team by dave brailsford, there's no question he duped me. he duped you? he did. he is sir dave brailsford now, he was knighted. if he had told me at the time he was inviting me into the team, "by the way, just so you know

the full picture, we gave a therapeutic exemption to bradley before the 2011 tour de france." we will have two hold up a little bit and explain some of this for our audience because it is quite complicated, but the therapeutic exemption is important in the world of professional cycling because it means banned substances can be given as long as there is proof there is a medical need and now we are talking about bradley wiggins who won the tour de france in 2012 but it turns out, we didn't know at the time, and you didn't know when you were embedded with team sky, but it turns out that in three of his most significant lifetime races, just before those races, he got these therapeutic exemptions and he took a drug which could, in theory, have significantly enhanced his performance. yes. the thing about it is you can say oh, brailsford duped you, he didn't tell you. but he actually duped lots of people inside his own team. chris froome who finished second

in the tour de france, he had no idea that bradley wiggins was give these tues. let's be clear, what bradley wiggins took, because he got the therapeutic exemption, it was not in any way illegal or contrary to the rules of the sport. i think it's more correct to say it may not have been illegal. because if you get a therapeutic use exemption by exaggerating your symptoms, that's not legal. now, we don't know that. it may be that bradley wiggins was utterly entitled to get that tue. that's the part we don't know. would it have been different if bradley wiggins and the team had been entirely transparent at the time and said, "i am riding with this therapeutic exemption drug in me because i've taken it before the race because i had a problem and i've address that problem." of course, that would have been much better. but they would have drawn huge criticism on themselves. people would have said, "why did he need it for days before the race?" and there's a reason why

they didn't tell people. they didn't tell chris froome, they didn't tell any other rider in team sky, they didn't tell some of the doctors in the team, they didn't know about this. it comes back to, and we touched on this earlier in the conversation, the degree to which you as a journalist have the right without the most powerful evidence to trash the reputations and careers of elite sports people. you in the last let's say six months have gone out and very consciously, if i may say so, trashed bradley wiggins. you've said that you don't want to hear any more about his 2012 tour de france victory because in your view it's been completely devalued. you said as far as you're concerned bradley wiggins‘ reputation has been lost. and yet i come back to the point, the man has done nothing wrong in terms of the rules of his sport. in terms of the rules of the sport, he certainly hasn't been sanctioned. i don't accept the point that it's absolute, that they didn't commit a doping infraction.

i mean, there's a big investigation going on about a mysterious medical package that was delivered to bradley wiggins at a race in france in 2011. sky have failed to say what was in that package. that could have meant something that wasn't legal. if it was legal, why didn't they tell us when we asked what was in the package? it took them so long to come out and tell us. the point here is, you can say that i'm trashing him. team sky's leading rider now, three—time winner of the tour de france, has said that in his view what happened with bradley wiggins was unethical and immoral. you're talking about chris froome? yes. in a way, one of the most interesting things about this whole ethical, moral morass that you've entered and been in for so long now is your decision to be so harsh on what we now know about bradley wiggins, but still to maintain that as far as you are concerned, and your personal knowledge

of the man, that chris froome, the three—time tour de france winner, in your view is a man that you will always vouch for. you completely believe in his credibility and you will not countenance any questioning, which others do, the legitimacy of his race victories. no, i will never say i don't countenance his questioning. everyone has the right to question, that's what i do as a living. why would i say somebody doesn't have the right to question him? you co—authored his book. you have shaken hands with the man, you have said to chris froome, "i believe in you." what would you like me to do? would you like me to say, "i really believe in chris froome but it would be prudent of me to hedge my bets here." just sit on the fence? that's not my nature, i'm not going to do it. it's exactly what some of the most experienced people in the business say you should have done. i'm thinking of frankie andreu, the rider you've worked with to a certain extent as a source. he said, "when it comes to

chris froome you have been naive." "why didn't you just stay neutral," he said to you a while ago. "why say and vouch for the fact that he's clean when at some future point you might just look stupid if he turns out that he wasn't?" i don't see my reputation as being that relevant. what i see as being relevant is if i believe somebody is clean, i'm not going to lie and say i don't believe he's clean. i'm not going to say, "sit on the fence, david, because you never know what might happen in the future." if you believe somebody is clean, you owe it to that person to say it because if i didn't believe he's clean, i would say the opposite. so for me this idea of sitting on the fence is totally unappealing. i understand what you're saying, but to pick away at this for one more moment on chris froome. we also know that he used a therapeutic exemption clause. actually in a race, not even before a race but during a race he got an exemption to take a drug which was on the banned list. yes. yet you say that was fundamentally different from bradley wiggins. you also say that you're partly convinced by chris froome

because you had, and this is in your book, you had a very private one—on—one talk with him when he explained lots of things. what did he say to you that convinced you so much of his integrity? it wasn't just that but that was a moment where... and by the way, i never, you know... let me maybe put that conversation first into the context. i'm in a hoteland i'm walking up the fire escape and he's coming down. it's one of those stairways where there's nobody going to come, you just know. and he stopped, and he said to me, "i want to tell you one thing." and i said, "what's that, chris?" he said, "i'm telling you now that as long as i live, what i've achieved in this race will never... the perception of it will never be changed by anything that's going to come out." but you know what, the crazy thing is lance armstrong would have looked you in the eye and said just the same thing if he'd met you on a fire escape in 2001. he didn't. see, that's it. i actually met lance and i spoke to him and we said, "lance, what about doping? this sport has got so much bad press.

and here you are winning the tour de france for the first time." and this is what lance said. he said, "look, i'm going to address this question once and once only. and i'm saying to you guys, you journalists, you've got to fall in love with cycling again." he never actually said, "i would never dope, i do not dope." he said, "i have tested positive, i have passed all of the controls." now, if you're covering the sport and you're a sports writer and you see lots of this stuff, you actually know how to read what people are saying and saying, i have passed all the tests is not the same as saying, "i don't dope." how can it be, and i want to broaden the conversation now, because cycling has been one of your key focuses. but you've also looked at wider sport and drugs in professional, elite sport as a whole. how can it be that after decades of focus on stamping out the illegal substances in sports, performance enhancing drugs, that here today we probably can say that there is more systematic use of performance enhancing drugs

in athletics, in cycling, in other sports than there's ever been before. i don't think you can say that. look at what we've learned about the russians. yes, systematic doping in russia. in the past there's been systematic doping in russia. the russian systematic doping has been going on for at least a0 years according to professor richard mclaren, who did the report. so it's not something new. you've worked in the recent past with a former russian anti—doping executive who blew the whistle on what was going on, plus his partner, who is a former elite athlete who did dope for a while. you worked with them, they're now living in exile in the united states. and they have told you it was industrial scale. yes, of course. but going back through decades. but how come it can have been in the very recent past industrial scale when, as i made the point, the world anti—doping agency, the iaaf, and all of the other different world bodies supposed to be controlling drugs in sport

have spent years telling us they're cleaning it out. the reason why russia were able to get away with it was because it was state—supported. it's a big deal if you've got the ministry of sport and the anti—doping agency and the anti—doping laboratory all conspiring to cheat. that gives the advantages to their coaches, who are... you're saying men who claim to be on the side of the good guys, like sebastian coe, who now runs the iaaf, the athletics governing body, and indeed the world anti—doping agency, you're saying either they don't have the will or capacity to take on state programmes devoted to doping. they definitely don't have the resources. do they have the will? i'm not sure. if they were better resourced they would have bigger staffs, they'd probably have better people and they would

have better protocols. the world anti—doping agency, the former director—general, david howman, once said, "our annual budget is less than wayne rooney's annual wages." that is what we put into anti—doping. the entire world anti—doping agency budget for one year is less than one footballer, not even the highest—paid footballer in the world, is less than his annual wages. that's what we think of doping. in other words we're not concerned enough about doping to make a real impact. we're almost at the end. i want to start where i began, the idea of being a fan. you know what dick pound, the former chief of the world anti—doping agency, said to me not long ago on hardtalk? he said, "when i watch particularly cycling today, i simply cannot bear to watch it any more. i cannot take it seriously." he certainly cannot be a fan. how can you still be a fan knowing what you know? what dick has said there is my definition of cynicism. because that starts from the presumption that they're all cheating.

he called it realism. well, he can, and i can call it cynicism. because what happens if somebody who's clean is winning the tour de france but because you have a preconception that they're all cheats, so you brand him a cheat without having any evidence that he is a cheat, without having any knowledge, without having any insight, without having anything. that to me is cynicism. and i would fight as much against cynicism as i would against people who dope. david walsh, we have to end there. fascinating stuff. thank you for being on hardtalk. thank you. hello there. good morning. tuesday was a decent day for the eastern side of the uk. we've seen more cloud, though, coming in from the west, and all our weather is coming in from off the atlantic at the moment, all this cloud spilling across the uk. it's driven by an area of low pressure that's running between iceland and scotland, with these weather fronts too. the rain across the northern half of the uk is running across fairly quickly, but to the south, things grind to a halt towards the end of the night. so after the rain across

the northern half of the uk we get some showers rattling into the north—west of scotland early on in the morning, and again, there could be a bit of snow across the mountains. there'll be a strong wind, gales probably for northern scotland. by the morning, sunshine is out across northern ireland, and the cloud continuing to break up across northern england, brightening up quite nicely as that rain is out into the north sea. but across east anglia, southern england, perhaps the south midlands, mid and south wales, we've got more cloud. quite low cloud, quite mild. but there will be some rain in the air as well. it's never really going to clear away for much of the day. rain on and off across mid and south wales, perhaps the midlands, east anglia, and southern england. much more sunshine, though, arriving across north wales, northern england, northern ireland, and it is quite windy here in scotland, again, across the north and there will still be a few of those sharp showers. temperatures will be that bit lower. highest temperatures probably in the south—east, where we have all that cloud and the threat of rain. still some rain around

across southern parts of england and wales on wednesday evening. that rain eventually transfers southwards into the english channel. but to the north, we'll see the showers pepping up again across northern ireland and then into scotland, again, there could be some snow over the high hills. a drop in temperature later in the night perhaps in northern ireland, scotland, north—east england but nothing too cold out there. as we head into thursday, though, showers across scotland become fewer and lighter, largely confined to the north—east as the wind eases down. for many places, thursday will be a dry day, some sunshine around. more cloud, though, towards the south and south—west, with that rain sitting through the channel, and it threatens to come back northwards again overnight and into friday on a fairly weak weather front taking rain across the northern half of the uk primarily. and then behind that weather system, we're drawing in our air from a long way south. so this is really quite mild air, but it's going to be accompanied by a good deal of cloud. so little if any sunshine around on friday. but the uk at least, not much rain at all and temperatures as high as 13 or 1a degrees. now, as we head into the weekend it looks pretty unsettled, at least to start with.

outbreaks of rain on saturday. quite a mild day as well. getting more showery on sunday, but then temperatures beginning to slip away later on. hello. you're watching bbc world news. i'm adnan nawaz. our top story this hour: some of the cia's most closely—guarded hacking secrets have been leaked on the internet. among the many apparent revelations, claims that spies can monitor people through their tv sets. welcome to the programme. our other main stories this hour: saved from slavery and worse. we meet some of the young yazidis who escaped from the hands of the islamic state group, to find refuge in germany. 0n international women's day, women in ireland prepare to march against their country's anti—abortion laws, some of the strictest in the world. i'm sally bundock. in business: feast orfamine? it's budget day in the uk with the chancellor poised