Spy vs. Lie

Being a fan of any movie in which Lamborghinis explode, I went to see “Mission: Impossible III” and came away in a deep, wistful funk. Wouldn’t it be nice to think the government’s intelligence apparatus

had moves like that--the tear-off rubber masks and voice-mimicking software, the eye-of-God satellite tracking of arms dealers, cellphones that work well in both Berlin and Shanghai.

It would be nice, too, if the biggest ethical issue facing our intel community was, as the movie would have it, over-functioning rogue agents going beyond the law to track down terrorists. He’s breaking the law! He must be stopped! I saw the movie the same week it was revealed that government spooks were tracking reporters’ phone calls to find out who leaked the story of the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. I suppose I was struck by the disconnect: Why do I love the celluloid CIA so much more than the real one?

So I called the CIA to ask.

The CIA’s Hollywood contact is named, cinematically enough, Chase. Chase Brandon--or double-oh-Chase, as his e-mail has it--is a been-there, killed-that CIA veteran who, after 25 years in the clandestine service, took a job as the agency’s liaison to the entertainment industry, advising producers for TV shows such as “Alias” and “24” and films such as “The Sum of All Fears,” “The Recruit” and the “Mission: Impossible” series, in which the CIA is dramatized as the slightly better-dressed IMF.

This Brandon is delighted to do, providing the scripts in question bring credit, even everlasting glory, to the agency. “We decide which projects to lend support to,” says Brandon, who was just finishing up a covert-op on his lunch when I reached him at his office at Langley, Va. “We want to support those projects that accurately portray the genuine heroics of the men and women who work here.” Not tradecraft, in other words, but image craft.

An example of a project that did not meet Brandon’s high standards of verity: last year’s oil- conspiracy potboiler “Syriana,” with George Clooney as a gamed and gaming CIA operative, based on the book by former CIA’er Robert Baer. Here’s a short list of other subjects that are likely to receive Brandon’s cold, clandestine shoulder: overthrowing governments; the LSD brainwashing program MKULTRA in the 1950s; Iran-Contra; Valerie Plame; bungled intelligence pre-9/11; bungled prewar intelligence-- basically anything with the word “bungled” in it.

For understandable reasons, Brandon is not expansive on any of these topics. “The agency is never well-represented in the media,” he says.

Yet despite the bad press, missing WMDs and congressional hearings, there is one part of the CIA that’s happier than a kid with a new encrypted cellphone: human resources. “We get 10,000 resumes a month,” says Brandon. “We’re not seeking these people out. They are coming to us.” The reason, he says, is that many of the country’s brightest young minds are attracted by the powerful images that he--his office, he corrects himself--helps generate through its partners in the entertainment community.

And that’s how you spell propaganda.

Hollywood’s state-sponsored message machinery has a long history that need not be recounted here. The U.S. military routinely withholds assistance-- vital to the verisimilitude of martial epics such as “Black Hawk Down”--to get scripts changed to its liking. To cite but one example: The producers of “Top Gun”--a movie so glorying of military service it might have been made by the Signal Corps--changed the Kelly McGillis character from an officer to a civilian because fraternization is against the rules of military conduct, and of course never happens.

Law enforcement has likewise reached its own accommodation, everything from “America’s Most Wanted” to “Cops.” “The FBI” TV series (1965-1974) starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr.--on which J. Edgar Hoover had script approval--portrayed G-men as politically incorruptible warriors of justice, plaster saints in skinny black ties, an image so persuasive that recruitment soared even during the height of the anti-establishment ‘60s. Only after the series ended did Americans learn that the FBI had, in real life, been waging a savage campaign of intimidation and harassment against peace and civil rights activists.

The CIA actually was the last major spook house to open a dialogue with Hollywood. In 1996, the agency, weary of its operatives being portrayed as assassins or nut jobs--or in the case of the Clint Eastwood-John Malkovich film “In the Line of Fire,” both--set Brandon up in his current role as minister of truth. “Finally, we said everybody’s crafting our image but us,” Brandon says. “Maybe we should have somebody talking to the film industry.”

Or maybe not.

I don’t expect the agency to help producers who want to expose its incompetence or folly. But neither should it actively assist producers who want to make quasi-propaganda such as “Alias,” a collaboration so osmotic that Jennifer Garner is now the CIA’s new celebrity spokesmodel. Brandon’s job dangerously stokes two of America’s most outsized appetites, for fantasy and authority.

As for the high-tech “M:i:III,” Brandon says it’s terrific entertainment but still short of reality: “Some of what the agency does is truly extraordinary and nothing that any movie has suggested or any creative writer has ever imagined even comes close.”

That’s just what I’m afraid of.