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Movie Reviews
| The Good Shepherd. Dir. by Robert De Niro. Prod. by James G. Robinson, Jane Rosenthal, and Robert De Niro. Universal Pictures, 2006. 168 mins. (Universal Pictures, http://www.nbcuniversalstore.com/)
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| The Good Shepherd's publicity called it the "hidden history of the CIA," in the same way, I suppose, that the DaVinci Code (2006) is called a history of Christianity. The plot narrates a search by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) for the "stranger in our house" who leaked the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Soviets. Through a series of flashbacks we learn that the CIA, like its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), is run by blue-blooded members of the Yale University secret society Skull and Bones who seem to live out the lyrics of Yale's "Whiffenpoof Song"; the CIA's murderous misdeeds are the work of "gentlemen songsters off on a spree." In a scene perhaps intended to make their motives explicit, Wilson offers to quash a Mafia chief's deportation if he helps the CIA in Cuba. The gangster asks, "We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish have their homeland, the Jews their traditions.... What about you people, Mr. Carson [Edward Wilson's alias], what do you have?" Wilson replies, "The United States of America. The rest of you are just tourists." |
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The movie is no history of the CIA, but it adheres closely to the popular myth of the agency—a reflection of the lowly state to which the CIA's own misdeeds, the revelations of the Church Committee and investigative reporters such as Seymour Hersh, and a pervasive public cynicism have relegated the agency. |
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The Good Shepherd begins with a scene whose significance cannot be grasped until the end of the picture. On the day before the Bay of Pigs invasion, a young boy asks Edward Wilson for change for a dollar. Wilson takes the dollar to his office and gives it to his aide, played by John Turturro (modeled on James Jesus Angleton's longtime aide, Ray Rocca), who compares it to a list of serial numbers and tells Wilson, "Cardinal is interested." A few days later, after the failure of the invasion, a photograph of a couple in bed and an audiotape of their lovemaking arrive at Wilson's door, and the search for the mole begins. |
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Matt Damon's character is modeled on the agency's legendary mole hunter, Angleton, especially in the early OSS scenes, though during the Bay of Pigs episodes Wilson could be Richard Bissell, Frank Wisner, Bill Harvey, or Tracy Barnes, all famous CIA operatives and chiefs. As for the Skull and Bones angle, Angleton, Barnes, and Bissell did go to Yale, but they did not belong to Skull and Bones, while Wisner went to the University of Virginia and Harvey went to Indiana University. We have it on the CIA's authority (in the March 2007 issue of the CIA journal, Studies in Intelligence), that none of the characters alluded to in the film belonged to Bones. It is a matter of historical record that OSS founder William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan (played by Robert De Niro), a Bonesman in the movie, went to Columbia University, while Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, also Bonesmen in the film, went to Princeton University and Williams College, respectively. (Given the "Oh So Social" backgrounds of the OSS's staff, maybe the Skull and Bones device falls within the allowable bounds of poetic license.) |
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In their review of the film, the CIA historians also objected that Angleton did not "start to become unhinged" until a few years after the events of the film and that Frank Wisner was a solid sort, despite his mercurial temperament, and a "romantic at heart, like many of them," before his eventual nervous breakdown and suicide. Maybe the bizarre quirks of the characterizations were not so far off the mark, after all. One error the CIA review did not catch was De Niro's homily to Wilson about how the new CIA was going to be under strict civilian control because Adolf Hitler came to power by controlling the bureaucracy. The dictator that De Niro had in mind was, of course, Joseph Stalin, but in Hollywood, what's the difference? |
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