While nuclear culture argued for peace and restraint, stories of espionage and paranoia shaped the logic of the Cold War conflict and mobilized populations to support (or at least tolerate) their secret states. These stories had deep roots. In West and East alike, spy stories had been an important part of culture during World War II. They were a resource as ready for Cold War deployment as the unfired shells and stockpiled weapons on the inventories of Moscow and Washington.
With the coming of the Cold War, the "enemy" as portrayed in World War II/Great Patriotic War culture simply transmuted from a Nazi into an American or Russian. The first American Cold War film - Iron Curtain (William A. Wellman, dir., 1948) - not only played like a remake of Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, dir., 1939), it had the same writer, Milton Krims. In the United States, this change was driven both by the personal politics of studio bosses like Darryl F. Zanuck and by the eternal quest for box office novelty value. In the Soviet Union, writers of thrillers were more or less obliged to seek out American villains when the minister of cinema, Ivan Bolshakov, let it be known that the time had come to move beyond "Great Patriotic War" stories.672 Moscow won the dubious distinction of creating the first Cold War hate film with Russkii vopros [The Russian Question] (Mikhail Romm, dir., 1947) from a play of the same year by Konstantin Simonov, which dealt with the corruption of the US press rather than spies. Soviet spy stories followed and Hollywood was not far behind. The lead time on film production meant that the respective spy cycles spawned by the state-controlled Soviet industry and patriotic American industry appeared without reference to each other. Each needed the other as an enemy at the same moment. The confluence of mutual prejudice and paranoia would be repeated in the early 1980s.
Notable Russian offerings included Vstrecha na Elbe [Meeting on the Elbe] (Grigori Alexandrov and Aleksei Utkin, dirs., 1949), Sud chesti [Court of
Honor] (Abram Room, dir., 1949), and Sekretnaia missiia [Secret Mission] (Mikhail Romm, dir., 1950). America’s spy cycle included I Married a Communist (Robert Stevens, dir., 1949), My Son John (Leo McCarey, dir., 1952), and the Red-busting TV show I Led Three Lives (1953-56). Themes of paranoia associated with the Cold War were widely disseminated, in science fiction thrillers as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Seigel, dir., 1956), and were manipulated in The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, dir., 1962).
The epicenter of Cold War spy fiction was the United Kingdom. Spy stories became a veritable industry led by intelligence veterans Graham Greene, John LeCarre, and Ian Fleming. This reflected both historical roots - Britain had been thinking about Russian spies since the days of Rudyard Kipling - and contemporary needs. It is easy to read the potency of James Bond as an antidote to the loss of power experienced by the country as a whole. Moreover, espionage stories provided a way to preserve the trope of British opposition to totalitarianism and maintain the political certainties of World War II. Then there was the real world of espionage in which Britain played a special role assisting the United States and fell victim to high-placed enemies within. The spy became an archetypal figure, like America’s cowboy, through whom the dramas of national life could be played out.
British spy fiction evolved with the Cold War. In the 1960s, key figures in the genre turned away fTom Cold War rabble-rousing and began to offer a more complex commentary and reflect the same yearning for peace as that seen in the nuclear destruction narratives. The Communist villains in Ian Fleming’s early Bond novels gave way to movies in which Bond battled international crime syndicates, and East and West had to learn to cooperate. Interestingly, the shift in fiction anticipated the genuine political movement to detente. The more serious novels and films such as John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (novel 1963, film 1965), Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (novel 1962, film 1965), and Graham Greene’s The Human Factor (novel 1978, film 1979) presented real moral ambiguity and asked whether the conflict had reduced its players to brute equivalence. Secret agents abounded in increasingly spoofed or tongue-in-cheek form in the adventure television serials of the 1960s, including The Avengers (1962-69) and Danger Man (1964-68), and even children’s programs, as with the glamorous agent Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds (1964-65). The genre turned in on itself in the remarkable cult show The Prisoner (1967-68) in which an agent (played by Danger Man’s Patrick McGoohan) was imprisoned in a mysterious village. It is never clear whether the island is in the East or West, and it did not matter.
This was an exploration of the relationship between individual autonomy and state power.
The United States absorbed most of its spy culture from Britain but also produced homegrown fare, which seemed rather less reflexive and certainly less revealing of any national state of mind toward the Cold War. There were high-budget adventure movies, like AlfTed Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959) or Torn Curtain (1966), in which Cold War espionage merely provided the logic for placing the hero in jeopardy. There was a steady stream of novels, including full-blown series like Donald Hamilton’s long-running Matt Helm stories (1960-93), and by the end of the decade American spy novels had a special taste for Chinese villains and often depicted Americans and Russians teaming up to defeat them.673 From the mid-1960s on, American culture displayed a penchant for spy spoofs such as the movie Our Man Flint (Daniel Mann, dir., 1966) or the risible movie adaptations of Matt Helm. TV series in this vein included The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), which gave its American hero a Russian partner, I Spy (1965-68), and Get Smart (1965-70) with its famous range of wacky gadgets. American children’s television delivered the animated Bullwinkle Show (1961-73) in which a squirrel and a dimwitted moose foil the plans of stereotyped Soviet spies. These spoofs could be loosely read as reactions against the Cold War stories of the 1950s, albeit while retaining certain stereotypes of evil Russians and Chinese and their cloak-and-dagger intrigue. There was still plenty of mileage in the formal Cold War thriller. In the 1970s, Robert Ludlum began to publish highly successful spy stories, many with a Cold War setting.
Secret agents also loomed large in the Eastern European popular culture. Spy stories had deep roots here, too: Poland had Konrad Wallenrod, the hero of Adam Mickiewicz’s great narrative poem of 1828, who lived undetected amid and eventually destroyed the Teutonic Knights. But heritage alone cannot explain the proliferation of the Eastern spy story. Given the pervasive censorship restrictions around the Warsaw Pact, spy fiction must also have been thought useful by the authorities. Bulgaria produced the first great Eastern agent in the form of counter-spy Avakum Zakhov, the creation of Bulgarian writer Andrei Gulyashiki, and a favorite in books and on television across the Soviet bloc from his debut in 1959 in the novel Sluchayat v Momchilovo [The Momchilovo Affair].674 Although his cerebral character was closer to Sherlock Holmes, Zakhov was touted as the Communist James Bond, and Gulyashiki obligingly introduced "agent 07" as a character in Zakhov’s world in his 1966 novel Sreshu 07 (published in English as Avakoum Zakhov versus 07). Agent 07 survived the encounter, chastened by his brush with a better man.675
Unlike the Western spy stories, Eastern espionage fiction did not shift with the evolution of the Cold War and did not become either subversive fantasy or critical of the state. The Eastern spy story remained a cultural form in which the state was showing its value by secretly protecting the people. Several of the most influential stories did not take place in the Cold War at all, but in the moral certainty of World War II. The contemporary concerns that propelled post-Cuban missile crisis Western narratives into relativism or satire were dodged and the secret state was no less glorified for the historical setting. Poland provided the much-loved character Kapitan Kloss, a Polish secret agent operating within the Nazi Abwehr. Kloss appeared in live television plays and twenty comic books but is best remembered from the much-repeated eighteen-episode adventure series Stawka wieeksza niz zycie [More than Life Is at Stake] (1967-68).
Soviet spy fiction displayed similar trends. The USSR produced its equivalent to Poland’s Kaptan Kloss in Standartenfuhrer Otto von Stirlitz, alias of gallant Russian spy Maksim Isaev, operating in the inner circles of Nazi power. Stirlitz/Iseav was the creation of lulian Semenov, who produced a string of novels about the character, beginning in 1965 with Parol ne nuzhen [No Password Necessary]. Many were adapted to the screen, most notably in 1973 when the television mini-series Semnadtsat mgnovenii vesny [Seventeen Moments of Spring] (Tatiana Lioznova, dir.) held Russian audiences spellbound. The plot included a fiendish plan by the United States to make a separate peace with the Nazis. Stirlitz survived his wartime adventures to take part in the Cold War and gained Soviet immortality by becoming a stock figure in jokes.
East Germany produced an adaptation of the adventures of a "real life" spy in Streng geheim! [Top Secret!] (Janos Veiczi, dir., 1963) but scored its biggest hit with the television series Das Unsichtbare Visier [The Invisible Visor] (1973-76), starring Armin Muller-Stahl as the agent Achim Detjen. The Stasi reported a wave of new recruits to its ranks citing Detjen as their inspiration. The East German TV bosses hoped that the show would live on for years in sequels and re-runs, but their hopes were dashed when its star defected to the West. Ironically, MuUer-Stahl found his niche in Hollywood playing villains in the Cold War films of the 1980s.676
World History
