You’re not reading this

The Central Intelligence Agency is finally ready for its close-up — and for once without the help of Robert Novak.

“The Good Shepherd,” starring Matt Damon and directed by Robert De Niro, is Hollywood’s first attempt to dramatize the early history of the CIA — from its pre-World War II beginnings to the messy aftermath of the Bay of Pigs.

Since its inception as part of the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA hasn’t exactly been front and center in Hollywood films. When it shows up at all, its on-screen representatives generally skulk along the edges and in the shadows, as secret agents are supposed to do. They keep tabs on our more famous citizens (“Malcolm X”), use innocent people as pawns (“The Man With One Red Shoe”), and hang their own agents out to dry (“Spy Game”). They assassinate foreign leaders (“Syriana”), military leaders (“Apocalypse Now”), and possibly the president of the United States (“JFK”). They can be blazingly efficient (“The Amateur”) or buffoonishly incompetent (“Hopscotch”), but they are always dangerous.

Mostly, though, the CIA just isn’t there. In “Missing,” a film by one of the most daring political filmmakers in the world (Constantin Costa-Gavras), about a coup in a country in which the CIA has actually admitted involvement (Chile), the only time the word “CIA” is used is in relation to the missing American journalist, Charles Horman, who, because he asks a lot of questions, is thought by some Chileans to be CIA. As for those U.S. officials barbecuing in Chile on the day of the coup? It’s just a U.S. military group. Why are they there? They’re not there. Why are we talking? We’re not talking. Why are you reading this? You’re not reading this.

Alden Pyle, toymaker
It didn’t have to be this way. Within a year of being rechristened the FBI in 1935, “G-Men,” starring James Cagney, hit the screens. Within a year of V-J Day in 1945, a slew of movies mythologizing the OSS, the CIA’s World War II forerunner, were playing at theaters everywhere.

But from the beginning the CIA was more interested in staying behind the scenes than being on the screens. They bought the rights to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and changed the ending of the subsequent 1954 movie to suit U.S. political interests. They encouraged Hollywood producers to use well-dressed black actors in films to offset Soviet charges of American racism.

One of the more prescient political novels of the Cold War era is Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” published in 1955, in which a cynical British journalist (Thomas Fowler) and an idealistic young American (Alden Pyle) fight over a Vietnamese girl (Phuong) during the waning days of the French occupation of Vietnam. Turns out Pyle is CIA, and the plastics he’s bringing in are explosives, and the terrorist attack in Saigon was orchestrated by Pyle’s man, General The, to discredit the communists. Pyle winds up dead but the damage is done: A U.S.-backed megalomaniac is ready to take over when the French leave.

Hollywood — with advice from CIA officer Edward Lansdale, thought to be a model for Pyle — altered the story for its 1958 screen version. Here Pyle is what he seems to be: a boy scout. His goal is what he says it is: bringing toys to the children of Vietnam. He still winds up dead, but it’s a simple case of betrayal rather than a complex case of the chickens coming home to roost. Which makes the film, yes, a little less prophetic.

“Americans aren’t brought up to fight the way the enemy fights,” the Gen. Donovan character tells his recruits in “OSS,” a 1946 thriller starring Alan Ladd. “We can learn to become intelligence agents and saboteurs if we have to. But we’re too sentimental, too trusting, too easy-going...”

You can dismiss this as Hollywood hokum — he also refers to the embattled French as “a simple people,” probably a greater insult to French pride than the Nazi occupation — but it’s American hokum, too, part of our country’s idealized self-image. Honest Abe. “I cannot tell a lie.” Bluntness over pretense. We are the Paul Fist-in-Your-Face of countries. Skulking? How is that heroic? Overthrowing the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala in 1954? Where’s the hero in that?

Leiter. Felix Leiter
As a result, the agency’s now ubiquitous acronym was still unknown enough in 1963 to allow for the following conversation between Audrey Hepburn and Walter Matthau in “Charade”:

“Mrs. Lampert, do you know what the CIA is?”
“I don’t suppose it’s an airline, is it?”
“Central Intelligence Agency. CIA.”
“You mean spies and all that?”

The first identified CIA agent to appear in a mainstream film may have been Felix Leiter in 1962’s “Dr. No.” As an agent, he was perfect: bland and official. He blended in — better than he knew. In nine James Bond movies he was played by eight different actors. He was never sexy, never got the girl, always played second or third or fifth fiddle. It’s an oddity that Bond, the greatest movie spy, represented a second-rate power, but then the Bond movies are fantasies after all, escapist entertainment, and more popular abroad than in the U.S. If the hero had been CIA? Creating havoc in foreign countries? Not so escapist. Not much entertainment. The very toothlessness of Great Britain was part of its appeal.

Bond’s success led to a massive influx of on-screen spy organizations — ICE for Matt Helm, ZOWIE for “Our Man Flint,” IMF for “Mission: Impossible,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” — but not for the CIA. Agency heroes were relegated to B-flicks, like 1965’s awful “Operation C.I.A.,” starring a young Burt Reynolds let loose in Saigon, where, apparently, they speak Thai.

More and more of the CIA’s operations were being outed, and they didn’t make us look good. Assassinating world leaders? Trying to make Castro’s beard fall out? Spying on Eartha Kitt and other U.S. citizens? Breaking into Democratic National Headquarters? Just who were these clowns anyway? The CIA seemed less like defenders of the American way and more like the Keystone cops of the Cold War.

Which, of course, is about the time they finally began to appear on the screen.

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