LANGLEY, Va. — At CIA headquarters, beyond the handsome granite seal on its lobby floor and a wall of stars carved in honor of the agency’s fallen, experts are at work in the complex tasks of spycraft: weapons-trained officers, computer engineers, virologists, nuclear scientists.
But there are also storytellers, makeup artists, theater majors and ballerinas — Americans who probably never thought their skills would match the needs of a spy agency. Yet the CIA thought otherwise.
Though it rarely gets the spotlight, there’s a revolving door of talent between the country’s premiere intelligence agency and its entertainment industry, with inspiration and influence often working both ways.
The agency is targeting professionals at the intersection of arts and technology for recruitment, CIA officers told The Times, and continues to cooperate with entertainment giants to inspire the next generation of creative spies.
This month, the agency is assisting a New York Times bestselling author on a young adult book examining the foundations of the CIA laid during World War II. Scenes from a major upcoming film production were just shot at its headquarters, a logistical feat at an intelligence campus tucked away in the Virginia suburbs behind rings of security perimeters, where officers roam cracking down on Bluetooth signals. Another popular streaming TV series will be back at Langley to film this fall.
But their collaboration goes far deeper than that, officers said. Creative minds in Hollywood and the entertainment industry have long had a role at the Central Intelligence Agency, devising clever solutions to its most vexing problems, such as perfecting the art of disguise and harnessing a magician’s ability to cast spellbinding illusions. Indeed, in the 1950s, a magician from New York named John Mulholland was secretly contracted with the agency to write a manual for Cold War spies on trickery and deception.
These days, the officers said, creative skills are more valuable than ever in such a technologically complex world.
“You’re only limited by your own imagination — don’t self-censor your ideas,” said Janelle, a CIA public affairs officer, granted the ability to speak under her first name at the request of the agency. “We’re always looking for partners.”
An elusive history
David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst and author of “Damascus Station” and other spy thrillers, offered several theories on why the agency might be interested in fostering a robust relationship with Hollywood, calling it “a two-way street.”
“There definitely have been operational applications for espionage,” McCloskey said. “It’s probably the exception to the rule, but when it happens, it’s compelling.”
It’s easy to see why CIA leaders would be interested in Hollywood, he said, in part to shape impressions of the agency. “But their bread and butter business is receiving people to give secrets,” he continued, “and part of that is getting close to people in power.”
“The closer you are to Hollywood,” McCloskey added, “that’s a really interesting ‘in’ to having a lot of interesting conversations.”
The CIA’s mission to rescue six American diplomats out of Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, the subject of the film “Argo,” featured a detailed ruse centered around a fabricated movie project.
(CIA Museum)
Some of the CIA’s most iconic missions — at least the declassified ones — document the agency’s rich history with Hollywood, including Canadian Caper, when CIA operatives disguised themselves as a film crew to rescue six American diplomats in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, an operation moviegoers will recognize as the plot of “Argo.”
“‘Argo’ was almost too far-fetched to even believe,” said Brent, an in-house historian at CIA headquarters. “It’s almost more Hollywood than Hollywood.”
Canadian Caper was both inspired by Hollywood and relied on Hollywood talent. Agent Tony Mendez had been a graphic artist before joining the agency and helping craft the mission.
Another key player was John Chambers, the makeup artist who gave the world Spock’s ears on “Star Trek” and won an honorary Oscar for his trailblazing simian work on “Planet of the Apes.” He was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit for his work on the covert rescue effort.
The Los Angeles Times broke the story in February 1975 that business tycoon Howard Hughes had lent his ship, the Glomar Explorer, as cover for a CIA operation.
(CIA Museum)
Just a few years before, Howard Hughes, then one of the world’s richest men and a tycoon in media, film and aerospace, agreed to work with the CIA to provide cover for an effort by the agency to lift a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine off the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
Deploying Hughes’ Glomar Explorer under the guise of mineral extraction, the CIA was able to salvage most of the sub before The Times broke a story blowing its cover — “the story that sunk our efforts,” in CIA parlance.
And another mission was made possible thanks to a device invented by a professional photographer — a gadget that later became the inspiration of an over-the-top scene in the blockbuster Batman film “The Dark Knight.”
In Project Coldfeet, CIA agents gathering intelligence on a Soviet station erected on a precariously drifting sheet of ice in the Arctic needed a reliable extraction plan. But how does one pick up an agent without landing a plane on the ice?
The answer was the “skyhook”: Balloons lifted a tether attached to a harness worn by an agent high into the sky. A CIA plane snagged the tether and carried the agent off to safety.
In “The Dark Knight,” Batman makes a dramatic escape deploying the same kind of balloon-harness contraption.
‘The superhero spy’
CIA leadership often says that acceptance into the agency is harder than getting into Harvard and Yale combined. Yet the agency still has challenges recruiting the type of talent it is looking for — either in reaching those with unconventional skills, or in convincing them that they should leave secure, comparatively well-paid, comfortable jobs for a secretive life of public service.
It is no easy task managing work at the agency, especially with family, CIA officials acknowledged. Deciding if and when to share one’s true identity with their children is a regular struggle. But Janelle said the CIA tells potential recruits there is a middle ground that doesn’t require them to entirely abandon their existing lives.
A professional photographer working with the CIA invented what became known as the “skyhook,’ a surface-to-air recovery system used by the spy agency in an Arctic mission and later featured in the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.”
(CIA Museum)
“People don’t have to leave their companies to help their country and to work with CIA,” Janelle said. “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 want to portray the agency or spies as accurately as possible.
“Some producers and directors reach out and they do care about accuracy,” Janelle said, “but they ultimately pick and choose what’s going to work for the film or show.”
CIA analysts have also been known to leave the agency for opportunities in the entertainment industry, writing books and scripts drawing from their experiences — so long as they don’t track too closely with those experiences.
Joe Weisberg, the writer and producer behind the television series “The Americans,” and McCloskey, who is working on a fifth novel focused on U.S. and British intelligence, were both part of the agency before launching their writing careers. And as CIA alumni, they had to submit their works for review.
“There’s a whole publication and classification-review process,” Brent said.
That process can be a bit of a slog, McCloskey said: “They quite literally redact in black ink.”
But it is far more difficult for nonfiction writers than novelists.
“There could be bits of tradecraft, or alluding to assets, or people at the agency, which are clear no’s,” McCloskey said. “But with novels, it’s not that hard to write them in a way to get them through the review board.”
Try as they may, studios often repeat the same falsehoods about the CIA, no matter how often they are corrected. Officers and agents aren’t the same thing, for one. And as disappointing as it may be for lovers of spy thrillers, the majority of officers are not licensed or trained to carry weapons.
“One thing Hollywood often gets wrong is the idea that it’s one officer doing everything, when it’s really a team sport here,” Janelle said.
Jessica Chastain, center, plays a member of the elite team of spies and military operatives who secretly devoted themselves to finding Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the Columbia Pictures 2012 film “Zero Dark Thirty.”
(Jonathan Olley / Sony Pictures)
“Zero Dark Thirty,” an Oscar-winning film released in 2012 about the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was widely acclaimed but criticized by some within the intelligence community over the credit it lends a single, fictional CIA analyst for tracking him down.
McCloskey sympathizes with the writer’s dilemma.
“I can’t have 35 people on a team. From a storytelling standpoint, it just doesn’t work,” he said, acknowledging that little in the field of espionage is accurately captured on screen, even though there are plenty of former spies available to work as consultants.
“There’s no lack of sources to get it right,” he said. “It’s that the superhero spy — the Jack Ryans and Jason Bournes — are pretty much the Hollywood representation of espionage.”
However inaccurately glorified and dramatized, the agency hopes that Hollywood’s work can keep the revolving door moving, inspiring atypical talent to join its ranks.
“We have architects, carpenters, people who worked in logistics,” Brent said. “People might not realize the range of skill sets here at CIA.”
And as Canadian Caper showed, sometimes spycraft requires stagecraft. It’s possible that what’s needed most to complete the next mission won’t be oceanography or data mining, but costume design. Or maybe another ballerina.
