theamericans | Week six linkspam

jae posting in

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jae

No pressure there! ;)

To put it bluntly, though, those of us who are outside of the U.S. kind of don't matter that much in the end. Like, it's nice for FX to sell their show to other markets, but the only eyeballs that will ultimately matter in terms of the question of renewal-or-not are American ones. (I worry about this sometimes when I think about the percentage of our comm that's non-U.S.)

-J

From:

treonb

We could all PRETEND to be Americans!

From:

quantumreality

You know, there was actually a newspaper article - I want to say, about 15 years ago now? About "illegal" Canadians in the USA, who were in the US on a combination of overstaying student visas, or just semipermanently staying in the US (in those days US Customs pretty much took you at your word if you said you were making a day trip and didn't bother to check up on you) and working under the table.

Considering many of us speak essentially the same language, albeit with dialectical differences, as English-speaking Americans do, it's not surprising that Canadians got (and still get) a pretty easy ride of it. :P

From:

jae

Okay, I'll have you know that the context of the comm made me completely misread what you meant by "illegal Canadians in the USA" at first. :D

...and now I'm kind of intrigued by that concept!

-J

From:

quantumreality

At this point I would totally be unsurprised to hear that CSIS was running some kind of program like that. The cultural adjustment wouldn't even BE that much of one, either. :P

From:

jae

Yeah, it would be totally doable. HMMMM. ;)

-J

From:

treonb

I'd be very surprised if the Canadians don't have spies in the US, but this is exactly the issue that's been eating at me from the beginning. What would an illegals program give the Canadians (or anybody else) that a regular spy wouldn't?

It seems to me that everything we see on the show can be done just as well by a regular spy whose family lives back home.

Pretending to have a back story - like when Stan talks about where he was when Kennedy was killed and P&E join in - did they really need to live in the US for 20 years for that?

From:

jae

I've said this before when we've discussed this in email, but as long as there's a country called Russia and they're still running an illegals programme, I don't think it'll ever be possible for us to know what they feel they get out of that sort of spying (or for that matter what the Soviet Union got out of it) that they couldn't get equally well out of other kinds of spying. There are certainly people who agree with you that it's not worth the time and effort and expense (both Russians and Americans) and have written extensively about that. But they must get something out of it, or else they wouldn't still be doing it--even if it's just something like the psychological advantage of having a type of spy no one else has, or maybe pacifying conservative elements in their government that still have an emotional investment in the patriotism of the programme. (This interview in Foreign Policy with former Spetsnaz officer Boris Volodarsky after the U.S. illegals were arrested in 2010 gets at some of the other things they might think they get out of an illegals programme, for what it's worth.)

-J

From:

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 ;-)

Edited Date: 2014-04-01 02:24 pm (UTC)

From:

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

From:

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.

From:

quantumreality

There are some unique features of American culture that can only really be appreciated as an American, which is why Philip and Elizabeth were pushed into this program of extensive practice and indoctrination of subsuming their identities as Misha and Nadezhda in favor of Philip and Elizabeth.

Even Canadians, for all that they can take on a veneer of Americanization, are still essentially apart in some undefinable ways from Americans unless they actually live and act as Americans.

From:

treonb

I've already talked Jae's ear off about this, but I'll add a bit more ;-)

There are some unique features of American culture that can only really be appreciated as an American

Right, but I don't think a few years of intense training and then living in the US for 5,10,15 years can give you what growing up in that environment will give you. There will always be that one little thing you didn't think of, or didn't pick up yet. You'll still be different. Add to that the regional differences, in language and attitude.

If I were trying to build a cover, I'd therefore go with somebody who's not American, so any slip will be easily attributed to 'well, she's not from here'.

The illegal option means you put in all that effort and put your people through hell, when they can still slip up and still be caught. There might be less of a chance of that, but there's also less of a chance that when things get hairy, you'll pull them out in time. Because losing an illegal would be much more of a loss than a regular spy.

They do have an advantage of being there, and building long term contacts, but when we're talking about an ideological war like US vs. USSR, why not use a local who supports your cause?

From:

jae

If I were trying to build a cover, I'd therefore go with somebody who's not American, so any slip will be easily attributed to 'well, she's not from here'.

For what it's worth, the real-life illegals programme did/does use this tactic (not for everyone, but for many of them). The "German" illegals recently arrested after having been in Germany since the 80s had Austrian cover identities, for example. And often they would train illegals in two foreign languages, and one would be their cover identity's language, and one would be the language of the country they were going to be sent to.

-J