The Accidental Spy review – remarkable story of CIA operative abandoned by his handlers
Anthony Wonke’s headlong documentary introduces Blerim Skoro, recruited in post-9/11 New York to become an inside man in the ‘war on terror’, then left in the fieldIn the movies, the classic hazard for the undercover operative is psychological meltdown after getting lost in their new identity. In real life, the dangers seem more prosaic: being treated as an expendable asset and dumped. That was the situation for Muslim Kosovan refugee Blerim Skoro who, despite years spent protecting US national security as a prison informant and al-Qaida mole, was threatened with deportation. His paymasters, the CIA and FBI, don’t emerge creditably from director Anthony Wonke’s headlong, if narrowly focused, account.Skoro seems to have a gift for being in the right or wrong place at the wrong or right time; it’s not obvious which. After deserting from the army during the 1990s Yugoslav war, he wound up as an asylum seeker in New York with a young family. But a new hustle, running drugs for the Albanian mafia, backfires when he is picked up at customs. In his Manhattan prison, he has a direct view of the twin towers on 9/11; in the aftermath, the CIA recruits Skoro – already in the orbit of the Islamist contingent, thanks to his military bona fides and Qur’anic learning – as an inside man in the “war on terror”. Continue reading...
