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.

A Case of Censorship by Omission

BY MATT KENNARD, Columnist

Over the months of December 2007 and January 2008 the London Sunday Times published some of the most revelatory and important stories to have graced the British newspapers for decades. Their investigative team dug deep into claims by a former FBI translator that Marc Grossman, a top State Department official, “was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the [nuclear] information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.” It emerged last week, through an interview with one of the journalists on the story, that the FBI was complaining to the Sunday Times about its propensity to take journalism seriously and interview a few of their formers. A quick digest of what the case involves and how it has been inexplicably blacked out by the U.S. media is a shocking tale of political corruption and media venality.

Thirty-eight-year-old Sibel Edmonds is the whistleblower, and her claims are stunning. Grossman, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997, and later Under Secretary of State, is accused by Edmonds of “aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

The nuclear secrets that he is alleged to have let seep out for his own personal aggrandizement were dribbled to agents from Pakistan and Turkey. It is assumed that they have since fallen into the hands of infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist and trader A.Q. Khan, who is known to have sold secret nuclear information to a host of rogue regimes from North Korea to Iran.

The FBI hired Edmonds nine days after 9/11. They fired her six months later. She has claimed that she was fired because she highlighted the criminality of her seniors and her principled stand was not to be tolerated. She took her claim to the courts and filed suit against the Department of Justice, the FBI and several high-level officials in July 2002. In October 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege—a politicized and often misused legal doctrine—to block the release of any of the material that Edmonds had in her possession because it endangered national security.

But in the Sunday Times she has rehashed these claims with more damning furnishings. The latest revelation is that Grossman “tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.” She came into possession of all this information as she translated hundred of hours of intercepted recordings made during a six-year FBI investigation focused on an international nuclear smuggling ring.

And it is not only Grossman who is implicated. On Edmonds’ website she also fingers Douglas J. Feith, Undersecretary of State for Policy from July 2001 to August 2005, and Richard N. Perle, Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, among a dozen others. And the FBI has been accused by the Sunday Times of lying blatantly when they denied the existence of a key case file detailing corruption in the FBI after a Freedom of Information Act request from a human rights group. The Sunday Times claims it knows the file exists.

But these earth-shattering revelations have, astonishingly, not appeared in one mainstream newspaper in the United States. A whistleblower highlighting criminality at the highest echelons of government, the FBI blatantly lying about a report in its possession: these scoops have been plastered across one of the most august journals in Britain, yet not one outlet deigns to print it here in the U.S. What is going on?

The reticence is worse than weird. It is genuinely conspiratorial. Why on earth would titles like the New York Times and the Washington Post deem this story not important enough to get even a few column inches in their newspapers? Why is there this sordid silence?

Harry Shearer, one of the voices behind the Simpsons, asks these same questions on his Huffington Post blog. “The theft of U.S. nuclear secrets, the diverting of them to Pakistan (and, according to Edmonds, Saudi Arabia), the involvement of Israel in the scheme,” he writes, “all of these would justify as jaw-droppingly newsworthy in a rational journalistic universe. Clearly, that’s not where we live.”

Daniel Ellsberg, the great CIA whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers (an internal CIA evaluation of the Vietnam War decision-making) in 1971 goes further. The release of the Pentagon Papers caused a national political storm and changed the trajectory of the war in Indochina. He says Edmonds’ revelations are potentially even more explosive, but laments the mute media. “It’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971,” he writes. “They printed them then. Would they today?” he asks.

“For the last two weeks—one could say, for years—the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds…. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.”

Various rumors and theories are ricocheting around the blogosphere. Various commentators are saying there is evidence that the powerful individuals being targeted by Edmonds are contacting media outlets and beseeching them not to print, and that the newspapers are being craven and supine under this duress. Others are cleaving towards the more prosaic explanation that the story ‘lacks legs’ and adds nothing new to Edmonds’ previous utterances since she was fired. I know which of the theories I believe.

Reams of comments have appeared under the Sunday Times articles, many coming from despairing American citizens railing against their impotent media. The latest installment—the third in the series—has Michael Monk, from Raleigh N.C. lamenting in the comments section: “You can be the free press we don’t have in the states.” Ron Curtis, of Cleburne, T.X., writes more pugnaciously, “The American ‘news’ media is a disgrace and nothing more than a modern-day Izvestia or Pravda of the Soviet era, spewing propaganda and brainwashing Joe Sixpack with images of Britney and nothing-else-matters-wall-to-wall election coverage.”

Is Mr. Curtis right? One of the most potent tools of thought control in an ostensibly democratic society is censorship by omission: it does not involve overt manipulation of reality, but the more insidious shielding of germane information from the populace. The American media need to show us, and show us soon, that they haven’t consciously imbibed this technique to keep the corrupt politicians happy and the people in the dark. Otherwise this transatlantic blockade of information is going to get more embarrassing and the silence increasingly hard to uphold.