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.
Q. 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?
Milt Bearden: 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.
Q. Would you say this is the most authentic spy movie to
date?
MB: 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?"
Q. 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?
MB: 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.
Q. How were you were recruited into the CIA ?
MB: 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.
Q. 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?
MB: 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.
Q. 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?
MB: 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.
Q. 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?
MB: 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.
Q. What do you mean
by "down
range?"
MB: 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.
Q. 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?
MB: 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.
Q. Am I straying to far from the movie to ask where you
think Middle Eastern animosity towards America really stems
from?
MB: 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.
Q. Did you feel as though Syriana captured the essence of
life as an agent?
MB: 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.
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