The Good Shepherd
Some movies are bad, some are bad but amusing and worth watching anyway, some are excruciatingly bad—so bad you wish you'd known before going and saved yourself the trouble. The Good Shepherd is that bad. Compounding the misery, it's way too long with a runtime of 167 minutes. De Niro, directing, must have been trying to work out some deep antagonism for his audience, or perhaps induce the cinematic equivalent of water-boarding to put people in a receptive frame of mind for his message—and it is, I think, fair to say he has a message—that the CIA sucks. Literally and figuratively, with plenty of homoerotic overtones throughout.
It was old-home week at Mazza, where I saw the film when it opened last Friday. Quite a bit of muttering over various bits. Sharon was mesmerized and kept telling me "my dad looked exactly like that," but I found too many historical inaccuracies. Towards the end, for example, the film supposedly depicts Leopoldville in 1961: well, I happened to be in Leopoldville in 1961 and despite that being a long time ago I have a pretty good memory of it and I can say flatly that nothing in the film even remotely resembled the reality of the Congo. A minor disappointment.
I suppose I should've know what was up when before seeing the film I clicked across Chris "Motormouth" Matthews' show and stopped long enough to listen to De Niro and Damon talking about it. De Niro was fairly coy; he must know he has a stinker. Damon was, well, an idiot. Either he wanted to play the part of nobody home for Matthews or he's really got nothing going on. Hard to say for sure, but Damon did allow that he wants to have an effective war against terror (my paraphrase), so if I had to guess it would be the latter.
De Niro's major failing (not to mention a plethora of lesser ones) is to mistake or conflate unselfconscious ambiguity with or for deliberately cultivated self-conscious ambiguity. It's a distinction with important differences. Agency operations or counterintelligence or even sensible analysis succeed or fail, often, from the conscious application of appropriate ambiguity. A contrary notion that senior Agency officers, historically, and generally, have been driven by perverse psycho-sexual dynamics of which they remained unaware and incapable of escaping—that's Hollywood talking. De Niro says his film is "well documented." Doubtful, but it's certainly not fair and balanced.
When I was on my first tour in Marseille a family friend, "Uncle" Roger, came around for a visit and took me to the best restaurant in town, Le Petit Nice, which as it happened was around the corner from where I lived, in the ancient neighborhood of Malmousque. Roger had been in charge of the OSS in southern France during WWII, and Le Petit Nice had been his headquarters.
Over cigars Roger told me this story: The OSS had got hold of a German spy, captured behind the lines complete with radio. As far as they could tell he hadn't alerted anyone to his capture so they wanted to break him in interrogation, get his codes, and go back on the air at his next scheduled broadcast with false intelligence, to muck up German planning.
So Roger's questioning this guy. "Where were you trained?" "In Paris," he said. 'Oh,' Roger thought, 'I know Paris well because my family had an apartment there.' "Where in Paris?" Such and such arrondissement. 'Aha!', thought Roger, 'that's where we were; I know this area really well.' "What street?" Such and such street. 'Well,' Roger thought, 'that's our street.' "Were you in a building near the bakery, or the post office? What was the address?" The prisoner gave the address. 'My God,' Roger's thinking, 'that's our building.' "Well, then, what apartment was it?" And it turned out it was indeed Roger's family's apartment. A total coincidence.
So Roger proceeded to describe the building in detail, the apartment in detail, leaving no doubt he knew all about it. The prisoner was dumbfounded, shocked to think that Roger already knew everything about this particular German spy service. And the prisoner figured, with Roger's subtle assistance, that if he started lying about other aspects of his work—such as his codes—that he might really be in deep shit. He gave up everything. Roger's group went back on the air at the next scheduled time with bad intelligence and did manage to confuse the Germans (though with only minor results).
It's a wonderful story, rich in history for being told to me where it'd happened. Roger Goiran passed away a few years ago. He was a good guy and I wish I'd known him better. It was more he married a truly wonderful woman who was very close to our family than that I knew him well myself. Later, he was station chief in Tehran before the Mossadeq coup, which he opposed, causing Allen Dulles to remove him a couple weeks before the event.
Anyhow, that's the kind of guy the Agency was made of, not the figments of De Niro's imagination.
Posted by George Kenney on December 26, 2006 12:19 PM 
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Comments
Shucks. I was looking forward to seeing this movie. I saw Syriana and Munich last year and thought they were excellent.
Posted by: Judy Truett | December 26, 2006 1:30 PM
Mr Kenney,
I do believe that Mr Gorian was a "good guy," and there's a real sense that you respected the man. But one man does not make an entire agency. There's good and there's bad. Yes, Mr. Gorian didn't want a democratically elected prime minister overthrown, that's good, it sounds as if your "uncle" had some moral fiber. But in the end Mossadeq was overthrown, and the agency prevailed, for awhile that is.
My father spent most of his career working for the FBI. He too appeared to have morals. He was a straight arrow, you got a sense that he was always "by the book." Unfortunately, he was so straight, as he explains it, that this moral fiber cost him from ever becoming the top guy of a field office. In the end, 'telling the truth' ruffled the wrong feathers in Washington. There are people who are acting in the interest of the public and there are ones who will lie, bend reality, and kill in order to serve the interests of a much smaller minority. As good historians have shown, the latter group of people tend to dominate the structures of power.
I to wish to believe that the CIA and the FBI and the NSA are looking out for the american peoples best interests. Sadly, only the naive continue to wear the flag while believing that this country truly loves them, and will protect them and only wants the best for them and their children. That may be true for the top 1% or maybe even for just the top 0.10%, but for the rest of us the reality is, that it's a mirage. For evidence I cite the writings of Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Vandana Shiva, and the other historians who back up their claims with documentation from the National Security Archive.
Mr Kenney, you seem like an intelligent, and thoughtful man, and I thoroughly enjoy your podcasts. I have to say though that I have trouble with your assessment that the halls in Langley are crowded with well-intentioned men who only wish to serve our benevolent rulers. Mr Gorian sounds like he was a good man, but can you really say that the agency is bursting at the seams with well intentioned people? That I am afraid would be contradictory to what constitutes that agencys real mandate.
Tony L
p.s. You for one, know better than the rest of us, what transpired in Kosovo.
Posted by: Tony | December 26, 2006 10:17 PM
I second Tony's comment. Yes, the CIA has good apples amongst its ranks, but its overall effect is that of a rotten apple. The world would be a better place without the CIA/MI6/DGSE/KGB/Mossad. Sure, they’ve had their uses at times but they are basically instruments of state-sponsored terrorism. Let us not forget Operation Northwoods, Operation Gladio, USS Liberty, Mossadeq, Gulf of Tonkin, the Moscow 1999 bombings etc… And this is only what we know about.
Posted by: Kevin M. | December 30, 2006 9:14 AM