The Americans is a very entertaining show (Pastor Tim plotline aside) but the various activities of its main characters exemplifies the work of espionage agents about as accurately as Looney Toons depicts the laws of physics. It would be nonsensical for Directorate S (the bureau of the KGB responsible for training and deploying agents operating without official cover) to spend years embedding agents within the fabric of Western society only to repeatedly expose them by having them conduct high risk direct spying and ‘wetwork’. In the context of the show this is justified by the increasingly desperate tempo of operations in response to Reagan-era saber-rattling, which was real as far as it goes, but bugging a presidential advisor’s house by threatening his housekeeper’s son and assassinating senior scientists in the fledgling SDI program would have such calamitous blowback it is hard to see the moribund and bureaucratic Soviet-era political machine ever take such risks.
Real deep cover (e.g. non-official, versus the official cover of ‘cultural attaches’ and ‘trade representatives’ with diplomatic protections) are focused on collecting more publicly available information that is difficult for known agents to access, understanding the cultural mores and beliefs of Western societies, and the identification and recruitment of vulnerable people in sensitive positions, particularly those in critical industries such as defense, aviation, finance, high tech manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, et cetera, e.g. stuff the Soviets could actually use to improve their failing economy and industrial development. Approaching and recruiting government and military personnel with security clearances was extremely risky as such people have regular training and oversight specifically about the risks of being recruited, and when such recruitments occurred it was (as far as publicly available foreign information indicates) because the would-be spy approached known Soviet agents, often in the most clumsy of ways (e.g. Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee).
It should be noted that there is a distinction between an intelligence agent, who runs the spy network and collects information, and a spy, who is actually engaged in acquiring information through often illegal means like photography, stealing classified documents, et cetera. In the parlance of the American intelligence agencies, the former is a ‘case officer’, whose job it is to identified, recruit, and manage ‘assets’ who do the actual spying. This arrangement protects the case officer from direct exposure and provides plausible deniability should a spy be captured because the spy is not someone with a past that can be traced back to the country that he or she spies for. The KGB ‘Illegals’ program was so remarkable because they did actually train and create covers for Soviet citizens to become long terms spies embedded in Western society (something the CIA and British intelligence never attempted based largely upon failures during WWII attempts to infiltrate Nazi Germany) but the program was about as effective as getting a subscription to the New York Times, at least according to former ‘Illegal’ Jack Barsky, because it shied so far away from exposing its agents to any risk of discovery that they never collected anything of strategic significance.
One of the problems with such a deep embedding–aside from training agents to meld perfectly into a foreign society–is that the agents will become enamored with their new surroundings and decide to not fulfill their duties or even expose the operation; Barsky, for instance, got a college degree, a job as a programmer with MetLife, married and had a family (in addition to the marriage he left behind in the Soviet Union) and essentially never looked back until his cover was exposed by the fall of the Soviet Union, and then openly admitted to the FBI his status, which offered him citizenship in exchange for what he could provide them about the program. Barsky claims (and is probably honest) that he provided nothing of any significance to his Soviet handlers, e.g. nothing but financial reports and news that was publicly available. And even if he could have provided more cultural and social insights, it is questionable that Soviet intelligence would have correctly interpreted the information.
During Operation RYAN, the massive intelligence gathering effort that was a response to the Soviet political panic following the NATO exercise Able Archer 83, agents were directed to uncover evidence that the Western nations were preparing for an all-out peremptory attack on the Warsaw Pact, and ‘found’ such evidence in entirely innocuous news stories about local politics and normal troop rotations. The Soviets, despite their extensive spy networks (mostly compromised by Operation Ivy Bells and associated discoveries) misunderstood Western societies and politics at least as badly as Western intelligence misread Soviet intent, and in some ways the leaks of information were positive on both sides in showing that neither NATO or the Warsaw Pact nations were ever really as ready for war or as strong, militarily and economically, as the political rhetoric indicated. The biggest intelligence losses were actually exposure of foreign spy assets and operations, and the theft of industrial information such as how to make zero cavitation submarine propellers, and while this was damaging it never gave either side a real strategic advantage.
Espionage agencies are occasionally directed to engage in ‘wetwork’, e.g. kidnapping, assassination, et cetera, but when done against other large nations it generally involves a third party for deniability. (The exceptional thing about the recent spate of Russian poisonings is how blatant Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular has been about it, and is indicative of just how far the country’s fortunes have fallen that it has now shed any real plausibility as a legitimate actor among nations and is now acting like the criminal thuggery it has become.) The KGB would typically use Bulgarian agents for at least its known assassination efforts, while the CIA would train third parties for operations such as the Bay of Pigs invasions and operating companies like Civil Air Transport and Airdale Corporation. This often backfired as the principals of such operations, already doing illegal things in a deniable way, elected to expand the operations to include their own profit-taking criminal enterprises such as drug smuggling, arms running, and human trafficking.
This shady side business is about as close to he cinematic notion of spying, although the people involved were often less competent than James Bond after his third vodka martini and often resulted in political blowback onto the agencies and people involved. The recently deceased David John Moore Cornwell, writing under the nom de plume John le Carré, was probably the most accurate portrayer of the reality of espionage, with petty bureaucrats vying for promotion and authority by exaggerating the importance of irrelevant or even deliberately false information while the spies they ostensibly run take profit and pleasure in their confusion and ineptitude. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy may be the greatest actual spy novel actually written, although Greene’s Our Man In Havana is probably more typical f the integrity and information value that comes from espionage.
Stranger