- 31 minutes ago
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00There's a version of your favorite films and TV shows that you weren't allowed to see.
00:05Scripts were rewritten, scenes were cut, endings were changed, and characters were altered.
00:10They had stamped top secret on the top and the bottom and the sides in the margins of every single
00:16page.
00:17And I said, guys, this is not top secret. This is a Hollywood movie. It's already on video. It's done.
00:24I'm talking children's animations with rewritten endings, comedy films you've never heard of with deleted scenes, superhero franchises built in
00:32secretive contracts, and a screenwriter who tried to tell the wrong story and was found dead with both hands missing.
00:39It's not an accident that every Hollywood movie about the CIA is pro-CIA.
00:45This has been running since the 1940s. What started with Walt Disney producing propaganda shorts for the military has now
00:52evolved into a formal permanent operation.
00:55One that now reaches into the biggest franchises on the planet, and it hasn't stopped expanding from there.
01:01When John Kiriakou, a CEI whistleblower who went to prison for exposing the torture program, was asked on the diary
01:07of his CEO how the agency would hypothetically design an influence campaign, this was his answer.
01:13You would have to have a goal that would be specific enough that you could actually track the progress to
01:20it.
01:21It has to be a message. You've got to be able to get a specific, well-honed message out there.
01:28And the message can be anything. It could be, you know, love the CIA, we're the good guys.
01:34It could be support the overthrow of the Iranian government.
01:37It could be, you know, any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu is anti-semitism.
01:44It could be anything you want it to be. You just have to make sure that it's repeated enough.
01:47He mentions a couple of things there that are highly relevant right now.
01:51Take Argo, an Oscar-winning film that almost everyone has heard of.
01:54The plot follows a CIA officer who poses as a Hollywood producer to smuggle six American diplomats out of Iran,
02:01all during the 1979 hostage crisis.
02:03As you can imagine, the CIA is unambiguously the hero.
02:08There's barely a single mention of the CIA's overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government,
02:12or the installing of a dictator who ruled with a secret police force trained by the CIA.
02:17And given the current conflict in Iran, you could reasonably argue that the public's understanding of who Iran is and
02:23how he got there was influenced, in part, by films exactly like this.
02:27During filming, Affleck visited CIA headquarters multiple times, sat in roundtables in the director's conference room, and even emailed the
02:35agency promising to do the agency proud.
02:38The CIA had actually been promoting the Argo operation as a suggested movie plot on their own website years before
02:44the film was made,
02:45and even thanked Affleck publicly on Twitter for the film.
02:48Affleck said this when interviewed as part of the press tour.
02:51Are there many actors in Hollywood who also moonlight as agents, do you think?
02:55I think there are probably quite a few, yes.
02:56I think probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents, and we just don't know it.
03:00But Argo's only the surface, and you'll be shocked about where exactly the strategy operates in Hollywood,
03:06the films it touches, and how smart it truly is.
03:09Take the original script for The Hulk.
03:11The canon storyline, as per the comic, involved Bruce Banner being transformed after a US military program gone wrong.
03:17It also included dialogue referencing Operation Ranch Hand, a real program that sprayed roughly 20 million gallons of chemical herbicides,
03:26including Agent Orange over Southeast Asia, poisoning a possible 4 million people.
03:30Both details were removed purposefully by CIA advisors.
03:34This is according to leaked files seen by The Conversation.
03:37They then changed the origin story to a lab experiment gone wrong instead,
03:41because they couldn't risk anti-government sentiments in a franchise of this size.
03:45In the Transformers films, a Pentagon liaison inserted specific dialogue instead of removing it.
03:51In one scene, just after American troops had been attacked by a Deception robot,
03:55he added the line, bring him home, to reinforce US military values.
03:59Numerous superhero films, including practically the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe,
04:03which is the single biggest franchise in history, were all built on this from the ground up.
04:08Captain Marvel was granted full Air Force support.
04:11The Air Force was advertising the film on social media before Marvel had even started marketing it.
04:16Captain Marvel and Black Panther were both used directly in recruitment campaigns.
04:21The result was a documented spike in female applicants to the Air Force Academy.
04:25They literally called it, the Captain Marvel Effect.
04:28On Iron Man, which was massively supported by the Pentagon,
04:31with 1 billion dollars worth of equipment,
04:33there were literally fights on set between the directors and the agency.
04:36A Pentagon liaison, Phil Strub, objected to a line in which a military character says,
04:41people would kill themselves for the opportunities I have.
04:44The director, John, pushed back, and soon,
04:46they were standing on the flight lines at Edwards Air Force Base with 200 crew watching.
04:50They eventually settled on they'd walk over hot coals,
04:53but even then, that didn't make the final cut.
04:56But a much weirder example is Meet the Parents,
04:58when Ben Stiller's character walks into Robert De Niro's workplace.
05:01In the original script, he finds CIA torture manuals that was rewritten.
05:06Now he finds photos of De Niro meeting Bill Clinton.
05:09IMDb credits Chase Brandon as a technical advisor,
05:12and Milt Bearden as consultant CIA, on the film which you can see here.
05:17These examples just cover what we know for certain from a leak of 60,000 pages of documents,
05:23which confirmed the CIA has been involved in more than 2,500 productions in total.
05:28The Pentagon runs something called the Entertainment Media Office,
05:31a formal liaison operation that works directly with Hollywood Studios.
05:35They support studios financially, offer advice on sensitive topics,
05:39and lend them specialist equipment and prime filming locations.
05:42In exchange for permissions, the CIA get to read and approve the script before a single frame is shot.
05:47They also have complete veto power, and directors are obliged to follow their word.
05:52One Pentagon minder said on record,
05:54If they don't do what I say, I take my toys and go away.
05:58A declassified CIA document released in 2019 all but confirms that,
06:03logging dozens of meetings between the CIA's Office of Public Affairs and executives from NBC,
06:07Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Paramount, and CAA.
06:11The document covers just two years from 2014 to 2016.
06:15It includes lunches, development deals on campus filming approvals,
06:19and meetings to develop CIA-themed TV shows.
06:22The CIA has always claimed it merely answers requests on an as-needed basis.
06:27The document shows active outreach.
06:29The agency is going to the studios, not the other way around.
06:32But you have to stretch back much further to find out when this all began.
06:36Because when one of George Orwell's most important works was adapted into a movie,
06:40the CIA had the final say over its closing moments.
06:43That film is Animal Farm, a classic anti-establishment story about rebelling against power.
06:48After Orwell died, the film's rights to Animal Farm were purchased by two men,
06:52and both were undercover CIA agents.
06:55This was in 1954, the height of the Cold War and the Red Scare,
06:59when the fear of communism was at its peak.
07:01The CIA funded the entire animation.
07:03They hired British animators, deliberately avoiding American studios to create distance,
07:08and because the agency distrusted Hollywood animators during the Red Scare.
07:12And they rewrote the ending.
07:14In Orwell's book, the animals look through the farmhouse window and can't tell the pigs from the humans.
07:19The line says, quote,
07:20The creatures outside look from pig to man, and from pig to man, and from pig to man again.
07:25But already it was impossible to say which was which.
07:28This is the whole point.
07:29Revolution replaces one set of oppressors with another.
07:32Capitalism and communism are equally corrupt.
07:35The CIA couldn't have that message going out.
07:37So, their version ends with the animals triumphantly overthrowing the pigs in a second revolution.
07:43Communism bad, rebellion good, America wins by implication.
07:47See, watch how they storm the building and how it doesn't imply the same message as the book at all.
07:53It's subtle, but the new version reinforces the division between good and bad.
07:57It creates a moral precedent that corrupt systems can be overthrown and replaced with something better.
08:02Which is a really comforting thought, unless you realize it's exactly the story the CIA tells every time it topples
08:09a government.
08:10Orwell's ending says the opposite, that power corrupts regardless of who holds it.
08:15And that revolution just replaces one set of oppressors with another.
08:18The director, Joy Batchelor, strongly opposed the change.
08:22So, the CIA threatened to pull financing.
08:25The intelligence officer, E. Howard Hunt, who later became involved in the Watergate scandal,
08:29said the film was, quote, carefully tweaked to heighten the anti-communist message.
08:34Although it was originally aimed at adults, Animal Farm found its primary audience in school over the US and Europe.
08:40By then, the state and media were already deeply intertwined.
08:43Governments had correctly identified that the media was the best way to access the minds of the public.
08:49Generations of children were shown a CIA-funded film with a CIA rewritten ending,
08:54as if this was a faithful adaption of Orwell.
08:57So, you may not be surprised to learn that Disney was the testing ground for how effective propaganda could be.
09:02While it might be hard to believe today, Disney was actually going broke, and the government offered it a deal.
09:08They accepted, and within two years, over 90% of Disney's output, mostly propaganda, was government content.
09:14Disney characters found their way into all sorts of government materials, including 1,200 military insignia.
09:21Walt Disney even personally designed this terrifying Mickey Mouse gas mask,
09:25or to make children less afraid during air raids.
09:28If you look at Disney films through the ages, like Snow White, The Incredibles, and Frozen,
09:32they're often said to carry some level of deliberate messaging.
09:35In a conversation between Theo Vaughn and Robert Greene, the guy who wrote The 48 Laws of Power,
09:40Greene said they offer a singular worldview that runs through most Western mainstream media.
09:45While modern society came to describe this phenomena as woke,
09:48the more important aspect is the consent it manufactures.
09:52And what angered me about Hollywood, you know, people pretending to be these liberal, wonderful people in favor of all
09:59the best causes out there to create art.
10:01What bullshit?
10:03They wanted power.
10:04They loved having the power over people.
10:07You know, they would drop the woke stuff tomorrow if they could make more money doing something else.
10:14Someone upstream decides what the acceptable worldview is, and the media is passed accordingly.
10:19The Pentagon did it with military values.
10:21The CIA did it with anti-communism.
10:23Hollywood does it now with whatever sells.
10:26The product always looks like entertainment and not ideology.
10:29These are films watched by billions, not just in the West, but worldwide.
10:33So this is also a matter of the image the world's superpowers want to project.
10:37Soft power has always mattered enormously to the West.
10:40Huge military, invincible superheroes, perfect moral values, intelligence agencies that can do anything they please and always win.
10:48Now, you might be wondering what happens if someone breaks ranks and goes against the grain.
10:52Whether it's possible to subvert the CIA and inform the public of the truth.
10:56Well, there has been at least one occasion when someone tried to do exactly that.
11:00He was Gary DeVore, a Hollywood screenwriter with major credits on Schwarzenegger's Raw Deal,
11:05Christopher Walken's The Dog of War, and Backroads with Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field.
11:09He was deep into a script idea that even his own wife didn't fully understand until after he was gone.
11:15When I first moved in with Gary, he said to me,
11:19don't be alarmed if you get a call from a person from a government agency.
11:23Just take their name down and their number and don't be worried about it.
11:27In the first four years, there were two calls.
11:31And then, not too long before he actually disappeared, there were several from the CIA at Langley.
11:39It was called The Big Steel, set during the US invasion of Panama.
11:43A friend of his, Hollywood director John Irvin, had lunch with Gary a few weeks before he disappeared.
11:48He could tell that something was off.
11:50He was troubled. Something was bothering him.
11:54He was, um, he wasn't really in the conversation.
11:57He was having trouble with the script he was writing.
12:01Which he talked about, more about not the script, but about a government very, very sensitive, inconvenient truth.
12:09He was speaking more as a journalist than he was as a screenwriter.
12:13He was talking as an investigator.
12:15A researcher who later investigated the case, called Dr. Matthew Alford, eventually uncovered what Gary had found.
12:21And it's really dark.
12:23The dictator of Panama, Manuel Noriega, made secret recordings in wired rooms of senior US officials having sex with un
12:34-fucked prostitutes, male and female.
12:37One British newspaper commented on this.
12:41And the story was then buried. And the guy who wrote it got shot by an anonymous sniper.
12:47Gary planned to put that in a Hollywood film.
12:50He was driving home through the desert, and then that was the last anyone heard from him.
12:54And he said, I'll see you later. I never heard from him again.
12:57It's like Gary DeVore simply vanished into thin air.
13:00There was a massive surge, foot patrols, helicopters, a $100,000 reward.
13:05But zero leads and no witnesses.
13:08He was missing for 374 days.
13:12But then his Ford Explorer was found beneath 15 feet of muddy water at the bottom of the California aqueduct.
13:18Despite the aqueduct having been searched extensively, his laptop containing the script was missing,
13:24his gun was missing, and his hands were missing.
13:27Why were his hands cut off?
13:34Listen, the man had his fingers removed. Why? Why?
13:39In my own mind, feel that there is crime here. I do not feel that my husband drove off of
13:45this bridge.
13:45Within a week of his disappearance, agents from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DOD arrived at the family home.
13:52After an official went into his office, his computer was wiped.
13:56And here's an unlikely connection to meet the parents and other films years later.
14:00It was Chase Brandon, the CIA's Entertainment Industry Liaison Officer, who was among those at the scene.
14:07When Alfred started digging into the case years later,
14:10he received a warning to stop what he was doing and leave while alone.
14:14You know, of course, you've received an informal or semi-formal warning
14:24from a CIA and DOD contractor
14:29who said to you, back off the CIA, you're going too far with this now.
14:35These people can and will ruin your life and come knocking on mine on your doors.
14:40A former White House official from the Reagan and George Bush administrations confirmed
14:44that DeVore harbored a deep-rooted relationship with the agency
14:47and conceded the case as the hallmarks of a cover-up.
14:51The CIA declined to comment on the entire situation and the case officially remains open.
14:56So, that's the other side of the coin.
14:58What potentially happens when the CIA's veto isn't obeyed?
15:02We don't really know the truth of what happened, but it does show you that you should mess around
15:06with topics not sanctioned by the agency.
15:09As for the impacts this all has on society,
15:12Theo and Joe Rogan were very perceptive about how it can change public perception.
15:16So, in World War I, one of the problems that they had
15:19was people didn't want to be over there killing people.
15:22Yeah.
15:22And so, people were shooting, but they weren't shooting at the actual enemy.
15:27And so, then they realized, well, we've got to do something about that.
15:29And so, after that, they started creating all these really patriotic war movies
15:34where the guys are heroes, they go over and they shoot all the bad guys,
15:37and then they're awesome.
15:38So, then the next group of people that go to war
15:40are all going to be indoctrinated with these films.
15:43John Kiriakou thinks that nowhere has that indoctrination been more effective
15:46or more dangerous than in warming the population up to the idea of torture.
15:51One thing that bothers me the most is when Hollywood perpetuates the myth
15:56that torture prevented acts of terrorism or disrupted acts of terrorism.
16:02And to me, that myth is dangerous in that it affects public opinion.
16:08You can put whatever euphemism you want on it.
16:10You can call it enhanced interrogation technique.
16:12I don't care what you call it.
16:14What we did to some of those people was just illegal.
16:18Kiriakou would know.
16:19He's the only CIA officer who ever went to prison over the torture program.
16:23I objected to the CIA's use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques,
16:28which I believe to be torture.
16:30And I went public with that information in December of 2007.
16:33All this time, by the way, I'm waiting for somebody to come out and say something.
16:39And nobody said anything.
16:41As a result, I was prosecuted and served 30 months in prison.
16:45But I'm glad I did.
16:47Somebody had to do it.
16:49This is especially true in the film Zero Dark Thirty, which is about capturing Osama Bin Laden.
16:54John Kiriakou thinks it's the strongest example of making the CIA look clean from every angle.
16:59Zero Dark Thirty.
17:01So Zero Dark Thirty, I think, is the most egregious example of CIA interference in Hollywood.
17:08The CIA gave the filmmakers classified briefings over a classified mock-up of the Bin Laden compound.
17:14The film essentially pushed that the torture program is what led them to Bin Laden.
17:18Kiriakou says that's a complete lie.
17:20This was a film that the CIA made a policy decision on that it was going to cooperate fully.
17:26To the point where senior CIA officers gave them inappropriately classified briefings
17:33over a classified mock-up of the Bin Laden compound.
17:38Okay, that's chargeable under the Espionage Act.
17:42The CIA just turned it over.
17:44Why?
17:45Because it made the CIA look good.
17:47In real life, intelligence work is edgy, gruesome, and morally ambiguous.
17:51Mainstream TV and cinema don't need to be accurate.
17:54They just need to feel right and not leave the audience with too many lingering questions or ambiguity.
17:59They pick up on this exact point in the podcast.
18:02Even though they are torturing people.
18:05Now, entire population is so kind of almost like brainwashed into,
18:10but they are good guys, so torture is okay as long as good guys are doing it.
18:14Well, that was the narrative.
18:15And they've got so desensitized towards doing bad shit.
18:19And if it's the CIA or if it's Tom Cruise or if it's like Mission Impossible
18:23and they're doing bad shit and they're torturing people, that's okay.
18:27Like now the message is that's okay.
18:29You don't worry about it.
18:30So desensitization and controlling the narrative is central to this whole strategy.
18:35But there are deeper layers than promoting and suppressing films.
18:38The CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, literally named after Q from James Bond,
18:43has been funding tech companies since 1999.
18:46Google bought an In-Q-Tel funded mapping startup called Keyhole that became Google Earth.
18:51In-Q-Tel and Google then jointly invested in a company that builds predictive analytics by mining web data.
18:56Palantir was one of their earliest investments.
18:59The CIA had established an entire directorate of digital innovation specifically to engage Silicon Valley.
19:05So it's all linked together and practically operates in plain sight.
19:09Theo Von told Green a story about bumping into a construction worker at Century City Mall in LA.
19:15Yo, what's up?
19:16So I start talking to him and he's like, dude, guess what we're building?
19:21I'm like, I don't know.
19:22You know, I thought maybe it could have been like a Hardee's or something.
19:24He's like, we're building like a 20 story building and 10 floors of it are the CIA
19:33and the other 10 floors are a management company, Hollywood management.
19:37Theo was mixing up the CIA and CAA, Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most powerful talent firm.
19:44But Green made it sound like the real thing was even worse.
19:47And you go to that building and they call it like the Death Star.
19:51There are like, you know, politicians who are being represented by CAA.
19:56Athletes, tech bros, influencers.
19:59It's pretty frightening though when you go inside.
20:02It's almost like Scientology, Hollywood's version of Scientology.
20:06He's describing high level ongoing talks at the intersection of the media, government and big tech.
20:12All in a building lovingly called the Death Star.
20:15So you can now see how this whole influence campaign is far bigger than cutting lines in Marvel movies.
20:20It relies on cross collaboration between multiple arms of state and private power.
20:25And the product hasn't stopped at the cinema.
20:27It's been actively following the audience, which means you, wherever you go, including online.
20:31Do you think the CIA have a strategy for podcasters and for podcasting?
20:36I think yes, now they do.
20:38It took them a little while to get current.
20:42But just like they over time developed a strategy with Hollywood.
20:47Sure, they're developing a strategy with podcasters.
20:50This strategy is consolidating as we speak, which will only make it easier for agencies like the CIA to wield
20:56greater control over the narratives.
20:58Larry Ellison, whose company Oracle now hosts TikTok US Algorithm and controls its content moderation, just bought Paramount through his
21:05son David.
21:06And if their bid for Warner Bros and Discovery goes through, you can add CNN, HBO, Warner Bros, Cartoon Network,
21:13Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, Discovery, TLC, TBS and TNT to that list.
21:19An internal memo obtained by NPR confirmed the Ellison-led entity will control what's allowed and what's not on the
21:25platform.
21:26Bernie Sanders called it oligarchy.
21:28And Oracle, which sits underneath all of this, has held government contracts with the CIA and the Department of Defense
21:34for decades.
21:35Whatever you call it, the media pipeline is now shorter than it's ever been.
21:39And in fewer hands.
21:41There's a through line from Donald Duck selling war bonds to Captain Marvel.
21:45Selling Air Force recruitment to Google Earth, tracking your location has never been broken.
21:49The methods have evolved.
21:51Direct propaganda, covert funding, script consultations, structural incentives, venture capital and digital surveillance.
21:58But the principle itself hasn't changed.
22:00Get the message right, make sure it's repeated enough, and eventually nobody questions this anymore.
22:04And if you've seen what happens when someone steps outside that system, a screenwriter at the bottom of a canal
22:10with no hands,
22:11a researcher warned to back off before they ruin his life, maybe then you understand why so few people ever
22:17try.
22:18It's not a theory about Hollywood, but a description of what 60,000 pages of declassified documents confirm has already
22:24happened,
22:24and is still happening, to the stories you grew up on.
22:27The truth is, we simply don't know how deep this rabbit hole really goes.
22:31How much of the information-rich world around us is real,
22:34and how much is fake or manipulated just enough to maintain a thin veneer of authenticity.
22:39Like we saw in this recent video we did on the CIA compromising podcasts,
22:42the rabbit hole truly goes deep.
22:44In any case, the strategies employed by the CIA and the government to influence the media are not theoretical,
22:50and they don't spend millions on them for no reason.
22:52So ask yourself, when you're next watching your favourite films and TV shows, can you really take them at value?
22:58If you think you can, ask yourself for how much longer do you think this will be the case?