Argo
This would not be the first time the CIA asked someone associated in the film industry to use their connections in order to solve an international crisis. In fact, the recent Ben Affleck movie Argo was based on a true story in which CIA operatives pretend to be filmmakers in order to fly to Iran during the hostage crisis in 1979. Tony Mendez led a team to recover six American diplomats from Tehran, pretending to be members of a production.
Zero Dark Thirty
But, did you also know that the CIA also helps Hollywood write movie scripts? The Entertainment Liaison Officer was created to help filmmakers receive “factual” advice and props in order to create movies. One major motion picture that worked with the CIA was Zero Dark Thirty.
The 2012 action-thriller, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was supposed to be based on a true story. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was called “the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man”. The movie dramatizes the 10 year manhunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. The search eventually leads to the discovery of bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, and the military raid on it that resulted in his death on May 2, 2011.
According to a 10,000 word investigative report by Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the entire Bin Laden death story is all a lie.
This weekend Hersh published a new investigative report on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the gist of which is that Bin Laden wasn’t so much in hiding, as previously reported, but being held on house arrest by Pakistani security services when he was killed.
It is important to point out that the CIA helped write the script for Zero Dark Thirty. When the movie was in pre-production, the CIA demanded changes to the movie’s script. In a memo obtained by Gawker, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ had several scenes changed and altered.
The much-discussed opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty features the main character Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, observing a detainee at a CIA black site as he is water-boarded and shoved into a tiny box during an interrogation. It appears that an early version had Maya participating in the torture. But during their conference calls, the CIA told Boal that this was not true to life. The memo reads: “For this scene we emphasized that substantive debriefers [i.e. Maya] did not administer [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] because in this scene he had a non-interrogator, substantive debriefer assisting in a dosing technique.”
There were several other scenes altered and changed. But, it demonstrates that we will probably never know what really happened and what we do know is probably fan-fiction.
How the CIA allegedly influences Hollywood
According to Daily Mail sources, Tricia Jenkins, author of The CIA in Hollywood, told reporters that CIA worked hard to influence Hollywood movie scripts. ‘In this documentation, concerning one major Hollywood movie, it is clear that the CIA functioned as the principle partner in shaping the original script and its influence exceeded that which would have been filled by an aggressive producer or studio executive.’
We may never find out if Sean Penn is actually a spy but, considering recent government activities it doesn’t seem that far fetched.
