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The Keystone cops of the Cold War
This is how I first encountered them: as the bumbling super-patriot Col. Flagg on TV’s “M*A*S*H,” and as the hipster agents played by Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould in their over-obvious attempt to re-make their “M*A*S*H” film success: “S*P*Y*S.” I remember a 1975 “Smothers Brothers” sketch in which Pat Paulsen, playing a CIA director, tries to spin the CIA’s role in a more positive manner — all the while receiving phone calls and painting “Xs” over portraits of world leaders around his office. The laughter it provoked was knowing; dig a centimeter deeper and it’s not so funny.

That’s always the problem with CIA comedies. In “The Man with One Red Shoe,” Dabney Coleman plays a deputy CIA director who says, “I haven’t felt this good since I overthrew the government of Chile” — a line which probably doesn’t play well in Santiago. “The In-Laws,” starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, is a glorious exception.

1970s CIA dramas, on the other hand, tend to be chilling and heavy-handed. Go down the CIA hole and all the lines blur: between right and wrong, truth and fiction, in and out. If someone wants in, they’re told they can’t come in. If someone wants out, they’re told, “Where might ‘out’ be?” It’s all very “Alice in Wonderland.” Who’s pulling the strings? Who can you trust? Not the CIA — they kept trying to kill their own: Burt Lancaster in “Scorpio,” Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor,” John Savage in “The Amateur.”

“You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?” Redford asks incredulously in “Condor.”

Craig T. Nelson puts it more cynically in “The Osterman Weekend”: “The truth is a lie that hasn’t been found out yet.”

Even the good guys and bad guys blurred together. In “Scorpio” Lancaster compares new CIA agents to KGB agents. In “The Amateur,” a Holocaust survivor compares them to the Gestapo. “When I first worked for the agency, its use seemed so clear,” says field agent Walter Matthau in “Hopscotch.” “Now you need a scorecard to know who the players are. Even then it’s fuzzy.”

In “Condor,” the quintessential 1970s CIA drama, CIA director John Houseman sums up the decade when he’s asked if he misses the kind of action he saw in the intelligence field before World War II. He responds, in that impeccable Houseman voice, “I miss that kind of clarity.”

Jack Ryan to the rescue
As we all did. That’s what the Reagan years were about, right? Re-establishing clarity? Evil Empire vs. Morning in America? Yet our on-screen CIA remained fuzzy. It continued to use innocent people as pawns in power games: Rutger Hauer in “Osterman,” Tom Hanks in “Red Shoe,” Beatty and Hoffman in “Ishtar.” Its best agents were always ex-agents: Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal and the like. Men no longer beholden to the morally suspect and idiotic policies of their bosses.

Jack Ryan changed all that. In “The Hunt for Red October,” in 1990, he’s an analyst, not a field agent, but he still jumps into the fray — or, in his case, into the frigid North Atlantic. He’s smart. His boss, James Earl Jones, is smart. Hell, the agency is smart. This had never been done before. A team of smart CIA agents working together to prevent a war?

Things got crazier when Harrison Ford took over the role from Alec Baldwin and turned Ryan into more of a lone gunman (without a gun): fighting Irish terrorists in “Patriot Games” and Colombian druglords in “Clear and Present Danger.” Near the end of the latter film you get a preposterous scene: Ryan trembling with moral outrage as he lectures the President of the United States. Moral outrage from the CIA?

Hollywood was simply following the headlines. If the big scandal of the 1960s was Bay of Pigs (a CIA operation), and the big scandal of the 1970s was Watergate (Barker, McCord, Hunt, et al), the big scandal of the 1980s was Iran-Contra, which, while it involved CIA agents in lesser roles, was a National Security Council operation: Oliver North and John Poindexter and the like. All morally repugnant ops didn’t have to be placed at the CIA’s doorstep.

Witness this decade’s build-up to the Iraq War and its on-screen counterpart: “Syriana.” George Clooney’s CIA operative tries to cut through the crap to tell the truth about the Mid-East to “The Committee for the Liberation of Iran” but they’re not buying. His evidence doesn’t support their policies. They’re only looking at evidence that supports their policies.

Still, “Clear and Present Danger” has a forced innocence that’s hard to take — never more so than when long-time CIA administrator James Earl Jones, dying of cancer, is shocked, shocked, that his government could be involved in something as awful as covert operations in Latin America. “You thought you had a job that made a difference, that you thought was honorable,” he says. “And then you see this.” One wonders if the old man had been reading his memos.

Americans love their innocence and keep returning to it — against all odds and common sense. By the beginning of the new century, the CIA was considered harmless enough to allow for roles for kids (“Spy Kids”), teenagers (“Cody Banks”), Johnny Depp (“Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and Chris Rock (“Bad Company”). Here we have the new clarity. CIA? Wheeee!

Chickens coming home to roost
Of course CIA movies for adults were still being made. For an action-thriller, “Spy Game” is a fairly realistic look at the agency. Then there’s the “chicken coming home to roost” movies. In “The Spook Who Sat By the Door,” a surprisingly good 1973 B-picture, the CIA’s first African-American operative leaves the agency to foment a black power revolution in Chicago. In “In the Line of Fire,” John Malkovich’s CIA assassin is intent on killing the President of the United States. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done for God and country?” he asks. “Some pretty horrible things.” So now he’s doing them to God and country.

More controversially, there’s Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” which suffers from length, paranoia and, above all, the smallness and creepiness of the men being prosecuted versus the vast sweep of history and power they are accused of representing. The film’s overall argument, though, removed from the sweaty, frenetic pace of the film, is actually (or aesthetically) logical. It’s “Frankenstein.” The monster we create ends up killing us. We created the CIA not only to gather foreign intelligence but to ensure that foreign governments remained the right kinds of governments. Any whiff of left-wing bias, any attempts at land-grabbing socialism, any friendly talks with the Soviet Union could be met with a CIA-backed coup. And if the CIA felt that our own government had too much of a left-wing bias? What then?

It’s the same aesthetic logic as in “The Godfather” movies. The power Michael Corleone wields to save his family (Part I) is the power he uses to destroy his family (Part II). Once you go down that path, it’s hard to stop.

The Bourne Shepherd
Which brings us to “The Good Shepherd.” De Niro’s film is epic in length, has an all-star cast (Damon, Angelina Jolie, De Niro, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, William Hurt), and is written by Oscar-winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “The Insider,” “Munich”). It just doesn’t work. Edward Wilson (Damon) starts out dull and then clams up. People in the movie don’t talk like people, they talk like themes. “If you lie to your friends, they won’t trust you and you’ll never feel safe,” Wilson’s father tells him.

“Get out while you still can, while you still believe, while you still have a soul,” Wilson’s agency mentor tells him. We see where the movie is going but it takes forever to get there. It’s both too obvious and too muddled — a neat trick.

Michael Gambon, as Wilson’s mentor, is good, as always, and there’s a powerful scene involving the torture of a Russian defector that suggests parallels, for those who want them, between Cold War and War on Terror paranoia. Is our fear of the enemy blinding us to its weaknesses? Does our fear actually make the enemy stronger? Do we even know what we’re doing? But this scene is a blip.

If you truly want to understand the agency — or at least our conflicting desires towards it — go no further than Damon’s other CIA alter-ego, Jason Bourne. He’s both superhuman assassin and clean-cut amnesiac. He can kick serious ass and then blink as innocent as a newborn babe. This is exactly what we want in a CIA agent. He does the dirty work our paranoia demands and then forgets all about it so our conscience is clean. Iran? Guatemala? Cuba? Vietnam? Chile? We just…don’t remember.

If we ever knew in the first place.

Erik Lundegaard doesn’t write for MSNBC.com. He can’t be reached at: .

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