The Last Spy review – former CIA station chief tells it like it was from inside the tent

This is a straightforward, scrupulously assembled documentary that pays tribute to retired spymaster Peter Sichel, a German Jew who escaped the Holocaust, joined the United States’s first espionage bureau OSS, and then became the chief in a number of crucial CIA stations after the war, such the ones in Berlin and Hong Kong. Still fully in possession of every marble at the ripe old age of 100, Sichel reflects to camera on his middle-of-the-action view of events during the cold war, and a little tea gets spilled along the way, but not so much that he’s likely to get in any trouble for revealing state secrets. Still, he’s unabashedly critical of some CIA operations, such as the plots to destabilise leftist regimes including that of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.

Director Katharina Otto-Bernstein can be heard asking perspicacious questions off camera, but mostly her job here is to get Sichel going with the anecdotes and then fill in the historical blanks with a blend of archive footage and supplementary talking-head interviews. The latter come from a variety of old CIA hands and the journalists who covered them, including author Scott Anderson, journo Carl Bernstein and son-of-CIA-man John Hadden; they fill in the background on the subterranean politicking between CIA chief Allen Dulles and his secretary of state brother John Foster Dulles during the Eisenhower administration.

In addition, Sichel’s daughters and wife reflect on the strain Sichel’s career put on family life, although it would seem he’s a benign enough paterfamilias to have them all say nice things about him. The most interesting insights come from Sichel himself, especially when he recollects the arduous journey out of France when he was still a teenager before the Nazis invaded; he had to guide his distraught father in a quest to find Sichel’s mother and sister. Later on, memories of the epic levels of alcoholism in Washington circles adds colour, evoking a world of outward repression and inner libidinousness running on boozy lunchtimes and constant smoking that sounds like a mashup of Mad Men and John Le Carré.