Velocities of suspicion

The award-winning French spy-thriller series The Bureau (Le Bureau des légendes) opens as a love story wrapped in a spy thriller wrapped in a workplace drama. But the tradecraft spear becomes a 21st century cyber pruning hook.

The series has the three-dimensional-chess feel of a John Le Carré story. The pieces have their prescribed roles in defined hierarchies and shift strategically between their professional, personal, and interior lives; but one piece moves by its own rules.

Chess is an ISIS firebrand’s (Illyès Salah) undoing in The Bureau.  

The narrative develops around people who work for an office of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the French government agency for foreign intelligence. Known in French as Le Bureau des légendes, this office spies in foreign countries under the cover of fictitious identities known as legends. In this series, the bureau’s missions involve Algerian, Syrian, Iranian, and, in season four, Russian targets. It competes more often than cooperates with its better-resourced counterparts in the US Central Intelligence Agency, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), and Israeli Mossad. The opposition are authoritarian entities, from Islamic State* zealots to minions of nationalist ‘strongmen’.

Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz) pitches to Nadia el Mansour (Zineb Triki) in The Bureau.

The series opens introducing a charismatic French spy returned to Paris after a six-year assignment in Damascus. Guillaume Debailly (Mathieu Kassovitz), code-named Malotru, recruited agents in Syria under the cover of working as a teacher named Paul Lefebvre. While in Syria, Paul met and fell in love with Nadia el Mansour (Zineb Triki), a professor of history and geography, married to an older Syrian doctor. Their affair had nothing to do with their work. Paul did not recruit Nadia; Nadia had no idea Paul is a spy. But its consequences drive the plot. The couple reconnect when the Syrian government send Nadia to Paris with an undercover diplomatic delegation. She is compromised when Nadim El Bachir (Ziad Bakri), an ambitious Syrian intelligence officer, works out that she is involved with a French spy.

Malotru’s skill, charm, and sang-froid set him apart; several peers remark that he would have been an ideal cold warrior. When the Syrian government detain Nadia, Malotru must dig deep in his bag of tricks to manipulate official resources to free her. He succeeds; but his efforts compromise himself, alienate Nadia, and lead to his capture in Syria by the Islamic State. When the disenchanted Nadia discovers Malotru’s role in her release, she works to free him.  

Son of Pain: Many-wiled Malotru’s (Mathieu Kassovitz) true battleground is his interior space.

But the many-wiled Malotru’s true battleground is his interior space. Derived from the Medieval Latin male astrucus, or ‘born under a bad sign’, malotru means misfit. In addition to his complicated professional life and relationships with his colleagues and his affair, the narrative develops his relationship with his teenage daughter Prune Debailly (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) and, to a lesser extent, his unresolved conflicts with his ever-disapproving father (Bernard Le Coq), a retired army major general.

Steely Marie-Jeanne Duthilleul (Florence Loiret Caille) holds her ground in The Bureau.

Meanwhile, characters introduced in the first three seasons come into their own, maturing the series and taking it in new directions by season four, when the main action moves to Russia and Malotru’s past activities bring the bureau under counterintelligence scrutiny by JJA (Mathieu Amalric) and his right hand, Liz Bernstein (Anne Azoulay). Called Jean-Jacques by a higher-up, a former colleague associates JJA with James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA chief of counterintelligence whose obsession with the threat of a highly-placed Soviet mole corroded CIA morale into the 1970s. Season five is slated for US release in March 2020.

Bureau chief Henri Duflot (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) confers with his boss MAG (Gilles Cohen).

Reportedly based on DGSE officers’ experiences, the show’s superb casting sells its authenticity. The workplace is roughly what one would expect in a professional milieu in Washington or London. And there is meticulous attention to detail, whether the character is an elderly Kabyle mother or a hijab-wearing young Parisian; a Pasdaran cop or Persian hipster; CIA bureaucrats or FSB officers; Islamic State foot soldiers, Kurdish women warriors, or well-connected Syrians. Furthermore, each speaks their natural or acquired language (with subtitles), though English often is the common language. A Russian spy in Paris grouses in English to a Syrian colleague about having to communicate in the ‘enemy’s’ language.

FSB officer Stepan (Miglen Mirtchev) and Syrian officer Nadim El Bachir (Ziad Bakri) use ‘the enemy’s language’ [English] in The Bureau.

For the first three seasons, the bureau is headed by Henri Duflot (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and his steely right hand Marie-Jeanne Duthilleul (Florence Loiret Caille). They answer to Colonel Marc Lauré (Gilles Cohen), code-named ‘MAG’, DGSE’s director of intelligence. MAG is an acronym for ‘Moule à gaufres’ or ‘waffle iron’, one of many codenames borrowed from epithets the obstreperous Captain Haddock hurls in the French classic animated series Tintin. MAG answers to DGSE Director of Operations Marcel Guingouin (Patrick Ligardes), an amusingly typical French military technocrat.

Azeri security challenges Marina Loiseau’s (Sara Giraudeau) legend in The Bureau.

Among those who lie abroad is Marina Loiseau (Sara Giraudeau), a Persian linguist and seismologist. Marina, a case officer like Malotru, is focused on Iran’s nuclear energy and weapons programs. She leaves DGSE after a bad scare in Iran makes her panic-prone; but she returns, intrigued when a stranger pretending to represent DGSE unwittingly recruits her to be a seismologist in Azerbaijan. In season four Marina has learned Russian and is reassigned to Moscow.

Jonas (Victor Artus Solaro), a French millennial young George Smiley, interviews a source.

Raymond Sisteron’s (Jonathan Zaccaï) Achilles heel is his weakness for damsels in distress. Jonas Maury (Victor Artus Solaro) is a French millennial young George Smiley with a penchant for pop-culture references. Sylvain Ellenstein (Jules Sagot) is the bureau’s tech wizard and, in season four, César (Stefan Crepon) its hacker wunderkind. The laconic Mule (Irina Muluile) performs operational support such as surveillance, role-playing, escort, driving, and logistics. 

The laconic ‘Mule’ (Irina Muluile) wants a word in The Bureau.

Meanwhile, contrary to disavowals that no one at DGSE takes seriously, CIA’s clandestine service is busy in Europe and elsewhere doing the same kind of work as the bureau. DGSE long suspects that CIA’s man in Paris, Peter Cassidy (Brad Leland), whom a CIA colleague calls ‘John’ and is code-named YouKnowWho, runs a mole in the DGSE bureau.

CIA colleagues Barry (Miles Anderson), Chehlauoi (Dominic Gould), and YouKnowWho (Brad Leland) play an ‘away game’ at DGSE HQ in The Bureau.

Espionnage est un mot français volé par les anglais et les russes. 

Le Bureau des légendes (The Bureau) 2015-2020 France. Canal+ and TOP-The Oligarchs Productions; creator Éric Rochant.

*The show’s characters refer to the Islamic State, ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah (الدولة الإسلامية‎), as ‘Daesh’. This is a pejorative acronym derived from one of the group’s former names, meant to distinguish it from the population at large and disparage its claim to have restored the caliphate.