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CHALK MARKS / OPINION — Spying isn’t a funny business. The stakes are too high, egos too big, mistakes too consequential. That isn’t to say spying can’t be funny; every operation has funny moments, some bordering on the ridiculous.
I have a friend who on his second night in country on his first assignment received an unscheduled-meeting request to see a contact that evening. Not yet familiar with the roads, my friend followed a squiggle on his map through an old town until the dark road became so narrow that his mirrors began scraping stone. The road ended at a staircase.
With no way to back up the winding alley, my friend knew he wasn’t going to make the meeting. Not the stuff of heroes, sort of humiliating, but a mistake of the sort that if dealt with properly is forgiven because espionage takes place in the real world. Stuff happens. Abandoning an ops vehicle in a city center in the middle of the night because you couldn’t back up, however, is a problem of a different magnitude.
Unvanquished, the newly-minted case officer climbed onto the car’s roof and with a bit of local language, pockets full of cash, and lots of chutzpah, found a group of wayward youths and paid them to carry the car backwards out of the alleyways. A long process and not as discreet as one would hope, but desperate measures and all that.
It’s a great and funny story. No one was smiling the next day though when my friend told his Chief of Station what happened. But there were a lot of laughs (and admiration) as the story made its way around the world on the spy gossip network.
Spy stories are always funnier after the fact. I once hitched a ride in a remote area with a guy who chain-smoked cigarettes through his tracheal tube. To make it worse, he was talkative, and every so often to clear the phlegm from his throat he would have to hand me his cigarette, cover the throat tube with his right hand, and launch a lugie out the window. All while driving a stick shift. I only recently recovered from this experience. It was funny the moment I got out of that car but not a second before.
Mistaken identity in operations is as funny as in real life, but twice as cringy. I once inherited a communications plan with dubious ‘oral paroles’ for a contact who had been out of touch. I was to wait on a Sunday, during a certain time on certain corner, posing as a tourist flagging down a ride. When a car of a certain make pulled up, I was to ask the driver of a certain age wearing a black cap how much he would charge to take me to a well-known tourist spot some distance away (my oral parole).
The driver would respond with a greatly inflated price (his parole response), and I would know he was my contact. Unfortunately, the make of the car was ubiquitous, the driver middle-aged and wearing a Yankees cap, the destination common, and with currency depreciation, by the time I met the guy, the price was spot-on to current rates. Twenty confusing minutes later, which included me asking him for documents and his passing me his car registration, it was clear that I was in the wrong car and the officer who had designed this meeting plan, needed to be exiled to Headquarters.
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I can’t speak for all spies, but I don’t think that the majority find comedic portrayals of espionage offer much to the narrative or emotions of living a life in intelligence in the way dramas and thrillers do, but real spies do love jokes at their own expense more than anyone.
Good spy comedies don’t reveal anything about espionage, but they can amplify the funniest and most ridiculous quirks of the trade. Humor that pokes at the self-serious nature of spies and the truly serious nature of their work is like a cowbell – sometimes you just need more – and it ends up being all that anyone really remembers.
The classic spy comedy ‘Spies Like Us’ is a perfect example. I encourage you to watch/rewatch this spy comedy staple, but I warn you, this is not a great film, despite a few great laughs. Spies Like Us came out in 1985, when farcical comedy film quotes were the basis of conversation among dudes of a certain age. To this day, I am confident I can have a soul-searching conversation with my high school and college friends using only lines from ‘Stripes’, ‘Caddyshack’, ‘Spies Like Us’ and other comedy brand names of the era.
I am not a comedy film fan by nature. I love the good ones, but it’s not a genre I seek out, so on a few occasions, I have been late to the joke.
This was the case on my first day at CIA, when I entered a conference room of new hires. I said hello to the one woman already seated around the conference, and we were soon joined by five others. Then the door opened and entered a man I will call Wavy Phil. He looked nervous but seeing as he was a late arrival, he suddenly assumed a half-serious half-joking posture and strode up to the nearest person, offered his hand and greeted him “Doctor!”
He then went around the table shaking everyone’s hand, calling each of us “Doctor,” and to my bafflement everyone responded with “Doctor” in turn. At a complete loss, I answered “Doctor” as well. As Wavy Phil got to the end of the room, everyone broke into a laugh. Ice was broken and friends were forged. Wavy Phil is my friend to this day.
I admit now that I observed colleagues make similar entrances and greet one another as “Doctor” for several more years before I learned that Wavy Phil had reenacted the most famous scene from Spies Like Us, and to this day, I and other former colleagues will occasionally greet each other as “Doctor.” It’s a funny scene for any viewer, but for a group of professionals that spend much of their working life pretending to be something other than what they are, “Doctor” became comedic shorthand for just how absurd the spy business can be.
There are two types of espionage comedies – the ridiculous and the sardonic. ‘Spies Like Us’ reflects the former, and The Coen Brothers’ ‘Burn After Reading’ is the flag-bearer for the latter.
Burn is a darkly funny and cynical film with few one-liners, but it did lead to a window of time in which officers ended every meeting in my office by flapping their arms and walking out in faux-outrage shouting “This is a persecution!” It made me laugh every time.
Burn is more on-brand Coen Brothers film than a spy movie, and it goes all in on the dark humor and cynicism of American bureaucracy the directors are known for. With a superstar cast all playing against type, the film gets the underbelly of mid-level bureaucrats caught in the Beltway machine just right, and I expect those familiar with the Federal Government will find the film funnier than those who expected Clooney and Pitt to act like hero spies instead of the ham-handed fools they portray.
The “persecuted” John Malkovich is brilliant and Frances McDormand perfect, but for me JK Simmons as the untitled “senior” CIA official, steals the movie in only two scenes. Simmons’ final scene, sorting out the chaos that has taken place, including dead bodies, plastic surgery and an off and on-again fugitive escape to Venezuela, is the soul of the movie, comedic genius and perhaps the best combination of government ennui and efficiency ever shown on screen.
A few espionage films and tv shows have tried to combine the ridiculous and the sardonic, but none have succeeded to the degree of the bawdy and brilliant animated show ‘Archer’.
There was a time in the early 2010s, when it was impossible to enter a CIA station and not hear references to ‘Archer’. To this day, any food crumbs left in Station spaces leads to someone calling out “that’s how you get ants,” the catch line of the series’ 2009 pilot.
‘Archer’ may not have been written just for spies, but it appeals to that community on many levels as its apparent goal was to get laughs by skewering the sacred tenants of intelligence organizations.
I don’t know what else to make of the decision to give ‘Archer’s’ International Secret Intelligence Service the same acronym as a real terrorist organization, other than to announce that lines would be crossed. When 2009-era ISIS was latent it was pretty funny, but a few years later, when resurgent ISIS was wreaking havoc across the globe, it was unfunny enough to prompt ‘Archer’s’ organization to merge with the CIA in Season 6, an ironic and hilarious storyline in itself.
Archer gets it laughs from focusing on the dysfunction in the functions of spying, targeting the funny underbelly of espionage through a misfit team of accountants, HR professionals, and analysts. Two great examples of this are captured in the Season One pilot “Mole Hunt” and the third episode “Diversity Hire.”
Mole Hunt starts with a training exercise and a minute in, the viewer knows that this cartoon is not for kids, Russians are always the bad guys, and lines will be crossed. The premise that personal expenses and accounting issues lead to uncovering a Russian mole is right out of tradecraft 101 and rings the bell of truth while making fun of bureaucracy at every turn.
Running jokes about accounting, desk assignments, lack of security, and the role of HR officers combined with the implication that spies are only interested in themselves, sex, and cocktails, provided fodder for hours of water cooler conversations in CIA stations across the globe.
Mole Hunt sets the table for Archer’s brand of humor, and Diversity Hire cuts to the bone. When this episode aired in 2009, the CIA was at the forefront of seeking to improve diversity in the workplace and the topic was not as ubiquitous as it is today. CIA was doing the right thing far before most organizations, but that’s not to say there wasn’t some clunkiness in the integration of this needed evolution into the practices and traditions of intelligence operations.
Diversity Hire goes all in on the evolution, poking fun at everyone, but Archer and his tradecraft and mommy-issues most of all. From the weekly all-hands meeting that opens the episode to the revelation that its Archer’s bad phone tradecraft that keeps getting people killed and prompting the need for a new hire, the episode reflects the show’s uncanny ability to localize the topical issues of the day amidst the serious contexts of espionage to great and hilarious effect.
When the temperatures rise this summer and you just want to chill out and not think about anything too serious, I recommend a spy comedy binge. There’s just enough tradecraft in spy comedies to keep you interested, and more than enough laughs to get you through a family vacation with your in-laws. As always, here’s an operational plan to get you going:
Primary Window:
‘Archer’ Season One – an episode or two a night, during air travel, and after the kids are in bed. Play the “which character are they?” game at family reunions.
Alternate Window:
Start with ‘Burn After Reading’ on a rainy Sunday afternoon and chase it with ‘Spy’ and Melissa McCarthy in the evening, my favorite of the farcical spy comedy films.
Beverage:
Primary – slurp a smoothie like Brad Pitt in ‘Burn’ (even he doesn’t look cool with a smoothie)
Alternate – slurp your third martini like Archer’s mom Mallory
Snack: No Snacks – That’s how you get ants!
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