Yahoo News 6 huge spy clichés busted by a real CIA spy!
We've all seen enough spy movies and TV shows from Bond to Bourne, from Mission: Impossible to Tinker, Taylor… to know the many tropes associated with the genre. High-tech gadgets. Undercover operations. Jet-setting to glamorous locations. Double agents. But how much of it is actually true?
Robert Baer is a former CIA case officer who spent most of his career assigned to the Middle East, but also worked field assignments all over the globe. He was even the inspiration for George Clooney's character in 2005's Syriana, with Baer's books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil serving as the basis for the Oscar-winning movie.
"I joined the CIA right out of college in 1976 and went into operations," he tells Digital Spy. "Even when I got out of the CIA, I worked for the UN in the Middle East on assassination investigations. So I was in 21 years, as purely an operator."
MoRE recently, Baer has worked as a consultant on film and TV projects, bringing some extra authenticity to the worlds of Tom Clancy on both the 2014 film Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit starring Chris Pine, and Amazon Prime Video's new series Jack Ryan, fronted by John Krasinski.
Related: Jack Ryan season 2: Release date, cast, plot and everything you need to know
Amazon's series has been applauded by critics for its sharp storytelling and spectacular action sequences. But even with a real-life CIA veteran on board, the series isn't 100% accurate to real life, something Baer himself happily admits.
"There's no bigger downer in a writers' room than a person who says, 'That's not the way it works' – 'cause if you do that, and you listen to that person every time, you're gonna put people to sleep."
How close, though, are the likes of Jack Ryan, the Bond films and their ilk when it comes to capturing the realities of espionage? These are the biggest spy movie and TV show clichés ... analysed by a real spy!
1. Gadgets!
Bond and his high-tech gizmos... the stuff of pure fiction, right?
Nope. Baer insists he and his CIA colleagues would use gadgets "a lot" on operations, mostly for the purposes of encrypting valuable information.
"When I was in particularly dicey areas of Moscow and places like that, we had satellite communications encrypted... One thing I'd always like to see on-screen is, when you don't even trust the system – the CIA – you keep a separate encryption system around your neck.
"You double-encrypt everything, so any moles inside the CIA can't betray you."
The encryption tech is necessary, Baer explained, because a secret agent can't use a regular cell phone, laptop or desktop computer hooked up to the internet.
"From across the street, I can read your computer keystrokes, from radiation," he explained, also revealing that he and colleagues could use special cameras to "see around walls with cameras... seeing who's on the other side by ambient reflections."
Verdict: TRUE!
2. Double agents!
Speaking of "moles inside the CIA", Baer says that turncoats within the intelligence community are a genuine concern and not just an over-used plot twist on 24.
"One I used to work with... Aldrich Ames, he was [secretly] a Russian KGB officer and he betrayed my agent."
Ames was a CIA officer turned KGB mole who was convicted of espionage in 1994. At the time of his arrest, he had compromised more CIA assets than any other mole in history.
"They're everywhere. There's a pathology in the intelligence community of betrayal. It runs through the psyches of people like this, that join intelligence. Every thing you do is based around [the idea] that your colleague was going to betray what you're going to do."
Verdict: TRUE!
3. Gunfights!
Most screen spies are armed to the teeth and engage in at least one major bout of gunplay per mission. But Baer reveals that, while CIA officers are armed for their own protection, they're rarely called upon to draw their weapons.
"I was issued a weapon in a lot of posts, and the protocol was: you've got 14 rounds, [and if you're under fire] what you do is you lay down lead and run like hell. Rarely did I ever see anybody aggressively get into a gun fight.
"It's more of a defensive thing, and [movies and TV shows] tend to mix up assaulters – like SEALs and Delta, or SAS – with espionage, because it's more exciting."
He adds: "Jack Ryan was a Marine, though so that's how you can get away with that."
Verdict: FALSE!
4. The maverick spy!
It's all-too-common for James Bond / Ethan Hunt / Jack Bauer to defy their superiors and go rogue on an operation – in particular, Daniel Craig's 007 spends more time defying M's orders than he does actually following them.
While a case officer actively defying orders would, of course, be reprimanded, Baer says that the best spies are intended to operate independently "out in the field" and, ideally, won't refer back to HQ for instructions.
"That's the worst way to run operations," he insists. "The best way is have a guy on point who knows exactly what's going on and makes up his own requirements.
"He doesn't need analysts back at headquarters to tell him what to think and what to do... he's figured it out, and he's one step ahead of headquarters all the time. It's the way that espionage is best carried out."
Verdict: TRUE! (Sort of)
5. International glamour!
The works of John le Carré – all dead-letter drops and cups of tea in damp 1950s office buildings – might be an accurate reflection of his own time spent working for both MI5 and MI6. But according to Baer, US espionage operations veer more towards the Bond-esque.
"One time a couple of us had a private jet, with an unlimited credit card. You show up at Heathrow with your own jet, and your car, and you go to casinos, playing roulette and the rest of it, yeah."
Baer did admit, however, that your typical CIA guy wouldn't blend in among the rich and wealthy quite as easily as the suave agent 007. "Royalty and very rich people would spot a phoney CIA guy right away," he says.
Verdict: TRUE!
6. Going undercover!
Baer says that secret agents infiltrating an enemy operation under a false identity is "rare" in the modern spy game... and it's because of metadata.
It's pretty simple in 2018 to track someone's digital footprint, and if they don't have an extensive history of metadata, you've got a spy! "It's these 'skip traces' that will you tell whether this is a legit identity or not," he explains. "Because if you've never used a credit card in your life, that will show up.
"If you go into Switzerland, for example, they'll run a credit check on you, and if you're using an alias passport, they'll immediately call the Swiss federal police and you're done."
Maybe that's the reason why James Bond always gives his real name to the bad guys?
Verdict: FALSE!
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is available on Amazon Prime Video now.
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