{"id":4384,"date":"2010-06-30T12:59:26","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T16:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4384"},"modified":"2018-01-15T13:46:19","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T18:46:19","slug":"coming-to-the-small-screen-soon-modern-spies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/06\/30\/coming-to-the-small-screen-soon-modern-spies\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming to the small screen soon: “Modern Spies”"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a perfect media pitch: modern spies in America! It’s bound to be a mid-season replacement on Fox in 2011!<\/p>\n

Charles Stross<\/a> wonders why this is a surprise:<\/p>\n

\n

The only thing I’m startled at is that anyone would find this surprising. Pre-Glasnost, the KGB was heavily into the economic and corporate espionage business — not simply trying to suborn politicians and penetrate rival intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies, but actively trying to gain competitive advantage for the Soviet Union’s big industrial enterprises. From the early 1980s on, it was a huge priority for them — and indeed, Vladimir Putin was allegedly employed by the KGB directorate concerned with economic espionage. And human intelligence operations, even long-term infiltration ones, are comparatively cheap to engage in — given that agents need to work to maintain a cover identity, it takes relatively little money to maintain them in the field and to maintain a management structure at HQ: the cost of a single spy satellite would cover a hundred spies and their controllers for a multi-decade mission.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking at this, it’s hard to disagree with Jim Geraghty<\/a> “I hope some creative casting director is signing Jewel Staite to play the alleged Russian spy Anne Chapman.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a perfect media pitch: modern spies in America! It’s bound to be a mid-season replacement on Fox in 2011! Charles Stross wonders why this is a surprise: The only thing I’m startled at is that anyone would find this surprising. Pre-Glasnost, the KGB was heavily into the economic and corporate espionage business — not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,53,1119,13],"tags":[476,101],"class_list":["post-4384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military","category-politics","category-russia","category-usa","tag-espionage","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-18I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4384"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41766,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4384\/revisions\/41766"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}