And not all of the pieces fit in the puzzle.” “Pieces fall from the sky and add to the pile the analyst already has,” she said.
ZERO DARK THIRTY MEANING MOVIE
I talked to her by phone when the movie came out. “It’s not connecting dots, it’s more like a jigsaw puzzle,” said Cindy Storer, an ex-CIA analyst, one of the group that goes back before 9/11. You’re talking about thousands upon thousands of megabytes to collate, analyze, parse, analyze again, and define gaps. Telling the whole story would be a looooong movie.Īfter 9/11, the actual process involved reconciling vast bodies of information.
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Gina Bennett, a veteran CIA analyst, wrote the first strategic warning about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden while at the State Department in 1993. Saying otherwise misrepresents not only how the hunt for bin Laden worked, but how the whole system works. This 10-year hunt involved hundreds of people with several people at the core.) More often than not, effective intelligence-including the effort to find Osama bin Laden-is the result of sustained, collective efforts that spark moments of intuition among a pool of experts and processes, not individual hunches that compel monumental effort. (But they do ride with a large posse that helps with more than the gunfights.
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In reality, cowboys don’t work as targeters. You expect to see someone chasing the C-130 shouting, “Shane, come back!” Because she's not actually Clint Eastwood, she cries a little. She gathers up a posse, heads out, and kills the bad guy. She's Clint Eastwood's “Man With No Name,” re-imagined as a twenty-something woman. People applaud the team that's on the court when the buzzer goes off.īut I was surprised at what I saw. We've got the go-it-alone gunslinger, Maya, whose past is murky and future is vague. Reading hundreds of reports and crafting papers is just not that exciting. And depicting the reality of national security is challenging: much of the information is secret, and a lot of it is just not dramatic. I get that this is a Hollywood movie. Hollywood will gravitate to a film that is digestible and, ultimately, profitable. And not just the parts involving torture that has become such a major point of contention around the film. The whole story the film tells, both in terms of the time scale and the type of human effort it depicts, is likely to create some important misconceptions for the public about how our national security system really works. When I became a supervisor, I did the same thing, and dodged my share of clipboards.īut for all the similarities between my career and fictional Maya’s, the movie’s version of how counter-terrorism works didn’t resonate with me. It’s easier for established officers to take a hit over a bad decision than for a new officer, whose career could end on an early miscall.
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Supervisors sell this as "top cover" for the lower-level officer, and there is some truth to that. I could relate to Maya as a mid-level officer, being asked to "backbench" at a briefing-you’re briefing the guy who has to brief the guy-while she knows it’s her analysis that brought everyone together in the room.