TV SERIES REVIEW: The SPY
A Netflix Miniseries
Reviewed by Paul Kolbe
Paul Kolbe is Director of The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Kolbe also led BP’s global Intelligence and Analysis team supporting threat warning, risk mitigation, and crisis response. Prior to that, Kolbe served 25 years as an operations officer in the CIA. He was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service and served in Russia, the Balkans, Indonesia, East Germany, Zimbabwe, and Austria.
Anyone with experience running agent operations knows that many successful operations end badly. Incredible accomplishment is often offset by wrenching failure and tragic results. Contrary to their depictions in Hollywood, spy story endings are seldom uplifting.
The Netflix mini-series The Spy, starring Sasha Baron-Cohen, drives home with brutal clarity the truth that the very attributes needed for operational success can also lead to compromise and disaster. The audience knows from the first scene that this is not a story where the hero’s journey ends in triumph over adversity. Rather, we watch the hero overcome one obstacle after another, with each barrier only leading to another higher and more dangerous one.
In raw, emotional detail, The Spy explores and exposes the gritty toll operations can take on agents, on their families, and on their handlers. At the same time, it shows the improbable success that these sacrifices can achieve. The show raises the question: to whom does the leader of an intelligence operation owe most responsibility – to the agent on the line or to the mission? What is the right balance between an agent’s life and the value of the intelligence collected?
Eli Cohen was an Egyptian born Jew who, while living in Egypt, showed early operational acumen by helping to secretly smuggle Jews to Israel. He was forced to emigrate to Israel in 1956 amidst an atmosphere of increasing Egyptian suspicion and repression of the Jewish community. Still driven to serve after arriving in Israel, Cohen worked as a counterintelligence analyst with the Israeli Defense Forces. He applied twice to Mossad, but was twice rejected, leading him to leave the IDF in frustration. Mossad assessed Cohen as too eager to be a reliable operative. He married Nadia Majald, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant, and settled into work as a department store clerk, resentful that Israeli society around him viewed him only as an Arab, oblivious to the risks he had taken to save other Jews.
In the early 1960’s, Israel faced a critical intelligence gap. Syrian forces were regularly targeting Israeli settlements and farms below the Golan Heights on banks of the Sea of Galilea. Syrian artillery and machine gun fire was inflicting casualties and creating enormous political pressure. Mossad had no assets in Damascus and could not provide intelligence on Syrian plans, intentions, or fortifications. Mossad looked feckless and unable to protect Israeli citizens.
Desperate to find a source capable of operating in the hostile, denied environment of military ruled Syria, Mossad again reviewed its files. It needed to find a trusted ethnic Arab, someone operationally astute and willing to take high risks. Eli Cohen’s name emerged from the pile of profiles. He was discreetly approached, and he accepted the call to duty without question or hesitation. Following an intense period of operational testing and training, Cohen was dispatched to Argentina in 1961 to build a cover legend as the heir of a wealthy Syrian businessman who had settled in Buenos Aires. His mission: to establish contact with the Syrian Embassy in Damascus, build a relationship with the Syrian Defense Attaché, and find a way to Damascus. He portrayed himself as a Syrian patriot, eager to return to his homeland, and with ample cash to put at the disposal of the Bath party (illegal in 1961, but which came to power in 1963.)
What follows is an incredible operational chronical of Cohen boldly creating relationships which he leverages to ratchet himself ever closer to the circles of power in Damascus. He plays on greed, avarice, ambition, and vice, settling himself up as a trusted confident of the most senior levels of the Syrian army. The intelligence which begins to flow via clandestine transmissions from Baghdad to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv is game changing. For the first time, Israel is able to disrupt Syrian attacks on its citizens, but it also gains surprising insight into Syrian plans to strangle Israel’s strategic water supply.
Quality intelligence creates insatiable demand for more. As Cohen’s access increased, the prospect of even better product tantalized. Cohen’s handlers overlooked the niggling signs of an operation unraveling, the compounding coincidences and mistakes that lead to compromise. Further, Cohen’s impulsive recklessness, which Mossad had first assessed as making him unsuitable for service, drove him take ever greater risks.
Sasha Baron Cohen, best known for the outlandish comedy of Ali G and Borat, would seem an unlikely choice to portray the darkly suspenseful story of Eli Cohen. He is brilliant, capturing the dual life and personality of an agent operating under deep cover, in an assumed identity far behind enemy lines. A simple routine of slicing and eating bread in imitation of life at home with his wife serves as a powerful reminder of a life he has left behind, and to which he dares not cling.
Typical of espionage dramatizations, The Spy features a number of scenes which undoubtedly stem from Hollywood’s penchant to juice the narrative rather than depict reality. An improbable murder, a ridiculous surveillance mistake, the timely intervention of a beautiful and deadly Mossad blonde, and a footrace with border guard dogs, are all likely fantasy. But other incidents, which should have only sprung from the fevered mind of a scriptwriter, are amazingly true. The viewer must decide which is which.
The Spy tells a story that needed to be told and tells it well. It adds to the body of dramatized real events which capture essential elements of the spying profession’s many contradictions. It reveals the scars inflicted not just on the protagonists, but on all of those around them – on their families, on those they work for, and on those they work against.
This miniseries earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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