There was an actual Hollywood movie premiere here last week just like those of storied legend, complete with red carpet, floodlights, stretch limos, smiling stars, dishy blonds in tight dresses, flashing cameras and endless cheek-kissing and name-dropping.
What gave this event its singular cachet was that it was right here at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters.
Not a movie-set CIA headquarters, mind, but the real thing — the actual, vast, super-secret spook complex nestled (and then some) in the Northern Virginia woods behind all manner of barbed wire, tank traps, motion detectors, bulletproof sentry boxes, guard dog patrols and other security stuff we probably don’t want to know about. (I feared some of the heavy Hollywood name-dropping might set off a land mine, but the agency must have turned them off for the evening.)
This was in fact the very first Hollywood movie premiere ever held at the Langley complex, occasioned by an equally rare and improbable occurrence:
After more than 50 years of the CIA’s existence, during which it among other things managed to win the Cold War, Hollywood finally has made a movie that portrays the agency as it really is and the work of the nation’s intelligence officers as they actually perform it.
So declared Central Intelligence Director George Tenet amid all the glad-handing attendant upon the stretch-limo arrival of star Tom Berenger and his dishy blond wife, Trisha.
“We all grew up watching Efrem Zimbalist Jr. playing the FBI on TV,” said Tenet. “I think it’s great if the American people can see the kind of work we do here and learn something about the courageous people who do it. If some of the young people who see this movie decide they might want to come and work here, that’s great too.”
The film (actually a Showtime cable movie) is “In the Company of Spies,” to be telecast at 7 p.m. Sunday and starring Berenger as a retired spook called back to active duty to help “extract” (rescue) an agency operative who’s been snatched and is being tortured by the North Koreans.
The lovely and really talented Alice Krige (why is this remarkable woman not a major motion-picture star?) plays Berenger’s cool assistant (reminding me a little of one of the actual female CIA operatives who caught turncoat spy Aldrich Ames), and a remarkably understated (for once) Ron Silver plays the director of central intelligence.
Tenet has reason to be thrilled with this picture and to despise all its predecessors. Hollywood’s past screen treatment of the agency has ranked on a verisimilitude scale somewhere down there with “Snow White and the Three Stooges.”
Usually portrayed by the likes of Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) when he was a B-movie actor, CIA types in the movies long have been depicted as either mean-minded, cold-hearted, imperialist archfiends bent on world domination (i.e., bad guy Cliff Robertson vs. good guy Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”), a murderously conspiratorial rogue Praetorian Guard capable of presidential assassination (Oliver Stone’s “JFK”) or as uptight, bumbling, officious clods who couldn’t even devise a means of defoliating Fidel Castro’s beard.
“In the Company of Spies” portrays the agency folk as I’ve always known them to be — rather bright, well-educated and highly motivated types, tending remarkably to the drab and inconspicuous — and inordinately wedded to their jobs.
As in the real spook world, Berenger, Krige et al do most of their work not running around back alleys in trenchcoats with guns but in a CIA basement, surrounded by computer consoles and video monitors, where they analyze satellite surveillance images and various forms of audio intercepts.
There is one covert action operation in which an adversary is killed with a knife, but not a single bullet (or poison dart) is fired. There’s a behind-the-lines covert espionage operation as well, realistically carried out by an American agent who’s an unapologetic drunk — not exactly rare in spookery.
The premiere included a gala reception in the lobby of the CIA headquarters building, at which they played James Bond movie themes and had about one security guard for every guest.
The screening itself was held in the new CIA auditorium building, referred to as “the Bubble” and resembling a shield cover for a missile silo, before an audience of agency brass and worker bees. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was among the guests. Given the dangerous behavior of the stock market lately, he’d be a prime candidate for a CIA snatch job, if it actually did that stuff. But it doesn’t — and didn’t.
After the large movie screen rose (with an eerie hum) from the Bubble’s floor, and the film got under way, the audience proceeded to indicate with boos, cheers and laughter where the producers got things right, which was pretty much every place.
The U.S. senators in the film, don’t you know, were portrayed as shallow, self-serving boobs and the White House national security adviser as a weaselly, power-hungry, hypocritical, conniving, politically obsessed nincompoop.
As I say, the real thing.
