Army's Hallucinogenic Weapons Unveiled, by Sharon Weinberger (Wired.com):

Advocates of using chemical agents in nonlethal warfare are increasing, making now a good time to start reviewing the historical record. A recently published book on the Army's infamous "Edgewood Experiments" involving hallucinogenic agents like LSD may help shed more light on the debate. The infamous CIA work, MK ULTRA, is often considered synonymous with all government LSD experimentation. But the historical record is far more complex.

This may be the first and last time in my life that I call a self-published book a "must read," but psychiatrist James Ketchum's Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten is an usual case. As Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News has already pointed out, this book "is a candid, not entirely flattering, sometimes morbidly amusing account of a little-documented aspect of Army research."

Evan Thomas could give DeNiro some pointers on making a good espionage film

I saw The Good Shepherd over the holiday weekend. Directed by Robert DeNiro, starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, it purports to be "the untold story of the birth of the CIA." Regretfully, it fails to deliver.

The plot is laid out across some notable events in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency -- it's origins in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) struggling to roll back the Soviet tide in World War II, in anticipation of Stalin's bid for power, it's later operations in Central America and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, tied together from the perspective of a fictional character named Edwin Wilson (an amalgam of James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell). Failing to heed the advice of his mentor ("Get out while you still can, while you still have a soul"), Wilson's gradual moral corruption in the in the clandestine world of espionage and U.S. foreign policy is a window into the soul of our nation. "The Godfather Part II set in Langley, Virginia" as one reviewer put it.

While I am generally unapposed to the use of fictional characters when making a historical film, I wonder if, in this particular case, DeNiro couldn't have done better to forego the soap-opera and emphasize the history -- and even confine his gaze on a small part of that history for that matter. Covering three decades of U.S. covert operations and espionage would have been better accomplished in the form of a documentary series on PBS television. As a sprawling two hour and 46 minute Hollywood epic, one gets the sense that the scriptwriter (Eric Roch - Munich 2005) bit off a little more than he could chew. As Wesley Morris notes:

Indeed, "The Good Shepherd" is chock full of everything -- assassinations, betrayal, comeuppance, marital discord, the rise of Castro, an intense torture sequence, defenestration, John Turturro as a sociopath agent, De Niro "Strangelove"-ing it up in that wheelchair, the brief return of Joe Pesci as an informant, and a manmade plague of locusts.

But that also leaves it a 2 1/2-hour farrago: a character study, a soap opera, a psychological profile, and a docudrama full of Roth's obvious affinity for cool spy jargon ("The doctor has no more patients," says Hurt to Damon about a CIA-backed coup in Cuba).

In short, the film fails in its effort to be "all things to all people". Buried within are the makings of what would have been a truly great "cloak and dagger" film (Wilson's sparring with his KGB nemesis Ulysses), or even a decent chronicle of U.S. covert operations, but in the end, I found myself more annoyed than anything else -- suffering through the dreary soap-opera of the protagonist's life and anxiously awaiting the occasional snatches of historical reference that filtered through. And the fact that the main characters in the the film are works of fiction, their relation to the major players in this period of covert history, was for me the greatest aggravation of all. To concur with reviewer William Arnold (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

[DeNiro] can't begin to tie the movie's sprawling events into a satisfying narrative package. It seems not only aimless, but redundant, choppy and unnecessarily confusing. . . . his characterizations are clumsy, and his members of the Power Elite always seem less real people than stick figures in a propaganda movie.

DeNiro's interpretation of the CIA's history is tainted with a strong dose of liberal spin which I imagine will appeal to the Howard Zinn school of history. If readers desire something a little more substantial, they would be better served putting their $10 towards purchasing Evan Thomas' engrossing The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA Simon & Schuster (October 17, 2006: 2nd Edition), which asks the same moral questions and covers much of the same historical ground as The Good Shepherd.

Whereas DeNiro attempts to blend history and Hollywood fiction, a drama spanning three decades interspersed with allusions to historical events, Thomas covers the actual lives of four pioneers of the CIA: Frank Wisner, Richard Bissel, Tracy Barnes and Desmond Fitzgerald: principled men with strong convictions and laudable goals (stemming the Communist tide), yet deeply flawed in its execution. Benefiting from extensive interviews, Thomas' book portrays the CIA "as it saw itself". One can appreciated the fact that Thomas is both respectful of the general intent of these figures (never dismissing or minimizing the very real concern over the Communist threat), and yet approaching his subject with a critical eye towards the moral quandaries of their profession.

As Thomas concludes: "In the end, they were too idealistic and too honorable, and were unsuited for the dark and duplicitious life of spying. Their hubris and naivete led them astray, producing both sensational coups and spectacular blunders").

Related Links

• Review: "The Good Shepherd" by Harry Forbes. Catholic News Service Dec. 22, 2006.
• The "Traditionalist" Catholic blog TradReviews has seen The Good Shepherd as well. Apparently the blogger appreciated the character development much more than I. Perhaps if I didn't see the film with the expection of a history lesson I would have had a better appreciation for the drama.
• Readers interested in this subject may benefit from J. Ransom Clark's The Literature of Intelligence: A Bibliography of Materials. You can find reviews of the aformentioned book by Thomas here.
• "The Need for Integrity: Thoughts Provoked by The Very Best Men, by Michael Thompson. A "moment of reflection" from the CIA periodical Studies in Intelligence Vol. 39, Number 5, 1996:

  [Thomas'] empathy for his subjects--even though an air of amused condescension filters through to an audience when he speaks of his book--points up issues that would otherwise be obscure, as does his vivid evocation of a period when, contrary to the underlying realities of American politics (as we have since learned, sometimes painfully), a dominant Executive, a compliant Congress, a complicit press, a largely unquestioning public, and almost unlimited funds allowed the DDP to function virtually without oversight or accountability.

• "Expert's Picks: Books on Espionage, Selected by Evan Thomas" Washington Post, 31 Jan. 1999

Abbie Hoffman - Unpublished Interview

In 1986, Kesher Talk contributor Van Wallach interviewed 60s radical Abbie Hoffman for a New York publication. Based on five hours of conversation, the edited transcript never got published. Hoffman died, at his own hand, in 1989. Now, thanks to the magic of blogging, Hoffman's wit and energy live again -- see "Conversations with a Ghost: The Abbie Hoffman Interview".

The Founding Fakers

In "The Founding Fakers" (The New Republic 8/11/03), Franklin Foer tackles what I consider a glaring and persistent flaw in the conduct of recent Republican administrations: namely, the willingness of some within the GOP to cloak some morally repugnant characters who would otherwise fall into the category of criminals or terrorists in the mantle of democracy when it is politically expedient to do so -- i.e., "the foreign opposition leader romanticized beyond reason."

Liberals did this with Stalin and Fidel Castro; Reagan with the Nicaraguan Contras (or as he called them, "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers"); the Bush (senior) administration with the Afghan mujahedin . . . and now, says Foer, the spotlight may be turning towards militant groups in Iran such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a militant organization based in Iraq which, although currently classified as a terrorist organization, may be useful should the U.S. extend its "war on terrorism" into Iran.

Extolling the virtues of cults like the Iranian mujahedin doesn't simply cheapen rhetoric about liberal democracy, it cheapens conservatism itself. Ever since Edmund Burke, conservatives have made skepticism about revolutions and revolutionaries a central tenet of their politics. As Irving Kristol rephrased the classic complaint in a 1972 essay, "to think we have it in our power to change people so as to make the human estate wonderfully better than it is, remarkably different from what it is, and in very short order, is to assume that this generation of Americans can do what no other generation in all of human history could accomplish." This rigid traditionalism has been sometimes deployed to justify turning away from injustice. But it was also a source of humaneness, a bulwark against rash plans for social upheaval, a vital warning about the violent excesses of ideological fervor, a reminder that revolutions often end in tears. In this new era, with grand plans for remaking the map and new heroes being born, we could stand to be reminded of these old dictates, which add a touch of realism to right-wing idealism and offer a salutary dose of conservatism for conservatives.

Whether the MEK will occupy the same pedestal as the Contras remains to be seen, but I do think Foer has a good point: it's one of those blatant utiliatarian political decisions that can only turn around and hurt us in the end.