Former CIA Officer Reviews Counterterrorism Portrayals in Film and TV

Hollywood often misrepresents counterterrorism, but some films accurately depict the dangers and complexities of the field.

### CIA Officer Rates Counterterrorism Scenes in Movies
* 🎬 Former CIA officer John Kiriakou reviews counterterrorism scenes from various movies and TV shows, rating their realism.
* 🔫 He notes that most CIA officers don't routinely carry weapons, contrary to common movie portrayals.  Exceptions include high-threat locations like **Pakistan** and **Athens**.
* 👤 The portrayal of "lone wolf" terrorists is deemed realistic, citing **Carlos the Jackal** as an example.  Attacks on public transportation are also considered plausible due to infrastructural vulnerabilities.
* 🧪 The depiction of intelligence agencies searching for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is accurate, as is the risk of dangerous meetings with double agents.
* 💥 The portrayal of a suicide attack at Camp Chapman is realistic, though the scale is exaggerated; such attacks remain a constant threat.
* 🏠 The depiction of the Osama bin Laden raid is rated highly for accuracy, particularly the nighttime raid and the use of stealth helicopters, though the film incorrectly attributes Bin Laden's location to torture.  The film's cooperation with the CIA is criticized as potentially violating the **Espionage Act**.
* 💧 The use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, is discussed, with Kiriakou emphasizing their illegality and ineffectiveness in obtaining actionable intelligence.  The film "The Report" receives a high rating for its accurate portrayal of these events.
* ✈️ Drone strikes are addressed, highlighting the unfortunate reality of civilian casualties and the lack of accountability. The film "Homeland" is praised for its realistic depiction of daily operations, despite some Hollywood embellishments.

AMA got a possible jackpot from all accounts. Uh, that's that's how it played out. There was never any intent to take

Bin Laden alive. My name is John Kiriakou. I'm a former CIA counterterrorism officer, and after the 9/11 attacks, I

became the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, where I led a series of raids that

resulted in the capture of dozens of al-Qaeda fighters. I went on to be the chief investigator at the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee. Today we'll be looking at counterterrorism scenes in movies and TV and judging how real they

are. Yeah, literally none of that is true to life, but that's that's what makes you love James Bond. First of

all, I'll say almost no officers carry weapons. You have to be in a in a post that is rated as high or critical threat

for uh terrorism. Uh, the only posts where I ever carried a gun were Athens and uh and Pakistan. Um,

otherwise I was I was always unarmed. And you're not going to walk into Parliament just opening fire; it's just it's just

not real life. You got me now. Here is your price. Love it that as part of this film was absolutely

believable. In this James Bond movie, R is considered to be what's called a lone wolf terrorist, somebody who's not a

member of an organized group. He acts alone. Those are more prevalent than you might think, and the person who comes to

mind most immediately is Carlos the Jackal. This is a guy who successfully kidnapped, get this, all at once, every

single oil minister in OPEC. But for all intents and purposes, Carlos was a lone wolf. Attacking public transport is quite

easy. Transportation is probably the weakest link in our infrastructure. In Tokyo, there was an attack some years ago uh by

Uh, the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist group—it was more of a cult that adopted terrorism as a policy—where

they spread poison gas through the ventilation system and killed a whole bunch of people. So, although we haven't

seen something like this happen, it is possible.  I'll give it a couple of different ratings, so...

shooting up Parliament—no, sorry, one. But a threat to transportation, while it's not, you know, crazy action-packed like we saw with

you know, uh, Raoul blowing a hole in the ceiling—that's not going to happen—but that threat is real. So I'd say seven or

Good evening, Mr. Hunt. The weapons you recovered in Belarus were confirmed to be VX nerve gas, capable of

devastating a major city. So at the beginning of this clip, Ethan Hunt was told that he's looking for nerve gas.

That's true. I mean, every major intelligence service hunts for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. $50

million to let Benji go. They come one step closer... Shoot me! Stop! Yeah, you know, there are elements of reality in that.

Sometimes, part of the job, especially in counterterrorism, is that you have to put yourself in dangerous positions like

that. Well, there was one situation where I was handling a double agent. He didn't know that I knew

he was a double agent, and he didn't know that I knew that he had been instructed to shoot me in our final meeting. So we

had prepared a team, just like you saw here in the clip, to protect me. It's not as sexy as this, with a beautiful

woman sitting there next to you, you know, with a gun in your ribs to do you the favor of killing you. Um, you know, and the

technology isn't on your contact lens, uh, but the idea is correct. On realism, I'd give it a four because

The danger of that, of that kind of meeting, sure, is accurate. It's a little cooler than it is in real life, and the rest of

it's just Hollywood. Hey, put your hand out of your pocket. The attack at Camp Chapman was a

catastrophe for the CIA. I actually worked with several of those people. There was a source who had been offered

up to us by a third-country intelligence service. He got right into the center of the base. It was a failure

at every step of the way. There were, there were almost immediate improvements, uh, after this happened. So, suicide attacks happen; um, they're not supposed

to happen at that grand scale, but it's always a danger. This is depicting the Osama bin Laden raid, and the clip is as close to

real life as we're going to get in a film. There are a couple of things that are consistent with all counterterrorism

raids, especially counterterrorism raids related to al-Qaeda. First of all, they're all at night, usually in the middle of

the night, uh, in Pakistan. We only did our raids after 2 a.m., or at, or after 2 a.m.

because you want people to be asleep; you want them to be caught unawares. That's what they did in this case. Now, they came

in to the bin Laden compound with, with two stealth helicopters. So this was far, far more complicated than anything I

ever did. What a possible jackpot, from all accounts, uh, that's, that's how it played out. There was never any intent to take

bin Laden alive. There are similarities in the real-life raid that the movie got wrong, and they got it

wrong on purpose. In the movie, they were able to deduce bin Laden's location thanks to the torture program, that is

not true. I can't be any more clear about it; it's just simply not true. What led to

Bin Laden's location was really great analysis. A targeting analyst is going to pour through sometimes millions of pieces of data to put this thing together.

where you can say we've narrowed it down to this neighborhood in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The one thing that bothers me

the most is when Hollywood perpetuates the myth that torture prevented acts of terrorism or disrupted acts of terrorism.

And to me that myth is dangerous in that it affects public opinion. This was a film that the CIA made a policy decision

on that it was going to cooperate fully, to the point where senior CIA officers gave them inappropriately

classified briefings over a classified mockup of the bin Laden compound. Okay, that's that's chargeable under the

Espionage Act. The CIA just turned it over. Why? Because it made the CIA look good. This clip, as a clip, the clip that

we just watched, I would give it a nine because it is pretty much the way things played out, but no, it wasn't the torture

that gave up Osama bin Laden. [Music] My name is Ali Soufan. I'm with the FBI.

There's only one interrogation technique that works: rapport building. Another person that you saw in the clip was Ali

Soufan. Ali, uh, Ali and I work together both in Yemen and in uh, in Pakistan. Ali Soufan went to the secret site and Ali

did what the FBI has been doing: he established a rapport with his prisoner. And after about six weeks

of this rapport development with Ali, he finally opened up and he gave us actionable [Music]

information. We stop the music when he starts talking. Then he can sleep. Learned helplessness. So briefly, in this clip you

see one of those contract psychologists, um, James Mitchell, explaining to Ali Soufan what his goal is. His goal is

learned helplessness; that's the goal. The goal is to completely break him psychologically. Now, they did that by

using what they called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Some of them were very, very minor and mild; it sort of

worsened to things like sleep deprivation. We saw that in the clip with the loud music, and you saw Aboba hanging

by his, uh, wrists with handcuffs, so he can't kneel or sit or lay or get comfortable in any way.

1, 2, 3... where is the next attack? Waterboarding, which most Americans now know about and was supposed to be the worst,

and it's pretty darn bad. We waterboarded each other in training just to see what it's like; it's awful. Sleep deprivation

and the cold cell actually killed more people, where, you know, it's already 50°—you're you're so cold, you're naked, and

then you have this ice water thrown on you, and your body just stops working; you go into, into, uh, into shock and just die.

You can put whatever euphemism you want on it; you can call it "enhanced interrogation techniques." I don't care what you

call it; what we did to some of those people was just illegal. Just to be transparent, I was the

script advisor on that film, and, um, it was written by a friend of mine. Everything in that film was true;

everything was based on the Senate Torture Report. In this clip, we see Adam Driver, who is portraying the Senate

Intelligence Committee's lead investigator on the CIA's torture program. What was released was not the Senate Torture Report; it was a very

heavily redacted copy of the executive summary of the torture report. The report itself was 5,000 pages long; the

executive summary was 500. They waterboarded him 183 times. Everything they got from him was either a lie or

something they already had. Well, now what we saw in this clip was Adam Driver uh briefing Senator Diane Feinstein, this

who at the time was the senior Democratic senator from California and chairwoman of the Senate

intelligence committee on his findings. His findings were that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was

waterboarded 187 times; Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. Neither one of them gave

up any actionable intelligence uh during torture. I objected to the CIA's use of so-called enhanced interrogation

techniques, which I believe to be torture, and I went public with that information in December of 2007. I resigned from the

CIA to go into the private sector. All this time, by the way, I'm waiting for somebody to come out and say something,

and nobody said anything. As a result, I was prosecuted and served 30 months in prison, but I'm glad I did. Somebody had

to do it, and in the end, I think it made the country a safer place. This clip and the movie, "The Report," as a whole is a 10—a strong 10.

We got lucky, Jac, with NATO satellite, and that's the location right there. Cam on.

Yeah, I can't tell you how many times we droned weddings or funerals, and then we'd have to say, "Oh, sorry, here's a

million dollars; our apologies." So that is unfortunately true. Uh, what's not true is it wouldn't be up to an individual case

officer to order an air strike. She could call the head of CTC and recommend the air strike, and he says, "Go for it." Members

of the Pakistani Taliban vowed retaliation for the alleged attack. Hesam Hakani has been martyred. Yeah, this kind of

thing happens all the time. So in this clip, this member of the Pakistani Taliban named Hakani uh was was the

Targeting the Haqqani network—it's a real network, a real terrorist network, right on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

They're really Afghans, but anyway, be that as it may, we learned later on in this season that Haqqani wasn't at the

site and had left. That is also something that's quite common. You know, rarely, rarely does the American

government admit to a mistake. There was a mistake in Afghanistan just days before we pulled out, where we killed

this, you know, high-value target who was loading missiles into the trunk of his car. He was actually not only not a high-

value target, he was an employee of the American government, and we just blew him up with a missile from a

drone. And then said, "Ah, sorry, our bad."  We added that Mr. Haqqani was attending a wedding at the time of the attack and

that over 40 members of his family were also killed. And then you end up killing civilians virtually every single

time, which is another problem. The National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and indirectly the CIA say that they do

CIA Officer Rates 9 Counterterrorism Scenes In Movies | How Real Is It? | Insider

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CIA Officer's Perspective on Counterterrorism in Film

Introduction of John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism officer, and his experience.

Most CIA officers don't routinely carry weapons; exceptions are high-threat posts.

Analysis of a James Bond scene depicting a lone wolf terrorist, comparing it to real-life examples like Carlos the Jackal.

Discussion of the Aum Shinrikyo attack in Tokyo as an example of a real-life threat to public transportation.

Analysis of a Mission Impossible scene involving nerve gas, highlighting the reality of intelligence agencies searching for WMDs.

Analysis of a scene depicting a suicide attack at Camp Chapman, discussing the reality of such attacks and improvements made afterward.

Assessment of the depiction of the Osama bin Laden raid, highlighting nighttime raids and the use of stealth helicopters.

Critique of the film's portrayal of torture as a factor in locating bin Laden, emphasizing the role of data analysis.

Discussion of the importance of rapport-building in interrogations, contrasting it with the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

Discussion of the reality of drone strikes, including accidental targeting of civilians and lack of accountability.

Analysis of a scene depicting a drone strike, highlighting the inaccuracy of the portrayal and the common occurrence of such events.

Critique of the lack of transparency and remorse regarding civilian casualties in drone strikes.

Analysis of Portrayals of Specific Terrorist Attacks

Analysis of a scene depicting the Mumbai attacks, highlighting the initial misidentification of the perpetrators and the heroic actions of hotel staff.

Analysis of a scene depicting intelligence cooperation, emphasizing the commonality of such collaborations.

Analysis of a scene depicting the Munich Olympics massacre, highlighting the accuracy of the core narrative and the embellishments.

Analysis of a scene depicting the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, discussing the events and the portrayal of the Taliban's role.

Overall Assessment and Concluding Remarks

Final assessment of *The Recruit* as a realistic portrayal of the CIA.

Critique of the unrealistic portrayal of events in the show *24*.