Introduction

The Withholding of Available Data from the Public The largest library archive about the DOD’s influence on entertainment is held at Georgetown University and curated by Lawrence Suid. The authors and several colleagues of different ages, genders, and levels of academic experience requested access to these files. Suid rejected each request. In his clearest refusal to share material, Suid explained that, ‘I trust you will understand the difficulty I would have in opening my files while I am still using them’,1 though he has not generated any new analysis since 2005. In 2004, Robb highlighted some egregious examples of the DOD exerting political influence over Hollywood scripts. Despite his extensive discussion of the archived documentation, Suid’s books have made no direct reference to the politically-motivated changes on numerous films, including: Clear and Present Danger (e.g. removal of racist language by the President); Tomorrow Never Dies (e.g. removal of a joke about the US losing the Vietnam War); Contact (e.g. changing a scene that makes the military appear paranoid); Thirteen Days (e.g. an attempt to convince the producers that the Joint Chiefs had behaved responsibly during the Cuban Missile Crisis); Windtalkers (e.g. a scene depicting a historically accurate Marine war crime was removed) – as discussed below – as well as Tears of the Sun (the military prevented the depiction of ‘nasty conspiracies’); The Green Berets (e.g. references to the illegal US bombing of Laos were removed); Rules of Engagement (e.g. the lead character is ‘toned down’); Black Hawk Down (e.g. a scene depicting the military machine gunning wild boar is removed); and Goldeneye (the nationality of a duped American Admiral is changed), as discussed in Alford and Secker’s 2017 book. Although Suid gives good coverage of film releases that have been denied cooperation, he chooses not to comment whatsoever on productions that were terminated due to the DOD’s refusal to cooperate, including Countermeasures, Top Gun II, and Fields of Fire. Direct approaches to the DOD’s ELO have also proven to be of dubious utility. Strub claimed ‘I stopped keeping paper records long ago. I don’t maintain electronic ones, either’ and that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request could only disclose, at best, a ‘brief entry in an incomplete data base’. He suggested we contact Suid, which only serves to highlight how the presence of Suid has helped insulate the DOD from the FOIA (Strub, 2014). Actually, although the ‘incomplete data base’ is mostly lacking information about the degree of political influence and script changes brought to bear by the DOD, it does contain some relevant new data and it helped clarify the scale of DOD support to entertainment products. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of the new data concerns what the military provided to the filmmakers in terms of access to people, locations and vehicles and does not record what the Pentagon asked for in return. Similarly, our request to the US Navy for copies of script notes on recently-supported productions resulted, after well over a year’s delay, in a response saying that they do not keep copies of script notes (2017). We appealed and provided them with a copy of their own notes on Lone Survivor, released to another requester, but no further information has so far been forthcoming. The available CIA records regarding their involvement in and influence on entertainment products are even more scant. While hundreds of pages of emails and memos regarding Zero Dark Thirty were released in response to a FOIA lawsuit, the equivalent records regarding other CIA-supported productions have never been released. Secker and others have requested files on Argo and Top Chef – which unlike Zero Dark Thirty were even granted permission to film at CIA headquarters – but the CIA’s responses say they cannot find even a single document.2 The same problem applies to the Chase Brandon era (1996–2006) in the CIA’s liaison office. According to his successor, Paul Barry, when Brandon left the Agency in late 2006 he took all his papers with him, and so ‘nothing remains from the past’ (quoted in Jenkins, 2009). Tricia Jenkins’ work suggests two alternative reactions to this hole in the CIA’s records: (1) that it does not make much difference because, as producer Michael Beckner put it, ‘everything he did with the CIA was done on a handshake and a phone call’ (Jenkins, 2016: 69) and so Brandon’s paper-trail was probably minimal anyway; and (2) that it might matter enormously because extensive memos show that Chase Brandon was responsible for essentially ghost-writing the film The Recruit and so, presumably, he used this written method for a considerable body of material. The 2016 edition of Jenkins’ book The CIA in Hollywood cites documents from an unspecified court case proving how: [Brandon’s] role far exceeded the one that even an aggressive studio executive or producer would play in the development of the film … one can’t help but wonder why [writer Roger] Towne and [producer Jeff] Apple allowed Brandon to have so much creative control over the original script unless it was always understood to be a CIA written film disguised as an independent production. (p. 87) Jenkins concludes that ‘it is clear that Brandon was far more involved in some films’ actual development than anyone outside of the industry previously imagined’ (p. 87). Overall, then, institutional secrecy makes it impossible to assess the true scale and nature of the political influence wielded on Hollywood by these two institutions, especially the CIA. We only know that in some well-documented instances it is fundamental to the politics of these entertainment products (we discuss some examples below). The CIA seems to have taken its popular refrains like ‘the secret of our success is the secret of our success’ and applied them to its work on entertainment productions. In the wake of Robb’s criticism, the DOD further limited public access to source materials that reveal script changes by replacing the twentieth century style of paper trail with more circumspect and anodyne diary-style activities reports. This lack of transparency could presumably be quickly reversed, were it not for a mindset that does not want the public to know.

The Scale of the Work: The Number of Around 575 DOD-Assisted Films in Suid’s Books is Already Well Over a Decade Out-of-Date Our figure of 697 is higher than even Suid has documented, though in the vast majority of these cases we have nothing more than a list from the DOD or an IMDB credit to say that anything occurred. The files we have received through the FOI combined with other sources indicate that the DOD supported 814 films between 1911 and 2017, which is over 200 more than Suid’s latest published list from 2005. We are certainly not saying that Suid compiled a bad list, especially since we know first-hand how hard it is to cover every production, but he has at least missed some from his era. Moreover, he never lists the figures himself – we have to count and it’s not entirely clear from his rubric which products were subject to script revisions. Nor does he systematically display DOD cooperation with TV at all. If we include the 1,133 documented TV titles in our total count, the number leaps to 1,947 productions. If we are to count the individual episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland and NCIS, alongside the influence of other major national security organizations like the FBI, CIA and White House, then the figure would be in the thousands. While the DOD is by far the most active, the CIA takes the same approach with considerable success and has affected dozens of projects. It is time to recognize the roles of both the CIA and DOD in screen entertainment as being extensive, covert, pro-active and highly politicized.

The Available Historical Archives and Histories Say Virtually Nothing about the DOD and CIA’s Involvement with Other Screen Entertainment, Namely Television and Video Gaming Despite Suid’s encyclopedic list of movies, comparable histories have never been produced on the work of the DOD in the television or computer games industry. While most histories and discussion of the ELOs focus on their overt and obvious role in war films and disaster movies, the Army’s reports mention assistance granted not just to movies but to an enormous range of series including chat shows, sports coverage, military-themed reality shows, other reality TV, competitive reality series, cooking-themed reality TV, game shows, action adventure series, dramas, children’s programming, awards shows, military and non-military documentaries, and independent films including foreign productions from Belgium, Japan, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland and Sweden.3

The CIA’s Involvement in a Significant Number of Entertainment Products Was either Not Known or Not Discussed Publicly in Any Context Until 2014 Jenkins used credit listings and occasional comments by CIA officers in the press to identify productions the CIA has assisted. These included Alias, JAG and 24, and the handful of films mentioned on relevant IMDB pages. In the years since, more information has become available showing that the CIA have been involved in a considerably larger number of films and TV shows. In 2014, Brandon updated his personal website to include the names of not just films and TV shows on which he worked but also of people he worked with in the entertainment industry. While his IMDB page lists only three films from his time as the ELO he also helped to produce comedies like Meet the Parents and its sequel Meet the Fockers and historical retellings of past CIA operations like Charlie Wilson’s War and The Good Shepherd. This combination of promoting the CIA through action and comedy and revising history through cinematic drama is similar to the way the DOD liaises with the entertainment industry. In total, while Brandon was running the CIA’s ELO, he worked on 12 major feature films, 11 TV shows or series, and had some kind of involvement in at least 10 other television productions as well as several books and unfinished film projects. Among his creative ‘partners’ Brandon listed producer Jeff Apple and screenwriter Roger Towne, both of whom worked on The Recruit, detailed elsewhere in this article. Brandon also listed producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, who is responsible for the DOD-supported Transformers franchise as well as the Salt and Red franchises. Salt credits a former CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle with providing consultancy on the project but director Phillip Noyce – who previously made Patriot Games with CIA assistance mentions on the DVD commentary that the whole creative team had a video conference with currently-serving CIA operations officers while they were writing the script. This can only have happened with official CIA approval. Red does not credit any consultants or technical advisors, but former CIA officer Robert Baer is featured on the DVD commentary talking about his role in helping to produce the film. On top of Brandon’s work, if we include former CIA agents providing production assistance, then the number goes up to over 20 major TV series and at least 29 films since 1996.4 It is reasonable to ask, given the institutionalized secretiveness, whether the number is even higher.

The DOD and CIA Do Not Always Admit to Supporting Screen Entertainment Products and They Do Not Always Provide Support Through Their Formal ELOs Both Strub and Brandon have denied working on productions to which they demonstrably did provide assistance. The world’s most financially successful film franchise the Marvel Cinematic Universe has enjoyed overt, admitted Pentagon assistance in several of its productions. Despite this, Strub claimed that the DOD withdrew cooperation from The Avengers because ‘We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization [S.H.I.E.L.D.] and our place in it’ (Ackerman, 2012). This didn’t stop National Guard soldiers and vehicles appearing in the film and Strub and the heads of the Army’s and Air Force’s ELOs John Clearwater and Francisco G. Hamm were all thanked in the credits. Strub, Hamm and Clearwater’s IMDB pages do not mention their involvement in The Avengers, and the DOD and the National Guard’s own lists released under the FOIA do not include The Avengers.5 Suid blithely mentions 13 films under ‘unacknowledged cooperation’, including the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies – which Strub outright denied to us had received DOD support. The updates to Chase Brandon’s personal website enable us to show that he was engaged in similar activity. Brandon denied granting technical assistance to The Bourne Identity, saying in one interview (Patterson, 2001) that it was ‘so awful that I tossed it in the burn bag after page 25’. However, he starred in a short ‘making of’ featurette on the Special Edition of the DVD for The Bourne Identity, where he expresses how much he enjoyed the film and praises its realism (DVD, 2002). In a later interview, Brandon said ‘we did a trailer on the DVD’ (Williams, 2009) but he also listed the film among his technical advisor credits when updating his site in 2014 – an indication that his involvement was greater than just assisting with a trailer. Brandon has given similarly ambiguous statements about his involvement in the TV show 24.6