Angelina Jolie’s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the
Deep State
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem
strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state
have always been intimately intertwined.
by Alan Macleod
November 04th, 2020
By Alan Macleod
With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in
the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood
legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in
Time magazine, the star of “Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,”
sat down with the former head of the UK’s MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to
ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.
“Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the
current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to
denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious
problem, and we should organize to prevent it,” the British spook told the
actress.
Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to
challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. “We are going to have two sharply
different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable
future. We mustn’t be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend
ourselves,” he told Jolie.
Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world’s most
notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem
strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state
have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself
as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN
Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time
rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s worst human rights abuses.
At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration,
responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world’s worst
humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.
Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security
apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign
Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times
with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and
Myanmar. “Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up
the mantle of global leadership,” they questionably asserted, decrying
America’s “steady retreat over the past decade” that has, “dangerously eroded
the rule of law,” and condemned the Trump administration’s inaction in Syria
that could have “deterred mass atrocities,” and reduced the refugee crisis.
Salt
Jolie’s collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to
her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked
closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point
is the 2010 blockbuster Salt, where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a
Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna
Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country
inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with
Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new
Cold War.
“Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change,
for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians,” Tom Secker,
an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress. “If you watch
the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry
Medvedev.”
Salt, Angelina Jolie Evil Russian
Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer
“We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA,” said Jolie of her experiences
preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the
organization; “One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women
that you can‟t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really
are,” she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical
advisor.
A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA
involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. “In an effort to
ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA,” it reads. “For
years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment
industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors,
producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help
debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency
equities,” it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, “to help
prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency,” in mass media.
Propaganda on an enormous scale
The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford
and Secker’s book “National Security Cinema” details how, since 2005, documents
they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely
collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes
many of the largest film franchises, such as “Iron Man,” “Transformers,” “James
Bond,” and “Mission: Impossible,” and hit TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,”
“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Master Chef” and “The Price is Right.”
In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions,
such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical
direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the
agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations
are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.
“The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the
producers of “Hulk” (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive,”
Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress.
But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale…What I
suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that
rewrite scripts — and we find they’re all on the side of the national security
state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of
military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual
assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It
amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture.”
Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or
intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state,
who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better
propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar
content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so
wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.
In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John
Rizzo, wrote that his organization “has long had a special relationship with
the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering
relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers,
directors, big-name actors.” Many of America’s most familiar faces have visited
the organization’s headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De
Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.
In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of
Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely
with Hollywood to further its own image.
Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show “Jack Ryan,” for instance, has
the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical
dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro).
John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in
order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as
amazingly “apolitical.” “They’re always trying to do the right thing,” he said
of them, claiming they “care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic
way.”
Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside
Venezuela’s largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a
submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.
“Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don’t know it. And I
wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common,” said
“Batman” star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps
jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.
Propaganda works
The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep
state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of
the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes
from the hit spy series “24” to liberal college students made them far more
likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
Democrat-aligned voters’ opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the
last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution
(and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).
Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely
opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support
and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American
aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a
champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for
destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.
