How the CIA infiltrated Hollywood
Since the CIA was formed in 1947, they’ve been up to more meddling than Scooby-Doo and the gang. However, unlike that dishevelled bunch of pot-smoking ghostbusters, Harry S. Truman’s society-shaping brainchild has welcomed more well-manicured arseholes than the cumulative total of Hugh Heffner’s pool parties. While the agency has been blighted by follies in the past – like excessively funding a fruitless remote viewing (psychic reconnaissance) programme – their most successful venture has been ushering pop culture towards their own commanding ideal. Hollywood had happily gone along for the ride.
Take, for instance, that confusing modern art you see hung on a gallery wall. You muse at the squiggles and blots called something like but not necessarily ‘Finding God in a Potato’ and you wonder whether you simply don’t get it because you’ve been cursed with a dull brain or dishwater intellect. That reaction is textbook CIA manipulation—at the dawn of the Cold War, they looked to make culture a subversive weapon.
This much is proven: The Congress for Cultural Freedom was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. This group promoted American ideals. It promoted modern artists like Jackson Pollock as part of those ideals. This group was also a funded offshoot of the CIA. Thus, it has been argued that the CIA purposefully elevated modern art both in terms of value and acclaim as a way to diminish socialist realism. In other words, those daft Commies are still doling out drab pictures of bushes for pennies, whereas Pollock is quite literally extolling the freedom of the human soul on canvas and his bright new world deserves to be handsomely rewarded.
This creates a paradox in the life and work of Pollock forevermore. As Kurt Vonnegut once put it in his novel Bluebeard: “Modern art is a conspiracy between shysters and the rich to make poor people feel stupid!” In other words, ‘let say that there is life and death contained in all these scribbles and those who don’t see it have to either go along with it or squark from their lowly perch.
However, the explosion of pop culture created somewhat of a problem for The Congress for Cultural Freedom because those folks on the lowly perch were now quite happy to dismiss the elevated art world as something that wasn’t for them and relish in the advancing world of cinema. Thus, with the modern art crowd already satiated with Jack the Dripper and Mark Rothko and the colourful cohorts, the CIA set their sights on movies. This was a trickier operation altogether—it’s one thing convincing a clutch of enthusiasts that a new artist’s wild style really is worth taking notice of, it’s a whole new ball game trying to reshape an established industry from the inside.
A year after the CIA was formed, the Pentagon established the position of an entertainment liaison officer. The CIA already had similar departments in operation. Since 1947, they have assisted and funded the production of 60 film and television shows. However, to begin with, its initial aim was to hide its existence from entertainment. It wanted to be covert or at least mythical and urged all onscreen depictions to be removed from screenplays.
Their cover was blown by Alfred Hitchcock in 1959 when North by Northwest displayed a brief glimpse at the now ubiquitous crest. While they were slowly being etched out into public glare before this, it represented the moment that the CIA’s relationship with Hollywood suddenly changed.
During the era when they were covert, things had gone swimmingly. The organisation was able to pull strings and any errors were mere mishaps of fate with nobody to blame. Therefore, production companies were happy to break bread with this benevolent secret force. As long as the CIA didn’t get mentioned by name, then they were happy to inform filmmakers about entertaining espionage stories. If the resultant screenplays portrayed American organisations in a favourable light (which they usually did off the back of World War II) then they may have even received funding.
However, with exposure came blame. The cloak of anonymity that Hitchcock had lifted, was torn away. Suddenly, the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, The Gary Powers spy plane and other farcical operations hit the headlines and the inflated sense of confidence that the CIA had in the 1950s was misplaced as the American public turned on the organisation—movies followed suit.
Until the late 1950s, most depictions of American intelligence had been grand tales of brave heroics and masterful cunning. These features assured the public that they were in safe hands. Those hands belonged to smartly dressed all-American white men, you will never see these clean fingers, but you ought to know that they can outbox and outfox anybody. This changed when the hands were revealed, and they were grubby, greedy and fumbling. Thus, you had parodies like The Man from U.N.C.L.E in the 1960s and darker conspiracies like Scorpio in the ‘70s.
Therefore, the CIA went from a position of chummy collaboration with Hollywood, crafting subversive pictures that portrayed America to be almighty in a similar fashion to emerging modern art to being castigated and spurned. During these times, tactics had to turn dirty. You see, Hollywood was a band of outsiders who weren’t easy to cajole.
An emblem of the counterculture battle that followed comes from a planned Marlon Brando picture about the US illegally selling arms to Iran. The CIA were involved in this scandal and, naturally, they didn’t want it to be exposed in a film. So, they decided to set up a production house and they purchased the rights to the picture, outbidding Brando to simply cast the script onto the ash heap.
Once these dirty tactics were established, a sort of stronghold was established which has hitherto been underreported. It wasn’t until recently that freedom of information revealed just how many pictures sport the CIA’s fingerprints. They were heavily involved in Zero Dark Thirty attempting to overstate the threat posed by terror in the wake of the Osama bin Laden assassination in order to drum up support. But in less obvious instances, they also meddled with Meet the Parents, removing torture manuals from Robert De Niro’s old intelligence loot.
However, because much of this has been buried for so long and often the scripts were simply looked over and altered by shadowy figures in an unofficial capacity, it is hard to tell just how much they have helped to shape Hollywood, and, therefore, culture as we know it.
