'The English Spy': Secret Agents Before Pegasus

When there were no cell phones and no Pegasus program was invented to snoop on them, spies had to move like in spy movies.

For example, sending a businessman to Moscow to contact a Soviet agent who was going to give him information about the nuclear plans of the USSR.

To the worst of the Cold War, the early sixties, takes us the interesting film

(a very free translation of

, the mail or messenger), by Dominic Cooke, on Amazon Prime Video.

We witnessed the backroom of the missile crisis, the ones that Khrushchev installed in Cuba.

A young Kennedy stood up but knew how to give Moscow room to withdraw instead of launching the preventive attack that the hawks were asking for.

It is a nightmare that this argument sounds so current to us, so likely to be repeated today.

Benedict Cumberbatch, always a credible actor, plays Greville Wynne, the businessman with interests in Eastern Europe recruited by MI6 in collaboration with the CIA.

Russian Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the snitch that warns of Khrushchev's plans, is played by Merab Ninidze.

I will not gut the plot anymore, which was true and is on Wikipedia.

Although, of course, we know that at the end of that crisis, in 1962, a nuclear holocaust was avoided.

Spies then ran enormous risks as some still do today.

gain weight in this profession

.

We learned from Snowden's leaks that the powers spy massively and remotely on friend and foe, on world leaders and on many unremarkable people.

Surprise: Catalan politicians who challenged the state, fled from justice or set the streets on fire were spied on.

Another surprise: the Spanish government itself was spied on, it is suspected that from the south.

Why?

Because it can.

And without risking your skin.

Since we are already being spied on by so many applications that we carry on our phone.

In a way, we all live on Pegasus.

You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on