Intelligence in Recent Public Media
A movie directed by Robert DeNiro; screenplay by Eric Roth. Universal Pictures. 2006
Reviewed by David Robarge, Gary McCollim, Nicholas Dujmovic, Thomas G. Coffey
Given the publicity surrounding the opening of Robert DeNiro's film
The Good Shepherd, Studies in Intelligence
invited CIA's Chief Historian, David Robarge, CIA historians Gary
McCollim and Nicholas Dujmovic, and CSI Lessons-Learned Staff member
Thomas Coffey to a roundtable discussion of the movie on 8 January 2007.
David Robarge: It's unusual for the Center for the Study of Intelligence to pay attention to a film, but
The Good Shepherd
warrants the attention because the movie markets itself as the "untold
story," "the hidden history of CIA." This is unlike other movies or
television shows that use the Agency as a vehicle to present what is
transparently total fiction. I'm thinking of
Mission Impossible, the two Bourne movies based on Robert Ludlum's novels,
Spy Game,
The Recruit,
Alias,
The Agency, and so forth.
By using composite or archetypal characters modeled on real CIA
officers, by placing them in scenarios based on actual historical
events, and by careful attention to sets, costumes, and other details,
The Good Shepherd has a degree of authenticity, a documentary feel, reminiscent of Oliver Stone's
JFK.
Intelligence officers should know about the many liberties the film
takes with history, but those new to the profession or hoping to learn
something about its history may not readily recognize the distortions.
The PlotDR: The basic plot centers
on the Agency's early history, starting with its predecessor, the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS). The lead character, Edward Wilson [see
next page for table of characters and actors], who is based mostly on
Cold War-era counterintelligence chief James Angleton, leaves Yale in
1939, joins OSS, serves in London, and then joins CIA in 1947, when it
is created. Wilson's service involves hotspots in Latin America, in
Europe, and in Washington through 1961. The Bay of Pigs is the
overarching real-life event from which the film moves backward, and then
forward, in time to show Wilson and other Agency officers in personal
and professional crises and turmoil during a roughly decade-and-a-half
period before and after the establishment of the Agency.
Wilson is a kind of spy for all seasons. He's modeled after several
real people: at one point he's Frank Wisner, chief of the operations
directorate in the 1950s; at another time he's Richard Bissell, the Bay
of Pigs planner; then maybe he's another senior officer of the time,
Tracy Barnes with a bit of Bill Harvey, also of Cuba operations fame.
But clearly, James Angleton, the longtime counterintelligence wizard, is
the incubus lurking over them all.
In the end,
The Good Shepherd tells a story much like John LeCarre's
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:
intelligence is inherently a sordid and corrupting business founded on
deceit and betrayal and exacts heavy costs on individuals, their
families, and their associates.
The Historical LibertiesDR:
The Good Shepherd is
on firmest historical ground in its attention to the artifacts of the
times. It gets all the little details right: the eyeglasses, the desk
sets, the street signs, the newspaper boxes—much like those quality
historical dramas that the British are so good at producing. But as a
rendering of history writ large, the film seems to me more like the
"propagandamentaries" of Costa Gavras, such as
Z and
State of Siege, which use familiar, but not necessarily true-to-life, episodes and personalities to make political points.
Gary McCollim: I saw three major errors driving the plot,
errors Agency people will notice. One—supposedly the key element in the
failure of the Bay of Pigs operation—is the belief that someone leaked
the name of the landing site. In reality, there were 1,500 Cubans
involved—no one asks how many of them talked to friends and relatives.
The
New York Times knew about the operation; there were lots of
people in the administration who knew about it; and Castro had spies in
the expatriate community CIA drew its fighters from.
Nicholas Dujmovic: Arguably the film makes CIA look better
operationally than was really the case, at least with the Bay of Pigs:
it would have succeeded, the film says, if only the landing place was
not leaked. We all know there were plenty of problems with the Bay of
Pigs on the policy side, on the planning side, and on the execution
side. There was plenty of blame on CIA's part and on the White House's
part for it to have failed quite on its own.
Thomas Coffey: Even if the operation had initially
succeeded, the idea that this paramilitary battalion would have melted
into the jungles and mountains to spawn a general uprising against
Castro is fatuous. CIA's own analysts judged that Castro's popular
support was strong and that he controlled the army and the security
services. Even if the group had secured the beachhead, its members
eventually would have been hunted down. The supposed leak had nothing to
do with historical reality. The idea just serves as a hook on which to
hang Wilson's problems throughout his career.
GMc: Right. The search for the leak becomes the vehicle for
focusing internally, inside the Agency, for "the stranger in our house."
And it leads to flashbacks in this Angleton-character Wilson's mind to
scenes of how he got involved in intelligence. This leads to the second
major error: Wilson's son is born in 1941 and graduates from Yale in
1960 at the age of 19 (he must have been a prodigy of some kind) and in
1961 he is stationed in the Belgian Congo as a first-tour CIA officer.
At the time, it was an important post, as the US government sought to
stabilize the situation in a newly independent country. This dynamic is
ignored to make the point that Wilson's son turns out to be the source
of the leak, albeit inadvertently.
Most egregious is the third error: the characterization of the reason
the film's CIA director, Philip Allen, was forced to resign after the
Bay of Pigs. We all can see in this character Allen Dulles, the
preeminent DCI of the 1950s, who indeed had to resign in 1961. What's
wrong is that Philip Allen is forced out because it was found that he
was squirreling away money in a Swiss bank account. Sure, the film lays
the groundwork for the ouster by indicating that President Kennedy
wanted CIA heads to roll after the fiasco, but the film leaves the
impression that there were a lot of corrupt people at the top of the CIA
leadership. No one has ever made that kind of claim against any
director of CIA.
DR: On top of that, you have the notion that Wilson had
learned of the bank account from a friend in the FBI and that he was
holding the knowledge as a weapon—while his suspicions and paranoias
mounted. Then, suspecting that Allen leaked the landing site, he springs
the corruption charge as a way of getting rid of the director. This is,
as you say, totally contrived: the only remote connection to history is
that the Dulles law firm, years before, had helped United Fruit
establish a monopoly in Guatemala. (In the movie it's a coffee company.)
This fact has been the source of the "economic imperialism" theory for
the successful CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954.
ND: One of the themes you see throughout the film is a
proto-Marxist position that economic interests of the capitalist elite
are primary, which helps establish the overall tone of cynicism.
DR: We need to address the tone you refer to, but there's more to say about its historical transgressions.
GMc: The film ends in 1961, in actual history a very
important year in Agency history. The Bay of Pigs essentially made CIA a
public institution. Before then, the Agency was so secret that people
didn't talk very much about it. After the Bay of Pigs, everything
changes. All of a sudden there are news stories, books are published,
and investigative journalism flourishes.
By making 1961 the fulcrum of the film, filmmakers were forced to
further twist the timelines of history. The coup in Latin
America—Guatemala—happens before 1950 instead of in 1954, and instead of
the use of false radio broadcasts and a few aerial bombings to scare a
president into abdicating, the film shows soldiers with guns invading
the presidential palace and arresting people. Never happened.
Another example of distorting history to fit the conclusion of the movie's last reel in 1961 is
The Good Shepherd's treatment
of a pair of Russian KGB officers who the movie asserts defected in the
1950s. The real defectors on which these characters are loosely based
came to the United States in the early 1960s. In addition, their stories
have been twisted. The first was Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected in
1961, and the other was Yuri Nosenko, who defected in 1964. Nosenko was,
in fact and as the movie indicated, incarcerated and subjected to
hostile interrogation, but he was not treated violently. On top of this
distortion, Director DeNiro and Screenwriter Roth conflate these events
with the infamous MKULTRA experiments with LSD that led to the
unfortunate death of a US Army scientist.
TC: I'd point to a few more details: The Angleton figure,
Wilson, goes to London as an OSS officer in 1941. The blitz makes a
great backdrop, but the OSS wasn't created for another year, and
Angleton didn't get to London until 1943. The blitz was over by then. He
was there only briefly and spent most of his OSS service in Rome, which
was relatively quiet after the Allies pushed through it. Had DeNiro and
Roth put Wilson in Rome, they would have missed an English angle: they
appear to have wanted to establish the British as the masters from whom
we learned the "black arts" of intelligence.
DR: By ending the movie in 1961, De Niro and Roth, indeed,
created all sorts of historical train wrecks. Angleton, for example, did
not start to become unhinged until the early 1960s; he was most
effective in the 1950s, when the Wilson character is becoming paranoid.
It's just a fundamental misstatement.
TC: The film's treatment of Kim Philby—Arch Cummings in the
film—is also very wrong. Philby's problems were evident by the early
1950s. Angleton was one of the very few Agency officers who was read
into the VENONA material pointing to Philby's treachery. Philby was
largely out of intelligence work by 1953, and Angleton knew why. The
whole relationship as portrayed in the film is much too Hollywood: you
have the double game within the double game, which creates unnecessary
and unhistorical complexity. By having Richard Hayes ( i.e., Richard
Helms) taking over the Agency in 1961, the film also overlooks the fact
that a West Coast industrialist—an outsider—John McCone, ran CIA after
Dulles. Helms didn't become director until 1966.
Real history should be interesting enough. For example, the Guatemala
coup is a great story. The covert operation in Iran in 1953 leading to
the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister, another good story, doesn't
even play in this movie.
ND: And the real characters! The real Angleton, the real Frank Wisner, the real Bill Harvey are stories in their own right.
Another historical falsehood is that becoming a leader at CIA hinges
on membership in Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale. No senior
figure of the time at CIA ever had anything to do with that
organization.
DR: In a sense,
The Good Shepherd is a
Godfather-type
tale told through the imagined lens of the Eastern establishment elite.
There are lots of problems with that approach: Angleton went to Yale,
but he did not belong to Skull and Bones. Richard Bissell (Edward Wilson
in the Bay of Pigs context) rejected an invitation to join the society
because he thought it was too weird. Allen Dulles (the Skull and Bones
hierarch Philip Allen) went to Princeton. And Richard Helms (Richard
Hayes in the movie), another supposed Skull and Bones guy, went to
Williams College and was temperamentally unsuited for that kind of
organization.
The real characters involved in these events are described in
The Very Best Men, by Evan Thomas, and
The Wilderness of Mirrors,
by David Martin—books that are referenced on the movie's Web site but
don't seem to have been used in the making of the film. A former Agency
officer, Milt Bearden, served as a technical consultant. He is not a
historian, and it's unclear what his specific role was. He apparently
provided little, if anything, more than insights into operational
details. Full disclosure: the CIA History Staff was never consulted.
ND: Bearden has publicly defended the interrogation scene in
which the CIA interrogator abuses, beats, and then waterboards the
second defector. In truth, when the second defector, Nosenko, came out
shortly after the Kennedy assassination, the United States needed to
know all that he could provide about possible Soviet involvement. The
stakes were very high—certainly higher than that shown in the film. You
could not have had a more volatile situation in which the truth was
needed. And yet the "hostile interrogation" Nosenko was subjected to did
not include physical violence, and he was never drugged. There
certainly was no waterboarding. The movie's interrogation scene is
clearly not a commentary on history but on recent events, and it's an
injustice to CIA.
Truth in Storytelling?TC: The film
is also provides a distorted view of Agency life. By depicting service
in the Agency as a life of lies, secrets, and the dirty business of
operations and counterintelligence, it suggests that people who work in
CIA turn into monsters like the Angleton character. In short, by working
in CIA you live a life of deception, can't trust anyone, and lose your
soul. But these are incompatible themes. For example, in reality,
keeping secrets bolsters the sense that you have to trust others, it
fosters comradeship. There's a sense of community in CIA culture and
history that is belied by the film's dog-eat-dog atmosphere.
ND: A film can take a strictly documentary approach in
trying to take a photograph of history as it happened. If that's the
standard, then anyone with historical sense is going to dislike the
liberties
The Good Shepherd takes. If one approaches the film as
a work of art, one must still ask if there is truth in the
story-telling. Does it convey the sense of the time: the atmosphere, the
motivations, the tone, and the challenges? I think we all agree that
the film fails that test as well. It fails because it inserts themes we
know from our studies of the period were not there: the overarching
economic interest, the WASP mafia dominance, the cynicism, the dark
perspective. In reality, the stakes were high during the Cold War; the
Soviets were seen to be on the march and very dangerous. It was serious
business, and there were many personal costs. And yet, most CIA people
were enjoying their work at the same time, as any number of oral history
interviews and memoirs will attest.
TC: The film also does not mention any long-term successes.
There's nothing to show that work in CIA was worth anything in a
strategic sense.
GMc: It does show technical analysis in a positive light,
making sense of a fuzzy picture and reading an audio tape. But there's
no mention of the U-2 spyplane, a huge CIA technical success. Or the
satellite program. Or the Berlin Tunnel. Those were significant
successes.
And speaking of omissions, where's the Korean war? It was the
experience of US servicemen imprisoned by the North Koreans and Chinese
that made us think the enemy could brainwash our people and get them to
spill secrets. That concern led to CIA investigations of LSD and other
drugs. That is a story in its own right, but this movie suggests LSD
came up as a truth serum out of the blue. The picture painted here is
that CIA officers were sloppy in administering drugs during an
interrogation and allowing a defector to jump out the window while they
just stand there.
And there's the ahistorical way in which the CIA elite are portrayed
as bloodless and stoical. Many of CIA's leaders in the 1950s were quite
temperamental and emotional. They screamed and yelled and pounded the
table; they were even party animals, and all that is completely omitted.
ND: Frank Wisner was famous, well before his nervous
breakdown and suicide, for his mercurial temperament. He was a romantic
at heart, like many of them. On the film's tone, what DeNiro and Roth
have done is to take a perceived aspect of Angleton's character—from
later in his life, the paranoid, suspicious, trust-no-one mentality—and
work it backwards throughout his whole life and expand it horizontally
to everyone else in intelligence, in OSS, in British intelligence, and
in CIA, with one exception. Everyone in this film is paranoid, cynical,
and not very likeable, except—and this is hugely telling—the Russians!
The Soviets, for heaven's sake. The most likeable and human person in
the movie is the KGB spymaster "Ulysses."
DR: A clear knockoff of John LeCarre's "Karla," who in fact
has no historical counterpart because the Soviets kept killing off their
spymasters.
On the Up Side?DR: Is there something right
about this movie or something of value in it? Historically,
operationally, atmospherically, institutionally? Can people learn
something from the film?
GMc: The film did portray how the work put stress on
marriages. The truth is that work for this Agency requires a great deal
of time and effort, and seemingly solid marriages have fallen apart.
ND: Memoirs of the period, by David Atlee Phillips or
Richard Helms, for example, show the stress of the job, particularly on
the operational side, that led to divorces and remarriages. But to
answer David's question, I would have to say no, other than that this
film offers a good explanation of why there is so much public
misunderstanding of the CIA, its history, and the profession of
intelligence.
TC: I can't find much in it to recommend. It's a disservice
to the pioneers of the Agency, who certainly don't deserve this kind of
treatment. They were real patriots, interested in the mission of
fighting the Soviets, not in who's backstabbing whom, and keeping the
secrets. There were mistakes during this period, but they engineered
successes as well. And our people enjoyed what they did. But the movie
doesn't suggest that at all; it's way too cynical and nasty.
ND: It's interesting that the historical works recommended
for further reading on the movie's Web site include Evan Thomas's very
good history of the period,
The Very Best Men, and Thomas has publicly disagreed with the film's facts and tone. Tom Mangold's very harsh book on Angleton,
Cold Warrior,
is also cited, but the Angleton that Mangold writes about, bizarre
though he became later on, is far from the movie version of him.
GMc: I don't think I would recommend this film to students,
unless I wanted to use it in a classroom as a foil to explain the
reality.
DR: There are many great Agency stories yet to hit the
screen. One that comes to mind is the Congo episode, from 1960 through
1965 or so. From decolonization, you have the Agency's efforts to get
rid of Patrice Lumumba, the Simba uprising, the capture of hostages in
two Congolese cities, the mounting of a major paramilitary effort to
rescue them that included CIA officers, and then after a civil war, the
establishment of a pliant dictator—an archetype of the sort of leader
we've used many time elsewhere in the world—this is a great story. The
closest thing Hollywood has done is
Tears in the Sun with Bruce Willis, but that's just Rambo in the jungle.
So, lacking alternatives,
The Good Shepherd is probably as
good as any film on the Agency. For the intelligence professional it's
probably worth seeing, at least to be able to discuss it intelligently
in social and professional settings.
ND: I agree. But if we could prescribe reading beforehand to
prepare one to recognize the movie's distortions and falsehoods, I
would say read
The Very Best Men or John Ranelagh's history of
the Agency, not to mention the contributions of the History Staff that
are available on Agency Web sites.
