Seven different operations are examined, including the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama, an interview with the man who shot Pope John Paul II, the Mossad operation that eliminated participants in the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, the Americans who actually worked undercover with the Taliban and a Cold War operation to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
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However, the first episode talks about the people involved in Operation Jawbreaker, which entered Afghanistan a few days after 9/11 and worked with the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban out of Kabul and other territories they controlled. Schroen (who died in 2022) is interviewed, along with other CIA agents, as well as senior Northern Alliance commanders who worked with the CIA. The effort to overthrow the Taliban was to prevent them from continuing to give Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who carried out the 9/11 attacks, safe haven in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan.
A key Afghan figure interviewed is former ambassador Masood Khalili, who was with Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Northern Alliance leader behind whom the alliance's various factions rallied, was killed two days before the 9/11 attacks. .
While we appreciated the breadth of the Spy Ops episode Jawbreaker, there was a bit of a macho, jingoistic tone that bothered us. Because? Because we know what happened in Afghanistan over the past 22 years, especially the fact that the Taliban took power as soon as US troops left for good in 2021.
Throughout the entire episode, as Schroen and other members of his team detail the tactical moves they made to get members of the Northern Alliance on their side, get them weapons and other supplies, and train them, we wonder if the episode was going to address That elephant in the room: was all that effort and time finally in vain?
We were glad to see the matter addressed in the end, although the tone of displeasure from those in the operation felt extremely one-sided. There was no nuance in that part of the episode.
We see the departure of the troops and the famous scenes of refugees hanging from the planes leaving Kabul airport. But there is no disputing the fact that, yes, the operation drove out the Taliban without much of a fight and installed a government that returned to Afghans the freedoms that the Taliban had taken from them. But during those two decades there was always the feeling that everything was a house of cards. And although the CIA members interviewed all spoke in proud tones of what they had achieved, there was no contemplation of why the Taliban left so easily and how difficult things became after that seemingly easy victory.
We don't expect that kind of one-sidedness from the rest of the series, although given that the spies themselves are the ones discussing these operations, it seems like it will be a possibility. We'll have to watch it episode by episode.
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