Forty Years of the Condor

[An] assassin, dressed as a mailman, murdered a former Iranian diplomat inside [the District of Columbia] Beltway, in 1980, a tactic that intelligence and police officials insist came from Condor …
  —James Grady

In 2010, an Andean Condor named Thaao (pronounced tay-oh) died at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was eighty years old, the greatest verified age ever recorded for a bird. It was born, as John Burgeson of the Connecticut Post wrote, “the same year that Mickey Mouse made his debut, John Dillinger escaped from prison, [and] Mahatma Gandhi walked 200 miles to protest the British salt monopoly”.

With a wing span of over 3.5 metres, the condor is a carrion-eater, nesting on inaccessible rock ledges, at elevations of up to 5000 metres, and is a natural hang-glider that Charles Darwin once observed “flying for a half-hour without once flapping its wings”. They mate for life. The Incas believed the condor (kuntur) represented the sun god, Inti, who carried the spirit of a dead person to heaven, the upper world, and was the messenger of the gods.

One of the benchmark political thrillers of the mid-1970s was Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, adapted from James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor.

The movie was the prototype for an entire genre of spy films to follow—the conspiracy thriller—with the central theme of a rogue cabal within a larger government institution following a corrupt agenda, and of the lone and ostracised protagonist—what Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called “a journalist or amateur investigator who finds himself (often inadvertently) pulling on a small thread which unravels a vast conspiracy that ultimately goes all the way to the top”—and is subsequently set up to be the patsy of the real white-collar culprits; and of his eventual exoneration, against the seemingly insurmountable odds of an organisation with overwhelming resources.

In 1975, the film critic Roger Ebert called the film:

A well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it’s all too believable. Conspiracies involving murder by federal agencies used to be found in obscure publications of the far Left. Now they’re glossy entertainments …

Three Days of the Condor was one of my favourite movies of the 1970s. Faye Dunaway was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress, and Max von Sydow, who played the coldly efficient hit man, was awarded Best Actor at the Cartagena Film Festival.

The new ten-episode series, Condor, produced by MGM Television and Skydance TV, takes its inspiration from the film. It is a rewarding watch, faithful to the spirit of the original, with the inevitable expanded cast of characters and plotting that these long series require.

The character of CIA analyst Joe Turner, codenamed Condor, masterfully acted by Robert Redford in the original film, is played in the series by Max Irons, the son of Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack; the primary female lead of Kathy Hale, originally Faye Dunaway, is now taken by Katherine Cunningham, and the enigmatic Alsatian assassin, Joubert, unsurpassably nailed in the original by Max von Sydow, is now a svelte young woman, Gabrielle Joubert, played by Arab-Israeli actress Leem Lubany.

None of these new actors threaten the achievement of their predecessors, but it doesn’t matter. The series still works; the young actors form a tight ensemble and the drama is sustained by the compelling nature of the dynamic conspiracy thriller narrative. Leem Lubany, with only five years of film experience and no formal acting training, is fascinating to watch as the leader of the assassination squad.

James Grady wrote Six Days of the Condor when he was only twenty-four years old. His father had managed movie theatres and his mother had been the county librarian. He describes himself as a “bookish, movie-going kid”. He graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism and became a staff aide, in 1972, for the Montana Constitutional Convention. In the notes to Six Days of the Condor he recalls those fraught times:

The Cold War ruled. Ghosts of JFK, RFK, MLK and Lee Harvey Oswald haunted America. Dr Strangelove and his arsenals of doomsday atomic weapons tick-tocked toward imminent and seemingly inevitable launch. The Soviet Union sprawled as an evil gulag wasteland behind an iron curtain, while Communist China coiled like an invisible dragon behind a Bamboo Curtain. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI knew everything about everybody … and it might use it against them. Hitler might not be hiding in Paraguay, but former Nazis who escaped after World War II had operatives in Swiss banks and at remote communes. Israeli avengers stalked the globe: they got Eichmann, they could get anybody … President Richard Nixon’s White House henchmen were formalizing their dirty tricks strategies into thuggish crews that would be called plumbers created for burglaries and murder. In the jungles and cities of Vietnam, my generation was in that war’s twelfth year of Americans killing and dying. Only the crazy weren’t paranoid.

In the local library Grady found the addresses of thirty publishers and sent out his submissions, with a synopsis and a sample chapter. Twenty-four replied with outright rejections. Six asked to see the complete manuscript. He sent the finished book to one and received no reply. Four months later, becoming impatient, he followed up, only to be told they weren’t interested. Discouraged, but unwilling to give up, a week later he sent the manuscript to W.W. Norton and forgot about it.

Then the phone rang. Norton offered him a $1000 advance to publish his book. As this was a tenth of what he was earning per year, and he was pretty much at the end of his rope, he agreed. A couple of weeks later, his reality shifted. The publisher rang again to advise him that movie producer Dino De Laurentis was interested in making a film of his novel and would pay him $81,000 for the screen rights. Grady remarked that this miracle allowed him the financial security to focus on writing exclusively for the next eight years.

In the 1975 movie, Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, an agency analyst, codename Condor. He works for the American Literary Historical Society in New York, a CIA front, and his job is to read popular literature—books and newspapers—and take note of anomalies, odd juxtapositions and hidden meanings, that might be useful to the intelligence service.

He discovers something unusual, files a report to his superiors and, while he is out getting lunch for his colleagues, his entire office is massacred by a team of trained assassins. He returns to the carnage and, terrified, phones the CIA’s New York office at the World Trade Center, on a secure line, using his codename, and is told to wait nearby and he will be brought in to safety. But the meeting is a trap and Turner realises that someone inside the agency is behind the hit and they need to silence him to complete the job.

Looking for a place to hide, he abducts Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) and forces her to take him to her apartment. Gradually she comes to believe in his innocence and helps him. They become lovers.

The chief assassin behind the attack on his office, Joubert, played by Max von Sydow, discovers her address and sends an accomplice, disguised as a postman, to kill Turner, but the attempt is thwarted. Later, in a confrontation at the house of the man behind the plot, CIA Deputy Director of the Middle East, Leonard Atwood, played by Addison Powell, Turner discovers that the innocuous report he filed provided links to actual plans for a rogue CIA project to seize Middle Eastern oil fields, and his entire section had to be eliminated to avoid disclosure.

Joubert arrives at the residence, but instead of killing Turner, in a plot twist, kills Atwood instead, staging it as a suicide. Joubert reveals himself to be freelance, only occasionally employed by the CIA, and has now received a new contract to remove Atwood, who has become an embarrassment to the agency, and let Turner go free.

Later, Turner has a face-to-face with the Deputy Director of the New York CIA, Higgins, played by Cliff Robertson, who explains that the oilfield operation was an internal clandestine plan, without official CIA approval, but still defends it on the grounds that something of this nature will eventually become necessary when oil shortages start affecting people’s day-to-day lives—people will willingly look the other way. Turner tells him he has sent his report to the New York Times.

The present television series still has Joe Turner as an analyst, but with a high-tech update: this time he discovers that the CIA has been using one of his algorithms to spy on fellow Americans. With this program, an Arab-American, identified as being 12 per cent likely to commit a terrorist attack, is assassinated. Threatening to resign over this misuse of his research, Turner is falsely led to believe by his superiors that the killing was justified as the murdered victim was carrying a pneumonic plague virus and had planned to release it at a major sporting event. Investigating deeper, Turner discovers suspicious advance stock market purchases by a CIA front company of the pharmaceutical plague antidote, and a chief operative, Nathan Fowler, played by Brendan Fraser, orders a hit team, led by Gabrielle Joubert, to eliminate Turner’s section. As in the original film, Turner is the sole survivor and goes into hiding.

There is an added counter-plot, suggestive of an episode of 24—an operative from the rogue cabal intends to release the plague virus in Mecca during the annual Hajj pilgrimage. A believable modern nightmare scenario for our times. Any more detail would spoil surprises.

I would like to contrast the series with the original movie and Grady’s novel, trying not to give away too much.

Most of the names of the main characters have changed from the book version. In the novel, Joe Turner was called Ronald Malcolm. Grady said he made up this name precisely to portray him as an “average guy”. In the introduction to the book, he says:

In those days, James Bond, super spy, dominated espionage fiction. Despite fine movies having been made from their excellent books, masters John le Carré and Len Deighton were overshadowed by 007 … as much as I love “Bond, James Bond” I didn’t want to write about a superhero. A superhero always triumphs—is immune to paranoia, is never in ultimate jeopardy.

Grady intended his “ordinary” hero to be more like the way he remembered his own youth:

You know the kid I was. Coke bottle-thick, unfit-for-military-service eyeglasses. Off in the clouds … on the third string of the football team only because there was no fourth string. Obsessed by, unworthy of, and unsuccessful with every teenage girl.

He says he absorbed the lesson from the movies of Alfred Hitchcock that “the best suspense stories are believably personal: real people hit with life or death choices”.

Ronald Malcolm’s section of the CIA—54/12—actually existed, created during the Eisenhower administration. It turned into the Special Group during the Kennedy years, renamed the 303 Committee during Johnson’s term, the 40 Committee during Nixon’s, the Operations Advisory Group during Ford’s presidency, the Special Coordination Committee during Carter’s, the National Security Planning Committee under Reagan, and the Office of Special Plans with George W. Bush. It came under intense scrutiny for alleged unethical activities and has since fragmented into a myriad of sub-groups.

Other characters from the novel given name changes for the movie were the lead assassin Joubert (Maronick in the book) and the primary love interest, Kathy (Wendy).

The Middle East plays no role in the book: a criminal clique within the CIA is involved in heroin smuggling. The oil conspiracy was invented for the film, and agency insider-trading of the plague-virus antidote was substituted for the series.

Wendy, in the book, jumps into bed with the protagonist after having just been abducted by him at gunpoint, which seems unlikely, and a bit of male wish-fulfilment. Grady describes her as not much of a looker, but this plain portrait was knocked on the head by Faye Dunaway.

In the film version, Kathy and Joe Turner have a romantic relationship, but in the television series, Kathy is abruptly killed midway through, suggesting a future attraction between Turner and the female assassin, Gabrielle Joubert. Leem Lubany is good as the hit woman, and very physical, but nowhere near as memorable as the great actor who played Joubert in the original film: Max von Sydow.

Von Sydow appeared in eleven highly regarded Ingmar Bergman films, such as The Seventh Seal. Critics said he and Bergman had an almost symbiotic relationship in those Swedish masterpieces. But von Sydow was still unbankable in Hollywood until his portrayal in The Exorcist (1973) of the Catholic priest Father Merrin, a tour de force of understatement, which not only brought him to the attention of mainstream audiences, but helped illuminate the little-known role of the exorcist in the workings of the Catholic Church.

As the ruthless Joubert, von Sydow created one of cinema’s first audience-friendly and empathetic “bad guys”, an ethical and almost heroic figure. In Three Days of the Condor, Joubert allows Turner to live and disappears into the night, but in the source novel, although Maronick lets Malcolm live, the bookish analyst still seeks payback for the murder of his division and, unbelievably, ambushes this highly-trained assassin in an airport toilet, killing him.

The film portrays Turner as a whistle blower—but the book suggests that he may now be allowed to advance to a more active position as a field agent due to his proven aptitude.

All of the sequels to the original novel—Shadow of the Condor (1978), Condor.net (2011), Last Days of the Condor (2014), Next Day of the Condor (2015) and Condor in the Stacks (2015)—attempt to capitalise on the success of the original novel, without bringing anything substantially new to the table.

Only in an ancillary book, Mad Dogs (2006), does Grady introduce a dynamic new idea: five CIA operatives are institutionalised after going insane on the job (one of them being Condor), and are confined to a secret agency asylum in Maine. They become pawns in a frame-up when their psychiatrist is murdered. They escape and work together to find their psychiatrist’s killer. One can only hope that a team of scriptwriters and directors will bring out the drama of this book in some forthcoming movie.

Conspiracy thrillers work only if viewers share the assumption that the big government agencies that affect their day-to-day lives are rotten at the core. When the average person hears the name “CIA”, the first images that come to mind are corruption, dirty tricks, redactions, secret killings, character assassination, torture and invasion of privacy. (Did I leave any out?) Yet no one is yet able to suggest a way to ensure that the protection such organisations provide to the nation can be kept in place without the negative aspects. Is it possible to imagine a national security agency that can exist effectively without a dark side?

It is said that the public is aware of many more of the CIA’s failures than its successes, mainly because sharing success stories might compromise current operations. What are some of the achievements of the CIA that are often overlooked?

In its previous incarnation as the OSS, it knew in advance of the plot in 1944 to kill Hitler. It had early knowledge about V-2 bases in position to bomb England. It negotiated the surrender of a million Nazi troops in Italy before the end of the war in Europe. It received a copy of the secret speech Khrushchev made denouncing Stalin before it was delivered. It gave John F. Kennedy a warning on what the Russians were up to in Cuba; enough of a warning to prevent the missiles from becoming operational. During Vietnam, for most of the time, it sided with the doves, rather than the hawks, distrusting the illusion held by the government that military force could win the war. Ruggero Orlando, in Storia Illustrata, wrote:

[the CIA] would have preferred to go it alone in Southeast Asia in fighting a “personal war” as conceived by John Kennedy. It was to be a war fought among the floating bars and homes of Saigon and Mekong River with homemade bombs, dagger thrusts, about-faces and truces, with children used as couriers, and beautiful women used to distract the adversary. The CIA would have preferred this rather than to reduce the rivalry with the communists to what the poet Auden called the “coarse and stupid event of battle”.

The CIA opposed the bombing of North Vietnam and induced President Johnson to forgo his candidacy for a second term. It correctly predicted the outcome of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and assured Johnson that Israel was never in jeopardy. It armed the Mujahideen when they fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. More recently, CIA intelligence informed the mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. The agency is now headed by the first woman director in its seventy-one-year history, Gina Haspel.

Todd Katzberg, the executive producer of Condor, commented in a recent interview that he believes that “many of the issues relating to paranoia and distrust in the government [that existed in the 1970s] are still relevant today”. Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times said:

Condor is … more intellectually aggressive than the Pollack film, which crammed most of its thoughts about the way of the world into one climactic confrontation; characters here endlessly argue politics and philosophy and human nature, at work and at home, at fancy dinner parties and poolside bull sessions.

Personally, I was hoping for cameos by either Robert Redford (now eighty-two), Faye Dunaway (seventy-seven) or Max von Sydow (eighty-nine) but perhaps this might happen in Season Two next year.