ABSTRACT
The movies The sample for the 2000s included George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), Jim Wynorski’s The Gargoyle: Wings of Darkness (2004), Kevin Allen’s Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004), Vasili Chiginsky’s Mirror Wars: Reflection One (2005), Stephen Spielberg’s Munich (2005), and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006). We will be making some comparative references to other movies from this period, including, in order of year of release: John Hamilton’s Codename: Jaguar (2000), Tony Scott’s Spy Game (2001), John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama (2001), Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), Andrew Davis’ Collateral Damage (2002), Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day (2002), Phillip Noyce’s The Quiet American (2002), Phil Alden Robinson’s The Sum of All Fears (2002), Harald Zwart’s Agent Cody Banks 1 (2003), Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit (2003), Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy (2004), Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004), Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale (2006), Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn (2006), Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart (2007), Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), Mikael Saloman’s The Company (2007), Jim Threapleton’s Extraordinary Rendition (2007), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal – Nerakhoon (2008), Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008), Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Burn After Reading (2008), Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth (2008), Marc Foster’s Quantum of Solace (2008), Joshua Seftel’s War, Inc. (2008), Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity (2009), and Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness (2010)
In historical context The decade saw a significant uptick in movies representing the CIA. Our initial searches established 25 for the 1960s, 25 for the 1970s, 26 for 1980s, 23 for the 1990s and, even though we established the sample in 2007, 36 for the 2000s. We discovered more movies subsequently, and particularly for the 2000s. The 2001 9/11 attacks cast a shadow over the rest of the decade, whose movies directly or
otherwise mostly bought in to the official 9/11 Commission Report (2004) of a significant act of terrorism committed by Middle Eastern terrorists (almost all Saudi), members of a non-state entity, al-Qaeda, that lacked a structure comparable to a standing army or corporation (Curtis 2004c). Challenging alternative accounts, such as those of David Ray Griffin (2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2008) are rarely acknowledged or represented. 9/11 was leveraged by the Bush II Administration as a pretext for the revenge invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, on the premise that the Taliban who controlled much of Afghanistan (and had even been recent beneficiaries of US aid) had hosted Osama Bin Laden and his alQaeda camps. Yet the Taliban had offered to hand over Osama Bin Laden both before and after 9/11, in return for a relaxation on sanctions (before 9/11) or, later, proof of Bin Laden’s guilt for 9/11 and an end to US bombing (Cockburn and St. Clair 2004). The US invasion had been scripted before September 2001 (Arney 2001, quoting Pakistani former Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik). Additionally, 9/11 was leveraged into a generalized engagement in a “war on terror.” This welded neatly to a discourse about the “clash of civilizations” proposed in 1996 by Samuel Huntington, a former consultant to the US Department of State, and former White House Coordinator of Security Planning. Weak or fabricated intelligence suggesting both the involvement in 9/11 of the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was deployed in support of the 2002 Bush doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, and the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq (see reports of the memo written by Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, on January 31, 2003 – reported by Doward et al. 2009). The invasion of Afghanistan contributed to growing US involvement in and destabilization of Pakistan. The invasion of Iraq ran in parallel with an intensification of controversial US and Israeli claims of Iran’s intention to build WMD. The CIA was significant in all these events, even as it outsourced much intelligence and covert work to mercenary units such as Blackwater (later Xe) (Scahill 2009; Smith and Warrick 2009). The CIA was closely associated with the least creditable aspects of the “war on terror.” These included (1) “rendition” (the illegal kidnapping of terrorism “suspects” from any country and their dispatch to secret CIA prisons or other places of detention; victims were frequently then subject to torture) (Leopold 2009); (2) widespread POW abuses, including torture and murder, at Baghram in Kabul, Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, and Guantanamo, Cuba (Goldenberg 2002; Nimmo 2004; Norton-Taylor 2009); (3) “war-by-unmanned-drone” and assassination teams targeting terrorist “suspects” (BBC 2009; Wikileaks 2010) and the cause of substantial numbers of civilian deaths and casualties. Bizarre or tragic CIA stories that surfaced during the period included exposure of the brother of Afghanistan president Hamid Khazai as a drug-running CIA asset (Filkins et al. 2009); Blackwater’s contractual relationship to the CIA (Scahill 2009); assassination of several CIA and Blackwater (Xe) employees by a double or triple agent (Nasaw 2010). The CIA was controversial in other ways. A breakdown of communications between intelligence agencies, for which the CIA shared responsibility, contributed
to “failure” to predict the events of 9/11, despite advance warning from many other sources (Griffin 2004a; Office of the Inspector General 2007). CIA Director George Tenet supported Secretary of State Colin Powell’s misleading case for WMD in Iraq to the UN Security Council in 2003, and the agency otherwise failed to supply timely evidence of the actual non-existence of WMD (or was Western confidence in the absence of WMD necessary for the invasion)? Just in case, the Department of Defense had by-passed the CIA (Pincus and Smith 2007), setting up its own intelligence unit to find or concoct “evidence” to support the case for war – a reprise of 1980s strategies to exaggerate the Soviet threat (Curtis 2004b; Goodman 2009). Further embarrassments included the apparent “failure” of the CIA to act sooner in the case of an attempted airplane bombing in Detroit (December 2009), and the killings of CIA agents in Afghanistan by a double or triple agent who may not have been adequately vetted prior to his entry to a CIA camp (Nasaw 2010). When the intelligence agencies had been brought together in 2005 under the umbrella of a Director of National Intelligence, it seemed to some to be a set-back for the agency. There was unprecedented outsourcing of almost all forms of intelligence work, impacting the role and size of federal organizations like the NSA and the CIA (Priest and Arkin 2010a, b, c; Shorrock 2008). Examining the greater prominence of the CIA in movies of the 2000s, we are struck by the conflict between its onscreen salience and off-screen threats to its power and prestige.
