ABSTRACT
Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), who of course was MI6, not CIA, felt that way about his own profession in Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965). Being the kind of character he was, he would surely have felt much the same way about film-makers. The question is, though, what did Hollywood think about him? This book is an investigation by the authors into representations in (mainly) Hollywood film of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), probably the best known of the 17 principal agencies of the intelligence community of the United States of America (USA). In 2010, this community accounted for approximately two-thirds of the world’s expenditure on intelligence ($75 billion out of a global total of $106 billion), and not far short of one-fifth of all intelligence personnel (i.e. 200,000 out of a global total of 1.13 million), for a country that has 5 percent of the global population and 23 percent of its economy (Debusman 2010). The CIA is an exceptionally well-known national and international icon or even “brand,” one that exercises a powerful influence on the imagination of many citizens throughout the world as well as on the creative genius of moviemakers, novelists, and investigative journalists. It has also been the model for – sometimes actively involved as consultant in – the formation of many other intelligence agencies around the world, even the agencies of some of the countries that emerged from the demise of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The CIA may also be seen as an important component of the institutional armory of both US “national” self-defense as well as of the promotion of “national” interest abroad, often covertly through practices of espionage and analysis, as well as by means of military, political, and propagandistic subversion of non-US regimes, or of groups within non-US regimes that are considered unfriendly to the USA. We place speech marks around the term “national” because we wish to make it clear from the start that invocation of “national” interest may often obscure what may be very particular or special interests, or may cover up deep disagreements as to what exactly is the “national” interest, or what would be the best ways in which to realize this “national” interest. Several histories of the CIA (see, for example, Blum 2003, 2005; Weiner 2007) establish beyond reasonable dispute the proposition that for over 60 years the CIA has routinely toppled, or destabilized or has participated in attempts to
topple or destabilize, both democratically elected and undemocratic regimes, and has participated in subversive movements (even if such participation was often ineffective, strategically or tactically inadvisable, directly or indirectly in violation of international or domestic law) that have cost, at a conservative estimate (taking account of the enumeration of instances of intervention listed in Blum 2003), hundreds of thousands of innocent lives (which the institution’s defenders would doubtless argue were the inevitable price paid in order to save many more). Or it has fought in a shadowy, often sinister supplemental role in support of more orthodox military US confrontations with regimes or groups within mainly (but not only) emergent or developing nations that have resisted the will of the hegemon, as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. For much of the time, this activity was justified on the pretext of protecting the US and the world from Communism (and, now, from terrorism), although some (e.g. Blum 2003) argue that it would be more accurate to say that it was generally undertaken for the purpose of maintaining capitalism and maximizing the availability of overseas markets for the products of the US and other major capitalist nations. Such is the iconic power of the CIA that popular imagination about its political role may overlook the extent to which its position in the world of intelligence has weakened, relative to the broader intelligence apparatus of which it is merely one component, and relative to the scale of outsourcing of intelligence work. The future of the agency was already in question in the 1990s as politicians wondered whether the agency still had a useful role to play following the end of the Cold War, and whether it could survive the damage wrought by Russian mole Aldrich Ames, whose nine-year-period of treachery was discovered in 1994. The popular perception that intelligence had failed to provide timely warning of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 constituted a further threat. In response to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks 2004), the Administration of George W. Bush in 2004 created The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The Director is head of the US intelligence community and cannot simultaneously serve as Director of the CIA. He serves as head of a 17-member intelligence community (including the ODNI as one of these). The intelligence community’s total budget in 2010 was approximately $75 billion, representing a growth of 100 percent in the nine years since 2001 (Priest and Arkin 2010a). The Director of National Intelligence advises the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 is another indication of greater diffusion of intelligence operations at federal level. Outsourcing of intelligence is a further factor (Shorrock 2008). Writing in the Washington Post (July 8, 2007), R.J. Hillhouse reports that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors. He quotes a Washington Post report by Walter Pincus that more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon’s newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity) is made up of corporate contractors. Hillhouse demonstrates that between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA’s most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS),
responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations. A July 2010 series of reports of a two-year investigation for the Washington Post (Priest and Arkin 2010a, b, c) described a “dependency [on the corporate sector] that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest – and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.” Of the 854,000 people whom Arkin and Priest calculated to be holding the top-secret level of clearance for the US security establishment, some 265,000, or nearly one-third, working for 1,931 companies, were contractors; 533 of these companies had come into being since 2001 and others had expanded. In Washington, DC, and its surrounding neighborhood, 33 new building complexes for top-secret intelligence work had appeared since 2001, occupying the equivalent of almost three Pentagons, or 22 US Capitol buildings. Among the big corporate names were Northrop Grumman, SAIC, General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, CSC. Of the 1,931 companies involved, 110 accounted for roughly 90 percent of all this corporate work. At the CIA, employees from some 114 firms accounted for roughly one-third of the workforce, or about 10,000 positions, used in every conceivable way, including killing, spying, and war-planning, work considered to be fundamental to the agency’s core mission. Even the government was not sure how many corporate employees were on the payroll. To our knowledge, this evolving, complex diffusion of traditional state power into the sinews and recesses of private capital accumulation is rarely if ever captured by Hollywood. This consideration therefore raises the question of the possible role of Hollywood representation in projecting an overly simple image of national intelligence operations. In this study we concentrate on the CIA. Although we have frequently encountered representations of other agencies, notably that of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Secret Service, it is our impression that the CIA is the primary iconic reference point for intelligence (both US and global) in cinematic drama and that, perhaps more importantly, its privileged place in American cinema has been left relatively unexplored by scholars. The topic of this book is interdisciplinary in as much as it potentially traverses a number of different literatures. These include literatures on the construction of cinematic texts as informed, in particular, by the discipline of “film studies” or “television studies” (as illustrated, for example, by Miller 2008a, b; Packer 2009); entertainment, ideology, and propaganda in the context of media representations (especially as elucidated by the discipline of “cultural studies”) (see Barker 2008; During 2007 for critical introductions); state, military, and commercial subsidization of movie industries (see Miller et al. 2001, 2005; Robb 2004; Valantin 2005); the infotainment industries and agencies of national security (Valantin 2005); media and globalization (see Boyd-Barrett 2006; Thussu 2006, 2008). The current work relates to these different literatures, but is distinct from them. Within the political economy tradition of media studies, the rationale
for this present work starts with its relevance to the evolving study of media imperialism. This is a tradition that has often focused on issues of infrastructure, business models and finance, market structure and market share (e.g. BoydBarrett 1980, on news agencies; Miller et al. 2001, 2005, on Hollywood), as it has with texts and representations (e.g. Dorfman and Mattelart 1991, on comics). Schiller (1992) examined how US media infrastructures and content served the interests of US global political and economic dominance. Boyd-Barrett (1977a, b) addressed media imperialism primarily within a post-colonial framework that examined the implications of First World media dominance for the prospects for autonomous media growth in developing and other countries. Boyd-Barrett (1998, 2006) argues that contemporary media imperialism theory needs to move beyond the presumptions of post-colonialism, even of neo-imperialism, and to examine media within a global order that has been structured by the policies, institutions, interests, and practices of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism (the first advocating global economic deregulation that mainly benefits the alreadydeveloped countries; the latter resorting to military conquest and control in the effort to ensure the continuing preeminence of the already-developed countries, in particular the US, in an increasingly multi-polar world in which previously “emerging” economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China acquire regional if not global economic ascendancy), whether these may be deemed successful or otherwise. In effect, Boyd-Barrett has reverted to a “Schillerian” (see Schiller 1992) framework of “classic” imperialism (albeit, an imperialism that moves in constant progression through many different forms) while retaining the idea that imperialism is a generic power relationship that should not be identified nor exemplified solely with reference to specific, historically situated “superpowers” nor even with relativities of power between nation-states (as opposed to configurations of power that extend beyond territory as the principal defining feature). Thussu (2008), for example, refers to “neoliberal imperialism.” In examining such power relationships, the point is not necessarily to focus on one-way manifestations of influence and power as mediated or even facilitated by the media, but to look at contests for power as these are played out in media representations and constructions. Alford’s (2010) work focuses principally on the ways in which Hollywood has supported US global supremacy, whereas our work is as interested in examples of counter-hegemonic or alternative hegemonic discourses in Hollywood product. In most cases, the literature we surveyed did not examine the CIA’s presence in film from a perspective of media imperialism, although the works of Valantin and Alford, discussed above, certainly approach the topic of how movies contribute to the empire’s establishment of cultural hegemony. In relatively few of the works that we examined was the work of the intelligence agencies in general or of the CIA in particular the main topic of concern, though this is not to say that such works were unhelpful. Our broad starting point, then, is to ask how Hollywood movies, both mainstream and other, relate to, conceptualize, or ignore the global order of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, the ascendant ideologies for much of our period, in their content or in their own business practices, or both. Whether the
CIA is seen as a bastion of US defense against the imperialistic aspirations or interests that would set themselves in opposition to a neo-liberal order of globalization or, alternatively, is seen as an aggressive weapon for the extension and maintenance of US global power (or of US-based neo-liberal/neoconservative interests), the study of its representation in popular culture, and in particular Hollywood movies, is likely to provide useful insights into the role of Hollywood in either providing support to or subverting elite definitions of what the institution of the CIA represents and how this role may change over time or in other ways. We are particularly interested in issues of representation, with a view to articulating the relationship between representations of the CIA as these might align directly or otherwise with the interests of (especially) the US government and those of its allies, as well as to identifying instances and patterns of textual resistance to these interests. We focus primarily although not exclusively on movies that have been generated from within traditional “Hollywood,” movies made initially for theater release rather than for television, that derive from the heart of the empire, so to speak, or which have been produced elsewhere but then distributed by the Hollywood majors (or by companies that have been folded into these at some point in the past 50 years) and are fairly easily accessible through mainstream US retail distribution outlets such as Blockbuster or Netflix. The analysis principally draws from textual narrative, but seeks meanings of narrative both from within the text itself and from external sources of meaning-making that include contemporary political and economic developments and histories of the CIA and the intelligence community. Within the intelligence community, our primary focus is the CIA, which we argue is the best-known of the intelligence agencies, but we also draw attention to relationships between the CIA and other agencies generally, and to specific other agencies, both of the US and other countries, where these could arguably have formed a likely source of meaning-making for audiences about the nature of intelligence. For example, both our core sample and extra-sample movies include several James Bond movies, as well as other spy movies based on the works of British authors, and these inevitably inspire comparisons between representations of American and British intelligence services. We generally do not draw conclusions about audience understandings and reactions, since we have conducted no studies of these, nor have we found a significant literature that would throw much light on this subject. Our claim is more modest – namely, that we find the texts are inscribed by narrative development in ways that privilege certain readings over others, while we recognize that the privileging of meanings does not determine the meanings that actual, historically situated audiences extract. Despite the high level of public awareness of the CIA, and its longstanding place as a part of Hollywood film, academic investigations of the relationship between the two appear to be relatively few. A literature review for this book that spanned several disciplines – including journals of film (Film and History, Film Comment, Film Quarterly), popular culture (Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television), and literature (Contemporary
Literature) – revealed only a few articles approaching the CIA in film (e.g. Price 1996), with none approaching the topic from a similar angle to ours. Examinations of espionage in literature were slightly more prominent (e.g. Price 1996). Each journal, as well as other online research databases (e.g. Academic Search Premier) were subject to queries referencing the CIA itself (e.g. “Central Intelligence Agency,” “espionage,” “spy,” “spies”) extending to more general terms whose incarnations are affected by the CIA (“democracy,” “government,” “secret service,” etc.). In the case of representations of spies in literature, Price (1996) argues that the spy has taken a road from bumbling amateur, originally, into cold professional by the 1970s and 1980s (although we noted many cinematic examples across our much longer timespan of non-professionals who get caught up in the espionage business, often involuntarily). Snyder (1977) argues that espionage films in general often portray their main protagonists as victims of “the imperialist order” within government bureaucracies that toy with their agents, and we certainly found some movies that would fit this description. These and other sources (including Rubenstein 1979; Parish and Pitts 1974) have helped us identify narrative frames and constructions that helped us to compare the films we viewed. They have also provided us with recommendations as to possible films to include in our broader non-sample survey. In some cases, the literature predates by several decades the films that we have looked at, as well as actual political events that may have inspired them. Additionally, the CIA has made its presence felt across multiple sectors, and it is quite possible that other disciplines, such as political science, may have approached our topic from starting points outside of our purview. Book-length literature that discussed film studies in general, as well as espionage in particular, were more fruitful. Some books that dwell specifically on the espionage genre do not necessarily address the CIA or espionage in recent decades. Miller’s (2003) masterly Spyscreen focuses rather more on early espionage movies, with stronger reference to their representations of gender and culture than to their ideological work in the political domain. Much the same can be said of his 2008 work, The Avengers, an analysis of the popular British television series of that name. Miller’s work does reference some of the classic Hitchcock espionage movies, and this is a theme also taken up in a somewhat more focused way (from our point of view) by Lethier (2009), whose chapter in a collection that traces the links between media and espionage identifies Hitchcock as the creator of the “CIA film,” and a Western Cold War propagandist. In total, 14 of Hitchcock’s 53 feature films dealt with secret intelligence. Several of these, being about the Second World War or the lead-up to it, pre-date the CIA. Some of his later works employed veterans of the British Military Intelligence Service as screenwriters. Notorious (1946) was the result of “deep and detailed” negotiations with Edgar Hoover, but Notorious was not a spy movie. Movies such as Topaz (1969) and Torn Curtain (1966) bore significant relationship to real events (Cuban missile crisis, Soviet defections, anti-missile defense controversies). Spy stories, writes Lethier, “were considered the safest vehicles for presenting America’s reassuring power in the best possible light” (2009: 192).
