Review: In ‘The Spymasters,’ C.I.A. Leaders Recount Tactics of the Post-9/11 Years

Mark Mazzetti

New York Times, March 28, 2015

“The Spymasters” begins with an act of vengeance.

Leon Panetta, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recounts an agency manhunt for the planners of a 2009 suicide bombing at a desolate base in southeastern Afghanistan that killed seven of its employees. Hours after he attended the burial of one of his officers at Arlington Cemetery, Mr. Panetta gave the order for an armed drone to destroy a compound in Pakistan that was hiding a militant leader — killing everyone there, including the intended target’s wife and children.

If he hadn’t given the order, Mr. Panetta recalls, the man might have escaped and carried out future attacks. But later in the film, he admits that the action was also “personal.”

That opening monologue is a fitting start for Showtime’s two-hour documentary about the C.I.A.’s secret wars, which have wholly remade a spy agency once created to collect and analyze Cold War intelligence. At turns engrossing, maddening and unsatisfying, “The Spymasters: C.I.A. in the Crosshairs,” directed by Gedeon and Jules Naudet, relies on interviews with the 12 living C.I.A. directors (and two men who served as acting director), as well as others who have been central to the agency’s terrorist hunt. (In an act of corporate synergy, it is narrated by Mandy Patinkin, who plays a C.I.A. grandee on Showtime’s “Homeland.”) Almost all of the film is spent talking about the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, paying particular attention to the most polarizing tactics — targeted killings, secret detentions, waterboarding — that the C.I.A. has employed in the last 14 years.

The film’s most obvious parallel is the “The Gatekeepers,” the remarkable 2012 Oscar-nominated film about Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. In that film, past Shin Bet directors wrestle with their own tactics over decades of war between Israelis and Palestinians, and raise difficult questions about whether Shin Bet’s methods — including targeted killings and brutal interrogations — had sown the seeds of violence in the West Bank and Gaza. In the film’s final moments, Ami Ayalon, a former Shin Bet chief, laments that “we don’t realize that we face a frustrating situation, in which we win every battle but we lose the war.”

But there is little of that kind of soul-baring or sober reflection in “The Spymasters.” With the legacies of the C.I.A.’s biggest post-Sept. 11 controversies at stake, the film’s protagonists are combative, often defensive, in recounting why they did what they did. George J. Tenet, the director from 1997 to 2004, along with some of his aides, lashes out at accusations of C.I.A. torture, and lays much of the blame for the Sept. 11 attacks at the door of the Bush White House. Mr. Panetta is more phlegmatic but adopts the tough talk of a wartime general when discussing a drone campaign in Pakistan that the C.I.A., as yet, still does not publicly acknowledge.

The three C.I.A. directors during the George W. Bush administration — Mr. Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael V. Hayden — all fiercely defend the brutal interrogation methods used during the early years after the Sept. 11 attacks. They also criticize President Obama’s expansive use of drone strikes, saying that no intelligence can be obtained from dead terrorists. (The value of the intelligence the C.I.A. gained from torture was directly challenged in a withering report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The Spymasters” gives the former chiefs a platform to rebut the report’s conclusions.)

Conversely, the three C.I.A. leaders mostly closely identified with drone strikes — Mr. Panetta, David Petraeus, John O. Brennan — all denounce the interrogation methods as contrary to American values but defend drone killings as necessary and effective in keeping the country safe.

There are fascinating parts to the film, including an account of the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, when the C.I.A. was delivering consistent warnings to the White House about the threat of a Qaeda attack. But these former C.I.A. officials have already told many of these stories — and made many of these and other arguments in the film — in memoirs and on cable news programs. It was long ago that these spies came in from the cold and into television green rooms.

There’s a basic tension at the heart of “The Spymasters” that the film tries little to resolve, which is especially disappointing in the wake of recent terrorist attacks by the Islamic State. All the men are convinced that their methods have been successful in combating terrorism, yet they believe that the threat of terrorism has never been greater. At the end of the film, Michael Morell, a former acting C.I.A. director under President Obama, says that the long war between the United States and terror groups is at something of a stalemate, with both sides able to claim victory.

The victory for the United States during the 14 years, he says, is the decimation of Al Qaeda’s core of operatives who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. But, at the same time, he says, the terrorists have been able to spread their ideology successfully across the globe.

So, who wins?