2 The CIA in Hollywood
duction). CIA administrators have also met with studio heads and theatrical agents in order to influence their ideas about the Agency more broadly, and its retired officers have likewise contributed to numerous films, including Sneakers (1992), MeettheParents (2000), Syriana (2005), TheGoodShepherd (2006), Rendition (2007), CharlieWilson’sWar (2007), Salt (2010), and Red (2010). As a result, this book sets out to answer a number of important questions regarding the CIA and its involvement in Hollywood (which here is used as a shorthand term to describe both the American film and television industry). These questions include: What is the nature of the CIA’s role in the motion picture industry? What texts has the CIA influenced and to what ends? What events motivated Langley (here used as shorthand for the CIA as whole) to reverse its closed-door policy regarding Hollywood in the 1990s? How does the role of the retired CIA officer in the entertainment industry differ from the role of the Agency, and why have these retirees generated so much government flak? How has film and television traditionally depicted the Agency? And what are the legal and ethical concerns that a relationship between the CIA and Hollywood present, especially in a democracy? In order to answer these questions, this book employs a close textual analysis of several CIA-assisted texts and incorporates existing scholarship and journalism on the topic. Perhaps most significant, however, TheCIA inHollywood also draws from numerous interviews I conducted with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency over the years. These interviews provide greater insight into the nature of CIA-assisted texts and an additional behind-thescenes, production economy perspective. This book is important because very few people know that the CIA has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, and they fail to understand how or even why the Agency has become more formally involved with this sector in the last fifteen years. Additionally, as Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham write, “academic debates on cinematic propaganda are almost entirely retrospective, and whilst a number of commentators have drawn attention to Hollywood’s longstanding and open relationship with the Pentagon, little of substance has been written about the more clandestine influences working through Hollywood in the post- 9/11 world.”1 Indeed, one of the greatest misconceptions about the CIA is that it purposely avoids all types of media exposure; in fact, as
