The Americans
Prologue
To the uninitiated, "The Americans" is a series that ran for 6 seasons on FX TV channel, between 2013 and 2018. It is set in the United States of America in the 1980's.
Spoiler alert! If you have not watched this series to the end, or if you have not yet watched it, this Prologue contains details of how it all pans out.
Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are KGB Directorate 'S' agents, known as "illegals", living in Washington DC. They were both born in Russia, selected and trained in their mid to late teens for assignments abroad. Having never met, they were introduced to each other in the months before their move to Canada in the mid 1960's. They were intensively trained, a wide ranging, lengthy and sometimes brutal preparation for their future roles. They arrived in the US via Canada, a safer route and an easier way to acclimatise to the American way of life. The time spent there helped establish their identities, careers and social skills, at the same time fine tuning their knowledge and understanding of the great differences between the lives they had known growing up in post war Russia and those of their peers in a far more prosperous and free-living setting.
Their identities were created from the records of real people who had died at a young age, a common method at the time for criminals and foreign agents to create a cover story with real roots. Nobody who knew Philip or Elizabeth suspected that they were anything other than true Americans, so convincing was their appearance, actions and way of speaking without any trace of an accent.
Over the next twenty years they integrate into society as a married couple, although their marriage was not that of a normal couple. To anyone in their social circles or work environment nothing would appear to be out of the ordinary, so well did they play their parts in public. In reality, Elizabeth could not find love in her relationship especially in the early years, instead she forged working relationships in her undercover work, one of which became a lasting and close friendship with Gregory, a disaffected and disillusioned black American. Their relationship became sexual very early on and carried on for many years. He was Elizabeth's first recruit.
Early on they established a travel agency business, which gave them the perfect cover for travelling the country in their secret role as KGB agents. None of their work colleagues or personal friends noticed anything amiss, with the exception of their close neighbour Stan Beeman.
Stan and his family moved in to the house almost directly opposite the Jennings in 1981. They soon struck up a close friendship, particularly Stan and Philip, with similar interests in Racquet Ball. There was one very major issue at play here, unknown to Stan. In the days after he and his family moved in, Philip asked what he did for a living. Stan replied, "I'm an FBI agent." If Philip and Elizabeth found this a shock, the next revelation rocked their world - Stan's main role was in counter-intelligence, focusing in particular on the location of Soviet "illegals". Fate had brought the hunter and hunted together as friends and neighbours, and only one side knew the truth.
This knowledge underpinned all future dealings, creating a great deal of tension for Philip and Elizabeth. Mere weeks after Stan moved in, the KGB agents were involved in a mission that attracted FBI attention. Stan made a link between the car seen by witnesses as being the same make, model and colour as his new neighbours. He slipped into their garage in the middle of the night, breaking into their car looking for evidence. Elizabeth had carefully cleaned the car to remove any incriminating evidence just hours before, so Stan found nothing, eliminating them from any suspicion in his mind. Unknown to him, Philip was in the garage hidden in the shadows, watching Stan all the time. From that point on, Philip and Elizabeth always avoided bringing operational vehicles home.
The relationship between the Jennings and the Beemans continued without further suspicion on Stan's part until the late 1980's.
Philip and Elizabeth's relationship eventually matured into one based on love and companionship, formed in part by the secrets they both knew of each others activities. Philip had always loved his 'wife', but for Elizabeth love took many years to grow. As trained KGB agents they had both participated in many highly dangerous operations, sometimes involving loss of life of their own fellow Russian colleagues, and sometimes their "assetts" - people they had developed to provide information useful to them. Often they had personally carried out assassinations, eliminating enemies of Russia, or those in a position to expose them, or even some people whose death would be advantageous to their operations. These were almost always on the orders of their own handlers, who directly liaised with the KGB heirarchy in the Soviet Embassy, called the Rezidentura, who in turn liaised with the KGB in Moscow, called the "Center". Even so, their experience had taught them that sometimes a decision had to be made immediately, so Philip and Elizabeth between them were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths or disappearance of many US citizens, some of them FBI agents.
Did they regret any of these deaths? Almost certainly, although they were always justifiable in their own minds as being necessary to protect their own position or that of mother Russia, their homeland. Elizabeth always appeared to be the stronger of the two, her loyalty to "the cause" being unshakeable in contrast to Philip, who often had doubts, liked the American way of life, and considered defecting at one point for financial security.
Throughout all this, in the period the FX show runs over six seasons, Philip and Elizabeth also manage somehow to raise two children, a true product of their marriage. Paige is just becoming a teenager in 1981, and her brother Henry three years younger. In between running their travel agency business, operating their various spying activities, they also keep their children well grounded and following American values, participating in all the activities usual of American children of the time.
The other theme of their lives and undercover work was the pursuit of information to feed back to their handlers. They did this through a variety of means, but a common method was through sexual liaisons, usually with people having direct access to classified information, or able to plant listening devices in offices. One of these "honeytraps" saw Philip develop a relationship with Martha which lasted a few years, involved a phoney "Marriage" that she completely believed in, until eventually she came under suspicion by her own colleagues. Right until the moment when Philip took her to a safe house, and revealed his true identity and purpose, Martha had no idea that he was a Russian. She had believed that Philip, or "Clark" as she knew him, was working for internal affairs, looking for evidence of "moles" or illegal activity within the FBI. Her world totally blown apart, Martha was immediately smuggled out to Russia and had to adjust to life in a foreign country.
The final season documented the events that led to Philip and Elizabeth fleeing the country and returning to Russia. The tension was heightened in the final episode when Stan Beeman, whose suspicions had been building over recent days, finally put the pieces together and tracked them down to the parking garage underneath Paige's apartment, just as they were returning to their car to set off for Canada – their chosen route out of the country. In the tense exchange that followed, the Jennings admitted their role as KGB agents. Philip appealed to Stan's better nature, despite being ordered to surrender at gun point, and Stan eventually allowed them to pass and escape the country, a clear breach of his responsibility as an FBI agent, a crime to which he could never admit. Why did Stan do this? It was not clearly explained, but the viewer was left with the feeling that his relationship over the years, affection for them as a family and his previous experience working deep undercover himself, caused his resolve to waiver.
This story is inspired by a scene in that final episode, where Stan spoke to Henry Jennings to tell him his parents had left him behind. No words were heard, the scene was very short, leaving the viewer to imagine how Stan broke the devastating news to Henry.
Acknowledgements
Very briefly, thank you firstly to my wife Julie, who has put up with my obsession with this series, my constant tapping away on the laptop while she tries to watch her own programmes, for buying me the DVD box set for our wedding anniversary.
Secondly, thank you to my three daughters, who have been helpful and supportive in reading this story and commenting as needed.
Finally, thank you, thank you! to the creators, writers, crew and cast of this amazing series which has kept me captivated more than any other series in my 52 years.