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20 and 21 August 2014
'The Americans' is a TV show about Russian Illegals (i.e. spies) working
in the US under false identities and living seemingly normal lives as
an American couple. The show is set in the early 1980s and is packed
with suspense, espionage, counter-espionage and tradecraft gadgets.
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Following the succes of the TV series both
in the United States and in Canada, where the show was aired by FX,
the production company - Fox Television - has now released a DVD box
with all thirteen episodes of the first season (2013).
On 20 August 2014, the DVD box was presented to the press in The Netherlands
and a day later in Belgium. At both events, Crypto Museum was present with
a selection of gadgets and artifacts that appear in the show, such as
radio bugs,
espionage cameras,
Russian spy radio sets
with Burst Encoders
and bug-tracing equipment.
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The series is created and produced by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg
and is set during the Cold War of the 1980s. In The Americans we are following
the lives of Elizabeth and Philips Jennings who seem to be an ordinary
American couple with two children - a boy and a girl - living in the
Northern Virgina suburbs of Washington, D.C. where they
run their own travel agency.
In reality however, they are highly trained and skilled Soviet KGB officers,
specialised in gathering information, infiltration, observation and
espionage.
To give the series an extra edge, they live opposite Stan Beeman,
an FBI counter-intelligence agent who's job it is to expose such illegals.
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Compared to popular espionage films, such as The Bourne Identity
and the James Bond series, The Americans presents a much more realistic
image of the espionage trade during the Cold War and the lives spies
with fake identities. Many of the story lines are based on real events
from the archives of the various intelligence agencies around the world,
such as the CIA, the KGB and the Stasi,
that have only recently become known.
Furthermore, many of the gadgets shown in The Americans
are real and are
used in the same way as during the Cold War of the early 1980s.
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Most of them
have been supplied by US collector Keith Melton, who also was
Technical Advisor for the show. Much of his collection is featured
in his book 'Ultimate Spy' [1]. Some examples are a
Minox camera,
the Russian Tochka camera,
a Minifon wire recorder
and a range of radio bugs.
As far as we are concerned, The Americans is a must see.
We can barely wait for the next season.
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- H. Keith Melton, Ultimate Spy
ISBN: 0-7513-4791-4. 1996-2002.
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© Crypto Museum. Last changed: Saturday, 23 August 2014 - 16:57 CET.
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