The Good Shepherd

Front Page Magazine has a review of the film The Good Shepherd:

In the early going of The Good Shepherd, we learn that somebody tipped off Fidel Castro to the Bahia de Cochinos as the place where an exile army, backed by the United States, would land. Thus advised, Fidel crushes the invasion, a loss that has CIA man Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) rather downcast. Who tipped off the bearded one? It will be more than two long hours before viewers find out, but first they must endure political education.

Lesson number one in this film is that all CIA men are manufactured by the Skull and Bones society at Yale, a kind of spook finishing school, where we see them cavorting in skeleton suits, swearing secrecy, and wrestling in the mud while being pissed on by their "brothers." Edward Wilson doesn't like the urine treatment but stays aboard even though he believes the Bonemen are a squad of soulless, backstabbing sellouts. This interminable film, which the Washington Post called "brilliant," gets a lot more wrong, though sometimes in an entertaining way.

[. . .]

A Soviet operative turns out to be the Heroic Russian, a veteran of Stalingrad and frostbite. The lesson here, children, is that unlike the duplicitous Yale pansies, the Soviet spooks actually fought Nazis in combat. In the post-war period, the game is to grab as many German scientists as possible, the obligatory dark hint of a Nazified USA.

The Bonesmen proclaim that some leader in Latin America, an eloquent, gentle peasant, has become a threat. It is made clear that the spooks need to create these threats to keep themselves in business. The CIA, acting through the front company Mayan Coffee, unleashes locusts on the reformer's crops. The Good Shepherd thus attempts to deal with the Guatemala of Jacobo Arbenz. After Cuban revolution, Wilson tries to swing a deal with a mobster, Joseph Palmi, played by Joe Pesci, who reportedly lost three casinos to Fidel Castro. Even over the heavy-handed score comes the sound of a barrel being scraped.

[. . .]

At the end of his career, Wilson finally opens an envelope which, as a child, he took off his father after his suicide. In this note, Wilson's own father confesses to being a coward and sellout. Wilson burns the letter and moves on. Despite their failures, Wilson and his Bonesmen gang wind up running the CIA. General Sullivan portrays the agency as the de-facto U.S. government, responsible to nobody. As Clover observes, "Agency first, God second."

Among the Hollywood left the CIA has served as a convenient three-letter code for evil. This clumsy film takes the tradition to new lows. Spycraft and espionage remain of interest but there is not much evidence that cinema can convey it in a dramatic way that also does justice to the truth.

What is most disappointing about this is that the CIA richly deserves to be kicked around, but not for the reasons given.

The truth is that the CIA is the most left-wing of all the government's agencies. Even the State Department only matches the CIA in leftward tilt. All through the Bush Administration the CIA has ran a series of covert operations intended to discredit the President's policies and undermine his position with other world leaders and the American people.

The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame affair is an example. Wilson's trip to Niger, at the suggestion of his CIA employee wife, Valerie Plame, where he told one story in a classified verbal briefing (he was never required to file a written report) and told another story in an op-ed piece in the New York Times was a put-up job.

The "outing" of Plame as a CIA worker by Washington's gossip industry was just icing on the cake as far as the Agency's leftist nomenclatura was concerned since it resulted in Fitzgerald's long and damaging political witch hunt. And this is just the most well known Agency attempt to torpedo the Administration.

Bottom line is that the Agency was created under a Democrat administration and came into its own during the Kennedy/Johnson years when the Ivy League "best and brightest" very nearly succeeded in destroying the nation. The CIA has never been able to grow beyond the politics of its founders and shapers and probably never will.