An offer they couldn't refuse

The CIA is often credited with 'advice' on Hollywood films,

but no one is truly sure about the extent of its shadowy
involvement. Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham investigate

Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham

The Guardian, Friday 14 November 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-
scott

Spies like us ... Body of Lies

Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's

fascination with spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage
thrillers, through cold war tales such as Torn Curtain, into the
paranoid 1970s when the CIA came to be seen as an agency
out of control in films such as Three Days of the Condor, and
right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and Ridley
Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always
wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is
how much the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-
makers. In fact, the story of the CIA's involvement in
Hollywood is a tale of deception and subversion that would
seem improbable if it were put on screen.

Body of Lies Release: 2008 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15

Runtime: 128 mins Directors: Ridley Scott Cast: Alon
Aboutboul, Carice van Houten, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark
Strong, Michael Gaston, Oscar Isaac, Russell Crowe, Vince
Colosimo More on this film The model for this is the defense
department's "open" but barely publicized relationship with
Hollywood. The Pentagon, for decades, has offered film-
makers advice, manpower and even hardware - including
aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art helicopters. All it asks for
in exchange is that the US armed forces are made to look
good. So in a previous Scott film, Black Hawk Down, a
character based on a real-life soldier who had also been a
child rapist lost that part of his back-story when he came to
the screen.

No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behavior

towards the US armed forces has seemed, it has at least
happened within the public domain. That cannot be said for
the CIA's dealings with the movie business. Not until 1996
did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had
established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would
collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers.
Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served
for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services
division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he
isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a
cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration

were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a
deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could
it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose
books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana
- told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to
Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang
around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi

was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for
Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently
discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in
reports about how film censorship was being employed to
boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen
abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had
persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were
"well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda
about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version
was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg.

Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958
adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American,
describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title
role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously
ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American
foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling
consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical
British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the
man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's
American had been based in part on the legendary CIA
operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt,
then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded
director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his
own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to filmmakers, however. It

even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights
to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954
British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long
been rumored, but only in the past decade have those
rumors been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told
in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in

Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as
funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters
of verisimilitude. Having serving does that or former CIA
agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might
wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former
agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of
Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former
officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when

making its 2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written
by a former agent). Langley was equally helpful to the
novelist Tom Clancy, who was invited to CIA headquarters
after the publication of The Hunt for Red October, an
invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently, when
Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency
was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour
of headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for
star Ben Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to
advise - a role he repeated during the filming of glamorous
television series Alias.

The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two
less action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De
Niro's The Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an
approximate version of the story of the famed CIA head of
counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton; and Charlie
Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to supply the
Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet
occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended
badly, as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to
the terrorists of al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was
not the case. As Beardon - who had been the CIA man
responsible for the weapons reaching the Afghans - observed
shortly before the movie came out, the film would "put aside
the notion that because we did that [supply arms], we had
9/11".

Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA

likes to offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded
on by Paul Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to
the CIA - a very senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh
spoke at Lynchburg College of Law in Virginia - where he had
become an associate professor - about the CIA's relationship
with Hollywood. A journalist present at the lecture (who now
wishes to be anonymous) reported that Kelbaugh spoke
about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. A
CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the
shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the
filmmakers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to
the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.

Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us,

Kelbaugh emphatically denied having said such a thing, and
said he remembered "very specific discussions with senior
[CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to
affect [film] content - EVER." The journalist stands by the
original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to discuss the
matter further.

So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth -

it's worrying enough. But there are cases where some
believe the CIA's activities in Hollywood have gone further -
far enough, in fact, to be the stuff of movies. In June 1997,
the screenwriter Gary DeVore was working on the screenplay
for his directorial debut. It was to be an action movie set
against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama in 1989,
which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega.
According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an
old friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's
regime and US counter narcotic programmes in Latin
America. Wendy told CNN: "He had been very disturbed over
some of the things that he had been finding in his research.
He was researching the United States invasion of Panama,
because he was setting the actual story that he was writing
against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous
amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also
our own government's money laundering."

At the end of that month, DeVore had been in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, working on another project. He was travelling back
to California when, at 1.15am on June 28, he called Wendy, a
call she says has been excised from phone records. She told
CNN she was "terribly alarmed" because he was speaking as
though he were under duress. She was sure "someone was
in the car with him". That was the last time Wendy DeVore
heard from her husband.

A year passed, but the case refused to die and speculation

mounted. Even the Los Angeles Times began contemplating
CIA involvement. DeVore was presumed dead, but there was
no body, and no end to the questions. Lo and behold, just
nine days after the LA Times reported the case, DeVore's
body was found, decomposing in his Ford Explorer, in 12 feet
of water in the California Aqueduct below the Antelope Valley
Freeway, south of Palmdale - a city located in "aerospace
valley", so dubbed by locals for its reputation as a US
military-industrial-complex stronghold - fuel to the fire for
conspiracy theorists.

The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of

DeVore's death to be "unknown", but police eventually
reached the tentative conclusion that the screenwriter's
death was an accident: he had fallen asleep at the wheel,
they said, before careening off the highway and into the
water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain: DeVore's
laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing
from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on
long trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative
allegedly showed up at DeVore's house to request access to
his computer; Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield
noted that previous drafts of DeVore's script were
inexplicably wiped from said computer during the same
timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off
the highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the
absence of visible damage to the guardrail at the scene of
the alleged accident; and how come no one noticed an SUV
sitting in the water beneath a busy highway for a whole
year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a conspiracy
movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled by
De Vore's death.

Despite the CIA's professed desire to be more open about

the role it plays in Holly-wood, it's hard to take its newfound
transparency too seriously. After all, what use is a covert
agency that does not act covertly, even if some of its
activities are public? And if it is still not open about the truth
of events decades ago, many of which have spilled into the
public domain accidentally, how can we be sure it is telling
the truth about its activities now? The spy may have come in
from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the
cinema.
• Body of Lies is released next Friday