Week six linkspam

[jae]

A Forbes interview with the David Madden, president of Fox Television Studios, about an executive's look at producing The Americans.

A Vulture interview with Alison Wright (Martha) on Martha's chances of survival and other matters.

An Esquire interview with South African actor Cliff Simon, who played Yossi-the-Mossad-agent in "The Deal" (episode 205).

A Shape interview with Avital Zeisler, the self-defense expert who trained Keri Russell (Elizabeth) how to fight using something that could pass as systema.

TV Guide's piece "Underneath the Wigs," based on an interview with hair and makeup artist Peg Schierholz.

A Greencastle Echo-Pilot interview with makeup artist Lori Hicks.

An FX-produced mini-documentary takes a look at the KGB Rezidentura and what it took to build the set.

The official description has been released for episode 210.

Columnist Blake Rutherford from Arkansas Business makes a comparison between the show's political stories and the real-life politics of today.

There are some new spoilers from TV Guide's Ask Ausiello column.

The fashion blog Into the Gloss has a piece on how to replicate Elizabeth's early 80s look.

The Americans is now airing in Israel, with each episode airing the Sunday after it aired in the U.S. and Canada.

And there are two new 8tracks.com fanmixes for the show: Sorry I Didn't Kill You and Party At Ground Zero.

Comments

[treonb]

Thank you for that article! It's very interesting. What does he mean by this sentence: "Certainly, the illegals are used in other countries with difficult counterintelligence environments like Britain, for example, but rarely in "soft" countries like Austria or Finland."

I've been thinking about what I wrote.. and I do take some of it back. I can see the advantages to having somebody in the country full time forever. Even if they aren't native-native, they'll still have less chance of getting caught. And if you send in a regular spy, he'll have to rebuild his networks and connections every few years. But I'm still not sure those advantages are worth the effort (both money-wise and psychological). We don't know how many have been turned or caught. I realize the KGB disagrees ;-)

[jae]

I'm not an intelligence community expert, so I can only guess what he meant by that sentence--but my guess would be that there are countries that put a lot of money and resources into counterintelligence, of which the UK is unsurprisingly one (and I'd imagine Israel too, and likely Canada, certainly the U.S.), while countries like Austria don't have very many counterintelligence resources and are therefore easier to penetrate with more "ordinary" spies.

-J

[treonb]

Makes sense.

I found this: Inside soviet military intelligence

The basic flow of agent material which is not subject to particular suspicion goes from countries with hard regimes into countries with more soft regimes. In the opinion of the GRU, an opinion fortified by the experience of many years, the hardest country is Great Britain, followed by France, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium and Holland. As soft countries the GRU includes Finland, Ireland and Austria among others.