Spy Ops Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Seven different operations are examined, including the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama, an interview with the man who shot Pope John Paul II, the Mossad operation that took out the participants in the Munich Olympics attack in 1972, Americans who actually went undercover with the Taliban, and a Cold War operation to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
The first episode, though, talks to the people involved with Operation Jawbreaker, which went into Afghanistan a few days after 9/11 and worked with the Northern Alliance to push the Taliban out of Kabul and the other territories they controlled. Schroen (who died in 2022) is interviewed, along with a number of other CIA operatives, as well as Northern Alliance higher ups that worked with the CIA. The effort to remove the Taliban was to prevent them from continuing to give Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who executed the 9/11 attacks, safe haven in the mountainous terrain in Afghanistan.
A key Afghan figure interviewed is former ambassador Masood Khalili, who was with Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Northern Alliance leader that the various factions in the alliance rallied behind, was assassinated two days before the 9/11 attacks.
While we appreciated the comprehensiveness of the Operation Jawbreaker episode of Spy Ops, there was a bit of a macho, jingoistic tone about it that bothered us. Why? Because we know what went on in Afghanistan for the past 22 years, especially the fact that the Taliban took right over as soon as American troops left for good in 2021.
Through the entire episode, as Schroen and other members of his team detail the tactical moves they made to get Northern Alliance members on their side, to get them weapons and other supplies, and to train them, we wondered if the episode was going to address that elephant in the room: Did all that effort and time ultimately go for naught?
We were happy to see it addressed at the very end, though the disgusted tone of those who were in the operation felt extremely one sided. There was no nuance to that part of the episode.
We see the troops leaving and the famous scenes of refugees hanging off planes departing from Kabul airport. But there is no discussion of the fact that, yes, the operation flushed out the Taliban without much of a fight and installed a government that brought freedoms back to Afghans that the Taliban had taken away. But there was always the feeling over those two decades that it was all a house of cards. And while the CIA members interviewed all talk in proud tones of what they accomplished, there was no contemplation about just why the Taliban left so easily and just how tough things got after that seemingly easy victory.
We don’t expect that kind of one-sidedness from the rest of the series, though given that the spies themselves are the ones discussing these operations, it does seem that it’s going to be a possibility. We’ll just have to take it episode by episode.
