Tehran - Apple TV Series - Season 1 of 3

Tehran — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

Israel-Iran conflict up close and personal. Our girl is a computer hacker in the employ of Mossad. By exchanging clothes with a flight attendant, she gets into Iran and the flight attendant gets a flight out. Mossad's goal is to get her into the same room as a secure computer system so she can turn off the power to the anti-aircraft radar that is protecting an Iranian nuclear installation so the Israeli jets can come in and bomb it into smithereens.

Unlike James Bond, the operation does not go smoothly. When the op collapses, our girl has an opportunity to leave (extraction in military parlance), but she refuses. She is determined to fulfill her mission. Her bosses are totally willing to let her go ahead with her hairbrained scheme, not like there is much they can about it, other than sending in a hit team to execute her, which they are totally capable of doing. This is real hot-war espionage shit.

Our girl is talented, but she isn't James Bond. The show basically rocks from one coincidence to another, sometimes in favor of our girl, and sometimes in favor of the Iranian secret police. Numerous people get sacrificed on the altar of operational security.

I am beginning to understand the problem with dictatorships - they are stupid and brutal - but they work in that the people in charge stay in charge.

Early on we have an old man lamenting that they didn't realize how powerful Khomeini had become until it was too late. The way I see it is that the upper class were so impressed with themselves and their great success is that they didn't realize how much resentment was growing in the lower classes. If you are in the upper class, you need to insure that the lower classes are getting what they need, and what they need is:

1. a share of the benefits that the upper class is creating,
2. something to do (a job for instance), and
3. something to believe in (a religion).

Failure to address these three issues is how you get your revolutions.

Unfamiliar - Netflix Series

Unfamiliar | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Pretty good spy thriller.

Ex-spies Simon and Meret operate a Berlin safe house until a past threat resurfaces. Now they're fleeing hitmen, Russian agents, BND, ex-lovers, and old enemies while trying to save their marriage.- IMDB

Too many times, we’ve watched thrillers that withhold information from viewers in a way that makes us feel like we’re being manipulated. Unfamiliar, a new German spy thriller on Netflix, reveals just enough in its first episode to give us hope that the reveals that are coming will feel mostly earned. - Decider

Soundtrack

The Night Agent: Season 3 - Netflix Series

The Night Agent: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

I knew we watched the previous seasons and I sort of remember thinking it was okay. After all, looking at the Episodes on Netflix, it shows that we watched both seasons, but it's been a year so my memory was a little hazy. Should have read my blog posts about Season 1 and Season 2. It's dumb, dumb, dumb. I don't know if it's any worse than the first two seasons, but it certainly isn't any better. But my better half is enjoying it and there is a fair amount of action, so it's tolerable.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (A Harry Palmer Novel) by Len Deighton

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (A Harry Palmer Novel) by Len Deighton

Stopped by Barnes & Noble the other day so I'm looking for something to read. I looked over the new Science Fiction section but it seemed to be all swords and sorcery. If there was any hard science fiction in there I didn't see it. So I headed over to Mystery / Thrillers. No Jo Nesbo, and no Michael Dibdin. Okay, I didn't remember Michael's last name exactly, but I knew some of the letters and I didn't find anything. And the I saw this book by Len Deighton and for some reason that name rang a bell. Seems I've read a couple of his books - The Ipcress File and Berlin Game. Don't often buy new books from bookstores. I think this is the second one this year. It's one of the perks of having paid off the mortgage - I can indulge in penny ante whims.

Dornier DO 28 Skyservant

The book starts off with a rendezvous in the middle of the Sahara desert. Business completed, they are picked up by a Dornier DO 28 Skyservant.

Espionage is a dirty business

I'm not collaborating
[I am a Palestinian, an honorable patriot, and I do not choose with enemies.]

Drugs, sexual blackmail: shocking confession letter exposes Israel’s Red Crescent spy ring - Kit Klarenberg and Jonathan Urmeneta

This is part of Israel's war against Hamas, the same Hamas that is funded by Iran, the same Iran that we are currently at war with.

The Heart of the Blob

CIA Headquarters Langley Virginia

I'm pretty sure there is thread, nay a string, a stream, a river of rot running through the CIA. There are probably some upright individuals in there, but when you have so much rot flooding the hallways, being upright likely means you will be swept away.

James Howard Kunstler has A Modest Proposal that starts like this:

You must wonder: what exactly has CIA Director John Ratcliffe been doing over in Langley, VA, lo these many months since things changed bigly in Swamptopia? Does he wander the hallways of that giant black box howling ineffectually. . . sit barricaded in his office playing sudoku. . . or is he doing what needs to be done: methodically uncovering and disassembling the diabolical racketeering operation that the agency has become?

One thing for sure: you have heard next to squat coming out of his mouth all year. Mr. Ratcliffe is playing a close hand in a dangerous game and I tend to think that he is for-real. Very few Americans know what really goes on backstage at the CIA, but just say they try to whack the director — that would be checkmate on them. The agency would not survive the arrests of its personnel. And, anyway, Mr. Trump is moving swiftly now to shut down the engine of its nefarious activities.

The CIA, you understand, is the beating heart of the Deep State (a.k.a. the blob). The Democratic Party and the Never-Trump RINOs are its errand boys. And that is why a ten-year-long coup has been running to smash Trump and Trumpism. “Joe Biden” was a piece of furniture thrown out of the truck that the CIA was driving to escape the scene of the crime. “Joe Biden” was under threat of blackmail the whole four years he haunted the Oval Office, having run his own petty racketeering operation to keep his miserable, extended, sick family in beach houses.

Slow Horses — Apple TV Series

Slow Horses — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

Everybody's a villain here, except for the MI5 employees known as Slow Horses who have been exiled to Slough House, a small, seedy, three floor walk-up office building in a crummy part of London. All the action is at a higher level. On one side we have the Sons of Albion, a right-wing nationalist group. Over at Regent's Park we have Miss Stinky Pants Kristin Scott Thomas (Taverner). She's Deputy-Director of MI5, so she's got the power of the government behind her, in particular a tactical unit called the Dogs.

Pretty great show. MI5 - British version of the CIA, I guess - Gary Oldman (known by me as Zorg in The Fifth Element) is the disgustingly crusty old man running Slough House. First desk, AKA MI5 Director, is off on some diplomatic bullshit mission and while she's away Second Desk decides to cook up a false flag operation that will get blamed on the right-wing nationalists. She thinks this will give her an excuse to, in her words, "roll them all up". Her agent provocateur gets some white boys (three stooges) to kidnap a brown Briton who happens to be the nephew of some big shot in Pakistan, the idea being that when MI5 rescues him, it will help the Uncle feel more favorably toward Britain. Seems like a long shot to me, but you know you just can't trust those power hungry, liberal, white women with short blond hair like Hillary. Anyway, the plan goes awry and one of the white boys takes exception to Miss Stinky Pants' agent and lops off his head, so now when Miss Stinky Pants' dogs show up to rescue the hostage and kill the kidnappers, there's nobody there, well, except for the dead guy.

Menawhile, a very nervous reporter who has gotten wind of this fiasco, but since he has apparently fallen from grace he can't get anybody to listen to him. But somebody is interested in him, which gets our boy River interested, and since all he does at Slough House is busy work, he starts following the reporter around. Up till now, nothing very much is happening. But then River sees someone break into the reporter's house and now everything dissolves into chaos.

Season 1, 6 episodes, 45 minutes each.

Cast of Slow Horses
Actor		Character		Affiliation	Location	Role
Antonio	Aakeel	Hassan	Ahmed	Leeds University		student	kidnapped by the Sons of Albion
Chris	Coghill	Hobbs		MI5	Dogs
Chris	Reilly	Nick	Duffy	MI5	Dogs		head
Steven	Waddington	Jed	Moody	MI5	Dogs
Freddie	Fox	James 'Spider'	Webb	MI5	Regent's Park	Agent	Jerk
Sophie	Okonedo	Ingrid	Tearney	MI5	Regent's Park	Director General	First Desk
Kristin Scott	Thomas	Diana	Taverner	MI5	Regent's Park	Deputy Director	Second Desk
Gary	Oldman	Jackson	Lamb	MI5	Slough House	Boss
Christopher	Chung	Roddy	Ho	MI5	Slough House	Agent	hacker
Olivia	Cooke	Sidonie 'Sid'	Baker	MI5	Slough House	Agent	our girl?
Dustin	Demri-Burns	Min	Harper	MI5	Slough House	Agent
Rosalind	Eleazar	Louisa	Guy	MI5	Slough House	Agent
Paul	Higgins	Struan	Loy	MI5	Slough House	Agent
Jack	Lowden	River	Cartwright	MI5	Slough House	Agent	Our hero
Saskia	Reeves	Catherine	Standish	MI5	Slough House	Agent	number 2
James	Faulkner	Charles	Partner	MI5	former	Director General
Sam	Hazeldine	Alan	Black	MI5		undercover	Moe
Brian	Vernel	Curly		Sons of Albion			fanatic
David	Walmsley	Larry		Sons of Albion
Stephen	Walters	Zeppo		Sons of Albion
Samuel	West	Peter	Judd			MP
Paul	Hilton	Robert	Hobden			Journalist	Gadfly
Jonathan	Pryce	David	Cartwright			Our boy's grandfather

Character notes:

Standish is Lamb's long suffering number 2

I question whether Sid is 'our girl' because she gets shot early on and we only see her once more in hospital and at the end Roddy and Jack find that all of the digital records of her have been erased, it's like she never existed, which is weird, but it kind of paves the way for her to return in later seasons. Or not, I dunno.

Note that the character names of the three stooges are in the fact the names of the Three Stooges. Ok Moe was actually an MI5 Agent sent in to stir up shit and Zeppo is technically a Marx Brother, but you get the idea.

High Pockets

Claire "High Pockets" Phillips

Manila Espionage is Claire's story about her life in Manila during WW2, and, hoo boy, what a life. She changed her name and opened a night club that catered to Japanese officers who were the only ones with the freedom and money to enjoy such things. Kind of like Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Café Américain in Casablanca. 

She's using the money she's making to buy food for POW's and the guerillas. Occasionally she extracts useful information from the Japs, which gets sent to the guerillas, who radio it back to the Americans. Eventually she gets arrested for espionage and spends eight months in prison before being liberated by the Americans. She weighed 145 pounds when the war broke out and 95 when she got out of prison.

Claire Phillips standing in front of her nightclub, Club Tsubaki, during its early-1940s heyday in Japanese-occupied Manila. (Image: Binford & Mort)

Reading it was kind of a slog. Her story was just a sequence of events.

Clandestine Activity

The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

Page 161

We're in the early stages of WW2 and the Germans are preparing to invade England from northern France (Operation Sea Lion).

Montmarte Paris
Hotel Bretagne is somewhere around here

The resistance has set up a radio transmitter in a room on the 6th floor of the Hotel Bretagne in Paris. With all the German army activity, there is a great deal of information that needs to encoded and then transmitted to London. The amount to be transmitted takes long enough that the Germans are able to get a fix on the transmitter. They break down the door and arrest the teenage girl operator. She crunches a cyanide capsule in her teeth and dies.

Mk. XV British WWII spy radio set

Nazi radio man Grahnweis inspects the Mark XV radio transmitter: 

Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, "Maybe something new inside."

There was. 

Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic - this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn't clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in the upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.

I had to read that passage twice before I figured out what happened to the Grahnweis and the senior officer.

Tom Lehrer, Rest in Peace

Tom Lehrer (1928 - 2025)

David Warren posts a eulogy for Tom Lehrer, which includes this line:

Lehrer, a brilliant mathematician, and atom bombist at Los Alamos, who studied under Irwin Kaplansky at Harvard from age fifteen, was like this master an amateur musician and composer of show tunes.

I know Tom from his tunes, never heard about the math or nuclear stuff.

From Wikipedia:

Lehrer was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955. He served until 1957, working at the National Security Agency (NSA). . . . In 2020 Lehrer publicly revealed that he had been assigned to the NSA; since the mere fact of the NSA's existence was classified at the time, Lehrer found himself in the position of implicitly using nuclear weapons work as a cover story for something more sensitive.

The phrase 'using nuclear weapons work as a cover story' sounds like something out of a James Bond-ish movie.

The Night Agent: Season 2 - Netflix Series

The Night Agent: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

It's still a dumb show, but it sucked me in. I suspect the good part is that, once again, we're trying to figure what's going on, i.e. we have a puzzle to solve. Not only are we trying to figure out who the villain is, but we're also trying to figure out just what their crime was. Adjacent to this is are the very subtle clues we get as to who the bad guy(s) is/are. In season one I was immediately suspicious of the White House Chief of Staff, but for the first half of the series she seems to be a straight-shooter, a hard-ass, but a stand up girl. We don't get any real evidence to her culpability until we get half way through, and even then we aren't sure just what kind of bad behavior she was involved in.

We've got the same thing going on again here. Once again, our guy's boss is suspect, but all the clues are superficial, i.e. she's a bitch, but being a woman in charge of security, you probably need to be. Besides, our guy's boss in the last season turned out to be the villain, and the producers wouldn't pull this same stunt again, would they?

There's plenty of action, fights, chases and gun battles. There was a great scene near the end of season one where our guy and his buds are pinned down by the nasty girl operating a scoped rifle from the top of a tower overlooking a shipping container depot. Things are looking grim for our guys, but then the good girl, who was supposed to wait outside, manages to climb up that tower without being observed and knocks nasty girl over the railing and she plummets to her death. It was such a surprise that I howled.

So every so often there is one of these unexpected bits that make the whole thing worth while.

Black Bag - Regal Movie

BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14
Focus Features

Wonderful psychological thriller.

Someone inside the UK's national security apparatus is selling secrets to the enemy and George (Michael Fassbender) is tasked with finding them. To this end he employs a man who comes up with a list of five people all of whom are co-workers, and one of whom is George's wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). George is the polygraph (lie detector) man and normally he would call each of these people in for a session with his machine, but this time he decides to try something different and instead invites them all for dinner at his home.

Nothing comes of this first dinner, but now his wife is off on Black Bag mission, 'Black Bag' meaning secret and she can't tell him anything about it other than she will be back in couple of days. George's professional curiosity is aroused, so he swaps his keycard for hers (a black plastic card with no identifying marks), uses it to sneak into her office, checks up on her and finds she is going to Zurich. Hmm.

He finds an old theater ticket in a trash can by her dresser, memorizes the date and time, and replaces it. He asks her if she has seen this film (Dark Windows) and she denies it. We see them in the theater when something shocking appears on the screen, everyone in the theater reacts except her. Then there is a second shocker and this time she reacts. So, was that ticket hers, or not? If not, how did it get there? I am puzzled.

Meanwhile, a Russian dissident who is under surveillance by this UK spy outfit manages to elude his watchers. They are watching the house where is using some kind of thermal camera that shows there are a number of people in the house. There is an interruption in the camera feed for a couple minutes and now the number of people is reduced by half. The conclusion is that he has slipped away and that he had advance knowledge of the glitch that he must have gotten from someone in this spy outfit.

Now George gets Clarrisa, the IT girl (Marisa Abela), to 'borrow' a surveillance satellite during a three minute period that occurs during a 'handoff', presumably while the satellite is changing its focus. They zoom in on the coordinates George stole from his wife's computer, and what do you know, we see his wife walk into the scene and sit down on a park bench in Zurich. A man comes in and sits down with her. IT girl uses a facial recognition program to identify this guy. Turns out he is in cahoots with the Russian dissident who slipped away. 

Kathryn meets with a CIA guy and tells him that these two Russians are driving across Poland. The CIA sends a big fat drone and blows up their truck, putting a stop to their plan to cause a meltdown of a Russian nuclear reactor. They expect such a disaster would bring down Putin.

George hosts a second get together at the same table in his house, but this time there is no food. He starts the meeting by throwing a handgun into the middle of the table. He explains the situation and waits for the culprit to reveal himself. He explains that the ticket in the trash was a very poor ploy to implicate his wife. She is an experienced spy and would not leave anything so obviously incriminating where George could find it. The culprit reveals themself by picking up the gun and firing a couple of rounds, but they are blanks. Kathryn reaches into her purse, pulls out a gun and shoots the culprit dead.

There were a couple of interesting little snippets. While George is preparing dinner, wearing a white  long sleeve dress shirt and an apron, he splashes a little bit of red sauce on the cuff of his shirt. It is barely noticeable, but he goes off to change it. Just reinforcing George's image as fastidious.

In another we have Arthur, the head of this department (Pierce Brosnan looking like an old man, well duh, he is an old man. Very disconcerting because James Bond never ages.), sitting down for dinner at the counter of a tiny restaurant. He is served a fish on a plate. We are treated to a close up of the fish's head and the fish is still alive. Never mind that people eat all kinds of weird food, Arthur is apparently a weirdo because eating live animals is pretty much verboten in Western Culture.

Kleo: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Kleo: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Very entertaining. Previous posts about the show:

• Kleo - Netflix Series
• Christ the Redeemer
• Tubular Bells

Christ the Redeemer

We just finished rewatching Kleo. We pulled up Netflix the other night looking for something new to watch and we see that there is a new season of Kleo available. We remember watching it before, but not well enough to pick up where we left off, so we decided to just start watching it again from the beginning and see what happens. Maybe our memories will be jostled and we'll say 'oh yeah, I remember this'. We did remember bits and pieces of it, but not enough to get bored so and we ended up rewatching the whole thing. It's pretty great, it's a quirky little show, full of oddball characters, curious settings and bright colors.

Kleo is an East German assassin employed off-the-books by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police. She is sent to West Berlin through a tunnel to kill a man in a nightclub. She returns to East Berlin and shortly thereafter is arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison on vague charges of treason.

At the time of her arrest she is pregnant. On arrival in the prison she gets in a fight with a girl gang and gets the stuffing kicked out of her and she loses the baby. Not only does she lose the baby her organs are so damaged that she will not be able to ever have a child. Now she has another reason to seek revenge.

Just recently I realized that most women's greatest desire is to have children. This might be because this desire is similar to breathing - it's such a fundamental part of us that we don't even think about it. I know that when I was younger I didn't want to have kids. It wasn't until I was in my early 30's that this changed.

But back to our story. Kleo is in prison, it's 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down, all political prisoners are released, Kleo among them and she wants to know why she was sent to prison when, as far as she knew, she was just doing her job. So she goes looking for answers and at every step of the way the next person she encounters would rather kill her than tell her why, but she being an assassin, she kills them instead. 

Eventually she learns that the whole thing is about a secret pact East Germany made with President Ronald Reagan that would keep the East German government propped up with loads of cash. What? Why you might ask? Because the plot requires a secret that a whole bunch of people are willing to die to protect, that's why. It doesn't make any sense to me, but who knows? There has always been all kinds of skullduggery going on, so yeah, sure, why not? Whatever, we'll pretend Reagan made a secret pact with Erich Honecker. Was it really secret? Britannica has this to say:

"Under Honecker’s rule, East Germany was one of the more repressive but also one of the most prosperous of the Soviet-bloc countries of eastern Europe. He allowed the growth of some trade and travel ties with West Germany in return for West German financial aid."

Eventually we find that the secret is in documents contained in a red suitcase, so for the rest of the show we are chasing this red suitcase."

Note with coordinates

A few seconds before the end of episode 7, Margot Honecker (aka The Purple Witch) hands the above slip of paper to Ramona, another secret Stasi assassin, who just happens to be nine months pregnant.

Hiding Place for the Red Suitcase
Episode 8, 27 minute mark

Episode 8 has Kleo and her sidekick Sven finding the suitcase in the base of the above statue. I asked Google Lens to identify it and while it found a bunch of very similar statues, it did not find an exact match.

Christ the Redeemer

There is a similar statue in a similar location on the Chile-Argentine border, but you can see that while there are similarities, it is not the same one. Which makes me wonder - where did they find the statue for the show?

Central Chile, South America
Blue marker is from coordinates on the note
Red marker is the location of the statue

Anyway, because I gotta be me, I plotted the locations of the coordinates from the note and the actual statue on Google Maps.  The coordinates that the Purple Witch gave to Ramona point to the middle of the Atacama desert. No statue there.

Update December 2025 corrected a couple of typos.

Villanelle

Villanelle is the villain in the Netflix series Killing Eve. She is a very talented, lovely young female  psychopath. She is employed as an assassin by the mysterious Twelve. They employ her to kill various high-profile people which she does with verve and style. They reward her with large sums of cash and a nice apartment in Paris. She socks some of the money away and spends what she wants on designer clothes.

Problem for Villanelle is that she doesn't feel anything. She enjoys the killing, and she enjoys having nice things, but her constant refrain is 'I'm bored' which she repeats at volume in the most inappropriate settings, kind of like a toddler. So perhaps she enjoys the killing because while she is on this mission she isn't bored.

She is in love with Eve Polastri because, near as I can tell, Eve is not boring. Eve is enamored of Villanelle, but she is conflicted because Villanelle is the killer Eve has been tasked with catching.

I'm starting to feel some sympathy for Villanelle. I mean, imagine what it would be like to not feel anything. You would have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, much less getting anything done. Then again, I wonder how many working stiffs only keep getting up and going to work because they have trained themselves to do so. You work at the same tedious job for decades and you might not feel anything anymore either. Maybe that's where workers going postal comes from.

While Villanelle is a prolific killer, she has only killed one person (that I recall) who wasn't an assigned target. Since we don't know the affiliations of her targets, we don't really know whose side she is on. She might even be working for the same people as Eve, and they are just letting Eve investigate to see how much she can find out so they can fix whatever chinks she finds in their security.

I mean, there's the case of Andrew Peel. He is the scion of a wealthy family who has murdered the rest of his family. He is now in control of some data mining software that can reveal anything about anybody. He is offering it to various unscrupulous characters. Eve and Villanelle (wait, what? Yes, secret spy missions make strange bedfellows) are sent to find out who his customers are along with the caveat to not kill him. Villanelle kills him anyway on account of he wanted her to kill Eve. Or maybe she disliked him. What, feelings? Well, she is in love with Eve, so a bit of loyalty there.

The best part is that nobody is upset about Peel's death. Killing him put a stop to the sale to the evil software package, which is like the best possible outcome. Now we begin to suspect that Carolyn sent these two to Rome because she suspected this is what would happen. You know, a win-win situation. Either they actually get the information she wanted, or they flake out and kill him. Either one works for her.

Carolyn and Villanelle are both angling to move up in their respective organizations. I wouldn't be surprised if we find Villanelle and Carolyn going to the same meetings.

NSO Group

i cant stop thinking about this exploit
Low Level Learning

Ben Hawkes has a webpage about this.

So who is this NSO? They have a website that is completely opaque, it tells you nothing about who they are. Wikipedia is a little more forthcoming. Here is the introduction:

NSO Group Technologies (NSO standing for Niv, Shalev and Omri, the names of the company's founders) is an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones. It employed almost 500 people as of 2017.

NSO claims that it provides authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime. The company says that it deals with government clients only. Pegasus spyware is classified as a weapon by Israel and any export of the technology must be approved by the government.

According to several reports, NSO Group spyware has been used to target human rights activists and journalists in various countries, was used for state espionage against Pakistan, for warrantless domestic surveillance of Israeli citizens by Israeli police, and played a role in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government.

In 2019, instant messaging company WhatsApp and its parent company Meta Platforms (then known as Facebook) sued NSO under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO in the U.S., and the US included NSO Group in its Entity List for acting against U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, effectively banning U.S. companies from supplying NSO.

 

Killing Eve

KILLING EVE Official Trailer (HD) Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer Thriller BBC Series
JoBlo Streaming & TV

I dunno about this show. We've got two very smart women, one works for the British government in some kind of Ministry of Information and the other is an assassin operating at the behest of some shadowy group. Our girl, Eve (Sandra Oh), works for the government, is good at data analysis, but not too sharp when dealing with the real world. The bad girl, Viallanelle (Jodie Comer), has no patience with any kind of bureaucracy but is talented with all the tools of an assassin, knows how to fight and has plenty of street smarts.

Eve is fine in the office, but out in the field she is a bumbling nitwit. I find myself yelling at the screen in every episode because she is doing something boneheaded. Now that I think about it, I realize she is much like Sam Lowry, the hero/victim in Brazil. 

Villanelle takes an interest in Eve because she is the first person to get an inkling of just who she is, which makes her a worthy adversary. Eve wants to find out who Villanelle is working for. Her victims are all over the map, politically and geographically, so it is not apparent who is benefitting from all these killings. Villanelle and Eve sit down for dinner one night (not Eve's idea of a good time) and Eve asks her. Villanelle responds that if you go high enough, they are probably working for the same people. Aha! Conspiracy! I newd it!

Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) is the head of the Russia Section at MI6. She is kean, as into neato-keano, as she is very quiet, keeps in the background, but wields a heck of a lot of power. I've seen Fiona around before, but the only shows I remember seeing were Enola Holmes and the Harry Potter films where she played Petunia Dursley.

Later post about Villanelle

Citadel - Amazon Prime Series

Citadel - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Prime Video

Action packed spy thriller with a plot straight out of a comic book and about as believable. As long as you are not expecting any kind of emotional connection with the characters, it's fine.

The Recruit - Netflix Series

THE RECRUIT Trailer (2022) Noah Centineo, Drama Series
Netflix

Newly graduated lawyer gets a job working for the CIA. Hijinks ensue. On one hand we've got political squabbling going on in the office and on the other we've got him flying hither and yon trying to figure out whether this woman locked up in an Arizona prison has any real dirt on the CIA. A lot of it is fairly contrived, but some of it, like the general office ambiance, seems fairly realistic, i.e. pretty effed up. Our boy stumbles constantly and often gets beat up, but he ain't dead yet.

P. S. Wrote this three months ago, probably had more to say about it, but I don't remember what that might have been, so, post it.

Update April 2024 replaced missing video.

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Dark Voyage by Alan Furst

Great story about the adventures of a tramp steamer and her captain sailing around Europe in 1941.

Captain DeHaan and his ship, the Dutch tramp steamer Noordendam, are co-opted by British intelligence to carry a load of commandos to a headland on the north coast of Tunisia in the Mediterranean. The object of the commando raid is to take out a German post that is watching ship traffic using Bolometers, a new, high tech, whiz bang  infra-red detector gizmo. They drop anchor just offshore in the middle of the night, the commandos take small boats into shore and do what commandos do. Naturally, there are complications, but they mostly get away, raise anchor and steam away without anyone being the wiser. Just another tramp steamer sailing east in the Mediterranean.

Thermal Imaging Sensor

I didn't find any good pictures of WW2 German Infrared Detectors, but I did find this very cool image in a story about current infrared research. 

Breguet 730 Flying Boat
Page 55. Never flew during the war.

As they are sailing away from the commando raid, they see a couple of enemy patrol aircraft but nothing comes of it.

Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero
Page 55.

Browning GP35  Automatic
The captain's gun

They dock in Alexandria, Egypt, where all is chaos as the Germans have launched an invasion of Crete. Our ship gets loaded with munitions along with a couple of tanks and a couple of airplanes. They convoy to Crete. No sooner are they docked than the harbor is attacked by a squadron of Stuka dive bombers. The anti-aircraft guns on the British warships dispose of most of them, but they do some damage. Our ship and crew escape with only minor damage.

Nothing like a little success to get you assigned more of the same. Now it's back to the west end of the Mediterranean where they pick up a cargo of black-ops radio gear which includes some largish antennae masts and trucks to haul them. They have to sail north around England and Ireland, across the North Sea and into the Baltic, passing between German occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden.  Somehow they manage to arrive at their rendezvous at the southern tip of Sweden, in the middle of the night again, and manage to unload their cargo onto a fishing trawler that makes several trips carrying the gear the mile to shore. It is well after dawn when they finish, but they are underway by the time the regular Nazi patrol aircraft comes by. 

Now they are home free, all they have to do is navigate the minefield between Denmark and Sweden, the same one they had to navigate on the way in, but a German patrol boat spots them and decides to inquire. Well the jigs up now, sailing under false colors, looks like they are heading for a German prison or worse. Well, except the mess boy and the cook deliver coffee to the bridge, and boy do they deliver. The guard gets a coffee pot to the head and the Nazi lieutenant gets a knife in the back. Their ship is faster than the German boat by maybe two knots, but with a thick cloud of black smoke, night falling and confusing radio messages indicating chaos onboard the ship, they manage to evade the patrol boat.

With the Germans alerted to their presence, the way west seems closed, so they head East to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania). They arrive just as Germany has forgotten their pact with Russia and has mounted an attack. The port is under attack, so they pick up a load of refugees and head north toward Finland. Their ship is part of a rag tag convoy that gets attacked by German airplanes. Their ship is damaged, damaged, damaged, but it keeps limping along well enough to carry them aground on a Finnish island.

On page 38, Captain DeHaan reviews the 40 book library he keeps in his cabin.

• Multatuli  Max Havelaar
• Louis Couperus
• William Shakespeare Henry V
• Joseph Conrad  The Mirror of the Sea
• Joseph Conrad  Nostromo
• Joseph Conrad  Heart of Darkness
• Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer
• Joseph Conrad  Lord Jim
• T. E. Lawrence The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• Malraux Man's Fate
• Malraux  Man's Hope
• Stendhal The Red and the Black
• Stendhal  The Charterhouse of Parma
• Tolstoy  War and Peace
• Bowditch The American Practical Navigator
• Nicholl's Deviation Questions and Law of Storms
• Baedeker for France
• Colette My Mother's House
• Colette  The Vagabond
• Colette Claudine in Paris
• Colette  Claudine at School

On page 184 Furst mentions Captain Claude Farrere of the French minesweeper Lieutenant Borri
Serebin. Kind of weird just throwing in a couple of specific names like that since they don't seem to have any bearing on the story, so I do some checking. Found nothing about the French minesweeper, but Captain Claude, well that's another story. 

J. P. Sauer & Sohn, Suhl CAL 7,65
Page 222 - The Nazi lieutenant's gun

Map of Noordendam's Travels