This month, three Bulgarian nationals were found guilty of spying for Russia from a Great Yarmouth guest house. Kidnap plots, surveillance on Ukrainian troops, weapons trades with China, disinformation, bags of burner phones and fake passports – the details of this, one of the biggest spy investigations in Britain, are so astonishing they could have come straight from Cold War fiction.
I would know. I recently spent three deranged weeks binge-watching all six seasons of The Americans, the Cold War thriller starring Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as deep-cover KGB officers posing as all-American travel agents in suburban 1980s Virginia, and now I see spies everywhere. My life has been overthrown from within.
This (unhealthy) obsession has left me incapable of focusing on anything else. I trust no one. I’m blasting through Duolingo Russian at alarming speed. My search history must surely have triggered some red flags on some government database and I’m spending a worrying amount of time on Reddit.
I’ve started using terms like “tradecraft” and “asset”; I found an excuse to wear a wig at the weekend. I seek out people who have not yet suffered through my evangelising about the many-layered, erotic nuances to a tooth-pulling scene, or explaining why a really romantic beheading is the ultimate test of a man’s devotion to his wife.
The Americans is a restrained, subtle portrait of two complex antiheroes, of the competing loyalties of family and country, of a Moscow-arranged marriage that turns into a real one (and realer still: Rhys and Russell fell in love off-screen and have a child), of the brutality and banality of espionage and the futility of all this sacrifice and bloodshed to save the doomed Soviet Union.
It is one of the best-written, most sophisticated and addictive dramas I have ever seen (it’s streaming on Disney+ and Channel 4). And despite its being set 40 years ago, it is impossible to watch it without reflecting on what is happening in Russia and Ukraine today, and how Putin has destabilised the world order to such an extent that our own Prime Minister is actually talking about a UK-led peacekeeping force in Europe.
It is impossible, too, to watch it without considering the lingering impact of Russia’s long-held, deeply embedded contempt for the West.
The Americans’ showrunners Joe Weisberg (ex-CIA) and Joel Fields never wanted their audience to draw parallels to contemporary geopolitics. Ahead of its final season, in 2018, Fields told Vanity Fair: “We would prefer for the show to metabolise in a world in which people are looking with bemusement at Russia, as the enemy of the past, and wondering why they were ever demonised. Instead of looking at the show with fresh eyes, considering the Russian’s new enemies.”
But both during its original run from 2013 to 2018, and now, real-world events, its examination of the power of Soviet mythology and its plot’s grounding in cases of real-life “illegals” – undercover spies resident in foreign countries, operating without diplomatic cover – make their words redundant.
The spy stuff in the programme is meticulously accurate, from the primitive (disguises, dead drops, phone taps, Bulgarian umbrellas) to the preposterous (honeytraps, fake marriages, bioweapon theft, cracking up corpses and stuffing them into suitcases).
Every time the story appears to stretch credulity – the exhumation of a scientist’s body for cell samples, the KGB’s designs on Philip and Elizabeth’s children as “second generation” spies, the seduction of a CIA agent’s teenage daughter, the hunting down and assassination of defectors from decades past – there is evidence not just of how this really happened, but some modern story that is even more extreme. Think of Sergei Skripal, an enemy of Putin, who was poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in the Salisbury branch of Zizzi in 2018; or Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with radioactive polonium in a London hotel in 2016.
But the plots are not what makes this such illuminating TV. Far more interesting is the way its focus on the domestic and emotional lives of these spies, rather than the historical bigger picture, forces you to consider the Soviet frame of mind.
These two soldiers, recruited as teenagers from Russian cities devastated during the Second World War and groomed to the Communist cause, are trained to be uncompromising in their belief that their job is part of the greater good and that the survival of their motherland is more important than anything else – including their own children. The drama’s greatest tension comes not from the action, but when their feelings about each other and their family threaten their commitment to the Party.
The conflict between their loyalties, the fear that “Americanness” might be creeping into them and their children – who do not know their parents’ real identities – is more distressing to them than the relentless murders they are forced to commit. Their missions involve acts of untold evil, the orders from “Moscow Centre” growing more dangerous (and Philip more dubious about whether he is still working on the side of world peace) as they destroy or dispose of anyone who obstructs their pursuit of kompromat.
The more time you spend with Philip, on whom the work takes a greater emotional toll and who is seduced by the glamour of capitalism, and Elizabeth, the more staunchly devoted, resilient, and ruthless, the more deeply we understand how un-American they are, no matter their accents. Their entire existences are a decades-long project to undermine the Western way of life.
It would be foolish to imagine the impacts of this indoctrination do not live on. Decades before he was President, Vladimir Putin himself worked in Dresden as an illegals support officer. When he gained power, he gradually reactivated sleeper agents in the West who had been living as ordinary citizens since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ten were rounded up by the FBI in 2010 as part of “Operation Ghost Stories” – on which The Americans is partly based – and just last year Artyem and Anna Dultsev returned to Moscow after decades undercover in Buenos Aires and Slovenia, with their eight- and 10-year-old children, who believed they were Argentinian until they stepped on the plane. Putin met them with flowers and kisses at the airport.
The world is a very different place since 1987, when The Americans concludes, when Gorbachev met Reagan at the Washington Summit, and when glasnost and perestroika would begin to render everything Philip and Elizabeth fought for a failure. The KGB is no more. But from everything we know about about acts of Russian espionage on our own soil and the man who decrees them, the “illegals program” is far from history.
‘The Americans’ is streaming on Channel 4 and Disney+