Hi Charles, I'm curious, what's your opinion of Jack Idema? :o)


>>Ah me too...
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>>>No, but it sounded like something I would like and I have always liked him. I am still reeling from how massively disappointed I was in The Good Shephard
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>And the really sad thing was that there were so many good stories to be told - Bissell, Shakeley, Barnes, Harvey ( Berlin station chief in early 50 who was responsible for the Venona intercepts ), Wisner, Desmond Fitzgerald, Dulles, Tony Po . And of course James Jesus Angleton ( and if that is who they loosely based Damon's character on - he was I think supposed to be counterintelligence - then they really blew it. Just the relationship between Angleton and Kim Philby would have made a movie. In TGS it was a throwaway scene.
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>Diniro's cameo certainly didn't do justice to Wild Bill Donovan. In the late sixties in Istanbul I was lucky to know a woman who had been there since her days in OSS. Her brother was one of the originals - Amherst, Williams, OSS, one of Donovan's first, one of the people at the table in Georgetown with Fitzgerald and Wisner and Ben Bradlee and Kathrine Graham and the Alsops and Cord Meyer ... god did she have stories ( and a drinking problem ) Lots of late nights listening to tales of the wild times. She knew Donovan, Casey, Alan Dulles and a whole lot of the case officers and field guys (she did Berlin, Vienna, Madrid and Beirut as well as Istanbul ) There were 100 good movies there.
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>People don't know much about that history as a rule - though it is not very secret anymore. There are snapshots - they saw Colby - college professorial looking guy - couldn't tell by looking at him just how many times he'd been dropped in to Nazi occupied Europe on a Jedburgh team. They saw cartoon depictions of the agency during the Church hearings but never saw the stars on the wall in Langley or even know the names of the guys who went into Fukien in '50 or did crazy improbable things in the Bekaa and Berlin and Peshawar and the Plain of Jars. They mocked Richard Helms because he thought it mattered and had disdain for them. And they never understood how Bill Casey took it off the books and hid it all in plain sight.
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>Robert Littel's The Company is a great read that would make a great movie. Buckley's Spytime is a lot of fun http://www.amazon.com/Spytime-Undoing-James-Jesus-Angleton/dp/0151005133
>I'm reading E. Howard Hunts An American Spy now and loving it.
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>The Good Shepherd was like a movie about the American Revolution where they decided to leave out Washington and Hamilton and Franklin and Arnold and just make up characters that were "composites" Silly.