Fascinating; I'm still thinking and remembering.

Rating: 10/10 (7 January 2007)

At urging of friends who know my background, I saw the movie last night. No critic (insufficiently knowledgeable) of actors, movie direction, an the like, I do know "tradcraft" and the CIA. I can say, therefore, that like the company, the movie is a "wilderness of mirrors." I knew "Virginis Slim" Angleton, and recognized him immediately in Matt Damon's performance. I also recognized others like Kim Philby (who I was alerted by a guy named Bill Harvey was a KGB agent I might -"probably" was his term - be assigned as a mission). Some other figures in the movie are a mixture of real people. The dates - defections of Anatoy Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko, for instance - are out of sync with history. The Bay of Pigs landing was betrayed by the members of 2506 Brigade, who could be heard in Little Havana Miami and elsewhere (Useppa Island, for instance),bragging and threatening concerning it weeks before. It happens that I myself was there in December, 1960, and in Cuba during the month of January, 1961.
Otherwise very close to the truth as I know it, Churchill's "riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside and enigma," The Good Shepherd may BE the truth. In my book "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," I tell of my recruitment at sixteen, to be trained in assassination of (foreign) leaders. As far as I know, ten men were so trained (by, among others, the new 10th Special Forces in Bad Tolz, German. When JFK threatened to tear the CIA to pieces, the team was ready.
The movie, of course, only hints at the CIA's "orchestration" (CIA organizer Frank G. Wisner's favorite expression) of the Cold War. It doesn't mention the military-industrial complex (President Eisenhowers's coinage) coup d'etat that was the CIA's primary mission and raisson d'etre. That the coup, the reason JFK was killed, succeeded is the only possible explanation for our history (fifteen trillion dollars in military spending, for instance) - since the time.