The mini-series “The Spies of Terror”, broadcast on M6, follows four French secret service agents during the hunt for the sponsors of the attacks of November 13, 2015. Did they really exist? Response from the writers.
This Tuesday, November 23, M6 launched the broadcast of Spies of Terror, a mini-series in four episodes which follows the hunt for the sponsors of the attacks of November 13, 2015 by the French secret services.
Among them are Lucie (Fleur Geffrier) and Alexandre (Pierre Perrier), two anti-terrorist agents from the DGSI, Malika (Rachida Brakni), analyst from the DGSE as well as Vincent (Vincent Elbaz), major at the territorial DGSI of Lille.
Did the agents present in the series really exist?
The Spies of Terror is adapted from the eponymous book by Matthieu Suc, a Mediapart journalist specializing in the issue of terrorism, who interviewed numerous French secret service agents in order to write his work.
For the needs of the series, however, it was necessary to modify certain elements, in particular the characters who are amalgams of several people. “There are certain characters who are more inspired than others”, explained Matthieu Suc during a press briefing.
“Lucie and Alexandre symbolize a service each. The intelligence component for Alexandre and the judicial component for Lucie. We had to synthesize because if we had been a documentary, there would have been 10/20 people per department. It's fiction, we have to condense it.”
A need to protect real sources
This is obviously not the only constraint to which the authors had to adapt when writing the series. They had to cheat in order to protect the real agents and the real sources.
“There are things that we would have loved to tell and which would have been extraordinary. But we couldn't, because we have responsibilities”, confided Matthieu Suc.
“There were things that we couldn't tell, even though in story terms it was very effective, and even crazier. But telling it could have endangered this source. And there was no question of doing that”, added Franck Philippon, the screenwriter of Spies of Terror.
“It was quite funny. Generally, reality is not well constructed enough to make fiction and we complain about it, but here we found ourselves not being able to tell it for security reasons. The goal was not to endanger anyone. The only red line was to respect temporality. We should not reverse the order of events. Because the order has an even emotional logic for the people who live it.”
Catch the last two episodes of Spies of Terror this Tuesday, November 19 from 9:10 p.m. on M6. The episodes are available now on the M6+ platform.
