Movie Quote of the Day (‘The In-Laws,’ With an Intro to a Nutty New Relative)

Dr. Sheldon Kornpett [played by Alan Arkin]: “You were involved in the Bay of Pigs?”

Vince Ricardo [played by Peter Falk]: “Involved? That was my idea.”—The In-Laws (1979), screenplay by Andrew Bergman, directed by Arthur Hiller

Quote of the Day (William F. Buckley, on a Past CIA Operation)

“A dozen years ago someone remarked that the weekend’s attempted assassination of Sukarno had all the earmarks of a CIA operation: Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.”— Political commentator, editor, and conservative public intellectual William F. Buckley (1925-2008), “On the Right,” Danville Register (Va.), Dec. 23, 1972

Well, this weekend’s removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was more successful than that failed (and officially denied) hit on the Cold War Indonesian President. The story has it that the Central Intelligence Agency had been tracking Maduro’s activities since August.

But I doubt that we will find out soon whether the CIA under current head John Ratcliffe made any mistakes in this or any other activities since the beginning of Trump 2. In a larger sense, questions are already rising about even the wisdom of such covert operations as this one.

A warning to this effect was raised by none other than current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Within 24 hours of President Trump’s announcement of Maduro’s removal, people with memories longer than the 24-hour-news cycle were circulating Gabbard’s 2019 warning about such an operation:

“Venezuela poses no threat to the United States,” Gabbard, then a Democrat, said in a video. “Congress has not authorized the United States to go to war in Venezuela, and there’s no justification for our country to violate the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”

This Day in CIA History (Frank Wisner, Former Ops Head, Kills Self)

Oct. 29, 1965— Frank Wisner, a workaholic former operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency who directed multiple controversial covert activities in the early era of the Cold War, committed suicide at age 56 on the family farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The death was the third in two decades of important figures who had shocked Washington by taking their own lives. In 1949, after being asked to resign as Defense Secretary by President Harry Truman, James Forrestal (whom I profiled in this prior post) had leaped from a window while under psychiatric care in Walter Reed Hospital. Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, killed himself with a shotgun in 1963.

All three men suffered from severe depression, with Wisner and Graham now formally diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and Forrestal exhibiting behavior that has led to more recent diagnoses of delusional disorder or schizophrenia. 

The stress of being in a position of significant responsibility—and, sometimes, not measuring up to it—can result in feelings of worthlessness that lead to self-destructive behavior. Though, unlike Forrestal or Graham, he was little known to the general public, Wisner, by virtue of his leadership in the nuclear age, was as important a figure as either.

Mental illness was not the only tie among these three men. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence organization to which Wisner had belonged, was disbanded, Forrestal supported his lobbying effort for a replacement agency. Moreover, when Wisner, as head of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) authorized Operation Mockingbird in an alleged attempt to influence American and foreign media, he selected Graham to run the project.

These contacts with Forrestal and Graham were only a couple of examples of how Wisner organized a network of mentors, friends, and proteges to further his intelligence activities.

I first became aware of these “global salvationists” intent on countering international Communist influence in Burton Hersh’s 1992 account, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, which examined him in relation to Eisenhower cold warriors John Foster Dulles and younger brother Allen; legendary OSS chief ``Wild Bill'' Donovan; New Deal diplomat William C. Bullitt; and Carmel Offie, the dandyish assistant to Bullitt and Wisner.

Later, in the 1990s, Evan Thomas, in The Very Best Men, changed the focus to how Wisner interacted with colleagues Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald in the CIA's formative period up to the Vietnam War.

These and other government officials, politicians, and journalists formed part of an elite “Georgetown social set” that, according to Thomas, “shared the same social background, the same ideals, and the same confidence in America’s role in the world.” Perhaps none embodied its aggressiveness and risk-taking quite like Wisner.

The key event in his career occurred towards the end of World War II, when, while stationed in Bucharest in the fall of 1944, he warned his OSS superiors that the Soviets were taking over Romania. 

Haunted by his failure to prevent this early maneuver in the campaign to pull Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence, Wisner was determined to combat the regime’s infiltration at every turn, there and elsewhere around the world, a far-flung set of espionage and psychological warfare operations that became known as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.”

With little to no American experience with spycraft before WWII, Presidents of both parties had no record for assessing what worked and what wouldn’t. Two of the more audacious CIA activities sanctioned by Wisner—coups against elected leaders orchestrated in Iran and Guatemala—were initially deemed successful in that they toppled regimes deemed friendly to the Soviets.

Within a quarter century, however, policymakers were grappling with the consequences of the coups: mistrust about American motives throughout Latin America, and in Iran, a revolution that put in power the Ayatollah Khomeini’s hostile theocratic regime.

In Eastern Europe, Wisner was willing to accept ex-Nazis if they would help strike back against the USSR. CIA backing of dissidents within the Eastern bloc could not dislodge the Soviets, however, and the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution only fed Wisner’s frustration and guilt over encouraging it with propaganda without US military backing.

In December 1956, Wisner suffered a nervous breakdown that several friends attributed to the failed uprising. Psychoanalysis and electroconvulsive treatment were not enough to alleviate his condition.

With access to Wisner’s medical records provided by his children, Douglas Waller contends in the biography The Determined Spy that the spymaster’s mental illness predated any malaise he may have felt about being transferred from Langley to a less consequential London posting. That’s surely true, but the ambitious Wisner’s sense that he was being placed on the shelf surely didn’t help his frame of mind.

Wisner retired in 1962 from the agency to which he had brought his unflagging energy and willingness to push against legal and ethical norms to bring down the Soviets. A lucrative consulting business over the next three years did little to assuage his growing anguish, until he borrowed a shotgun from one of his sons and killed himself.

Flashback, September 1975: Redford Paranoid Thriller ‘Three Days of the Condor’ Opens

Three months after the Rockefeller Commission released its report documenting abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Three Days of the Condor was released 50 years ago this week, further heightening audiences’ fears about a secret government agency run amok.

The movie, which starred Robert Redford, brought in $27 million in box-office revenues on a budget of $20 million, cementing the actor’s status as the premier leading man of the mid-1970s after it had been temporarily disrupted by the underperforming The Great Gatsby.

The film was an adaptation of the James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor. Though there were numerous changes from page to screen (itemized in Allan MacInnis’s 2011 post from the “Alienated in Vancouver” blog), the most significant might have been the time compression indicated by the title.

Peter Yates, who worked with Redford three years before on The Hot Rock, was originally set to direct. But he was replaced by Sydney Pollack, who had collaborated with the star on The Way We Were and would make a total of seven films with him.

Pollack’s “great gift,” Redford said in a Time Magazine interview after his friend’s death in 2008, was “to cover what could have been just sort of crass commercial filmmaking with a whole artistic [approach] that was more abstracted and was more hip and was more offbeat.”

In Pollack’s filmography, the movie resembling this the most might be The Pelican Brief, another slick thriller featuring the biggest box-office star of the time (Tom Cruise) and the requisite love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

Redford’s character, Joe Turner, goes out to pick up lunch for his colleagues at the fictitious American Literary Historical Society (a CIA cover), only to discover upon his return that all his coworkers have been slaughtered. Following a planned attempt to “come in from the cold” that nearly ends with his own assassination, he goes on the run to save his life and ferret out the truth

Reflecting in some manner the film’s plot, the atmosphere on the set was “tense,” according to this recollection by photographer Terry O’Neill, “mainly because the film was very topical, New York City was a bleak place in 1974, the President [Nixon] had just resigned, and the former head of the CIA [Richard Helms] was supposedly on set talking to Robert Redford.” 

That turned out to be the case, as the actor was, with as little fanfare as possible, eliciting from Helms inside tips about his former agency.

Redford’s Turner is supposed to be bookish and slightly naïve as he pores over books in his unsecured office.

But Redford being Redford, he doesn’t look the slightest bit nerdy, an impression enhanced by his stylishly casual apparel: flared denim, a gold and gray wool tie, and a gray tweed herringbone jacket that fostered such a fashion trend that “all menswear guys have tried to copy this jacket,” said French designer Nicolas Gabard, according to Charles Teasdale’s retrospective on the film this month in The Financial Times.

I guess the filmmakers needed something to make it plausible that Faye Dunaway’s Kathy would fall for this stranger who abducts her in his frantic attempt to stay alive—not normal behavior for most women in similar circumstances.

But for all that, the plot was taut and the conspiracy details not especially far-fetched—especially so for 1970s audiences who were learning daily, through the evening news, to distrust whatever the government was telling them. 

Though Dunaway did not experience with Redford or Pollack the animosity she had encountered with Roman Polanski on Chinatown, her role was also hardly as complex or extensive as in that classic neo-noir. Nor was she able to rehearse or emotionally bond much with Redford, who was already busy with pre-production on All the President’s Men.

That adaptation of the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein bestseller about how they broke the Watergate story was a real-life version of the “paranoid” or “conspiracy” thriller genre that became so prominent in the Seventies.

Such movies as The Parallax View, The Conversation, Klute, and Winter Kills marked a sharp turn away from nail-biters from a few decades before, when—at least on film—the U.S. government protected its citizens from foreign agents infiltrating the U.S. (Additionally, two Godfather movies and Chinatown evinced cynicism about Law and Order, American style.)

Now, with revelations of Presidential deceit about Watergate and Vietnam—not to mention the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.—the American government and private companies with access to high-tech equipment and secrets were being depicted as nefarious.

Unlike wartime and later “conspiracy” movies, Three Days of the Condor was neither blithely optimistic nor pessimistic. Its “open” ending about Turner’s fate was, however, deeply disquieting—in effect, leaving it up to the public to defend against attacks on the liberty of institutions as much as on individuals, from whatever quarter.

Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, on the CIA and Cooking)

“An unfortunate truth of espionage is that the public only hears about the errors of the CIA; their success stories are never revealed. The opposite is the case for cooking—culinary flops are forgotten while the great meals are remembered long after. The smart cook strives for the best of both worlds—in the field and the kitchen—behaving as a clandestine operative of cuisine. Here are the essential rules for cooks and spies: Discard your failures swiftly. Learn from mistakes. Identify saboteurs such as a clumsy prep-cook or a spouse who hides the salt. Take credit for others’ work and blame your mistakes on underlings. Most importantly: keep your top recipes secret.”  —Chris Offutt, “CIA Cake and Jeff Davis Pie,” Oxford American, Fall 2014

Quote of the Day (Martin Short, on What Musicals and the CIA Have in Common)

"A musical is only as good as its director. The same can also be said for the CIA."—Comedian Martin Short at the Tony Awards, June 6, 2004