By Rachel Marsden
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
PARIS -- The realities highlighted by the Oscar-nominated
film "Zero Dark Thirty," which detailed the operation that ended with
the killing of Osama bin Laden, don't begin and end with the debate over what
some call "torture" as a means of obtaining intelligence. That's just
the only issue from the film that politicians and the media have glommed onto.
More than anything else, "Zero Dark Thirty" is one of the rare films
that accurately portrays the realities and frustrations of working in espionage
and intelligence.
I think it's safe to say that tactics like loud music,
sleep deprivation and water-boarding would at least be more effective than
asking an unlawful enemy combatant obsessed with killing you to politely fill
you in on any adverse operations. The question of whether an activity
constitutes torture really depends on your own definition of it: your point of
reference, personal preferences and level of tolerance. Western military and
intelligence personnel are trained to withstand enemy interrogation tactics.
It's just one of those things that go with the territory when you choose
warfare as a profession, particularly when you engage as a freelance guerrilla
unassociated with a nation-state covered by the Geneva Conventions'
protections.
But "Zero Dark Thirty" depicts many other
realities about intelligence work that have passed under the radar.
One of the reasons why most films about intelligence and
espionage are unrealistic is because in movies, officers are allowed to take
initiative. They get an idea, maybe run it by a colleague on the down-low or
muse about it to a superior, then simply run out and execute it. The
paper-shuffling and painstaking approval process is typically omitted from
films, likely for fear that watching officers fill out forms would put
audiences to sleep.
"Zero Dark Thirty" makes the very real
frustrations of not being able to act entrepreneurially within a bloated
bureaucratic agency highly compelling, with the main character -- a CIA officer
portrayed by Oscar-nominated Jessica Chastain -- butting heads with her chief
of station and her colleagues almost as often as with obstructive terror
suspects at agency black sites. As in real life, the bureaucracy was almost a
character unto itself in the movie -- like the ghost in a horror film that we
never see but constantly tortures the protagonist.
Chastain's CIA officer says to the agency director that
she's "done nothing else" over her 12 years with the agency besides
work on the bin Laden case. Unlike with James Bond films, information doesn't
just fall into someone's lap, or come as the result of a one-night stand with a
source after a few well-shaken martinis. Chastain's character spends years
vetting little bits and pieces of information as they trickle in. At one point
she's devastated to learn that a lead in which she had invested enormous time
and resources pursuing might ultimately be a dead end. "Confirmation
bias" -- assessing a theory or a piece of information as valid because you
desperately want or think it to be, and excluding other information for the
same reason -- is mentioned several times throughout the film as an impediment
to good intelligence work.
The film includes various shots of information mapping
boards, showing the connections CIA analysts have drawn between various pieces
of information and terror suspects. Intelligence work is a giant puzzle with
millions of tiny pieces. Sometimes a nugget of intelligence carries no
particular significance when it first pops onto an analyst's radar, but it ends
up becoming valuable as more pieces are added. Vibrations in the muck can turn
out to be significant in the final analysis.
This is why, for example, Russian models and businessmen
in major world cities such as London, Paris and New York are encouraged to cozy
up to wealthy or connected businessmen or politicians, or why Chinese students
abroad are asked to feed tidbits back to the state. They are intelligence
assets who are rewarded on a piecemeal, freelance basis for collecting
seemingly innocuous bits and pieces about things like connections between
people, contact information, business strategy, personal habits and patterns.
Their job is simply to collect and feed into the system as much information as
they can without assessing importance. Someone higher up the food chain takes
care of assessment and puts the puzzle together. It may just be those few words
that slipped from a businessman's mouth at the dinner table that, unbeknownst
to him, end up being the final piece of something years in the making.
As with the shadowy world of espionage itself, the most
interesting real-world lessons in "Zero Dark Thirty" are a bit
farther below the surface.
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