The KGB spy in movies and TV shows: Ponies, The Americans and more

In the 45 years after World War II, the western hemisphere had a very defined enemy: the Soviets.

Almost every geopolitical conflict on every continent came to be viewed through the lens of east versus west, a binary of communists bad, capitalists good.

The reality was always more complex than that and the west justified – or tried to justify – the likes of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, supporting dictatorships in Brazil and Chile, and the rest, on the basis that it was trying to stop the spread and influence of the USSR.

It’s interesting to view that narrative through how popular culture has dealt with the Cold War, especially movies and TV series made after the fall of the Soviets.

While the Soviets, especially as embodied by the ruthless KGB, are generally still two-dimensional characters who serve merely as foils to the western heroes. But in most of these works, the West aren’t so clean, especially when it comes to how the CIA and MI6 operate.

A lot of that is that it makes for far more interesting storytelling when the conflict is not just east versus west, but when it’s internal. It’s much harder to defeat an unknown enemy.

Often that’s the double-even-triple cross of agents. In the Charlize Theron-starring Atomic Blonde, an action and stunts extravaganza set to a kickarse 1980s soundtrack, there are so many questions of where loyalties really lie, you’d struggle to remember who was ultimately working for whom.

Pop culture and art are much better placed to examine the shifting grey zones of the Cold War, certainly more than governments who have agendas of power and secrecy.

Sometimes spy thrillers seem far-fetched, but then when real-world cases are occasionally revealed, it doesn’t seem that removed from the fictional, plus or minus some gadgets.

Think of the cases of the American turncoats, the CIA’s Aldrich Ames, FBI agent Robert Hanssen or the British spy ring the Cambridge Five, who were all leaking secrets to the Soviets. They’re so wild they might as well have come out of the imagination of a writer.

It certainly sparked at least one novelist, John le Carre, who based Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on the Cambridge Five debacle. Ian Fleming too, referenced them in From Russia with Love, which went to on to be one of the best Bond screen adaptations. A Spy Among Friends, the series starring Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce, was also about the Cambridge Five.

These works confront the truth that the West is not unimpeachable, even within the dynamics of the Cold War.

There’s a new series out this week called Ponies, a play on the acronym PONI aka Person of No Interest. That’s who the two main characters Bea (Emilia Clarke) and Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) are, the wives of CIA agents stationed in Moscow in 1977.

Bea speaks fluent Russian thanks to her Belarussian grandmother (Harriet Walter) and works at a secretary at the embassy. Twila has no aptitude for typing and filing but she is street smart. Those skills come in handy when their husbands are killed and the CIA reluctantly agrees to put them in the field because no one would ever suspect them of being spies.

They are terrible spies, and watching Ponies is genuinely stressful because after all the movies and TV shows we’ve seen, audiences are versed in the very basic precautions you would take.

You wouldn’t, for example, if you have an undercover identity as a Russian woman wooing a vicious KGB agent (Artjom Gilz), be speaking English loudly out on the streets of Moscow, palling around with another American woman. Which Bea and Twila do.

You also wouldn’t be going on a date with that KGB agent without having already set up a cover home in case he wanted to go there with you. It’s all the little things that add up to a lot of shouting at the screen in frustration.

Realism isn’t the point of Ponies, which is really about a friendship between two unlikely bedfellows, and to never underestimate persons of no interest.

The KGB agent in question is portrayed as a vicious individual who will also blackmail his own side for professional advancement, plus he murders sex workers once they’re no longer useful to him. There’s not much more to him, which is a shame considering he’s a large part of the series.

But the series does, eventually, (mild spoiler alert) introduce elements which declare that the Americans and the CIA are not all on the side of angels. Even some who aren’t specifically betraying their country commit other crimes.

Perhaps, if Ponies is greenlit for a second season, it will go deeper into spy life, on both sides.

If you consider the 2018 film Red Joan, starring Judi Dench and loosely based on the life Melita Norwood, there’s an argument to be made that not everyone who leaked to the Russians did it out of greed, self-interest or malice. Norwood has said that she did it to help avoid World War III.

The best Western-produced TV or movie that gave nuance to KGB agents was, undoubtedly, The Americans.

Created by Joe Weisberg, it starred Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as deep-cover Soviet spies living as normal Americans in suburban Virginia, close to Washington D.C. On the surface, they ran a travel agent, had two American-born kids and did mundane things.

When no one was looking – and these are spies who actually took safety protocols very seriously – they ran operations, recruited assets and followed instructions from their handler.

The two leads, Elizabeth and Philip, were also portrayed as having different levels of allegiance to the USSR and acceptance of US life, which gave the series another texture to explore as they also grappled with the morality of their actions and deceptions.

These characters weren’t depicted as black hats, but as people who were brought up in and experienced a different way of life, who knew hardship and pain, and who genuinely thought what they were doing had a greater purpose.

We love watching fictional spies and are fascinated by real-life ones because the idea of that inner turmoil makes for seriously good storytelling. Or, at least when it’s done well, when it’s more than black-and-white tropes, no matter which side of the Iron Curtain, it does.