How Jack Ryan Captured Hollywood

By David Talbot, Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

In the final season of the big-budget Jack Ryan, a Prime Video series that ended its four-season run last month, our hero fights the evil convergence of bioweapons-wielding terrorists and global drug pushers and a corrupt U.S. senator in league with this dark web. Ryan and his team only prevail—saving our country from mass slaughter—by resorting to torture, murder, civilian-endangering firefights, and the wanton use of advanced military weaponry, which is lovingly depicted. (Happiness is a warm gun, if you’re a self-confident CIA rogue.)

Yes, “we broke protocol” and employed “any force necessary” to stop the threat of annihilation, Ryan proudly tells the crooked senator, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. Throughout the series, Ryan defies the committee’s oversight, and at the end he’s shown to be right. Ryan exposes the senator’s treason and treachery! The spy was right all along!

American democracy is seen as weak and broken in drama after drama. Only the lawless Jack Ryans can save it.

Jack Ryan is played by a white actor—John Krasinski, who for me never overcomes the wisecracking geniality of his role on The Office. (That all-American persona makes him even more disturbing as a CIA action hero.) But season four also features a Latino man as president (Jordi Mollá), a black woman as CIA director (Betty Gabriel), a black man as her deputy (Wendell Pierce), and a Latino man as Ryan’s hitman sidekick (Michael Peña).

Special Ops: Lioness, a new series on Paramount+, is even more diverse. Zoe Saldana leads a female-heavy CIA commando team that kicks ass like the guys.

These “entertainments” play like CIA recruiting tools, propaganda that says this is not your grandfather’s spy agency. We come in different colors, some of us identify as women. But we’re all Americans. And that’s cool.

We might drone people, and sure, sometimes even our own people, or kind of innocent people. Fuck. That’s not good. But usually it’s bad actors, evil people who had it coming.

Variety critic Alison Herman accused Lioness of weaponizing “women’s liberation in service of the military-industrial complex.”

And that’s what these shows do. They provide new window dressing for the American empire, they update the rationale for U.S. imperialism. We’re not just spreading democracy; we’re protecting women’s rights.

Which brings me to my own encounter with Hollywood. After Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, my bestselling book about Robert F. Kennedy’s private search for the truth about the assassination of his brother President John F. Kennedy, was published in 2007, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone told me, “Hollywood will never make your book.” 

It seems he was right. Top studios and producers have repeatedly optioned Brothers and its 2015 bestselling “sequel,” The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. But no Hollywood filmmakers have been bold or committed enough to make movies or TV series out of my books, which illuminate the dark side of U.S. power in the 20^th Century.

The CIA vowed that JFK, Stone’s 1991 dramatic blockbuster about the Kennedy assassination, would never be repeated, opening an office in Los Angeles to vet and even write scripts and “assist” cooperative filmmakers. And the spy agency has been largely successful. In the nearly 32 years since JFK was released, only a handful of movies–– including Kill the Messenger, A Most Wanted Man, and The Report––have portrayed the CIA in a sinister light. Meanwhile, a steady flood of movies like The Recruit, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, have presented the spy agency more flatteringly, while TV franchises like Jack Ryan and Special Ops: Lioness display CIA shoot-and-blow-‘em-up heroics with patriotic fervor.

The message behind these CIA-friendly films and TV shows is blatant: we live in a dangerous world—only ruthless, clandestine tactics can protect us.

This has been the CIA’s message ever since it was founded in 1947 as the Cold War began. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, concerned about some of the disturbing reports he heard about the spy agency’s covert activities, appointed an old friend, retired Air Force general James H. Doolittle, to inspect the CIA. Ironically, the Doolittle Report gave Allen Dulles–– the agency’s aggressive director, known for fomenting coups and assassinating foreign leaders––even more license to kill and overthrow. “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost,” stated the Doolittle Report. “There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable means of human conduct do not apply.” As I wrote in The Devil’s Chessboard, “Dulles could not have put it more zealously himself.”

In recent years, the CIA has annexed Hollywood. The message that derring-do agents must defy democratic laws and norms to combat apocalyptic foes is embedded in countless screen projects. “After 9/11, the merger between Hollywood and Langley got baked in,” Nicholas Schou, the author of Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood, told me. (I’m proud to say I edited the book and wrote its foreword.)  “We expect to see heroic CIA spies going to extremes to fight terrorists, drug cartels –- anyone who threatens the American homeland.”

Schou also wrote the book Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, on which the 2014 movie was based. The gripping political thriller—which starred Jeremy Renner as Webb, the newspaper reporter who exposed the “dark alliance” between the CIA, Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and the cocaine trade—pilloried the spy agency and press for destroying Webb’s career. But the film was ineffectively marketed and distributed by Focus Features and soon disappeared.

These days, the CIA is used to more glossy treatment in Hollywood.

Instead of counting sheep in bed at night, I count all the studios and producers who bought the rights to my books, who insisted they were brave enough to tell the true story of the Kennedy assassinations and other dark tales from the American crypt. Let’s see, at first there was Lionsgate, then the Motion Picture Academy president, then Starz executives. They wanted to make the JFK drama the “tentpole” of their TV season. Then there was the global media giant, Fremantle. Then there was the A-list movie director. Then there was the big film producer and the Oscar-winning director. I‘ve forgotten a couple of others along the way.

Is it just Hollywood, Jake––or is it something more nefarious, like capture-and-kill? Who knows. But Oliver Stone was probably right. Hollywood can’t handle the truth.

The entertainment industry is a wilderness of mirrors. Perfect for the CIA.

Next week from David Talbot: The CIA and the U.S. press