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BARACK OBAMA: I directed our military

to take targeted strikes.

DONALD TRUMP: Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike.

JOE BIDEN: We will respond with force and precision

at our time, at the place we choose,

at the moment of our choosing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROGER STAHL: Well, they finally did it.

- It's been more than 30 years, but Maverick is back.

ROGER STAHL: It was hard to miss the news.

NEWS ANCHOR: Maverick is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: Maverick is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: Maverick is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: Maverick Mitchell is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: He's back.

- Maverick is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: Maverick is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: He is back.

NEWS ANCHOR: Maverick is back.

- Maverick is back, baby.

NEWS ANCHOR: is back in action.

He's back in the film.

[CHEERS]

- I definitely feel that love and feeling

up here from you all.

ROGER STAHL: The Pentagon was feeling the love, too.

Beneath all the noise was a quiet little contract

that allowed the US military to weave in key talking points,

oversee the script, and require an official screening

before its release.

Of course, it wasn't the first time.

- All right, talk to me, Goose.

ROGER STAHL: You may not remember the original film

as an instrument for engineering public opinion,

but the Pentagon does.

The office that supplied all those aircraft carriers

and F-14s said as much in its own database.

The film completed rehabilitation

of the military's image, which had been savaged by the Vietnam

War.

- I got you down.

ROGER STAHL: You might wonder how often they do this

and how deep the influence goes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FILM NARRATOR: This is the Army Air Force's first motion

picture unit in Culver City, California.

ROGER STAHL: Propaganda, I've been

studying it the better part of my adult life, especially

the war variety.

I've written the books, taught the courses.

I knew that the DOD had an office for helping with movies.

But we didn't even basic things about it.

How many films?

Were there really script changes?

And what were they?

It might as well have been a broom closet locked up

in some dusty corner of the Pentagon.

Then documents started to get out, some real revelations.

The paper trail led me to a couple of British researchers

who had been filing countless Freedom of Information Act

requests.

I didn't quite know what I was getting into.

But they were delivering thousands of pages, eye popping

news, just about every day.

- Hi, guys, some new documents arrived this morning.

These are some of the US Army script

notes on a Man of Steel, the Superman movie.

ROGER STAHL: When that door blew open,

I got a glimpse of something way bigger than I thought possible.

But this journey was just getting started.

TRICIA JENKINS: The Pentagon is powerful in the film and TV industry

because they have expensive toys.

They have submarines.

They have aircraft carriers.

They have extras.

They have pilots.

They have helicopters.

MATTHEW ALFORD: That is going to give them rights, usually contracted

in, to change the script.

OLIVER STONE: You can call it censorship.

You can call it propaganda.

It's all of these things.

TANNER MIRRLEES: But this is more insidious than actually sort of state

controlled and state produced propaganda.

Because it passes off as just entertainment.

- Are you the ranking officer here?

TRICIA JENKINS: And that's when propaganda is the most effective.

You're a little bit more open to incorporating those ideas,

because your defenses are down.

- Hit it.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: Some people probably would say,

well, yeah, I've heard of this, like with Top Gun, maybe

Black Hawk Down, maybe some of the Marvel series.

MATTHEW ALFORD: But what they don't know is how systematic this has been,

and how huge this operation has been.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: Now these Freedom of Information requests

that have been successful allow us

to actually look at that list.

And it's stunning.

MATTHEW ALFORD: What we've found is

that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of products

have been affected and are often rewritten at script level

by the national security state in the United States.

Do normal people know about that?

No, of course they don't.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So say you're a producer and you want to make a war film.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: You would walk into the Entertainment Liaison

office in downtown Los Angeles.

MATTHEW ALFORD: You say I want to film an Air Force base,

or I want an aircraft carrier, or I want some Black Hawk

helicopters, or whatever it is.

And they would tell you straight away,

give us your entire script.

They're not stupid.

They're not saying, just give us those sections

where some dialogue takes place about the military.

They want to have the entire manuscript.

So that they can get a sense of the broader

context in which the military is being portrayed.

If they go through the script and say,

we don't really look that heroic on page 18,

we're going to need you to change page 18,

the filmmaker either usually has to acquiesce

or the Pentagon says, that's fine.

You have the freedom to not change it.

But we're going to take our toys and go home.

Now, it's up to the filmmaker to decide,

do I want to accept and make these changes?

MATTHEW ALFORD: You'll end up signing a contract.

And then you're locked into that.

You're making a film with the DOD, the Department of Defense,

as your ally.

And they are a really important collaborator within that.

They're effectively like another producer.

ROGER STAHL: You might wonder what the military's own rules say

about this.

It turns out, for decades, the directive

was to promote authenticity and dignity

of military representation.

Such a thing is open to interpretation, of course.

But after 1988, the list expanded.

Now, they were to promote something

called public understanding, recruiting, and official policy

positions.

It's still a bit abstract on paper.

Whose interests are being served in practice?

MATTHEW ALFORD: Producers are able to get cut-price helicopters,

cut-price tanks, cut-price aircraft carriers,

as well as men, and material, and advice.

And the more realistic, of course, a film can be,

the bigger the chances are for being big box office hits.

And the DOD says this is a wonderful opportunity

to present ourselves before the public in a positive light

through a medium that is mass, that is commercial,

that isn't inflected with negative connotations

of propaganda.

ROGER STAHL: Just listen to how the Pentagon itself

puts it in the weekly activities entry for the 2013 film Lone

Survivor.

"Entertainment feature films like

this reach far greater audiences than any single news media

story.

Audiences going to see the film will voluntarily

sit through a two hour infomercial."

If you're a producer who can deliver this kind of thing,

you just might have a career on your hands.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: There are particular types of directors and filmmakers

the Pentagon really likes to work with

and has been working with repeatedly, because they know

that they can trust them, people like Jerry Bruckheimer,

people like Michael Bay.

PHIL STRUB: We've worked with Mr. Bay here since Armageddon,

if I'm not mistaken, and hope to do more of the same.

ROGER STAHL: That's Phil Strub.

He directed the office for 30 years.

You'll be seeing a lot of him.

The name of the game in his world

is leveraging military access to tilt the narrative

and to maintain persistent relationships with the Michael

Bays out there.

I've got a direct line to the Pentagon.

ROGER STAHL: For them, it's a matter of greenlighting

projects the office will like.

They know that their scripts are going to get vetted.

So what the effect quite often is

is that filmmakers already write their scripts in ways

that they know will ultimately please the Pentagon.

Once we said we're interested, then we

met with Simpson/Bruckheimer.

They very much wanted us.

We were concerned about will the military allow us to do it.

Because I didn't want to get involved in a movie that

didn't get made.

I just... I really wanted to get something made.

Because we had written six pictures before this, and not

one of them got shot.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: People self-censor and tame down any potential critical

view, because they know otherwise,

it's going to get a desk reject straight away.

ROGER STAHL: The CIA essentially copied this model

when it opened its own office in 1996.

TRICIA JENKINS: But what they figured out is that they can be really

effective in the pre-production stage.

And so they work a lot with screen writers

as ideas are being formed or drafted

in order to be able to have a say in how the agency is going

to be represented.

ROGER STAHL: As you might imagine,

no one involved in these deals, whether it be the CIA, DOD,

or entertainment industry at large,

is exactly clamoring to talk about them publicly.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: And perhaps that's not surprising.

You would have to ask yourself as someone

who goes to the cinema whether I want to pay to actually watch

some propaganda stuff.

This relationship is not secret.

It's just that they don't want to make a big thing of it.

What they don't want anyone to know

is that this is done systematically.

And they also are particularly wary of the public knowing

about script rewrites.

If people actually saw a script

and then looked at the kind of blue bowdlerizing lines

that the military had done on the script,

I think people would begin to realize how dangerous

and how censorious this kind of activity is.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROGER STAHL: To see how all this works, just

look at how the Entertainment Office has

used the biggest weapon in its arsenal, rejection.

It can put a production at a distinct disadvantage.

Say you want to make a film based on the Kennedy White

House tapes about how military leaders almost

got us into a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That'll earn you a solid one.

You'll have to go to the Philippines for old planes

to repaint and military bases.

You'll have to construct U2 sequences from scratch

and beg a museum for a destroyer.

Rejections like this have become more common over the years.

On the heels of World War II, the Pentagon

assisted a long list of films.

But it rarely flat out denied filmmakers.

As Americans began to deal with a more controversial history

of military intervention, though, the rejections

started to come, first with films

that failed to celebrate US military action in Vietnam

and continuing with the Cold War, Gulf Wars, and issues way

beyond war films.

But these were only the rejections

that were lucky enough to still be made.

Many more weren't.

That is no military assistance often means no show.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer said that without military help,

he couldn't have made Pearl Harbor.

It apparently means a lot when the Navy pulls

more than 20 Vietnam era destroyers out

of storage for you to blow up.

There wouldn't have been a Top Gun without support either,

he said.

Most of the time, it comes down to the studio's need

to keep costs low.

Take The Hunt for Red October, producer Mace Neufeld

said Paramount straight up told him

if you don't get cooperation, we won't make the movie.

And they put it in the contract.

It was a good thing for Neufeld that the script

was an easy sell.

It set him up for the long Jack Ryan franchise.

In contrast, consider another '90s film, Countermeasures.

If it doesn't ring a bell, it's probably

because it was never made.

Sigourney Weaver had signed on to play the lead role.

But that didn't matter as much as what the Entertainment

Office thought.

They didn't want a story about weapons smuggling

on an aircraft carrier.

MATTHEW ALFORD: That was rejected explicitly on the grounds

that we don't want to denigrate the White House.

We don't want to remind the public of the Iran-Contra

scandal, which involved illegal arms sales,

and drug running, and arming of Contra rebels,

and all sorts of horrendous things in the '80s.

ROGER STAHL: In this case, the Pentagon got its wish.

The public was not reminded.

The Office's own database is littered

with these denials never made.

So no Eagle in the Sky.

Denied, and never made.

And no Recovery.

It's clear from its own notes that the Pentagon knows

a denial can shoot down a film.

The entry for A Moral Issue concludes

that since the film was never produced,

the answer must have been no.

Here's a sample of titles from the '80s and '90s,

all denied and never made, so you can see what you missed.

What themes can earn a film a denial, you ask.

We start to see a clear pattern when

you look through the documents.

The office internally calls these showstoppers.

And yeah, sometimes they can stop the show.

The Pentagon publicly says it denies films because they're

in some way unrealistic.

But you don't have to be an expert

to scratch your head when it comes

to something like Top Gun.

Just listen to what the consultants and writers

admitted in retrospect.

- The idea that people chase people around,

trying to get Sidewinder tones, particularly down in the dirt,

is not reality at all.

- It's not realistic compared to what we do every day.

- And I said, well, there's no trophy.

I said, if there was a Top Gun trophy,

no one would ever graduate.

You don't understand the intensity of these guys.

It would all be midair collisions, and crashes,

and everybody'd die.

Nobody would ever graduate from Top Gun.

JACK EPPS JR: It's very anti-Top Gun.

Maverick as a character is anti-Top Gun.

It's all about being together.

So it was a dramatic license.

And I think it worked.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good movie.

ROGER STAHL: None of these concerns

appeared in the Pentagon's list of requested script changes.

In fact, a memo from the Marine Corps

later admitted that the Pentagon had supported

lots of unrealistic scenes.

In Top Gun, they said, buzzing the tower wouldn't

have happened without career ending consequences.

And the famous inversion scene simply couldn't happen.

The Marine Office assembled this list

not to keep everyone honest, but rather to justify

an unrealistic scene of its own, a Harrier jet flying

through a cave for a Top Gun style film

they hoped to develop.

The issue of realism comes to a head with films

written by vets themselves.

Surely they must pass the authenticity test

if Top Gun did.

Jarhead was based on the celebrated book

by Marine vet Anthony Swofford and adapted for the screen

by another marine vet.

The DOD has one look at the script, though,

and finds too many serious concerns.

They don't want audiences to see what Swofford saw,

like a sniper trainer praising the Kennedy assassination

as the perfect shot, Marines getting excited for war,

boasting about killing ragheads and shooting

Bedouin camels, references to friendly fire,

and attempted suicide, and an abusive drill instructor.

DRILL INSTRUCTOR: What the fuck are you even doing here?

Sir, I got lost on the way to college, sir.

ROGER STAHL: In fact, the Pentagon

sees the movie as such a threat that it

moves to block the director from recruiting

any off-duty military personnel as extras.

When the film premieres, the Office explains to the press

that it denied Jarhead assistance because it was not

a quote, "feasible interpretation

of military life."

Reporters from NPR and the LA Times

ask if they can take a few Marines to the film

and get their reactions.

"Absolutely not," says the Entertainment Office.

But eventually outlets like the San Diego

Tribune do manage to scare up some Marine vets, who guess what?

Universally laud the film for its realism.

Or take Fields of Fire from the early '90s,

which was denied and ultimately never made.

This one was notable because it had some real muscle behind it,

Jim Webb, a highly decorated Marine Vietnam vet

who had written a best selling novel

and would go on to be a US Senator.

At the time, he had just come off a stint

as Secretary of the Navy.

Now, that's some credibility, right?

Not enough for Phil Strub at the Pentagon office.

The script, he says, makes it look like "fragging,

burning villages, executing prisoners, and drug abuse where

everyday occurrences."

Yes these things happen, but mostly not.

"Consider making substantive changes."

The Marine Corps, for its part, disagrees

and asks him to reconsider.

Webb's book is required reading for Marine officers

and is generally acknowledged by Marine Vietnam veterans

as the most genuine fictional account of the war.

Webb himself had some strong words.

"It appears to me that what you're really saying

is that when it comes to Vietnam,

DOD will support only sterile documentaries

or feature films that amount to nothing

more than dishonest propaganda."

Sorry, says Strub.

And it became a Vietnam film we didn't get to see.

I kept thinking about Oliver Stone, too.

Before becoming a filmmaker, this

was a guy who had volunteered specifically

for combat duty in Vietnam and emerged a decorated vet.

His early breakouts are still lauded as the most realistic

of the post-Vietnam wave.

But it was a real uphill battle with the Pentagon,

rejection after rejection.

Platoon for a long list of unacceptable themes.

Born on the Fourth of July because it

made a strong statement against participating in the Vietnam

War.

Both were put on hold for years.

I'd give my right eye to hear what

the man himself had to say about all this.

Luckily, he had read some of Alford and Secker's early work

and was impressed.

Matt was able to shake a few trees

and get an interview for me.

Military veteran, Hollywood veteran,

I pictured it going down something like this.

- I assume if you've come this far, what

I have to say interests you.

But I'm not going to name names and tell you

who or what I represent, except to say you're close.

ROGER STAHL: I wasn't prepared for this.

Obviously, I was shocked by some of these...

What these films had to go through to get what they call

weapons of war, Pentagon cooperation,

as well as CIA cooperation.

It's a gigantic iceberg that you've touched.

ROGER STAHL: Wait, Oliver Stone can't believe

how deep the story goes.

It raises the question, could the industry

be in the dark as much as the rest of us?

I guess you know what they say, the best PR is invisible.

But what about his firsthand experience?

I wrote Platoon as a naive young screenwriter,

because it was the truth of what I saw in Vietnam.

Of course, it was dramatized.

And at some point, I forgot exactly when,

we sent in the script and asked for their cooperation.

We got a pretty definite turndown from them,

saying this was an unrealistic portrayal of GIs.

ROGER STAHL: It was about this time that Top Gun paid a visit.

OLIVER STONE: I was offered the script when it was a magazine article

or something way back by Don Simpson.

I just couldn't do it.

I thought it was...

I knew... at that point, I was accepting that Platoon

would never get done.

You have to understand, I had shelved Platoon.

I put it out of my mind.

I had written Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon and I...

Both projects had died.

STAHL (to Stone): It is astonishing that you were offered the Top Gun script.

That is an astonishing fact.

And I'm still trying to process that.

ROGER STAHL: It would have made for an easier start on a career.

While Top Gun was opening up the after burners

with full military support, Platoon and Born on the Fourth

barely made it out of the jungle alive.

It's not the only factor in play, I know.

But this is how the military's invisible hand

moves over Hollywood.

STAHL (to Stone): Do you recognize this?

I wanted to bring a gift for you, blast from the past.

ROGER STAHL: I had his Platoon rejection letter framed.

I never saw this.

It's funny they mention what I mentioned,

the murder and rape of innocent Vietnamese villagers.

Well, I saw both.

The cold blooded murder of one US soldier by another,

did not see that.

But certainly, there's reports of it up and down.

They have admitted to fragging, how many were

killed in fragging incidents, I imagine they minimized it.

And the portrayal of the majority as illiterate

delinquents.

The entire script is rife with unrealistic and highly

unfavorable depictions.

So I'm glad you got this.

That's 1984.

That would be the second time I tried to do the movie with Dino

de Laurentiis.

I'd love to get a copy of that, by the way.

Oh, thank you so much.

The whole ethos of that office, Pentagon,

is that they're supposed to provide accuracy

to the filmmakers, accuracy.

And they do the opposite.

They provide inaccuracy and lies.

You show the bad side as well as the good side.

We keep making military movies, especially since 2001,

glorifying the American soldier, glorifying our patriotism,

nationalism, homeland, all this nonsense.

We make it into this fetish.

We fetishize the military.

No one can say a bad word about them.

This is wrong.

This is wrong.

You have to point out evil when it happens.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROGER STAHL: Before we go any deeper,

you might wonder how it is we came to know

what goes on in that office.

I'll tell you one thing, we didn't learn about it

from the news.

On the exceedingly rare occasions

when the issue does get press attention,

this is the kind of thing you get.

REPORTER: Phil Strub reviews scripts,

deciding if a script has the glimmer of realism or fun

he's looking for.

ROGER STAHL: Realism and fun.

Sounds innocent enough.

If you wanted to know any more than that,

though, for decades, there was just one place to look.

There was one guy, basically, one historian who totally

dominated this field in the '70s, '80s, '90s, all the way

up into the 2000s.

ANCHOR: The film and military historian, whose book, Guts and Glory,

is recognized as the definitive study of the relationship

between the military and movie industry, Lawrence Suid.

MATTHEW ALFORD: And he was the person who had all

of the relevant documentation on this.

But Suid was the only person writing about it.

And so scholars didn't even bother looking into it.

ROGER STAHL: Suid largely bypassed any concerns

about steering public opinion and instead told

a story about the military constantly fixing

Hollywood's mistakes.

Eventually, though, someone else came along

and did a little muckraking.

MATTHEW ALFORD: It was in 2004 that a journalist, a kind of maverick

journalist who I quite like called

David Robb decided that he was going to investigate this.

ROGER STAHL: Robb interviewed a bunch of industry folks

and combed the few public documents

the DOD had made available to Georgetown University

and the National Archives.

He somehow persuaded the Marine Corps Office in LA

to give him a peek, too.

MATTHEW ALFORD: He acquired much of the initial documentation.

And he was able to punch a big hole in what Lawrence Suid had

been saying for the previous 30 or 40 years.

ROGER STAHL: It was nowhere near a comprehensive picture,

but this was the first time someone

had made the case that the Entertainment Office was

a sophisticated propaganda machine.

Suid did not like this at all.

He wrote a scathing review that all but charged Robb

with fabrication and dismissed the idea

that the office wielded any influence over movies

beyond making them more accurate.

Robb shot back, calling the review libelous.

It has to be the most contentious exchange I've ever

seen in an academic journal.

But Robb's work inspired other researchers

like Matthew Alford, who set out to get

a full sense of the operation.

And this is two decades, three decades after these things

should have been investigated.

I started looking into it.

And of course, I contacted the Department of Defense.

I contact Phil Strub.

And Strub can say to me, oh, we don't have that documentation.

We've given it to Lawrence Suid.

ROGER STAHL: So he picked up the trail

himself, just across the pond and just up the river

from the Pentagon at Georgetown University Library.

MATTHEW ALFORD: You asked if I was nervous.

And a little bit nervous.

Not really nervous about being on camera.

But nervous because I've just spent a large amount of money

to come over to a library.

And I've spent over $1,000 to come to a library.

ROGER STAHL: There, he found the public collection of DOD

donated documents, which he could access no problem.

But then there was Suid's personal collection,

which Georgetown held quite separately.

This was the real prize, the documents the DOD had

given exclusively to Suid.

MATTHEW ALFORD: So every time anyone wanted to go

into that private collection, which

as far as I can tell, no one ever did,

because it was never advertised, it was never...

There was no kind of publicity or awareness

of this whole thing, but when I tried to get into that archive

and when a couple of my colleagues

tried to get into that archive, Lawrence Suid

was able simply to say no.

I'm using that.

ROGER STAHL: What do you do if you get stonewalled like this?

Well, you need a real bulldog.

Enter another enterprising Brit, freelance journalist Tom

Secker.

Having read Robb's work, too, he had been carpet bombing the DOD

with Freedom of Information Act requests.

- Hey guys, we've got some new documents.

These are some DOD script notes on the film Pitch Perfect 3.

MATTHEW ALFORD: In fact, the government was so annoyed

at the amount of document requests

that Tom Secker put in that they labeled him a vexatious

requester.

And so Tom, and I think Tom actually found out

that he was called a vexatious requester, because he

put in a request for any information about himself

in emails.

And so from that point, I think I said to Tom, well,

maybe you should put in more requests.

And Tom said, oh yeah, I'd quite like to do that.

And then, it just snowballed from that point.

And we ended up having thousands and thousands of pages

of documentation come in.

ROGER STAHL: Internal correspondence,

activity reports, line by line script changes.

The world was opening up.

Then another break.

In an email, Phil Strub offhandedly

mentioned the existence of an incomplete database.

So Tom put in a request for it.

First, the army denied having it.

And then later that year, the request came through.

This was the Rosetta Stone.

Although missing lots of entries, the database

listed 900, all the way to the present, films and TV shows.

It was a bit of a shock.

When we interviewed Strub, a few years back,

he denied even keeping count.

Well, I don't have an exact number that

would describe what pictures the department was involved with

or...

ROGER STAHL: Before all these document releases,

you had to assume that the DOD and CIA had affected

only a couple hundred films.

Now we could account for 10 times that many,

more than 2,500 films and television shows.

Count up the individual TV episodes,

and it's thousands more.

Naturally, the CIA files have been harder to crack.

TRICIA JENKINS: It's tough, because the CIA has been less transparent than

the Department of Defense in terms of how they work with

Hollywood, because so much of their stuff is done

in the pre-production stage.

It happens in conversations over the phone.

There's not a paper trail.

There are emails that are exchanged.

But you have to get access to those emails

through a FOIA request.

Sometimes those are denied.

Sometimes those take years to come to fruition.

And so this relationship, and exactly how it works,

and what scenes the CIA has objected to, what

scenes they were pushing in order to have them incorporated

into the final product is a very murky world

that's very hard for academics to penetrate.

ROGER STAHL: While the CIA material trickled in,

the DOD story took a dramatic turn.

I knew Suid had been ailing.

But in late 2019, Georgetown Library

informed me that he passed away.

I would never get to meet him.

I would get to meet his archive, though.

I was shocked to learn that his estate had opened it

to the public.

And I was the first to have a look.

The collection truly took my breath away,

a mountain of official documents that blew the lid

off the whole operation.

But a few other things caught my eye, too.

There were these little notes from the Pentagon Office

that suggested Suid just had to ask,

and they'd hand the documents right over.

There was also a big stash of audiotaped interviews.

It struck me that the ones with Phil Strub

seemed pretty chummy.

Strub promises to give up files.

And you can hear him tapping away at the Pentagon database.

LAWRENCE SUID: GI Jane has a file?

PHIL STRUB: Probably, yes.

LAWRENCE SUID: OK, but no cooperation.

Tuskegee Airmen, you gave them some help?

PHIL STRUB: Oh, yeah, big time.

What was the one I was just going to look up?

Forrest Gump.

LAWRENCE SUID: Yeah, Forrest Gump.

ROGER STAHL: Apparently Strub gave Suid database

login privileges.

I found a screenshot in the collection.

That's some high level clearance.

LAWRENCE SUID: I have that written.

You'll see the manuscript, The Siege.

ROGER STAHL: Hold on, did he just

tell Strub you'll see the manuscript?

Then I discovered older taped interviews

with Donald Baruch, who ran the office before Strub.

He's giving notes on the Guts and Glory manuscript.

DON BARUCH: At the top of page 5,

you say "filled with historic..." this

is in regard to Deer Hunter.

Now, we're on page 6, and you say

"although the Navy provided..." final paragraph on page 3...

Page 7, I would suggest deleting "at the same time"

and starting "the studios recognized

the value of Department of Defense cooperation."

Now you're saying here...

LAWRENCE SUID: Page 12?

DON BARUCH: Page 12.

ROGER STAHL: I had to wonder, how deep was

Suid's relationship with the Pentagon Office?

So I headed to New York to Don Baruch's personal archive,

kept at Baruch College founded by his uncle, the financier.

In a box of Office memorabilia, they

happened to have Baruch's Rolodex.

Right alongside Clint Eastwood and other Hollywood

heavyweights, there was Lawrence Suid.

Baruch also kept a Suid file.

In it, I found his letter recommending the Guts and Glory

project for a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He even kept early drafts of its chapters and clippings

of its reviews.

So there it was.

For decades, the Office had been trading

access to influence not just the big screen,

but also its very own story.

It was starting to become clear why we had

known so little for so long.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you really want to dive into these script negotiations,

a good place to start is how these offices

project the institution itself on the screen.

Take something obvious, like recruiting, which

runs deeper than you think.

This kind of thing has a long history.

But of course, Top Gun took it to new heights.

They even set up recruiting tables outside theaters.

This function of the film was not

lost on Director Tony Scott.

- All these kids must hate me, because they all

signed on thinking they're going to be fighter pilots pulling

broads all over the world.

And they all ended up in 11 stories down

in some shitty old aircraft carrier,

stuck in the Indian Ocean.

- Hollywood, you're looking good.

ROGER STAHL: More recently, there

have been even bigger leaps into this territory.

Act of Valor literally started life as a recruitment ad

before the Navy decided it would make a good feature film.

Captain Marvel was also a recruiting bonanza,

a vehicle for the Air Force to reach young women.

- The Air Force was welcoming and amazing.

It was important for Brie to go up in the F-16

and discover who Carol Danvers is.

- Going to be fun.

The core of her is the Air Force.

It's the spirit of the Air Force.

But more than anything, it was like the spirit of the Air

Force and the spirit of being a pilot.

ROGER STAHL: Even the CIA is in on the game.

Its involvement in the show Alias went far beyond support.

Jennifer Garner, who played the main character,

did a series of recruitment pitches.

- Right now, the CIA has important exciting jobs

for US citizens.

ROGER STAHL: Then there's The Recruit.

- You're kidding.

- Applications for the CIA are up tenfold.

- Would I have to kill anyone?

- Would you like to?

ROGER STAHL: Not too subtle, right?

But you'd still never guess how large of a role

is played by Chase Brandon, the longtime head of the CIA's

Entertainment Office.

TRICIA JENKINS: And almost nobody knows this,

but Chase Brandon wrote the entire treatment

and like 80 pages of the original draft of The Recruit.

And he is not listed as a screenwriter

at all in those credits.

The only thing he is listed as is a technical consultant.

- You have all just stepped through the looking glass.

What you see, what you hear, nothing is what it seems.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROGER STAHL: Beyond the recruiting pitch itself,

these institutions are also keen to sweep

persistent internal problems under the rug.

The Pentagon is very sensitive about depicting mental health

issues.

For example, they denied Home of the Brave

due to the "vein of suicide, domestic violence, chemical

abuse, and depression."

They didn't like the image of vets having a miserable

time readjusting to life.

It was unfortunate.

The Pentagon was making it harder

to produce this film exactly when vets

needed the public conversation the most.

ANCHOR: Record high military suicide.

SHEPARD SMITH: Military suicides are on the rise.

ROGER STAHL: Over the next decade,

way more military personnel would die by suicide

than combat.

The Office has also worked to downplay any impression

that the military has struggled with institutional racism.

A good example of how they typically approach the issue

is the Laurence Fishburne movie The Tuskegee Airmen.

It was based on the real life experiences

of the first African-American air squadron in World War II.

How did the Office deal with the story of racism

in the military?

By containing the racism two a bad apple, of course,

who then has to be dressed down by his superior officer.

This meant also making sure there

was no racism depicted coming from the top

of the chain of command.

They reversed characters to make the Senator, rather than

the general, the source of the bigotry.

- I'm General Stevenson.

This is Senator Conyers.

ROGER STAHL: So with this new storyline,

what about the scene in the original script

where a baseball game breaks out into racist taunts

and a fistfight?

It appears in this scene that race was and remained

a major factor to the troops, which it did not,

the Office declared quite confidently.

So the fight is out of place and has to go.

Maybe the office doesn't get the irony

that its habit of covering up institutional racism

is institutional racism.

Like racism, the Entertainment Office

has done its best to make you forget

all about sexual harassment and assault

in the ranks, which includes a pattern of leaders retaliating

against victims who complain.

The problem first went public in 1991 with the Tailhook scandal.

This is where hundreds of Navy servicemen

assaulted more than 80 servicewomen

at a convention in Las Vegas.

A congressional investigation flagged a Top Gun mentality

as a major factor.

The fallout from Tailhook is what

delayed a sequel for so long.

Since then, the Office has treated sexual harassment

and assault more like a PR problem than an actual one.

They denied GI Jane because it dared

to depict a high officer harassing with impunity.

And in more recent years, they have actively

endeavored to whitewash the issue.

They've enlisted their long running partners, Army Wives

and NCIS to run a counter plot line.

The problem in this alternate universe

is the victim, who refuses to admit

that an assault has occurred.

The military leadership is so eager for justice,

though, that they launch an investigation anyway.

- Zero tolerance is no slogan around here, agents.

It's a moral imperative.

If that officer was harmed on this ship,

we'll move heaven and Earth to help you.

- I only wish Farrell had said something at the time.

We could have done something about it.

- We're doing something now.

ROGER STAHL: Given that the Navy reviews every NCIS script, what

would happen if the producers were to drift

from this official plot?

Well at one point, the Navy received a script

that more closely resembled what targets had repeatedly

described, harassment by numerous crew members

and unresponsive leadership.

The Entertainment Office sounded the alarm.

A panicked conference call and a day

later, the Navy had revised the entire storyline.

When the episode eventually aired,

it was a tale of sailor bystanders stepping in,

and timely and effective engagement by those in charge.

- A matter as sensitive as this required immediate action.

During our transit, I ordered an investigation.

ROGER STAHL: Even wins over a skeptical detective in the end

after she sees him go the extra mile to nab the perpetrator.

See, no institutionally enabled rape culture here.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Another main job of the Office is

to sell regular Americans on pouring vast resources

into these institutions.

All those weapons can get expensive.

Pushing them had always been a staple of old style propaganda

films like The Big Picture series.

NARRATOR: One example.

The F-111, the greatest innovation

in aircraft design of recent years.

ROGER STAHL: But over time, the Entertainment Office

took over this function.

The everyday workhorses became those ubiquitous weapons

documentaries on the Discovery, History, and National

Geographic channels.

This kind of boosterism is especially

important for systems like the F-35, which

gained a trillion dollar reputation as the most wasteful

project in Pentagon history.

The goal is normalizing these huge expenditures.

NARRATOR: To remain a superpower,

the US needs to constantly update its technology

and military hardware.

ROGER STAHL: It's all over their notes.

A primary reason for assisting is the opportunity

to showcase these weapons.

Projects like these, they say again and again,

support modernizing the force.

And this means that they're able to show off how sexy,

and how wonderful, and how useful,

and how targeted their new products are,

which means that the public is going

to be less liable to criticize the arms industry as something

that is messy, unpleasant, dark, cruel.

ROGER STAHL: Of course, Hollywood

has played a lead role in selling weapons, too.

They rewrote the Hulk so he climbed on an F-22

and rode it into the sky.

They got the F-35 to fly alongside Superman.

And got Ludacris to show off the new Ripsaw vehicle.

6.6 liter V8 DuroMax engine with an M-153 CROWS remotely

operated weapons station on top.

See, the army's developing machines

like this the soldiers can drive from a mile away.

So they can stay safe and alive.

ROGER STAHL: Or consider the Transformers franchise,

which might as well have been a military parade.

The Air Force excitedly listed everything

to be filmed, the army too.

MICHAEL BAY: Action.

- What the Air Force has done in this show has shown us

all the good toys, brand new stuff that really hasn't even

been put into the field yet.

MICHAEL BAY: I've always been like some of the first

to shoot military hardware.

In Armageddon, I was the first to shoot the B-2 bomber.

Then this movie was the F-22s.

It's just very fitting that Starscream

was the air commander.

And second in command takes that form

of literally the baddest weapon system in the world right now.

ROGER STAHL: The Iron Man franchise

was an outright celebration of the arms industry.

It started out as the exact opposite.

The original script for the first movie

was all about Tony Stark going to battle against the arms

manufacturers, including his own father,

who he says was stealing his ideas

and twisting them into truly destructive weapons.

By the time the film went into production with the DOD,

however, the whole thing was gone.

Co-star Jeff Bridges told the press they didn't have a script

and were getting regular notes from what

he called the suits at Marvel, who

were, of course, getting notes from the brass at the Pentagon.

ANNOUNCER: Today, Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons

industry by ensuring freedom and protecting

America and her interests around the globe.

ROGER STAHL: When it was all said and done,

Stark had happily inherited his father's business

and become an emissary of the military industrial complex

himself.

Flipping the storyline cleared the runway for all of this.

- B-2 bombers, C-17s, and F-22s, and F-35s, I mean,

you could literally pause the screen and tally it up,

and it would probably come out to a billion and a half

dollars.

ROGER STAHL: On a broader scale, the military and CIA

also want to sell the public on the image

that they are the ones who save the day.

Take the alien invasion film Independence Day.

TRICIA JENKINS: Like, there are some things that they

objected to which had nothing to do with historical accuracy.

One of the things that they were upset about

is the guy who ultimately defeats

the aliens is a civilian and is not a military hero.

They wanted the heroes of that film

to have military backgrounds.

They also didn't like how the aliens, even though they're

supposed to have advanced technology,

were able to so thoroughly decimate the American military.

ROGER STAHL: The Office listed the damage,

which included 30 F-18s, one B-2 bomber, and one whole Pentagon.

Although they denied the film in the end,

director Roland Emmerich got gun shy about that last one.

So we famously got the Empire State Building, White House,

and Capitol, but not this ultimate showstopper.

Same thing with Rampage where giant mutants attacked

the city.

The Pentagon rejected this one after the filmmakers

failed to incorporate their script notes.

The problem?

The mutants rampage all over the military.

Sci-fi is one thing, but the stakes

go up when it comes to revising the memory

of actual missions gone wrong.

Take the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, Somalia

that eight years later became the basis for Black Hawk Down.

At the time, it was universally regarded

as a debacle, a needless sacrifice

of 19 American troops, not to mention the slaughter of 1,000

Somalis.

- Today, I want to talk with you about our nation's

military involvement in Somalia.

ROGER STAHL: Afterward, the Entertainment Office

was on high alert for anything that

looked like it in its scripts.

So for Clear and Present Danger, they worried about a scene

where Colombian militias overwhelmed US special forces.

"Rangers in Somalia just went through a real world

fiasco that made the military look ridiculous," they wrote.

"The DOD is not about to cooperate on a movie that

does the same thing."

In this case, they made changes to ensure

the film would ultimately turn out to be, in their words,

"more of a commercial for us than damage control."

But with Black Hawk Down, high level leaders

saw an opportunity to recast the memory of Somalia altogether.

- We got full cooperation from the Defense Department

through two administrations, William Cohen who

was the outgoing Secretary of Defense

was a big fan of the book and said

he would help us in any way to get the movie made.

ROGER STAHL: All that essential equipment gave the DOD

tremendous leverage.

Director Ridley Scott said it would

have been hard to make the film without it.

RIDLEY SCOTT: And so we went right to the wire

in terms of negotiation with the Pentagon

about their requirements as to how

they wanted to be perceived during the film.

But that negotiation took a long time.

ROGER STAHL: First, the Pentagon negotiated away

a few unheroic things.

MATTHEW ALFORD: The original book was actually very good.

And there was loads of things changed in that.

But the most obvious thing was that one

of the veterans who came back from Somalia,

he was convicted of sexually assaulting a child.

ROGER STAHL: It got out that they

had pressured the filmmakers to change the character's name.

MICHAEL ALFORD: So they created...

The only composite character, the only totally fictionalized

character in that film, was Ewan McGregor.

ROGER STAHL: With those messy details out of the way,

all they had to do was focus on the story of the rescue

and avoid any bigger questions.

ROBIN ANDERSEN: The filmmakers grabbed victory out

of the jaws of defeat, a symbolic victory,

where that film did just that.

The soldiers say, I don't care about the politics.

I'm just in it to fight next to the guy beside me.

And we're not going to leave anybody behind.

- You know what I think?

It don't really matter what I think.

Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics

and all that shit, just goes right out the window.

OLIVER STONE: But Somalia was a mess from beginning to end.

We had... America had three or four abortive missions there

that had not worked before.

We'd set up a scenario that was like this,

that the people started to distrust us and hate us.

And then we covered it all up with this nonsense movie.

It's a typical whitewash of a military...

Military corruption, typical.

ROGER STAHL: From then on, the film

became a model for restoring public faith

when overseas interventions go wrong.

It turns out, you can always rescue history

with a rescue story.

The CIA tried it too with Argo.

The film is based on a rescue that occurred during the Iran

hostage crisis, how the CIA smuggled Americans

out by pretending to be a Canadian sci-fi movie

production company.

The Entertainment Office had been pushing

this storyline for a while.

Five years earlier, the Office had recommended it

to Hollywood and TV producers on what it

called it's Now Playing page.

Eventually, Ben Affleck picked it up as director and star.

He was already in the pipeline, as he had previously

starred in another CIA sponsored film, The Sum of All Fears.

The CIA's exact role in Argo had been something of a mystery,

though.

They took eight years to respond to Matt Alford's

Freedom of Information request.

And when we finally got the internal emails,

they didn't include script negotiations.

We got a peek into how cozy the relationship was, though.

The CIA knew it had a keeper.

"We are hoping to develop a close working relationship

with the filmmakers on this project," they wrote.

After his first couple of visits to Langley,

Affleck was obviously keen to stay in the CIA's good graces.

"We love the agency and this heroic action.

And we really want the process of bringing it

to the big screen to be as real as possible."

Over the course of this gushing relationship,

the CIA Public Affairs Office reviewed multiple versions

of the script.

"The Agency comes off looking very well, they wrote."

The synergy couldn't have been more perfect.

The CIA working with Hollywood to tell a story

about how the CIA worked with Hollywood to save the day.

The irony was thick with scenes like this.

- The United States government has just

sanctioned your science fiction movie.

- Thank you, sir.

ROGER STAHL: You could say it turned out

pretty well for both parties.

- And the Oscar goes to...

ROGER STAHL: Hey, the First Lady of the administration

that helped produce the movie.

- Argo.

Congratulations.

[CHEERS]

ROGER STAHL: And hey, it's Jennifer Garner,

from that other CIA show, Alias.

Argo was on a whole different level,

though, reframing history for a new generation.

Some parts of the story just got buried,

like the fact that it was the CIA that

led the coup that set the whole crisis in motion, which they

finally acknowledged a year later after the documents were

declassified.

- That is the coup that toppled Iran's democratically elected

prime minister.

ROGER STAHL: And the fact that the CIA

failed to see the crisis coming.

TRICIA JENKINS: Even by Tony Mendez's own admission,

the Iranian hostage crisis was an intelligence failure.

For those six people, absolutely, the CIA

was their savior.

Too bad for the other hostages who remained

in captivity for over a year.

ROGER STAHL: 52 of them to be exact.

And they just kind of fall out of the script.

TRICIA JENKINS: And so the story is not on the failure.

It is on the success.

And so Argo really becomes a story of redemption for the CIA

in the face of one of its biggest intelligence failures.

ROGER STAHL: Another rescue story in the bag.

- Great work, boys.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, I think probably Hollywood

is full of CIA agents.

And we just don't know it.

And I wouldn't be surprised at all

to discover that this was extremely common.

ROGER STAHL: Yeah, I doubt he would be surprised.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I have to confess that at one point,

I got pretty wrapped up in one of these deals.

In 2017, the National Geographic Channel

aired a popular miniseries called The Long Road Home.

It was about a 2004 ambush of US soldiers

outside Baghdad in Sadr City.

They called it Black Sunday.

And it put the first big crack in the US public's faith

in the occupation.

Eventually, ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz

wrote a bestseller about it.

And it was optioned for a series.

The army was all over it, opening up

Fort Hood, Texas for shooting virtually the entire thing.

In particular, they allowed the producers

to renovate an urban combat training

site to look like Sadr City.

- This is more than three football fields long.

It is the largest set working in North America today.

- Thank you everybody, positions please.

ROGER STAHL: There you have it, the largest film

set on the largest military base.

The promos mentioned the military's involvement.

So naturally, there was a lot of talk about accuracy.

- It's been amazing having the Army as our advisor,

because I always wanted this to be as authentic as possible.

- National Geographic is famous for telling the truth.

I love that they're making honest, real, hard hitting

television.

ROGER STAHL: I wondered how honest.

So I contacted a couple of vets who had

been wounded in the firefight.

I had the idea to rendezvous with them at the base

and maybe tour the site.

I thought the army might jump at the chance to show some Purple

Heart heroes around.

After all, they had trained at that very facility

before shipping out.

And this was their story.

No dice.

- I guess the first question I have is,

one, have you talked to the Chief of Public Affairs

folks out in Los Angeles?

That needs to be the first stop before we can allow you

guys to come in and film.

Essentially there has to be a production assistance agreement

between yourself and the Army.

ROGER STAHL: If you're curious, yeah,

I did send them a formal request.

- Do you think I should tell them there's

a part in the movie where I talk about them changing

the parts of movies they don't like?

I just think they're going to want to change that part.

(LAUGHS)

ROGER STAHL: Well, I eventually did tell them.

And they stopped writing me back.

In the meantime, the vets and I could only

meet in Killeen, Texas, just outside of the base,

hang out in a modest motel, and watch the show together.

I wondered whether they'd recognize themselves

and what they went through.

- It was traumatic.

It hurt to see this.

No, it wasn't that.

It didn't inspire any flashbacks or anything.

No, it should have.

(LAUGHS) Had it been done properly,

maybe I would have gobbled it up and had

different feelings about it, also intense feelings,

but not anger.

- Yeah, I felt like a liar, because the story that I

have been telling my family was not what was shown on the show.

ROGER STAHL: For starters, the guys

mentioned that the show wasn't too kind to their friend

and fellow GI Tomas Young in the episode devoted to him.

This was significant, because his story was that

of the early peace movement.

Paralyzed by a bullet, he went on

to become one of the most visible war protesters,

alongside Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in the same ambush.

Young's own death became a symbol

of the anguish and betrayal felt by many vets.

REPORTER: Unable to swallow pills,

unable to pull a trigger, unwilling to implicate anyone

else, Thomas plans to starve himself to death.

ANCHOR: Wounded April Fourth, 2004, his fifth day in Iraq,

shot in Sadr City, is now writing

a letter on this 10th anniversary

called the last letter, a message to George W Bush.

TOMAS YOUNG: You are each guilty of egregious war

crimes, of plunder, and finally, of murder,

including the murder of thousands of young Americans,

my fellow veterans, whose future you stole.

STAHL (to vet): Yeah, how did they depict Young?

- As a pussy.

And he wasn't.

He was cool.

He was well read and a cool guy.

Yeah.

- I think they depicted him as a douche bag.

- What do you know about it?

War?

You ever even been shot at?

Well, then do me a favor and shut up.

ROGER STAHL: The show carefully controls

Young's image, especially his anti-war activities.

We see him protesting.

But you come away with the sense that he's

just bitter about having been wounded.

We never get to hear any of his speeches.

According to the documents, the Army

even vetted each of the protest signs' slogans.

And of course, they completely avoid mentioning his suicide.

But there's more.

The show also went to work correcting any impression

that Black Sunday was a strategic blunder.

This was curious, because in the book,

it's clear that command failed to anticipate the uprising

and may have provoked it.

They also failed to anticipate the need for armored equipment.

Scores of soldiers had to head into the firefight

in unarmored Humvees and fish in a barrel supply trucks.

But the show lets the man in charge, Battalion Commander

Gary Volesky, entirely off the hook

and even makes him the hero.

The series puts him where he wasn't, in a Humvee

at the vulnerable front of the rescue convoy.

This was a spot that, in reality,

had been occupied by Captain George

Lewis, a big part of the book.

Lewis disappears from the story entirely.

- How are we supposed to turn?

DUNCAN KOEBRICH: I wrote to one of my buddies about it.

I said, I think they're going to put Colonel Volesky in Captain

Lewis's spot.

And he said, that would be a serious deviation

from the book.

And then the next episode aired, and sure enough, he

gives a speech in a motor pool and climbs in and leads us

from the front, which he did not.

ROGER STAHL: Turns out, Volesky's character

does a lot of valorous things up there.

DUNCAN KOEBRICH: I don't know how involved General Volesky was...

This is part of why I want to hear his thoughts on being

depicted, imbued with the valor of Captain Lewis.

ROGER STAHL: It was a question on my mind, too.

It seemed likely that he'd played some role in the show's

development.

There he is on set, telling everyone to break a leg.

And it just so happens that he served as Chief of Army Public

Affairs during a critical period between the first script

reviews and the show's broadcast.

There was one more thing gnawing at me.

Remember Captain Lewis, whom Volesky replaced in the show

at the front of the rescue convoy?

The guys mentioned that Volesky had

made him the primary scapegoat after the ambush

and relieved him of duty.

- When he looked at it as a bad thing in the army,

he lost his job for it.

But now, to show civilians of it,

now something heroic, something good.

ROGER STAHL: I had to track Lewis down and ask him

about all this.

He was working for the Army as a civilian

at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

He confirmed that Volesky had indeed

removed him from his post.

But what did he think about Volesky

taking his place in the convoy on the show?

- Yeah, I don't know why they did that.

It doesn't make much sense to have a battalion commander

leading a convoy of a company.

I mean, that's a pretty simple thing.

I think most people who have any military experience

would say, wait a sec, that doesn't

make a whole lot of sense.

ROGER STAHL: And what would he want to say to Volesky?

- Yeah, I'm just wondering how it happened

and whether he had any knowledge or involvement in it.

And I hope he didn't.

I mean, because if he did, I mean it'd completely trash

any respect I had for him.

TRAVIS WALKER: I don't think the blunder came with Captain Lewis...

Was one who took the brunt of it, who got relieved of duty.

I think the blunder came from way up top, because I mean,

we didn't have armored vehicles.

Some guys had armor that didn't fit.

Some guys... it was just a total...

DUNCAN KOEBRICH: Mechanized infantry

against a supply truck.

- We didn't do anything that we trained for.

DUNCAN KOEBRICH: Yeah.

ROGER STAHL: That's not the story we got, though.

We didn't see those in charge needlessly

sacrificing the lives of these soldiers

or Young's fight to make sure it doesn't happen again.

It was a story of a good war and a misguided peace movement.

It was a story of enemies who come out of nowhere

and a battalion commander who puts his own life on the line

to get his guys back.

That's how Black Sunday goes from a black eye to something

more like Black Hawk Down.

DUNCAN KOEBRICH: I have to wonder, OK, why are they

doing this?

Why are they depicting these scenes

that contradict what happened?

I don't think that's creative license.

I think that's a cover-up.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROGER STAHL: There's still one big issue

that we haven't touched.

What about certain unsavory historical realities

that the CIA and Pentagon would rather keep tucked away?

Consider war crimes.

In short, they want you to know that there's

nothing to see here.

For example, the CIA has always been

sensitive about its associations with torture.

For a long time, it was the number one showstopper,

no joke.

MATTHEW ALFORD: So in Meet the Parents,

for example, Ben Stiller walks into Robert De Niro's office...

Robert De Niro is the CIA character.

And in the original script, he is

meant to see CIA torture manuals on the desk

all around, as a way of...

As part of the script.

It's a way of making Robert De Niro's character

look frightening.

However, the CIA itself did not like this.

And because they were consulting on the film,

they asked for it to be changed.

And so that's why when Ben Stiller goes

into that office in the finished film,

it's just pictures of Robert De Niro meeting famous people

like President Clinton.

It's watered down, basically.

- Looking for something, Greg?

- Oh.

ROGER STAHL: Things changed after 9/11, though.

The CIA teamed up with shows like 24,

which did depict torture, lots of it,

but as a justified and effective measure to keep America safe.

- You got information, Paul, I need it now.

ROGER STAHL: By the time Zero Dark Thirty arrived,

the CIA's use of torture was an established controversy.

The red flags went up when it went public

that the Obama administration was involved in the film.

NEWS ANCHOR: What has some on Capitol Hill so angry?

- You believe, when watching this movie,

that waterboarding and torture leads

to information that leads then to the elimination of Osama bin

Laden.

That's not the case.

ROGER STAHL: What we do know is that behind the scenes,

the CIA was busy leveraging the film

not only to justify US torture, but to soften its image.

The agency demanded that the screenwriters

remove the torture dogs, despite the fact that the CIA did

use dogs routinely.

And they politely asked that the script

keep to those torture techniques already in the public domain.

The Pentagon has also done its best

to suppress any suggestion of war crimes.

For example, in the original script for the World War II

movie Windtalkers, there was a character

called The Dentist who pulls gold teeth from the mouths

of dead Japanese soldiers.

The Marine entertainment officer wanted it gone.

"The dentist character displays distinctly un-Marine behavior,"

he wrote.

But it's no secret that this kind of racism

fueled trophy taking was commonplace in the Pacific.

Eugene Sledge describes the practice

as widespread in his famous memoir, which is required

reading for Marine officers.

Gold teeth were the least of it, too.

Soldiers raided bodies for bones and ears.

They developed techniques for boiling

of flesh off of severed heads.

These grim souvenirs flooded the home front,

even showing up in Life Magazine.

But the Marine Office didn't want the film

to bring any of that up.

Phil Strub at the Pentagon concurred.

"Stealing gold teeth, yep, has to go."

So it went.

Lone Survivor got the treatment, too.

There's the pivotal scene where the platoon captures

some Afghani goat herders and tries

to decide what to do with them.

According to Marcus Luttrell's firsthand account,

the commanding officer argued that they

should kill them quietly, hide the bodies,

and keep a pact of silence.

He eventually put it to a vote, though.

And in a split decision, the group let them go.

The Pentagon didn't like this image of military leaders

advocating war crimes and had a long discussion

about changing it.

In the final version, it's the commanding officer

who unequivocally orders the group to let the captives go.

- This is not a vote.

This is what we're going to do.

ROGER STAHL: How would the Office

justify twisting the story like this

if you were to, say, put them on the spot?

Well, as luck would have it, I had the chance to ask.

The Navy held a webinar about how

it works with Hollywood, a sort of advertisement

for its services.

Dennis Moynihan was the chief information officer

while Lone Survivor was in production.

He'd been talking about how authentic they

were able to make it.

I couldn't believe the moderator picked up my question.

But being a military ethics professor, he took an interest.

Trigger warning, there's going to be

a fair amount of squirming.

- I have one more.

This is an interesting one, too.

And this is a question for you, Admiral Moynihan.

"How does the military deal..." and this

is Roger Stahl, by the way, providing this question.

"How does the military deal with the suggestion of war crimes?

I'm thinking about Marcus Luttrell's book,

where the CO suggests they kill the captured goat herders.

This suggestion goes missing from the film.

This change seems like it compromises

the principle of authenticity."

What do you think of that?

- Look, it gets to, again, a lot of the things

that we talked about.

Does it reflect well on the military?

Can it be used for recruiting?

And can people like David, and in this case, Peter, still

tell a credible story.

So is everything that ever happened in that situation

reported on included in the movie?

No, it's not.

But I think that's OK.

Because in the end, you got a very credible product

that certainly, the service, I think was proud of,

and I think that Peter was proud of as well.

So every detail, absolutely not, for all the

reasons that we talked about before.

But I don't have a problem with that.

- OK, good.

And I have a question for the...

ROGER STAHL: Yeah, of course, not every detail.

What about crimes of aggression,

like overthrowing foreign governments?

Well, in recent years, you see a pattern of support

that normalizes these kinds of interventions.

Of course, you have Iron Man running ops in Afghanistan.

But you also have The Suicide Squad.

Here, the US military sends in a team of B-list superheroes

to overthrow a fictional Latin American government.

So a long history of illegal US military action

in Central and South America ends up as not much more

than a punch line.

Or take Jack Ryan, the most popular series on Amazon Prime

to date.

Season two got off with a bang by demonizing Venezuela,

a longtime US foreign policy target.

- Your concern is that the Russians are secretly

selling weapons to Venezuela?

It would fit a pattern.

[MUSIC - "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH"]

SINGING: It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound?

- This ends up in the news, it's just going to cause panic.

- A nuclear Venezuela you will not

hear about in the news, because we'll already be dead.

ROGER STAHL: The central plot is the CIA trying

to tip a Venezuelan election.

SINGING: There's something happening here.

ROGER STAHL: The agency seeks to topple a dictator

and put a liberal, populist, human rights

candidate into power.

The thing is, something was actually happening there

in Venezuela at the time.

US foreign policy leaders were doing their best

to delegitimize an election by stoking an insurrection.

But unlike in the show, their favorite candidate

was less populist and more the empire friendly kind.

So with CIA and DOD help, you might

say that Jack Ryan put a pretty face on the whole operation

in real time.

- My character is Gloria Bonalde.

It's an amazing character because she's a family woman.

And she's not very interested in politics.

ROGER STAHL: The Pentagon also wants

you to forget all about certain policies of mass destruction.

Consider Agent Orange in Vietnam.

This was a vast toxic spraying program

designed to kill the jungle and make Vietnamese resistance

fighters easier to bomb.

It poisoned a whole country, including many US troops.

One of these poisoned vets wrote a book about it,

along with his father, who happened to have

been in charge of the spraying.

Eventually, a script for a TV movie

landed on the Pentagon's desk.

You guessed it.

The movie is "inflammatory," they wrote.

Besides, "the exposure of most Vietnam veterans to herbicide

orange was not very great."

Mind you, this was three years after Agent Orange

manufacturers had paid out a huge class action

settlement in a case that drew out over 100 medical studies.

Luckily, the film got made in the end.

Without it, throngs of suffering vets

would have remained invisible for much longer.

As time went on, it also became clear

that Agent Orange was having near genocidal effects

on the Vietnamese population.

REPORTER: An epidemic of birth defects, brain damage,

and rare cancers still affecting hundreds of thousands

of Vietnamese today.

ROGER STAHL: For the Entertainment Office,

any reference to Agent Orange was a problem,

even if the program's codename appeared years later

in some comic book movie.

MATTHEW ALFORD: There was an Operation...

Operation Ranch Hand was designed to capture the Hulk.

But the Pentagon didn't like it, because of course, Operation

Ranch Hand was the name of a real operation using chemicals

in Vietnam.

So they were trying to avoid any kind of association

with any of these sorts of things.

- I'm requesting a National Command Authority Override.

Angry Man is unsecure.

MATTHEW ALFORD: You could call it petty.

But in a way, it's just... it's the Pentagon

operating like a slickly oiled PR machine.

But it's a slickly oiled PR machine that is not just

advertising toothpaste.

It's advertising the most violent and powerful

organizations on the planet.

ROGER STAHL: The Office is also touchy about nuclear weapons.

There's a long history of rejecting

movies that suggest they might not entirely be under control.

Take one from the Cold War, The Day After,

which envisioned the outcome of a nuclear exchange.

It happened to be the highest rated TV movie in history.

Nearly half the US population tuned in.

President Reagan even watched it.

He wrote in his diary that it left a powerful impression

on him.

And its influence led directly to nuclear disarmament talks.

The Pentagon denied this one because it

didn't like the image of an accidental nuclear war,

a skirmish that gets out of control.

They wanted it to be crystal clear

that the Soviets started it.

They had a problem with this scene in particular.

- Well, maybe they'll contain it.

After all, I've still got symphony tickets for tonight.

- The thing that bothers me is that damn launch on warning.

- What's that?

- That's when one side tells the other

that they're going to fire their missiles as soon as they

think the other guy's missiles are already on the way.

- Use them or lose them.

ROGER STAHL: The Pentagon wanted this out.

"We do not have a launch on warning policy," they wrote.

"And the public should not be misled that we do."

But they did.

Launch on warning was an official policy

in The Single Integrated Operational Plan

beginning in 1979.

And because of it, the US came dangerously close to launching

in a few occasions.

Thankfully, the filmmakers stood their ground.

Had the Pentagon successfully changed the script

to lay all fault at the feet of the Russians,

the film might have served to drive nuclear buildup instead.

The Pentagon's view of nukes has reshaped entire franchises.

Consider Godzilla.

The monster began as an explicit allegory

for the US nuclear bombing of Japan.

And these critical associations held all the way

through the 1998 version with Matthew Broderick.

By 2014, though, the DOD was fully involved.

So things had to change.

The nuclear sub one of the monsters

carries off into the jungle, they

switched that from American to Russian,

as not to give the impression that we could ever

lose control of our arsenal.

- We located your Russian sub.

ROGER STAHL: The whole attitude toward nukes

had to change, too.

There was a scene in the original script where

one of the characters tells a harrowing story

about his grandfather surviving the bombing of Hiroshima.

The Office wanted it gone.

"If this is an apology or questioning the decision

to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that

will be a showstopper for us."

So we got this speech instead.

- The arrogance of man is thinking

nature is in our control, and not the other way around.

ROGER STAHL: There's more.

The bomb goes from being the threat

to helping solve the problem.

It turns out, the nukes weren't the monsters

but were actually being used to blow up monsters back

in the day.

- All those nuclear bomb tests in the '50s.

Not tests.

- They were trying to kill it.

ROGER STAHL: And they were still our best hope.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Godzilla was different after this.

The 2019 version didn't have DOD help.

But it nevertheless stuck with the nukes as heroes theme.

A planned explosion supercharges Godzilla

to fight the good fight.

It's hard to imagine a more complete reversal.

This long time warning about the dangers of proliferation

is now an extension of the US military

and something of an advertisement for the bomb.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

These days, it's not just about war movies.

The Pentagon has managed to colonize

the entire entertainment landscape.

They've always had their toe in sci-fi, for example.,

But now it's a major part of the game.

Consider that Transformers was the first franchise

to cooperate with all four branches.

Sci-fi and comic book movies served as a refuge

from all those real and hugely unpopular overseas occupations.

TANNER MIRRLEES: The science fiction and fantasy

creates kind of an imaginary space

for the various melodramas of the military

to be scripted and played out without ever having to address

the real motives of foreign policy in the world today,

nor the consequences for those that fight on its behalf

and die in its wake.

ROGER STAHL: If this embrace of sci-fi

strikes you as a bit strange, you're not alone.

ROBIN ANDERSEN: When Philip Strub or anybody

in the Entertainment Liaison Office

says that it has to be accurate, we're

just changing these scripts to make it accurate,

what I love about that is now we are battling space invaders.

That's not a very accurate portrayal

of the Department of Defense and the role

of the Department of Defense.

ROGER STAHL: Once you've conquered fantasy,

where do you go?

Reality, of course.

This is probably the most surprising thing

about the documents.

The Pentagon has staked a flag in every little strange corner

of reality TV.

They've had their hand in game shows,

like The Price Is Right for a while.

Despite all the yelling and running around,

the military carefully manages these events.

This includes handpicking participants.

And audience participation is out,

because they regard it as too spontaneous.

On these game shows and especially daytime talk shows,

you'll see a ton of reunions.

The office is constantly arranging them.

Then there are the many military themed home makeover shows.

You can also invite the Dude Perfect influencers to romp

on your aircraft carrier.

- I've wanted to do something like this since I

saw the movie Top Gun.

ROGER STAHL: Or have the Rachael Ray

Show put a bunch of service people

through a cooking challenge.

Cooking shows are an astonishingly big part

of Pentagon assistance with TV.

Cake shows, especially.

Boy, do they love cake shows, lots

of different kinds of cakes, fighter jet cakes, tank cakes.

You have competition shows that serve as recruiting vehicles.

Then there's what you might call harder TV documentary

fare, the kind of stuff on the History and Discovery channels.

These are those programs that celebrate weapon systems,

sniper rifles, Apache helicopters, F-35s,

and what it's like to drive what will probably

replace the Humvee.

So that's what Jay Leno has been up to.

- Well, that was pretty cool.

ROGER STAHL: This also includes shows

like Taking Fire and Inside Combat Rescue that embeds you

with the troops overseas, usually

through the eye of the helmet cam.

The guy behind this pivot to reality TV was David Evans.

He took over as director of the Pentagon office in 2018,

but before that, his job was to manage assistance

for documentary and unscripted television.

Shows like Inside Combat Rescue represented a big turn

in that direction, a winning formula.

DAVID EVANS: It was a huge success for Nat Geo.

They saw the ratings go through the roof on it.

A year later, two years later, three years down the line,

other filmmakers coming to us, wanting to do...

Or wanting to do something like a Nat Geo show.

And they'll say as much.

Yeah, we want to do another Inside Combat Rescue.

ROGER STAHL: Striking out into all this new territory

has required that the Office take a more aggressive posture.

These days, they're not just waiting around for producers

to come to them.

They're out there pounding the pavement and drumming up deals.

Suddenly, the Air Force is producing

an ad for its services and circulating it

among industry types.

NARRATOR: The Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office

is the industry's gateway to an extraordinary arsenal

of aircraft, equipment, incredible personnel,

and locations.

ROGER STAHL: They're hitting the road to conferences and trade

shows to reach new markets.

KEN HAWES: And the reason that we are here today

is to inform filmmakers about our capability,

about our office, and what we can do to help

them help us tell our story.

ROGER STAHL: They're presenting at Comic-Con and a bunch

of other industry conferences.

They're going to military tech expos,

not to advertise their services, but to find out

what cool new gadgets are out there to pitch to producers.

Publicly, they claim they don't pitch.

Here's the new head of the Pentagon office at that Navy

webinar.

GLEN ROBERTS: We don't ever pitch.

We don't have an active pitch where I will call a studio

and say, hey, have you guys thought about this.

ROGER STAHL: You have to wonder why he's saying

this when they clearly do.

Recall, they had pitched Act of Valor

to the studios and pitched episodes about sexual assault

to NCIS, what they internally called the Navy's big request.

But there's a whole lot of day to day pitching, too.

They sent a congratulatory letter

to the new head of Fox Team Programming

and requested a meeting to pitch him potential Air Force ideas.

They pitched a story of a Marine and her bomb

sniffing dog to film studios, Animal Planet, Letterman,

and Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

And they took the opportunity while working

on an episode of Extreme Makeover Home edition

to pitch an idea about doing it again with a different Air

Force team.

In the past few years, you start to see

entire sections of the weekly reports categorized

under outreach.

The military worries when they notice a production for which

they were not approached.

So they often reach out to offer assistance.

Back when he headed up the office,

David Evans summarized this role on his own LinkedIn account.

Engagement runs through the entire spectrum of production,

beginning all the way back with concept and script development.

So we're at a unique point in the evolution

of military propaganda in the US.

On the one hand, the Office has managed

to evade scrutiny and insinuate itself more deeply than ever.

But on the other, we can finally see the big picture

and do something about it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MATTHEW ALFORD: I think the reason it's important,

and perhaps the reason it's important to me,

is because whenever there is American

and British military action around the world,

particularly over the last 20 years,

that military action has been extremely destructive.

ROGER STAHL: The stakes are high.

We're talking about dominant representations

of the most powerful military on the planet, bigger

than the next dozen countries combined

that has been bombing other countries more

or less continually since World War II,

and with a staggering legacy of human suffering.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MATTHEW ALFORD: The mood music for that is our popular culture.

ROGER STAHL: This is the cinematic universe that's

been operating under the radar for decades in which there

isn't a problem the US military can't solve,

and where alternative stories get sucked into a black hole.

It's a universe of officially prescribed threats

and target nations.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: This is not just

a concern to the United States.

It is a concern to the world.

These are highly censored, politically motivated

portrayals of the American empire, if you wish.

MATTHEW ALFORD: We're just a bit affected

by that, which means that we're a bit more confident about how

great military action will be.

And we're a bit more confident that those

evil Iranians, or those evil Chinese, or evil Venezuelans,

or whatever it is, we're just a bit more confident that they're

a bit less human.

And that kills thousands, tens of thousands,

or even in Iraq's case, a million people.

ROGER STAHL: It eventually hit me.

This isn't just a collection of script changes.

We're inside of it, speeding through this world created

in the image of the military industrial complex.

And with razor thin margins of public support

for some of these disastrous wars,

this skewed image of the world might just

be nudging us over the edge.

So what questions should we be asking if we want out?

Why shouldn't we know what they're doing?

- They shut down a battleship,

put up a giant 22 foot tall movie screen...

And actually, should we even be paying these organizations

to generate propaganda that's going to be

bounced back to us at the movies?

Why do Americans not hear Voice of America

or any of the other identified propaganda formats

distributed around the globe?

ROGER STAHL: It turns out that the US has some long standing

propaganda laws that, at the very least,

prohibit its use on domestic audiences.

And the DOD's own public affairs directives

prohibits selective benefit, that

is favoritism toward a particular ideological movement

or commercial enterprise.

So it seems like abolishing the Office might

have some legal justification.

But what if these deals could just be made more transparent?

It's clear that the Freedom of Information Act

isn't quite cutting it.

For example, Tom Secker asked the Navy

for the past decade of script notes.

They said they didn't keep them.

Two years, over 100 emails, and three formal appeals later,

they admitted they did keep them, 240,000 pages.

But they said they couldn't release them, because they

contained trade secrets.

They're giving us the runaround more and more these days.

It's getting to the point of absurdity.

Like the time when Tom put in a request for documents related

to a dozen productions and the DOD

came back with 1,000 pages redacted, and I mean blank.

It may take legal action to get these offices to comply

with public information requests.

But on the most basic level, shouldn't we at least

know if they've had their hands on a production?

After all, rules for commercial entities

have been around since the 1930s.

Take this typical military supported

episode of Rachael Ray that featured military themed

Suave products.

At the end, Suave is required to disclose, but not the military.

That could change.

So you might see something like this.

OK, maybe something more like this.

The point is...

The public has a right to know.

And I think the Pentagon should be legally obliged

to make that information available to the public.

Not at the very end of a 3-minute credit run.

Not in the scrolling credits, somebody

listed as a technical advisor.

At the start of the film.

SEBASTIAN KAEMPF: It wouldn't be particularly popular

either with the film industry or with the Pentagon,

because people, I think, would not necessarily

be prepared to pay money to see a film like that.

If the CIA wrote a movie,

do you really want to go see that?

I mean, is that what's going to pull in box office numbers?

No.

Then we get a culture that is greater...

With a greater degree of transparency.

And then the public will vote with their feet

and vote with their wallets.

I think at the end of the day, because I'm a media educator,

I really just want people to be critical media consumers.

The problem is that you can't be a critical media consumer

unless this relationship between your war

movies and the military or your spy movies and the CIA

is made transparent.

Because the moment you become aware of it,

you can go to the movies and be far less subject

to the propaganda messages that the government is

trying to get you to believe, or to accept, or to act upon.

I guess that's really what I want for people.

ROGER STAHL: For a decade now, I've

been asking myself the same question over and over.

Has the long arm of the security state refashioned this one?

And how about this one?

Now you're asking it too.

Imagine living...

MOVIE TRAILER VOICE: in a world...

ROGER STAHL: where we don't have to.

[MUSIC PLAYING]