How the CIA Got Hoodwinked by Hollywood

The agency made a serious mistake in cooperating with the makers of the 1973 spy film Scorpio.

In January 1975, one of the members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board fired off an unusual memo to the CIA. The PFIAB, as it’s known, is one of the more obscure parts of the U.S. intelligence community. It quietly advised a dozen presidents on major issues affecting U.S. intelligence since the Eisenhower administration.

Leo Cherne, a strident anti-Communist who ran the International Rescue Committee, addressed his memo to the assistant to the CIA director. Cherne was not worried, as he often was, about the U.S.-Soviet balance of forces. Nor did he concern himself with the sweeping congressional investigations into CIA wrongdoing.

What got Cherne’s attention was something far more mundane. Cherne had questions about something he had seen on TV.

Cherne’s memo was about the 1973 spy movie Scorpio, which he had watched a few days earlier when it aired on TV. What bothered Cherne was that a film that made CIA officers look like a bunch of amoral assassins had been m…