CIA Agonistes

The last time the USA tried to make sense of the CIA -- and even rein in its more violent and tyrannical urges -- were the Congressional hearings of the 1970s. The Senate bleated again -- briefly -- when Dianne Feinstein's torture-probing committee discovered it was being spied on by the CIA. But since 9/11 the CIA --- and the entire metastasizing national security complex -- has pretty much had its way, from drone assassinations to black sites. Just ask Julian Assange.

And so it's left to the dream factory to deal with our recurrent national nightmares. Most recently, FX (and Hulu) offer us The Old Man, starring the wonderful Jeff Bridges as an ex-CIA agent on the run and the equally superb John Lithgow as his FBI nemesis.

And from British TV (available on AMC), we have a remake of The Ipcress File, starring Joe Roth, instead of Michael Caine, who unfortunately sleepwalks through his role as a working-class hustler caught up in a maze of Cold War intrigue.

Both TV shows shed a weird light on the clandestine exertions of the spy world. In The Old Man, the CIA's machinations during the Soviet war in Afghanistan seem to backfire and Bridges is pitted against his former national security colleagues. So we're supposed to root for him against the current CIA and FBI overlords, I guess. (Only five of seven episodes in Season One have been shown so far.)

In the one-and-done Ipcress File series, which is set in 1963, the bad guys are a far-right, fundamentalist U.S. general and his military clique, who inveigle a patriotic CIA official into their plot to assassinate President Kennedy, with the help of a U.S.- beguiled British espionage official. So it's on the right track. Sort of.

The best part about the entertainment industry telling us dark stories about our official history is that at least it's TRYING to get at the truth. But the plots of these two shows are both twisted and simplistic. They succeed in disturbing us, but they also confuse us.

The truth is STILL out there.