We’re only two episodes into the four-part BBC 2 series, Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game, Series 1, Paranoia, and it’s very worth watching.
In the early 80s, for those around at the time, we remember the great risk was nuclear war – but quite how unwittingly close to it we got … well. We shudder at recalling the High Noon bluster of Ronald Reagan, forever seeking to smoke out his Soviet foe and duel it out. But he and co. were seemingly unaware quite how such moseying prose affected its true target, the cigarette-ash-grey Yuri Andropov, who went from KGB boss under Leonid Brezhnev to Soviet premier at the latter’s death, and who simply took such rhetoric as another box ticked on his giant Armageddon bingo-card – the prize being world war three.
Ronnie’s audience is the world; Andropov’s, himself – in the bunker of his own mind – the actors and factors making up his algorithm leading to war being way beyond the imagination or rationale of bombastic Ronnie and crew, let alone their control.
Secrets and Spies – the day after
Fascinatingly, we see Reagan is as horrified as the rest of America about the horror of a nuclear attack on the US depicted in the TV film, The Day After (for me, that and the British equivalent Threads, nothing’s touched the sides of such fear since). With a TV drama finally giving this ex-Hollywood actor a handle on reality, he volte-faces towards peace with the homeliest homily about an American and a Russian couple randomly crossing paths, realising all they have in common, and promising to forge a friendship over dinner. In delivering this peace parable Reagan is really quite affecting – is that actual fear in his eyes?
But our hopes of averting Armageddon best rest with Andropov being laid to rest – which he duly is, only to be replaced by the ash-tray-grey Konstantin Chernenko, at the stage of life where one wonders, ‘should I expire before I start WWIII, or die in it?’
Before we forget how to breathe, enter stage left two true heroes of the Soviet Union: rising-star Mikhail Gorbachev, who thought communism was corrupted but in its true form both worthwhile and redeemable; and KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky, who believed the contrary: communism was a crushing, busted flush, and only democracy could save Russia (ill-fated though that would be, see Adam Curtis’s Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone).
Based in London, he becomes a double-agent for the British, and MI6 come to trust him such they expel his boss to enable his promotion to bureau chief – which his Moscow bosses deliver, so enamoured are they by his intel. And he knows Gorby, communism aside, seeks peace. Gordievsky becomes entrusted and empowered, by both sides, to help the West understand Gorbachev is someone the West could speak with and trust in, “a man to do business with”, as Margaret Thatcher put it, she herself also appreciating the nameless Gordievsky as “our man”.
The thing is they’ve all got almighty juggernauts of death in their cohort, whose courses need to be reset – there are many, many aboard both ships who want it head-on. And with as much power as Gordievesky’s promotion and prominence earns him, it also renders him prey to the petty politics and jealousies simmering beneath the veneer of the tight-fit, ideologically uniform outfit of patriots in the London bureau. Because they’re human, too.
A mole in our midst
But the real twist is the greatest threat to him, us all, is office politics across the ocean. The CIA’s USSR expert Aldrich Ames, on an arc of slights and being overlooked by his masters, rides an ill-starred pursuit of happiness in the vices of freedom that runs up $47,000 in debt, becomes a much sadder, duller version of the vengeful operatives in In the Line of Fire or Under Siege.
Into his frustrated hands seeps intel from MI6 to the CIA about the clandestine web of double-agents, including Gordievesky (showing why allied agencies actually don’t trust each other). Agents risking their lives to save everyone’s on the planet from nuclear holocaust – to Ames their value is how much he can sell them for by betraying them to Moscow so as to clear his debts, ending the quest for peace as the old guards would capitalise on such betrayals to finish it all forever, and us.
It wasn’t the peaceniks appeasing communists, not the epic battle of democracy vs communism, or East vs West, that brought the world to the brink – it was one man’s debt, the blood of capitalism, and his ‘economically rational’ decision to get the banks off his back that rendered secondary all laws, morals, loyalties, world peace, his own existence, as expendable. Oh, the irony.
Coming in from the cold
That’s as far as we’ve got – a spoiler is we’re still here, but it’s gripping stuff, and rich in snippets and asides that refresh and reset our memories of what we thought we knew, like seeing Russia only as a frozen hell of abject dourness, images the Soviets allowed and the West happily carried, through the endless freezing Red Square parades watched by old men in heavy coats and hats atop Lenin’s mausoleum (some leaving the balcony to go join old Vlad on the slab).
The traditional parade for the kind of old men that the wonderfully wry Moscow and New York universities’ Professor Nina Kruscheva, the grand-daughter of Nikita Kruschev, recalls her generation eye rolling and slow handclapping. And a youthful Jeremy Paxman’s non-PC comment on (Moscow University academic) Raisa Gorbachev, accompanying Mikhail to Downing St., that Western observers were delighted she was not the usual ‘23-stone Olga’ Soviet wife.
Her and Mikhail standing with Thatcher, backed by ministers like Geoffrey Howe, Malcolm Rifkind, Paul Channon, ‘bastards’ we recall, ‘vegetables’ indeed,but giants of intellect and integrity compared with today’s lot, whose abject venality, even as they head for the electoral compost, repeatedly exposed by the minute as vapid, bottomless, and amoral as Ames’. We’ve survived him. And we’ll survive them.
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