Joe Weisberg is a former CIA Counterterrorism Center officer whom John Kiriakou describes as a colleague, a friend and a brilliant writer — “a real sweetheart” who worked in the centre at the same time he did, and for whom he says he has “deep respect.”[1][2][3]
The resignation
Kiriakou tells the same story a dozen ways and it never changes in substance: Weisberg walked up to him at the office one day and announced he had resigned that morning. “I was like, ‘What? Why would you resign?’ And he said, ‘This job is just not for me.’”[1][4][5]
The reason is always the same organ. “I don’t have it in my gut to convince somebody to commit treason.”[6] In the fullest telling: “I just don’t have it in my gut to get somebody to commit espionage or treason. I can’t do it. I just don’t think I’ll be good at it.” Asked what he would do instead, Weisberg said he was single, had no children and nothing to tie him to Washington — “I’m gonna go to Hollywood and find my fortune.”[7][3] Kiriakou’s own gloss is that Weisberg was “a terrible case officer” who “just wasn’t cut out for it,” a mismatch of personality rather than ability.[8]
The novel, then the show
Between the agency and the blockbuster there was a book. Weisberg wrote a novel — “quite a well regarded novel that didn’t really sell very well” — which the CIA’s prepublication reviewers heavily redacted, and which was praised precisely for being true to life. After that one novel he created The Americans.[9][6] He became, in Kiriakou’s description, a wealthy and highly sought-after A-list writer and showrunner.[3]
Kiriakou’s verdict on the result is unqualified: “the best intelligence-related show ever.”[10] He describes the premise in detail — two Soviet KGB intelligence officers posing as an American married couple in Falls Church, Virginia in the mid-1980s, their cover a travel agency at Dupont Circle, while they penetrate the Farm, the Pentagon and defence contractors, recruit Americans and carry out hits. “I loved it. It was 100% true to life. 100%.”[11][12]
Why he says it is true
The show’s realism is, for Kiriakou, a documentary claim about the Russian illegals programme rather than a compliment about craft. The Russians send an illegal — a deep-cover officer — for twenty or twenty-five years, in place and waiting to be activated.[11] He points to a former neighbour of his own in Arlington, Virginia, an elementary school substitute teacher arrested as a Russian sleeper agent for the SVR after years of living as an ordinary American.[13] And he reports the question he is asked most about the series — did the KGB really do something like that? — with the answer he always gives: “oh yes. And not only did they do it, but they did it quite successfully.”[14]
Every script redacted
Weisberg’s other function in Kiriakou’s argument is as the strongest available example of CIA influence over Hollywood and of censorship by prepublication review. Weisberg submitted every single script of The Americans to the CIA’s Publications Review Board for clearance, “and every single script came back with redactions — and we’re talking about fiction, fiction that was set in the 1970s, 1980s, and they’re still redacting that stuff. It’s mind-boggling.”[15][16]