CIA Meets Hollywood
The CIA reaped a rare reward by opening its doors to a movie crew to shoot a few scenes of In The Company of Spies. At its cloistered headquarters in this Washington suburb, the CIA received a klieg-light-bright portrayal of a spy agency more accustomed to dark jokes about blown covers and bungled missions.
The movie, produced by Showtime and Paramount Network Television, depicts a heroic team of CIA officers and analysts who pull off a monumental covert operation that not only snatches one brave officer from the jaws of death but also saves the United States from nuclear disaster.
The movie is scheduled to air on Showtime on Oct. 24.
To mark the most extensive CIA cooperation with movie makers ever, the agency's director, George Tenet, invited the film's stars Tom Berenger, Ron Silver and Alice Krige as well as CIA employees and a cast of Washington political luminaries to a screening and private reception Wednesday evening.
"They portrayed us in a very good light," Tenet told reporters.
His appraisal was affirmed in a spontaneous burst of applause from the audience at a point near the end of the movie when the president (played by Len Cariou) learns that the CIA effort succeeded in foiling a North Korean plot to import Russian missiles capable of striking the U.S. West Coast.
"When it's good, it's spectacular," Tenet said about the agency.
The president's national security adviser, whose constant second-guessing of the CIA's daring plan is meant to represent the kind of political wishy-washiness that many believe has weakened the agency in recent years, responds by saying the agency's reputation was built on its mistakes.
That is precisely the message Tenet and the rest of the CIA want the American public to hear - that despite its setbacks, the usually untold successes are what makes the agency so valuable.
"What Showtime has done is given us a chance to tell our story," Tenet told the audience before the screening started. He even made a recruiting pitch, saying he was "not ashamed to say" that young Americans who see the film should consider the intelligence field as a rewarding career.
Robert Cort, one of the film's producers, said he was an analyst at CIA headquarters for two years in the early 1970s. Cort said his cover was that he worked for "some obscure Army agency," and in that period he realized how little Americans know about what the CIA does.
Tenet said he believes the movie will give Americans a more accurate picture of the CIA, which often is portrayed in Hollywood as an inept, even evil, enterprise operating beyond the White House's control.
For the Showtime producers, the CIA provided technical advice to make the film more accurate and realistic, spokesman William Harlow said. That is the kind of cooperation the Pentagon often provides to Hollywood (there is even a full-time Pentagon staff to cordinate it), but it's new for the CIA.
Even in an era of more openness by the CIA, the idea of Hollywood stars descending on the agency's wooded compound along the Potomac River was remarkable - especially for those who work there.
There was nothing cloak-and-dagger about Wednesday evening's screening. In the fading light of a warm autumn day, a parade of black limousines deposited stars on the steps of the white headquarters building. Television camera lights glared and news photographers clicked away as several cast members stopped to chat with reporters.
Berenger, who plays a retired CIA operative who returns to save the day in a crisis with North Korea, said the CIA deserves more credit than it generally gets. "If they do something well and right you never hear about it," he said.
By Robert Burns