New evidence for the surprisingly significant propaganda role of the CIA and the DOD in the screen entertainment industry
This
article reassesses the relationships of the Central Intelligence
Agency and Department of Defense with the American entertainment
industry. Both governmental institutions present their relationships
as modest in scale, benign in nature, passive, and concerned with
historical and technical accuracy rather than politics. The limited
extant commentary reflects this reassuring assessment. However, we
build on a patchy reassessment begun at the turn of the 21st century,
using a significant new set of documents acquired through the Freedom
of Information Act. We identify three key facets of the
state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or absent
from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The
withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the
work; and 3. The level of politicization. As such, the article
emphasizes a need to pay closer attention to the deliberate
propaganda role played by state agencies in promoting the US national
security state through entertainment media in western societies.
Part
2 - The Withholding of Available Data from the Public
The
largest library archive about the DOD’s influence on entertainment
is held at Georgetown University and curated by Lawrence Suid. The
authors and several colleagues of different ages, genders, and levels
of academic experience requested access to these files. Suid rejected
each request. In his clearest refusal to share material, Suid
explained that, ‘I trust you will understand the difficulty I would
have in opening my files while I am still using them’,1 though he
has not generated any new analysis since 2005.
In
2004, Robb highlighted some egregious examples of the DOD exerting
political influence over Hollywood scripts. Despite his extensive
discussion of the archived documentation, Suid’s books have made no
direct reference to the politically-motivated changes on numerous
films, including: Clear and Present Danger (e.g. removal of racist
language by the President); Tomorrow Never Dies (e.g. removal of a
joke about the US losing the Vietnam War); Contact (e.g. changing a
scene that makes the military appear paranoid); Thirteen Days (e.g.
an attempt to convince the producers that the Joint Chiefs had
behaved responsibly during the Cuban Missile Crisis); Windtalkers
(e.g. a scene depicting a historically accurate Marine war crime was
removed) – as discussed below – as well as Tears of the Sun (the
military prevented the depiction of ‘nasty conspiracies’); The
Green Berets (e.g. references to the illegal US bombing of Laos were
removed); Rules of Engagement (e.g. the lead character is ‘toned
down’); Black Hawk Down (e.g. a scene depicting the military
machine gunning wild boar is removed); and Goldeneye (the nationality
of a duped American Admiral is changed), as discussed in Alford and
Secker’s 2017 book. Although Suid gives good coverage of film
releases that have been denied cooperation, he chooses not to comment
whatsoever on productions that were terminated due to the DOD’s
refusal to cooperate, including Countermeasures, Top Gun II, and
Fields of Fire.
Direct
approaches to the DOD’s ELO have also proven to be of dubious
utility. Strub claimed ‘I stopped keeping paper records long ago. I
don’t maintain electronic ones, either’ and that a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request could only disclose, at best, a ‘brief
entry in an incomplete data base’. He suggested we contact Suid,
which only serves to highlight how the presence of Suid has helped
insulate the DOD from the FOIA (Strub, 2014).
Actually,
although the ‘incomplete data base’ is mostly lacking information
about the degree of political influence and script changes brought to
bear by the DOD, it does contain some relevant new data and it helped
clarify the scale of DOD support to entertainment products. Despite
this, the overwhelming majority of the new data concerns what the
military provided to the filmmakers in terms of access to people,
locations and vehicles and does not record what the Pentagon asked
for in return. Similarly, our request to the US Navy for copies of
script notes on recently-supported productions resulted, after well
over a year’s delay, in a response saying that they do not keep
copies of script notes (2017). We appealed and provided them with a
copy of their own notes on Lone Survivor, released to another
requester, but no further information has so far been forthcoming.
The
available CIA records regarding their involvement in and influence on
entertainment products are even more scant. While hundreds of pages
of emails and memos regarding Zero Dark Thirty were released in
response to a FOIA lawsuit, the equivalent records regarding other
CIA-supported productions have never been released. Secker and others
have requested files on Argo and Top Chef – which unlike Zero Dark
Thirty were even granted permission to film at CIA headquarters –
but the CIA’s responses say they cannot find even a single
document.
The
same problem applies to the Chase Brandon era (1996–2006) in the
CIA’s liaison office. According to his successor, Paul Barry, when
Brandon left the Agency in late 2006 he took all his papers with him,
and so ‘nothing remains from the past’ (quoted in Jenkins, 2009).
Tricia Jenkins’ work suggests two alternative reactions to this
hole in the CIA’s records: (1) that it does not make much
difference because, as producer Michael Beckner put it, ‘everything
he did with the CIA was done on a handshake and a phone call’
(Jenkins, 2016: 69) and so Brandon’s paper-trail was probably
minimal anyway; and (2) that it might matter enormously because
extensive memos show that Chase Brandon was responsible for
essentially ghost-writing the film The Recruit and so, presumably, he
used this written method for a considerable body of material. The
2016 edition of Jenkins’ book The CIA in Hollywood cites documents
from an unspecified court case proving how:
[Brandon’s]
role far exceeded the one that even an aggressive studio executive or
producer would play in the development of the film … one can’t
help but wonder why [writer Roger] Towne and [producer Jeff] Apple
allowed Brandon to have so much creative control over the original
script unless it was always understood to be a CIA written film
disguised as an independent production. (p. 87)
Jenkins
concludes that ‘it is clear that Brandon was far more involved in
some films’ actual development than anyone outside of the industry
previously imagined’ (p. 87).
Overall,
then, institutional secrecy makes it impossible to assess the true
scale and nature of the political influence wielded on Hollywood by
these two institutions, especially the CIA. We only know that in some
well-documented instances it is fundamental to the politics of these
entertainment products (we discuss some examples below). The CIA
seems to have taken its popular refrains like ‘the secret of our
success is the secret of our success’ and applied them to its work
on entertainment productions. In the wake of Robb’s criticism, the
DOD further limited public access to source materials that reveal
script changes by replacing the twentieth century style of paper
trail with more circumspect and anodyne diary-style activities
reports. This lack of transparency could presumably be quickly
reversed, were it not for a mindset that does not want the public to
know.
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