This is the Job
The eerily omniscient Mark Felt movie ended at 9pm. What an unbelievable story; a President with henchmen installed in DOJ, CIA and FBI and all other agencies who give more loyalty to a misguided and ill-intentioned traitor of a leader than to the nation and people they are meant to serve. That couldn’t possibly happen again, could it? And now I was looking for another movie to take me through to a decent bedtime that would be less likely to have me rise in the dark of the San Diego night when my still East Coast body says its time you get up. And there it was, only a third into it, Spy Games with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. I think Spy Games May be the best and most entertainingly accurate depiction of what likely goes on in Langley than any movie before or since. It seemed the perfect epilogue to the Watergate expose just ending. The only challenge would be not thinking of Redford as a Washington Post journalist turned uber-spy.
The contrast of the two movies was more vexing than expected. Deputy Director Felt was the model of discipline and sobriety in a post-Hoover FBI. He was a 35-year organization man who knew way too much about far too much. He was the moral leader of his team and had little or no respect for the political appointees like L. Patrick Gray, the Acting Director who was Nixon’s man. He despised the leaking of confidential investigative information to the White House that Gray clearly enabled. And yet, Felt became the man who out of an extreme sense of duty to the American people, felt the need to betray the administration and his oath of office and whistleblow the truth about Watergate to the Washington Post. He thereby became one of the most important, if somewhat risque-named as Deep Throat, informers in modern American history. Felt was the least likely double-agent imaginable. He was buttoned-up and professional. He was discrete to a fault. But he was a patriot in the end in that he was prepared to give it all up for the sake of the country.
Spy Games is an interesting movie about the end of a CIA operative’s (Redford) career and how he spends his last day using all his tradecraft skills to help a young operative that he recruited years before and who is being sacrificed by the Agency for some greater glory in a trade negotiation (actually to just insure that some Agency functionaries don’t encounter any difficult questions in their Congressional testimony). During the course of the day, the Agency bureaucrats go through the process of trying to unwrap why the younger agent (Pitt) has broken into a Chinese prison. Meanwhile, Redford is working against the Agency behind the scenes and with his own contacts and resources. The irony in this movie is less about Redford doing things in contradiction to the Agency, we all tend to believe that operatives always have their own agendas that probably don’t connect well Agency objectives. The unusual aspect of all of this is that Redford goes against his own rules. When he’s training Pitt he tells him with great conviction that he cannot put the safety of “assets” above his own safety. He tells Pitt, again with great conviction, that he (Redford) will not come to get him if he ever gets into trouble. The one added piece of advice is for Pitt to put aside enough money so he can “die somewhere sunny”.
During the course of the last day of finagling with the Agency big-wigs, Redford breaks every one of his own rules. He uses his Bahama Bungalow money to set up the escape for Pitt and his paramour (who is also in the prison and is the reason for the attempted break-in). This woman is in the Chinese prison due to Redford’s own counter-intelligence efforts (she is sort of an anti-American terrorist sympathizer). So with one fell swoop that includes his safe money, his career reputation, perhaps his freedom (since what he is doing is presumably illegal) and the resources of the U.S. Government that he has learned how to commandeer, Redford puts in motion the operation under the moniker “Dinner Out”, which is a name used by Pitt in the bad old Beirut days to buy Redford a special birthday gift.
At one point during Pitt’s training in Berlin, when Redford reads Pitt the Riot Act about his rules of engagement, Pitt protests that these “assets” are people and they needed to be treated like people. This is what sets Redford off on his lessons, but not before he explains to Pitt that “this is the job” and that it’s a damn important job at that. He tells Pitt that if he doesn’t do it they will simply get someone who will. Life is not fair. The needs of the “Army” will be served, and “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die.” This is what makes the end of the movie with Redford escaping Langley’s guarded gate in the nick of time, so special. It has an air of Legends of the Fall (another Pitt classic) when Aiden Quinn argues to the Universe that he (Pitt) broke all the rules and yet they all still loved him best. We all end the movie loving Redford, just like we all ended loving Liam Neisen’s Mark Felt character, as much or more for their willingness the break the rules for the right reason as because they were the hero of the respective story.
This is the job. When I changed paths after college and went into banking instead of international development work, like I had trained to do, I asked my mother, who had spent her forty year career in international development, if she was disappointed in me. She said she was not because the only way the world would change for the better was if people of conscience chose to go to work in areas like banking which were prone to insensitive rule-following. This is the job. It’s important that it be done and done right and you can correct for the failings inherent in the job later on. As I head off into my next chapter, I need to remember that. I have always believed in just doing the job, but I try never to forget the demands of the Universe after the job is done.