Former CIA spies come in from the cold as Hollywood players
The place in Brooklyn looks like a CIA safehouse. Inside, writers are plotting out popular cold war espionage show The Americans - one of an assortment of Hollywood spy or national security dramas being driven by ex-spies.
The place in Brooklyn looks like a CIA safehouse. Red brick office building with peeling metal awning. No sign. Inside, writers are plotting out popular cold war espionage show - one of an assortment of Hollywood spy or national security dramas being driven by ex-spies.
The show's creator and co-head writer Joe Weisberg is a former CIA officer who never fathomed he would one day sit in an office with Soviet propaganda posters and a cut-out figure of President Ronald Reagan, concocting television fiction.
"When I left the CIA, if you were going to ask me, 'Would you write about espionage?' I'd say, 'Absolutely not. It would be a betrayal'," said Weisberg, 49, a spy-turned-novelist who got tapped by Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Los Angeles to write television scripts. "I had never heard of CAA before. Now that's like the CIA to me. It's this huge thing in my life."
The career afterlife of a CIA official typically followed well-known paths: Work for a military contractor. Join a law firm. Consult for the CIA. Write a memoir. But hunger for espionage shows and films is cracking open new opportunities for those with a flair for drama.
Weisberg is perhaps the most successful of the CIA alumni who have infiltrated Hollywood. , about two deep-cover KGB operatives living in suburban Virginia in the 1980s, was ranked by many television critics as one of last year's top 10 shows.
But he is not alone. Former senior CIA officials Rodney Faraon and Henry "Hank" Crumpton are executive producers of NBC's , which stars Katherine Heigl as a CIA analyst and member of the agency's presidential daily briefing team - one of Faraon's old jobs.
Faraon and Crumpton are developing a dozen other CIA-themed dramas through their firm Aardwolf Creative. (CIA buffs know that "Aardwolf" is the code name for very candid cables to headquarters.)
"The CIA is sexy, especially since [9/11]. There's more transparency into what the agency does, particularly as it prosecutes the war on terror," Faraon said.
Many ex-CIA officials tiptoe into Hollywood by writing books, getting them optioned, and consulting on whatever project results. That's how Valerie Plame, a former covert operative whose cover was blown when her name was leaked, got her start. She worked on , the movie based on her memoir. Then she served as a technical adviser on the pilot of . Now she's a consultant to Warner Bros Television, advising on shows such as CBS's .
But, much like spy-memoirists, spy-screenwriters face legal limits in their creativity.
"There are times when I say, 'You got to take this out'," said Faraon, though he doesn't have ultimate control over scripts. "I try not to leave any tells. It's a matter of us being responsible. But we also don't want to take a Pollyannaish view of the CIA. That wouldn't be authentic."
