Larry Cohen ‏@larryjcohen

That moment when the show you've been working on for over a year has a subway ad.

John Porter prangte auch überlebensgroß an vielen Stellen in London. Ich weiß noch, wie groß die Euphorie damals war, als das erste Plakat entdeckt wurde

War in London zu Crucible-Zeiten doch auch so.
Und Mr Thornton hing mal groß am Times Square am World Kissing Day, als er schon in N Y wohnte. Ich kann mich auch an große ItS-Transparente in NYC erinnern vor der Kinopremiere.
Auf alle Fälle viel Promo für BS!

Zu TC-Zeiten lief zeitgleich der ItS-Trailer am Piccadilly Circus. Epix lässt sich auf jeden Fall nicht lumpen.

Und erst mal die entzückende ItS-Werbung an Londoner Bushaltestellen ...
Epix investiert richtig viel Geld ins Marketing - hoffentlich zahlt es sich aus!

A CIA agent tells all about the dark side of espionage. Content by @BerlinStation https://t.co/yXqU6sEol9 https://t.co/1PRuWolozT

CONTENT BY EPIX
THE DANGEROUS LIFE OF SPIES
A three-part series on the realities of high stakes espionage made possible by The EPIX Original Series, Berlin Station.
Watch the first two episodes of Berlin Station for free here

A ROUTINE OPERATION
The Reality of Espionage

The year is 1973. American disillusionment with the Vietnam War is spreading rapidly and consuming the general populace—a resounding refusal to believe the old model of military combat makes sense when the enemy is an ideology. Both sides seem to agree. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is in Paris, negotiating a U.S. withdrawal. But Kissinger and his staff aren’t the only government employees in Paris. The CIA is also there, in the shadows, eavesdropping on the North Vietnamese delegation. The mission: gather intelligence on the North Vietnamese’s position, hopefully providing the U.S. government with some diplomatic leverage. And similar to the Vietnam War, their enemy is hiding in plain sight, using the geography to their advantage, waiting to strike a crippling blow.

Robert Baer, Afghanistan, 2005
A German man, regularly hired by the CIA for such a job on European soil, is running the routine audio-surveillance operation from a hotel room across the street from the North Vietnamese delegation. Instead of listening to and recording the conversations, probing for information to bolster Kissinger’s negotiations, he removes all of the equipment, loads it into his car and drives to Germany. There he holds a press conference exposing the United States and its covert surveillance operation. Roll the credits sequence, and it would seem like a modern cable drama cold open.

This is the story according to Robert Baer, an ex-CIA case officer with direct knowledge of the operation. As detailed in his memoir, See No Evil, he spent two decades as a spy, with years of paramilitary training and routine activities designed to minimize risk in the field. His past assignments include Morocco; New Delhi, India; and Khartoum, Sudan. Today, Baer is a columnist, author and frequent guest on CNN. He is also a story consultant on EPIX’s new spy thriller Berlin Station, which follows a dramatic mole hunt for a whistleblower in Berlin.

C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D C E N S O R E D Baer’s story shows the humanity at the core of espionage—it’s not just scripted entertainment that has flawed heroes and conflicted plotlines. The life of a field agent is rife with deception, suspicion, a constant ache of insecurity, and the potentially fatal reality that your mission has been compromised. What must a spy do to succeed?

The Job of a Field Agent

When Baer arrived in India on his first mission, he was scared that he would screw up and lose an informant. Against CIA protocol, he also found himself romantically entangled with an Irish foreign national (Langley was “rightly pissed”).

“Don’t keep anything in your pockets that can identify anyone in an operation.”
Despite those early foibles, Baer established a routine—the cornerstone of gathering good intelligence. He adopted the spy’s mindset, creating a fiction during the day so that at night he could gather information from multiple assets. He kept a physical office where he took appointments during business hours. And when night covered the city, Baer, like any good spy, got down to the real business of espionage—gathering information from the dark edges of the city.

This is where the job (and the threats) of being an agent truly begins: in the field with informants.

How you gather information from an informant can be best achieved under the guise of a friendly drink, “trolling for people,” as Baer describes it—probing for ideologies or political affiliations under the illusion of socialization in bars and clubs. A useful asset can bring critical documents, information about the government, or individuals within it. CENSORED CEN SO RED CENSOR ED CE NSOR ED C ENSORED

A field agent’s modus operandi is skilled undercover work: collect intel without detection. The intelligence you collect is yours to debrief, translate into English, type up in a report, and send as an encrypted message back to CIA headquarters. The CIA and the folks in Washington decide the next order of business. Your duty is done.

“This is pretty much the way espionage works for everybody, whether you’re Russian or British,” Baer says. “You’re just out meeting assets.”

The Risks

But even the most familiar schemes cannot prevent an operation from going south. Information is a fickle mistress, easily wooed by the enemy. As the unveiling of the surveillance operation during the Paris Peace Accords illustrates, when things go bad with a CIA operation, they can go bad spectacularly.

Inasmuch as it is your job as a field agent to collect intelligence, it is also your job to protect it. In one precarious situation, Baer says, a CIA station chief working in an unnamed African country found himself stopped by police while driving a car. The officers ordered the CIA agent out of the vehicle, frisked him and took his address book. The book detailed more than a few relatives and friends. It contained information on every asset the agent had gathered during his post. In an instant, his entire operation was compromised.

“That is a lesson learned—it’s the type of thing that the CIA told you about,” he adds. “Don’t keep anything in your pockets that can identify anyone in an operation.”

The information you gather is dangerous in the wrong hands, but the spy himself is information—his existence alone betrays a government agenda. Identify a spy and you uncover a mission. The implications of this can be bleak. Baer recalls an instance where the CIA flew a case offer to Europe. It was a simple routine, but in this operation, the agent carried a briefcase containing a notable sum: one million dollars. When the CIA found out the officer had died mid-flight they could not and did not claim him. Disavowed, in the parlance of Mission Impossible.

CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSOR “There are so many operations that have gone bad, but they’re classified,” Baer says. “There are legions of things that go wrong for no good reason at all.” CENS O RED CENS ORED CENSOR ED CE NSORE D CENSO RED CEN SO RED CE NSO RED CEN

Things that “go right” don’t get the glory, or the press. Small (or large) victories in espionage—ones that might help stop a war or avert some diplomatic disaster—are really the sum of a few small and seemingly mundane interactions. You discuss some information over a drink with an informant, extract the important pieces of their story into a document, and deliver it to a superior. With a job well done, there are no car chases or action sequences, just a bunch of interviews conducted under the cover of darkness.

This darkness is not ubiquitous, however. The world is filled with a gradation of danger for a spy, increasing the threat to missions with an already increased sense of importance. Where is the spy least safe?