CIA in ction

Espionage and secret operations have long been a source

of ction, and the real and perceived U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a source of many books,
lms and video games. Some ction may be historically
based, or will refer to less action-oriented aspects, such
as intelligence analysis or counterintelligence.

and intelligent Mary Pat Foley.

Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which has been
issued in two editions and made into a lm, is based on
an amoral CIA agent operating in Southeast Asia.[5]

3 Films and TV series

1

Adaptations of real events

In Three Days of the Condor, a low-level CIA employee codenamed Condor (Robert Redford) works
in a small brownstone oce reading books, magazines, etc., looking for enemy codes. He slips out to
buy some food, and upon soon returning, nds that
all his co-workers have been murdered.

The lm Charlie Wilsons War, released in December

2007, gives a popular account of the eorts of U.S. Congressman Charles Wilson to secure funding for the CIAs
Operation Cyclone, giving covert assistance to Afghan
rebels during the Whether we like it or not, the Taliban
is part of the Wests legacy...Soviet war in Afghanistan.
This lm positively portrays the CIA, while nishing with
a muted scolding of Congress for funding the war but
not funding subsequent peacetime reconstruction. This
lack of funding for reconstruction, or what are called
Operations Other Than War (OOTWA) in military parlance and counter-insurgency doctrine, are mooted as an
antecedent to the present War on Terrorism. According
to Declan Walsh, writing in The Guardian, the support of
the mujahideen by the U.S. and Pakistan backred on the
U.S. in the form of the 9/11 attacks, and is now backring
on Pakistan.[1] The lm has its critics.[2]

In The Hunt for Red October, Alec Baldwin plays

CIA analyst Jack Ryan. The character is also played
by Harrison Ford in the lms Patriot Games and
Clear and Present Danger, while Ben Aeck portrays Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears. Chris
Pine portrays Ryan in the original story Jack Ryan:
Shadow Recruit.
The Good Shepherd, narrates the CIAs tumultuous
early history as viewed through the prism of one
mans life. While the lead character is a composite of several real people, including long-term chief
of the CIA Counterintelligence Sta, James Jesus
Angleton. Angleton is also the basis of William F.
Buckley, Jr.'s novel Spytime: The Undoing of James
Jesus Angleton[3]

The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and released in 2006, narrates the CIAs tumultuous early history as viewed through the prism of one mans life. While
the lead character is a composite of several real people,
the most important is the long-term chief of the CIA
Counterintelligence Sta, James Jesus Angleton. Angleton is also the basis of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton[3] The same
story is told in the 2007 TNT miniseries The Company.

In JFK, the CIAs connections to Anti-Castro Cuban

freedom ghters, far right extremists, and the Maa
are portrayed, as well as the CIAs alleged participation in President John F. Kennedy's assassination,
the assassinations cover-up, and the CIAs attempted sabotage of the prosecution by Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) of former CIA domestic contact agent Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones).

Hypothetical but modeled on real

organizations

In In the Line of Fire, a former CIA assassin, played

by John Malkovich, informs a U.S. Secret Service
agent, portrayed by Clint Eastwood, of his plans to
kill the president.

The character Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy's books is a CIA

analyst.[4] Ryan is never a case ocer in the usual sense of
the term, as opposed to characters such as John Clark and
Domingo Chavez. Ryan starts as a contract consultant,
becomes an analyst, and rises in responsibility. There are
operations ocers that play a major role in Clancys novels, such as Idamurs mom, to say nothing of the creative

In Nixon, Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins, is shown nurturing, threatening, and paying o
the CIA as he attempts to salvage his presidency.
In Ronin, Robert De Niro portrays a former CIA ofcer.
1

VIDEO GAMES

In Spy Game, Brad Pitt plays a CIA agent who is

trained by a CIA ocer (Robert Redford) but eventually turns rogue.

In Covert Aairs, Piper Perabo plays a CIA trainee

suddenly promoted to a eld operative in order to
help capture her ex-boyfriend.

In Bad Company, Chris Rock plays an undercover

CIA ocer who is buying a bomb from Russian terrorists.

In Torchwood: Miracle Day, Mekhi Phifer plays

CIA ocer Rex Matheson who is investigating the
eponymous Torchwood Institute. Alexa Havins and
Dichen Lachman also portray CIA ocers.

In The Recruit, Al Pacino plays a CIA training ocer

who recruits a young trainee (Colin Farrell).
In Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the sequel to Desperado, Johnny Depp plays CIA ocer Sheldon Jeffrey Sands, who is manipulating events in Mexico.
In Body of Lies, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA
case ocer tracking a terrorist called Al-Saleem in
Iraq.
In Taken, Liam Neeson plays a former CIA operative whose daughter is kidnapped in France.
In Law Abiding Citizen, antagonist Clyde Shelton is
a former CIA assassin who specialized in covert operations.
In Salt, Angelina Jolie plays a CIA ocer accused
of being a Russian sleeper agent.
In the Bourne lm series, Matt Damon plays a former CIA SAD paramilitary ocer whom the CIA
wishes to terminate for disobeying orders to assassinate a political gure.
In Safe House, Denzel Washington and Ryan
Reynolds play CIA operatives.
In RED, Bruce Willis and Karl Urban play CIA operatives.
In Prince of Malacca, a Wall Street billionaire hedge
fund manager, after seeking nadi astrology in India,
becomes a CIA intelligence ocer with a special
directive from the President to investigate a drug
cartel in Southeast Asia.
In Alias, Sydney Bristow rst works for what she believes to be a black ops division of the CIA, which
turns out to be an enemy organization; she subsequently becomes a double agent for the real CIA.
In Burn Notice, Jerey Donovan plays a spy that was
burned and tries to gure out who burned him and
much of the plot and characters have links with the
CIA.
In Chuck, Sarah Walker is an CIA operative working
with the NSA to protect and gain intelligence from
the title character. The series also has other CIA
ocers, notably Bryce Larkin, as well as a splinter or rogue element within the CIAs ranks, called
Fulcrum.

In Homeland, Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a

CIA Covert Operations Ocer on the trail of a U.S.
Marine suspected of becoming a terrorist after his
capture by extremists.
In Person of Interest, Jim Caviezel plays John Reese,
a retired CIA operative working with a hacker to
stop violent crimes in New York.
In the James Bond lm series ctional agent Felix
Leiter is Bonds primary contact in the CIA.
In the Fox miniseries 24: Live Another Day, the CIA
is a U.S. agency operating within London that captures federal fugitive Jack Bauer. The agency takes
the main governmental role over CTU in the miniseries.
In The Dark Knight Rises, Aidan Gillen plays a CIA
agent, named Bill Wilson in the novelization, who is
tasked with extracting the Russian nuclear-physicist
Dr. Pavel (Alon Abutbul) from Uzbekistan to the
United States.

4 Video games
In Smugglers Run 2, the CIA gets involved with the
smuggling operations.
The CIA is a central player in the events of Tom
Clancys Splinter Cell. In the game, NSA agent Sam
Fisher must determine the fates of two CIA agents
who disappeared while spying on the government of
Georgia. Fisher must then inltrate the CIAs headquarters in Langley, Virginia in order to track down
the source of a security link within the agency. Later
games in the franchise feature operatives from a ctional NSA initiative known as SHADOWNET.
In the No Russian level of Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare 2, Private First Class Joseph Allen, a U.S
Army Ranger is attached to a CIA element in an attempt to gain antagonist Vladimir Makarovs trust.
Langley can also be a randomly generated call sign
for any of the Task Force 141 NPCs that accompanies the player throughout the campaign.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is focused around a character named Alex Mason who is in the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group and Jason Hudson, a CIA ocer,

3
as they take part in covert activity during the Cold War.
They were members of Operation 40, which conducted
undercover operations in Cuba and participated in the Bay
of Pigs Invasion.
In "Battleeld: Bad Company 2", the CIAs Special
Activities Division is the playable faction in the campaign and is a DLC faction in multiplayer.
"Homefront" a rst-person shooter that challenges
players to survive and impact a ctional future scenario in which America has been economically devastated and occupied by a foreign power. Game is
thought to be a CIA government recruiting tool by
the Iranian government. Although, the CIA did help
develop the story line it has no connection to any
government except Korea invading and occupying
the US by means of force.
The CIA appears again in "Call of Duty: Black Ops
2". The CIA appears in both the 1980s section of
the campaign as well as the future. The CIA also is
a playable faction in the Zombie mode Grief.
The IAA, referred to as simply the Agency, mimics the CIA in Grand Theft Auto: V. There are several story line missions in which the protagonists inltrate the agency for various purposes such as extracting a person illegally held captive by the IAA,
or to steal a biochemical warfare weapon being produced by the IAA at a secret government facility.

NSA in popular culture

DIA in popular culture

7 References
[1] The Taliban blowback, April 16, 2008, The Guardian
[2] Roddy, Melissa (December 21, 2007), Tom Hanks Tells
Hollywood hopper in 'Charlie Wilsons War'", AlterNet
[3] Buckley, William F. Jr. (2001), Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton, Harvest Books, ISBN 0-15601124-7
[4] Clancy, Tom (1984), The Hunt for Red October,
HarperCollins, ISBN 0-87021-285-0
[5] Greene, Graham (2004), The Quiet American, Penguin
Classics, ISBN 0-14-303902-4

8 Further reading
Jenkins, Tricia, Get smart: a look at the current relationship between Hollywood and the CIA, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 29(2)
(2009), pp. 229243. [The author interviewed Paul
Barry, who is in charge of the agencys liaison with
Hollywood industry. The article also describes that
CIAs image became negative when Cold War ended
and when Aldrich Ames was discovered.]

The CIA is a faction in both "Battleeld 3" and Jenkins, Tricia. The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency
"Battleeld 4.
Shapes Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2012.

Comedy and spoofs

Meet the Parents is a comedy featuring Robert De
Niro as a retired CIA interrogations ocer.
American Dad! is an animated comedy series that
spoofs the CIA.
The CIA is portrayed in the NBC spy comedy television show, Chuck.
Weird Al Yankovic released a song called Party
in the C.I.A., about himself dreaming of becoming
an agent on his 2011 album Alpocalypse.

See also
Vince Flynn - author of government ction with major characters who work for the CIA
R J Hillhouse - author of political ction about the
outsourcing of the CIA

9 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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