Citizen-Spy

56 The Irrelevant Expert
shadow government. According to Zacharias,“Seven leading Communist officials
were to defect, branding Khrushchev a tyrant and dictator, obsessed with power,
and no longer guided by Marxist theories. It was tentatively arranged for American
agents to land in Siberia and fly the Soviet officials out of the country.
However, too many people knew about it and Malenkov, the ringleader, was
arrested....Malenkov,somehow,managed to commit suicide prior to his execution.”
NBC was deeply concerned about Soviet responses to such a claim, and
insisted that the admiral “qualify his remarks by stating that these are the facts
in which the most competent sources have advised us.” 12 NBC’s Continuity
Acceptance Department advised Screen Gems:
While recognizing in this series that the Communists are our adversaries,
and in this light making them the “heavies” in our stories,
it is nevertheless unwise to accuse them of crimes or complete
depravity and brutality as brought out in this script. While not
specifically a documentary show, the series has a strong documentary
flavor, and infers that these things happened. The basic problem
is that we are making very serious charges against a country
with which we are engaged in a “cold war” but with which we still
carry on normal diplomatic relations....There is no objection to
the portrayal of espionage and its by-products of stealth or violence,
rather our problem lies in the portrayal of crimes against
humanity and international law by the Commies....I believe it
would be wise through the whole series to use “Communist” wherever
possible, rather than “Russian.” This pits us against the leaders
and the ideology rather than the Russian people. 13
Executive producer Harry Ackerman was outraged, and vented to his associates
at Screen Gems:
To top this whole thing off, now NBC rears its ugly head. As of
fifteen minutes ago, we have just received an official complaint from
the network to the effect that we are injecting ourselves too much in
the political scene by showing the Russians performing villainous
acts against the U.S. If we must do stories about Russian espionage,
apparently the NBC feeling is that we should not call a spade a
spade nor a Russian a Russian, but should confine ourselves to
phrases like “a certain country” or “a certain middle east group,” etc.
My feeling is that if we are forced to go completely in this direction, it