Intelligence operatives from MI6 to the CIA share their secrets
The riveting story of America’s plan to quickly strike Al Qaida and the Taliban is told in the first episode of Netflix hit Spy Ops.
We love a good conspiracy thriller. We’re easily sucked in by the conflict of secrecy and spies, honour and betrayal, the grim atmosphere, and complex morality. The world of the spy story, both in fiction and in life, is founded on deception, betrayal and duplicity. And, safe in our lounge rooms, we can’t get enough of them.
Following the September 11 terror attacks, the genre came in from the cold; dark conspiratorial visions highly suspicious of our political institutions became a part of mainstream TV viewing with shows such as 24, State of Play, Prison Break, Burn Notice, House of Cards and Homeland. More recently The Bureau, The Black List, The Night Agent, The Recruit, Fauda and The Old Man have hit our screens.
They all operate in a macrocosm of political ideologies and national allegiances, where there are few truths, and criminal activities and the use of violence are routinely sanctioned.
As a teenager I was fixated on the tradecraft of spies gleaned from books: clandestine meetings, “going grey”, to blend into crowds, or dressing down to eavesdrop in coffee shops, building a “legend” or a fake cover story and dead letter drops. It’s a fascination that endures, though I’ve always admired the notion of the spy as swashbuckler at work in the raw, gritty reality of field operations rather than salaried, world-melancholic, and disillusioned bureaucrat.
Netflix’s new documentary true crime series holds obvious appeal to anyone fixated on the spy story, a show that promises intelligence operatives from MI6 to the CIA sharing insider stories of spy craft, Cold War campaigns, and coups carried out by covert agents. And featuring interviews with actual espionage officials, officers, and spies.
The series is from the hugely successful international factual company Big Media, which specialises in documentary TV about espionage, true crime, military, history, wildlife and science. Founded in 2009, Big Media has produced more than 70 original unscripted series for the world’s biggest entertainment platforms, Netflix, Discovery, Amazon, and Disney among its clients.
Created by Isabelle Gendre, who co-wrote and directed the first episode, the series follows other Big Media shows such as Spycraft and Terrorism Close Calls and was conceived as a kind of antidote to the way public trust in governments is at record lows.
“We are living in a time when it’s difficult to discern fact from fiction, and people are given lots of stories, lots of things to think about our spy agencies, about our government, about our world today,” Jon Lowe, Big Media’s co-founder and chairman, who serves as executive producer of Spy Ops, says. “And it is really important to highlight the successful missions of the CIA and other organisations who are working to protect us and do it in an objective documentary format like ours.”
This is all very well but it comes at a time when Americans, especially it seems, have never felt more deeply that espionage is basically dishonourable and somehow un-American. Time reported recently on the way the CIA, NSA and FBI “had been meddling in politics and breaking the law to protect the interests of their agencies and preferred political bosses, not the American people.”
The problem with espionage services is just who is the enemy? As George Smiley says in Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy, “Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy.”
Notwithstanding all this, the series is already a huge success for Netflix. The show found itself on the streamers’ Top Ten chart in its first week with 11,500,000 hours viewed in just two days – and kept rising and trending.
Spy Ops looks at several missions from the CIA, MI6, Mossad and Russian SVR, examining not just the operations but those who led them. They include Operation Just Cause, the US military invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega, and MI6’s Operation Pimlico, an account of the lifting of British-run agent Oleg Gordievsky out of Moscow in 1985.
It also looks at Project Azorian, the attempt by the US military to recover a sunken Soviet submarine during the Cold War, and a dramatisation of Mehmet Ali Agca’s attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II. There are some extraordinary interviews, and the series is packed with new unseen military footage.
The first episode is an account of Operation Jawbreaker, America’s first operation into Afghanistan, a complex and seemingly innovative plan to quickly strike Al Qaida and the Taliban. And it’s a fascinating, often riveting, story told with the propulsion of a military thriller, although at times the operation it documents seems so cack-handed and comical to be true. But there’s little doubt that the insertion of a team of CIA operatives and many duffel bags of cash into the so-called “graveyard of empires” led to the relief of Kabul. Though they needed a great deal of local help, much of it on horseback.
At the start, we meet CIA officer Gary Schroen, a veteran of many clandestine operations, nearing retirement. It’s September 19, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smouldering from the 9/11 attacks. Schroen is deputised to start the fight back. His orders from his superior are to form a detachment, get into Kabul, and break the Taliban. “And when you do, kill bin Laden, cut his head off and put it on dry ice and ship it back so I can show the President.”
He picks 10 operatives for the mission. They gather arms from a huge secret CIA weapons cache but are forced to buy uniforms and clothing from a local second-hand store. They also pick up three million dollars in cash, “to induce the local warlords to do the right thing.” This was to be a covert cash-fed action.
The team’s mission is to work with the Northern Alliance, a loose collection of militias opposed to the Taliban and convince them to side with the USA to end the reign of terror unleashed by the Taliban and their radical ideologies.
At this stage it must be said, it’s all looking a little ad hoc and hastily improvised. They fly into Afghanistan on a CIA-modified Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter piloted by CIA officers but according to Schroen’s account only just make it. They land in the Panjshir Valley on September 26, 2001, within 15 days of the attacks on US soil, and meet with Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a local commander for the Northern Alliance.
Then they help him plan his offensive against the Taliban. As part of the mission, they attempt to map out the front line of operations and plot the enemy positions for US air attacks. Unfortunately, they are all futile and wasted. As General John Mulholland, a Special Forces commander says, “We used to refer to Afghanistan’s early days as Mad Max meets Star Wars – we were bringing ancient methods of war on horseback and combining it with 21st century technology.”
It’s an entertaining and informative start to the series if, as many critics have complained, just a little jingoistic, and it’s never explained just why the Taliban exited Kabul so easily. But an end sequence does show just what happened when the Americans left for good in 2021, the chaos left behind, and just what a pack of cards the occupation had been.
There are many insightful interviews, not just with Americans but several of the Northern Alliance commanders who worked on the operation.
It’s a series built around artfully filmed talking heads and re-enactments of which there are many. While controversial in documentary series, here they add nuance and certainly add texture to the personal accounts, as well as creating mood and tension.
They’re well executed, too, highly filmic, the actors are often indistinguishable from the CIA operatives and the first episode provides an insightful introduction to the moral, political and cultural consequences of intelligence work.
Spy Ops, is streaming on Netflix.
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