Oddly, on the night I watched a fictional CIA operative work for years to kill Osama bin Laden, I come home to read the obituary of an actual CIA operative, who used traditional (non-torture*) methods to catch the worst traitor in CIA history, Aldrich Ames. Jeanne Vertefeuille joined the agency in 1954 as a typist, and, as a mid-level worker in the 80s, was chosen as part of a small team tasks to find a potential mole. It took eight years. There’s this from the obituary:
In a debriefing after his arrest, Mr. Ames told his interrogators that when K.G.B. officials had asked for the name of a C.I.A. official whom they might plausibly frame as a mole, he said he gave them Ms. Vertefeuille’s name, adding that she was the principal mole hunter.
His admission surprised her. “At first, I wanted to jump across the table and strangle him,” Ms. Vertefeuille said. “But then I started laughing. It really was funny, because he was the one in shackles, not me.”
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*Having seen Zero Dark Thirty, I’ll note that I couldn’t characterize it as “pro-torture,” or as suggesting that torture was key in identifying bin Laden’s courier. The largest breaks depicted come from standard-non-torture methods– information that had been neglected in existing files sent by friendly intelligence agencies, telephone intelligence, and dogged work on the ground to find and then follow the courier. I hope to write more about the movie, which I would recommend, in a later post.
Thanks for posting about J.V. Can’t wait to see “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Fascinating. Sad how it can take an obit to bring such folks to light.
Looking fwd to the ZDT post of course. Does the threat of more torture provoke a disclosure?
You’re saying the CIA agent in “Zero Dark 30″ is fictional? From this article, the portrayal seems to be pretty accurate:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-zero-dark-thirty-shes-the-hero-in-real-life-cia-agents-career-is-more-complicated/2012/12/10/cedc227e-42dd-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_story_1.html
So she apparently was an abrasive personality who was in fact the driving force befind finding Bin Laden.
a mid level worker, former typist, became 007? HAH
Read the obit, Terminator. After 30 years in, she was picked as a part of a 4 person team to find a mole that the people running the CIA were committed to disbelieve existed (partly because of the way the agency had disemboweled itself during Angelton’s mole hunt, I’m sure). She was set up for a project people thought would fail. And she didn’t.
I’m not sure how you equate the kind of methods she was using with 007, in any event.
Anderson: arguably. The movie is pointedly ambiguous about what provoked it.
Mandrake wrote: “You’re saying the CIA agent in “Zero Dark 30″ is fictional?”
I have an odd reaction to that. What did I say that provoked it? In any event, I read the Wash Post article when they published it. Having seen the movie, I’d certainly say the officer is fictionalized– to make the movie work from a single point of view, she’s given a number of rolls that I have trouble believing one agent would hold– in addition to analysis, she gets directly involved in torture (that didn’t stretch credulity), but then is the one who reveals to the Navy Seals who the target is, and does their major briefing, and then is the one who officially identifies the body (pretty informally, too– zips open the body bag, gives him a good hard look, and then tells Washington that the president can be informed that the CIA official charged with ID has made the ID).
I wondered if the incident where the 9 CIA folks died in a car bombing occurred as the movie describes it. If so, the CIA agent running that particular operation was behaving very stupidly– it’s like a moment in a slasher movie when the audience wants to scream at the teenager “Don’t open that closet!”
It’s a fictionalized account of actual events (an interesting one, too). In the ways I’ve noted (and others), the screenwriter and director have simplified some things and combined others in the interest of creating a steamroller of a narrative, and they accomplished that goal