Is Hollywood inspired by the CIA, or vice versa?

Langley, Virginie – At the headquarters of the CIA, beyond the beautiful granite seal on its floor and a stars wall carved in honor of the agency waste, experts are at work in the complex tasks of the Spycraft: officers trained in arms, computer engineers, virologists, nuclear scientists.

But there are also storytellers, makeup artists, theater majors and ballerinas – Americans who probably never thought that their skills correspond to the needs of a spy agency. However, the CIA thought the opposite.

Although he rarely gets the spotlight, there is a rotating talent door between the country’s first intelligence agency and its entertainment industry, inspiration and influence often operating in both directions.

The agency is targeting professionals at the intersection of arts and technology for recruitment, said CIA officers in Times, and continues to cooperate with entertainment giants to inspire the next generation of creative spy.

This month, the agency is helping a successful author of the New York Times on a book for young adults examining the foundations of the CIA filed during the Second World War. Scenes from a large cinematographic production to come have come from its head office, a logistical feat in a intelligence campus nestled in the suburbs of Virginia behind rings of security perimeters, where the police wander the Bluetooth signals. Another popular streaming television series will be back in Langley to film this fall.

But their collaboration goes much further than that, said the officers. Creative minds in Hollywood and the entertainment industry have long played a role in the Central Intelligence Agency, designing intelligent solutions to its most thorny problems, such as perfecting the art of disguise and exploiting the ability of a magician to launch bewitching illusions. Indeed, in the 1950s, a New York magician named John Mulholland was secretly contracted with the agency to write a manual for spy of cold war on cunning and deception.

These days, officers said, creative skills are more precious than ever in a technologically complex world.

“You are only limited by your own imagination – do not take care of your ideas,” said Janelle, a CIA public affairs official, has granted the possibility of speaking under his first name at the agency’s request. “We are still looking for partners.”

An elusive story

David McCloskey, former CIA analyst and author of “Damascus Station” and other spy thrillers, has proposed several theories about the reasons why the agency could be interested in promoting a robust relationship with Hollywood, considering it “a two -way street”.

“There have certainly been operational applications for espionage,” said McCloskey. “This is probably the exception to the rule, but when it happens, it’s convincing.”

It is easy to see why CIA leaders would be interested in Hollywood, he said, in part to shape the agency’s impressions. “But their bread and butter business receives people to give secrets,” he continued, “and that is close to people in power.”

“The closer you are of Hollywood,” added McCloskey, “it’s really interesting” in “to have a lot of interesting conversations.”

Some of the most emblematic missions of the CIA – at least those declassified – document the rich history of the agency with Hollywood, notably Canadian Caper, when CIA agents disguised themselves as filming team to save six American diplomats in Tehran during the hostage crisis of Iran, a cinema operation which will recognize as the intrigue of “Argo”.

“” Argo “was almost too eccentric to believe,” said Brent, an internal historian at the CIA siege. “It’s almost more Hollywood than Hollywood.”

Canadian Caper was inspired by Hollywood and relied on Hollywood talents. Agent Tony Mendez had been a graphic designer before joining the agency and helping to develop the mission.

Another key player was John Chambers, the makeup artist who gave the ears of the spock world on “Star Trek” and won an honorary Oscar for his similar work on “Planet of the Apes”. He received the CIA intelligence merit of intelligence merit for his work on secret rescue effort.

The Los Angeles Times broke up history in February 1975 that the business magnate Howard Hughes had lent its ship, The Gloar Explorer, as a cover of a CIA operation.

(CIA museum)

A few years earlier, Howard Hughes, then one of the richest men in the world and a media, cinema and aerospace magnate, agreed to work with the CIA to provide coverage for an agency effort to raise a Soviet nuclear submarine flowed on the soil of the Pacific Ocean.

In deployment of the Glumaire explorer of Hughes under the cover of mineral extraction, the CIA was able to save most of the submarine before time broke a story blowing its cover – “the story that sank our efforts”, in the CIA plot.

And another mission was made possible thanks to a device invented by a professional photographer – a gadget which later became the inspiration of an exaggerated scene in the film Blockbuster Batman “The Dark Knight”.

In the Coldfeet project, CIA agents collecting information on a Soviet station erected on a sheet of ice drifting in the Arctic needed a reliable extraction plan. But how can we collect an agent without getting an airplane on the ice?

The answer was the “skyhook”: balloons raised a tied attached to a harness worn by a high agent in the sky. A CIA plane hung the attachment and won the security agent.

In “The Dark Knight”, Batman makes a dramatic escape by moving the same type of balloon withdrawal machine.

‘The spy superhero’

CIA leadership often says that acceptance in the agency is more difficult than entering Harvard and Yale. However, the agency still has challenges to recruit the type of talent it is looking for – either to reach those who have unconventional skills, or to convince them that they should leave safe jobs, relatively well remunerated and comfortable for a secret public service life.

It is not an easy task to manage work at the agency, especially with the family, recognized CIA officials. Deciding if and when sharing your true identity with their children is a regular struggle. But Janelle said that the CIA said to potential recruits that there is common ground which does not force them to completely abandon their existing life.

A professional photographer working with the CIA invented what has become known as “Skyhook”, an air surface recovery system used by the spy agency in an Arctic mission and then presented in Batman 2008 “The Dark Knight”.

(CIA museum)

“People don’t have to leave their business to help their country and work with the CIA,” said Janelle. “People come here because they love their country and know they can make a difference.”

Janelle is part of a team that regularly engages with creatives who wish to portray the agency or spies as precisely as possible.

“Some producers and directors contact each other and they care about accuracy,” said Janelle, “but they finally choose what will work for the film or the show.”

CIA analysts are also known to leave the agency for opportunities in the entertainment industry, write books and scripts that draw from their experiences – as long as they do not follow this experiences too much.

Joe Weisberg, the writer and producer behind the television series “The Americans”, and McCloskey, who works on a fifth novel focused on the American and British finishing services, both part of the agency before launching their writing careers. And as the CIA student, they had to submit their work for exams.

“There is a whole process of publication and classification,” said Brent.

This process can be a bit of a SLOG, McCloskey said: “They have literally expelled in black ink.”

But it is much more difficult for non -fictional writers than novelists.

“There could be trades, or refer to assets or people from the agency, who are clear of NO,” said McCloskey. “But with novels, it’s not so difficult to write them so as to pass them through the examination committee.”

Try as they can, studios often repeat the same lies on the CIA, regardless of the frequency they are corrected. The officers and the agents are not the same thing, for one. And as disappointing as it may be for lovers of spy thrillers, the majority of officers are not allowed or trained to carry weapons.

“One thing that Hollywood is often wrong is the idea that it is an officer who does everything, when it is really a team sport here,” said Janelle.

Jessica Chastain, Center, plays a member of the elite team of spies and military agents who secretly devoted themselves to the search for the leader of Al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden in the film by Columbia Pictures 2012 “Zero Dark Thirty”.

(Jonathan Olley / Sony Pictures)

“Zero Dark Thirty”, an Oscar-winning film released in 2012 on the hunt for Al-Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, was largely acclaimed but criticized by some within the intelligence community for credit, he gives a single fictional analyst of the CIA to find him.

McClosKey sympathizes with the writer’s dilemma.

“I cannot have 35 people in a team. From a narrative point of view, it simply does not work,” he said, recognizing that little in the field of espionage is caught with precision on the screen, even if there are many former spies available to work as consultants.

“There is no shortage of sources to do things well,” he said. “Is that the spy superhero – Jack Ryans and Jason Bournes – are roughly the Hollywood representation of spy.”

Also inaccurately glorified and dramatized, the agency hopes that Hollywood work can move the rotating door, inspiring atypical talents to join its ranks.

“We have architects, carpenters, people working in logistics,” said Brent. “People may not carry out the range of skills here at the CIA.”

And as the Canadian Caper shows, sometimes contractions require stagical. It is possible that what is most necessary to complete the next mission is not the oceanography or exploration of data, but the design of the costumes. Or maybe another ballerina.