For The Spymasters, Chris Whipple conducted extensive, exclusive interviews with nearly every living CIA director, pulling back the curtain on the world's elite spy agencies and showing how the CIA partners-or clashes-with counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been a powerful player on the world stage, operating largely in the shadows to protect American interests. This is one of the few times that we’ve been given access to the deepest thoughts of our top spies, but the film proves that trying to get real insight from people who keep secrets for a living is no easy task.This event will be streamed online as part of our P&P Live! Series. However, there are some glimmers of hope in current debates about how far Americans are willing to go to remain secure and in the growing skepticism about how much we can trust this agency that so often operates outside of the public purview. The Spymasters is certainly successful in giving the CIA a platform to burnish its reputation. Many of the interviewees arrogantly use the same circular logic: “Well, if we didn’t waterboard/use drones and bad things happened, how would you feel then?”
Torture and drone strikes are the most debated topics of the film, and the discussions on their morality and legality are absorbing, if not especially enlightening. It’s when many of the directors start defending the decision to use torture that things get a little bit squirrelly. To put it mildly, this may stretch some viewers’ credulity. The CIA heads say that these sources were highly credible, even though the weapons never turned up. The same goes for the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, most notoriously the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The film starts with several players, including Leon Panetta and George Tenet, both of whom get the most airtime, once again telling us that the CIA knew an attack by al-Qaida was coming and briefed Bush the month before it happened, which also serves to deflect any blame from the CIA for not stopping it. The Spymasters will not satisfy those looking for a definitive history of the CIA or a candid view into its inner workings for one thing, it only deals with the post-9/11 era. And when they are, it’s usually to point out the flaws of another director’s tenure or damage a political opponent. While many of the directors disagree on key topics like the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding) and drone strikes, they are all so dedicated to the CIA’s mission that they don’t reveal much and are rarely openly critical. By only interviewing the CIA directors, the filmmakers allow a certain groupthink to infiltrate the process. The first 15 minutes consist of throat-clearing platitudes, it is often hard to tell who is speaking, and interruptions from directors Gedeon and Jules Naudet frequently take the viewer out of the experience entirely.
This new film is slow-moving and, at a solid two hours, long-winded. However, the former spooks in Spymasters aren’t nearly as candid as the Israelis. In aesthetic, tone and pacing it seems directly based on The Gatekeepers, a 2012 film that interviewed all the former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police. On two out of three of these criteria, it sadly comes up short.Īs a film, The Spymasters is a bit of a failure. You can view it as a piece of filmmaking, as an apologia for the tactics the agency has to employ to get its very difficult job done, or as a rewriting of history from the CIA’s point of view. There are a few ways to judge The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs, a new documentary which interviews all 12 living former heads of the CIA (and several other key personnel) and premieres on Showtime at 9pm on Saturday.
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