I HAVE be re-watching a very old but terrifically good British television drama series. The Sandbaggers is, it must be said, of a certain vintage, running originally as it did in the late 1970s early 80s. Production-wise, it looks a bit creaky these days but that did not stop the New York Times in 2003 calling it the best spy series in television history. Frankly, I couldn’t agree more.

Written by a Scot, Ian Mackintosh, a former naval officer who, some believe, may himself have worked for the intelligence services, the series takes its title from a fictitious small, elite group of British intelligence officers: the Special Operations Section nicknamed the Sandbaggers.

This is not James Bond stuff. Alongside plot lines about prosaic budget wrangles, careerist inter-department rivalry and delicate relations with their US counterparts in the CIA, each episode portrays the Sandbaggers as prepared to get their hands dirty in the shadow lands of politically sensitive intelligence. Watching the series again, I couldn’t help but be struck by how much the ongoing spat between United States president-elect Donald Trump and US intelligence wouldn’t look out of place as an episode of The Sandbaggers.

The fact that a certain former MI6 counter-intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, sits at the heart of the explosive Trump-Russia dossier only adds to the parallels with what the drama series portrays.

It was Mr Steele who is said to have prepared a 35-page document that alleges the Kremlin colluded with Mr Trump’s presidential campaign team and that the Russian security services have material that could be used to blackmail him, including an allegation that he paid prostitutes to defile a bed that had been slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama.

How much of that report rings true is, of course, another matter. Yesterday, I spoke to an old friend and colleague who has also read the report and who is, shall we say, more than familiar with Moscow intrigues and spy spats.

He remains convinced that much of the detail in the document’s pages shows a real understanding of goings-on in Russia, but agrees with Newsweek magazine’s assertion that the report’s pages are a strange mix of the “amateurish and insightful”.

Among the more fundamental errors made by the report’s author for example, are references to Alpha Bank rather than Alfa, and the given impression that the suburb of Barvikha on the tony Rublevskoe highway near Moscow is a closed government compound, instead of just an expensive vacation home area favoured by Russia’s new rich. There are other inconsistencies but, despite these buckles in its content, it has served its purpose.

After all, if you employ the likes of a former MI6 officer to dig up dirt on someone like Mr Trump, then most likely dirt is what you will get, even if the veracity of some detail is questionable.

It was the enigmatic and eccentric James Jesus Angleton, the former chief of CIA counter-intelligence between 1954 and 1974, who is credited with coining the phrase “Wilderness of Mirrors” to describe the kaleidoscopic and confusing world of intelligence and espionage. Lost in that wilderness is where we find out ourselves right now over the Trump dossier and the real-estate mogul’s stand-off with US intelligence. The more we seem to know, the more confusing it becomes. But it has ever been thus in the world of spooks.

Those within the intelligence community are like the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen but full of pronouncements which others seldom profess to understand fully but accept on faith anyway. Only one thing is certain in this wilderness and that is that there is always someone, somewhere, who is privileged to what is as near as dammit the definitive version of the truth. That’s about as good as if gets for, in the intelligence wilderness, there is no truth; only versions of it.

So far, the CIA, FBI, Russian FSB, Kremlin, Barack Obama and Mr Trump himself have given their interpretation of recent events but we are still no nearer a full understanding of what has gone on and perhaps never will be.

This is bad news, not least for the American public who potentially could be witnessing the first throes of a US constitutional crisis at the beginning of a new presidency and particularly sensitive moment in world affairs.

The simple, inescapable fact is that, while many Americans voted for Mr Trump, their future president looks like a man holed beneath the political waterline even before stepping into the White House.

At his first press conference as president-elect a few days ago he turned it into another theatre of the absurd, full of his usual bluster and bullying. But there was something different too about his appearance and delivery.

Lurking within his usual rhetoric were signs, albeit small, that chinks in the political armour exist.

At times he seemed more prone to backtracking or deviating on previous comments and proclamations.

I might be mistaken but perhaps what we are seeing are the first signs of a Trump team slowly waking up to the fact that the comfort zone of say-what-you-like presidential campaign hustings is well behind them. Welcome, instead, Mr president-elect to the bear pit of realpolitik, a place, as US history has shown, where it can be perilous for politicians to make enemies of those within its powerful intelligence community.

Yesterday there were few signs that the stand-off between Mr Trump and his spies was relenting.

While the president-elect yet again resorted to his dark-of-the-night tweets in insisting that US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, called him to “denounce the false and fictitious” Russia dossier, the spy chief meanwhile, was doing what spies are expected to do – saying little.

Mr Trump is in treacherous waters. In the past a number of US presidents have chosen to ignore, challenge, or supplement from other sources the information delivered by their intelligence agencies.

As history attests, the outcome of those respective strategies tells us a lot about the fate of various presidents.

Ultimately, be it in the US or UK, it is the responsibility of intelligence professionals and their new leaders to adapt to the next political administration’s priorities and decision-making style.

At present in the US, there are few signs of this happening. For the time being the bad blood between the president-elect and his spies continues to flow.

There is also just that growing sense that, in the long run, scalps will be taken. If The Sandbaggers is anything to go by, then I know whom my money would be on when it comes to surviving politically to fight another day; and it’s not Mr Trump.