A nation must think before it acts.
FPRI’s Senior Fellow Naveed Jamali Quoted in the Washington Post on Working as an FBI Double Agent
“While training to be undercover, he [Jamali] used Bourne, Bond, George Smiley, “Magnum P.I.” and Michael Mann characters as role models, plagiarizing their mannerisms and dialogue. “The way I protected myself is by using movies and TV to build a character that [I was] comfortable with,” he says.
Jamali also says that on “The Americans,” the reasons the characters go into spying feels true to life. In Season 2, Andrew Larrick, a Navy SEAL and a closeted gay man, becomes vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians and is forced to spy for them. And last season, Lisa, a struggling single mother and recovering alcoholic, agrees to trade information gleaned through her security clearance in exchange for money. The show “gets the motivation of those characters down very, very well,” he says. “It’s a very difficult line between duty for your country and self-preservation.””