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The parents who came in from the cold — 20 Comments

  1. I have watched the series you refer to – The Americans (2013 TV series). A good series but very graphic scenes of violence that didn’t need to be there. More sex than necessary as well.

  2. “The Americans” is definitely bingeable. I enjoyed it. The husband and wife actors held up their parts. Margo Martindale, who played Mags Bennett, the criminal matriarch on “Justified,” played their KGB handler in “The Americans.”

    It was interesting the show creators moved the show back to the 1980s. Maybe there was more drama with the Cold War still on. Maybe Russian spying seemed less believable during the 2000s into the Obama years.

    “The 1980s are calling and they want their foreign policy back.”

    Yet Russian skulduggery today is the hot ticket for liberals. Maybe they would like to take another crack at it…

  3. I’m another who watched The Americans. Had mixed feelings about it but found it a good enough story to keep watching. And by the end very much wanted Elizabeth to end up in the Gulag.

    Anyway–I thought it was fairly unbelievable and looked around online trying to find out whether any such thing had actually been done for an extended period of time. What I found suggested it had not. Oddly, this story didn’t turn up. I didn’t construct my search very well, obviously. I am truly shocked that these people really did it and got away with it for so long.

  4. Good Cold War drama. It was quite consistent with the sort of thing intelligence circles told people in government and the military about illegals going back decades.

    Interesting differences with “The Americans” – spoiler alert if you haven’t watched it yet – are that (1) the older child (daughter) is recruited as teen and participates with her parents for some time, and (2) at the end, both children stayed in the United States (the younger one left at his boarding school; and the daughter got off the train on which she and her parents were escaping to Canada at the last stop in the US).

    One has to have a certain amount of empathy for the two teenaged sons of the real world couple: loss of both US and Canadian citizenship. On the other hand, what would their actual loyalties be? Could Canada or the US ever trust them? There is no easy answer for that….

  5. Not as bad as what the Kuklinski kids had to come to terms with….similar, and not

    one wonders… even more when one is from a refugee family… with history…

    one of my most interesting things i played with as a child, but cant find is this:
    The Latvian factory VEF (Valsts elektrotehnisk? fabrika) manufactured the camera from 1937 to 1943…

    The Minox subminiature camera attracted the attention of intelligence agencies in America, Britain and Germany, and most of the Eastern Bloc (East Germany, Romania) due to its small size and macro focusing ability. There is at least one document in the public record of 25 Minox cameras purchased by the US Office of Strategic Services intelligence organisation in 1942.

    The close-focusing lens and small size of the camera made it perfect for covert uses such as surveillance or document copying. The Minox was used by both Axis and Allied intelligence agents during World War II. Later versions were used well into the 1980s. The Soviet spy John A. Walker Jr., whose actions against the US Navy cryptography programs represent some of the most compromising intelligence actions against the United States during the Cold War era, used a Minox C to photograph documents and ciphers.

    yes it was fun to play with…
    among other things from people of that era…

    Decades later when i was getting married, my friend was also getting married… i guess i lucked out… cause his wife turned out to be a chinese spy, and homeland security is still trying to find her…

    then there is the training i got from corporations where dad worked and uncle, in corporate espionage… which today, i do security in IT on the side giving talks at the wall street security conferences..

    but, why not study those that had everything and switched sides losing it all?

    i do miss that minox…

  6. Anyway–I thought it was fairly unbelievable and looked around online trying to find out whether any such thing had actually been done for an extended period of time.

    Mac: I had a childhood fascination with Soviet spies. Some of what I read was romanticized, but even then spies didn’t behave as Elizabeth and Phillip did.

    Spies run networks. They find sources and receive information, which they pass on to their intelligence service. It’s high-pressure, tedious work but doesn’t involve breaking necks on a regular basis.

    Col Rudolph Abel was an important, long-term Soviet spy in the US. He helped run the Rosenbergs during the Manhattan Project. The FBI eventually caught Abel while he was posing as a painter and photographer in Brooklyn. He was later traded back to the Soviets for the U-2 pilot Gary Powers. His life looked nothing like “The Americans” couple.

  7. As I was reading this post I thought it sounded like the premise of The Americans. Had no idea that series was based on a true story. Fascinating.

  8. Spies live amazingly normal lives. They marry and have children like everyone else. Among my contemporaries those of us who weren’t married with children at the outset of our careers all were before retirement.

    The only difference was that with young children you have to limit what you tell them because they tend to chat with their playmates and teachers; at some level of maturity though, “Dad works really really long hours and travels all the time” doesn’t cut it, and you have a sit-down talk.

    The Russian illegals are a unique category, as described in the posted article. They were (are) completely on their own and subject to the laws of the host country, posing as nationals. The vast majority of case officers are under diplomatic protection and if discovered the worst penalty is likely being declared persona non grata.

    You would think no family could survive this level of stress but all my colleagues are still married, decades later.

  9. My wife and I were hooked on the TV show. It collected a large number of award nominations and wins, see here. I thought the production was just right. The whole 6 seasons are available on Amazon Prime and included with the subscription price if anyone is interested.

  10. Great post Neo … or pointer-tip, since I read the linked article, with keen interest. I write this, without reading other Comments first. I was unaware of this story, or the Series.

    At the top, it is obtuse to ‘wonder’ about the (at least hoped-for) role of any children of these plants. And the putative recruitment. This was a ‘feature’ from the get-go, not a ‘bug’.

    I did a Cold War hitch in military high-tech. Not an officer, not intelligence. But even in such relatively pedestrian environments, the lines do begin to blur. Like with the boys…

    I suspect when we look at Assange and Snowden et al, we are looking at the cutting edge of intelligence and spying. Clear & clean lines are not there … not very useful. Major blurring.

    The extreme value of a second-generation operative means that serious thought went into their handling. To transition an innocent child (or later adult) to incremental levels of awareness, and hopefully (some degree of) co-optation, needs to be done right.

    Of course, the game-board has changed, ‘out from under’ Alex and Tim. But just imagine the mirror-case … kids raised in Russia, now semi-stranded/exiled in the West: we’re talking profoundly unique individuals with matchless perspective.

  11. huxley: “It’s high-pressure, tedious work but doesn’t involve breaking necks on a regular basis.”

    One of my continuing complaints about the series was the amount of violence that Phillip and Elizabeth engaged in. Constant string of murders. I guess that’s just show biz– they had to keep the audience engaged–but it got preposterous.

  12. Very interesting that the spies used steganography to encode info in maps, much like the AI map maker that was cheating did.

    In a related way, an old Dean Koontz book had a significant twist being a US “city” actually being a training ground for Soviet kids to learn English and “be American”; I only just finished this 1982 book last week.

    The Russians were embarrassed at being caught, but also proud at doing it.

    Now, I think the Chinese have also been doing it, like Feinstein’s driver, but have better at avoiding being caught.

    Huawei’s IP thefts are tangentially related.

  13. Artfldgr
    The Minox was used by both Axis and Allied intelligence agents during World War II. Later versions were used well into the 1980s.

    The parents of childhood friends had a Minox camera. Interestingly enough, both parents had friends and relatives with Cold War connections. Come to think of it, the father himself did, as he made some spending money doing a report for a US government agency on on his visit to relatives in an Iron Curtain country.

    The Minox: A Closer Look at Every Spy’s Favorite Camera

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