Body of Lies: A Review

By TOMÁS DINGES, Correspondent

“Body of Lies” is a story about the dapper subtlety of the Jordanian intelligence service, the General Intelligence Department (GID) and the contrasting bumbling of an out-of-touch, impatient and ineffective CIA leadership that squashes good efforts by good agents.

The movie is a good story. Worth watching, if anything, to gain insight upon intelligence in Jordan, a country and intelligence service few lay people pay much attention to. It’s also a lot better than the other recent CIA flick, farce as it was, Burn After Reading, by the Coen Brothers.

Partners in fiction and in real-life, the GID have long collaborated with the CIA and allied with the United States. The movie is a film-adaptation of a novel of the same name. The author, David Ignatius, is a long-time columnist for the Washington Post who worked as the editor of the International Herald Tribune from 2000 – 2004. “Body of Lies” is his sixth novel.

Blessed or cursed by geography, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is bordered by Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Over his 47-year-rule, King Hussein has been a savvy diplomat playing countries and politicians to his benefit with regularity. Two recent biographies review his life. His foreign legacy is seen as pragmatic and non-confrontational, but pro-Western. He died in 1999, but left behind an intelligence service in the GID, or Dairat al-Mukhabarat al-Ammah that has often cooperated with U.S. intelligence services, most notably advancing a warning of imminent Al-Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001.

In this movie, the head of the GID is tall, eagle-eyed and wears tailored suits and silk even to torture sites, desert rendezvous (filmed in Morocco) and raids on bloodied terrorist warrens. His character is based upon a Jordanian official identified by a senior CIA official in a conversation with Ignatius.

This is intelligence chief as omniscient and omnipresent. With observational powers spread throughout the small country of six million, it brings to low relief the maxim that information is power.

While seen as a force for good, the Jordanian’s play all sides in order to maintain control and ensure their own survival.

The CIA agent is played by Leonard DiCaprio. An embattled young divorcee operating initially with a long scruffy beard and fluent Arabic in Samarra, he loses his loyal “indigenous asset” partner at the outset of the film. He is moved to Amman, Jordan. He receives little sympathy from his handler, played by Russell Crowe.

Crowe is a cold man with a southern accent and a curt directness that is like Dick Cheney. He runs violent operations aboard his yacht in the soft light of the early morning. He plots surveillance while picking his daughter up during cheerful after-school chaos at a private school in D.C.’s suburbs. He peers into Jordanian alleyways via a camera mounted on the flying MQ-1B UAV that broadcasts to his operations center.

The target for Crowe, DiCaprio and Hani Salaam, head of the GID, is a bin-Laden-like figure with an ego apparently greater than his tactical terrorist sense. After DiCaprio gains the trust of Salaam, they work together to develop surveillance of an al-Qaida-like cell in downtown Amman. Crowe runs a failed parallel operation, ruining that trust and blowing the operation. He is arrogant and forceful.

After a falling out at the Washington Mall, Crowe sends DiCaprio back to Amman. He is allowed back in by the GID, this time to create a straw terrorist organization (think scarecrow) in the region to incite and then eliminate the bin-Laden figure. The CIA relies on Saudi intelligence to eavesdrop and distribute information about the new terrorist group. The Saudi’s inform the Jordanians.

The straw organization was based upon “the famous British World War II deception of the Nazis described in the memoir, ‘The Man Who Never Was,’” according to Ignatius in an interview with Ken Silverstein of Harpers.org. The Brits used a “body of lies,” a decoy body cast out to the waters of the Atlantic with intelligence documents, to convince the Nazi’s they would invade from another place than they actually would.

In Jordan, the parallel operation being run by the CIA is actually surveilled by the GID. The GID uses DiCaprio, who gets captured as a result of an inexplicable, falling-out-of-character love interest. “Welcome to our Guantanamo,” goes the arch-villain as he applies a hammer blow to DiCaprio’s pinky finger. But, lo and behold, the slow, steady, GID cultivation of an asset leads them to the bin-Laden figure and saves DiCaprio from further mutilation.

The lesson: the GID’s methods are effective; the CIA’s are ineffective. This ineffectiveness will drive good agents away. Ignatius called it “seduction and abandonment,” a moral obligation to allies. DiCaprio would stay in Jordan after his mission, disillusioned with CIA methods.

The reality? I don’t know. Ignatius describes for Silverstein how Jordanians gently conducted interrogation while cultivating assets and accurate, actionable intelligence. But, his own paper, the Washington Post, wrote in 2007 that Jordan was actually a well-used waystation for captives of extraordinary rendition operations. This month Human Rights Watch released a 95-page report indicting Jordan for rampant use of torture. The CIA would capture targets and dump them in Jordan, where for as long as two years they would experience regular regimens of torture and interrogation. That wasn’t mentioned in this movie. Probably for good reason.

According to the New York Times review, Americans don’t watch movies that involve torture or politics these days (see Rendition, Redacted and Lions for Lambs). They will see Dark Knight, a dystopia driven by “ruthlessness, political expediency and moral bankruptcy,” according to the Times. This is part of what drives “Body of Lies.”

So, while it is true that politics are not overt, for it may have been too risky, the context of this movie is what drives it, even if it makes no grand statement in its telling.

Tomás Dinges can be reached at tdinges@gmail.com.