The cover to the Series 1 DVD set The Sandbaggers was a television series produced and aired by the ITV network in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was rebroadcast once in the 1980s, and also shown in Canada by the CBC and in the United States by PBS. The series consisted of twenty 50-minute episodes, produced and aired in three series.
The Sandbaggers followed the field exploits of an elite group of British intelligence officers, the Special Operations Section colloquially known as the Sandbaggers, operating in Europe during the Cold War. Why the group was called the Sandbaggers was not explained in the context of the show, but it may have to do with putting up sandbags as a defense against an incoming flood. Individual Sandbaggers came and went during the course of the programme, with Willie Caine (Ray Lonnen), Sandbagger One, appearing the most often.
The programme's main protagonist, however, was Neil Burnside, Director of Operations for the Secret Intelligence Service and overall in charge of the Sandbaggers. Burnside, as played by Roy Marsden, was a spy in the mold of John Le Carre's own George Smiley: a man at war with his own superiors as much as with the enemy, and struggling with his own inner demons.
A typical episode showed Burnside's bureaucratic maneuvering - usually in support of his officers - intercut with scenes of the Sandbaggers themselves in the field. Though not wildly popular with viewers during its initial run, The Sandbaggers was notable for its gritty treatment of the intelligence business and its jaded view of bureaucratic infighting. The programme was particularly grim, even for its time, showing the moral ambiguity and emotional cost inherent in espionage operations, and did not shy away from killing off recurring characters. The programme's last episode ended on a cliffhanger, which has never been resolved.
The programme was created by Ian Macintosh, a formal naval officer turned television writer. Macintosh wrote all of the episodes for the first two series. For the third series, Macintosh only wrote four out of the six episodes. During the shooting of the third series, in July 1979, Macintosh and his girlfriend, a British Airways stewardress, were declared lost at sea after their single-engine aircraft went missing over the ocean near Alaska following a radioed call for help.
Because of the atmosphere of authenticity that the scripts evoke and the liberal use of "spook" jargon, there has been speculation that Macintosh may have been a former operative of SIS, or had contact with the espionage community. This has extended to speculation that his disappearance was no accident, or had to do with a secret mission he was undertaking. There is a possibility that Macintosh may have been involved in intelligence operations during his time in the Royal Navy, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. When asked, Macintosh himself was coy about whether he had been a spy.
However, even if Macintosh may have had experience of the world of real-life espionage, the structure of SIS depicted in The Sandbaggers is actually closer to that of the Central Intelligence Agency than the real-life SIS. There is no formal section of SIS known as the Special Operations Section (as far as is publicly known), and they are not called Sandbaggers.
Greg Rucka, novelist and creator of the comic book espionage series Queen and Country, has said that the comic book is consciously inspired by The Sandbaggers. In the comic book, the Special Operations Section is known as the "Minders".
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