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 made with help from the agency.
“How did it come about that Scorpio was filmed in part at CIA headquarters at Langley—an obvious break from CIA past practice?” Cherne wondered. “What did CIA expect to get out of its cooperation—since the motion picture has such an anti-CIA focus?”
Equally distressing to Cherne was some of the laziest journalism I have ever laid eyes upon. Clifton Daniel, a reporter with The New York Times, had also watched the movie when it aired on TV and cited it as an authority in his article about the Rockefeller Commission, a panel investigating CIA spying inside the United States.
“The agency has even been suspected of assassinations,” Daniel wrote. “Last night NBC television showed a 1973 fiction movie, Scorpio, in which six murders are committed by CIA agents or hired gunmen.”
Scorpio was the first major motion picture ever to be filmed at CIA headquarters—and it was such a disaster for the agency that filmmakers, with one exception,1 would be banned from Langley for nearly two decades.
One piece of intelligence that the CIA apparently had never picked up was that Hollywood was and is a town full of phonies who can’t be trusted. The CIA took the filmmakers at their word that the movie would not sensationalize the agency.
The CIA’s only saving grace was Scorpio was so bad that few people ever saw it. The film stars Burt Lancaster as a veteran CIA officer named Cross whom the agency dispatches an assassin to kill because Cross knows too much about covert operations. Yes, that’s roughly the plot of the Jason Bourne films, but Scorpio fails in almost every area: acting, screenplay, directing. Even the music is terrible.
It’s so awful it belongs in a museum as a curiosity to be studied and avoided. Unless you must know what Burt Lancaster looks like in blackface or need to subject yourself to repeated lines of dialogue such as “Maybe we should just go. Like the Arabs,” Scorpio is two hours of your life you will never get back.
“A patina of mediocrity,” was the headline on Tom Shales’ review in The Washington Post, which is one of many Scorpio-related declassified documents found in the CIA’s Freedom of Information Reading Room. The review is trademark Shales: “Lancaster strides through the film with the imperial disdain of someone who thinks he’s too grand for the role. He looks mainly too old.”
How did this come about? Another declassified memo lays out the story. The decision came from the top: It was CIA Director Richard Helms who green-lit the filming at Langley.
What led Helms to make an exception for Scorpio was a personal entreaty from John V. Tunney, a one-term senator from California and a sometime actor. Tunney wrote Helms, saying that the filming at CIA would routine shots of a car driving through the entrance and actors entering the headquarters building. Arthur Krim, the chairman of United Artists and a personal friend of Helms’, also asked for permission to film at Langley.
A week after Tunney wrote his letter, Helms met with David Silver, a production manager. Silver wrote to tell Helms that the project “is in no way an exploitation film or designed for sensationalism.” Which was utter horseshit.
The letters to Helms never mentioned Scorpio. The title, the CIA director was told, was Danger Field.
The CIA had violated another axiom of Hollywood bigshots: Always ask for a script.
According to IMDB, Telefon, a 1977 picture, was also filmed at CIA headquarters.