The CIA In Modern Memory

The proximate cause of my starting this blog was when, last Sunday night, A&E ran the Jason Bourne trilogy of films based on the Robert Ludlum novels. I never took any interest in Ludlum as a writer, and it wasn't until a few years ago when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum for the first time and recognized that, at least, with all the fights and explosions and car chases and stuff, it wasn't bad entertainmnet. But that was before Crossfire Hurricane and the peeing Russian hookers reached the national consciousness.

We decided to record the whole trilogy when A&E ran it and watched all three over the next nights. What struck me was the image portrayed of the CIA throughout the three films, The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever.

Did Martn Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

But then I looked back at how the CIA had previoiusly been portrayed in Hollywood, in particular two of Hitchcock's greatest films, North by Northwest (1959) and Topaz (1969). Hitchcock was a creaative genius, a poet in the broad sense, whose imaginative presence in the public consciousness was close to Charles Dickens a century before. Espionage was one of his favorite themes. As a succesful artist, he played off public' expectations. The intelligence agencies were our protectors from Hitler and then the Communist menace (which of course was real, but the agencies' actual record was, shall we say, mixed.)

In North by Northwest, the mama's-boy ad executive Roger Thornhill bumbles into a communist plot to assassinate a non-existent CIA operative, George Kaplan. Kaplan is a great-granduncle of the Russian hookers of 2016, a fiction created in Langley for its own purposes. The communist spies mistake the real Thornhill for the fake Kaplan, and glorious cinema ensues, the Twentieth Century Limited, the corn field, the auction scene, Mount Rushmore. Much of the action is manipulated by a senior CIA operative known only as The Professor, played by Leo G Carroll.

Did The Professor go to Yale? You betcha. Heck, he probably teaches there and recruits Bonesmen. That's why he's The Professor.

We may assume The Professor is also an Allen Dulles protégé. His purposes are obscure, but they're nevertheless benevolent. Despite the inconvenience to Roger Thornhill's privileged life, his descent into the underworld of espionage forces him to grow up and become an unwilling hero, as many of Hitchcock's leading men do in his spy-genre films. Eve Kendall, the female CIA agent who is effectively a prostitute, is also redeemed, and at the end of the film, she and Kendall marry.

The Yalies are in charge, they order things rightly for our good, and it all comes out right, indeed beyond our expectations.

Hitchcoxck's 1969 Topaz, in my view highly underrated and one of his greatest, pursues a similar theme. In the film, the CIA plays a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in revealing the Soviet buildup of nuclear rockets in Cuba in 1962. The CIA agent Mike Nordstrom (John Forsythe) learns of the scheme from a Russian defector, whom he capably extricates and flies to the US from Denmark. The CIA's competence is reinforced by the blustering complaints of the defector, who comically insists the KGB would have done a mucb more professional job.

Nordstrom, eminently competent, works through a French agent, André Devereaux, to bribe a high-ranking Cuban, as well as to use an existing anti-Castro network in Cuba that Deveraux controls via his adulterous relationship with Juanita de Cordoba, widow of a revolutionary hero. Deveraux's actions -- not directly Nordstrom's reponsibility but effectively controlled by him -- keep the dirty work at arm's length from the Yalies in Langley.

Nordstrom, in fact, plays the same role as The Professor. Deveraux's continued efforts threaten his marriage, but his wife's liaison with another Frenchman helps expose a network of Soviet moles in the French government. We must recognize that these moles are at the top of the French elite, graduates of the École nationale d'administration, but corruptible, unlike, say, Nordstrom himself. Or, gee, the Ivy Leaguers back in Langley.

Nordstrom was most likely a protégé of The Professor. But is he a Yalie? Probably not. A little too country-clubby on one hand, a little too much the man of action on the other. Let's give him Dartmouth.. John Forsythe's son Eric was a classmate of mine there. Whatever he is, he's squeaky-clean.

Notice the portrait of JFK behind Forsythe's shoulder in the photo. But let's also recognize we're looking back on 1962 in this film from 1969, a very different time, after race tiots, Viet Nam, the 1968 election, and the arrival of Nixon, with a public character less worthy than that of a used car salesman. Hitchcock is deliberately creating a rosy, nostalgic reference to an idealized past, in which the CIA plays a prominent role that, of course, it never actually had.

The populist Truman strontgly resisted creating the CIA. He despised the OSS director William Donovan, and it was remarked that OSS stood for "oh-so-social". On balance, I think Truman's instincts were correct. Before The Professor, before Mike Nordstrom, the CIA gave us the surprise of Chinese intervention in Korea, its bungling of the Cambridge spy network, its bungling of Southeast Asia, and the Bay of Pigs. I asume both The Professor and Mike Nordstrom played key roles in all of this. Don't you?

But the real question here is why Robert Ludlum, only a decade after Topaz, was able to sell the public on the idea of CIA leadership much closer to what we've now come to know in John Brennan. Martin Marshall is more credible in modern media than The Professor.