Mr. and Mrs. Smith...

There is a deep absurdity to espionage, one that seems to have been made worse by the apparent eagerness of spies to embrace a clumsy pastiche of B-movie and dime-store short-story clichés[1].

“You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,” [the intercepted message] said. “Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles and send intels [intelligence reports] to C[enter].”

Is this a joke? This has all the traits of a high school screenwriting class: A message from Russia lacking the definite pronoun (I hope that this was originally sent in Russian); a nice and helpful summary of all that has been provided to the spies, the clumsy classic of contextualization; and of course, the misssion!! That way the audience does not need to be bored by scenes of meetings in hotels, or flashbacks, or some other way of introducing the objectives of the spies that might unnecessarily eat into the 1hour 38minutes running time, time that could be better served by an expensive chase scene or sex.

But I guess the way we know it's not a joke is the headline in the Washington Post (online): Alleged spies targeted think tanks, officials say. I suspect that even the greenest of high school screenwriters would think that this was implausibly misguided (not to mention dull, but I suppose real world espionage is going to be less sexy and exciting than a teen's fantasy). I wonder if they were in situ in time to hear the devious crafting of the public option, or the current debates on when to start cutting the deficit. Do you think they learned our Afghanistan policy? Maybe they could send it to Moscow, and then have Moscow send it back to us. Certainly I'd like to hear what the Council on Foreign Relations believes we should do, without, that is, going on to their website or taking a bus down to D.C. 

[1] Apparently the same thing happened to the mob. Once the Godfather movies came out, everyone in the Mafia--from the top on down--started to imitate what they'd seen in the movie. The result was that thugs and family men became caricatures, aspiring to what they now saw as an appropriate and desirable personage.