[AndrewBissell]

> usually with the belief that the ends justify the means

This is exactly how the vast majority of the purportedly CIA-ambivalent media franchises ultimately come out in The Agency's favor. If they depict agents doing bad things, it's always made pretty clear that the world would be even worse if they hadn't.

[bladegash]

While I don’t disagree with you, I think there’s a bit more nuance to that. Please don’t take my comments below as critical of your point, just thinking through it out loud a bit.

What you’re describing is a very utilitarian perspective towards ethics/morality and I’m not sure everyone would walk away with that conclusion. There are plenty of people who do not believe the ends justify the means, or at least, don’t always. Others may think it is immoral, but necessary in some circumstances. This includes people that do or have worked in this line of work, to include me. It is also complicated, because there is no way of knowing if the outcome would be worse had they not done the “bad” thing. It also assumes we all agree as to what is “bad” versus what is “good”, or even somewhere in between.

Maybe a better way of looking at it is as though they are portrayed as flawed heroes? Or even good people that sometimes have to/choose to do bad things?

I don’t know the answers to those questions and it is very likely I am way off, but I appreciate you bringing up your thoughts on the matter!

[AndrewBissell]

Appreciate your thoughts as well! Without getting into the weeds too much on it, I would draw a contrast between a few perspectives:

a.) "The intelligence community are the good guys and mostly do the right thing, minus one or two foibles here and there." In this category you've got your Marvel movies, your James Bonds, your Tom Clancys, etc

b.) "The IC is fighting the good fight, but sometimes has to do morally questionable things to get it done." This is stuff like Zero Dark Thirty and encompasses most of what you might call "serious" cinema that depicts the CIA.

c.) "The IC is deeply morally flawed, serving the interests of an elite few at the expense of the vast majority both at home & abroad, and often undertakes actions where this must be clear to anyone involved who has a conscience." This is very rare. There are a few paranoid conspiracy films from the 70s, there's American Made, there's Kill the Messenger, there's JFK, but I'm already struggling to come up with more names.

Intelligence work is so compartmentalized that I believe it's possible for the vast majority of those who work in it to believe they are fighting a good (or at least neutral) fight without allowing for too much cognitive dissonance at all. I don't think this is true of, say, the FBI agents who buried the allegations against the Epstein & Franklin pedophile rings, or the CIA agents who ran drugs into Mena airport to supply funds to child murdering contras in Nicaragua. These are the characters which tend to be assiduously avoided in Western media.