In real life, the FBI was never like this.
WASHINGTON — Among the many differences between the Land of the Free and that Sceptred Isle is the no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty seriousness with which the Brits take their domestic security.
Our FBI agents may be inching toward black leather trench coats with some of the provisions of Patriot Acts I and II, but essentially they’re still cops, operating under the rules governing law enforcement.
Their British counterparts, the men and women of MI5, are essentially spies. And, in dealing with terrorism and other serious crime, they operate domestically under the same lack of rules and in the same clandestine “black job” fashion as the United Kingdom’s external espionage service, MI6, and our own CIA. They even call themselves “spooks”.
If this means picking people’s locks, bugging telephones at will, window-peeping, posing as virtually anyone, using up to 30 aliases, fornicating in the line of duty and carrying on like secret police — well, God save the queen.
This all comes to light — and the television screen — in a simply ripping new series called “MI-5”, making its debut on the A&E cable network at 9 p.m. Tuesday. Produced jointly by the BBC and A&E, it’s already the most popular television drama in Britain, where it’s called “Spooks”.
It is also the only television show anywhere in which the principals go after terrorists in every episode.
“It’s been very controversial in England,” said actress Keeley Hawes, who stars as junior case officer Zoe Reynolds. “Most of the episodes have been controversial. Episode 8 is about Muslim bombers. There were an awful lot of complaints. It was just the idea that someone would be making a drama out of this.”
The series also deals with Irish terrorists, Balkan terrorists, racist English terrorists, Kurdish terrorists, anarchists bent on disrupting a visit by President Bush and even American anti-abortion terrorists.
“It gets bloodier as it goes on,” said Hawes, who noted that all the scripts were written before Sept. 11. “They had to make a lot of changes.”
Real-life casting?
Unlike the real FBI, television’s FBI is heavily populated with attractive young women. Hawes, 26, and other leading cast members are certainly that, but this actually does reflect the real MI5. More than half its agents are under 40 and nearly half are women.
“This is something we queried about at the beginning,” Hawes said. “Apparently they are very young, taken out of Oxford and the universities and trained up very quickly. You continue training while you’re with MI5. You do lock-picking exercises. Then you learn how to tap phones.”
Representing the older contingent is veteran film star Jenny Agutter (“Logan’s Run”, “The Eagle Has Landed”, “Riddle of the Sands”), 49, who plays senior case officer Tessa Phillips, a cool, ultra-chic, manipulative lady who goes to bed with a Cabinet secretary accused of illegal gun-running to determine his guilt or innocence. Certainly not conduct countenanced by John Ashcroft’s Justice Department.
“It’s great to play someone very different from yourself,” Agutter said. “Morally, I’m a bit prudish, but Tessa is very cynical and a self-obsessed control freak… Tessa’s story is about the intellectual subtleties, the dangers of corruption from within. Lying and manipulation are part of the job. And you are your own moral guardian, so the lines can get very blurred.”
Hugh Laurie, who has turned from past “goofy” roles such as Bertie Wooster in “Jeeves and Wooster” to darker stuff, sees the unfettered nature of MI5’s methods as a factor in the tension and a cause for real-life worry.
“They’re subtle about it,” said Laurie, who plays a turf-fighting, underhanded senior MI6 agent. “But they are unfettered. [Author] John le Carre said that the operations of agencies such as MI5 and MI6 reveal the true nature of a nation’s politics. Because they’re free to do so much, what they choose to do and not do reveals a lot about their national character.”
Laurie said the U.S. is fortunate because agencies such as the FBI are constrained by the Constitution.
“We don’t even have a written constitution,” he said.
But Sept. 11 may have changed matters.
“You may have something like MI5 one day” he added. “Who knows? You may have it already.”
For the show’s verisimilitude, the producers of “MI-5” relied on the advice of a former MI5 agent, Nick Day, who now runs the Diligence corporate intelligence agency with a partner from the CIA.
He said the real-life MI5 is perhaps not quite so wild and woolly as the TV version.
“There’s a lot of paperwork as well,” he said. “MI5 is a supremely careful and thorough organization. Every operation, no matter how small, must be approved through the right channels, and there are a number of legal controls.”
Hawes recalls an evening of indoctrination arranged for her and other cast members by Day.
“We all went out and met a lot of spies one evening — MI5, and ex-KGB, and some CIA,” she said. “We got to this gentlemen’s club, and we all had a bit of a boozy night with them, which was very interesting indeed. We were all delighted. Beside ourselves. They’re quite good drinkers, from what I could judge.”
Did they give away any secrets?
“They gave us the impression that they were,” she said, “but they revealed nothing.”
By Michael Kilian for Chicago tribune.
(Source: hughlaurie.net)