In 2023, two former BND heads penned a joint article in a German newspaper, describing the agency as a \u201ctoothless watchdog with a muzzle and an iron chain\u201d. Other spy services didn\u2019t trust it with information because it was subject to a \u201csprawling control-bureaucracy\u201d of at least seven external oversight bodies.<\/p>\n
The strict regulation is in part a response to unease over the BND\u2019s predecessor, the Gehlen organisation, set up by Major General Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi-era military intelligence officer who worked for the Americans post-war. He employed numerous ex-Gestapo and SS officers, on the basis that they were only people capable of dealing with subversion from Communist east Germany.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the modern restrictions, the BND often focuses less on active 007-style field missions and more on information analysis. Which is not a template for exciting spy drama, unless one has a particular appreciation for watchful line managers and diligent parliamentary oversight committees.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a bit of a learning curve,\u201d Coates admits. \u201cFor example, the BND aren\u2019t allowed to spy on German citizens \u2013 so that was a difficulty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coates got around this by centring the action around two former, rather than serving, BND agents \u2013 Simon Sch\u00e4fer and his wife Meret. The middle-aged couple run a BND-authorised safe house in Berlin, where spooks who get into trouble on missions can seek sanctuary. Their semi-retirement is then disrupted by the arrival of a wounded hitman, who claims to be a \u201cfriendly\u201d, but who has sinister intentions. It\u2019s all linked to Russian agent Josef Koleev, whom the Sch\u00e4fers have history with from an operation in Belarus 16 years before. The real secrets in the drama that unfolds, though, are personal ones between the Sch\u00e4fers themselves and their 16-year-old daughter, who is not quite whom she appears.<\/p>\n
As former agents, the Sch\u00e4fers also have rather more leeway to go rogue, getting involved in surveillance operations and car chases that might otherwise fail the average BND risk assessment form. True to his soap-writing roots, Coates also concentrates on how the events affect the Sch\u00e4fers as a family \u2013 hence the title Unfamiliar, which plays on the words \u201cfamily\u201d and \u201cliar\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2023, two former BND heads penned a joint article in a German newspaper, describing the agency as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[918,1238,5,3256,4617,442,4618,4616,2957,3039],"class_list":{"0":"post-4520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-netflix","12":"tag-spy-novels","13":"tag-standard","14":"tag-television","15":"tag-television-editors-choice","16":"tag-top-story","17":"tag-us-content"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}