{"id":13012,"date":"2016-03-11T11:04:39","date_gmt":"2016-03-11T17:04:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=13012"},"modified":"2016-03-11T11:04:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T17:04:39","slug":"cold-war-files-the-americans-are-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/11\/cold-war-files-the-americans-are-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold War Files: The Americans are Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Americans4\"<\/p>\n

\u2026or is it the Russians?\u00a0 The popular FX series premieres episode one of season four on Wednesday. (March 16th).<\/p>\n

In case you\u2019re not already read in on the cold-war drama, prepare to be taken back to 1980s Virginia and into the household of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, a seemingly normal American couple who are actually Russian spies.<\/p>\n

The first three seasons of the show were filled with murder, intrigue, and deception, as any good spy thriller should be.\u00a0 That might be because one half of the two-person show runner team (the other half is Joel Fields) once took a stab at being a real life spy.\u00a0 Joe Weisberg trained as a CIA Officer on the operations side and spent about three and half years at the Agency before getting out and entering the far-less dangerous world of television. \u00a0But it may very well have been his time at the CIA that led to some of the creative success he\u2019s enjoying now.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was taking the polygraph at the Agency, and I was asked on the polygraph, \u2018Are you joining the Agency to get information about espionage so you can write about it later?\u2019\u00a0 And I sorta froze because I wasn\u2019t at all. I was totally joining the Agency because I wanted to be a spy. It never even occurred to me, but once they said that on the polygraph, I was like, \u2018Whoa, that\u2019s a good idea\u2019,\u201d Weisberg says, laughing.\u00a0 \u201cThey sorta got it into my head, and then I was afraid I was gonna fail the polygraph.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s no lie that the show is based on real life spy rings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Russians actually did set up \u2018illegal\u2019 rezedencies (like our overseas \u2018Stations\u2019) shortly after 1917,\u201d says Cipher Brief expert and former CIA Senior Service member John Sipher.\u00a0 \u201cSince so few countries recognized the Soviet Union, they had to set up spy operations that did not rely on formal embassies. \u00a0But even after they established formal embassies and KGB rezedencies, they continued to also support these illegal, off-the-grid teams.\u201d<\/p>\n

That definitely explains the roots of the real-life Russian spy ring the FBI busted up in 2010, one of the headline events that inspired Weisberg to launch the series.\u00a0 That ring was filled with spies who posed as normal, ordinary, even boring Americans, before their cover was blown, and they were \u2018swapped\u2019 back to mother Russia.\u00a0 But if you think that writing timely television is as easy as ripping from the headlines, Weisberg says, think again.\u00a0 He freely admits that The Americans<\/em>is a \u2018made for cable\u2019 show, which (ahem) means he has a lower budget to work with.\u00a0 Their writing team consists of seven writers, and the production team of course, is bigger, but there are still financial restrictions that limit just how \u2018real\u2019 he can keep the scenes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted from the start to make the tradecraft in the show extremely realistic, or as realistic as possible, and it raised a number of issues.\u00a0 First of all, there was the fact that tradecraft that was done in movies or television shows generally was not realistic or well done ,so I had that in my favor.\u00a0 I had in my favor that I was trained at the CIA, I knew a lot about real tradecraft, and I knew that it hadn\u2019t been done right, so that was a big opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then he had to find out whether the CIA was willing to play ball.\u00a0 Not because the Agency had a say in the script writing process, but because Weisberg once worked for them and had a clearance, so he had agreed to something all spies must agree to, the (sometimes) dreaded, pre-publication review process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started sending scripts to CIA, and I really didn\u2019t know what to expect, but I was very pleased to discover that on a lot of tradecraft issues, they were pretty open, so I could show quite a bit of tradecraft, which was great,\u201d said Weisberg.<\/p>\n

What was not anticipated, however, was just how much the financial strains would impact the ability to show real tradecraft, like surveillance and counter surveillance operations, a common tactic in cold-war era spying.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really know how counter surveillance works, and I know enough to put these things together and do a very realistic depiction, but if you wanna really, really show this stuff the way it\u2019s really done, you can imagine the number of cars you would need, and the number of streets that you would have to film to do a realistic depiction of an actual counter surveillance team following somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he had to figure out how to keep to the spirit of a true counter surveillance operation, while making sure he didn\u2019t blow his budget. \u00a0So he shot it all on fewer streets and with fewer cars.\u00a0 The true spirit of the tradecraft, he says, still came through.<\/p>\n

When we talked, I asked Weisberg for one little nugget about the first episode that only an insider would know.\u00a0 He kinda laughed and thought for a second before giving up the goods.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll see a scene in the first episode of the new season that takes place in an outdoor market in Russia, in the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, and it\u2019s kind of a short scene.\u00a0 We went to considerable trouble and expense to build that set that may not look fancy, but its hard to find a location that looked at all like 1940s Russia. \u00a0It was supposed to be a daytime scene, and it was starting to get dark. After all this trouble, we didn\u2019t think we were going to be able to shoot the scene, because there wasn\u2019t enough light.\u00a0 It was such a disappointment because we weren\u2019t going to be back at that location.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0But they were able to shoot the scene in the very last seconds of daylight.\u00a0 So now you know.<\/p>\n

So back to that idea of getting ideas anywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that a lot of people are creative people and I think that a lot of people have a similar experience like I do, which is that you walk around the streets daydreaming and those daydreams consist of a lot of stories but you tend to sort of dismiss them or throw them out and think that they\u2019re not valuable, but they are valuable. The crazy daydreams you\u2019re having, the ones that you don\u2019t want to tell people about that are embarrassing, those are stories,\u201d said Weisberg.<\/p>\n

Read the Original Article at The Cipher Brief<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026or is it the Russians?\u00a0 The popular FX series premieres episode one of season four on Wednesday. (March 16th). In case you\u2019re not already read in on the cold-war drama, prepare to be taken back to 1980s Virginia and into the household of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, a seemingly normal American couple who are actually…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2770,5406,3140,2908,1725,2426,4319,4880],"tags":[5405,3494,5407,5408,5409,3976],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}