Spys of Today 1965

National Archives

Date: May 4, 1965

Original Title: Science of Spying, 1965

Film Type: Black and White / Sound

Credit: Office of the Chief Signal Officer

Archival Source: National Archives/263/263.1060



This documentary presents an account of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activities that had previously been covert, including activities in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Congo, Vietnam and Laos. The film includes interviews with CIA director Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell.



About the CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, with responsibility for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers. The CIA also oversees and sometimes engages in tactical and covert activities at the request of the President of the United States.



The CIA succeeded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), formed in 1942 to coordinate espionage activities against the Axis Powers for the branches of the United States Armed Forces. The National Security Act of 1947 established the CIA, affording it "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad".



The primary function of the CIA is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers, but it does conduct tactical operations and carries out covert operations, and exerts foreign political influence through its tactical divisions, such as the Special Activities Division. Often, when field operations are organized, the U.S. military carry these operations out on behalf of the agency while the CIA oversees them. Intelligence-gathering is performed by non-military commissioned civilian intelligence agents, many of whom are trained to avoid tactical situations.



Sometimes, the CIA is referred to euphemistically in government and military parlance as Other Government Agency, particularly when its operations in a particular area are an open secret. Other terms include The Company, Langley, and The Agency.



The CIA from 1953 till 1965: Allen Dulles, who had been a key OSS operations officer in Switzerland,  became director of the CIA in 1953, at a time where U.S. policy was dominated by intense anticommunism. Dulles enjoyed a high degree of flexibility, as his brother, John Foster Dulles, was simultaneously Secretary of State.



During this period, there were numerous covert actions against left-wing movements perceived as communist. The CIA overthrew a foreign government for the first time during the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, at the request of Winston Churchill.



Some of the largest operations were aimed at Cuba after the overthrow of the Batista regime, including the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961) and attempts to remove Fidel Castro from power.



In 1962, there have been suggestions that the Soviet attempt to put missiles into Cuba came, indirectly, when they realized how badly they had been compromised by a U.S.-UK defector in place, Oleg Penkovsky.



One of the biggest operations ever undertaken by the CIA took place in Congo in support of Mobutu Sese Seko to become president in 1965.





This Film presents an Account of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Activities that had previously been covert, including actions in Iran, Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Cuba, and Guatemala. The film includes interviews with CIA Director Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell.



As described in the Book, Into the Fray: How NBC’s Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News By Tom Mascaro, The Science of Spying, marked the Arrival of Bob Rogers as a field Reporter Producer.



The Program aired May 4, 1965, and tracked the Roots of US Covert Operations back to the 1950’s, providing a stark account of clandestine initiatives in a time before public disclosures, Congressional investigations, and Hollywood movies made the 1970’s a difficult time to be an American Spy.



The Pentagon Papers, the Pike and Church Committees, and thrillers such as Three Days of the Condor eventually revealed the CIA’s complicity in assassination plots and international meddling, which Yate and Rogers had already seen up close.



NBC management stood firm when “The Science of Spying” attracted criticism. And representatives from Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBD&O) screened it and advised their Client B.F. Goodrich Company to withdraw.



BBD&O issued a statement saying the program violated the Goodrich advertising policy “in that it treats a controversial public issue in a way which may do harm to the government of the United States.” NBC countered that the documentary fell within the broad outlines of the program policy originally submitted to and accepted by the BF Goodrich Agency, BBD&O.



The CIA watched the program and tracked subsequent reactions in the national press. Viewers wrote to President Johnson complaining NBC News had given America’s enemies negative propaganda. Yates may have anticipated some adverse reactions to the program, but he never expected to be frightened by what he discovered.





“Into the Fray: How NBC's Washington Documentary Unit Reinvented the News”



From 1961 to 1989, a committed group of documentary journalists from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) reported the stories of America’s overseas conflicts. Stuart Schulberg supplied film evidence to prosecute Nazi war criminals and established documentary units in postwar Berlin and Paris. NBC newsman David Brinkley created the template for prime-time news in 1961 and bore the scars to prove it. In 1964 Ted Yates and Bob Rogers produced a documentary warning of the pitfalls in Vietnam. Yates was later shot and killed in Jerusalem on the first day of the Six-Day War while producing a documentary for NBC News.



In Into the Fray, Tom Mascaro vividly recounts the characters and experiences that helped create a unique, colorful documentary film crew based at the Washington bureau of NBC News. From the Kennedy era through the Reagan years, the journalists covered wars, rebellions, the Central Intelligence Agency, covert actions, the Pentagon, military preparedness, and world and American cultures. They braved conflicts and crises to tell the stories that Americans needed to see and hear, and in the process they changed the face of journalism. Mascaro also looks at the social changes in and around the unit itself, including the struggles and triumphs of women and African Americans in the field of television documentary. Into the Fray is the story of adventure, loyalty to reason, and life and death in the service of broadcast journalism.