20 Declassified Facts About The Mission: Impossible Series
6. The Series Foreshadowed A Real-Life Spy Scandal
The MacGuffin in the first film is a list of American NOCs, "non-official covers." NOCs are spies who, if caught, would be disavowed by their home country and therefore left to the mercies of the nations who captured them. In other words, they'd be tortured and killed.
In a best-case scenario, those spies would be in the States when exposed, and keep their lives and freedom but lose all their effectiveness and their careers. This actually happened seven years later to CIA operative Valerie Plame (AKA Valerie Plame Wilson) in a 2003 scandal known as "Plamegate." Plame's memoir of being exposed was eventually turned into a film of its own, Fair Game, in 2010.