- Former
CIA agent Michele Rigby Assad reacts to espionage scenes in movies and rates their accuracy. - Assad rates "
Spy Game" (2001), "The Bourne Identity" (2002), and "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" (2018). - She also looks at "Spy" (2015), "Homeland" (2011-2020), "True Lies" (1994) and "Argo" (2012).
Michele Rigby Assad served undercover for 10 years as a counterterrorism officer in the CIA. She is now a corporate consultant and keynote speaker. She holds a master's degree in contemporary Arab studies from Georgetown University and a political science degree from Palm Beach Atlantic University.
She is the author of "Breaking Cover: My Secret Life in the CIA and What It Taught Me About What's Worth Fighting For."
Following is a transcript of the
- Now, we know you're a pretty good liar, but what if you're caught by the enemy and faced with a lie-detector test?
Michele Rigby Assad: OK, if you are being polygraphed, it's already too late.
Hi, I'm Michele Rigby Assad, a former intelligence officer with the CIA. I spent the majority of my career in the Middle East doing counterterrorism and counterintelligence work. And today we're going to review television and movie clips to see, are they real or not?
"Alias" S1E8 (2001)
Sydney: Do you see anything?
Dixon: Get closer, I can't tell if he's got the card on him.
Sydney: Anything?
Dixon: Yeah, the key card's in his breast pocket.
Michele: The idea of having an earpiece where you have immediate support and targeting assistance as you're carrying out your operation, no, that does not happen. I have never used multiple wigs during an operation or different sets of clothes. I have changed my appearance. I have put my hair up into a ponytail or put a hat on or changed a shirt or taken a shirt off. It's very rare in your career to require a big change of appearance like you would see here in this clip.
Dixon: Hold that for 30 seconds. The duplicate key card's printing.
Michele: The high-tech nature of that piece, being able to read the key card and be able to then create a new one based off of that, I've never heard of that before.
Man: Wonderful. Yes, yes, well, of course, getting funding is very difficult, particularly in today's...
Michele: It's the oddest thing. You can be on the edge of the earth in a place that's not very well known, and you could actually recognize a CIA classmate or colleague, but you do not cross paths. You do not acknowledge each other, because you could both be in the middle of an operation. And we try really hard to de-conflict operations, so you don't want to greet them with the wrong name. So you just kind of, like, wink at each other and keep walking. So, I would rate this clip as a one. Not realistic at all.
Rating: 1/10
"Mission: Impossible" (1996)
Kittridge: I know how much Jim, in particular, meant to you, Ethan.
Ethan: Yeah.
Michele: It isn't unusual to have an operational meeting in a restaurant. They are seated right next to the glass front of the building. You would never sit there, because presumably anybody walking by on the street has a clear view of this operational meeting taking place. With high-end restaurants, you're going to get waiters and waitstaff there incredibly attentive to your needs as a diner, and you don't want that. You want to scope out the restaurant and get a seat towards maybe the back or the side of a restaurant. You don't want it too noisy. You don't want it too quiet. And you also want to know where the back entrance is. So you want to be able to come and go from separate entrances and exits after meeting with a clandestine source. So, this whole scenario would have never actually taken place in real life.
Ethan: Why was there another team?
Kittridge: What?
Ethan: Of IMF agents at the embassy tonight.
Michele: Absolutely not. That would never, ever happen, and the reason is, you have to have a full understanding of everyone involved in the operation. Everything you've done is fully planned out and de-conflicted with people in the area. So if you were to notice the other team, you would have called out the operation from the beginning.
Kittridge: I can understand you're very upset.
Ethan: Kittridge, you've never seen me very upset.
Michele: That part is accurate. The sense of no matter what happens, you have to keep your head on straight. You have to focus and think, OK, what next?
[explosion]
They certainly make intel officers look incredibly cool, and who doesn't want explosive gum? Love that. I would give it a two out of 10 for realism, which doesn't mean I don't absolutely love this movie. I do, but not realistic at all.
Rating: 2/10
"Spy" (2015)
Patrick: I was given the specific instructions by Elaine to tailor these gadgets to you.
Michele: Nothing on that table, we wouldn't be using anything of that nature. The things that we are assigned when we go to a war zone are things like your Glock or your helmet or your Kevlar vest. When you are having an operation that requires a piece of
Patrick: This antifungal spray can freeze and disable any security system.
Michele: What I love about the silly items that he gives her, are things she can stash in her purse and her suitcase and no one's ever really going to think twice about. The idea is to not stand out. She's successful in this movie because she's the unexpected spy. You don't want people to take note of you. We talk about lulling people to sleep. Backstopping, like you're creating a persona and the persona's that you're just a normal, everyday person, and you even need things like this. I give it a three. But of course for fun I give it a 10.
Rating: 3/10
"The Bourne Identity" (2002)
Bourne: I can tell you the license-plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself.
Michele: Now, his powers of recall are quite incredible and unrealistic. Essentially, you're trained to remember people's profiles when they stand out, when they do something that's unusual or different. You're conducting a surveillance detection route. So you're making sure nobody's going to follow you to your clandestine meeting. You want to make sure that you don't see the same cars twice, and so one technique that they teach us is to speak out loud a description of the various vehicles that you're seeing. So, it's called commentary driving.
This whole scenario would have never actually taken place in real life. We learn how to use our car as a weapon in case we're ambushed. We learn how to drive a car. Really drive it to its limits. How to avoid impacting casuals in the field. I mean, it's the best. It's, like, the coolest part of our training, but you hope you will never use any of it. And so I was driving in my car alone, and I was in the process of possibly getting carjacked. I had to use my vehicle to hit someone a couple of times to get them to move so I could drive out of harm's way, and I didn't think too much what I was doing about as I was in the middle of this scenario, but my training kicked in, thank God, and I was able to get away, and thankfully I also didn't hurt that person. I would give it a two out of 10 for realism.
Rating: 2/10
"True Lies" (1994)
The idea that we shoot people or we have black belts in martial arts and we take people down with a kick, the psychology of espionage is very on the down low and not in-your-face action-packed sequences. We did get some physical training, and most of it was, you know, what you do if things go really bad. We get qualified on a Glock, and we feel quite comfortable with a Glock after that training. So I would rate this clip as a one.
Rating: 1/10
"Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" (2018)
Jack: The game. When we were in Paris, we uncovered correspondence between Suleiman and his brother, Ali.
Michele: So, the way the scene is set up, with a room full of intelligence officers from very, very senior level all the way down to junior-type officers, is quite unusual. It might remind you of something you have seen in the press, and that is President Obama sitting with his closest security and intelligence advisors as the operation against Osama bin Laden unraveled. They were right there along the way, they heard the communications, and you see them sitting in the room together. So, most of the time that doesn't happen. That would have to be an incredibly high-level-type operation, but you would always have people in the room who are subject-matter experts. You could speak up as a junior officer, because you may be the only one in the room who actually has the substance or the knowledge about your target.
Jack: They were using a video-game system's online-messaging app to communicate.
Michele: So, terrorists and other criminals have actually used the chat function in games to communicate with each other. They have used it as a form of covert communications. We have the calculation of risk versus gain. So, would we try to insert ourselves in a relationship between two really close brothers? You would walk into that probably understanding that you would not be able to have the proper verbal paroles to make the connection.
Jack: Who's got this?
Agent: Let's go, guys! Get on it, get on it.
Michele: Most of our operations are not as quickly unfolding or as rapid as this one. The CIA is very much a bureaucracy, like every US government agency, and it takes us a long time to plan, implement, execute operations. There are very, very few instances in your career where something like that would happen, where you're kind of jumping through hoops and looking up information quickly. I mean, we do do that, but it's not, it's not as prevalent as this clip would make you think.
Agent: He's still online, Jack.
Michele: I love the authenticity of showing how a terrorist operates, especially using the gaming chat. Although, you know, Hollywood amps it up a bit, but because of all that, I'd give it about a seven.
Rating: 7/10
"Argo" (2012)
This clip makes me sweat, because it is so realistic in terms of what we deal with when we're crossing borders or getting ready to board a flight or enter or exit a country. It can be incredibly dicey. Like, I feel all sweaty, and my heart is racing even thinking about it right now. You have to be so confident in keeping your cover and maintaining your legend. Even if your insides feel like they're literally exploding, you cannot show that on your face. You have to remember who you are, what your name is, what you're doing, what your purpose was in the country, when you entered, when you exited. In terms of your cover story, you want to keep it as close to the truth as possible because you have to memorize it and you have to recall it easily and you have to recall it under stress. This movie is based on a real-life situation, which is right after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Some Americans were able to escape the embassy and with the help of the Canadian government come up with this operation to get them out. So not only is it realistic, but it really did happen. They did actually have university students putting those photos together to try to figure out the identities of all of the US embassy staff.
Guard: What was the purpose of your visit?
Bob: We are looking for locations for a film.
Michele: Airport authorities don't even have to have a good reason to detain you or to stop you from boarding a flight. If they don't like the way you look or they don't trust you or you say something wrong, that could change the course of your entire life. Technology has changed a great deal since 1979, when this happened, and it's making it more difficult for intelligence officers and others to cross borders covertly, because now we've got all kinds of thumbprints and eye scanners and all kinds of equipment that's used to establish your identity. This one I give a nine, because it's so close to accurate.
Rating: 9/10
"Homeland" (2011-2020)
Lynne: I really don't want to do this anymore, and I mean it, Carrie. I feel like I can't even breathe now.
Carrie: All you have to do now is keep your eyes and ears open for the remainder of your contract with the prince.
Michele: So, I love this clip, because it really shows the bread and butter of what it is to be an intelligence officer. The way that she handles her source is not ideal. She basically said, "You have to do this." Oh, my goodness! You would never say that to a real source. They are there because they want to be there. They are there because they understand the risk and they're willing to take the risk. Now, what you have to do is, if they're nervous, if they're concerned about moving forward or they feel like their life is in danger, you have to talk them through that. You have to train them. And so the idea of telling her, like, "You have to do this," is the worst way to treat a source. Every time you have a source meeting, if there's a lot on the line with the source, it's almost like you have to re-recruit them every time.
Carrie: You are the only agency asset to have had eyes on Nazir in seven years.
Lynne: Asset?
Michele: We do in fact call our sources assets, but we would never do that to their face, because it's a very inhuman way to refer to them, and they are human beings.
Lynne: I am just some girl from Sandusky, Ohio, you talked into helping out her country.
Carrie: And I won't let anything happen to you.
Michele: We are not God that we can protect our sources. There are certain things in certain situations that we can do to help our sources out, but at the end of the day, they're the ones on the front lines. They're the ones in difficult situations, and they're the ones who have to make a decision. So you have to help them think through scenarios, ways to ensure that they keep themselves safe and don't take any unnecessary risks. Your sources may not intuitively know what's too risky, what they can get away with, and if, at the end of the day, they don't feel comfortable, they can walk away at any time. But the part of this that is inaccurate to me is the fact that a Western woman who is the girlfriend of a sheikh would be anywhere remotely close to a wanted terrorist. That would not happen. She is unvetted, untested. Fundamentally, she's a Western woman. So that whole scenario is extremely unlikely. I would give this clip an eight, only because it is the closest thing to a real-life covert meeting with a source that I have ever seen in the movies or on television.
Rating: 8/10
"My Spy" (2020)
JJ: Now, we know you're a pretty good liar, but what if you're caught by the enemy and faced with a lie-detector test?
Michele: OK, if you are being polygraphed, it's already too late. If you are arrested or detained by a foreign government and you're being polygraphed, done. You're finished. You don't even want to get to that point.
JJ: The key is to focus on your breathing. The slightest increase in your blood pressure is an indicator that you're not telling the truth.
Michele: So, no, we are not trained how to defeat the polygraph, because, you know, once that happens, you're already probably imprisoned. So that's not accurate at all. The agency uses the polygraph as part of your security and background investigation. So basically if you train someone to defeat it, you're training your employees to defeat one of the methods you use to keep them honest. So they would never want to do something like that.
Rating: 1/10
"Spy Game" (2001)
Nathan: I can probably make arrangements for you to end your tour of duty in San Diego, in which case I'll presume you'll forget we ever had this conversation.
Michele: Getting personally recruited in that manner, so, while I know a couple of people that that happened to, the vast majority of us actually apply to the CIA online or through someone that we know.
Nathan: The next day, we started his tradecraft.
Michele: Wow. No, it could take an entire year for the CIA to vet you, and you have to go through so many processes of polygraphs and very long interviews and psych exams, and so you have to go through a battery of tests before you get to the part where you're actually going through training. Now, in terms of your tradecraft training, that takes about a year, and it's very, very intense, and it's not one-on-one like you see here. You have classroom time, and then you have role playing in the field, and you do go out in public and you practice your skills. So that part is accurate.
Nathan: Always carry cigarettes and a lighter, too. Great icebreaker.
Michele: Now, the whole "cigarettes and a lighter," they can be very useful, especially in parts of the world where smoking is a big thing. So, I spent a lot of time in the Middle East, and a lot of people smoked. They were quite useful for when you were serving in really dangerous places, where there are a lot of military or criminal checkpoints. A pack of cigarettes or a box of cigarettes could potentially save your life. It's very valuable in certain parts of the world, so you would keep that in your glove-compartment box.
Nathan: The suit in the kitchen. Threat?
Tom: Wait, how'd you see that?
Michele: Every time we can use a mirror or a glass door or a glass window to see a reflection, oh, that's the best. Intelligence officers love reflections.
Nathan: Solicit information from someone.
Tom: Gladly.
Michele: Elicitation is one of the most important skills that you have as an intelligence officer. So, you would need to be able to talk people into doing things for you. You need to have the emotional intelligence that allows you to make a connection to ultimately recruit and handle sources, or just to kind of get through your day, maintain your cover and your, you know, your lifestyle abroad, whatever that is. But those are really critical skills. I rate this a seven. It's... there's some inauthentic pieces, but I like it as a whole.
Rating: 7/10
"Body of Lies" (2008)
Roger: Mr. Al-Masri? Mr. Omar Sadiki.
Sadiki: As-salamu alaikum.
Al-Masri: Wa alaikum assalaam.
[camera clicking]
Michele: So, what I find inauthentic about this scene is that you have your target and then an operator almost crossing paths. That would never happen in real life. So, of course, what's happening here is the target is being set up to be photographed with another individual. You would have coordinated, in an operation like this, way ahead of time, and not in the actual office where it's going to occur. This is what you call the operational bubble, and you have to get outside that operational bubble to do something like photograph these two. And you saw this huge lens that he's using. That's going to grab a lot of attention. So it's highly likely someone would have seen him in the car with this ginormous lens. If there'd been another car on the other side of him, possibly, but he wouldn't even need a lens that big, because he's really not that far away. We would have definitely created a scenario where you get your target into a specific location, but you want to protect your technical asset who's taking the photograph. So you want them to be outside the operational bubble. So that's the part that's not authentic here. I'd probably give it around a six, so slightly authentic, but there are a lot of problems here, as we've pointed out.
Rating: 6/10
Who doesn't love Melissa McCarthy in "Spy"? I laugh out loud at this movie. She is so brilliant.