Conclusion
Since the CIA first started appearing in motion pictures in the 1960s, the Agency has been depicted in a very negative light. Indeed, Hollywood’s most common constructions of Langley revolved around the image of the CIA as a rogue organization, working outside effective oversight; as a malicious organization that betrays its own assets and officers; as possessing a strong predilection toward assassination; or as a buffoonish and hopelessly inept outfit. Given this cinematic history, it is understandable that the CIA wished to reverse its popular image by working with motion picture creators, but given its culture of secrecy, it did not actually embark on the public mission until the 1990s. During the early part of the 1990s, the CIA experienced a number of setbacks that finally demanded that it become more proactive in shaping its image at home. These challenges included the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left many to question whether the CIA was still needed in a post–Cold War era, and the highly publicized case of Aldrich Ames, who not only highlighted the CIA’s failure to weed out a mole in operation for nearly a decade, but who also publicly claimed that the intelligence business was a “sham” since the information the Agency collected was rarely valuable to policy makers’ needs. Accusations that government agencies had grown too secretive—and thus prohibited citizens from gaining the information they needed to valuably participate in a democracy—also played a role in the CIA’s public affairs crisis during the 1990s. Collectively, these issues pushed the CIA into a collaboration with film and television producers, in order to shape its domestic image and reassure citizens and Congress that the Agency was still necessary and valuable. This agenda started with the tightly controlled television series project called TheClassifiedFilesoftheCIA, but after that failed to air, the
