Spider
A Bright Cold Day In April
One of the first things people ask you about, at film networking events and the like, is whether you’re doing this as a hobby or … not. I get why people ask me this question: I’m an older guy at this point in my life (much to my surprise), and it’s more usual for someone my age to be thinking about retirement and grandchildren than about starting a new career. Family Guy, the animated show from Seth MacFarlane, even has a joke about Gen X people suddenly attempting to enter entertainment later in life—the humor relying on how sad it is—and so forth. My answer to that question is that I’d very much like to get paid for the work I do; what I’m attempting is to establish a market value for it. While Coyote Run showed that I could at write something valuable enough for actors to say the lines, Child Stars that I could tell a story briefly, and Romantic Comedy that I could give directors something interesting to shoot, the project that (to my mind at least) established that I could cover a commercially viable genre was Spider.
Spider was born out of a 2024 article in The New Yorker by Ben Taub, “Russia’s Espionage War In the Arctic.”1 In the article, Taub begins by mentioning how, in the long polar winter, animals shed their summer dark coloration for Arctic white: during “the months of snow and ice, predators resort to camouflage and deception.” It’s a wonderful metaphor for the story he has to tell, which is about how the previously quiet and sleepy Far North has slowly been turning wide awake in recent years, particularly since the outbreak of the Ukrainian War in 2014 and the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. What had been a place where people focused on survival rather than political advantage has since become a Hot Spot in a new global Cold War.
The particular action Taub describes centers on the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, a town of around 3500 people situated nine miles west of the Russian frontier and about sixty miles from Zapadnaya Litsa, headquarters of the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, successor to the Red Banner Northern Fleet of the old Soviet Navy. Kirkenes is about ninety miles west of Gadzhievo and Vidyevo, strategic nuclear submarine bases on the Kola Peninsula. All of these installations guard the approaches to Murmansk, one of Russia’s few ice-free ports that does not require passing through a chokepoint controlled by the West, as do the ports on the Baltic or Black Seas. In other words, Kirkenes sits on the threshold of a very important doorway.
What is happening in and around Kirkenes, Taub tells us, are cat-and-mouse games between the Russian intelligence services—the successors of the old KGB, like the Federal Security Service and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), as well as the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate, the military’s intelligence agency)—and the Norwegian Intelligence Service, run by the country’s Ministry of Defense. Kirkenes is a known listening post operated by the NIS for electronic and other surveillance of Russian naval and aviation operations, and lately its waters have been host to Russian fishing trawlers with radios capable of being tuned to particular frequencies and operated by clean-shaven, unusually young and fit sailors sporting particularly short haircuts. But this is merely what is happening at sea.
On land there is similar sport. Over the past several years, Taub reports, “civilian life in northern Norway has been under constant, low-grade attack,” including cyber warfare against Norwegian towns and ports, along with “tourists” who “have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure.” The strategy is called “hybrid warfare”; the aim is “to subvert, to sabotage, to hack, to destabilize, to instill fear.” What’s playing out in Kirkenes, in turn, is part of a larger plan: in the past five years,
agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines.
Looked at as a whole, Taub notes, officials in both Norway and other NATO countries are coming to the conclusion that Russia is conducting operations designed to test Article 5: that part of the NATO treaty that guarantees that every nation will come to the defense of every other. In other words, to provoke the question of whether “the United States [will] engage in thermonuclear war over a sparsely populated swath of Arctic Norway.” These probing acts are, Taub says, what lie behind Finland and Sweden’s recent decisions to join NATO.
In 2015, the hushed friction taking place in and around Kirkenes took an international turn, when refugees from the Middle East and Africa began arriving at Storskog, a town six miles away: “the only official Norwegian-Russian border-crossing point.” What was odd about the arrival of these people was that the entire area on the Russian side of the Norwegian frontier—a place saturated with naval bases, military airfields, electronic listening posts and other installations appropriate for one of the most sensitive locales in the world—is under the jurisdiction of the Russian security services, and nobody “can reach Storskog from anywhere in Russia without a visa or written authorization” from them. To the Norwegians, it appeared as though “the Russians were deliberately sending the migrants, to incite discord in the Norwegian population and to test the limits of the country’s humanitarianism,” particularly since it “soon became clear that a number of the arrivals had been given intelligence tasks,” like taking “selfies with Norwegian police or security officials in the background.” Some of those tasks were more sinister.
In one paragraph, Taub describes how “a former government official from a country in Asia, had fled criminal charges at home” and ended up in Murmansk, where the FSB first interrogated him and then sent him across the Norwegian frontier. He was told to tell Norwegian officials who he was and that he possessed secrets vital to Norway, then report what he learned back to Russia via social media. The objective, Norwegian intelligence officers speculated later, may have “been to find out how somebody ends up in a P.S.T. or military-intelligence recruitment trajectory from the migrant stream,” such as the “specific house” such recruits might be brought to, and so forth. In that paragraph was the genesis of the plot of Spider.
A character however is not a script, and the story emerged once this character was put in contact with another aspect of Taub’s account: Russia’s attempts to suborn Norwegians themselves. During the Second World War, when Kirkenes—along with Norway as a whole—was occupied by the Nazis, some in the area spied for the Soviets, sending information to the Red Army regarding German military preparedness. After the war, as the rest of the country committed to NATO, the people in the area elected a Communist as mayor, and the Norwegian domestic intelligence service (predecessor to the NIS) “carried out illegal surveillance of former partisans and suspected Communists.” These acts have been exploited by the Russian state to suggest, to sympathetic Norwegians and any other audience, that Norway is an illegitimate state, and that Russia is the proper ruler of the far north.
In some ways, this propaganda campaign—backed by efforts at rewriting history so as to emphasize early Russian exploration in the Arctic, and so on—is more insidious than more tangible threatening acts, like flying airplanes directly at NATO installations. (Which Russia is also doing.) So far, at least, such ideological warfare has not been very successful, at least among Norwegians. But the notion that the true threat does not arise from overt “kinetic” acts of war, but rather from secret persuasion, is a haunting one, and if Spider is successful at all, then it does so because it raises the question powerfully. As the writer of the script, I won’t presume to answer that query. What I will say is that the bounds of this question far exceed the limits of an obscure Arctic border crossing; it may be the most pressing of our time.
In his article, Taub mentions that Norwegian, and NATO, figures are plagued by whether these efforts on the part of Russia are real, or if “the threat [is] mostly imaginary,” and cites the remark of “a former C.I.A. counterintelligence chief” on such matters, about how the shadowy world of espionage is “a wilderness of mirrors.” That chief was James Jesus Angleton, who studied literary criticism at Yale in the 1930s, being particularly inspired by William Empson—author of Seven Types of Ambiguity—and the work of modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. In the 1920 poem “Gerontion,” Eliot writes that
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors.
Angleton’s point, then, is usually presumed to be a poetic way of speaking of the difficulties in interpreting actions without knowledge of intention—the situation, as the literary deconstructionists would later say, we “always already” inhabit. Angleton then is a hinge between the worlds of literature and that of affairs of state, which is also to say between the affairs of the great world and that of the internal workings of a single mind.
That distinction is one that many today are willing to collapse, which is one reason why Angleton is often derided or even a figure of fun in intellectual circles today: he conducted a long term “mole hunt” within the CIA for years, searching for spies within the organization that many later said damaged the CIA’s effectiveness. In a 1992 book about Angleton’s efforts, David Wise wrote that the episode created “scars that had yet to heal decades later” within the agency.2 “Mole Hunt” was even the title of the pilot episode of the cartoon show, Archer, in 2009—a show that mocked the whole world of Cold War espionage. Angleton, in other words, is the card-carrying left-wing intellectual’s version of Senator Joseph McCarthy: an embodiment of right-wing paranoia.
Yet, that depiction of Angleton is itself a flattened version of reality, because although many mocked, say, Senator McCarthy’s assertion that there were Soviet spies within the U.S. State Department in the 1950s and earlier, there really were Soviet spies, Alger Hiss, long celebrated in left-wing circles, did work for the Soviets, even if exactly when and for how long will likely always be under dispute. And there were Soviet spies within the Western intelligence agencies: Angleton had even worked with the most famous of them, Kim Philby, during the Second World War. Anyone who cites the “wilderness of mirrors” line as an indictment of the supposed intellectual sins of the Right, in other words, is at risk of being duped.
The problem with espionage in short is that the further you investigate the less, rather than more, certain you become. The uncertainty is inherent, particularly once the question of money is introduced. “Money” however is itself an inherently unstable term: although people like Philby were paid, it was quite clear that the money wasn’t the motivating factor. Instead, Philby, at least to some degree, was motivated by his belief in Communism. But if so, then “money” becomes just shorthand for any kind of incentive at all. All money can do, really, is tell you if that person is an amateur, or professional. I have been paid, if not much, for my writing, so in that sense I’m a professional. But in the sense that I’m not making a living at it, I’m an amateur. That makes sense, I think, because as this post demonstrates, I’m not much for ideology, either of the right or left. If you’d like to read my work biographically, in other words, you could say that Spider is my means of enacting my own intellectual conflict within the wilderness of mirrors that is the contemporary world: that is, whether I am a predator in colors of camouflage and deception.
Anyway, this has turned out to be a much longer post than I anticipated. Spider was shot at an art gallery in the basement of a brownstone building a block east of Chicago’s Humboldt Park, on an April day that, fittingly, felt closer to February than May. I was on hand for this shoot, as hasn’t always been the case, but I didn’t spend a lot of time actually observing the production. Instead, I spent a lot of time talking to the owner of the art gallery, Marlene, a woman who shared much of the description a Soviet defector provided of the supposed Soviet mole Angleton fruitlessly searched for: “of Slavic descent, had a last name that might end in ‘sky,’ definitely began with a ‘K,’ and operated under the KGB codename ‘Sasha.’”3 Everything about that description was true of her, I’d note—at least except for that last part.
But then, how would I know?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/russias-espionage-war-in-the-arctic. All quotes in this piece should be assumed to come from this work, unless footnoted differently.
Wise, David. 1992. Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA. New York: Random House.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (2013). “James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the “Monster Plot”: Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations” (PDF). Studies in Intelligence. 55 (4): 45.