Does the Central Intelligence Agency read my Spy Culture website? Why yes, yes it does. There I was, innocently putting together a timeline of the CIA’s work in Hollywood going from WW2 to Zero Day when I happened upon an article on the CIA’s blog from February 2025 called The CIA and Pop Culture.

An innocent enough title, you might say, and the ‘here’s some interesting facts you probably didn’t know’ style of the piece will be familiar to anyone with an internet connection.  But the first factoid jumped out at me:

From what CIA historians have been able to uncover, the Agency’s earliest interaction with Hollywood was in cooperation with the making of the 1965 James Bond film, Thunderball. At the end of the movie, Bond and his lady friend are rescued from the ocean with the help of a CIA-proprietary B-17 aircraft using a device called “Skyhook.” Some Agency seniors clued the filmmakers in to the device’s capability, and shockingly the officers even arranged for the plane and crew to take part in the filming. (That’s definitely not something the Agency would do today). As a thanks, apparently those Agency seniors were given the red-carpet treatment at the film’s DC premiere.

Needless to say, I have some comments.  For one, Thunderball was not the Agency’s first interaction with Hollywood.  Most likely, the first CIA-supported film was The Day the Earth Stood Still from 1951, the same year the CIA removed all references to themselves from the Bob Hope comedy My Favorite Spy and effectively prevented Cavalier Productions from making a film about the Agency.  In 1952 the CIA also rejected Warner Bros.’ attempt to make a CIA film, warning Jack and Harry that they ‘would take every step to discourage the production’.

The previous year Carlton Alsop and Finis Farr, two CIA assets in Hollywood, were dispatched by Howard Hunt to England to secure the rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the film version of which came out in 1954.  Men of the Fighting Lady also came out in the same year, also made with CIA assistance.  I could go on, but the point is that the CIA got their hooks into Hollywood well over a decade before Thunderball.

For another, CIA historians did not uncover the use of the CIA skyhook plane in Thunderball – I did.  I first wrote about the CIA skyhook being used in Thunderball in November 2016, and again in National Security Cinema which came out in mid-2017.  Admittedly, I could not have done this without the groundwork done by Joe F Leeker (see here) but still, this was a Spy Culture exclusive over 7 1/2 years ago, the CIA are being plain arrogant in claiming credit for this discovery.  Especially when CREST (the CIA’s online electronic reading room and database of CIA documents) contains nothing on Thunderball except a handful of newspaper articles from their media monitoring/open source office.

Bizarrely, the search results don’t include a memo by CIA Deputy Director Marshall S Carter, who was invited to a special screening of Goldfinger by Bond film technical advisor and government liasion Charles Russhon.  Russhon told Carter that the next Bond film would be Thunderball, but this document doesn’t come up via the search on CREST.

For yet another, I have seen no evidence that CIA officials attended the premiere of Thunderball, and I’ve read an awful lot about the making of that particular film (including the original print of The Battle for Bond).  Indeed, the plane in question wasn’t technically CIA property at the time of the filming, it was registered to a front company called Intermountain Aviation.  Nonetheless, the plane does appear in the film, all histories agree that Russhon used his government connections to get access to it, and a CIA front is still a CIA front.

As such, we can be almost certain that the CIA do read Spy Culture and have read National Security Cinema, and know that I have a tendency to get a little annoyed when people steal credit for my work and my discoveries (as evidently happened on the Gary Devore podcast made by a friend of theirs that I discussed here).  Imitation is the most flattering form of flattery but if they want to help then the CIA could just offer me a job in their history department.

Document

CIA memo on invitation to see Goldfinger