The Daily Beast Podcast - ‘The Americans’ Creator: Being in the CIA Made Me Empathize with the KGB

Episode Date: October 24, 2021

In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Joseph Weisberg explains how his time in the CIA made him see the KGB and Russia in an entirely new light (“They weren't like evil, cold-blooded killers.��) Plus, he tells Molly Jong-Fast all about his new show that’s about a serial killer and his therapist, who happens to be Steve Carell. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Joseph Weisberg, who is, of course, the creator and showrunner of the amazing show of the Americans. And he's going to talk to us about his new book today, Russia Upside Down. Welcome to the New Abnormal, Joseph. Thanks, Molly. It's very exciting when we have a guest who is in the intersection of entertainment and politics. I'm at that intersection. That's where I'm at. I never thought of it quite that way. living at that intersection. That's right. So I want to know the story of how you came to this book

because I think it's cinematic. So go. Molly, I'd like to tell you that this book is at the intersection of entertainment apology. You know, I had a sort of a bouncy and interesting route, but it really did run through those two places. You know, I was always really obsessed with the Soviet Union and remained obsessed with it after it collapsed. And I also had spent a couple years working at the CIA, so I was very interested in intelligence and espionage and whatnot. And I published a spy novel about a decade after I left the agency. I got a call from an agent in Hollywood who said, would you like to write television because we're always looking for spy shows? And I had an interest of looking for a career. I was a novelist, but I wasn't looking to get into

Hollywood, except I was broke. So I was looking to get to Hollywood, even though I didn't know it. Exactly. And that sort of started this, you know, I'd gone down this path probably in the early 90s. where I had started rethinking the Soviet experience and my kind of early notions that Ronald Reagan was right and it was an evil empire. You know, I was a big time cold warrior. Did the CIA pick you up at Yale? No. I called them.

I literally looked them up in the phone book, saw it to my surprise that they were listed, called them and asked if I could have a job application. I have a feeling that's what everyone did. I have a feeling the whole they picked you up as just a myth or maybe happened in like the 50s. It's more bureaucratic than that now. You know, you're not.

only person who's been on this podcast who has called the CIA and asked them for a job. Really? Who else? Yeah. Evan McMullen has like story after story about calling the CIA and then being like you're 13, no. I have to have a drink with him and trade that story back and forth. Exactly. So anyway, so go on. So you got into the CIA. Yeah, I got in CIA and Soviet Union collapsed right after I joined. I left the CIA. I was only there for a couple of years. I didn't really do much except train, but I read a lot there and saw a lot of things there about how espionage worked. And after I left, I just started rethinking. In particular, I read this book by a guy who had been a KGB officer named Victor Cherkoshin. And his book was about him and his friends at the

KGB. And they sounded exactly like me and my friends from the CIA. They weren't these like evil, cold-blooded killers. I still had this sort of childlike view of what that was probably like. And so I started to rethink really everything that had gone on. And I started to read more widely. of course a lot more was available from the Soviet archives. I don't read Russian, but I was reading people who were reading the Soviet archives. And I started to see what a narrow view I had had of the whole place. And then, you know, I started, it sort of came up with idea for this show based on the fact that if it wasn't such a black and white situation, you could have KGB officers who were humane. Humane's not quite the right word for them, but who were relatable and who you liked.

And then as, this is why I'm really making this about the intersection, as we did the show, and I was always looking for plots and stories and things and reading more and more history, I started developing even further, you know, the notion that this was a complex, rich country like our own, rather than some faraway evil empire where we were superior. Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting. I love the Americans. It's one of those shows that is even better than you think it is. You know, it's a really a show that's stood the test of time.

So your experience with the CIA really made you have compassion for the experience? You know, I think that my experience of the CIA really started to upend my views because it was so different than what I expected there. I expected to join and have some combination of James Bond and Le Carre. I knew it was going to be only 10% James Bond and 90% Le Carre, but that was okay with me. But what I really expected was that I would find sort of the secret wheels that were turning and how things really really. worked. And I found instead a pretty dysfunctional bureaucracy like any other dysfunctional bureaucracy. By the way, I want to say that there's some good things about that bureaucracy, some things that work well, and I loved the people there. But overall, I concluded, and not everyone agrees with this,

obviously, but for me, that espionage was very counterproductive and did much more damage than anything positive. And so it started to kind of open me up to the idea that I, in general, and the way I was looking at the world was maybe a little narrow or even, as I say, in the title, upside down. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So you did the show and then you came to the book from the show? Yeah, kind of. I mean, it was a little more, this book sort of came out of me thinking about and studying these issues from the time I was really pretty young, almost like 17. I started getting obsessed with this topic. I guess it was, I think it was right after the show ended, a friend of mine who still worked at the CIA had been put in charge of a lecture program there. And he called me up

and he said, you should come give a lecture. And so I started thinking about it. And I thought, well, I have a lot of ideas about how not just I, but our country, sort of mismanaged Soviet policy. And the CIA was obviously very central to all that. So it would be sort of fun to go into the CIA and say, hey, guys, I think we've sort of had it all wrong. And I planned the whole lecture out and I had an outline. I was all ready to go. And then he called me back. And he said, by the way the topic of the lecture is counterintelligence. And I was like, I don't get to choose the topic. And he said, no. And I said, I don't know anything about counterintelligence. And he said, well, you'll figure that part out. So I, I, I, I, I don't get to choose that part out. So I didn't give the lecture, and then I was also very disappointed because I realized I actually had a lot to say about all this, and I already had an outline.

So I just thought, as someone who had written a couple books previously, I thought I'll just make it a book, which was, you know, a little bit naive because that outline obviously didn't do me much good an end. That's where the idea came from to write it all down. Just give us the central thesis of your book. Sometime in my late 20s, I went into therapy, and I started looking at myself and my feelings and my lack of ever. access to my feelings and sort of the rigidity with which I viewed myself, my relationships, and the world in general. And I found that I had trouble accessing what I was really feeling, and I had trouble seeing the world in complex terms. And the two were very closely related, because if you see things in kind of a black and white way, it affects you, it affects your relationships,

and it affects how you see the whole world, including politics. Now it took me years to sort of put that together and extend it out to politics. But when I started then, looking in a broader way at the Soviet Union, particularly at the Soviet Union, I started seeing that I had missed the fact that the whole place was a really complex society, that it was like ours, and that it had good things and bad things, and people who supported it, and people who didn't. It was just anything other than a simplistic evil empire. And essentially, once I rethought that, I started seeing modern-day Russia very differently, too, and seeing that we were kind of repeating our same habits of, you know, making Putin nothing but a villain and making the Russians only a country that attacks us and where it's innocent victims.

So to the degree the book has a thesis, it's to kind of connect the personal to the political and look more broadly. It's interesting because, and I'm curious to know your take on this because you have now spent so much time on Russia. you're a Russia expert in as much as anyone as. It strikes me that right now America is kind of refocusing on China. Yeah, it's hard to know. I think my concern is that we're going to get ourselves in kind of versions of cold wars with Russia and China at the same time, which is something we've done before. So we're certainly capable of having two enemies at a time when I think it would probably make more sense to have no enemies.

I think this sort of human impulse, I had it very strongly in myself. I was a young man, and I was looking for a purpose and meaning in my life, and I found that by picking an enemy that I could fight against. That gave me something to do. It gave me a job. It gave me a belief system. It was very appealing in so many ways, but it was dangerous, and it's dangerous when we do it collectively. So I agree that we're moving towards that with China. I think we're already there with Russia, and I think we could easily afford to back off of that. I think it would be a great favor to ourselves and to the world. It seems like Russia, even though there's still this big American enemy, right, they have interfered in our elections. Putin is, you know, is very

powerful. These Russian oligarchs have all this money. They're moving to America and the UK, and they're sort of, but the country itself is in pretty sad shape compared to a place. like China. Yeah, you know, there's often been a kind of debate, I think, about whether or not Russia would have been, whether the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, if instead of reforming the way he had reformed it, had changed it the way that China changed, would it be still here and much richer and more successful? Nobody knows the answer to that. And there are a lot, those are two different countries with two different histories and politics. And Gorbachev, most of all, was a believer in communism. So there was no way he was going to make that decision. But, you know, Russia is simultaneously

struggling, but, you know, I'm not sure it's as bad as we tend to perceive. Their economy, obviously, has also improved. We tend to compare them to us, right? So if they're not as rich as us or not as rich as China, then they're not doing well. But they really have to be seen on their own terms, under which they're probably certainly economically doing better than they've done in a long, long time. So we had on the podcast, like about three weeks ago, the chief of staff for Alexander Navalny, whose name is Lenin Vokov. And I said to him, this is like one of my favorite moments in podcasting. I said, you know, you had democracy and you lost it. And he said, we never had democracy in Russia. And I'm wondering what you think of that.

It's an interesting comment. I don't know exactly what he meant without hearing more details. but I, you know, the idea, the claim that they had democracy, of course, was that under Yeltsin in the 90s, things were freer and more open and more and less, well, they weren't less corrupt, but they were freer and more open and certainly more democratic. And I assume the counterclaim would be that they were so corrupt and Yeltsin was so powerful and wielded that power in such a corrupt way that it couldn't be counted as democracy. But in a way, I think it's very instructive and important question because we tend to see it through the eyes up. they should have democracy. They ought to have democracy. Something's wrong if they don't. But Russian history does not really support that idea. There is certainly have always been in Russia and in the Soviet Union and since westernizers and people who essentially are Western liberal Democrats in their outlook. But they have never been popular and they have never really swayed the majority. And it's probably fair to say that most in Russia, you know, democracy doesn't have the same ring in Russia that it has here, I'm told by many people who have lived there and who speak Russian,

that it isn't the sort of unambiguously positive idea. It is not an aspiration. They are, for example, most Russians more concerned with stability. And that's, you know, if you think about the history of that country, that's pretty understandable. If we've gone through what they had through, we might also be more interested in stability than democracy. We might even be headed in that direction now. So, you know, whether or not they've had it, I don't think it's where they're head in and I don't think it's what most of them want. So interesting. I mean, it is, you know, when Afghanistan fell, we did have a whole conversation about, like, you know, American nation building when I was growing up in the

90s was like, like, we're going to bring democracy to everyone and they're going to love it and love us for it. And we have learned, we have learned that they hate us for it and they don't want it. And we can't do it anyway. And, you know, and if Afghanistan has proved anything, It's that we're just complete morons when it comes to like going into a country and giving them what we think they want. And I'm curious to know, I mean, I feel like there's a lesson there in Russia, too. Yeah, I think it's very much the same. You know, the problem with the story you're telling, which I agree with, the problem is we seem to have to learn that lesson over and over and over again, which is really a shame that it doesn't kind of stick. But, you know, when I was growing up, as you are unkindly mentioning, I'm a little over a decade.

older than you. But when I was growing up, my perception was that the Soviet dissidents, like Sakharov and Sjarnsky and all those guys, that they were the great Soviet heroes and that everybody loved them but couldn't say so because they'd go to jail if they voiced support for them and that, you know, it was only the evil repressive Soviet government that was keeping those guys from transforming the nation into a Western liberal democracy. Well, boy, was that wrong? Those dissidents never. had widespread support in the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they were not popular in retrospect. They are not looked back on as heroes now. They were outliers. They represented the

small percentage of the country that saw things like we did. And it's very hard for us, both for me as an individual, it's very hard, and it seems hard for us as a country to sort of get past the idea that they're supposed to be like us. It's a very, very powerful notion, and it's cost, you know, almost literally countless people of their lives. And it has mostly been non-American lives, although, of course, that's also why we lost so many of our own people, you know, fighting in Korea and Vietnam. So it's a, it's a dangerous, dangerous misperception. Yeah, it's so interesting. Can you tell us what TV you're doing now, because Americans were such a huge success? I mean, will you go back to Russia? Are you doing something more CIA-ish? Can you just tell us, please? Yeah, yeah, sure.

you know, my partner, Joel Field, who I work with, we made the Americans together. We were the showrunners of that. And we're now going to be making a new limited series about a serial killer and his therapist. And we're going to start shooting it this summer. Steve Correll is going to be the therapist, which we're super excited about. And we're almost done writing the script. So I think it's going to be pretty fun show. Oh, that's so cool. We'll definitely invite us to the set. And by us, I mean me. That sounds amazing. That's going to be incredible. Who's playing the serial killer? We don't know yet. That's so cool. I can't wait to watch that. Steve Correll is a dramatic actor. It's amazing. He's so good, isn't he? Yeah.

That's really cool. Well, thank you for joining us. I hope you'll come back. I would love to. It was a great pleasure. Thanks, Molly. Thanks. On that note, we'll wrap this episode

of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens?

Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studied The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.