Milt
Bearden served in the CIA for 30 years, culminating in a stint overseeing
the Soviet-East European Division of the CIA’s Operations Directorate
and then working as the CIA Chief in Bonn. He is the author of The Black
Tulip: A Novel of a war in Afghanistan, and is a regular contributor
to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He worked with Robert
De Niro on Meet The Parents and the two have become good friends. He
acted as the CIA technical advisor on The Good Shepherd.
Do
you believe this film could have been made were it not for 9/11 and
the extra interest in the Agency during the Iraq War?
The concept started well before that, but that's an interesting question.
I'm not sure where the bearing with 9/11 would come in. There's no control
in the States, and you can make a film about anything you want to. Would
it be something that would be as interesting as I think it's going to
be to the public? I’m not sure, but the public worldwide has,
so far, been sent on a wild goose chase when it comes to the spy world.
There are some wonderfully entertaining movies out there which, in reality,
have nothing to do with the spy world. Like the currently successful
James Bond movie. I joined the CIA just as the first Bond films came
out with Sean Connery. All those are great fun but have nothing to do
with anything. But this film was something that De Niro was going to
do and he was going to make it real. And he really captured that.
Would
you say this is the most authentic spy movie to date?
You can take pieces of this film, take this contest between the KGB
officer and the Matt Damon character and you've got woven in there one
of the most sophisticated tales of agents targeting each other and their
attempts to compromise. It’s up and down, kind of like a match
that keeps changing, until the end and... then you're still not sure.
Although I would always warn you that, to use the baseball term "Edward
Wilson always bats last." So yes, nobody has ever done a film as
sophisticated as that. It's very close to some of things I've seen over
the years, and I've seen a great many things. This all came out of Eric's
mind and he'd ask me "Would you say it this way or that way?"
Was
Eric’s reference to you primarily about the emotional impact of
the operative rather than actual factual detail, which presumably he
could glean more easily?
Yeah. You know, this film will take you where you haven't been before.
You think as a film person you've been almost everywhere. We're taking
you inside a guy who starts off as any other brilliant kid that comes
to Yale and goes into Skull & Bones. You watch and go through this
stuff and the Matt Damon character is a composite of real people. They're
all dead but De Niro was able to use the sons and daughters of his subjects
to get inside this group, the way they were and the way they owned America.
America really was run by the Oxbridge crowd, Andover, Yale. We don't
have that anymore.
How
were you were recruited into the CIA?
I had been in the airforce and had a come back and was working on my
PhD. In those years you had professors all around the country from the
American educational establishment who were friendly to the America
Incorporated school and they would spot somebody and tell the CIA to
give that guy a call. They would take a look at him. As soon as they
asked me if I’d like to travel the world and serve my country
I said "get me out of here," and I never looked back.
A
big part of this film looks at the problems operatives have trying to
maintain a happy marriage. Yet I understand you're happily married?
I've been happily married now for 29 years but I have an ex wife too!
I contend that the divorce rate in the clandestine services was probably
greater than elsewhere in America, the publishing world, the film world
or any other high pressure worlds. But you could argue that we had a
huge amount of personal problems.
If
I've had a hard day I go home and unload on my girlfriend, what does
a CIA guy do? Does it just build up inside and eat away at him or her?
You're in a situation where you take your complete identity and put
it in a cardboard box. Everything is new, your passport, your driving
licence, your credit cards, your library card, pictures of kids or no
kids, your dog. Then you become that person and disappear for some period
of time. You don't come home and talk about that. I wouldn't want anybody
to go away from this film and say that every CIA marriage is doomed.
You've got to understand the energy of the female character played by
Angelina Jolie. She was a beautiful, pampered senator’s daughter
married to this perfect husband, who then becomes a dry goods exporter,
as far as his story goes. She then becomes nothing. She would have been
a wonderful society wife, and much happier as the wife of the under
secretary of state. But Angelina is terrific. And look at Matt, look
what he did.
One
of the most memorable sequences was the torture scene. The person being
interrogated points out to us that perhaps Russia wasn't as big a threat
as the CIA maintained. Was that true?
Could be. Every single thing in this film is based on something true.
It's fictionalized and made into a movie, a metaphor. I think if you
make a metaphor out of the truth sometimes it contains more truth than
the absolute truth. There were two Russians, Golitsin, the first, came
and defected to James Angleton at the CIA. And we thought there was
going to be a master plot for the Soviet Union to take on the world.
Then comes Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko did not necessarily get beaten up but
he was put into solitary confinement and that was big black mark on
the CIA. So bring it all together and put it in a metaphorical impression
of what happened and you get the truth shown in the movie. There was
a debate about the threat that the Soviet Union really posed and the
truth is that kind of risk assessment never really got documented. Part
of the reason was that there were 30,000 war heads in the Soviet Union
that would go down range if you lit the fuse.
What
do you mean by "down range?"
If you go "down range" they would light off and go where they're
supposed to go. Do I contend that the Soviet Union was as big as the
military industrial complex of America and the UK. No.
Do
you think West found it easier to cope with one big tangible threat
like Russia rather than now, where don't have a seen enemy?
The set piece of the fifty year cold war was pretty simple. It was us
and them. The shirts and the skins. That wasn't something terribly hard
to deal with. It was something that two or three generations of Americans
who came through this city of Washington were able to understand and
say, "This is easy to deal with." After 1991, then we've got
this world out there that's been described by directors of Central Intelligence
as no longer one big dragon in front of his lair, but we have a rain
forest full of vipers. Well, we've been at that now long enough to where
I think we should stop for a moment and say, "What is it?"
"Where do we want to go?" Do we want to have what is being
proclaimed by fundamentalist Islam as a great clash of the Judeo-Christian
world against Islam? That's not a goal of ours. Everything we do now,
has consequences that are infinitely heavier. One big dragon at the
mouth of the cave is infinitely more manageable than a forest full of
vipers.
Am
I straying to far from the movie to ask where you think Middle Eastern
animosity towards America really stems from?
It certainly doesn't come from one or two of the things that people
point to - from the Afghans, from beating the USSR in Afghanistan. They
didn’t say "We can now beat the USA." We can go back
at least to Paris in 1919, or back to Richard of Lionheart. But the
reality is that it comes from the break up of the Ottoman Empire and
the consistent humiliation of the Middle East by the West. There were
high points of humiliation in the ’67 war and also from the unconditional
love for Israel from the USA. We let them go to far.
Did
you feel as though Syriana captured the essence of life as an agent?
It is only one of a couple of movies that captured a legitimate complaint,
but it didn't capture my heartbeat. Nor did it capture the world's heartbeat
but it quite discreetly presented a case, and you began to understand
who the kids were that blew up the tanker. Nobody had done this before
because we demonize our adversaries so much, they're not even human.
But that was the success of that movie.
The
Good Shepherd
Interviews
Robert De Niro
Eric Roth
Matt Damon
Angelina Jolie
John Turturro
