Introduction

If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.1 Richard Gid Powers, introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience 13 Rue Madeleine, a 1947 semi-documentary that commemorates the sacrifice and courage of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), opens with a shot of the US National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The building’s location, at the heart of the nation’s capital on the Washington Mall, amidst so many iconic monuments to American democracy, is no accident. Like the Washington or Lincoln Memorial, it is a depository of historical experience that binds up the nation. In its inner-sanctum, as audiences then and now would know, the United States of America’s founding documents, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are housed. After the establishing shot the camera slowly tilts from top to bottom, surveying the archive’s columnar neo-classical facade – a common architectural feature of America’s monuments that evokes a sense of both history and authority. Finally, it comes to rest on a statue in the forecourt of the archive called Future. On Future’s plinth, the inscription reads: ‘What is Past is Prologue’. At this point we hear the booming voice of an omniscient narrator – an oratory style borrowed from the newsreels of the time that was also a defining feature of the semi-documentary format:...

Quiet Americans: The CIA and Hollywood in the Early Cold War

The CIA was established in 1947, but it did not appear in a Hollywood film until Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in 1959. Why? This chapter explains Hollywood’s long silence on American foreign intelligence during the early Cold War. It argues that a combination of patriotism, stringent libel laws, the restrictions of the semi-documentary format, and Hollywood’s in-house industry censor the Production Code Administration, encouraged filmmakers to respect the CIA’s proclaimed “passion for anonymity”. It ends with a sustained examination of one of the most well-known examples of CIA interference with a Hollywood representation of their Agency: Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1958 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American.

Conclusion

In his introduction to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s cogent critique of excessive US Government secrecy, FBI historian Richard Gid Powers wrote: ‘If official secrecy had a devastating impact on American history, its impact on Americans’ understanding of that history was a collateral disaster.’1 From the very beginnings of history as a professional discipline in the nineteenth century, indeed, since the time of the ancients and the first known works of source-based historical narrative by Herodotus and Thucydides, history has always existed, as Lynn Hunt put it, ‘in a symbiotic relationship with nationalism’....

The Death of the ‘Big Lie’ and the Emergence of Postmodern Incredulity in the Spy Cinema of the 1960s

In the 1960s American spy cinema underwent a profound transformation: out went the austere state-sponsored narratives of the semi-documentary format that proclaimed their historical authenticity due to their reliance upon official sources, and in came a new type of spy cinema, epitomised by the James Bond films, that was tongue-in-cheek, “camp”, and which revelled in artifice. Though ostensibly apolitical, this formal shift in the way in which Hollywood portrayed American secret intelligence was the beginning of a profound shift away from the state as the arbiter of authenticity and towards a new politics of incredulity, marking the onset of postmodernity in the United States.

‘What is Past is Prologue’: Hollywood’s History of the OSS and the Establishment of the CIA

At the end of the Second World War, the OSS were swiftly disbanded. In response, OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan launched a massive public relations campaign to celebrate the wartime activities of his agency and to advocate for the establishment of a permanent central intelligence agency. Hollywood, perhaps unsurprisingly given the extensive links between American filmmakers and the OSS, played an important part in mythologizing the OSS in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and in so doing helped make the case for the creation of the CIA.

Secrecy, Conspiracy, Cinema and the CIA in the 1970s

This final chapter examines the figuration of the CIA in the wave of paranoid conspiracy films that were made in the 1970s. Still suffering from the reverberations of Watergate and the Vietnam War, in 1975 America faced another season of scandal after the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a series of damning revelations of nefarious CIA and FBI activities in the New York Times. This compounded a culture of suspicion that had already set in, especially in Hollywood, by the beginning of the 1970s. The conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, films like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, were the polar opposite of the semi-documentary films that represented American espionage in the aftermath of the Second World War. Whilst the latter lauded the United States government as the arbiter of historical authenticity, the former perceived state secrecy and deception as nefarious obstacles that prevented citizens from knowing the truth of their history. Secrecy figures as history’s aporia, and few types of film express this better than the paranoid conspiracy thriller.

The Facts of War: Cinematic Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services

This chapter tells the story of the OSS Field Photographic Unit (FPU) and its impact on American cinema and society. Led by the legendary Hollywood film director John Ford, the FPU produced training, reconnaissance and propaganda films for the CIA’s wartime predecessor. In doing so, it is argued here, they made a significant contribution to what theorist Paul Virilio termed “the logistics of perception”, or the ways and means by which war is perceived. By helping to transform the second-hand experience of war from a predominantly textual to a mostly visual experience, the FPU left a profound legacy.