“Our Man in Montclair, NJ”: Spasiba, This Independence Day

I came home from work yesterday to find my 89-year-old father wielding The Lutheran magazine at a fly perched on the window pane.

“I’m swatting spies,” he explained.

Before he could correct himself, I shot back, “No, Dad, we’re not supposed to hit them anymore. We’re supposed to call the FBI.”

It’s been that sort of a week. Especially for a man who lived through the whole Cold War and now hears daily reports of Russian spies poking around in a United States that few of its own citizens want to investigate that closely – and many, indeed, are trying to get away from.

For as news reports have agreed, everything Moscow wanted to find out is on the Internet – or as one commentator put it, “on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.” The information from their man in Montclair might as well have been the vacuum-cleaner diagrams from Our Man in Havana.

“It sounds totally implausible. It’s probably true.”

There is an excellent reason I had a sense of déjà vu on Monday evening, when I came downstairs to find my father gaping at the PBS NewsHour as it reported the arrest of 10 deep-cover Russian agents in the United States. I really had seen it before. On the very same PBS station in the very same living room, no less – in 1991, at roughly the same time these agents arrived over here.

It was a BBC/WGBH four-part comedy-drama series that aired on Masterpiece Theatre, and it was called Sleepers. The basic plot – two Soviet deep-cover agents in England have been forgotten and have gone on to become more English than the English, until a glasnost-era KGB (re)discovers their existence – was enough to lure me in without the Cyrillic backwards “R” in the title (or even the presence of Nigel Havers in the cast).  The story, as it developed over the four episodes, has remained with me the past decade, so strongly as to have moved me to give the DVD set to a Norwegian friend and to ensure that I have my own.

It’s a brilliant work in itself, but downright uncanny in its similarities to this week’s news. It’s set in a recession. The United Kingdom, right down to MI5, is under austerity measures (even to the point of expensing Burger King meals). Big-player brokerage firms performing “dawn raids” and financiers living lavishly are a key part of the backdrop, as are ordinary workers dealing with families and strikes. Outdated communications technology between the sleeper agents and Moscow plays a role.

There’s even a disputed goal call by a referee in a World Cup match.

And there’s as much confusion in the series as in our current news about what on earth these “illegals,” as they now call them, were doing. (I did a double-take at the term, in the prevailing environment.) The New York Times has quoted former CIA operations head and Moscow station chief Richard Stoltz as asking, “What in the world do they think they were going to get out of this, in this day and age?”

It’s the question that struck most of us. Immediately.

“The KGB yet again. Seems they have nothing better to do these days.”

I should be mildly peeved at Russia’s SVR, the successor to the KGB (and run by old-timers from the latter). For 15 years, I have been spared the sight of certain “experts” on TV panels who made much of their living in the 1980s speculating what the Kremlin was up to. It took a bunch of Facebook-posting, lawnmower-happy operatives to bring them out of their safely locked rooms in the academy and into studios again – somewhat grayer, with a fine layer of dust, and wearing the same suits as when Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet president.

Suspicion abounds among these analysts as to the timing of the arrests. Were they meant to coincide with the Obama-Medvedev “burger summit” at the G20? Was this to undermine the U.S. president? Was it to undermine the Russian president?

The great games of the Cold War in these circles – as, apparently, in the SVR, and in U.S. political circles that still haul out the hammer-and-sickle and the word “socialism” as a sign of the biggest threat America faces – are alive and well. The problem is, the rest of us have moved on to RPGs.

I’m in the “in-between” U.S. generation: the one that didn’t have to practice hiding under the desk at school for fear of nuclear attack but still experienced a steady diet of fur hats and espionage as I grew up. So instead of being miffed, I thank the dear old fuddy-duddies in the SVR.

The spy game between the United States and Russia has been an indelible part of my life as an American: from the Fischer-Spassky match, Get Smart, and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s defection; through an actual Olympic boycott and presidents making ill-timed jokes; to my encounters with the British series Secret Agent (Danger Man, in the UK), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Sleepers. With the rosy lenses of adult hindsight peering into childhood, I admit the era of active intelligence efforts between our nations seemed one in which life was more clearly defined – when our foreign goals were clearer, our economic development more purposeful, our possibilities more exciting.

But that is nostalgia, old friends, and no more real now than my trips to Ayleid ruins in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Great fun, to be sure – but not real.

Spasiba, Director Mikhail Fradkov. For one thing, you have enlightened me as to my own laws. I had no idea one could register as a foreign agent. I admit it wouldn’t have occurred to me, even in this different era, that as defense analyst Alexander Golts told Time magazine about your sleepers, “If they had just registered as lobbyists, they would have been just fine.”

You’ve made me think, too, of how we view so much of life these days. We’ve invested heavily in the “game” attitude of winning and losing, advancing through levels, outwitting opponents. It’s hard when you want a rematch and your partner doesn’t want to play anymore.

But look at it another way: without you and our CIA and FBI, MI5 and MI6 and all the rest of the long history of agents and agencies, RPGs really wouldn’t be what they are. Maybe you should look to that industry if we’re being difficult about the old chess matches. You’d be amazed at the effort and strategy put into those.

Most important, overriding all the lessons and the laughs – you have brought back to me glimpses of a time past, and you have reacquainted me with what does endure: some of my favorite literary and film media of all time.

That is no small gift, even if you have confused my father. I thank you.

Happy Fourth of July.

“If it’s not a silly question, Comrade … might one ask what you’re doing with a monkey?”

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All block quotations are from Sleepers (Cinema Verity for the BBC/WGBH, 1991).