I’ve just finished season three of The Americans. Russian spies that speak perfect English and live among us in America. We were taught this when I was in school. That Russia had built entire “American cities” to train spies. They wore American clothes, ate American food, drove American cars, and spoke only English so they would not have a Russian accent. You can still find this talked about online.
Let us assume they had to have been trained somewhere and not quibble over it being a town/village/city/single street size. This wasn’t just cold war propaganda, the FBI even busted some back in the day. Personally I would be shocked if we didn’t have a Russian town/village/city/etc. built for the same purpose. You can only rely on defectors for so much.
Prior to the cancer known as social media you had to have physical actors to effect any change in an enemy. Despite everyone focusing on “intelligence gathering” when they think of spies, that is only a small part. You need them to discretely feed disinformation through channels that are simply believed. Well, discrete until you bought and paid for Donald Trump by funding the only bank that would ever issue him loans. Then you had a loud mouthed asshole spouting Russian propaganda all over social media. Well . . . until Twitter banned him. Nobody actually uses the Trump social media site.
My View of the Series
I really liked season’s one and two. The writers put a huge spin on the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. The entire KG-used-to-Be spy agency was running around like a chicken with its head cut off hoping to God none of them had anything to do with it. Season three ended with the whining daughter outing her parents to her pastor after promising not to. I don’t have high hopes for season 4 if that is your “cliff hanger.”
Still Going on Today
This critique may be a bit premature since I haven’t watched every season. I had to write this post though because the shit is still going on. Hopefully you followed that link to the couple arrested in Hawaii having used the identities of babies that died in Texas in the 60s to get security clearance. Yeah baby! Gotta hate it when a third world entity like Texas starts digitizing its birth and death records! Getting harder and harder to find locations that use only paper records.
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve written about Russia and spycraft before. I even wrote a novel where Russian Oligarchs profited from the war on terrorism in a way that only Russian organized crime could. A big chunk of the early chapters are available to read on this blog.
This Pair of Russian Spies
Granted we have only been told a tiny bit. The pictures of them in KG-used-to-Be uniforms are pretty damning. From what little bit has been released, this appears to have been real spycraft. They found Americans that were desperate (just foreclosed on) and offered them money along with some strings. Kind of reminds me of Donald Trump and his constant property failures, always getting loans from his Russian handler. Money “invested” by Oligarchs.
