The Amazing Stuff

Ever since Wings (1927), the first Oscar-winning film, was produced with Pentagon assistance, directors and producers have sought out military support to give their war epics a veneer of authenticity.

Often, the Department of Defense (DoD) provides military equipment as props and offers advice to ensure that the US military is depicted as accurately as possible. But sometimes, the Pentagon leverages the filmmaker’s reliance on their equipment to exert pressure for script changes that have a profound effect on the finished film.

10Black Hawk Down

Based on the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down (2003) follows the exploits of a group of soldiers involved in that disastrous military operation. When it was over, 18 Americans and an unconfirmed number of Somali were dead.Considering that the Battle of Mogadishu was widely viewed as a military embarrassment, it was surprising that the Pentagon granted support to the Ridley Scott–directed feature. But the DoD may have believed that the American public would focus on the bravery of the soldiers rather than the gory details of the botched operation.

The US military provided the filmmakers with technical advisers, 100 real soldiers, and eight Black Hawk helicopters. The Pentagon also used their own public relations officers to promote the film and even arranged screenings on military bases.

When asked in an interview with Mother Jones if the film could have been made without military support, Ridley Scott quipped, “Yeah. We just would have had to call it Huey Down.”

With this reliance on military hardware, the Pentagon pressured the screenwriter to change certain aspects of the script. Most notably, the Pentagon asked that the name of Ranger John Stebbins be changed. The real-life Stebbins had been court-martialed in June 2000 for the rape of a girl under 12.

Presumably, the Pentagon wanted his name removed to avoid controversy. So in the film, John Stebbins became John Grimes and was immortalized on the silver screen as an example of bravery and valor.

9Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor (2001) may not have been well received by critics, but the sweeping war romance still garnered the third-highest gross receipts of any romantic drama made since 1980. The Michael Bay–directed feature was granted full military support and was even allowed to film scenes at the real Pearl Harbor.

Jack Green, a member of the Naval Historical Center’s curator branch, was made available to the production and spent a full eight weeks on the set. He offered advice on Japanese naval formation and the finer points of navy drinking songs. He also directly influenced one of the film’s characters.

Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle was originally depicted in the script as “a boorish, oafish type of fellow.” Green was unhappy with this portrayal and asked that the character be rewritten to make the lieutenant more sympathetic to the audience. The producers listened, and the character was altered to better fit with Green’s vision.

8Transformers Franchise

It would be wrong to assume that the DoD only gets involved in films based on real-life military operations. In recent years, they have also become much more open to assisting films in the fantasy genre. After all, when the army is fighting a race of evil aliens, it often sidesteps the murky, unflattering aspects of conflict that may be depicted by more realistic war pictures.

Such was the case with Michael Bay’s behemoth Transformers franchise. The second movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, was called “one of the largest joint films made with the military” by Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Bishop, the film’s military liaison officer. Revenge of the Fallen holds the record for most number of military branches appearing in one film.

The armed forces’ extreme visibility in the movie drew some criticism. Some have claimed that the military’s support for a franchise essentially aimed at children is a conspicuous attempt to influence future recruits. In an interview with Variety, Captain Bryon McGarry, the deputy director of Air Force Public Affairs, confirmed the criticism to some extent with this statement: “Recruiting and deterrence are secondary goals, but they’re certainly there.”

7 GoldenEye And Tomorrow Never Dies

Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as the superspy James Bond was another high-octane piece of escapist silliness that was granted full military assistance. In GoldenEye’s script, the military took umbrage with the depiction of an incompetent American admiral who gets seduced and killed by the movie’s femme fatale, Xenia Onatopp.

The scene was hastily rewritten to change the admiral’s nationality from American to Canadian. The changing of a character that may reflect badly on military personnel may seem overly sensitive, but it was nothing compared to the reasons for tweaking the script of Bond’s next outing.

In the original script for Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond is set to illegally parachute into Vietnam. Before he does, a fictional CIA agent warns him of the possible ramifications of his actions by stating: “You know what will happen. It will be war. And maybe this time, maybe we’ll win.”

The Pentagon was embarrassed by the line. At the time, international relations with Vietnam had just been reestablished, and apparently, a line of dialogue in a campy spy film had the potential to incite an international incident. The dialogue was changed and did not appear in the finished film.

6Clear And Present Danger

Released in 1994, Clear and Present Danger tells the story of a clandestine war between Colombian drug traffickers and the US. Due to the film’s large scope, a number of military branches reviewed the script and requested major changes that affected the finished movie.

The navy was unhappy with a scene that had naval personnel brushing off civilian casualties after an air strike. The DoD also raised objections about the way in which the Colombian government was depicted. They were concerned that a negative portrayal could damage US-Latino relations.

Due to these concerns, a scene with the navy bombing a civilian target was altered, and all references to the Colombian government colluding with drug traffickers were removed. The army also requested that their soldiers always fight trained and heavily armed combatants.

All military departments connected to the film were also concerned about the portrayal of the US president. In the original script, the president orders covert operations in Colombia, which was prohibited by Congress. Perhaps the military’s unease was partially due to the close resemblance between events in the film and the Reagan administration’s illegal support of the contras in Central America during the 1980s.

Against Congressional decree, Reagan had secretly and illegally allocated funds to the contras to aid their fight against the left-wing Sandinista government of Nicaragua. A similar act occurred in Clear and Present Danger’s original script. Regardless of the reason, the scenes featuring the US president were altered so that the operation was deemed top secret but legal.

5The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff, a 1983 film that was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2013, followed the story of navy, marine, and air force pilots who took part in aeronautical research before America’s first manned trip into space. Based on the 1979 Tom Wolfe novel of the same name, The Right Stuff is an example of the military’s surprising candor about their reasons for getting involved in Hollywood.

The movie’s original script closely mirrored Tom Wolfe’s book. It featured colorful language that would have made the film more adult in tone. However, this predilection for vulgarity didn’t sit well with the US military.

The film’s producers received a letter complaining about the foul language. The military was worried that the vulgarity would guarantee the film an R rating and reduce the number of teenagers who could see it. As teenagers were the primary target for military recruiters, the Pentagon was aware that the film could drum up interest in military careers.

The Right Stuff’s producers bowed to the military’s request and removed much of the salty language from the film.

41984

In the decades that followed World War II, the CIA funded a large number of cultural artifacts that were pro-democracy and somewhat anticommunist. These cultural artifacts included books, journals, and movies.

In the 1950s, the CIA obtained the film rights to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, producing a film version that was released in 1956. Ignoring the deceased Orwell’s wishes, the film version deviated from the novel’s plot.

For example, the ending was completely different for the main character, Winston. In the movie, Winston defiantly shouts, “Down with Big Brother.” Then he is gunned down. But in the novel, the protagonist was completely defeated by the totalitarian state, ultimately realizing that he “loved Big Brother” after his failed attempt at rebellion.

Orwell’s estate seemed to be embarrassed by the CIA-funded film and had it removed from circulation after the distribution agreement expired. For years, the film appeared to be lost. Then in the early 2010s, it was made freely available on YouTube.

3The Quiet American

Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t the only classic novel to have its film adaptation manipulated by the CIA. For the 1958 movie version of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, CIA operative Edward Lansdale worked with Joseph Mankiewicz, the film’s director, in reversing the perceived anti-Americanism of the book.

Lansdale and Mankiewicz changed the story’s ending so that the communists were responsible for a city bombing and not a US-backed general as in the novel. Aiden Pyle, the titular quiet American, also had his profession changed from the arms dealer of the book to a toy manufacturer in the film.

Greene was horrified at the movie version of his novel, calling it a “propaganda film for America.” He took it as a personal insult and was quoted as saying: “One could almost believe that the film was made deliberately to attack the book and the author.”

2The Sum Of All Fears

Considering the amount of outside interference in the 2002 film The Sum of All Fears, it’s amazing that a coherent movie was made at all. The film was based on the 1991 Tom Clancy novel of the same name, which tells the story of radical East German separatists and a Palestinian terrorist cell that plan to blow up a football stadium.

Before work even began on the movie’s script, producer Mace Neufield began receiving complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations about the film’s likely use of Muslim terrorists. To avoid generating negative publicity, the Palestinian enemy in Clancy’s novel was changed to a neo-Nazi group.

After the movie was granted Pentagon assistance, the production was provided with an arsenal of weaponry. B-2 bombers, F-16 fighter jets, military helicopters, and an aircraft carrier with its crew of 5,000 soldiers were all made available for filming. But this expensive specialized equipment wasn’t provided without the military having a hand in how it was portrayed on-screen.

The CIA and military advisers on the movie objected to a scene with an aircraft carrier that was attacked and sunk by enemy combatants. The military was uncomfortable with the suggestion that an American vessel could be so easily destroyed. The scene was changed so that only the aircraft carrier’s flight operations were destroyed in the attack.

1Zero Dark Thirty

Oscar-nominated film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) told the story of the worldwide manhunt for Osama bin Laden. During the writing of the script, a strange symbiotic relationship developed between the film’s writer and director and members of the CIA’s counterterrorism unit.

In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s death, Zero Dark Thirty’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, began meeting with CIA officials to work on the script. Boal was even invited to a special awards ceremony that honored the soldiers involved in the raid that killed bin Laden, despite the fact that classified information was revealed during the ceremony’s speeches.

US Senator Dianne Feinstein criticized the movie’s implication that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT), such as waterboarding, provided vital information that led to bin Laden’s whereabouts. Feinstein referred to the film’s plot as a “false narrative.”

Considering how closely the CIA was involved in the writing process, it’s little wonder that Zero Dark Thirty’s plot matches the CIA’s official stance on EIT, a practice that the agency insists was instrumental in providing vital information in the hunt for bin Laden.

However, this conclusion was disputed by the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who decided that there was no evidence that detainees subjected to EIT provided useful information in the bin Laden manhunt. After Zero Dark Thirty’s script was completed, the CIA requested seven changes, one of which directly influenced the on-screen depiction of EIT.

Boal was asked to change a scene in which a detainee was threatened with a dog. The CIA claimed that it would never use dogs to intimidate prisoners. This wasn’t strictly true as the CIA had used dogs as part of their EIT in the past.

Pictures that surfaced during the Abu Ghraib scandal clearly showed military personnel, under orders from US intelligence officials, intimidating prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison with dogs. However, this detail didn’t make it into the finished film as Boal listened to the CIA and removed the dog scene from Zero Dark Thirty.

Fictional supervillain plots are just that: fictional. Except that some of the things that governments and even individuals have managed to pull off are just as outlandish as the things we’ve seen in James Bond movies. Here are 10 of these supervillain projects from around the world.

A Secret Nuclear Smuggling Network

There are smuggling networks and black market operations which deal in exotic things like animal furs and illicit drugs, but there has probably never been a black market network quite like the one run by Abdul Qadeer Khan. It dealt in information on how to build nuclear weapons as well as the actual nuclear material and equipment to make those weapons.

While countries have peddled nuclear secrets before, Khan is the first individual to have ever built a business providing these services. However, unlike a supervillain in a Bond movie, he didn’t face a dashing MI6 agent trying to stop him. Western intelligence agencies purposely overlooked Pakistan’s nuclear program for years and missed Khan’s nuclear network as well.

Khan is considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program and is revered in Pakistan as a hero. While working in Europe, he stole two designs for nuclear centrifuges and brought them back to Pakistan, using these designs to advance Pakistan’s then-fledgling nuclear program.

In the early 1990s, he tried to sell the nuclear technologies Pakistan had used to make a nuclear weapon. Deals were signed with Libya, Iran, and North Korea for Khan’s networks to provide centrifuge parts, bomb material, and a complete blueprint for a compact nuclear warhead that could fit on a missile. Khan appears to have grown rich and egotistical on the profits from his sales, and Pakistani politicians were none the wiser.

The entire network started to unravel when shipments of nuclear weapons to Libya were uncovered in 2003. Further findings implicated Khan, including documents wrapped in bags from an Islamabad dry cleaning company. In 2004, Khan gave a public confession and was put under house arrest in Pakistan—a mere slap on the wrist because he was released just five years later.

Anthrax In World War II

Dropping biological weapons over an entire nation to starve their populace sounds like something so evil that only a supervillain would advocate for it. During World War II, someone did strongly advocate for such a thing, but it wasn’t Adolf Hitler. It was Winston Churchill championing Operation Vegetarian.

The plan involved British bombers dropping anthrax-contaminated cattle feed over Nazi Germany. The German cows would eat the anthrax and die, depriving the Germans of all their livestock. Starvation would occur rapidly, with more deaths caused by the anthrax infecting humans.

To accomplish this massive undertaking, the British needed to manufacture and inject anthrax into five million linseed cakes. Then bombers would have to be modified to drop this unusual payload. However, smaller tests showed that the project was feasible.

Churchill overruled the concerns of several top scientists and ordered 500,000 anthrax-laced cakes from America in 1944, but World War II ended before the plan could be put into action. Although more tests were conducted on isolated islands as late as the 1950s, the British government favored nuclear weapons, which were far more practical. Postwar development of Operation Vegetarian was not pursued.

The CIA Mining Operation

In 1968, the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 suffered an accident and sunk into the crushing depths of the Pacific Ocean. A major loss for the Soviet Union, this represented a golden opportunity for the CIA, which could finally get its hands on Soviet missile technology.

There was just one small problem: The submarine was about 5,000 meters (16,000 ft) underwater. The CIA responded with a massive operation that would have made any supervillain proud. In complete secrecy, they attempted to raise the entire ship from the depths in an operation called Project Azorian.

To cover up the operation, the CIA approached billionaire Howard Hughes, who agreed to help. A massive ship, the Glomar Explorer, was built and ostensibly funded by Hughes, who announced that his new ship would mine the sea floor for the valuable mineral manganese. In fact, the CIA had secretly provided Hughes with the money to build the ship, and its real purpose was to use a gigantic claw to retrieve the sunken Soviet submarine.

Constructed from 1970–1974, the ship finally arrived at the site of the sunken submarine in July 1974. For over one month, the ship attempted to raise the submarine in complete secrecy while curious Soviet ships looked on. In the end, the mission was not entirely successful, with part of the submarine breaking off and sinking back into the depths. No nuclear missiles were recovered.

Before the Americans could try again, the entire operation was exposed in a strange series of events. Paranoid about a mundane burglary which had coincidentally made off with secret Azorian documents, the CIA enlisted the help of the FBI, which attracted media attention. Eventually, someone in the government leaked the entire operation, and the Soviets sent a warship to guard the remains of their submarine. Further salvage operations were canceled. The Glomar Explorer sat gathering dust until the 1990s, when it was purchased for oil drilling. The ship has now been scrapped.

Control Of The World Copper Market

In some Bond movies, supervillains want to control the supply of a specific commodity, with Goldfinger being a well-known example. In the mid-1980s, a Japanese trader tried to do the same thing with copper, but he didn’t need nuclear weapons to do it.

Yasuo Hamanaka, working for the Sumimoto Corporation, was once known as “Mr. Five Percent” because he controlled approximately that much of the world’s copper supply at the time. Although that doesn’t sound like a lot, copper, unlike gold, is constantly being used up. It is also difficult to move copper to where there are shortages, so prices that rise due to a copper shortage do not necessarily reverse quickly. These factors, along with Hamanaka being the biggest holder of copper at that time, gave him a huge amount of influence over the global copper market.

He used this influence to keep the price of copper high for over a decade, earning a huge amount of money in the process. He accumulated a lot of his copper in secret deals. But for years, the fluctuations in copper prices were explained away and were never linked to his influence, despite increasingly vocal complaints by other copper traders.

However, real-life business isn’t like the movies, and Hamanaka’s plans for world copper domination came to an abrupt end in 1996. Increased market regulations made his position untenable. When he tried to secretly buy up more copper, he was busted.

Everything quickly unraveled from there. Sumimoto fired Hamanaka, and he was jailed for fraud. Then Sumimoto learned they had been left with nearly $2 billion in debt as the price of copper (and all of Sumimoto’s massive copper holdings) went into free fall.

Saddam Hussein’s Supergun

In the late 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein wanted a weapon that could strike farther than any he had in his arsenal at the time. So like a Bond villain, he turned to outsize ideas.

Saddam commissioned Canadian physicist and engineer Gerald Bull, who specialized in long-range artillery and had worked for Iraq in the past, to build a gigantic supergun called the Babylon gun. This weapon would fire artillery shells thousands of kilometers and would be able to fire satellites into orbit.

The final gun design had a barrel 150 meters (500 ft) long with a diameter of 1 meter (3 ft). It was expected to launch a 600-kilogram (1,300 lb) projectile 1,000 kilometers (600 mi) using 9 metric tons of special propellant. The recoil of the gun would have been enormous, registering on seismic sensors around the world. Iraqi defector General Hussein Kamel al-Majeed claimed that Saddam planned several missions for the gun, including launching nuclear weapons and shooting down satellites.

A smaller, 350 mm prototype of the supergun was built. But before construction on the larger gun could begin, Bull was killed by the Israelis in 1990 because he was working to improve Iraq’s more mundane ballistic missiles. The same year, Saddam invaded Kuwait and was crushed by the US. Ultimately, the supergun project was dismantled.

Stealth Satellites

Remember in the Bond film Moonraker where supervillain Hugo Drax had a stealth space station in orbit that was invisible to the US military? The US military actually had such a program—code-named Misty—to secretly deploy stealth satellites into space to spy on enemies. These satellites couldn’t be seen through telescopes or tracked with radar.

The first satellite was launched by a space shuttle in 1990. But just a few days later, the satellite apparently exploded. Believing that this was an ordinary spy satellite, both Russian and American space experts thought that was the end. In fact, the explosion had been faked, and the satellite had deployed a stealth shield to hide itself while the experts were distracted by the explosion.

Less than a year later, however, the satellite was spotted briefly by amateur astronomers while it was maneuvering in space. As late as five years later, other sightings were reported, again by amateurs. The military learned a lesson. When the next Misty satellite was launched in 1999, it contained a decoy that threw off the civilian astronomers for a while.

However, at a cost of nearly $10 billion, these spy satellites weren’t useful enough in real life to justify the massive expense. The project was canceled in 2007.

X-Ray Lasers Powered By Nuclear Explosions

During the Cold War, the US government pursued a superweapon under the aegis of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Called Project Excalibur, it was supposed to use X-ray lasers powered by nuclear weapons to destroy Soviet ballistic missiles. The project was proposed by Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who believed that a series of these weapons could secure the US against a missile attack by the Soviets.

The weapon consisted of a nuclear weapon with a modified casing containing hundreds of solid lasing mediums. The explosion of the nuclear weapon would dump energy into the mediums, which would be excited and produce intense beams of X-rays, frying a huge number of Soviet missiles with every atomic detonation.

The Outer Space Treaty prohibited nuclear weapons in space, so the X-ray laser devices needed to be stored on the ground. X-rays are also absorbed by the atmosphere after just a short distance, which meant that the devices had to be deployed on rockets in Western nations closer to the Soviet Union, such as Britain.

Ten tests were conducted to see if nuclear explosions could be used to generate X-rays. Although there was some success in later tests, the end of the Cold War also heralded the end of the program. It was canceled in 1992.

An International Villain Organization For Hire

The Bond movie Thunderball introduced SPECTRE, a crime syndicate and terrorist organization for hire that was led by an evil genius. While the real-life Paladin Group didn’t steal nuclear weapons or hold Britain for ransom, they were a mercenary organization founded by the nearly mythical ex-Nazi soldier Otto Skorzeny, who must have been an evil genius to pull off as many feats as he did.

Formed by the scar-faced Skorzeny in the 1960s, the Paladin Group was envisioned as a global organization of mercenaries, who were neither military troops nor civilian spies. The organization specialized in training and equipping unsavory characters. In the geopolitical upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, there were many dictatorships and failing governments around the world that wanted mercenaries and killers, demands that the Paladin Group was prepared to service.

Unlike SPECTRE, the Paladin Group wasn’t immortal. With the deaths of both Skorzeny and his patron, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the group appears to have faded into history.

The Balloon Bomb To Destroy Soviet Harvests

The US once had a weapon, the E77 balloon bomb, that could potentially wipe out crops and livestock worldwide using biological agents. Inspired by Japanese balloon attacks on the US during World War II, the Americans combined a harmless leaflet-dropping balloon with a 40-kilogram (80 lb) payload of stem rust disease, which would destroy wheat harvests.

The stem rust was coated on turkey feathers, which would be released when the balloon had risen and then dropped to a predetermined height. Almost 5,000 of these weapons were ordered in 1950, enough to destroy more than 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 mi²) of cropland.

Designed to secretly destroy Soviet or Chinese agriculture, the balloons were tested over a decade and ready to deploy. However, the program was suspended in 1960. Bombs dropped by aircraft had become the favored delivery method of stem rust. As far as we know, all research into biological warfare ended in the US in 1969.

The US Government Is Purposely Spreading Malware

An automated system called TURBINE is spreading the implants and has allowed the NSA to expand their ambitions from just a few hundred priority targets to potentially millions of computer systems. In internal documents, the NSA claims that the system would operate like a human brain, automatically deciding what it would use to retrieve information from compromised computers.

The system is also user-friendly. A human overseer can ask a computer about an application it’s running without being overwhelmed with coding minutiae. The entire villainous operation could put the safety of the Internet at risk, as holes in security created by the TURBINE malware make further intrusions by other organizations and individuals more likely to succeed.

Sam Derwin is just your ordinary, debt-burdened college student struggling to get by!