Doug Liman Quotes
More of 'The Bourne Identity's script was taken from the events of the Iran Contra, which my father investigated for the Senate, than what was taken from Robert Ludlum's novel.
Liman, Doug. Interview by Steve Weintraub. Collider, Complex Media, 4 Nov. 2010.
He was not referring to economic corruption but intellectual and moral corruption. Regan who appointed many excellent key officials picked a very unfortunate choice to lead the CIA. William J. Casey had many faults and weaknesses—See {637472}, {636743} and {637469}. But the worst of his damage was imposing his ideology on the agency and having the intelligence analysts shape their intellectual product to conform with a particular world, political, and religious view. See {634408}. This became acceptable and as future administrations took power their ideologies were considered by the CIA professionals and reports were edited and shaped accordingly. Reform was instituted by some of the future CIA directors but there were precedents from the Casey days for years. One particularly bad manifestation of this intellectual corruption occurred when Vice President Richard Cheney imposed a neocon world view on the agency with a pliant CIA director and the agency gave the President a totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq nuclear capability and intention which triggered the disastrous Iraq war, made all the worse when there were not only no nuclear weapons in Iraq as had been reported, but there was not even a single laboratory trying to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear power.
When Bob Casey was the CIA Director, he the declassification of all the operational files of the WWII Office of Strategic Service. The huge collection is referred to as Record Book 2.6
Precursor to CIA. During WWII Donovan’s OSS, the FBI and the State Department had the three civilian intelligence organizations while each of the 4 Armed Services had their own intelligence services. Rarely did any of these 7 organizations communicate with any of the others. In the case of the OSS, the FBI and the military services tended to try and obstruct many of their operations. This was the first call for what became the CIA.
This was a critical shortcoming in that the NSA had the personnel for electronic intelligence. It was the major job of the CIA to place human agents—abroad—who could act as spies and/or recruit or manage spies.
The American Embassy in Berlin had wiretapped the telephone and telegraph wires of the German Foreign Ministry. The man who did that was hired by Secretary of State Lansing as the first employee of the new unit.
Intelligence agents tend to prefer covert activities to the less dramatic, non-exciting, activity of gathering and analyzing intelligence. Most national intelligence services tend to enlarge their portfolio to include covert activities regardless of what the national leaders intended. Because of the secrecy, they can often get away with this.
Douglas Eric Liman is an American film director and producer. He is known for directing the films Swingers (1996), Go (1999), The Bourne Identity (2002), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Jumper (2008), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and American Made (2017).
