Tonight on Netflix: espionage is a deadly art, and this incredible documentary series proves it! – News series

The world of espionage, and the countless affairs that flow from it, has always been a very powerful vector of the imaginary in fictions, on small as a big screen. If it was more than largely popularized under the pen of Ian Fleming with the (Mes) adventures of her secret agent 007 in quantity of films, the theme of espionage very often found himself in the heart of great films: the spy that came from the cold, the Pont des Espions, Gorky Park, the three days of the Condor, the letter from the Kremlin, the saga of the Jason Bourne, Adaptations of the works of John Le Carré, who was himself an old spy … The list is endless, or almost.

On the series side, we will remember, among many examples, the sensational series The Americans, created by Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, who relates the fate of a false couple of KGB agents living in the United States in the 1970s and 80s, and members of a dormant cell, before things get complicated, obviously …

In this exciting register, Netflix has a great documentary series of 8 episodes, Spycraft: the art of espionage. Available since 2021, on episodes whose duration never exceeds 40 min, she browsing in each of them a very specific theme: code decipherors; Sexpionage, powerful tool for persuasion and blackmail, and great Russian specialty (the famous “Kompromat”); high tech and satellite surveillance; the clandestine collection, evoking the methods for secretly capturing sensitive data; double agents, etc …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMGYWPKY4WY

If the 21st century is of course mentioned, the 20th century logically size the part of the lion, given the importance of the Cold War and the very deep involvement of espionage in the secret war to which the USSR and the United States were engaged.

Largely abundant by the stories of specialists and archive images, the subject is at the same time freezing, staggering and exciting, and more than ever anchored in our time. In the episode devoted to the use of the poison, which has our preference, it is thus mentioned the atrocious case of Alexandre Litvinenko, poisoned in 2006 at the Polonium 210 by two FSB agents, after having drunk a cup of tea at the bar of his hotel in London.

Or, much more recent, the Skripal affair: in 2018, the small town of Salisbury, England, was shaken by the poisoning of the ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Ioulia using a neurotoxic agent developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

It will also be recalled that the half brother of the current North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017, after receiving in the face of the VX, a deadly neurotoxic agent. In 2019, it was revealed that Kim Jong Nam was an informant for the CIAand that he had just met his officers of the American intelligence agency shortly before being poisoned … reality will always exceed, and by far, fiction.

If Spycraft will not make you a budding spy, the pedagogy of the subject and the strength of its subject make it a remarkable and inevitable documentary series.