Chase brandon

For this inaugural episode I am joined by my good friend and frequent collaborator Tom Secker. We begin by discussing the bizarre life and career of the CIA Hollywood liaison Chase Brandon. We then move onto the relationship between entertainment and the security services. We explore the notion that this going beyond mere propaganda, and instead represents a significant distortion of our culture and perception of reality and world events.

 
Tom Secker and I recently sat down to talk with Ed Opperman all about Matt Alford’s new book The Writer With No Hands.  The book deals with the bizarre “death” of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore and his mysterious links to the CIA.  We also talk about the second season of The CIA and Hollywood, and some recent Jeffrey Epstein developments.
 
Show Notes:

Tricia Jenkins' The CIA in Hollywood was one of the books that inspired me to start this site, and the recently published second edition expands considerably on the original. Because the CIA is resistant to FOIA requests and other forms of inquiry, Jenkins amassed a wide range of open source materials and interviewed various people both from the CIA (or formerly of the CIA) and from the entertainment industry.

Chase Brandon was the CIA's first Entertainment Industry Liaison. From 1996 to early 2007 he was the CIA's man in Hollywood, working on a dozen major movies and numerous high-profile TV shows. In this episode we examine the background of the CIA in the entertainment industry and how they founded their Entertainment Liaison Office and appointed Brandon in charge of it. We also discuss Brandon's career, especially his attempts to downplay and disguise his influence on entertainment including ghost-writing The Recruit.

Tom Clancy was one of the most popular spy authors of all time, but was he a spy himself? What are the nature of his government connections? How were the film adaptations of his novels supported by the Pentagon and the CIA? What script changes were made by the DOD in exchange for their support? In Part I of this two-part podcast we examine five Tom Clancy films - The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Chase Brandon was the CIA's first entertainment liaison officer, working in the entertainment industry for over a decade from 1996 onwards. Brandon helped produce over a dozen major films and a similar number of TV shows and more than any other individual helped set up a permanent CIA network within Hollywood and the rest of the industry.

Sibel Edmonds is our final guest as we dissect this shambolic re-telling of the Soviet-Afghan War.  Much of this conversation is devoted to what the film leaves out, such as Charlie Wilson being a CIA asset, the origins of Operation Cyclone being older and much more important than one drunk congressman and his ultra-right wing Christian friend and of course the likes of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Osama Bin Laden who are completely absent from the movie.  This was a no-holds-barred critique of this quite shameful piece of CIA pr

Good friend Adam joins us to discuss the 1998 action thriller Enemy of the State, and its unprecedented ‘revelation’ of surveillance technology.  We talk about how the film has a rogue’s gallery of technical advisers – including Chase Brandon and Marty Keiser – and how this led to one of the most spectacular depictions of the NSA and the spy state in general.  Following from this we analysed the likely purpose in the CIA masking themselves as the NSA in the film, and how this has scuppered the progress of any serious dialogue about mass surveillance.

Aaron Franz joined in the conversation as we looked at the film The Recruit, which more than any other film we’re covering in this season was moulded by CIA entertainment liaison Chase Brandon.  Like so many films, it tells the story of a young person inducted into a secret world with secret rules and codes of thinking and behaviour, and in doing so inducts the audience into that same world.  We discussed this dynamic from various angles – black operations, secret societies, occult or mystery school philosophies – before studying Brandon’s appea