U.S. government agencies from the Department of Defense to the Center for Disease Control employ entertainment liaison officers. Those officers' mission is to influence how the public perceives their government agency and to feed information to a willing consumer about government policy or action through film and television.Even the most secretive of agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), works with Hollywood to shape story lines about the government's work. For example, retired CIA officers have been involved in the making of Meet the Parents (2000), Syriana (2005), Rendition (2007), Charlie Wilson's War (2007), among others.
But the CIA's role in films and television goes beyond shaping how Robert DeNiro's character in Meet the Parents would needle information from his potential son-in-law. Author Tricia Jenkins writes in the introduction to her first edition of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television(2012), "It is my hope [to] . . . encourage more critical media consumption and shed additional light on the topic of government propaganda." With a history of censorship during the Cold War and even using Academy award-winning makeup artists to disguise agents during missions, the CIA's influence in entertainment goes beyond straightforward fact-checking. With key production roles in recent pop culture phenomena liketheHomeland series and the award-winning films Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, we asked Professor Tricia Jenkins to list her top film and TV programs heavily influenced by the CIA. The revised and updated edition of The CIA in Hollywood is now available.
Five of the Most Heavily CIA-Assisted Films and Television Programs
By Tricia Jenkins
1 The Recruit (2003)
This spy thriller stars Colin Farrell as a young CIA recruit, training at The Farm under the watchful eye of agency veteran and mentor, Walter Burke (Al Pacino). What the public doesn’t know about this film is that the CIA’s Entertainment Liaison, Chase Brandon, wrote The Recruit’s treatment and original draft alongside the credited screenwriter, Roger Towne. The documents discussed in the revised edition of The CIA in Hollywood reveal that Brandon’s role far exceeded the one that even an aggressive studio executive or producer would play in the development of a film, even though Brandon is merely listed as a technical consultant in the film’s credits.
2
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
An Academy Award nominee for Best Picture, Zero Dark Thirty follows Maya, a persistent CIA analyst, who successfully tracks Osama bin Laden to Pakistan, allowing the U.S. to eventually kill its greatest public enemy. Documents reveal that CIA officials were eager to collaborate with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, as they felt confident that “Mark and Kathryn” would be sympathetic to their interests and work to construct a positive portrayal of the agency’s role in the bin Laden operation. To assist the filmmakers, the agency set up multiple meetings for Boal and Bigelow with several experts who could offer inside information on the long search for the 9/11 mastermind. These included a real-life Maya; a translator involved in the raid; the unnamed Director of the Counter Terrorism Center; the CIA Director’s Chief of Staff, Jeremy Bash; the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Michael Vickers; and Deputy Director of the CIA, Mike Morrell. The Office of Public Affairs staff also held at least four conference calls with Boal, where he verbally shared his screenplay and discussed the direction of the script, allowing the Agency some input into the final scenes. Boal was also allowed access to a 2011 ceremony for roughly 1,300 military and intelligence officials, where CIA director Leon Panetta discussed information designated as “top secret” and “secret” during his presentation about the raid.
3
The Agency (2001-2003)
A CBS television series, The Agency was created with the guidance of Chase Brandon, the CIA’s entertainment liaison. While the public record suggests that the CIA and Brandon only collaborated on the pilot episode, later conversations with series creator, Michael Frost Beckner, revealed that throughout season one, the two would often converse about the show’s storylines, with Brandon offering up ideas that eventually led Beckner to suspect that Brandon and the CIA may have envisioned The Agency as a useful intimidation tool and a threat scenario workshop, in addition to a way to help the CIA burnish its image in a tumultuous time.
4
Argo (2012)
Winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, Argo uses docudrama to tell the tale of Tony Mendez, a CIA operative who successfully freed six Americans trapped inside of Iran during the hostage crisis of the late 1970s. The film’s production is based on both Mendez’s memoir, Master of Disguise, and a 2007 Wired article entitled “The Great Escape.” The CIA arranged for several members of the cast and crew to consult with former and current officers in order to get the look and feel of the agency in the 1970s just right. Screenplay writer Chris Terrio and director Ben Affleck were also in regular contact with the CIA’s official historians to discuss the finer points of the Iranian operation. CIA officials also granted permission for scenes to be shot at the agency's famous Langley headquarters, and Mendez himself became an active participant in the film’s development. In fact, Terrio spent a week at Mendez’s Maryland farm talking about the Iranian mission and the inner life of a CIA operative, and Mendez's wife, Jonna, eventually and affectionately christened Terrio their “mole” because the writer would often send them script updates, as well as photos of the sets to keep them in the loop.
5
Homeland (2011-present)
Claire Danes plays Carrie Matheson, a CIA analyst and eventual station chief, in this Emmy-award winning Showtime series. The show’s creators, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, report that they regularly work with a CIA liaison, who answers questions about agency culture and practices. The writers also run invented story elements past the CIA “to ensure [they aren’t] laughable to those in the know,” and those contacts also help to generate story ideas.
Show creators and on-screen talent have also visited CIA headquarters in Langley. Danes revealed that she has visited the Agency numerous times and that Carrie is loosely modeled on a real female CIA officer, who took the actress to the campus and introduced her to other female colleagues. Reportedly, Gansa has used his on-campus visits to solicit ideas regarding the locations of future story lines, and a gaggle of current agency staffers, former director Michael Hayden, and former head of the clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, attended a glamorous premiere and reception at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2013 to further enhance the CIA-Homeland connection.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, suspicions persist about the assassination of President Kennedy because much evidence points to a conspiracy and to a government effort to cover it up. Here are ten “conspiracy facts” that lead many observers to doubt the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the president was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald alone, firing from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, and that there was no evidence “of conspiracy, subversion, or disloyalty to the US government by any Federal, State, or local official" (p. 22 of the Warren Commission Report). All of the following facts are discussed and documented in Conspiracy Theory in America.
1
The bullet holes in the President’s shirt indicate that he was shot from the front. The lone-gunman hypothesis is contradicted by the locations of the holes in Kennedy’s shirt from the first bullet that hit him. The Warren Commission report (page 92) says that the hole in the front of the president’s shirt is less than 1 inch below the collar button, while the hole in the shirt’s back is 5 and 3/4 inches below the top of the collar. This means that the hole in back is lower than the hole in front. However, if Kennedy had been shot in the back from six floors up, the bullet’s trajectory would have been downward, and the hole in the back of his shirt would have been higher than the hole in front. The location of the holes suggests that the first shot to hit Kennedy came from a location in front of him and slightly above street level.
2
The location and immediate consequences of President’s Kennedy’s assassination cast suspicion on Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy was killed while touring the home state of the vice president, who became president upon Kennedy’s death. In any murder investigation, the first question is: Who benefitted? Suspects are identified on this basis, and then their statements and actions in relation to the crime are scrutinized. The government failed to pursue this, the most obvious line of inquiry, at least in part because Johnson had much control over the investigation. Within a week of the assassination, he selected and appointed the members of the Warren Commission, which included, among other Johnson friends, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency who had been fired by Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation.
3
Vice President Johnson had a strong motive to want Kennedy dead. It was rumored that Johnson was going to be dropped from the president’s ticket in Kennedy’s upcoming bid for reelection. The morning of the assassination, this rumor appeared on the front page of the Dallas newspaper. It came from none other than former vice president Richard Nixon, who happened to be in town on business and had been interviewed by the newspaper the day before. One reason for thinking Kennedy might be considering other running mates was that an ongoing Senate investigation had linked Johnson to a bribery scandal centered on Senate Majority Secretary Bobby Baker. in January 1964, two months after the assassination, Johnson admitted he had accepted an expensive phonograph from Baker, and he acknowledged wrongdoing to Congress, which, no longer wanting to pursue the case against him now that he was president, ended further inquiry into Johnson’s role.
How does your forthcoming book, The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power, intersect with the current breaking news about the NSA?
The stunning revelation that people all over the globe—including both Americans and citizens of many other lands, innocently phoning or e-mailing their friends and associates—are being monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA) was explicitly predicted in my book. The book also anticipated the U.S. government response: blaming the messenger rather than repairing the massive transgression against individual rights and personal freedom entailed in these NSA surveillance programs.
What specifically are you referring to when you outline the NSA’s activities?
I refer collectively here to a group of related NSA projects by the name of one of them, “Prism.” That initiative has gathered data on individuals’ use of telephones, including the point of origin, identities of people calling, time of day, duration of conversations, and numbers and locations of recipients. The NSA collection is chilling—in the single month of March 2013 the agency vacuumed up no fewer than 97 billion bits of data—and they have been at it for the better part of a decade. A related effort collects the contents of electronic messages sent from persons in the United States to foreign addressees. This intelligence program dwarfs the NSA wiretapping and surveillance efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, aimed at American citizens, which proved so controversial they were subjected to congressional investigation. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 was enacted specifically to curb this kind of abuse.
Have acts such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 or other forms of oversight been at all effective in limiting these abuses?
Such reforms as were instituted in the 1978 act have been progressively dismantled, in a process that began even before 9/11. Following that tragedy, the government pulled out all the stops with the Patriot Act, plus the 2008 amendments to it. The Family Jewels shows how NSA surveillance and other domestic abuses (by the NSA, CIA, and other elements of U.S. intelligence) sparked fierce controversy in the 1970s and led to the creation of the present American system for intelligence oversight. But the security services have now replicated the abuses on a global scale, as the book documents, and they rely on secrecy to protect themselves from accountability. The Family Jewels argues that abusive actions carried out in secret create “Family Jewels,” scandals waiting to burst out and discredit legitimate intelligence operations. Congressional oversight is not enough. Prism shows the reality that has been so shrouded in secrecy.
How does the government justify the NSA’s activities? For example, has Prism been effective in preventing attacks?
Government officials point to one case in which Prism helped derail a terrorist plot, and to one other where the NSA collection assisted in the criminal investigation of an attack already carried out. This value (two cases) needs to be weighed against the chilling effect of authorities mounting surveillance of all citizens everywhere, gathering trillions of pieces of data. Proportionality is an issue. So is the open violation of the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. The Family Jewels explores the controversial intelligence activities—then and now—in detail, shows the failures of presidential control and congressional oversight, and illuminates the debilitating effects of secrecy. The book offers a way forward. The Family Jewels furnishes a guide to thinking about the central security issue of our time.
What do you think is the next step? How do we work toward a balance between gathering necessary information and protecting private citizens?
Really we’re talking about two kinds of efforts here. One is at the level of authorization and accountability. In The Family Jewels I discuss creating a mechanism for regular, periodic housecleaning—public reviews of intelligence activities by a board akin to the 9/11 Commission. If intelligence officials knew they would be obliged to answer to the American people, regularly, inevitably, in a forum they could not avoid, that would go a long way toward getting rid of abuses. The other kind of work we need is more gumshoe intelligence efforts. Prism really represents a lazy man’s device. We had a capability, so we found a way to use it. Of the two cases being cited in justifying this overreach, I’ve seen no convincing evidence that the New York subway plot could not have been broken up by more conventional means, and as for the investigation of the Mumbai attack—well, that involved a criminal inquiry after the fact. The FBI and other authorities would have had no difficulty at all in obtaining a proper warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court enabling them to explore all of that individual’s electronic communications, and thus all the material used to obtain his plea. Plus the Mumbai case had nothing to do with breaking up a terrorist plot. If that’s everything the administration can offer in support of Prism, I’d say they’re on awfully thin ice. The bottom line is that the spooks have gone way too far, that the secrecy abets their enterprise, and that it’s time for citizens to sit up and pay attention. “Big Brother” is here, today!
