I don’t remember. He was out in the sticks in Kazakstan which may have made the difference.
I doubt Martha would even be able to make it to the embassy gates; she’s going to be under surveillance, and there’s surely a contingency plan if she tries that. Most likely all trying to get to the embassy would accomplish would be her winding up in a KGB prison.
It would be somewhat easier for Phillip, Elizabeth, & Paige to flee if their cover was blown, but Henry would be in New Hampshire. The Jennings can’t just show up at his school if they’re on the lamb so either Henry would have to responsible for dropping of the radar himself (& they’d need a quick way to signal him) or the Centre would have to keep agents in the vicinity of the school to kidnap him.
Or they could just let him stay. It will be the same when he is in college. I thought you were talking about when they have to go out in the middle of the night.
Ahhhh…yeah, I would imagine.
Embassy people in Moscow, including Americans, used to make a killing off of used western goods. Then the State Department decided that it was wrong to make a profit off the locals while representing America, so the practice was halted. Most other countries didn’t have those sorts of reservations. You could, however, still sell your used things, but couldn’t exceed the purchase price. I sold my stereo gear in Africa to a disco owner for the new price. The equipment was still perfectly serviceable, and even at the new price was a far better deal than they could ever have hoped to find in that part of the world, given the hefty import VAT taxes.
Americans were also not supposed to buy rubles on the black market, but were instead required to buy them at the embassy exchange rate. Nobody else in the country did that other than the US. At the time, black market rate for rubles:dollars was 8:1. At the embassy, it was .8/1. Most employees had “a guy” and skirted the regulation.
Hajario wrote: “As I said in the next sentence which you cut off for some weird reason.”
Whoops, sincere apologies.
Apparently there were; actress Alison Wright (who did her homework) discusses a little bit about some real-life ‘spy wives’ in the links below. According to her, a lot of them ended up committing suicide after they found out how badly they’d been manipulated and lied to.
While it’s basically a fantasy, a lot of plot twists are actually true to life in this series. In this article (about halfway down), the showrunners discuss that Nina’s death from last year was actually very close to the way Soviets did execute their prisoners.
I know someone who served as a diplomat in the CCCP thrice between the 60’and the 80’s and she said that it was not always so especially in the 1960’s. Her words “sometime in the late 1970’s, the Soviets forgot how to make consumer goods”.
We visited the CCCP in 1991**, as the family as part of an international military study tour. I was pretty young, my main memory is of my Dad never being around and my mother and other wives going crazy buying stuff in various department stores** using foreign currency. If you had hard currency, meaning one which was traded on the international market, and all of them did, Rupees, Riyals, Takas, Bhats etc you could empty the shelves before you emptied your wallet, and get good stuff, my mother still has some of it.
- The Coup occurred a week after we returned. Dad was not surprised.
** Which my mother tells me were off limits to the average Soviet.
I have a similar report from being there a year earlier, but I think due to your youth you misunderstood some of it. I checked out one of the hard currency shops, but it was not of much interest. It carried fashions and beers and such that you’d find in Western Europe, for hard currency prices similar to or higher than what you’d find there.
The department stores where you could “empty the shelves before you emptied your wallet” were the ones that used rubles, and the reason was that you could get so many rubles for a dollar. I don’t remember the specific numbers now, but I do remember sitting in a cafe after having eaten a substantial and very tasty meal plus a couple (very strong) beers, and marvelling at the fact that the whole repast had cost me less than a nickel American. (It was quite the shock to take the train from Leningrad to Helsinki and find that the prices there made everything work in reverse, where suddenly my American dollars were very paltry indeed.)
ETA:
My first impulse was to respond to that post the same way you did. But reading it more closely, I don’t think they meant “real life Marthas” as “women who were suckered into false marriages with KGB officers”, but rather people who passed secrets to the Soviets and then were spirited out of the U.S. and settled in the USSR to keep them from being prosecuted for treason and espionage. And I have no idea what the answer to that one is.
I’m confused then because you quote me saying Stan wasn’t going to be involved operationally, which is more or less the opposite of “continuing cooperation.” The CIA guy asking Stan about how he approached Oleg isn’t continuing cooperation, it’s just a heads up that they are going after Oleg and any protips Stan has to offer would be appreicated. It’s a one-time thing.
You think if Philip and Elizabeth’s cover were blown they would abandon their 14 year old son to the US government?
They are pretty much abandoning Henry all the time. How many times have they gone out on missions in the middle of the night, both of them together, and gotten into situations where they could easily have been arrested or killed and no one at home to watch over the kids?
Fact is, private school might be a realistic convenience for the Jennings. This way, they know Henry is being taken care of in case something happens to them…and Henry is out of the way, so he’s one less obstacle they have to tiptoe around. Granted, he’s been pretty clueless so far, but eventually, as he becomes a more mature teenager, he’s bound to start noticing things as Paige did. And given how well it went letting Paige the truth, they might just want to not go there.
In regards to Martha, I would view her role as a peripheral one. She had no idea until the end that she had been helping the Soviets, and had no clue–at least initially–about those who died. It’s not like she was in on the planning and execution of the Soviets’ operation. She was basically a patsy…a source to be worked.
I also think she has more to offer than it might seem on the surface. She can **directly **finger Phillip, and she can provide details of others he’s been working with. Anytime an agency can get a direct link to whom they are looking for, they will take it, regardless of how innocuous it may appear at first glance.
I agree it’s a long shot (as I originally posted) but what other options might she have?
And if something does happen, the Center can pick up both kids and whisk them away to a Martha-esque existence in the USSR. If it’s just a blown cover (which is a new meaning to the word “just”) they can get themselves and their kids out.
If their cover gets blown while Henry is 500 miles away, they can’t get him out. Various governmental agencies will tell the school to lock him down and he’ll be shut away before anyone can get to him. Also, he won’t be “taken care of”; he’ll be interrogated and possibly incarcerated. If he is ever let out, he definitely won’t be back in that school. He’ll be watched like a hawk, so no one will ever be able to get to him.
They love their son. They’re not the most attentive parents ever but not that out of line given the time and their background (they themselves weren’t helicoptered and this is the 80s, people were less intrusive into their kids’ lives), they’re not notably absent. They don’t want that for him.
I’m not sure what we’re arguing about; if this were a real-life situation then it seems likely to me that the CIA would want to be able to come for information to the FBI agent who’d had so much contact with the Soviet they wanted to recruit/acquire as an asset, any time something new occurred to them. I’m not seeing a reason for your suggestion that CIA questions for Stan could happen only once (“it’s a one-time thing.”)
Well, for one thing it’s because it’s then a CIA operation and Stan is not in the CIA. It can really be as simple as that. For better or worse, there are interagency rivalries. Turning a KGB agent is the CIAs bread and butter. It’s the kind of thing they pride themselves upon and love to do. They look weak and incompetent if they have to rely on Stan and the FBI hand feeding them little crumbs and clues to do their own job. I’d find it difficult to believe their pride, and their CIA bosses, would allow that. They’ll go to Stan at the beginning and get the ball rolling, but from then on out, it’s their game.
Plus, they have a tape of Oleg committing treason. What factoid that Stan knows could help them more than that?
For the sake of drama and the storyline, Stan had to be told what they were planning, but, in real life, I kind of doubt the CIA would have told Stan about their plans for turning Oleg in the first place.
I think I see the end game of the series coming into place. It was pretty clear from early on that Philip would have defected if he thought Elizabeth would too. His heart hasn’t been in it for a long time and he likes a lot about America. The arc seems to have been Elizabeth’s journey to disillusionment about the Soviet Union’s reality vs. the ideal she fights for. The revelation about the disease is the next step in this journey.
This series is going to end with one of the Jennings dead and the other defecting and telling the US Government everything. Dramatic irony says that Philip dies and Elizabeth sings.
**This series is going to end with one of the Jennings dead and the other defecting and telling the US Government everything. Dramatic irony says that Philip dies and Elizabeth sings.
**
I think you are on to something there about P and E. Show writers seem to love startling endings, and your scenario would certainly fit that bill. I agree though that one will be dead and one will sing, just not sure which character will do what.
Phillip would have a worse time of it as he actually killed an FBI agent. They tend to take that sort of thing personally.
That wedding scene made me wish they were digging holes again.
And Tatiana’s back in the picture. Paige starting to turn against Pastor Tim is a dream come true for the Jennings, but I think he’s completely right about Paige (well other than the immortal soul crap). The secret wedding was a nice touch.