Credit: Dangerous Minds / CIA

There’s an argument to be made that the greatest weapon an organisation like the FBI or the CIA could ever use in the fight against its enemies is its own mass media.

After all, weapons of warfare have all that collateral damage that states claim to care so much about, and people tend to stop being so all-in on war when they see its immediate repercussions…mostly.

However, with mass media, not only can you bury any images that might turn public opinion against the action of the state, but you can also tell stories about how fucking phenomenal the tools of your state are! It’s essentially the reason the cop show exists. Early forms of the news in the United States of America had this annoying habit of reporting accurately on the behaviour of police forces. Turns out, when that happens, no one likes the police! Who’da thunk?!

Thus, police departments and local governments put a hell of a lot of money into making captivating, thrilling TV shows that made cops out to be gallant, noble superheroes. More importantly, it made the people they caught out to be conniving, comically evil sociopaths that deserved everything that was coming. Slowly but surely, people began to associate the police not with news reports of their actual behaviour, but with the fictional characters on TV.

This sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Even decades after these plans were put in place, people were still using fictional characters to justify real-life atrocities. How often did we see US government officials defend torture in Abu Ghraib by saying that if it worked for Jack Bauer in 24, it’d work in real life? As stupid as it demonstrably is, tactics like this actually work, so it stands to reason that they’d eventually try this tactic with an even shadier bunch than the police forces of the United States.

It’s true, in the early 1990s, they tried to do this with the literal CIA.

What was the point of a CIA TV series?

Now, it’s true, it’s not like the CIA hasn’t been a fertile breeding ground for TV shows before.

Everything from Homeland to Person of Interest involved the Central Intelligence Agency. Hell, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan franchise is built on a CIA agent who works his way up to President of the United States, and the first Jack Ryan novel was published in 1984. Except there was something even more insidious about a pitch put forward by the director of the CIA, James Woolsey, in 1994.

In this case, the show would be a co-production with the CIA that dramatises real-life cases worked on by the agency. Hence the name The Classified Files of the CIA. Two heavy-hitting producers were brought in to bring the show to life as well, yet Aaron Spelling (of Charlie’s Angels and Beverly Hills 90210) and Steve Tisch (Forrest Gump) soon realised their issue. The CIA wouldn’t allow much fictionalisation in the adaptations of their cases, and the truth is that most CIA cases are incredibly boring.

A two-hour pilot episode for the show was made by 20th Century Fox, and right from the off, people could tell this was a dud. A humourless lecture that was nothing more than state propaganda. The pilot was shelved, and when Spelling and Tisch officially left the project, it was dead in the water. Probably for the best, but the truth is that every branch of the American armed forces has spent the ensuing decades pumping money into Hollywood to make them look good.

Maybe if they’d tried a TV show that showed how boring their lives were instead, people wouldn’t have been so impressed.