The DOD's directive on working with Hollywood says that they can provide production assistance if it is deemed 'in the best interest of the Nation', but as with all their criteria for deciding whether to give support the Pentagon interpret this very broadly.  They use the considerable influence that DOD ...
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When the producers of Clear and Present Danger approached the Pentagon to ask for military support they probably weren't expecting 6 months of script negotiations to get their film into a shape deemed acceptable by the entertainment liaison offices.  Documents from the DOD show how their concerns ranged from the ...
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1994’s Clear and Present Danger is one of the most important movies in the cinema of the war on drugs, depicting black operations by the CIA and US military against a Colombian drug cartel. In this episode I do a deep dive on Clear and Present Danger, and how it ...
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The US Coast Guard's film office remains open despite the government shut down. While 350,000 federal workers are currently not being paid and the national parks and national archives are temporarily shuttered, the government's entertainment propaganda apparatus continues to fire on all cylinders despite the lack of appropriations ...
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The new Amazon series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is the first TV show to film at CIA headquarters for several years, in keeping with the Agency’s long-time support for adaptations of Clancy’s work. In this episode I review and analyse the series, including the inevitable references to 9/11, the hallmarks ...
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Amazon's new headline streaming series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is the first TV show to film at CIA headquarters for several years, after a fairly disastrous run that saw two awful movies along with an awful TV programme film there circa 2014. In keeping with the CIA's longstanding love affair ...
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Aside from Ian Fleming, there is no more influential spy author than Tom Clancy. Clancy’s books (and the films and computer games based on them) benefited from his close contact with the US government. This week we shed light on his relationships with the CIA and the NSA, and ask ...
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Just as with James Bond and Ian Fleming, the CIA's CREST database is littered with reference to Tom Clancy.  In preparation for this weekend's podcast I put together a collection of over 100 pages of internal Agency memos and open source records that record Clancy's relationship with the CIA for ...
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Tom Clancy was a good friend of US intelligence.  After the publication of his enormously successful Hunt for Red October in 1984, he was repeatedly invited to speak at the CIA, NSA and FBI.  The CIA even paid him a $500 honourarium for his 'performance' for speaking at Langley in ...
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In 1988 CIA director William Webster attended the Bohemian Grove, where he gave a lakeside talk about intelligence matters. His speech, now available to the public for the first time, is both amusing and at times shocking. From Tom Clancy to a voyeuristic child who wanted to join the Agency, ...
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2002's The Sum of All Fears was the fourth major film adaptation of Tom Clancy's spy novels and perhaps the most visually spectacular. The part where terrorists nuke the Super Bowl, destroying Baltimore in the process, is one of the best nuking-a-city scenes ever committed to film. Recently released emails ...
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It is with some pride that I can announce that the American Journal of Economics and Sociology has today published an edition featuring not just one, not just one and a half but two articles that I wrote. The latest issue of AJES focuses on the role of the CIA ...
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