“Maybe there’s another CIA inside the CIA.”
I’ll never forget how I felt when Robert Redford delivered that line in Three Days of the Condor, the crackerjack thriller, directed by Sydney Pollack, that was released 50 years ago this September. A CIA inside the CIA? I was in my teens, but I was no naïf: a couple of years earlier, I’d been glued all summer to the Watergate hearings on TV; a year after that, I’d devoured Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All the President’s Men. So the idea that very dark things could be going on behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., was not new to me — although I was, and would for a long time remain, innocent of the real truth of Watergate, not least the fact that Woodward and Bernstein, far from being heroes of freedom, were tools of the Deep State. (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward)
Still, in those relatively innocent days — a good many years before the theory that the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination gained widespread currency, a long time before Donald Trump began decrying the Swamp, and an even longer time before former CIA director John Brennan was finally investigated by the Department of Justice for trying to bring down the Trump presidency — the notion of a CIA inside the CIA exploded my imagination.
Part of what made Condor so effective was that its hero, Joe Turner (no connection to August Wilson’s 1984 play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), was, unlike the Liam Neeson character in the Taken films, bereft of “a certain set of skills.” Yes, he’s a CIA agent — codename Condor — but he’s never been out in the field: a bookworm, he works at the American Literary Historical Society, a CIA front located in a handsome brownstone on New York’s East Side, where his wonderfully cushy-looking job is to comb through newly published thrillers and other texts in search of leads to actual intelligence operations or ideas for such operations. All he knows, in short, is what he’s read. But fortunately, he’s read a lot.
One rainy day, it’s Joe’s turn to go around the corner to buy lunch for his six coworkers. Upon his return, he finds them all murdered. Checking the home of a seventh coworker who didn’t come into work that day, he finds him slaughtered, too — and just misses being taken out himself. He calls CIA headquarters to be brought in from out of the cold — but when he turns up for the agreed-upon rendezvous, his purported station chief tries to kill him.
By now, it’s more than clear to Joe that he’s got a price on his head. What to do? Ducking into a clothing store to avert attention from a passing cop car, he grabs one of the customers (Faye Dunaway) and forces her to drive him to her Brooklyn Heights pad so he can use it as a hideout. Of course, Joe being Robert Redford, and his captive being Faye Dunaway, the kidnapping turns quickly enough into a romance. And the brief Brooklyn interlude gives him time to think. What’s going on? Why was his entire office wiped out?
Like Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Joe’s being targeted by spies for reasons he can’t fathom — and, to save his life, needs to figure out why. Thornhill’s search takes him from New York to Chicago to Rapid City; Joe’s, from New York to Washington and back. Neither of them is a superman — neither is above expressing fear and confusion — but under the circumstances, both of them are impressively unflappable, determined to get the answers. And to survive.
I’ve mentioned North by Northwest. Even more similar to Condor, plot point by plot point, is another Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps (1935). What distinguishes Condor from these earlier films is its post-Watergate paranoia and cynicism. The late, great critic John Simon called it “an elegy of private, political, and, finally, cosmic pessimism, a kind of national, if not indeed metaphysical guilt film to enchant the disenchanted.” Hovering over the whole thing, he added, was “the vague but all-inclusive malaise of Watergate.” Yes, Graham Greene and John Le Carre had been there before, even prior to Watergate. But Condor struck the perfect balance between capturing the truly palpable pessimism of a unique national-historical moment and providing classic Hollywood entertainment of the first order.
Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr,. and David Rayfiel and based on James Grady’s 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor (which I remember devouring avidly on a long family car trip), Condor would be followed by decades of other action thrillers — the Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible and Taken franchises, the later James Bond pictures, and many, many others. But in these pictures the paranoia was invariably a pose, the cynicism a reflex, the darkness merely aesthetic. Not so in Condor, where it was a part of the Zeitgeist.
Yes, Condor does have its silly moments. To prove to Dunaway’s character that his far-fetched story is true, Joe hands her his business card and shows her in her telephone book that his fake employer’s phone number is the same as the CIA’s. Even as a kid I remember finding this preposterous: the big-spending CIA doesn’t spring for a separate phone number for one of its fronts? Even more absurd is the film’s conclusion. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say that when we get to the end of this story — to which there doesn’t seem to be any possibly happy ending — Pollack and his screenwriters hold out deliverance in the form of the New York Times, which will set everything aright once it prints Joe’s story about the CIA inside the CIA. John Simon called this one out at the time: “Most curious is Turner’s final staking of his life — if not, in fact, America’s future — on his belief in the wisdom and power of the New York Times, the kind of act of faith one might have thought went out with Bernadette of Lourdes.” Ha! Indeed.
A year after Condor, Redford would star as Bob Woodward in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, another dark, moody film dripping in cynicism. If Condor merely reflected the post-Watergate mood, All the President’s Men was about Watergate itself — about the very story that had transformed the national mood and kicked in a cynical new era during which politicians would be even more cloaked in suspicion than ever and journalists would be revered as heroes. In fact, Woodward and Bernstein were profoundly undeserving of reverence; the story told in All the President’s Men is a fable, a mendacious narrative that all but a few of us bought for decades afterwards, seeing our two protagonists, typing away so earnestly in that brightly lit Washington Post newsroom, as rescuers of the Constitution, when in fact they were the unwitting instruments of a Deep State that was out to subvert the Constitution and remove a president who’d just been re-elected in a landslide.
Terrifically made and endlessly rewatchable, All the President’s Men is nonetheless a challenging experience because any informed viewer in the year 2025 knows it’s all a lie, even as it pretends to be about nobly unearthing the truth. Because the equally fine Condor is a fiction, it poses no such problems — which is to say that, half a century after it first hit the big screen, it still works like a charm, meaning that it can at once be appreciated as, first, a glimpse into something resembling the reality of Deep State machinations and, second, as nothing more or less than a rollicking adventure in the best traditions of Hollywood.
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