My wife and I watched and enjoyed the
final episode of the TV series The Americans the other night. We’ve watched the
espionage series since the beginning.
As a writer who covers
espionage, I’ve interviewed CIA officers, American military intelligence
officers, FBI counterintelligence agents, and British, Israeli and Russian intelligence officers over the years. I could spot where the show's producers and writers fictionalized real events from the Cold War. Other than there being far too much sex and violence, the TV show was fairly
accurate.
Not that sex wasn't employed during the
Cold War. Markus Wolf of the East German Stasi, who used sex frequently with “honey traps,”
said, “Sex and espionage certainly go together – that’s an old tradition.”
As for violence, yes, American
intelligence officers were killed in Vietnam, the Middle East and elsewhere, but
the KGB, the FBI and the CIA did not murder each other, as both sides feared the repercussions.
Lee Ferran at
realclearlife.com offers a piece on a sort of
“after action report” on The Americans.
Just hours before the final
episode of FX’s hit Cold War-era espionage drama The Americans aired and threw
#NatSecTwitter into convulsions Wednesday night, the stars of the show appeared
on stage at UCLA alongside real-life ex-CIA undercover officers to talk
tradecraft and what separates fact from fiction.
For the uninitiated, The
Americans is set in the 1980s and follows two Soviet intelligence officers
living secretly as a married couple with kids in Washington, D.C. as part of
the KGB’s infamous “illegals” program. The show was one of the most tense
dramas on television and gave off a particularly grounded feel.
Elizabeth and Philip Jennings
(played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, respectively) never drove invisible
cars or made clever quips after dispatching a nameless enemy. But they did
struggle with the moral ambiguity of their work as they manipulated and
destroyed the lives of relatively innocent people and, occasionally, murdered
others who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was a somber portrayal of
a secret, gruesome world, aided a great deal by the experience of show creator
Joe Weisberg, himself a former CIA officer.
But that doesn’t mean The
Americans got everything right. At Wednesday’s event at UCLA’s Burkle Center
for International Relations, former CIA officers and Cold Warriors Martha
Peterson and Mark Kelton joined Weisberg, Russell, Rhys and Costa Ronin, who
plays a Russian embassy official in the show, to set the record straight.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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