Robert DeNiro’s demonstration that he can direct a story-by-numbers via this incredibly inaccurate yet fictional story on the CIA’s infancy. Being a fanatic of History, a stickler for accuracy and having an above average knowledge (for an American) of America’s inept, bumbling record at intelligence…Shepherd was complete crap. I’m hoping it was a flop. Just checked imdb.com. YES! It was, cost $110 million to make, crap opening weekend of under 10 and made only $100 million back worldwide. Stick to playing cranky old men, crazy people and mobsters Bobbie!
Anyway, movies are notorious for whitewashing and disinformation. Case in point, many Ugandans born after Idi Amin’s dictatorship think The Last King of Scotland is true. But I think I can sleep securely know Shepherd wasn’t seen by enough Americans to cause much damage, primarily by raising the CIA’s trustworthiness score.
The plot entails the life and career of Edward Wilson, a surrogate for real person James J Angleton. After a tragic event in his childhood, we see him being silly at Yale which leads to him being initiated into the Skull & Bones, the same inbred, secret society the Bush clan and other assholes belong to. Although Wilson loves to study poetry, his club membership and WASP DNA provide him an automatic job in the OSS when the US joins WWII, right after his shotgun wedding to a debutante he knocked up; the overrated Angelina Jolie. Our ‘hero’ is trained in counter intelligence by the MI5 while stationed in London and after the war he interrogates the numerous Germans/Austrians captured by the Allies. Meanwhile, the tensions between the Soviet Union and US ratchet up.
Fast forward to the late Forties/early Fifties. Wilson comes home after being exclusively in Europe for almost a decade. He’s a stranger to his kid, his marriage is just a relationship of convenience (they never loved each other) and now the OSS is the CIA, America’s first non-wartime, intelligence organization outside the military or State Department. Wilson deals with uppity Latin American states thinking they have a right to their assets, defectors from the Eastern Bloc, dirty tricks and the bullshit office politics, namely how the director is lining his pockets through conflicts of interest. Wilson even survives the mass firing JFK initiates after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
I vaguely recall it wrapped up during the mid-Sixties with his son’s wedding being called off because the bride is murdered in retaliation by either the CIA or KGB. I was tuning out from boredom and annoyance with its last half hour, especially when the wrong, real-world blunders were ignored.
Shepherd is at best, a huge waste of 150 minutes. At worst, an insult to reality, History and failed PR for “the Company.” The actual person, Angleton, was a shitty person who oddly came from a more diverse background; his mother was a Mexican National from a poor family and he was a terrible student at Yale who only got into Harvard Law School through connections. Much like Ministry’s lead signer Al Jourgensen, he tried to convince others he was English with his faux accent, ashamed of being half Mexican and ‘gasp!’ Catholic! How Wilson kept his position running counter intelligence for the CIA after MI5’s Kim Philby was discovered to be a Soviet double agent proves my point on why the US and UK have the worst spy organizations; Both primarily recruit from the Ivy-league schools.
This complaint highlights why Amerika and the UK are going down the crapper; SCOTUS, Congress, the UK Parliament and the White House are packed with these dildos from Eton, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Brown, the Seven Sisters and Stanford, regardless of party or place on the political spectrum! They’re also why we got punched in throat 22 years ago, gentlemen don’t learn Arabic or other languages spoken by ‘brown’ or ‘yellow’ people. We continue to endure the disasters caused by WASP Groupthink with its Jewish, non-White and Catholic lapdogs, aka Uncle Toms.
The movie has one painful line nailing WASP sentiment which continues to permeate my homeland’s DNA and why we have a more polite, invisible caste or apartheid system. It’s paraphrased by Wilson but sadly, it’s attributed to FDR, one of my favorite leaders, warts and all. “Catholics and Jews are only guests in this country.” Obviously this racist phrase was updated to include Asians, Blacks and Latin Americans. Good luck getting it to stick to the First Nations. Nevermind how WWII was won through our diversity too. Maybe before he died, FDR like Lincoln, realized he was wrong about his past assumptions. He may have stopped having sex with Eleanor decades ago, but he did take her opinion seriously.
Another clarification Shepherd was dead wrong about. The Bay of Pigs. It didn’t fail over someone leaking. It failed for two major reasons. The first was Bautista’s flunkies (Gloria Estafan’s shit bird family being some) thinking the masses would welcome them, suddenly forgetting how awful Bautista was and Castro hadn’t been in power long enough to prove he’d be a continuation. The second didn’t require much effort for the KGB or Cuban intelligence to figure out, the invaders practically prepared in plain sight and were an open secret, like Kevin Spacey being gay 20 years ago. Castro didn’t need a mirror to read these moron’s cards because they were all face up on the table.
If you want to know the truth regarding the CIA, whose History is littered with war crimes, violations of our civil liberties, fuckups, near misses, occasional success and idiocy, read a book. I know will as I need a refresher. It’s been 30-plus years since I read a synopsis on American intelligence operations from the American Revolution to about the 1970s. If you want to see the douchenozzles as heroes, stick to obvious fiction…James Bond and all the Tom Clancy bullshit.