Netflix docuseries ‘Spy Ops’ explores top global espionage operations

Spy Ops, the docuseries

In short, no mission is complete without espionage, the basis of the new docuseries Spy Ops, currently streaming on Netflix.

The eight-episode documentary series joins hundreds, if not thousands, of films, books, and TV shows that centre on espionage, whether real or fictional.

In Spy Ops, viewers are taken behind the scenes of assassinations and military operations, often preceded by heavy and lengthy periods of espionage to ensure perfect execution. Episodes feature politicians, officers, experts, and researchers. The series also utilises an extensive archive of documents, video clips, and news headlines – as well as dramatic re-enactments – to make its point.

Spy Ops invites viewers into the secret world of intelligence agencies, where life-and-death decisions are made, and where this complex web of deceit slowly unravels.

Operation Wrath of God

The series devotes two episodes to Israel's Operation Wrath of God, which targeted leaders of the Palestinian organisation Black September.

The operation was in response to the group's involvement in the killing of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. (This has been the subject of numerous documentaries and feature films, one of the most notable being 2005's Munich, directed by American filmmaker Steven Spielberg.)

Golda Meir, the then Prime Minister of Israel, launched a Revenge Operation and ordered the formation of an "Assassination Squad" to carry out the targeted killings.

The operation began with the assassination of Wa'el Zu'aiter, a Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) representative in Rome, in October 1972. Mahmoud al Hamshari, a PLO representative in Paris, was targeted in December of the same year. Basil al-Kubaisi, Hussein al-Bashir, and Mohamed Boudia were assassinated in the following months.

In April 1973, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was the commander of the elite unit in the Israeli army, devised a bold plan to target PLO leadership. This plan involved complex espionage operations, which Barak himself explains in this documentary.

The plan included an amphibious landing operation by an Israeli group in Beirut that attacked a Palestinian headquarters, killing Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar, Kamal 'Udwan, and Kamal Nasser.

This sequence of assassinations was interrupted under European pressure in July 1973 when the Israeli hit squad accidentally killed a Moroccan in Lillehammer, Norway, simply because he resembled the prominent Fatah leader Ali Hasan Salameh.

Salameh remained at the top of the Israeli target list until his assassination in January 1979, when a car bomb exploded in Beirut following the resumption of Operation Wrath of God.

Salameh's role

According to the documentary, Salameh was an extremely valuable target for the Mossad.

He was a senior official responsible for the personal security of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, playing a role in his appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1974, after opening secret channels with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had also organised and financed Salameh's American honeymoon with his Lebanese wife (and Miss Universe) Georgina Rizk.

Spy Ops features testimonies about Salameh from Palestinian writer Saqr Abu Fakhr and the Lebanese politician-lawyer Karim Bakradouni, which help paint a picture of the man.

According to the series, Salameh demonstrated many leadership qualities. He managed to break the stereotypical image of the Palestinian fighter. He had diplomatic skills, spoke foreign languages, listened to Frank Sinatra, played sports, enjoyed partying, and loved travelling. He was well-liked within Western circles, making him a prime target of the Mossad until his assassination.

However, the series failed to include the assassination of Palestinian writer and politician Ghassan Kanafani, which occurred about two months before the Munich operation. This suggests that Israeli assassinations of Palestinians were not limited to Operation Wrath of God alone but preceded and followed it.

There are countless examples of the Mossad killing Palestinians.

Writer Abu Fakhr also points out, in his testimony, that the actual objective of the Munich operation was not to kill the Israeli athletes – but to take some of them hostage to put pressure on Israel to release hundreds of Arab and Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

Western portrayals dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as in the case of this series, often disregard the painful historical and political context of such events, portraying them merely as a confrontation between a group of "rogue Palestinians" and Israel, which defends its right to exist.

This unfairly reductionist approach towards the Palestinian people fails to consider the injustices and suffering they have endured from the 1948 Nakba to the present day.

Operation Just Cause: hunting a former ally

Spy Ops then takes viewers from Palestine to Panama, which was invaded by America with more than 20,000 soldiers on December 19, 1989.

After the deterioration of relations between the two countries, Operation Just Cause aimed to arrest the President of Panama, General Manuel Noriega.

General Noriega was initially an ally of Washington and received a salary from the CIA, as he assisted the agency in combatting the spread of communism in Central America. However, as hinted in the series, Noriega was not always a "good student."

In the 1970s, he became involved in drug trafficking, which damaged his relationship with American intelligence. However, after the Marxist Sandinista government came to power in Nicaragua in 1979, relations improved again. But this only lasted until about 1985.

Later, in 1989, drug charges and allegations of election fraud infuriated Washington, which decided to get rid of its former ally.

However, it is more likely that Noriega's mission was over, and America developed serious plans to overthrow him.

Operation Just Cause was launched and turned Panama City into a battlefield. Noriega sought refuge in the Vatican embassy in his home country; he spent 11 turbulent days there before surrendering on January 3, 1990.

The operation ended with his arrest and extradition to America, where he was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

He spent 17 years behind bars before moving to France. He eventually returned to Panama, where he lived under house arrest until he died in 2017 at the age of 83.

Assassination attempt on the pope

Another episode of Spy Ops focuses on the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981, who was shot and wounded by the Turkish Mehmet Ali Ağca.

Ağca was immediately arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Italy later pardoned Ağca, in 2000, and handed him over to Turkey, where he was imprisoned again for the 1979 murder of a journalist and other crimes. He was released in 2010.

Notably, Pope John Paul II visited Ağca in his Italian prison and forgave him in 1983. What is extraordinary is that 31 years after the incident, in 2014, Ağca visited the pope's tomb and laid flowers there. This adds a somewhat "melodramatic" dimension to the story that is altogether difficult to explain.

Indeed, the assassination attempt on the pope, who died in 2005, remains mysterious, surrounded by questions about the real party that gave the order to Ağca.

Ağca's appearance in this documentary only adds to the mystery, as he reiterates that he wanted to carry out an individual feat that history will remember.

All that is known about Ağca is that he grew up in a modest Turkish environment and was once a member of the Turkish extremist organisation Gray Wolves.

Though investigations into the event have not yielded much by way of motive, several theories have circulated about the attempted murder.

One theory suggests that it was ordered by Moscow, through the Soviet secret service KGB, which instructed the secret services of Bulgaria and East Germany to carry out the mission.

The pope had supported the Solidarity movement in Poland, which emerged as an anti-communist movement in the early 1980s, and Moscow saw it as a threat to Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.

Ağca himself has repeatedly made contradictory statements about the assassination attempt, both during and after the trial.

An Italian lawyer commented: "He played with all of us, told hundreds of lies, and constantly changed his testimony, forcing us to open dozens of different investigations."

The attempted assassination of the pope remains one of the most puzzling mysteries in the history of espionage and intelligence operations. As the documentary suggests, its details may not fully come to light for a very long time.

Project Azorian: Espionage in the depths of the ocean

Project Azorian was a secret CIA project developed in the early 1970s to recover the Russian submarine K-129 from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

The goal was to obtain intelligence from the sunken Russian vessel, which went down in 1968, about 2,600 kilometres northwest of Hawaii.

Project Azorian was one of the most expensive projects of the Cold War era. Its cost at that time amounted to $800mn due to the need to build a massive ship, especially for this mission, which could only recover part of the submarine.

The Soviets had been monitoring the location where the submarine had sunk, so the operation had to be carried out in secret. As a cover, Washington announced that their specially built ship was engaged in offshore oil exploration and claimed it belonged to the billionaire businessman Howard Hughes.

What followed was one of the CIA's most complex espionage operations, which utilised the hydrophone networks of the US acoustic surveillance system in the Pacific Ocean. These networks pinpointed the location of the sunken submarine even though the Soviets had failed to do the same.

 A team was then sent on a mission to photograph the depths of the ocean.

Based on these photos, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (then National Security Advisor) proposed a secret plan in 1970 to recover the wreckage so that America could study the Soviet nuclear missile technology and possibly obtain encryption materials.

This significant espionage operation showcased the extent to which countries can go to uncover their opponents' secrets and manoeuvres.

Gordievsky: Espionage to save a spy

Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian spy who worked for British intelligence, is hardly the best-known name in the world of espionage.

But an episode dedicated to him sheds light on why he was considered "the man who prevented World War III".

Gordievsky was able to successfully communicate to Western leaders the psychological state of mind of the Soviet leaders in the 1980s. As a result, they were able to avoid escalation and maintain self-control.

In Moscow, there were doubts about the behaviour of Gordievsky, who was practising intelligence work in London. He was recalled to his home country and subjected to an unofficial interrogation while under the influence of drugs.

However, British intelligence already had a plan to withdraw their agent from the Soviet Union if the situation became dangerous; they called it Operation Pimlico. In July 1985, British intelligence managed to smuggle their agent across the Soviet-Finnish border in the trunk of a car. Those involved in the operation managed to distract the Soviet police dogs at the checkpoints with a soiled baby diaper, a box of cheese, and onion slices.

Gordievsky admired Western values; his beliefs had changed completely after the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. He began offering his services to Western intelligence agencies and reportedly even refused to accept payments for his espionage activities.

While the Soviets viewed Gordievsky as a traitor, the Western media saw him as a servant of a just and righteous cause. They viewed his decision to share Russian secrets with them as a "virtuous betrayal."

Arguably, this is true of most spies – both traitors and heroes at the same time, much like Raafat Al Haggan, whose experience Saleh Morsi documented in a work that became a well-crafted TV series.

He was considered a hero by Egyptians and Arabs, but from the Israeli perspective, he was a traitor. A similar case concerns the Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who was regarded as a hero in Israel but was considered a swindler and traitor by the Syrians, who eventually executed him.

Operation Jawbreaker & Operation Taliban Spies

Spy games between Afghanistan and the CIA also find a place in this series in two episodes: Operation Jawbreaker and Operation Taliban Spies.

The first, Jawbreaker, is the codename of a limited US military operation following 9/11, considered one of the highlights of the war against al-Qaeda and the large-scale military operations that followed.

The second, Taliban Spies, reveals how CIA agents recruited some Taliban members from the local community to act as their agents.

The CIA worked diligently and desperately, using various methods to obtain exclusive intelligence information.

In this territory, which was unknown to Americans, espionage became a fundamental activity that enabled the optimal implementation of their mission.

In this poor and underdeveloped society – after the invasion of Afghanistan by some 60,000 soldiers during the administration of President George W Bush – American intelligence managed to penetrate ranks and use cunning deception to achieve its goals.

These efforts continued under the banner of counter-terrorism for two decades until Washington withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, allowing the Taliban to return to power.

However, US intelligence operations in Afghanistan are likely to continue.