In 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”.
