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Thanks so much for the book recommendations (both Hvistendahl's and your own).

What to watch: season 3 of Babylon Berlin! For anyone who hasn't watched it yet, I recommend this series in the strongest terms as good historical TV, but also because season three has some cute scenes depicting early/interwar uses of spy equipment - eg. "tiny" cameras used to photograph restricted documents in the secret state archives.

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You already mentioned The Americans, so I will take a different tack and suggest "Burn After Reading," the Coen Brothers movie about a bunch of hapless strivers who get caught up in CIA stuff they don't understand. It's dark comedy, but perhaps a necessary balance to the hypercompetent intelligence services portrayed in most spy fiction -- here, it's all a deadly comedy of errors, and by the end of the movie, nobody who's left is really clear on what happened or why.

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Well, this isn't a very original recommendation, but the grand master of spy fiction is the great John Le Carré. I recommend his books but if you're looking for something less labor intensive, you can't go wrong with either adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - the 2011 film and the 1979 BBC miniseries are both excellent in their own ways. I also really liked the first season of Counterpart, which takes a major science fiction conceit and wraps it in Le Carré-ian ground level espionage and atmosphere.

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Love your recommendations and the others by the readers who posted here. Not a big "spy novel" reader but I do remember watching "I Spy" and "Get Smart" as favorite tv shows when a young teenager. "The Americans" and "Homeland" both great to watch. I prefer reading true stories about espionage and spies, but in reality, who knows what the truth really is.

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