As soon as the Russian spy scandal broke, commentators rushed to lazy pop cultural comparisons: James Bond, the novels of John le Carre, the BBC TV series Spooks.
Yet no one seemed to mention the one bit of TV that the operation truly resembles (in structure and scope, not in success of execution): Michael Apted’s amazing series of Up documentaries.
That Russian espionage should be a simulacrum of TV should surprise no-one. After all, says liberal commentator Yulia Latynina in Sergei Loiko’s vivid LA Times piece,
“Putin’s Russia has an imitation of democracy, an imitation of the empire and now an imitation of espionage. The only thing Putin’s Russia is not even pretending to have is an imitation of an economy.”
But back to the films. The first of these, called 7 Up, was made in 1964. It gathered 14 seven year olds from different walks of life with the goal of following up on their life situation every seven years as they grow and become adults.
Motivated by the Jesuit motto of “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” Apted wanted to explore just how prescriptive the British class system was and how much a child’s background could be a predictor of future success or failure.
In the documentary, the poshest kids did in fact manage to achieve many of the ambitious educational and career goals that they had at 7.
Which is what the SVR was doubtless hoping for with its sleeper spies, going one further than Apted by paying all their expenses.
The logic must have been that if7 Up’s resident preps John and Andrew managed to become the Oxbridge trained lawyers they imagined being at 7, then Anna Chapman, with her money and ambassador’s daughter pedigree would also achieve her dream – of gathering nuclear secrets for the Motherland.
No wonder her Facebook profile declared (with painful irony, as it turns out!):
“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it”.
But unlike Apted’s series, what the espionage episode really demonstrated was not the progress of the sleeper spies, but the decline of the agency that sent them.
As Loiko shows in his interviews with retired Russian spies from the Soviet era, there is much shame at how the mighty KGB has fallen:
One former spy says:
“It is really a national shame and humiliation for Russia and its special services,” said the retired officer, who worked for many years as a spy-controller in the West. The U.S. documents “scream of the despicable level of professional training of the alleged Russian spies and those who trained and prepared them for this work.”
“I can’t believe they could try to pull a circus stunt like that — send to the United States a whole bunch of obviously unprofessional young men and women to work as ‘illegals’.
“Agents were sitting put in their host countries filing no information to the center, receiving no instructions and having no incentive to continue and no clue what to do,” said the spy controller. “The center was dead, with the remaining people sitting there, playing Solitaire.”
Historian Nikita Petrov also condemned “the desires of a gang of adventurist individuals to lead ordinary lives and build their family future in the United States at the expense of the Russian taxpayers”.
But the real tragedy here is not the downfall of the KGB, but the perverse situation of a country whose citizens feel they must resort to espionage in order to be achieve such modest dreams.