Spy thrillers don’t get closer to real-world spycraft than the 1968 Soviet film Dead Season. Written under nearly literal dictation from the KGB, it’s based on true exploits — or at least the Lubyanka-approved version — of an intelligence officer named Konon Molody, who had spent years in the West posing as a Canadian businessman. Rather startlingly, the actual Rudolf Abel (the man Mark Rylance would later play to Oscar-winning perfection in Bridge of Spies) shows up before the titles roll, in his first public appearance ever, to vouch for the accuracy of what we’re about to see. Imagine Zero Dark Thirty opening with a sonorous testimonial from Leon Panetta. The Soviets were nothing if not serious.
This commitment to gravitas, however, inadvertently creates what might be the funniest moment in any spy drama I’ve ever seen. A few minutes in, during a classic exposition-dump scene of two senior officers discussing the op, a stern voiceover cuts in. “In real life, of course,” says the narrator, “This conversation would be as impenetrable to the uninitiated as a dialogue between two mathematicians or astronomers.” In other words: you, the viewer, are a rube who needs things dumbed down; this is us grudgingly stooping to your level.
Fair enough, comrades. But it does raise a provocative question. What, exactly, do we — “we” being non-spies who read and/or write about espionage — mean when we define spy fiction as “realistic?” How would we know?
Let’s start with the obvious. The spy novel exists on a spectrum so wide it almost defies the notion of a genre. Some of it is also technically war fiction, some sci-fi or speculative, some farce, some political satire. And some — looking here at John le Carré, as one always must — is simply great literature of British manners that happens to take place in the spy milieu. It’s more or less a given that, if a novel’s main character does missions in outer space, or dispatches an army of adversaries with a rolled-up magazine, that novel is not striving for realism. Smiley’s People, whose idea of an action climax is a chapter-length interrogation, feels inherently more “real” than, say, Tom Cruise motorcycling off an Alpine peak onto a moving train. Why? Well, the main criterion is perceived plausibility, squared against our own relatively humdrum existence.
But here’s the twist. In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a world gone mad. We carry cameras, trackers, and listening devices on our person, voluntarily, at all times. Israel’s remote pager detonations, or the Ukrainian yacht caper that led to the destruction of Nord Stream, are wilder than most novels’ plots. The saga of the Stuxnet worm still feels like the stuff of sci-fi — and it’s been fifteen years already. Then there’s the deterioration of the very concept of truth itself, with increasing numbers of people abandoning reality for a fantasy world of globe-spanning cabals and conspiracies (with Russia’s enthusiastic assist, one must add). The window of plausibility has never been wider.
This leaves the reader looking for “realism” to rely on something else: trust in the author’s insider knowledge. This, too, is tricky. Some spy novelists are former spies and some (like myself) are not. Due to the specifics of the tradecraft, we the latter will never fully know what it is the former do. When I read a book by an intelligence veteran like, say, Alma Katsu’s Red Widow, my favorite bits are always the ones that detail incredibly minute things like the CIA’s email protocols, or what the Langley cafeterias look like, because I find comfort in the idea that she knows what she’s talking about.
More often than not, however, being an expert on the inner workings of the Agency does not automatically make one knowledgeable about the entire world outside of it. If I had a dollar for every time a Western author describing Eastern Europe or Central Asia couldn’t even get the names right, I might not have to write for a living. (This tradition goes back decades. In From Russia, With Love, Ian Fleming adds a boastful note that claims his description of the SMERSH headquarters is entirely fact-based and accurate down to its location — then proceeds to screw up the name of one of Moscow’s main avenues).
Most often, a realistic spy novel will be realistic in patches: a real insight here, a trope there. Consider, for instance, how many books and films conflate intelligence work with, well, murder. Most successful spies’ body count is by definition zero, but I realize that doesn’t make for an exciting narrative. Or take the undying cliché of the “sexy Russian female assassin,” which happens to be my personal pet peeve. Unlike Russia’s notorious deep-cover programs (everyone has seen The Americans, so let me recommend Shaun Walker’s forthcoming The Illegals as the best nonfiction work on the topic), it’s something that exists only in the Western public’s imagination. The weirdest thing about this trope is that it’s based on no historic precedent whatsoever. In fact, reality suggests the opposite: all notable female assassins in Russian history, from Fanny Kaplan to the Chechen “Black Widows” (sic) to our contemporary Darya Trepova, have directed their deadly actions against their own government.
Embarking on The Collaborators, my first spy novel, I knew I wanted to keep things as close to reality as possible for a non-spy. (Every time a character crossed a border, I needed to know what visa they were on). It quickly became clear that my best asset was my own peripatetic biography. I am an American born and raised in Soviet-occupied Latvia; I’ve spent three years in Moscow as the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of GQ — a bizarre chapter of my life that involved rubbing shoulders with the Kremlin elites and hanging out with opposition icons like Pussy Riot and the late, heroic Alexei Navalny. I followed that up with five years in Berlin, the world capital of spycraft, which led to writing on the spy series Deutschland 83. I had worked alongside survivors of FSB poisoning attempts and had once chatted about movies with Vladislav Surkov, the architect of Putin’s policy. I might not know what working at the CIA was like, but goddamn it, I knew the field.
With that in mind, I had given myself three hard rules: one, no scene in The Collaborators would take place anywhere I hadn’t lived myself. Not only would I then be able to set things in real locations, but the location often informed the action: for instance, at some point the main character, Ari Falk, recuperates in Berlin’s Charité hospital, so it made sense to have him meet with his boss at the Natural History Museum across the street. The second rule was that no character would speak a language I myself don’t speak (and if I speak it badly, so would they). This limited me, but in the best way possible. Ironically, The Collaborators is now the most personal and autobiographical thing I have ever written — and my previous book was a memoir.
The third rule had to do with the action scenes. I didn’t want to shy away from action completely; after all, as mentioned above, things like car chases and street shootouts do exist in life, for better or worse. So, no to outrunning explosions, yes to barely overpowering one or two skilled opponents, then hobbling off to the hospital with an ankle injury.
With that in mind, any action setpiece “big” enough to make the evening news in the real world would have to have a real-world counterpart. The book’s opening, in which a passenger plane flying over Belarus is forced to land because a dissident is on board, was a riff on the 2021 RyanAir incident. I modeled a scene in Moscow on a still-unexplained 2022 hack of Yandex Taxi (the Russian version of Uber) that had resulted in hundreds of cabs swarming to the same location. This way, if something didn’t strike the readers as plausible, I’d be able to cite an actual source!
As for all mentions of the CIA itself, I’ll be the first to admit that they’re based on other books, films, and the occasion conversations with friends and friends-of-friends in the NatSec or intelligence community. I have had some exposure to the workings of government agencies — just not the clandestine ones. The Covert Activities department doesn’t exist; it’s clearly a subdivision of what used to be called the National Clandestine Service (they keep renaming and restructuring these things), but beyond that it’s a total invention. For a scene set at the CIA’s Moscow Station, I simply used the interior décor of Radio Free Europe’s Prague headquarters, which I’ve visited as a consultant. Can’t be that different, right?
In other words, “realism” in even the most rigorous spy fiction is a sleight of hand like everything else. It’s the author telling us to trust them, but only to a degree. It’s the eternal push-and-pull between trust me, bro and if I told you’d have to kill you. And, if you put yourself in the right frame of mind, not knowing where facts end and fantasy begins is part of the pleasure.
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