Review: William Johnson’s Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer
By Wesley Britton
Johnson, William R., d. Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer.
Foreword by William Hood, p. cm.
Originally published: Bethesda, Md.: Stone Trail Press, 1987.
Re-published by Georgetown University Press, Feb. 2009.
ISBN 978-1-58901-255-4
$21.95
Determining the purpose of and audience for the republication of William Johnson’s 1987 Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer is tricky. Never intended for the general reader, Thwarting Enemies was clearly written as a “Counter-Intelligence 101” textbook for trainees, with researchers and scholars likely finding it a useful resource. Then and now, it’s also a good volume for fiction writers to have on hand if they want to get their particulars correct. But what would make this Cold War overview of interest for audiences, or future counter-intelligence officers, in the post-9/11 world?
I admit, the opening pages didn’t convince me Georgetown University Press was all that certain itself. For one matter, the very brief introductory paragraphs aren’t especially revealing. They claim Johnson’s “seasoned wisdom about the principles and tactics of counterintelligence” teaches “readers how to think about counterintelligence, and these basic principles carry through from era to era. Updates to account for current events and the latest gadgetry would have short-term benefit but would be dated once again within a few years.” Likely so, but then they say “the author passed away before republication was planned, so we elected not to attempt revisions that could not be approved by the author.” If no revisions then, a modern reader might expect some background details in the “Foreword” preparing them for what they might expect in the following pages.
However, in but two pages, William Hood provides a brief biography of Johnson, which does establish the author’s considerable bona fides. According to Hood, Johnson was an active participant in the D-Day invasion, and then joined the CIA in 1948 where he first worked “in the vital European counterintelligence field” before returning to Washington for “a senior assignment managing CIA's Far Eastern counterintelligence operations from 1960 until his transfer to Saigon in 1973.” Hood credits Johnson with helping create the network and structure in a new areana for the CIA as its predecessor, the O.S.S., had not been widely used in the Pacific theatre of WWII. More details are offered in the About the Author” description at the end of the book, such as: “As a young case officer he had several of the best coaches in the business of counterespionage, among them the Americans Jim Angleton, Bill Harvey, and Bill Hood. He was also coached by some British officers who cannot be named . . . He spent the last year of his service with CIA writing a classified counterintelligence training manual for young case officer recruits.” After his retirement in 1977, Johnson “organized and managed a series of seminars and lectures on intelligence as a function of government that was part of the University of Colorado's annual Conference on World Affairs.”
Without question, Johnson was more than qualified to craft this handbook for future counter-espionage agents. But the question remains: while useful before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what gives this book continuing value beyond being supplementary reading for new recruits? More than technology has changed—for example, Johnson’s discussion on wiretaps includes legal advice that was outmoded the day the Patriot Act was signed into law. The publisher apparently thinks, if you pick up this book, you already know what it is. Or they didn’t think it worthy enough for a more detailed introduction where the issues of the changes of the past 20 years could be addressed--while selling the point that basic principles, thought-patterns, strategies, etc. are the same now as they have ever been. In particular, all of Johnson’s accounts deal with the old duels with the KGB and GRU—battling modern terrorists is a different fish completely. Or is it? Some one could and should have addressed this in introductory pages.
None of this, of course, is criticism of Johnson’s own work as he passed in 2005. Undoubtedly, had anyone asked, he’d have opted to at least delete the sections on technological uses of surveillance equipment based on land-lines, concerns no longer relevant in the cell-phone age. Such deletions would have been simple enough as the book is organized in a series of segments on a variety of topics. Many of these segments are indeed still useful and, gratefully, told with wit and assurance. For example, the section on “double agents” reads, in part:
“No term is more misused by amateurs and greenhorns than `"double agent.’ Once in the discussion preceding a routine polygraph test, I told a greenhorn operator that one of my specialties was running double agents and managing double agent cases. So young smartypants stuck a surprise question at the end of the first series, "Are you a double agent?’ The breathing stylus on his machine jumped off the chart, and he had to write `Laugh at the point of my answer. I then explained that the proper question would have been, `"Are you a penetration?’
If you check the dictionary, you will probably find that a double agent is an agent working for two services at the same time. This will produce an image in your mind of somebody like Peter Lorre in the old movies, who spies on everybody and sells his information to the highest bidder. Today we'd call a double agent like that a `freelance,’ if we could find one. The fact is that since about 1945 the spy business has become a major international industry. Freelancers freelance just once. Then they either get gobbled up by professional services or (most often) they instantly go out of business. In other words, double agents, like all agents, are controlled by one service at a time. If control shifts from X to Y, a successful counterintelligence operation has been mounted by Y. To a professional CI officer . . . double agent’ means one of two things: a playback or a provocation. And it means an agent, not a staff officer.” (91-92)
This excerpt is typical of Johnson’s both personal and world-wise tone—he is out to share his experience, and with that experience comes a wealth of opinions. He discusses the problems of field offices having to work with the constraints of bureaucracy, budgets, and especially analysts who don’t properly collate the information in the files. There’s no shortage of advice: “Never neglect overt sources. Read the newspapers. Remember that information in the press is at best only 40 percent accurate, but though it may not give you useful facts, it conveys attitudes. The context in which a person is mentioned often tells you more about her than what is alleged or stated.”(181)
Such observations are the core of the book’s value—the passing along of one lifetime of experience, emphasizing the very human elements of CI operators. What Johnson handles most deftly is explaining and clarifying the many aspects of counter-intelligence, a far more complex profession than merely trying to stop our enemies from stealing our secrets. Johnson opens by asking readers if they have the 5 essential traits of a CI officer, and then discusses the distinctions between this work and other law enforcement agencies (and how to work with them), how to manage physical and technical surveillance, how to get and use doubles, moles, and defectors, the ins and outs of deceiving targets, and all of this recounted in a very compact, succinct style.
In the end, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer clearly remains indispensible reading for potential CI agents, and we should all be grateful such a volume is available for them. It’s been noted many times that, due to political maneuverings during the Bush administration, the CIA lost many of its experienced hands and a new generation of agents and operatives don’t share the same continuity of mentoring as in the past. Other readers can pick up information that remains topical, as in Johnson’s “Interrogation: How It Really Works” which includes a discussion on “The Myth of Torture.”(page 34). Still, this re-publication is likely to have a limited market beyond those in the “need to know” realm. That is, those curious about a career in CI, those taking their first steps into it, or those studying and keeping an eye on this important aspect of spycraft. One of these readers may, someday, help put out an updated edition retaining the wisdom of Johnson while taking the time to demonstrate why we still need it.
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For other book reviews, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at
www.Spywise.net
Monday, June 15, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Before Bond, Before Blofeld: The Roots of Spy-Fi
By Wesley Britton
Since 2000, spy collector extraordinaire Danny Biederman has been showing his fascinating collection of “Spy-Fi” artifacts at places ranging from CI headquarters to the International Spy Museum to the Queen Mary. Visitors to such venues have seen the original shoephone from Get Smart, the sleeve gun from The Wild Wild West, and the pen communicator from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Then, in 2004 Biederman published a coffeebook paperback, The Incredible World of Spy-Fi: Wild and Crazy Spy Gadgets, Props and Artifacts, From TV and the Movies (Chronicle Books). This collection of Danny’s photographs demonstrated that after all these years, you don’t have to be a spy fan to fondly remember the then cutting-edge technology of the “Spy Renaissance.”
Certainly, the 1960s is the decade most noted for “Spy-Fi.” After Goldfinger’s laser-cannon cut down the doors of Ft. Knox in 1964, the large and small screens were filled with secret agents both employing and battling the futuristic science dreamed up by script writers. The Avengers took on “diabolical masterminds” that could control the weather, build cybernauts, and shrink John Steed down to size. The men from U.N.C.L.E. took on THRUSH which, if novelist David McDaniel got it right, stood for the “Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity”—emphasis on the technology, whether created or stolen by all those international evildoers. When James Coburn became Our Man Flint in 1965, he battled baddies who weren’t merely out to blackmail the super-powers for ransom; they wanted the world to bow to their utopian designs under threat of weather controlling technology. Two years later, In Like Flint sent the agent into outer space a decade before James Bond took Holly Goodhead around the world one more time in Moonraker (1979). Perhaps “Spy-Fi” reached its 1960s apex in The Prisoner when, each week, Number Six battled technological attempts to break down his stubborn humanity.
Then came the ‘70s, and we saw 007 finally go under the sea and into space, bionic agents saving us from aliens and Bigfoot, and then following decades gave us computer nerds getting zapped with new tech from VR5 to Jake 2.O to Chuck. However, the roots of all this weren’t in the ‘60s. “Spy-Fi” had been there all along, beginning in the earliest of spy novels and silent movies which established the tropes of secret agents vs. technological advancements in warfare:
a. the mad scientist out for world domination, whether for himself or larger entity;
b. the more naïve scientist who finds himself the victim of his own experiments and becomes an unwitting pawn by friends or enemies of his/her country;
c. the attempts by nations or corporations to create powerful weapons to give them the advantage in global or regional conflicts.
Battling the Huns
The origins of “Spy-Fi” were in the first years of the 20th Century when British novelists dramatized the growing fears of the German threat before World War I. There was William Le Queux whose “Duckworth Drew” stories were precursors to later adventures focused on new technology as when he encountered an "electronic eye," an Italian device that detonated mines. Edgar Wallace wrote a
number of serialized stories like Code No. 2 (April 1916) which anticipated future technology including a computer-controlled hidden camera and infrared photography. Not surprisingly, the influential John Buchan also veered into speculation about the future. In Mr. Standfast (1919), the heroic Richard Hannay posed as a pacifist to uncover a German spy planning to destroy the English army by releasing anthrax germs on its mainline of communications.
During this very imaginative and rarely realistic period in spy fiction, secret laboratories churning out new explosives and
chemical weapons were part of the Victorian silent movie melodramas. In short films primarily made for female audiences,
little girls and their older counterparts had to help out their beloved lovers and fathers threatened by evil “Hun” agents
working for the Kaiser and his legions. Occasionally, these efforts bordered on science fiction. For example, In the 15
episode serial, The Black Box (1915), a detective invented a device allowing him to see who is calling him on the
telephone. In The Secret of the Submarine (1916), the hero and heroine cheated the Japanese out of a device that could
extract Oxygen out of water.
Hollywood favorite Marion Davies starred in one of the oddest of such stories, The Dark Star (1919). Davies played a girl
who has memorized secret plans held in a supernatural relic that had fallen from space with mysterious powers. Jennifer
Garner would encounter similar threats almost 90 years later.
One movie ahead of its time was The Eleventh Hour (1923) about a Secret Service agent foiling the plans of a blackmailing
Prince to steal new explosives. Like future masterminds, mad Prince Stefan had a secret submarine, a hidden wireless
cabinet, airplanes, motorboats, deadly lions and one device popular in the period, secret trapdoors. In the main, most stories
featured secret formulas on paper; the “Macguffin” wasn’t usually the device itself, but rather a description hidden in some
private code.
Still, fantasy found its way into unexpected places. Long before The Wild Wild West fused the Western, SF, and espionage, Ghost Patrol (1936) featured a government agent looking for looters who prey on crashed airplanes. Turns out, there's a mysterious ray coming from a radium mine that's taking down the planes. Singing cowboy Gene Autry took a turn at such fare in his first serial, The Phantom Empire (A.K.A. Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire, 1935). In the story, considered one of the first science-fiction serials, Autry discovered an underground civilization 20,000 feet beneath his Radio Ranch. Technologically advanced, these survivors of a lost continent use radium for ray guns and early television.
Nazis and Reds
In the run-up to and during World War II, most spy fiction was in a more realistic mold, with fantastic stories reserved for children’s radio programs. Superman, Tom Mix and The Shadow were among many heroes called on to serve as counter-spies on the home front. One film predecessor to similar movies of the 1950s starred Peter Lorre as a baron in Invisible Agent (1942). In the WWII propaganda picture, Lorre's character was a Japanese agent who's trying to shake down the son of the Invisible Man for his invisibility serum. This set the stage for four TV series with transparent secret agents, although all starred leads on the side of the angels. As described below, more invisible bad guys would return on the large-screen—after all, what better spy gimmick than being unseen?
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two terms were coined to define what followed—the Cold War and the Atomic Age. While the massive destruction of modern warfare in World War I had shocked the planet, the new reality of both nuclear weapons and the power of atomic radiation placed technology in the forefront of espionage fiction. Suddenly, films with plausible scripts included threats of nuclear annihilation from simple uranium hidden in wine bottles in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) to the more fantastic idea of third parties capable of nuclear blackmail as in Thunderball (1965). With no relationship to espionage, films in the mold of Frankenstein (1931) like The Fly (1958) dramatized what can happen if scientists fly too close to the sun. Likewise, giant monsters in B movies with big apes, giant insects, or Godzilla—whatever he was—seemed cautionary parables about larger consequences if science is not kept in check. You didn’t need an atomic bomb to make the point—any unusual device would do in the hands of those with dark agendas.
For example, imaginative “Spy-Fi” of this era included Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948), the first of a movie series starring Don Stannard as the character created for radio. In the first film, a disillusioned scientist planned to poison England's water supply. In Dick Barton Strikes Back (1948), Barton defeated a scientist (Sebastian Cabot) planning to destroy the city of Blackpool with an atomic ray gun. Finally, Dick Barton at Bay (1950) had Barton rescuing a kidnapped scientist and his daughter when spies want his death ray machine. During the 1960s, that synopsis would fit countless Euro-spy flicks starring a host of would-be Sean Connerys.
The Children’s Hour
During the McCarthy Ear, as with WW II, the more fantastic spy stories were designed for children. On radio, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy became Armstrong of the S.B.I.. For one 1950 season, Jack became a counter-spy for the Scientific Bureau of Investigation. On television, both British and American youngsters could see super-spies like Atom Squad, a cheaply produced 15-minute science-fiction TV series aired weekdays at 5:00PM EST. Broadcast live from the studios of WPTZ in Philadelphia, the title referred to a secret government agency dealing with threats to the planet from evil doers and mysterious technology like weather-controlling machines or giant magnets that could disrupt shipping. In the same mold, Captain Midnight was originally a radio serial airing from 1938 to 1949 before becoming a TV program from 1954 to 1956. While the 39 episodes were overtly science-fiction adventures for the young, the stories shared the same tone of anti-Communism as in adult-oriented 1950s Cold War dramas. Over half of the Captain’s escapades dealt with enemy agents, national defense, military technology, and despots planning to rule the world.
More expensive productions included The Invisible Man (1958-1959) with live actors saving England from Communist agents. More known for its novelty than scripts, the show takes its historical place as the first spy show produced by Ralph Smart, the producer who followed with Danger Man two years later. In 1959, The World of Giants was another live-action children’s effort. The most expensively made series of its day, the 30 minute black and white World of Giants was inspired by the success of the 1957 film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with a plethora of other tiny people B movies. In this case, it was an American FBI agent scurrying under doors and lifting up heavy telephone receivers.
Dr. Mabuse
But not all “Spy-Fi” was targeted to youngsters in their living rooms. Before Bond, one popular film series began with director Fritz Lang's 1922 Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler). While interesting ploys were used by the mad doctor, hypnotism wasn’t really a SF trope. But Lang directed two sequels, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse [1933] and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960. The 1960 project interested him as he wanted to use new film techniques and say new things about the times. After the atomic bomb, civilization could be destroyed and, in the rubble, a new realm of crime could be built up.
Thousand Eyes has Dr. Mabuse running his criminal empire from the Hotel Luxor. As with Ernst Stavro Blofeld who’d debut in 1963, His face is unseen as he gives orders leading to the takeover of a corporate empire using murder and blackmail. As with the later Bond films and the sci-flavored technology they inspired in countless imitations, the mechanical devices show the omnipotence of the evil doctor, especially his surveillance gizmos allowing him to watch his prey. He had seemingly overriding power including TV cameras in every room in the hotel, and can thus regulate as well as survey movement. But, as with Bond, this power turned out to be illusory--one good man can overcome a fiend.
New directors took up the series beginning with Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961), and science-fiction had a more prominent role in the scripts. This German-made production had FBI agent (Lex Barker) and Interpol agent (Gert Frobe, Goldfinger himself) after the doctor who’s out for world domination again using invisible assassins. Perhaps the best sequel to illustrate what the new movies were all about is The Invisible Horror (A.K.A. The Invisible Dr. Mabuse, 1962). IN this tale, Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) was after "Operation X," a device so secret it was said to be more important than super-bombs or rocket ships. Turns out, it’s a device that can make him invisible. FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) was also after the secret project a mad professor invented who hid in a lab. After an accident disfigured him, he created the machine so he can be with the unwitting love of his life, an actress (Karin Dor, later to star in You Only Live Twice). For most of the film, Barker tries to convince West German policeman Gert Frobe that Mabuse actually exists while Dor wants someone to believe her, that an invisible man is haunting her theatre dressing-room and giving her invisible kisses. Worse--the mad professor is watching her bathe--it's when he moves a bath towel that Barker finally nabs him. Now, this was humor for adults.
Once more, Peter Van Eyck and Klaus Kinski starred in Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse (1963) with and Wolfgang Preiss as the evil doctor again using hypnoses to control police and politicians. The run ended with The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964) with Interpol agent Major Bob Anders (Peter Van Weyck) sent to protect the secret death-ray mirror the evil Dr. Mabuse (Claudio Gura) is after. By this time, two James Bond movies had debuted—Dr. No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963). While the final scenes of Dr. No set the stage for, well, all the fantastic stages of hidden retreats for megalomaniacs, it wasn’t until You Only Live Twice (1967) that the 007 films became overtly “Spy-Fi.” So Dr. Mabuse must be considered a series more precursor to Bond rather than one of many series to come influenced by the world of Sir James.
The Meaning of it All
Admittedly, this short overview might indicate that early “Spy-Fi” was primarily seen in media geared for juveniles and therefore of interest only as historical artifacts in entertainment history. However, a number of issues arise from these sometimes primitive projects that first brought together espionage and science fiction.
One reason such fare is largely forgotten today is that technology marches on—if the adventures are based only on imaginative gimmeikry, which often becomes quickly antiquated, there’s little for future readers or viewers to enjoy. At least, “Saint” creator Leslie Charteris was concerned about this in 1966 when he claimed he worried about issuing new editions of his Saint books. In his “Forward” to the new publication of his 1931 Alias The Saint, Charteris wondered if he should update the old tales. He admitted the archaic telecommunications and transportation technologies in The Saint’s early adventures had changed significantly. In a similar “Foreword” to his 1965 edition of The Saint Overboard (1935), Charteris said his Jules Verne-like machines used by mad scientists were outdated as quickly as the books went to print, making his futuristic aqualungs and bathyspheres commonplace and uninteresting thirty years later. So Charteris said he was reluctant to bring out new editions thinking readers would be better served by new books with new settings and new topical references.
But Charteris learned new readers would indeed be interested in these yarns because They featured a memorable character who, like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, transcended his times. Good storytelling can be admired long after the “Macguffins” have lost their novelty.
In addition, “Spy-Fi” was often a mirror of public concerns, especially after the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb and put Sputnik into orbit. In my first book, Spy Television (Prager Pub, 2004), I noted:
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To a large extent, the “Spy-Fi” TV series of the 1960s and later were also extensions of the monster and space alien films of the 1950s, often cautionary fables about technology in the new Atomic Age. Likewise, secret agents contended with mind and body switches, artificial intelligence machines gone amok, genetically enhanced plants or animals, miniaturization rays, and deadly laser beams. Before worries about biological warfare became headlines after the September 11, 2001 attack on America, TV spies had long fought terrorists of every stripe employing artificially enhanced diseases as weapons. Long before The X-Files and the 2001 version of The Invisible Man employed new twists in cryogenic stories, spy shows used the old motif of artificial immortality to resurrect Hitler, transfer scientist’s minds into robots or computers, and seek out real and bogus Fountains of youth. Ironically, after September 11, much of this imaginative speculation seemed prophetic. For example, when news accounts reported powders carrying anthrax germs were found in mailed envelopes in October and November 2001, this author immediately recalled this had been one `Macguffin in a 1969 Avengers story, "You'll Catch Your Death."
In “Spy-Fi,” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was as influential as Ian Fleming, at least in terms of the goals of modern madmen. Super-villains were typically “zealous puritans intent on cleaning up social decadence” and earthly corruption by destroying humanity to have the species progress. Villains in series like The Wild Wild West were often social activists to the extreme, as in one terrorist wishing to use tidal waves to destroy polluters.
Each week, independent, freewheeling secret agents brought down such egomaniacs with Utopian designs for reshaping and controlling the world. Private investigators solved crimes against man; realistic agents solved crimes against society. But secret agents opposing SF masterminds fought crimes against nature. In the 1950s, this allowed writers to portray Communism as a force against nature, particularly human nature. This theme reached its height in The Prisoner when its 17 episodes were designed to be cautionary parables about the rights of free minds in a world seeking conformity and enforced order. Even in the shows created for pure entertainment, themes that warned of the dangers of ill-used technology, chemical, and biological tampering with genetics and the environment took the spy out of the sometimes claustrophobic Cold War atmosphere into wider vistas of adventure. And, as Cawilit and Rosenburg noted, the technological trappings allowed for ambivalent parables about the meaning of new gadgetry. Whatever devices secret agents had were used up before the final confrontations when one man stood alone against machinery that filled volcanoes. If technology was the deciding factor, Blofeld and his imitators would have won. (note 1)
From another perspective, Martin Willis once claimed the new emphasis on overheated technology had much to do with the return of James Bond in the person of Pierce Brosnan. Willis claimed the Bond series had always portrayed a 007 who had an ambivalent relationship with technology. This was shown in the popular "Q scenes" when Bond first demonstrates mastery over the gadgets before famously showing disrespect for them by destroying them in one scene or another. When Daniel Craig took on the mantle, it might seem the Bond people had decided “Spy-Fi” had run its course. No “Q” scenes in the Craig films; the evil “Quantum” wants international power by way of controlling natural resources. So—has “Spy-Fi” really run out of gas? What might we expect in the future?
“Toys vs. Boys”
By the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, a debate over the uses of new technology and espionage was a concern within the actual intelligence community. By 1998, the central debate was whether the emphasis should be “toys vs. boys,” that is, should technology supersede the place of agents in the field? This interest in “toys” in both fact and fiction seemed appropriate on a number of levels. In the post cold war era, the intelligence services of many nations monitored the manufacturing, sales, and purchases of advanced weaponry by countries such as Pakistan, Korea, Iran, and Iraq. At the time, satellite reconnaissance capabilities seemingly made the task easier. As the new millennium approached, drawing from old science-fiction stories, the NSA was working on computers integrating biological entities including bacteria used to build transistors. Such machines were planned to be able to reproduce themselves, combining electronic components with DNA. As Frederick Hitz put it, Will Smith's Enemy of the State (1998) was set in a world of computer hackers where stealing financial information and manipulating data are all taken for granted. In other words, the cutting-edge was now expected, not surprising.
Despite all this, with unintentional irony, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 25, 2001 that the new war on terrorism was being fought with “antique weapons.” On September 11, 2001, counter-terrorist experts like Jeffrey Beatty claimed the teams who destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the pentagon used “Low tech, high concept“techniques which turned commercial planes into bombs. As many later noted, the 19 terrorists might have been primitive technologically, but were well-organized, sophisticated agents who were masters of espionage tradecraft.
What all this means is that a once sub-genre in entertainment is now part of popular culture and the imaginations of real-life “Q”s are now focused not so much on creating new weapons, but rather means to foil those who know terror and devastation don’t require sophisticated high-tech. Surveillance and counter-surveillance are now center stage because countries like North Korea and Iran look to very real, and very old, technology to assert their place in international affairs. It seemed appropriate that on May 28, 2009, viewers of CNN saw “eye-in-the-sky” photographs of North Korean nuclear facilities; the following day, President Obama announced the creation of a new “Computer Czar” to oversee the security of U.S. government computers, especially in response to the ongoing threat of Red Chinese infiltrations.
Perhaps we’ve gone beyond “Spy-Fi.” If Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) on Fringe is any indication, mad scientists may now be more useful than fearsome. With creators like J.J. Abrams merging old formulas with new twists (Alias, Fringe), perhaps a new tradition is just around the corner, something that won’t remind us of invisible cars or weather-controlling machines that pale as opposed to such forces as Global Warming.
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Notes
1. I freely admit 90% of this article drew from my first three books on fictional espionage. Many of these points and ideas are developed in great detail, especially in Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction (2005.) These books, by the way, include the citations that might lead readers to my original sources.
2. Another example of “Spy-Fi” that didn’t really fit this overview was the “Stainless Steel Rat” stories that Harry Harrison first began publishing in 1957 in Astounding Science Fiction. My analysis of this series, “Espionage Around the Galaxy: The Spy-Fi of Harry Harrison” is posted at www.LeslieCharteris.com in the “Features” section.
For many more features on fictional and factual espionage, check out the offerings at—
www.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
Since 2000, spy collector extraordinaire Danny Biederman has been showing his fascinating collection of “Spy-Fi” artifacts at places ranging from CI headquarters to the International Spy Museum to the Queen Mary. Visitors to such venues have seen the original shoephone from Get Smart, the sleeve gun from The Wild Wild West, and the pen communicator from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Then, in 2004 Biederman published a coffeebook paperback, The Incredible World of Spy-Fi: Wild and Crazy Spy Gadgets, Props and Artifacts, From TV and the Movies (Chronicle Books). This collection of Danny’s photographs demonstrated that after all these years, you don’t have to be a spy fan to fondly remember the then cutting-edge technology of the “Spy Renaissance.”
Certainly, the 1960s is the decade most noted for “Spy-Fi.” After Goldfinger’s laser-cannon cut down the doors of Ft. Knox in 1964, the large and small screens were filled with secret agents both employing and battling the futuristic science dreamed up by script writers. The Avengers took on “diabolical masterminds” that could control the weather, build cybernauts, and shrink John Steed down to size. The men from U.N.C.L.E. took on THRUSH which, if novelist David McDaniel got it right, stood for the “Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity”—emphasis on the technology, whether created or stolen by all those international evildoers. When James Coburn became Our Man Flint in 1965, he battled baddies who weren’t merely out to blackmail the super-powers for ransom; they wanted the world to bow to their utopian designs under threat of weather controlling technology. Two years later, In Like Flint sent the agent into outer space a decade before James Bond took Holly Goodhead around the world one more time in Moonraker (1979). Perhaps “Spy-Fi” reached its 1960s apex in The Prisoner when, each week, Number Six battled technological attempts to break down his stubborn humanity.
Then came the ‘70s, and we saw 007 finally go under the sea and into space, bionic agents saving us from aliens and Bigfoot, and then following decades gave us computer nerds getting zapped with new tech from VR5 to Jake 2.O to Chuck. However, the roots of all this weren’t in the ‘60s. “Spy-Fi” had been there all along, beginning in the earliest of spy novels and silent movies which established the tropes of secret agents vs. technological advancements in warfare:
a. the mad scientist out for world domination, whether for himself or larger entity;
b. the more naïve scientist who finds himself the victim of his own experiments and becomes an unwitting pawn by friends or enemies of his/her country;
c. the attempts by nations or corporations to create powerful weapons to give them the advantage in global or regional conflicts.
Battling the Huns
The origins of “Spy-Fi” were in the first years of the 20th Century when British novelists dramatized the growing fears of the German threat before World War I. There was William Le Queux whose “Duckworth Drew” stories were precursors to later adventures focused on new technology as when he encountered an "electronic eye," an Italian device that detonated mines. Edgar Wallace wrote a
number of serialized stories like Code No. 2 (April 1916) which anticipated future technology including a computer-controlled hidden camera and infrared photography. Not surprisingly, the influential John Buchan also veered into speculation about the future. In Mr. Standfast (1919), the heroic Richard Hannay posed as a pacifist to uncover a German spy planning to destroy the English army by releasing anthrax germs on its mainline of communications.
During this very imaginative and rarely realistic period in spy fiction, secret laboratories churning out new explosives and
chemical weapons were part of the Victorian silent movie melodramas. In short films primarily made for female audiences,
little girls and their older counterparts had to help out their beloved lovers and fathers threatened by evil “Hun” agents
working for the Kaiser and his legions. Occasionally, these efforts bordered on science fiction. For example, In the 15
episode serial, The Black Box (1915), a detective invented a device allowing him to see who is calling him on the
telephone. In The Secret of the Submarine (1916), the hero and heroine cheated the Japanese out of a device that could
extract Oxygen out of water.
Hollywood favorite Marion Davies starred in one of the oddest of such stories, The Dark Star (1919). Davies played a girl
who has memorized secret plans held in a supernatural relic that had fallen from space with mysterious powers. Jennifer
Garner would encounter similar threats almost 90 years later.
One movie ahead of its time was The Eleventh Hour (1923) about a Secret Service agent foiling the plans of a blackmailing
Prince to steal new explosives. Like future masterminds, mad Prince Stefan had a secret submarine, a hidden wireless
cabinet, airplanes, motorboats, deadly lions and one device popular in the period, secret trapdoors. In the main, most stories
featured secret formulas on paper; the “Macguffin” wasn’t usually the device itself, but rather a description hidden in some
private code.
Still, fantasy found its way into unexpected places. Long before The Wild Wild West fused the Western, SF, and espionage, Ghost Patrol (1936) featured a government agent looking for looters who prey on crashed airplanes. Turns out, there's a mysterious ray coming from a radium mine that's taking down the planes. Singing cowboy Gene Autry took a turn at such fare in his first serial, The Phantom Empire (A.K.A. Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire, 1935). In the story, considered one of the first science-fiction serials, Autry discovered an underground civilization 20,000 feet beneath his Radio Ranch. Technologically advanced, these survivors of a lost continent use radium for ray guns and early television.
Nazis and Reds
In the run-up to and during World War II, most spy fiction was in a more realistic mold, with fantastic stories reserved for children’s radio programs. Superman, Tom Mix and The Shadow were among many heroes called on to serve as counter-spies on the home front. One film predecessor to similar movies of the 1950s starred Peter Lorre as a baron in Invisible Agent (1942). In the WWII propaganda picture, Lorre's character was a Japanese agent who's trying to shake down the son of the Invisible Man for his invisibility serum. This set the stage for four TV series with transparent secret agents, although all starred leads on the side of the angels. As described below, more invisible bad guys would return on the large-screen—after all, what better spy gimmick than being unseen?
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two terms were coined to define what followed—the Cold War and the Atomic Age. While the massive destruction of modern warfare in World War I had shocked the planet, the new reality of both nuclear weapons and the power of atomic radiation placed technology in the forefront of espionage fiction. Suddenly, films with plausible scripts included threats of nuclear annihilation from simple uranium hidden in wine bottles in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) to the more fantastic idea of third parties capable of nuclear blackmail as in Thunderball (1965). With no relationship to espionage, films in the mold of Frankenstein (1931) like The Fly (1958) dramatized what can happen if scientists fly too close to the sun. Likewise, giant monsters in B movies with big apes, giant insects, or Godzilla—whatever he was—seemed cautionary parables about larger consequences if science is not kept in check. You didn’t need an atomic bomb to make the point—any unusual device would do in the hands of those with dark agendas.
For example, imaginative “Spy-Fi” of this era included Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948), the first of a movie series starring Don Stannard as the character created for radio. In the first film, a disillusioned scientist planned to poison England's water supply. In Dick Barton Strikes Back (1948), Barton defeated a scientist (Sebastian Cabot) planning to destroy the city of Blackpool with an atomic ray gun. Finally, Dick Barton at Bay (1950) had Barton rescuing a kidnapped scientist and his daughter when spies want his death ray machine. During the 1960s, that synopsis would fit countless Euro-spy flicks starring a host of would-be Sean Connerys.
The Children’s Hour
During the McCarthy Ear, as with WW II, the more fantastic spy stories were designed for children. On radio, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy became Armstrong of the S.B.I.. For one 1950 season, Jack became a counter-spy for the Scientific Bureau of Investigation. On television, both British and American youngsters could see super-spies like Atom Squad, a cheaply produced 15-minute science-fiction TV series aired weekdays at 5:00PM EST. Broadcast live from the studios of WPTZ in Philadelphia, the title referred to a secret government agency dealing with threats to the planet from evil doers and mysterious technology like weather-controlling machines or giant magnets that could disrupt shipping. In the same mold, Captain Midnight was originally a radio serial airing from 1938 to 1949 before becoming a TV program from 1954 to 1956. While the 39 episodes were overtly science-fiction adventures for the young, the stories shared the same tone of anti-Communism as in adult-oriented 1950s Cold War dramas. Over half of the Captain’s escapades dealt with enemy agents, national defense, military technology, and despots planning to rule the world.
More expensive productions included The Invisible Man (1958-1959) with live actors saving England from Communist agents. More known for its novelty than scripts, the show takes its historical place as the first spy show produced by Ralph Smart, the producer who followed with Danger Man two years later. In 1959, The World of Giants was another live-action children’s effort. The most expensively made series of its day, the 30 minute black and white World of Giants was inspired by the success of the 1957 film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with a plethora of other tiny people B movies. In this case, it was an American FBI agent scurrying under doors and lifting up heavy telephone receivers.
Dr. Mabuse
But not all “Spy-Fi” was targeted to youngsters in their living rooms. Before Bond, one popular film series began with director Fritz Lang's 1922 Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler). While interesting ploys were used by the mad doctor, hypnotism wasn’t really a SF trope. But Lang directed two sequels, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse [1933] and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960. The 1960 project interested him as he wanted to use new film techniques and say new things about the times. After the atomic bomb, civilization could be destroyed and, in the rubble, a new realm of crime could be built up.
Thousand Eyes has Dr. Mabuse running his criminal empire from the Hotel Luxor. As with Ernst Stavro Blofeld who’d debut in 1963, His face is unseen as he gives orders leading to the takeover of a corporate empire using murder and blackmail. As with the later Bond films and the sci-flavored technology they inspired in countless imitations, the mechanical devices show the omnipotence of the evil doctor, especially his surveillance gizmos allowing him to watch his prey. He had seemingly overriding power including TV cameras in every room in the hotel, and can thus regulate as well as survey movement. But, as with Bond, this power turned out to be illusory--one good man can overcome a fiend.
New directors took up the series beginning with Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961), and science-fiction had a more prominent role in the scripts. This German-made production had FBI agent (Lex Barker) and Interpol agent (Gert Frobe, Goldfinger himself) after the doctor who’s out for world domination again using invisible assassins. Perhaps the best sequel to illustrate what the new movies were all about is The Invisible Horror (A.K.A. The Invisible Dr. Mabuse, 1962). IN this tale, Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) was after "Operation X," a device so secret it was said to be more important than super-bombs or rocket ships. Turns out, it’s a device that can make him invisible. FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) was also after the secret project a mad professor invented who hid in a lab. After an accident disfigured him, he created the machine so he can be with the unwitting love of his life, an actress (Karin Dor, later to star in You Only Live Twice). For most of the film, Barker tries to convince West German policeman Gert Frobe that Mabuse actually exists while Dor wants someone to believe her, that an invisible man is haunting her theatre dressing-room and giving her invisible kisses. Worse--the mad professor is watching her bathe--it's when he moves a bath towel that Barker finally nabs him. Now, this was humor for adults.
Once more, Peter Van Eyck and Klaus Kinski starred in Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse (1963) with and Wolfgang Preiss as the evil doctor again using hypnoses to control police and politicians. The run ended with The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964) with Interpol agent Major Bob Anders (Peter Van Weyck) sent to protect the secret death-ray mirror the evil Dr. Mabuse (Claudio Gura) is after. By this time, two James Bond movies had debuted—Dr. No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963). While the final scenes of Dr. No set the stage for, well, all the fantastic stages of hidden retreats for megalomaniacs, it wasn’t until You Only Live Twice (1967) that the 007 films became overtly “Spy-Fi.” So Dr. Mabuse must be considered a series more precursor to Bond rather than one of many series to come influenced by the world of Sir James.
The Meaning of it All
Admittedly, this short overview might indicate that early “Spy-Fi” was primarily seen in media geared for juveniles and therefore of interest only as historical artifacts in entertainment history. However, a number of issues arise from these sometimes primitive projects that first brought together espionage and science fiction.
One reason such fare is largely forgotten today is that technology marches on—if the adventures are based only on imaginative gimmeikry, which often becomes quickly antiquated, there’s little for future readers or viewers to enjoy. At least, “Saint” creator Leslie Charteris was concerned about this in 1966 when he claimed he worried about issuing new editions of his Saint books. In his “Forward” to the new publication of his 1931 Alias The Saint, Charteris wondered if he should update the old tales. He admitted the archaic telecommunications and transportation technologies in The Saint’s early adventures had changed significantly. In a similar “Foreword” to his 1965 edition of The Saint Overboard (1935), Charteris said his Jules Verne-like machines used by mad scientists were outdated as quickly as the books went to print, making his futuristic aqualungs and bathyspheres commonplace and uninteresting thirty years later. So Charteris said he was reluctant to bring out new editions thinking readers would be better served by new books with new settings and new topical references.
But Charteris learned new readers would indeed be interested in these yarns because They featured a memorable character who, like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, transcended his times. Good storytelling can be admired long after the “Macguffins” have lost their novelty.
In addition, “Spy-Fi” was often a mirror of public concerns, especially after the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb and put Sputnik into orbit. In my first book, Spy Television (Prager Pub, 2004), I noted:
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To a large extent, the “Spy-Fi” TV series of the 1960s and later were also extensions of the monster and space alien films of the 1950s, often cautionary fables about technology in the new Atomic Age. Likewise, secret agents contended with mind and body switches, artificial intelligence machines gone amok, genetically enhanced plants or animals, miniaturization rays, and deadly laser beams. Before worries about biological warfare became headlines after the September 11, 2001 attack on America, TV spies had long fought terrorists of every stripe employing artificially enhanced diseases as weapons. Long before The X-Files and the 2001 version of The Invisible Man employed new twists in cryogenic stories, spy shows used the old motif of artificial immortality to resurrect Hitler, transfer scientist’s minds into robots or computers, and seek out real and bogus Fountains of youth. Ironically, after September 11, much of this imaginative speculation seemed prophetic. For example, when news accounts reported powders carrying anthrax germs were found in mailed envelopes in October and November 2001, this author immediately recalled this had been one `Macguffin in a 1969 Avengers story, "You'll Catch Your Death."
In “Spy-Fi,” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was as influential as Ian Fleming, at least in terms of the goals of modern madmen. Super-villains were typically “zealous puritans intent on cleaning up social decadence” and earthly corruption by destroying humanity to have the species progress. Villains in series like The Wild Wild West were often social activists to the extreme, as in one terrorist wishing to use tidal waves to destroy polluters.
Each week, independent, freewheeling secret agents brought down such egomaniacs with Utopian designs for reshaping and controlling the world. Private investigators solved crimes against man; realistic agents solved crimes against society. But secret agents opposing SF masterminds fought crimes against nature. In the 1950s, this allowed writers to portray Communism as a force against nature, particularly human nature. This theme reached its height in The Prisoner when its 17 episodes were designed to be cautionary parables about the rights of free minds in a world seeking conformity and enforced order. Even in the shows created for pure entertainment, themes that warned of the dangers of ill-used technology, chemical, and biological tampering with genetics and the environment took the spy out of the sometimes claustrophobic Cold War atmosphere into wider vistas of adventure. And, as Cawilit and Rosenburg noted, the technological trappings allowed for ambivalent parables about the meaning of new gadgetry. Whatever devices secret agents had were used up before the final confrontations when one man stood alone against machinery that filled volcanoes. If technology was the deciding factor, Blofeld and his imitators would have won. (note 1)
From another perspective, Martin Willis once claimed the new emphasis on overheated technology had much to do with the return of James Bond in the person of Pierce Brosnan. Willis claimed the Bond series had always portrayed a 007 who had an ambivalent relationship with technology. This was shown in the popular "Q scenes" when Bond first demonstrates mastery over the gadgets before famously showing disrespect for them by destroying them in one scene or another. When Daniel Craig took on the mantle, it might seem the Bond people had decided “Spy-Fi” had run its course. No “Q” scenes in the Craig films; the evil “Quantum” wants international power by way of controlling natural resources. So—has “Spy-Fi” really run out of gas? What might we expect in the future?
“Toys vs. Boys”
By the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, a debate over the uses of new technology and espionage was a concern within the actual intelligence community. By 1998, the central debate was whether the emphasis should be “toys vs. boys,” that is, should technology supersede the place of agents in the field? This interest in “toys” in both fact and fiction seemed appropriate on a number of levels. In the post cold war era, the intelligence services of many nations monitored the manufacturing, sales, and purchases of advanced weaponry by countries such as Pakistan, Korea, Iran, and Iraq. At the time, satellite reconnaissance capabilities seemingly made the task easier. As the new millennium approached, drawing from old science-fiction stories, the NSA was working on computers integrating biological entities including bacteria used to build transistors. Such machines were planned to be able to reproduce themselves, combining electronic components with DNA. As Frederick Hitz put it, Will Smith's Enemy of the State (1998) was set in a world of computer hackers where stealing financial information and manipulating data are all taken for granted. In other words, the cutting-edge was now expected, not surprising.
Despite all this, with unintentional irony, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 25, 2001 that the new war on terrorism was being fought with “antique weapons.” On September 11, 2001, counter-terrorist experts like Jeffrey Beatty claimed the teams who destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the pentagon used “Low tech, high concept“techniques which turned commercial planes into bombs. As many later noted, the 19 terrorists might have been primitive technologically, but were well-organized, sophisticated agents who were masters of espionage tradecraft.
What all this means is that a once sub-genre in entertainment is now part of popular culture and the imaginations of real-life “Q”s are now focused not so much on creating new weapons, but rather means to foil those who know terror and devastation don’t require sophisticated high-tech. Surveillance and counter-surveillance are now center stage because countries like North Korea and Iran look to very real, and very old, technology to assert their place in international affairs. It seemed appropriate that on May 28, 2009, viewers of CNN saw “eye-in-the-sky” photographs of North Korean nuclear facilities; the following day, President Obama announced the creation of a new “Computer Czar” to oversee the security of U.S. government computers, especially in response to the ongoing threat of Red Chinese infiltrations.
Perhaps we’ve gone beyond “Spy-Fi.” If Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) on Fringe is any indication, mad scientists may now be more useful than fearsome. With creators like J.J. Abrams merging old formulas with new twists (Alias, Fringe), perhaps a new tradition is just around the corner, something that won’t remind us of invisible cars or weather-controlling machines that pale as opposed to such forces as Global Warming.
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Notes
1. I freely admit 90% of this article drew from my first three books on fictional espionage. Many of these points and ideas are developed in great detail, especially in Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction (2005.) These books, by the way, include the citations that might lead readers to my original sources.
2. Another example of “Spy-Fi” that didn’t really fit this overview was the “Stainless Steel Rat” stories that Harry Harrison first began publishing in 1957 in Astounding Science Fiction. My analysis of this series, “Espionage Around the Galaxy: The Spy-Fi of Harry Harrison” is posted at www.LeslieCharteris.com in the “Features” section.
For many more features on fictional and factual espionage, check out the offerings at—
www.Spywise.net
Thursday, May 7, 2009
DVD Review: In A Word--Intelligence
By Wesley Britton
On April 29, 2008, Acorn Media released the first season of Canada’s Intelligence on DVD in the Region 1 format. Finally, those of us south of the border got our first chance to experience one of the finest espionage-oriented television series ever produced. On April 14, 2009, Acorn released season two, and I’m impatiently waiting its arrival in the Netflicks catalogue. At the same time, I’m wondering—why can’t American networks do something on this level of, well, intelligence?
The multi-layered program debuted as a two hour movie in November 2005 and ran as a series from October 10, 2006 to December 10, 2007 on the CBC, roughly Canada’s equivalent of the BBC. Producer and writer Chris Haddock created Intelligence, describing the show as "half gangster, half espionage," and that’s a fair summation. That is, if you can accept mobsters without Italian accents and no desire for bloodletting. The gangster half of the show revolved around Ian Tracy as Jimmy Reardon, a third-generation Vancouver crime boss overseeing his family's legacy in shipping, money laundering, and pot smuggling. The espionage half centered on Klea Scott as Mary Spalding, daughter of an Army intelligence officer and head of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit. A black woman operating in a male-dominated realm, she wanted to move upstairs to become chief of he Asia Pacific Region of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). (Scott had earlier portrayed the co-starring role of FBI agent Emma Hollis on the third season of Chris Carter's Millennium).
Throughout the two season run, Spalding and Reardon had parallel storylines, with both their criminal and law enforcement activities complicated by rivalries with their respective competitors, most notably American agencies or gangs seeking control over Canadian interests. In the pilot, Spalding—as savvy, crafty, and strong-willed a spymaster as has ever been seen on either the small or large screen—began building her own independent network of informants by crafting an uneasy alliance with Reardon. She offered him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his becoming an informant on major criminal activity, notably gun smuggling like ships in Panama carrying arms destined for the Congo. At the same time, Spalding planted a dancer in Reardon’s club to spy on him while she established a relationship with the head of an escort service. And, after discovering one of her Chinese translators is a mole, Spalding turned him into her own double-agent.
Meanwhile, the calm and non-violent Reardon works with as much diplomacy as he can muster to avoid gang wars with two rising groups, the “Bikers” and “The Disciples.” In his view, there are drugs he doesn’t want to touch anyway, there is enough territory for everyone to have their own piece of the pie, and he is hoping to be out of the criminal business in five years. He has his own informer inside the Vancouver police department, Rene Desjardins (Michael Eklund). Reardon tries to appease his ambitious but reckless brother Michael (Bernie Coulson) who wants his own place in the sun. On top of all this, Reardon is constantly dogged by his neurotic ex-wife, Francine Reardon (Camille Sullivan) who threatens to bring his empire down. Neither Spalding nor Reardon know it, but American law enforcement is working to get Reardon on U.S. soil so they can bust him while the American DEA is using a heroin smuggler in much the same way as Spalding is working Reardon.
Throughout season one, Spalding also learns her agency—indeed all of Canadian intelligence—is riddled with moles as well as subordinates who’d like to see her go, especially the vicious veteran intelligence agent Ted Altman (Matt Frewer), her scheming second-in-command. (Frewer was once a pop cultural icon in the form of “Max headroom” during the 1980s.) Along the way, Spalding learns just how far the tentacles of the U.S. reach into Canadian intelligence. This is called "deep integration" of U.S and Canadian political and economic systems which included American intelligence agents infiltrating Canadian institutions. In particular, when Spalding began investigating the Blackmire group, a corporation out to steal Canada’s fresh-water resources, she ultimately discovered the organization was a front for the CIA. Oh, lest we forget, the Chinese and Vietnamese have their own plans as well . . .
If all this seems like much too much for any one series to carry, Intelligence was driven by well-crafted scripts by Chris Haddock who carefully blended in new characters and developments from episode to episode. Using a snowballing menu of perspectives, his storylines unfolded in well-balanced shifts from the criminal machinations to the turf wars inside Canadian law enforcement. Better, every character was fully realized, totally believable, and, especially in the case of Spalding, almost jaw-dropping in their abilities to maintain their own balancing acts. All this overlapping of criminal conspiracies and espionage in the plots drew, in part, from Haddock’s notion that drugs are the crucial modern industry. In his view, information--the buying and selling of “intel” on everything from heroin trafficking to international terrorism--is the most addictive and profitable drug of all.
While it was on the air, Intelligence developed a strong fan base, received critical favor, was sold to 143 foreign markets, and earned 11 Gemini nominations. However, at the end of the second year, citing poor ratings, the CBC did not schedule the show for a third season. Haddock publicly claimed the network was responding to pressures from higher-ups who didn’t like dramas of this kind on the network. He backed his point by noting, after initial interest from the company, the CBC was noticeably unsupportive of the series with minimal promotions throughout the two year run. This makes me wonder if Canadians have other infiltrations to worry about—perhaps the very sort of thinking that has doomed many a U.S. classic has moved across the border. Along with our CIA, perhaps they’re getting our breed of network executives. Too bad. It’s not often we get something like Intelligence, but at least we Yanks can now at least appreciate shows we knew nothing about during the original broadcast.
If I haven’t made it clear—don’t miss Intelligence! It is something special for anyone who ever appreciated The Sandbaggers, Danger Man, or, well, few shows are like it. With any luck, more in its mold will be coming—and would be most welcome from any country of origin.
----
I hereby thank David Spencer from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers for calling my attention to Intelligence as part of my research for The Encyclopedia of TV Spies.
More reviews by Dr. Wesley Britton are posted at—
WWW.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
On April 29, 2008, Acorn Media released the first season of Canada’s Intelligence on DVD in the Region 1 format. Finally, those of us south of the border got our first chance to experience one of the finest espionage-oriented television series ever produced. On April 14, 2009, Acorn released season two, and I’m impatiently waiting its arrival in the Netflicks catalogue. At the same time, I’m wondering—why can’t American networks do something on this level of, well, intelligence?
The multi-layered program debuted as a two hour movie in November 2005 and ran as a series from October 10, 2006 to December 10, 2007 on the CBC, roughly Canada’s equivalent of the BBC. Producer and writer Chris Haddock created Intelligence, describing the show as "half gangster, half espionage," and that’s a fair summation. That is, if you can accept mobsters without Italian accents and no desire for bloodletting. The gangster half of the show revolved around Ian Tracy as Jimmy Reardon, a third-generation Vancouver crime boss overseeing his family's legacy in shipping, money laundering, and pot smuggling. The espionage half centered on Klea Scott as Mary Spalding, daughter of an Army intelligence officer and head of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit. A black woman operating in a male-dominated realm, she wanted to move upstairs to become chief of he Asia Pacific Region of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). (Scott had earlier portrayed the co-starring role of FBI agent Emma Hollis on the third season of Chris Carter's Millennium).
Throughout the two season run, Spalding and Reardon had parallel storylines, with both their criminal and law enforcement activities complicated by rivalries with their respective competitors, most notably American agencies or gangs seeking control over Canadian interests. In the pilot, Spalding—as savvy, crafty, and strong-willed a spymaster as has ever been seen on either the small or large screen—began building her own independent network of informants by crafting an uneasy alliance with Reardon. She offered him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his becoming an informant on major criminal activity, notably gun smuggling like ships in Panama carrying arms destined for the Congo. At the same time, Spalding planted a dancer in Reardon’s club to spy on him while she established a relationship with the head of an escort service. And, after discovering one of her Chinese translators is a mole, Spalding turned him into her own double-agent.
Meanwhile, the calm and non-violent Reardon works with as much diplomacy as he can muster to avoid gang wars with two rising groups, the “Bikers” and “The Disciples.” In his view, there are drugs he doesn’t want to touch anyway, there is enough territory for everyone to have their own piece of the pie, and he is hoping to be out of the criminal business in five years. He has his own informer inside the Vancouver police department, Rene Desjardins (Michael Eklund). Reardon tries to appease his ambitious but reckless brother Michael (Bernie Coulson) who wants his own place in the sun. On top of all this, Reardon is constantly dogged by his neurotic ex-wife, Francine Reardon (Camille Sullivan) who threatens to bring his empire down. Neither Spalding nor Reardon know it, but American law enforcement is working to get Reardon on U.S. soil so they can bust him while the American DEA is using a heroin smuggler in much the same way as Spalding is working Reardon.
Throughout season one, Spalding also learns her agency—indeed all of Canadian intelligence—is riddled with moles as well as subordinates who’d like to see her go, especially the vicious veteran intelligence agent Ted Altman (Matt Frewer), her scheming second-in-command. (Frewer was once a pop cultural icon in the form of “Max headroom” during the 1980s.) Along the way, Spalding learns just how far the tentacles of the U.S. reach into Canadian intelligence. This is called "deep integration" of U.S and Canadian political and economic systems which included American intelligence agents infiltrating Canadian institutions. In particular, when Spalding began investigating the Blackmire group, a corporation out to steal Canada’s fresh-water resources, she ultimately discovered the organization was a front for the CIA. Oh, lest we forget, the Chinese and Vietnamese have their own plans as well . . .
If all this seems like much too much for any one series to carry, Intelligence was driven by well-crafted scripts by Chris Haddock who carefully blended in new characters and developments from episode to episode. Using a snowballing menu of perspectives, his storylines unfolded in well-balanced shifts from the criminal machinations to the turf wars inside Canadian law enforcement. Better, every character was fully realized, totally believable, and, especially in the case of Spalding, almost jaw-dropping in their abilities to maintain their own balancing acts. All this overlapping of criminal conspiracies and espionage in the plots drew, in part, from Haddock’s notion that drugs are the crucial modern industry. In his view, information--the buying and selling of “intel” on everything from heroin trafficking to international terrorism--is the most addictive and profitable drug of all.
While it was on the air, Intelligence developed a strong fan base, received critical favor, was sold to 143 foreign markets, and earned 11 Gemini nominations. However, at the end of the second year, citing poor ratings, the CBC did not schedule the show for a third season. Haddock publicly claimed the network was responding to pressures from higher-ups who didn’t like dramas of this kind on the network. He backed his point by noting, after initial interest from the company, the CBC was noticeably unsupportive of the series with minimal promotions throughout the two year run. This makes me wonder if Canadians have other infiltrations to worry about—perhaps the very sort of thinking that has doomed many a U.S. classic has moved across the border. Along with our CIA, perhaps they’re getting our breed of network executives. Too bad. It’s not often we get something like Intelligence, but at least we Yanks can now at least appreciate shows we knew nothing about during the original broadcast.
If I haven’t made it clear—don’t miss Intelligence! It is something special for anyone who ever appreciated The Sandbaggers, Danger Man, or, well, few shows are like it. With any luck, more in its mold will be coming—and would be most welcome from any country of origin.
----
I hereby thank David Spencer from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers for calling my attention to Intelligence as part of my research for The Encyclopedia of TV Spies.
More reviews by Dr. Wesley Britton are posted at—
WWW.Spywise.net
Sunday, May 3, 2009
OSS 117, 007, and Alfred Hitchcock: A French Secret Agent and the Bond Bonanza
By Ron Payne
FOR MANY YEARS I WAS AWARE OF FRENCH THRILLER WRITER JEAN BRUCE, WHO WROTE THE ADVENTURES OF SECRET AGENT HUBERT BONISSEUR DE LA BATH, better known in France as "0SS 117." Bruce, who created his suave and sophisticated agent, four years before Ian Fleming created BRITISH AGENT 007, earned millions writing about the character---and in the 1960s---at the height of the Worldwide Bond-Craze, Gaumont Studios, the oldest and certainly one of the greatest film studios in the world, started making motion pictures about Monsieur de la Bath 0SS 117.
SINCE 2006, when Parisian actor Jean Dujardin became the French equivalent of a new Sean Connery, with the hit Gaumont Studio production of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, there has been a renewed interest in the French counter-intelligence agent. THE NEW de la Bath adventure, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, also starring the charismatic Dujardin, soon to be released in Europe, promises to be a blockbuster for the great French studio, which only sixteen months ago lost a distribution-contract with Sony Pictures.
Hubert (pronounced U-Bear) Bonisseur de la Bath was created in 1949 to immediate literary success in France. Jean (pronounced like Sean) Bruce wrote like an angel doing Figure-Eights, effortlessly on ice, when he wrote about de la Bath, who has everything going for him that Bond does. He is handsome, cool-in-danger and good with the ladies. Ian Fleming read Jean Bruce, when he travelled in France and Bruce's books were easy to find in London bookstalls.
BUT the enormous popularity of the character has yet to catch on in America, though he has his admirers in this country as well. de la Bath has been portrayed on screen by Sean Flynn, the late son of movie idol-swashbuckler Errol Flynn. (Sean was lost in Vietnam, when captured by the North Vietnamese while riding his motorcycle. He was a photographer and war correspondent, like his father years earlier in the Spanish Civil War [1937] and the younger Flynn was held hostage for a year and executed.)
Frederick Stafford, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of Leon Uuris’s Topaz, also starred as de la Bath and gave the character a genuine James Bond-like persona. (It was because of his OSS 117 role that Hitchcock hired Stafford for the Topaz role.) Producer Harry Saltzman remarked at the time of the Topaz release, "If Frederick Stafford had not been French, but English, he might have followed directly in Sean Connery’s footsteps as Bond."
Kerwin Matthews, most famous in the United States as Gulliver in The Three Worlds of Gulliver and "The Sinbad" series (one in which he co-starred opposite Mrs. Bing Crosby) was also successful in the role. BUT FOR THE SAKE of comparisons, it was John Gavin, who later became President Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to Mexico, who stands out. Gavin, who played the romantic lead in Hitchcock’s Psycho, opposite Vera Miles, was a rising star at Universal Pictures before leaving for France and undertaking the role of Agent OSS 117. At Universal, Gavin felt lost in a relentless attempt by Universal executives to pigeon-hole him in roles better suited for Rock Hudson, who was the studio's top star at the time. If GAVIN was not being proposed for the next "Tammy" picture, he was made to fill out his contract playing "Destry," a character created by James Stewart in Destry Rides Again and who was later played by Audie Murphy. Gavin's Destry television series soon hit the dirt and Gavin picked-up the trail for France and GAUMONT STUDIOS, when his Universal Pictures agreements expired.
FRANCE WAS GOOD for John Gavin and his tenure as "0SS 117" was a successful one, if not the most successful of any other actor who played the role. (See his film, OSS 117: Double Agent at www.sinistercinema.com under Espionage and Spy Films).
IN 1971, after George Lazenby, on bad advice from his Business Manager Ronan O'Rahilly, resigned from the role of James Bond after just one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli were desperate to find a new Double-0-seven. John Gavin, on the strength of his '0SS 117,' was signed to a contract to be the next James Bond in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever. Mr. Gavin was given a script and United Aartists went on alert that John Gavin, would, indeed, be starring in the diamond smuggling caper, set to be filmed in Amsterdam, South Africa, London, Las Vegas and UNIVERSAL PICTURES (his old studio) in the spring. Diamonds Are Forever was to be EON Productions’s first Bond film completed in the United States. (Exterior scenes of Miami Beach in Goldfinger were 'Second Unit' sequences, with interiors and Fort Knox filmed at Pinewood Studios outside London.)
John Gavin, an American of Mexican descent, who played a French secret agent as Hubert Connoisseur de la Bath, was now ready to become ENGLAND's MOST FAMOUS EXPORT---James Bond, 'DOUBLE-0-SEVEN,' Ian Fleming’s GENTLEMAN AGENT with THE LICENCE TO KILL.
DOUBLE-0-SEVEN-DOUBLE-TAKE
Albert R. Broccoli liked John Gavin." Harry Saltzman liked John Gavin. Enter David Picker, Executive Vice President of United Artists. "WE WANT CONNERY....!" GET CONNERY BACK, AT ANY PRICE...! became the "War Cry" at United Artists, then a subsidiary of the giant San Francisco insurance firm, Trans-America Corporation.
SUDDENLY, producers Saltzman and Broccoli were faced with a new casting crisis. Broccoli had already turned down Burt Reynolds (because he was not English) and Reynolds claims he turned down Bond earlier (because "No one can play Bond but Sean Connery. ") Either way, John Gavin (who was definitely not English and had no woes about being compared with Connery) was already signed. His name was on the deal. The contract was "in the pocket."
TURN AROUND "007 STYLE."
There are many stories circulating that John Gavin was in a holding pen, contractually, during this period. That, actually, he was the back-up-plan, in the event Sean Connery could not be lured back into the ring to once again put on his gloves as Bond and go for the 'Championship.'
THE ANNOUNCEMENT GOES FORTH: Sean Connery "IS" JAMES BOND in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER." Dennis Selinger, Mr. Connery's agent at International Creative Management in London "inks the deal" that makes the future SIR SEAN, "the highest paid movie star in the world," up until that time. For a then staggering $1.2 million, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts (not to mention the financing of 2 motion pictures of Mr. Connery's choice by United Artists-- He does The Offence, which UA finances and Connery stars and produces in London), the legendary icon returns in the role that made him famous. Jill ST. John is signed as his co-star, and rumors of a romance between the two starts immediately during filming. Lana Wood is signed as 'Plenty O'Toole' and country-western singer-sausage king, Jimmy Dean, becomes Willard Whyte, the Howard Hughes of Diamonds Are Forever overnight.
John Gavin, though he is passed-over for the "superstar-making-role-of-a-lifetime," is paid $100,000 for his participation by the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, as Roger Moore, receives a call at the end of filming telling him "to cut your hair and lose weight. We think you're going to be the next James Bond."
---
For more on Frederick Stafford and how Alfred Hitchcock used him in Topaz, check out:
Killers, Traitors, and 007: The Influences on and Failures of Alfred Hitchcock
Posted in the “Spies on Film” files at
WWW.Spywise.net
There, you’ll learn how this film not only employed a former OSS 117, but a former Bond girl, namely Karen Dor from You Only Live Twice.
By Ron Payne
FOR MANY YEARS I WAS AWARE OF FRENCH THRILLER WRITER JEAN BRUCE, WHO WROTE THE ADVENTURES OF SECRET AGENT HUBERT BONISSEUR DE LA BATH, better known in France as "0SS 117." Bruce, who created his suave and sophisticated agent, four years before Ian Fleming created BRITISH AGENT 007, earned millions writing about the character---and in the 1960s---at the height of the Worldwide Bond-Craze, Gaumont Studios, the oldest and certainly one of the greatest film studios in the world, started making motion pictures about Monsieur de la Bath 0SS 117.
SINCE 2006, when Parisian actor Jean Dujardin became the French equivalent of a new Sean Connery, with the hit Gaumont Studio production of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, there has been a renewed interest in the French counter-intelligence agent. THE NEW de la Bath adventure, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, also starring the charismatic Dujardin, soon to be released in Europe, promises to be a blockbuster for the great French studio, which only sixteen months ago lost a distribution-contract with Sony Pictures.
Hubert (pronounced U-Bear) Bonisseur de la Bath was created in 1949 to immediate literary success in France. Jean (pronounced like Sean) Bruce wrote like an angel doing Figure-Eights, effortlessly on ice, when he wrote about de la Bath, who has everything going for him that Bond does. He is handsome, cool-in-danger and good with the ladies. Ian Fleming read Jean Bruce, when he travelled in France and Bruce's books were easy to find in London bookstalls.
BUT the enormous popularity of the character has yet to catch on in America, though he has his admirers in this country as well. de la Bath has been portrayed on screen by Sean Flynn, the late son of movie idol-swashbuckler Errol Flynn. (Sean was lost in Vietnam, when captured by the North Vietnamese while riding his motorcycle. He was a photographer and war correspondent, like his father years earlier in the Spanish Civil War [1937] and the younger Flynn was held hostage for a year and executed.)
Frederick Stafford, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of Leon Uuris’s Topaz, also starred as de la Bath and gave the character a genuine James Bond-like persona. (It was because of his OSS 117 role that Hitchcock hired Stafford for the Topaz role.) Producer Harry Saltzman remarked at the time of the Topaz release, "If Frederick Stafford had not been French, but English, he might have followed directly in Sean Connery’s footsteps as Bond."
Kerwin Matthews, most famous in the United States as Gulliver in The Three Worlds of Gulliver and "The Sinbad" series (one in which he co-starred opposite Mrs. Bing Crosby) was also successful in the role. BUT FOR THE SAKE of comparisons, it was John Gavin, who later became President Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to Mexico, who stands out. Gavin, who played the romantic lead in Hitchcock’s Psycho, opposite Vera Miles, was a rising star at Universal Pictures before leaving for France and undertaking the role of Agent OSS 117. At Universal, Gavin felt lost in a relentless attempt by Universal executives to pigeon-hole him in roles better suited for Rock Hudson, who was the studio's top star at the time. If GAVIN was not being proposed for the next "Tammy" picture, he was made to fill out his contract playing "Destry," a character created by James Stewart in Destry Rides Again and who was later played by Audie Murphy. Gavin's Destry television series soon hit the dirt and Gavin picked-up the trail for France and GAUMONT STUDIOS, when his Universal Pictures agreements expired.
FRANCE WAS GOOD for John Gavin and his tenure as "0SS 117" was a successful one, if not the most successful of any other actor who played the role. (See his film, OSS 117: Double Agent at www.sinistercinema.com under Espionage and Spy Films).
IN 1971, after George Lazenby, on bad advice from his Business Manager Ronan O'Rahilly, resigned from the role of James Bond after just one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli were desperate to find a new Double-0-seven. John Gavin, on the strength of his '0SS 117,' was signed to a contract to be the next James Bond in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever. Mr. Gavin was given a script and United Aartists went on alert that John Gavin, would, indeed, be starring in the diamond smuggling caper, set to be filmed in Amsterdam, South Africa, London, Las Vegas and UNIVERSAL PICTURES (his old studio) in the spring. Diamonds Are Forever was to be EON Productions’s first Bond film completed in the United States. (Exterior scenes of Miami Beach in Goldfinger were 'Second Unit' sequences, with interiors and Fort Knox filmed at Pinewood Studios outside London.)
John Gavin, an American of Mexican descent, who played a French secret agent as Hubert Connoisseur de la Bath, was now ready to become ENGLAND's MOST FAMOUS EXPORT---James Bond, 'DOUBLE-0-SEVEN,' Ian Fleming’s GENTLEMAN AGENT with THE LICENCE TO KILL.
DOUBLE-0-SEVEN-DOUBLE-TAKE
Albert R. Broccoli liked John Gavin." Harry Saltzman liked John Gavin. Enter David Picker, Executive Vice President of United Artists. "WE WANT CONNERY....!" GET CONNERY BACK, AT ANY PRICE...! became the "War Cry" at United Artists, then a subsidiary of the giant San Francisco insurance firm, Trans-America Corporation.
SUDDENLY, producers Saltzman and Broccoli were faced with a new casting crisis. Broccoli had already turned down Burt Reynolds (because he was not English) and Reynolds claims he turned down Bond earlier (because "No one can play Bond but Sean Connery. ") Either way, John Gavin (who was definitely not English and had no woes about being compared with Connery) was already signed. His name was on the deal. The contract was "in the pocket."
TURN AROUND "007 STYLE."
There are many stories circulating that John Gavin was in a holding pen, contractually, during this period. That, actually, he was the back-up-plan, in the event Sean Connery could not be lured back into the ring to once again put on his gloves as Bond and go for the 'Championship.'
THE ANNOUNCEMENT GOES FORTH: Sean Connery "IS" JAMES BOND in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER." Dennis Selinger, Mr. Connery's agent at International Creative Management in London "inks the deal" that makes the future SIR SEAN, "the highest paid movie star in the world," up until that time. For a then staggering $1.2 million, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts (not to mention the financing of 2 motion pictures of Mr. Connery's choice by United Artists-- He does The Offence, which UA finances and Connery stars and produces in London), the legendary icon returns in the role that made him famous. Jill ST. John is signed as his co-star, and rumors of a romance between the two starts immediately during filming. Lana Wood is signed as 'Plenty O'Toole' and country-western singer-sausage king, Jimmy Dean, becomes Willard Whyte, the Howard Hughes of Diamonds Are Forever overnight.
John Gavin, though he is passed-over for the "superstar-making-role-of-a-lifetime," is paid $100,000 for his participation by the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, as Roger Moore, receives a call at the end of filming telling him "to cut your hair and lose weight. We think you're going to be the next James Bond."
---
For more on Frederick Stafford and how Alfred Hitchcock used him in Topaz, check out:
Killers, Traitors, and 007: The Influences on and Failures of Alfred Hitchcock
Posted in the “Spies on Film” files at
WWW.Spywise.net
There, you’ll learn how this film not only employed a former OSS 117, but a former Bond girl, namely Karen Dor from You Only Live Twice.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Free Agent
Review: Jeremy Duns Goes Dark in Free Agent
By Wesley Britton
Free Agent by Jeremy Duns
Viking Adult (June 25, 2009 in U.S.)
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0670021016
ISBN-13: 978-0670021017
One tendency in book promotions that’s always driven me a bit nuts is the desire of literary agents, publishers, and reviewers to classify new novels and writers by comparing them to what has come before. I understand why. The point is to tell potential readers that, if you liked the latest by, say, Charles Cumming, you’ll enjoy this new offering by Ramone Unknown or whomever. But, in spy fiction, there’s another element in all this puffery. That is to attempt to anoint new novelists as those worthy of taking on the mantles of the Holy Trinity of Fleming, Le Carre`, or Deighton. Sometimes, the likes of Robert Littell will be mentioned to signal that the reviewer knows there’s been a wealth of spy fiction since the 1960s. Still, the theme often continues to be--what is the new writer doing that carries on the legacies of those who shaped the templates of espionage literature?
I’m as guilty as anyone else in this regard. As I turn the pages of new books, I find myself thinking how this read reminds me of one classic or another—or not. Take Free Agent, the first book from Swedish spy expert Jeremy Duns. Free Agent can’t help but beg comparison with the novels written during the Cold War as it is set in 1969 and the background is filled with reminders of the defections of Kim Philby and the “Cambridge Spy Ring.” Duns tosses out obvious bread crumbs to remind us of his forbearers—the British Secret Service is referred to as “The Circus” and he even briefly invokes the name of the Dreaded SMERSH. One Russian handler has the code name “Sasha,” the same moniker as the mole James Jesus Angleton feared throughout his tenure as head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. In the first pages of Free Agent, we’re reminded of operations during the aftermath of World War II where the lead protagonist, Paul Dark, was first tutored in the then nastiest tasks in undercover missions—taking out alleged ex-Nazis. Like Deighton before him, Duns added “family of spies” elements as it was Dark’s father who mentored his son in the unsanctioned killings of old enemies. Toss in the old lover who was supposedly murdered but wasn’t—which will allow double-agent Paul Dark to eventually investigate a mystery with very personal dimensions. Sound familiar?
The major twist in the story is that this book centers on a mole hunt from the mole’s point of view told in the first person. This means, in very short time, the reader knows Paul Dark is no heroic figure. In the first chapter, he murders the chief of MI6 because Dark’s 26 year cover as a Soviet plant is about to be blown. From that point forward, the main story is how Dark tries to hide his tracks of that murder and his quest to keep his treason secret. In the first 100 pages, I was indeed reminded of a past master, Graham Greene, in particular The Human Factor. Not the style or character development, but Greene’s often obvious sympathies with those on the other side of the Cold War fence. (Duns has admitted one influence was Derek Marlowe's book, A Dandy in Aspic, which also dealt with a traitor but was, admittedly, a very different breed of story.) However, unlike the characters of Greene or even Le Carre`, there’s no ideological or class war involved in Free Agent. We have a despicable narrator on the run with only one mission—to save his own skin.
The early passages, for me, were the most problematic. I was never clear what Paul Dark’s real motivations were for being a traitor to Queen and country. Yes, he was angry over rogue British operations he felt were not any different from the perceived evil of the Soviet bloc. His first contact, Anna, an alleged nurse in a hospital, ran intellectual Marxist circles around his thinly thought out defenses of the British way of life. But, in one scene he rejects her romantic overtures, the next she’s being removed in an ambulance, and then suddenly he wants to be a double-agent. For 26 years, he apparently never rethought his actions. Well, perhaps that’s the point. A simple broken-heart was all it took to keep him going for his entire career in MI6.
This is what makes Paul Dark difficult to empathize with. In the early pages, we see what Dark does but with little depth to tell us why. After his killing of his chief, we hear no words of remorse, no thoughts of the consequences of his actions beyond his drive for self-preservation. He’s able to avoid suspicion for his chief’s murder largely due to his agency’s astonishing lackadaisical response to their superior’s disappearance. With all the worries about moles, you’d think they’d be all over that situation with fine-tooth combs. Instead, Dark maneuvers himself a trip to Lagos in order to track down the one man who can finally expose him and do so in time to allow Dark to come up with reasonable explanations for his disobeying orders. Perhaps he is right—his strange behavior can be explained away. To his superiors at least, if not for we readers. This was a guy I wanted caught. I presumed what we would encounter, sooner or later, was some form of redemption. Well, to a minor degree, that’s what happens.
It’s after Paul Dark arrives in Nigeria during the Biafra War that Free Agent becomes what it was meant to be—a fast-paced “flight and fight” thriller where we forget Dark isn’t a character we should be rooting for. Not to give too much away, he comes to learn of the betrayals that set him up to become a dirty double all those years ago. He finds himself having to stop the assassination of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who’s come to Nigeria to draft a peace plan. By the last page, we are at last rooting for a traitor and cold-blooded murderer trying to get out of it all—but that won’t happen until, at least, the announced sequel—Free Country.
What all this means is that Free Agent is like those thrillers of old that readers would pick up in airport terminals and lose themselves in while traveling to their probably less than exotic destinations. And then forget about. It’s a book that shows the research that went into it. For example, Duns’s setting of Biafra, far from a typical location for a spy novel of the time, is a welcome change from the usual European cities or Caribbean islands where Bond and his ilk fought most of their duels with super-charged gangsters in proxy Cold Wars. We even get the Flemingesque “sacrificial lamb,” a journalist named Isabel who Dark picks up and becomes an immediate and competent partner in his adventure before her convenient disposal. Too bad—she was the most intriguing supporting character, but yet another whose motivations remain an open question.
I admit being curious about the next two books in the trilogy. Will Dark get out from under the thumb of the Soviets? Will he actually pay a price for his long-standing treason and other crimes? Sure, he saves the day in the end, but he isn’t redeemed in any real sense. Well, stay tuned. Duns is competent enough a storyteller to fill in the holes. So far, we’ve gotten a very readable page-turner if not a new iconic figure to invest ourselves in.
---
For other book reviews by Wesley Britton, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—
WWW.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
Free Agent by Jeremy Duns
Viking Adult (June 25, 2009 in U.S.)
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0670021016
ISBN-13: 978-0670021017
One tendency in book promotions that’s always driven me a bit nuts is the desire of literary agents, publishers, and reviewers to classify new novels and writers by comparing them to what has come before. I understand why. The point is to tell potential readers that, if you liked the latest by, say, Charles Cumming, you’ll enjoy this new offering by Ramone Unknown or whomever. But, in spy fiction, there’s another element in all this puffery. That is to attempt to anoint new novelists as those worthy of taking on the mantles of the Holy Trinity of Fleming, Le Carre`, or Deighton. Sometimes, the likes of Robert Littell will be mentioned to signal that the reviewer knows there’s been a wealth of spy fiction since the 1960s. Still, the theme often continues to be--what is the new writer doing that carries on the legacies of those who shaped the templates of espionage literature?
I’m as guilty as anyone else in this regard. As I turn the pages of new books, I find myself thinking how this read reminds me of one classic or another—or not. Take Free Agent, the first book from Swedish spy expert Jeremy Duns. Free Agent can’t help but beg comparison with the novels written during the Cold War as it is set in 1969 and the background is filled with reminders of the defections of Kim Philby and the “Cambridge Spy Ring.” Duns tosses out obvious bread crumbs to remind us of his forbearers—the British Secret Service is referred to as “The Circus” and he even briefly invokes the name of the Dreaded SMERSH. One Russian handler has the code name “Sasha,” the same moniker as the mole James Jesus Angleton feared throughout his tenure as head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. In the first pages of Free Agent, we’re reminded of operations during the aftermath of World War II where the lead protagonist, Paul Dark, was first tutored in the then nastiest tasks in undercover missions—taking out alleged ex-Nazis. Like Deighton before him, Duns added “family of spies” elements as it was Dark’s father who mentored his son in the unsanctioned killings of old enemies. Toss in the old lover who was supposedly murdered but wasn’t—which will allow double-agent Paul Dark to eventually investigate a mystery with very personal dimensions. Sound familiar?
The major twist in the story is that this book centers on a mole hunt from the mole’s point of view told in the first person. This means, in very short time, the reader knows Paul Dark is no heroic figure. In the first chapter, he murders the chief of MI6 because Dark’s 26 year cover as a Soviet plant is about to be blown. From that point forward, the main story is how Dark tries to hide his tracks of that murder and his quest to keep his treason secret. In the first 100 pages, I was indeed reminded of a past master, Graham Greene, in particular The Human Factor. Not the style or character development, but Greene’s often obvious sympathies with those on the other side of the Cold War fence. (Duns has admitted one influence was Derek Marlowe's book, A Dandy in Aspic, which also dealt with a traitor but was, admittedly, a very different breed of story.) However, unlike the characters of Greene or even Le Carre`, there’s no ideological or class war involved in Free Agent. We have a despicable narrator on the run with only one mission—to save his own skin.
The early passages, for me, were the most problematic. I was never clear what Paul Dark’s real motivations were for being a traitor to Queen and country. Yes, he was angry over rogue British operations he felt were not any different from the perceived evil of the Soviet bloc. His first contact, Anna, an alleged nurse in a hospital, ran intellectual Marxist circles around his thinly thought out defenses of the British way of life. But, in one scene he rejects her romantic overtures, the next she’s being removed in an ambulance, and then suddenly he wants to be a double-agent. For 26 years, he apparently never rethought his actions. Well, perhaps that’s the point. A simple broken-heart was all it took to keep him going for his entire career in MI6.
This is what makes Paul Dark difficult to empathize with. In the early pages, we see what Dark does but with little depth to tell us why. After his killing of his chief, we hear no words of remorse, no thoughts of the consequences of his actions beyond his drive for self-preservation. He’s able to avoid suspicion for his chief’s murder largely due to his agency’s astonishing lackadaisical response to their superior’s disappearance. With all the worries about moles, you’d think they’d be all over that situation with fine-tooth combs. Instead, Dark maneuvers himself a trip to Lagos in order to track down the one man who can finally expose him and do so in time to allow Dark to come up with reasonable explanations for his disobeying orders. Perhaps he is right—his strange behavior can be explained away. To his superiors at least, if not for we readers. This was a guy I wanted caught. I presumed what we would encounter, sooner or later, was some form of redemption. Well, to a minor degree, that’s what happens.
It’s after Paul Dark arrives in Nigeria during the Biafra War that Free Agent becomes what it was meant to be—a fast-paced “flight and fight” thriller where we forget Dark isn’t a character we should be rooting for. Not to give too much away, he comes to learn of the betrayals that set him up to become a dirty double all those years ago. He finds himself having to stop the assassination of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who’s come to Nigeria to draft a peace plan. By the last page, we are at last rooting for a traitor and cold-blooded murderer trying to get out of it all—but that won’t happen until, at least, the announced sequel—Free Country.
What all this means is that Free Agent is like those thrillers of old that readers would pick up in airport terminals and lose themselves in while traveling to their probably less than exotic destinations. And then forget about. It’s a book that shows the research that went into it. For example, Duns’s setting of Biafra, far from a typical location for a spy novel of the time, is a welcome change from the usual European cities or Caribbean islands where Bond and his ilk fought most of their duels with super-charged gangsters in proxy Cold Wars. We even get the Flemingesque “sacrificial lamb,” a journalist named Isabel who Dark picks up and becomes an immediate and competent partner in his adventure before her convenient disposal. Too bad—she was the most intriguing supporting character, but yet another whose motivations remain an open question.
I admit being curious about the next two books in the trilogy. Will Dark get out from under the thumb of the Soviets? Will he actually pay a price for his long-standing treason and other crimes? Sure, he saves the day in the end, but he isn’t redeemed in any real sense. Well, stay tuned. Duns is competent enough a storyteller to fill in the holes. So far, we’ve gotten a very readable page-turner if not a new iconic figure to invest ourselves in.
---
For other book reviews by Wesley Britton, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—
WWW.Spywise.net
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Michael Westen at Sea: A Review of Burn Notice: The End Game
By Wesley Britton
Burn Notice: The End Game
by Tod Goldberg
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Signet (May 5, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0451226763
$5.99
You spend the majority of your life in the company of spies and you begin to realize certain truths, chief among them that in order to be a good spy, you have to love your job. Statistically speaking, this is unusual. Most people hate their jobs. Most people wish they were doing something more interesting with their lives. So they go home and they watch television shows about people they can never be, or they read books about fantasy worlds they'll never inhabit, or they get on to the Internet and take on a persona, either on a message board or in a role-playing game, and they while away their free time pretending and then wake up the next day and head back to the cubicle maze. But when you're a spy, every day has the potential to be completely unlike the previous day. That kind of adrenaline is difficult to replace. I wanted to solve my burn notice and get my job back not merely because I wasn't overly fond of being manipulated by forces that wanted to use me for their own devices, nor because I found their belief that I'd capitulate to their will—as however many other burned agents had over the years—specifically rude and disrespectful, never mind that it's never fun being shot at on a regular basis. No, I wanted to solve my burn notice because I wanted my life back—the life I'd chosen. Dealing with the mundane was not a job I was uniquely qualified for. (Tod Goldberg, Burn Notice: The End Game)
One of my favorite reading pleasures during the 1960s was stopping by the book section of our local department store and finding new titles based on my favorite TV shows. There were so many choices and they seemed to come out like magazines, new books every month—The Avengers, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, GetSmart. Many were published in long-lasting series like U.N.C.L.E. with its 23 titles coming out like clockwork.
Back in those days, the adventures were short, usually around 160 pages. The books sold for about 45 cents. (I just noticed there’s no cent mark on my keyboard, a sign of the times for sure). You came to know certain authors would be interesting, like David McDaniel or Keith Laumer. Others would be odd, as in John Garforth’s unusual Avengers stories. The best you could hope for would be tales where the characters were true to their TV personas and the plots would keep you turning the page. I turned many a page.
Back then, of course, we didn’t have DVDs or on demand channels or YouTube so our only connections to our heroes in between the weekly broadcasts were the floods of merchandising items aimed for my generation, the lunchboxes, guns, magazines, books. For me, the tie-in novels were special. They were like extra episodes, extra stories about my heroes that Hollywood didn’t have time to film. When the spring repeats began and the summer replacement series kicked in, we had books to read. The actors might be on break, but the characters they played were still in danger, still jet-setting around the world, still taking on clandestine assignments with no commercial breaks.
I felt some of that old excitement when I read Tod Goldberg’s first Burn Notice novel, The Fix, when it came out last year. Once again, I had a book to read about some interesting characters when the show itself was on hiatus. That’s true again of his second contribution, End Game, again published when there aren’t any new episodes airing on USA. What are Mike, Sam, Fi and the rest doing while the next season is in preparation? Well, Tod Goldberg has one story to tell.
While reading End Game, and its predecessor The Fix, I admit thinking back to adventures of old and how times have changed. For one matter, the Burn Notice novels have a much heftier page count. That cent mark has no place on the cover. More importantly, Goldberg has opportunities and challenges few novelist of the ‘60s had. Take the character of John Drake in the Danger Man books. What did the writers, or TV viewers for that matter, know about Drake’s background? Where did he come from? What did he do when not on the business of NATO or Her Majesty’s Secret Service? With no back-story to work with, novelists were limited to sticking to fast-moving plots, and in many of those books, any agent’s name would have worked as well as any other. Sometimes, as in the Mission: Impossible or I Spy novels by John Tiger, the writer created a virtual alternate reality—using the character names but creating personal descriptions and circumstances never seen on television.
Luckily for Tod Goldberg, Michael Westen is a completely different story. Not only is Westen operating in his home town, Westen can’t distance himself from his past. Not with Mom and little brother Nate around. Mom, in particular, is always seeking—dare we use the term?—quality time with her son. So starting off End Game with Michael enlisting Fi to help him with the simple task of seeking out a Mother’s Day present and card give End Game character aspects we’d not seen back when the families of spies were neither seen nor heard.
Another challenge—and opportunity-- for Goldberg are Westen’s trademark “When you’re a spy” monologues. Westen’s first-person observations on spycraft give us alleged insights into what secret agents are doing out in the wilds, while at the same time giving Goldberg a chance to expand into areas scriptwriters can’t. (Does anyone really think any spy ever knew or used all the things Westen describes?) Meaning, the spy tidbits have to come quickly and not take up too much screen time on TV, but Goldberg’s monologues allow us to hear Michael’s thoughts and reactions to what is happening around him. I thought this was a bit more memorable in The Fix where Westen admitted feelings about Fi we can only infer from their on-screen chemistry. But there are choice scenes in End Game, notably the epilogue where Michael has to endure bonding time with Mom and a New Age therapist. A moment when Michael begins musing about his circumstances saying “When you’re no longer a spy . . .”
Speaking of Fi, I think she’s the least tapped resource on Burn Notice, whether in the scripts or novels. True, her particular skill set, and her lust to employ it, don’t require a lot of exposition. She is in the bind of many a TV heroine, trapped in a “will they, won’t they” realm that keeps her on the romantic hook—spiced with a major dose of attitude. Still, in End Game, she’s a conscience for Michael, a mix of a woman who’s most comfortable when she gets a chance to shoot someone while chiding Michael about his inability to be responsive to simple human courtesy. It’s Sam Axe that really thrives as a supporting character in the Goldberg books. He’s a sly con, a deft handler of all the gadgets, a quick analyzer of situations, almost a one-man IMF team. In the novels, we can see what he’s doing to investigate things we rarely see onscreen where, normally, we only hear his telling Michael what he’s found out, not how he found out. This is due, in large part, to Goldberg’s admitted love for the character and the actor who plays him, Bruce Campbell. (For more on this point, see my interview, “Having A Burn Notice Jones This Week? Tod Goldberg Has the Fix for You” posted at WWW.Spywise.net.)
I admit, I think Goldberg was more successful bringing the Burn Notice formula to life in his first book. It seemed richer, full of more surprises. The second-time around, I was more aware this was essentially another episode in the life of Westen and Co. that, because of the limitations of tie-in projects, couldn’t move the overall story arc of the series forward. In tie-in novels, by definition, we can’t see any character development or relationship changes. So, like many of the episodes from the last season, the “Burn Notice” storyline is only in the background. What we get is the Westen team taking on a gang war in Florida after the family of Paolo Fornelli, Helmsman for a yacht in the Hurricane Cup, are kidnapped. Would the super-rich stoop so low as to rig a winner-takes-all race? Of course they would. But there’s more to the plot than boat racing. But this is no place for spoilers. I suppose one disappointment is the final scene when Michael and Fi are out at sea, going to the very boundaries of Michael’s official confinement. While zigzagging around on the water, they’re more observers of the action than full-fledged participants, mainly checking out the fruits of their elaborate sting operation. Or maybe I’m just too used to agents sparring with the villain up to the very last minute, then heroically leaping into the icy waters below.
In spite of these quibbles, there’s no denying that it’s all here, the banter, the wry humor, Fi’s beloved explosions. Of course, explosions--the book begins with Michael driving past an exploding yacht, and he keeps moving so no one will think he had something to do with it. He will, of course. And so will you—if you’re a Burn Notice fan, this is one you won’t want to miss. If you’re not already a fan of the show, well, shame on you, and check this book out after spending a few happy hours with the DVDs of Seasons 1 and 2. Then The End Game will be waiting for you.
---
For other articles, interviews, and reviews from the author of The Encyclopedia of TV Spies, check out all the features at—
WWW.Spywise.net
Ordering information for Burn Notice: The End Game can be found at:
www.amazon.com/Burn-Notice-Game-Tod-Goldberg/dp/0451226763
By Wesley Britton
Burn Notice: The End Game
by Tod Goldberg
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Signet (May 5, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0451226763
$5.99
You spend the majority of your life in the company of spies and you begin to realize certain truths, chief among them that in order to be a good spy, you have to love your job. Statistically speaking, this is unusual. Most people hate their jobs. Most people wish they were doing something more interesting with their lives. So they go home and they watch television shows about people they can never be, or they read books about fantasy worlds they'll never inhabit, or they get on to the Internet and take on a persona, either on a message board or in a role-playing game, and they while away their free time pretending and then wake up the next day and head back to the cubicle maze. But when you're a spy, every day has the potential to be completely unlike the previous day. That kind of adrenaline is difficult to replace. I wanted to solve my burn notice and get my job back not merely because I wasn't overly fond of being manipulated by forces that wanted to use me for their own devices, nor because I found their belief that I'd capitulate to their will—as however many other burned agents had over the years—specifically rude and disrespectful, never mind that it's never fun being shot at on a regular basis. No, I wanted to solve my burn notice because I wanted my life back—the life I'd chosen. Dealing with the mundane was not a job I was uniquely qualified for. (Tod Goldberg, Burn Notice: The End Game)
One of my favorite reading pleasures during the 1960s was stopping by the book section of our local department store and finding new titles based on my favorite TV shows. There were so many choices and they seemed to come out like magazines, new books every month—The Avengers, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, GetSmart. Many were published in long-lasting series like U.N.C.L.E. with its 23 titles coming out like clockwork.
Back in those days, the adventures were short, usually around 160 pages. The books sold for about 45 cents. (I just noticed there’s no cent mark on my keyboard, a sign of the times for sure). You came to know certain authors would be interesting, like David McDaniel or Keith Laumer. Others would be odd, as in John Garforth’s unusual Avengers stories. The best you could hope for would be tales where the characters were true to their TV personas and the plots would keep you turning the page. I turned many a page.
Back then, of course, we didn’t have DVDs or on demand channels or YouTube so our only connections to our heroes in between the weekly broadcasts were the floods of merchandising items aimed for my generation, the lunchboxes, guns, magazines, books. For me, the tie-in novels were special. They were like extra episodes, extra stories about my heroes that Hollywood didn’t have time to film. When the spring repeats began and the summer replacement series kicked in, we had books to read. The actors might be on break, but the characters they played were still in danger, still jet-setting around the world, still taking on clandestine assignments with no commercial breaks.
I felt some of that old excitement when I read Tod Goldberg’s first Burn Notice novel, The Fix, when it came out last year. Once again, I had a book to read about some interesting characters when the show itself was on hiatus. That’s true again of his second contribution, End Game, again published when there aren’t any new episodes airing on USA. What are Mike, Sam, Fi and the rest doing while the next season is in preparation? Well, Tod Goldberg has one story to tell.
While reading End Game, and its predecessor The Fix, I admit thinking back to adventures of old and how times have changed. For one matter, the Burn Notice novels have a much heftier page count. That cent mark has no place on the cover. More importantly, Goldberg has opportunities and challenges few novelist of the ‘60s had. Take the character of John Drake in the Danger Man books. What did the writers, or TV viewers for that matter, know about Drake’s background? Where did he come from? What did he do when not on the business of NATO or Her Majesty’s Secret Service? With no back-story to work with, novelists were limited to sticking to fast-moving plots, and in many of those books, any agent’s name would have worked as well as any other. Sometimes, as in the Mission: Impossible or I Spy novels by John Tiger, the writer created a virtual alternate reality—using the character names but creating personal descriptions and circumstances never seen on television.
Luckily for Tod Goldberg, Michael Westen is a completely different story. Not only is Westen operating in his home town, Westen can’t distance himself from his past. Not with Mom and little brother Nate around. Mom, in particular, is always seeking—dare we use the term?—quality time with her son. So starting off End Game with Michael enlisting Fi to help him with the simple task of seeking out a Mother’s Day present and card give End Game character aspects we’d not seen back when the families of spies were neither seen nor heard.
Another challenge—and opportunity-- for Goldberg are Westen’s trademark “When you’re a spy” monologues. Westen’s first-person observations on spycraft give us alleged insights into what secret agents are doing out in the wilds, while at the same time giving Goldberg a chance to expand into areas scriptwriters can’t. (Does anyone really think any spy ever knew or used all the things Westen describes?) Meaning, the spy tidbits have to come quickly and not take up too much screen time on TV, but Goldberg’s monologues allow us to hear Michael’s thoughts and reactions to what is happening around him. I thought this was a bit more memorable in The Fix where Westen admitted feelings about Fi we can only infer from their on-screen chemistry. But there are choice scenes in End Game, notably the epilogue where Michael has to endure bonding time with Mom and a New Age therapist. A moment when Michael begins musing about his circumstances saying “When you’re no longer a spy . . .”
Speaking of Fi, I think she’s the least tapped resource on Burn Notice, whether in the scripts or novels. True, her particular skill set, and her lust to employ it, don’t require a lot of exposition. She is in the bind of many a TV heroine, trapped in a “will they, won’t they” realm that keeps her on the romantic hook—spiced with a major dose of attitude. Still, in End Game, she’s a conscience for Michael, a mix of a woman who’s most comfortable when she gets a chance to shoot someone while chiding Michael about his inability to be responsive to simple human courtesy. It’s Sam Axe that really thrives as a supporting character in the Goldberg books. He’s a sly con, a deft handler of all the gadgets, a quick analyzer of situations, almost a one-man IMF team. In the novels, we can see what he’s doing to investigate things we rarely see onscreen where, normally, we only hear his telling Michael what he’s found out, not how he found out. This is due, in large part, to Goldberg’s admitted love for the character and the actor who plays him, Bruce Campbell. (For more on this point, see my interview, “Having A Burn Notice Jones This Week? Tod Goldberg Has the Fix for You” posted at WWW.Spywise.net.)
I admit, I think Goldberg was more successful bringing the Burn Notice formula to life in his first book. It seemed richer, full of more surprises. The second-time around, I was more aware this was essentially another episode in the life of Westen and Co. that, because of the limitations of tie-in projects, couldn’t move the overall story arc of the series forward. In tie-in novels, by definition, we can’t see any character development or relationship changes. So, like many of the episodes from the last season, the “Burn Notice” storyline is only in the background. What we get is the Westen team taking on a gang war in Florida after the family of Paolo Fornelli, Helmsman for a yacht in the Hurricane Cup, are kidnapped. Would the super-rich stoop so low as to rig a winner-takes-all race? Of course they would. But there’s more to the plot than boat racing. But this is no place for spoilers. I suppose one disappointment is the final scene when Michael and Fi are out at sea, going to the very boundaries of Michael’s official confinement. While zigzagging around on the water, they’re more observers of the action than full-fledged participants, mainly checking out the fruits of their elaborate sting operation. Or maybe I’m just too used to agents sparring with the villain up to the very last minute, then heroically leaping into the icy waters below.
In spite of these quibbles, there’s no denying that it’s all here, the banter, the wry humor, Fi’s beloved explosions. Of course, explosions--the book begins with Michael driving past an exploding yacht, and he keeps moving so no one will think he had something to do with it. He will, of course. And so will you—if you’re a Burn Notice fan, this is one you won’t want to miss. If you’re not already a fan of the show, well, shame on you, and check this book out after spending a few happy hours with the DVDs of Seasons 1 and 2. Then The End Game will be waiting for you.
---
For other articles, interviews, and reviews from the author of The Encyclopedia of TV Spies, check out all the features at—
WWW.Spywise.net
Ordering information for Burn Notice: The End Game can be found at:
www.amazon.com/Burn-Notice-Game-Tod-Goldberg/dp/0451226763
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
"Blood Under the Bridge": A Review of The Company
“Blood Under the Bridge”: A Review of The Company
(Sony Home Video, 2007)
by Wesley Britton
Time Capsules
While his 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf had nothing to do with the Cold War, one phrase from Edward Albee’s award-winning script--“blood under the bridge”--can easily be used to describe the residue left behind from what the intelligence agencies of both East and West had inflicted on each other for over 40 years. In retrospect, there was considerable real and metaphorical “blood under the bridge” in the proxy wars, inter-agency turf wars, moles, traitors, defectors, and para-military operations from 1947 until the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Bloodied remains include the reputations of the CIA and British Intelligence. There was the “blow back” and public failures of misbegotten adventures. Before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., there had been the Hollywood blacklists, civil rights violations during the 1960s, Congressional hearings into secret hanky-panky, and deaths of Western agents resulting from the betrayals of moles like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Could all this blood be summarized in one book, one film, or—as in the case of TNT’s The Company, one miniseries?
Judging from Norman Mailer’s sprawling 1991 Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer didn’t think one 1,000 page opus would do it. The first part of his saga—from the creation of the CIA to 1963—was as far as Mailer went in Part One of his uncompleted exploration. However, in 2002 Robert Littell's best-selling The Company: A Novel of the CIA dramatized events from the formation of the agency after World War II to the foiled 1991 coup to oust Soviet leader Mikail Gorbochov by tracing the professional and private lives of three generations of agents on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Choosing watershed moments from each decade, Litell brought the careers of actual operatives and directors from Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, Richard Helms, and William Casey into his dramatization of the covert world. Litell's own fictional characters were given creditability by the author's use of historic details from vacuum tube radios to watches that needed winding before the advent of new technologies. Readers saw the history of defectors and moles in Berlin, failed covert activities in Hungary in 1956 and Cuba in 1961, and the political jousting between elected policy makers and the intelligence community in the 1970s and 1980s. Graphic scenes of torture and assassinations, office debates over ends and means, and battlefield love affairs exhibited past behaviors while pointing to the future in scenes in Afghanistan and dead-drop exchanges between Robert Hanssen and his Russian handlers. In each section, the torch was passed from generation to generation, and with each change of characters a sense of purpose, history, and destiny made it clear the novelist saw the CIA as a force to be proud of and necessary in the ongoing battles between the good guys and those with less honorable intent. (note 1)
The year before, director Tony Scott had offered a much tighter retelling of the agency’s history in his Spy Game, a feature film starring Robert Redford as Nathan D. Muir and Brad Pitt as Muir’s younger protégée, Tom Bishop. Centering on their father-son relationship, Scott showed how two generations of spies engaged in the “Great Game” in flashbacks filmed to look like the movie styles of the period in which they were set. Spy Game dramatized espionage in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and ironically concluded with the climactic moment of a suicide bomber bringing down a building in Beirut. (note 2) That incident signaled the coming shift in geopolitical conflicts, leaving behind the East vs. West duels to look ahead to the new War on Terror. “The Great Game” had had its beginning, middle, and end, so it would be new blood to take on a very different enemy. Still, in Spy Game, Harlot’s Ghost, and The Company, questions remained about the past. What had been the meaning of it all? Had the good guys won or left standing mainly by default?
As it happened, Tony Scott returned to these questions four years later through his brother, fellow filmmaker Ridley Scott. With screen writer Ken Nolan, Ridley had worked on Black Hawk Down (2001) and the two were reunited when producer John Calley began exploring the idea of making Littell’s The Company into a feature film. The Scott brothers and their collaborators determined a two-hour project wouldn’t be sufficient. They began expanding the project into a three-part, six-hour mini-series with director Mikael Salomon who’d helmed the 2004 TNT mini-series, The Grid. As he’d grown up in Berlin in the 1960s, he could bring a dimension of realism to the first segment when the producers considered using several directors for each part. Then, it was decided to use Salomon for all three parts for continuity even though each film would have very different elements. (note 3)
Synopsis
Broadcast on TNT from Aug. 5—Aug. 19, 2007, Nolan’s considerably streamlined script focused on three idealistic Yale graduates (class of 1950) and their evolution. Jack McAuliffe (Chris O'Donnell) and Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola) were recruited into the newly created CIA. Russian-born Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane), who likes Americans but hates what the country stands for, is recruited into the KGB by Starik (Ulrich Thomsen), a spymaster planning to destroy America’s economy. (As they younger characters would have to age over forty years in the series, the actors were asked to shave their heads so different wigs could be used.)
Setting up a relationship akin to that of Redford and Pitt in Spy Game, the first episode had McAuliffe and his mentor, Harvey Torriti, known as “The Sorcerer" (Alfred Molina) distressed to have their missions blown in Berlin in 1954. Torriti became certain there was a mole inside British intelligence leaking information and began setting traps to uncover him. At the same time, McAuliffe meets Lili, his principal informant and love interest (Alexandra Maria Lara) who’s feeding the CIA dis-information. Despite the disbelief of actual CIA counter-intelligence director James Jesus Angleton (Michael Keaton), Torriti’s scheme revealed MI-5 veteran Adrian “Kim” Philby (Tom Hollander) had been a KGB spy since the 1930s. Because Angleton had not seen through Philby’s “elegant artifice,” however, Philby was able to escape along with other members of his “Cambridge Spy Ring.” McAuliffe then tried to help Lili defect to the west before the KGB can take revenge for her mission being blown. Too late to save her, McAuliffe suspected her dis-information operation was one of the traps Torriti arranged to uncover Philby. He is correct, but Torriti denied the charge as the two toasted their mixed victory.
In the more action-oriented second episode, McAuliffe was involved in both the 1956 Hungarian revolution (filmed in Budapest) and the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco (shot in Puerto Rico). In Hungary (a setting that hadn’t been included in the first feature film script), the secret police captured McAuliffe when he tried to encourage local resistance to the Communist government. To get him out, Torriti let the Russians know if anything happened to the CIA agent, dead KGB operatives would be the result. After he is freed, McAuliffe learns he’d been captured due to a leak in the agency by a Soviet mole code-named “Sasha.” But he becomes resentful when the Hungarian revolution, spurred on by his labors and Western radio broadcasts, was crushed by Russian tanks as the American government refused to support their own propaganda with military power.
This circumstance repeats when McAuliffe is sent to work with Cuban rebels being trained to invade their home country while Toritti sets up failed plots to kill Castro. McAuliffe is in Cuba during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and is angered when his government, again, failed to back up its own rhetoric with military support. We see the consequences in two very different conversations. On the Cuban beach, Roberto Escalona (Raoul Bova), a Cuban-born resistance fighter, tells McAuliffe he must leave despite his team being massacred as no American body should be found to discredit the invasion as being anything but true patriots seeking to take back their country. Back in Washington, Senator J. William Fulbright (Richard Blackburn) argues with CIA director Allen Dulles (Cedric Smith), saying the U.S. can’t complain about Russian involvement in other nations when the CIA was doing the same.
The first hour of the much praised third part focused on Michael Keaton’s portrayal as chain-smoking James Jesus Angleton and his obsession to uncover “Sasha.” The second half dealt with the revelations that brought the careers of Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky, and Yevgeny Tsipin to their various climaxes. In a long, tense interrogation, Angleton grills Leo Kritzky as all the signs point to his guilt, but he is seemingly vindicated and freed. Then, mirroring the friendship of Angleton and Philby, McAuliffe learns his old friend Kritsky was indeed the traitor responsible for all his failed missions. By the series end, McAuliffe has become a lonely, childless veteran uncertain what he has accomplished. Yevgeny Tsipin learns his mission had been so ill-considered—that of bankrupting the U.S. economy—that his life’s work had only resulted in only one bad day for Wall Street. In the final moments, as the Cold War winds down, McAuliffe and Toritti discuss the meaning of their careers—despite the failures, the good guys won in the end. Or did they?
Evaluating the Series
The distinguished international cast featured actors able to mimic the mannerisms of historical personages, notably Tom Hollander who recreated Kim Philby’s famous stutter. (In 2003, Hollander had played another member of Philby’s ring, Guy Burgess, in the mini-series, The Cambridge Spies.) As with the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, which dealt with some of the same time period and themes, most critics recognized the series was more drama than history. In The Company, for example, Kim Philby’s cover was blown in 1954—in fact, he wasn’t discovered until 1963. While the producers said the film didn’t affirm the CIA but rather conveyed their respect for the lives of its agents, some reviewers noted the look back at the Cold War revealed that the duels between the CIA and KGB did not end with any clear-cut victors.
In Oct. 2007, the well-regarded miniseries was released by Sony Home Pictures on DVD and became available for download. Are the six-hours worthy of three evenings of your life?
Absolutely. As many have noted, the tone and pace of each episode is quite different, and each part can be viewed as stand-alone episodes or, better, in sequence. Some have complained the second film, with half set in Hungary, the second in Cuba, doesn’t have much character development. (note 4) Perhaps not, but each half of this film mirrors and reinforces the themes of the other—that while successive administrations were willing to give the CIA various marching orders to stir the Cold War pot, U.S. presidents weren’t willing to go to the brink of nuclear war. But Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had few qualms about inciting revolutions that left behind “blood under the bridge” in European streets and on tropical beaches. This, after all, is what kept the Cold War from becoming hot—contained battles that never led to a full scale holocaust.
True enough, the miniseries can’t match the complexity of the novel and the book remains one of the classics of all spy literature. But whether or not the events retold here are remembered history for older viewers or a Cliff’s Notes overview for younger watchers, the mini-series is heads above most other made-for-TV espionage productions. I’d deem it far superior to The Good Shepherd in terms of both character development and complexity. Highly recommended.
Notes
1. See Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction (Praeger Pub., 2005). P. 209.
2. A review of Spy Game is included in my “THE INDISPENSIBLES: THE BEST 30 SPY FILMS OF ALL TIME” posted at this website.
3. Many details used here came from the interviews included on the 2007 DVD extras.
4. Useful, and informative reviews of the series include:
Eliason, Marcus. “TNT's `The Company' an ambitious effort.” Aug. 2, 2007. Accessed: Feb. 12, 2008.
http://www.tnt.tv/series/thecompany/
Elber, Lynn. “Alfred Molina turns spy in `The Company.'” AP News. July 25, 2007. Accessed. Feb. 12, 2008.
http://www.tnt.tv
For more reviews, interviews, essays, and explorations into literary, film, and TV spies, check out the other files posted at
WWW.Spywise.net
(Sony Home Video, 2007)
by Wesley Britton
Time Capsules
While his 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf had nothing to do with the Cold War, one phrase from Edward Albee’s award-winning script--“blood under the bridge”--can easily be used to describe the residue left behind from what the intelligence agencies of both East and West had inflicted on each other for over 40 years. In retrospect, there was considerable real and metaphorical “blood under the bridge” in the proxy wars, inter-agency turf wars, moles, traitors, defectors, and para-military operations from 1947 until the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Bloodied remains include the reputations of the CIA and British Intelligence. There was the “blow back” and public failures of misbegotten adventures. Before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., there had been the Hollywood blacklists, civil rights violations during the 1960s, Congressional hearings into secret hanky-panky, and deaths of Western agents resulting from the betrayals of moles like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Could all this blood be summarized in one book, one film, or—as in the case of TNT’s The Company, one miniseries?
Judging from Norman Mailer’s sprawling 1991 Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer didn’t think one 1,000 page opus would do it. The first part of his saga—from the creation of the CIA to 1963—was as far as Mailer went in Part One of his uncompleted exploration. However, in 2002 Robert Littell's best-selling The Company: A Novel of the CIA dramatized events from the formation of the agency after World War II to the foiled 1991 coup to oust Soviet leader Mikail Gorbochov by tracing the professional and private lives of three generations of agents on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Choosing watershed moments from each decade, Litell brought the careers of actual operatives and directors from Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, Richard Helms, and William Casey into his dramatization of the covert world. Litell's own fictional characters were given creditability by the author's use of historic details from vacuum tube radios to watches that needed winding before the advent of new technologies. Readers saw the history of defectors and moles in Berlin, failed covert activities in Hungary in 1956 and Cuba in 1961, and the political jousting between elected policy makers and the intelligence community in the 1970s and 1980s. Graphic scenes of torture and assassinations, office debates over ends and means, and battlefield love affairs exhibited past behaviors while pointing to the future in scenes in Afghanistan and dead-drop exchanges between Robert Hanssen and his Russian handlers. In each section, the torch was passed from generation to generation, and with each change of characters a sense of purpose, history, and destiny made it clear the novelist saw the CIA as a force to be proud of and necessary in the ongoing battles between the good guys and those with less honorable intent. (note 1)
The year before, director Tony Scott had offered a much tighter retelling of the agency’s history in his Spy Game, a feature film starring Robert Redford as Nathan D. Muir and Brad Pitt as Muir’s younger protégée, Tom Bishop. Centering on their father-son relationship, Scott showed how two generations of spies engaged in the “Great Game” in flashbacks filmed to look like the movie styles of the period in which they were set. Spy Game dramatized espionage in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and ironically concluded with the climactic moment of a suicide bomber bringing down a building in Beirut. (note 2) That incident signaled the coming shift in geopolitical conflicts, leaving behind the East vs. West duels to look ahead to the new War on Terror. “The Great Game” had had its beginning, middle, and end, so it would be new blood to take on a very different enemy. Still, in Spy Game, Harlot’s Ghost, and The Company, questions remained about the past. What had been the meaning of it all? Had the good guys won or left standing mainly by default?
As it happened, Tony Scott returned to these questions four years later through his brother, fellow filmmaker Ridley Scott. With screen writer Ken Nolan, Ridley had worked on Black Hawk Down (2001) and the two were reunited when producer John Calley began exploring the idea of making Littell’s The Company into a feature film. The Scott brothers and their collaborators determined a two-hour project wouldn’t be sufficient. They began expanding the project into a three-part, six-hour mini-series with director Mikael Salomon who’d helmed the 2004 TNT mini-series, The Grid. As he’d grown up in Berlin in the 1960s, he could bring a dimension of realism to the first segment when the producers considered using several directors for each part. Then, it was decided to use Salomon for all three parts for continuity even though each film would have very different elements. (note 3)
Synopsis
Broadcast on TNT from Aug. 5—Aug. 19, 2007, Nolan’s considerably streamlined script focused on three idealistic Yale graduates (class of 1950) and their evolution. Jack McAuliffe (Chris O'Donnell) and Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola) were recruited into the newly created CIA. Russian-born Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane), who likes Americans but hates what the country stands for, is recruited into the KGB by Starik (Ulrich Thomsen), a spymaster planning to destroy America’s economy. (As they younger characters would have to age over forty years in the series, the actors were asked to shave their heads so different wigs could be used.)
Setting up a relationship akin to that of Redford and Pitt in Spy Game, the first episode had McAuliffe and his mentor, Harvey Torriti, known as “The Sorcerer" (Alfred Molina) distressed to have their missions blown in Berlin in 1954. Torriti became certain there was a mole inside British intelligence leaking information and began setting traps to uncover him. At the same time, McAuliffe meets Lili, his principal informant and love interest (Alexandra Maria Lara) who’s feeding the CIA dis-information. Despite the disbelief of actual CIA counter-intelligence director James Jesus Angleton (Michael Keaton), Torriti’s scheme revealed MI-5 veteran Adrian “Kim” Philby (Tom Hollander) had been a KGB spy since the 1930s. Because Angleton had not seen through Philby’s “elegant artifice,” however, Philby was able to escape along with other members of his “Cambridge Spy Ring.” McAuliffe then tried to help Lili defect to the west before the KGB can take revenge for her mission being blown. Too late to save her, McAuliffe suspected her dis-information operation was one of the traps Torriti arranged to uncover Philby. He is correct, but Torriti denied the charge as the two toasted their mixed victory.
In the more action-oriented second episode, McAuliffe was involved in both the 1956 Hungarian revolution (filmed in Budapest) and the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco (shot in Puerto Rico). In Hungary (a setting that hadn’t been included in the first feature film script), the secret police captured McAuliffe when he tried to encourage local resistance to the Communist government. To get him out, Torriti let the Russians know if anything happened to the CIA agent, dead KGB operatives would be the result. After he is freed, McAuliffe learns he’d been captured due to a leak in the agency by a Soviet mole code-named “Sasha.” But he becomes resentful when the Hungarian revolution, spurred on by his labors and Western radio broadcasts, was crushed by Russian tanks as the American government refused to support their own propaganda with military power.
This circumstance repeats when McAuliffe is sent to work with Cuban rebels being trained to invade their home country while Toritti sets up failed plots to kill Castro. McAuliffe is in Cuba during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and is angered when his government, again, failed to back up its own rhetoric with military support. We see the consequences in two very different conversations. On the Cuban beach, Roberto Escalona (Raoul Bova), a Cuban-born resistance fighter, tells McAuliffe he must leave despite his team being massacred as no American body should be found to discredit the invasion as being anything but true patriots seeking to take back their country. Back in Washington, Senator J. William Fulbright (Richard Blackburn) argues with CIA director Allen Dulles (Cedric Smith), saying the U.S. can’t complain about Russian involvement in other nations when the CIA was doing the same.
The first hour of the much praised third part focused on Michael Keaton’s portrayal as chain-smoking James Jesus Angleton and his obsession to uncover “Sasha.” The second half dealt with the revelations that brought the careers of Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky, and Yevgeny Tsipin to their various climaxes. In a long, tense interrogation, Angleton grills Leo Kritzky as all the signs point to his guilt, but he is seemingly vindicated and freed. Then, mirroring the friendship of Angleton and Philby, McAuliffe learns his old friend Kritsky was indeed the traitor responsible for all his failed missions. By the series end, McAuliffe has become a lonely, childless veteran uncertain what he has accomplished. Yevgeny Tsipin learns his mission had been so ill-considered—that of bankrupting the U.S. economy—that his life’s work had only resulted in only one bad day for Wall Street. In the final moments, as the Cold War winds down, McAuliffe and Toritti discuss the meaning of their careers—despite the failures, the good guys won in the end. Or did they?
Evaluating the Series
The distinguished international cast featured actors able to mimic the mannerisms of historical personages, notably Tom Hollander who recreated Kim Philby’s famous stutter. (In 2003, Hollander had played another member of Philby’s ring, Guy Burgess, in the mini-series, The Cambridge Spies.) As with the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, which dealt with some of the same time period and themes, most critics recognized the series was more drama than history. In The Company, for example, Kim Philby’s cover was blown in 1954—in fact, he wasn’t discovered until 1963. While the producers said the film didn’t affirm the CIA but rather conveyed their respect for the lives of its agents, some reviewers noted the look back at the Cold War revealed that the duels between the CIA and KGB did not end with any clear-cut victors.
In Oct. 2007, the well-regarded miniseries was released by Sony Home Pictures on DVD and became available for download. Are the six-hours worthy of three evenings of your life?
Absolutely. As many have noted, the tone and pace of each episode is quite different, and each part can be viewed as stand-alone episodes or, better, in sequence. Some have complained the second film, with half set in Hungary, the second in Cuba, doesn’t have much character development. (note 4) Perhaps not, but each half of this film mirrors and reinforces the themes of the other—that while successive administrations were willing to give the CIA various marching orders to stir the Cold War pot, U.S. presidents weren’t willing to go to the brink of nuclear war. But Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had few qualms about inciting revolutions that left behind “blood under the bridge” in European streets and on tropical beaches. This, after all, is what kept the Cold War from becoming hot—contained battles that never led to a full scale holocaust.
True enough, the miniseries can’t match the complexity of the novel and the book remains one of the classics of all spy literature. But whether or not the events retold here are remembered history for older viewers or a Cliff’s Notes overview for younger watchers, the mini-series is heads above most other made-for-TV espionage productions. I’d deem it far superior to The Good Shepherd in terms of both character development and complexity. Highly recommended.
Notes
1. See Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction (Praeger Pub., 2005). P. 209.
2. A review of Spy Game is included in my “THE INDISPENSIBLES: THE BEST 30 SPY FILMS OF ALL TIME” posted at this website.
3. Many details used here came from the interviews included on the 2007 DVD extras.
4. Useful, and informative reviews of the series include:
Eliason, Marcus. “TNT's `The Company' an ambitious effort.” Aug. 2, 2007. Accessed: Feb. 12, 2008.
http://www.tnt.tv/series/thecompany/
Elber, Lynn. “Alfred Molina turns spy in `The Company.'” AP News. July 25, 2007. Accessed. Feb. 12, 2008.
http://www.tnt.tv
For more reviews, interviews, essays, and explorations into literary, film, and TV spies, check out the other files posted at
WWW.Spywise.net
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