What's a spy novelist to do in the age of Trump?

Washington Post

17-02-2025

John le Carré had it easy during the Cold War. But how do we write espionage thrillers now?
Joseph Finder is the author, most recently, of the novel 'The Oligarch's Daughter.'
The big bald guy in the back of the bookstore has had his hand up for a while. He will not be ignored. When I call on him, he has a comment, not a question: He doesn't 'trust' my sources in the FBI or the CIA. They're the enemy. And Russia is our friend. I struggle with a response.
The great John le Carré had it much easier. He wrote his espionage fiction mainly during the Cold War, when the concoctions of spy novelists and scriptwriters seemed to be in dialogue with reality. The thriller, after all, took off in England around the end of the 19th century, amid fears of a German invasion in the years before World War I. Novels like Erskine Childers's 1903 'The Riddle of the Sands' and other invasion narratives not only reflected the public's state of mind but, in their scaremongering, also might well have affected the way people thought about Germany and its growing strength at sea. Had England gone soft? Hundreds of spy novels premised on secret German plots to invade England presaged the great war: capturing people's worries while honing those fears.
The spy novel ever since then (and later, movie and TV series) has captured the ambient anxieties of the age — never a mirror of reality; at best, a window. But I wonder if we're rising to the challenge at this fraught moment.
Story continues below advertisement
Advertisement
The gift of the Cold War, in entertainment anyway, was its stability — nothing changed; it seemed frozen in place. Writers could explore it without fearing the entire global order was going to be overturned by the time their books were published or their movies premiered. The genre allowed the storyteller to explore the crevices of reality, to play imaginatively with what might happen. For generations, Russian nefariousness was a sure thing to call upon; it was too important, too alluring, too charming and too ambiguous to ignore.
The best Cold War thrillers were never flat-out Russophobic — le Carré wrote with love for the Russian culture and people. It was the gray-faced apparatchiks of the Kremlin (and the West) who curdled his blood. In his fiction, Western and Eastern spycraft mirror each other, the methods equivalent and ultimately corrupting. His 'Spy Who Came in From the Cold' (1963), about a British intelligence officer sent to East Germany as a phony defector, and its great cinematic adaptation, chillingly captured the amorality of the spy game.
But when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, our favorite fictional playground was suddenly off limits. We thriller writers who specialized in Russia felt sort of like coal miners in West Virginia told to learn to code. Nobody wanted to read about Russia. Was it an ally? Was it a friend? We didn't know what to make of it. And when 9/11 happened, we had a new adversary, and throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bad guys on TV were, of course, mostly Middle Eastern terrorists. Take 'Homeland,' with a bipolar CIA officer who thinks a freed prisoner of war has been flipped by al-Qaeda. Or the Fox spy thriller '24,' which premiered just a few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. Its hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), dealt with a range of bad guys: Serbians, a Mexican drug cartel, a Turkish criminal mastermind, Middle Eastern countries.
So when the FBI rolled up a ring of 10 Soviet sleeper agents in 2010, it seemed jarringly out of sync. It seemed to hark back to an earlier time, when Russia and America were at loggerheads; wasn't that period long gone? This astonishing revelation of deep-cover Russian sleeper agents implanted into American society inspired the acclaimed TV series 'The Americans,' about two deep-cover KGB spies posing as Americans in Falls Church. The show's creator, Joe Weisberg, set the show in the late Cold War of the early 1980s because, in 2013, 'it didn't seem like we were really enemies with Russia anymore.' That period drama managed to pull off a wonderful nautilus shell effect: We found ourselves rooting for the 'bad' guys, Russian spies, even as one of them is having doubts about the morality of their mission.
And then came the first term of Donald Trump, when Russia was no longer a point of commonality for Americans. It became, instead, a point of fracture. The Republican Party, which was once most identified with the Cold War attitude toward the Russians, was quickly transformed. Remember the guy at a 2018 Trump rally wearing a T-shirt that said, 'I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat'? If you were a liberal, you hated Russia more than ever. You associated Russia with the Steele dossier and election interference, whereas Trump supporters hated those who hated on Russia, Russia, Russia. If you were a writer or a creative executive working on a spy thriller for TV, it was safer to sidestep Russia altogether. So we saw spy shows like 'Hanna' (2019) and 'Killing Eve' (2018), in which Russia intrigue is largely avoided. (In Season 1, Villanelle is smuggled into a Russian prison.)
Story continues below advertisement
Advertisement
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 returned it to villain status once again. The Wall Street Journal's Evan Gershkovich was arrested and imprisoned in 2023, and last yearthe courageous dissident Alexei Navalny died in a gulag. Now we have shows like 'The Diplomat' (its initial premise: Did the Russians bomb a British warship? Will the United States and Britain go to war against Russia?). The second season of 'Slow Horses' revolved around a Russian defector and sleeper agents. A masterful Biden-era creation like the Paramount Plus series 'The Agency,' a remake of the French series 'Le Bureau,' delves deeply (and grippingly) into the war in Ukraine and the espionage gambits surrounding it. It's a show in which we're meant to root for the CIA, however byzantine and heartless its schemes, at a time when some Republicans consider the CIA to be a part of the 'deep state' and the bad guys.
Now, with Trump back in the White House, will this change again? As America pulls back from the world, will spy shows follow suit? And if America's stance vis-à-vis Russia becomes once again riven, are we back in that zone of ambiguity? For generations, since World War II, America was seen as the guarantor of the international order. On the chessboard of the Cold War, every move concerned us. But not anymore.
'We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders,' Trump said in his inaugural speech — an unmistakable reference to Ukraine — 'but refuses to defend American borders.' We no longer care about the international order; everything, it can seem, is now transactional. 'Lioness,' Taylor Sheridan's terrific new Paramount show about female CIA operatives fighting the war on terror, reflects a Trumpian worldview, in which the main enemies are China and instability at the Mexican border.
The spy thriller has always served as our culture's early-warning system, a creative space where we can explore threats before they explode into headlines. So when writers and creators tiptoe around Russia's role in global affairs for fear of domestic political backlash, they aren't just playing it safe; they're sidelining themselves when it comes to the defining geopolitical challenge of our time.
Indeed, when half the country sees Russia as a mortal enemy and the other sees it as a potential ally, international intrigue may become a way to examine our own divisions — to dig under the surface and portray life under two oligarchies, say. To delve into the issues that affect us, that actually matter. Maybe that's how spy fictions can help us understand not just our adversaries but ourselves.