Our latest pandemic binge watch is The Americans. We are lucky to have so much good TV to pass evenings at home. This series alone offers something like sixty hours of viewing. We are nearly half way through. I expect we will take a break soon, watch something else before coming back for the second half in a few months. You can have too much of a good thing.
The Americans is cleverly conceived and written and well acted. The lead couple are a Welshman and an American woman, partners in real life, playing a pair of KGB agents deeply embedded into Washington society. It is set in the 1980’s, in the Reagan era, as the cold war was raging but Russia was starting to implode.
The choice of the 1980’s is very clever. It allows the writers to be somewhat more balanced in their scripts. Anything more recent would surely feel forced to be more jingoistic to retain mass US appeal. It is just about acceptable to provoke thoughts about equivalence between Reagan’s CIA and Andropov’s KGB, in both moral and practical terms. In that sense the show is quite courageous.
To my taste, the show is improving as we progress through its series. In series one, a chase for ratings and funds led to fast-moving, sensational storylines that stretched credulity too far. The lead couple live with their kids in American suburbia, and happen to have a senior FBI agent as a neighbour. In the very first episode the neighbour is suspicious, because of course the lead couple are gallivanting around in their mainly nocturnal double lives.
But once the show became established, and the writers could plot many series, priorities changed and that led the pace to slow. An intriguing element is how the KGB insists on recruiting the teenage children of the protagonists, something that could only be developed at a cautious pace. Other storylines become stretched over multiple episodes as well and become more credible as a result, and a slow build up of tension replaces most of the adrenaline rush of violent resolutions. A covert life is surely a very patient and tense one, and the series is does an excellent job of exploring the human side of this sort of existence.
The longer I watch the show, the more one primary message becomes obvious. Apart from being cruel, covert operations must be stunningly wasteful and often doomed. Much happens in our name, but we little about it and there is unlikely to be much scrutiny of activities.
The Americans does an excellent job of portraying how tough it is to keep activities restricted. Because nobody can be trusted, there need to be many levels of security clearance and a huge number of audits and checks carried out, all of which must make progress next to impossible. It is not just the scientists who must be vetted, but the maintenance engineers, janitors, door staff, administrators and everybody else, and a determined adversary will inevitably target the weakest link in the chain.
A neat example is how the male star infiltrates a senior FBI office by wooing a secretary. His entry point is to convince her that he is secretly auditing the department of her boss. The story is credible because surely that must happen, and relatively easy to pull off with some accreditation that the secretary cannot seek to check because the supposed department of her suitor is so confidential that nobody is supposed to know about it. The web of departments and clearances and verifications must surely be almost impossible to disentangle.
It may be a little sensationalised, but an extension of this concept means that many characters are somehow playing both sides as double agents or triple agents. When everybody knows something embarrassing about everybody else, this must be a likely outcome.
Ultimately, the secret activity becomes largely for its own purpose and otherwise futile, because true technological advantage will usually be fleeting. The value for money must surely be terrible. In our cyber age, this must be even more true now than in the 1980's of The Americans.
But the worst part of covert activity is how it must be sold so the population accepts it. Within a state, corporations and individuals are accountable under law. States themselves have few such limitations. International law is flimsy and routinely ignored, including by states claiming moral high ground. And somehow we are supposed to think this is a good thing.
So we have a retiring MI6 officer giving an interview to Time in which the interviewer asks how we are supposed to trust the ethics of his organisation, and all he can say is that they are good chaps who police themselves. We have semi-official state propaganda that aims to make us feel happy that Mossad and/or the CIA have taken out an Iranian nuclear scientist. Even Saint Barack timed the extra-judicial assassination of Bin Laden for electoral gain.
We only swallow it because we are constantly fed jingoistic messages, about axes of evil, about national security interests, about the unique heroism of our armed forces and about the evil intentions of our adversaries. There is not much detail: Americans are not asked to ponder why a Saudi war should be supported while an Iranian one should be countered. A neat episode in The Americans has the KGB trying to expose Reagan for his overt support of apartheid South Africa. Good luck with that one: such nuanced thinking is not encouraged, and sadly beyond the wit or interest of most citizens anyway.
It is the jingoistic propaganda which is the source material for the worst forms of populism, and the cynical practices of so-called civilised nations which give succour to autocrats elsewhere. If the true goal is uprisings leading to regime change, why do we make our own side seem so unattractive and offer such a barrage of propaganda opportunities? How can we pretend to promote cooperation between nations when we brazenly act in ways that undermine it?
One of the saddest legacies of Hitler was the belief in the west that he was defeated by war and that appeasement was by its nature a bad thing. Another word for appeasement is diplomacy. In the same way, perhaps the saddest legacy of the Reagan era is that the CIA defeated Russian communism. In truth, Russian communism imploded under its own contradictions, steered by a rare statesman in Gorbachev. Indeed, Russian communism appears to be making a comeback.
No, covert activity is part of the problem and never the solution. A well-led world would strive to systemically reduce covert activity. It tends to mushroom otherwise, because of the lack of scrutiny and the impossibility of its goals. The US and China appear to be in the process of making the same mistakes once again and ratcheting up a new cold war. We will all be losers.
The Americans is an excellent show. It makes me sad that its main message, so powerfully demonstrated, is not a routine part of discourse in society. Of all the things we should be marching about, I believe it is covert activity by our own side that should be the top target. One day this will happen, but humanity has to find a way of unwrapping itself from its national flags and their jingoistic messages before it happens.
The Americans did revive one more thought in my head. Might Donald Trump somehow be a Russian asset? Even if the idea is a little farfetched, the show suggests it is feasible, and it would certainly explain a lot of his behaviour. If so, the last month has played out as an absolute dream for Russia: by extension, it would now have tens of millions of assets. What a frightening thought that is.
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