MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Wild Foxes, Hokum, I’ve Seen All I Need to See, and Ada: My Mother the Architect
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CIA chief spills the beans
JOHN GREEN is riveted by the rare example of a disillusioned spymaster taking a swing at his paymasters and their folly
MASTERSPY: Peter Sichel [Pic: IMDb]
JAMES WALSH revels in a miscellany of beautifully observed characters, ranging from the parodic to the frankly batshit
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SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a fascinating, revealing, superbly acted evening of theatre
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STEVEN ANDREW praises a beautifully written and enjoyable read
The Last Spy (15)
Directed by Katharina Otto-Bernstein
★★★★☆
THE LAST SPY is the riveting biography of 102-year-old CIA spymaster Peter Sichel, revealing for the first time the epic and unvarnished history of the US foreign intelligence service from the inside. With a good dose of wit and humour to boot, Sichel unpacks the obscured roots of conflicts that plague today’s world and the toll espionage took on his personal life.
Sichel was born in 1922 in Mainz, into a well-off family of wine merchants. The family had to flee the Nazis as they were Jewish. They found refuge in the US, where the 19-year-old Peter joined the US army. With his language skills and affable manner he was recruited into the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, and became head of the CIA in Berlin.
In Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s documentary, Sichel openly criticises US governments for acting against the advice of its intelligence community to depose democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo and especially Iran.
The interview with Sichel at home is intercut with graphic historical footage of the events he describes and short comments by family members and journalists.
Over time, he grew increasingly disillusioned with CIA meddling and became a critic of US foreign policy.
He reveals how totally ineffective the CIA actually was, not even taken seriously by its own side. His views of the Dulles brothers (US secretary of state and CIA chief at the height of the Cold War) are hardly complimentary. They were fundamentalist Christians who saw their role as crusaders against “godless” communism.
Sichel underlines that there never was any danger or threat of the USSR invading western Europe, despite all the propaganda asserting the contrary. And he candidly reveals the obscured root causes behind conflicts that are currently shaking our world today. He argues that the West wasted a lot of money and lives, intensifying conflicts in the world rather than resolving them.
“We don’t think it through until the end, that an action we take today might in the long run be against our interest,” Sichel says.
This is a rare and fascinating film in which a former top CIA officer reveals what he did, what he saw, and analyses it in a deeply critical manner.
In select UK cinemas and on digital platforms May 1
