The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - Fade to Black | 7. Single White Chase Brandon

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

In the late 1990s, the CIA introduced its first Hollywood Liaison Office, a former clandestine services officer named Chase Brandon. Could Gary’s relationship with the Agency, and its Hollywood office, have played a role in his disappearance? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed: Fade to Black, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free.Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Campsite Media. The Bench. Oh! That's the sound of Ben Stiller in the 2000 comedy Meet the Parents, as he nervously trips and falls before entering the office of his future father-in-law, Robert De Niro, who plays a very tightly wound former CIA officer. In this scene, Stiller finds himself inside De Niro's secret basement office, which the writers thought would be filled with terrifying mementos of a shadowy CIA career. The room in the original script is covered in Central Intelligence Agency torture manuals from the School of Americas, which had been used in Central and South America as guidelines, as textbooks, on how to hurt people en masse and how to torture people. And so

De Niro's character is represented as being associated with these most horrific tools of the trade. That's Matthew Alford, who we met last episode. The British guy behind that documentary, or whatever it is. The writer with no hands. Alford is also a serious academic who studies the influence of CIA propaganda in Hollywood. He's singling out this particular film because in the final cut of Meet the Parents, the CIA torture manuals are not what the audience sees. When Ben Stiller goes into the office of Robert De Niro, he's still intimidated, but he's intimidated because

you see a picture of De Niro with Bill Clinton. And so they replaced the torture manuals with that. And according to Alford, this revision, allegedly done to erase an uncomfortable truth about the CIA's past, was made at the request of a familiar name. Chase Brandon asked for that to be removed. What Chase Brandon and the CIA seemed to be doing was seeking to influence popular movies and TV shows to make the CIA look better. And at times to even erase or rewrite little bits of history in very subtle ways. Like changing the visual gag in Meet the Parents. This was about cleaning up the CIA's reputation specifically from Central America, where it had been very much associated with employing methods of torture.

Brandon and the CIA's Hollywood office worked to shape and at times censor popular entertainment Films like The Recruit and Zero Dark Thirty And shows like Alias and The Agency You can't talk about Wendy DeVore and her search for Gary Without talking about Gary's relationship with Chase Brandon And the CIA And pulling on that tantalizing thread Inevitably leads to the CIA's operation working inside of the Hollywood machine.

This is the story that has been hiding in plain sight, hovering over the investigation of Gary's disappearance. When we last met Matthew Alford, he was dressed in a clown suit in that quasi-documentary, suggesting that Gary DeVore's disappearance was intentional and that the crash on the highway was staged. And that all seemed to somehow involve Chase Brandon or the CIA. But Matthew Alford, who has a PhD in political communication, has broader interests. My work is geared around this relationship between entertainment and politics,

or what you might call propaganda, and particularly as it relates to the representation of warfare and American foreign policy in particular. And so Hollywood, as a propaganda system, promoting the American national security state. And Alford's film, as performative as it may be, is practically a cautionary tale about the seductive power of the Gary DeVore narrative. Because Alford began his project with the most serious of intentions, to investigate CIA propaganda in Hollywood. But Gary's story, and Wendy's experience living through it, in it, is so mind-bendingly mysterious, it can be like kryptonite to the other important

truths in the story. The most significant truth is that part of Gary DeBoer's legacy appears to be helping to bring Chase Brandon and the CIA into the embrace of Hollywood writers. Because while the liaison office surely cut deals with producers and networks, giving the CIA power to censor films out of the view of the audience, the real holy grail for Brandon in his office was to get into writers' heads

as they were writing and creating stories. This is not my knowledge. This is my guess. It just makes common sense, although I do not have a way to say to you I guarantee it. He was recruited. And knowing Gary or any other writer of any other kind of suspense or interest, they all would have taken it.

For the moment, we're stepping around the questions of Brandon's involvement in Gary's disappearance, if indeed he was involved, to look at what the CIA's Hollywood office seemed to be trying to do to us, American TV watchers and moviegoers. This is a story about white propaganda and Black propaganda, and a CIA operation that seemed to break the law and its own charter from inside the Hollywood entertainment machine. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, you're listening to Witnessed Fade to Black, Episode 7, Single White Chase Brandon. I'm Josh Dean. More than 20 years ago, when Professor Tricia Jenkins was doing her Ph.D. at Michigan State in women's studies and film and TV, she found herself engrossed by a new show on ABC.

Seven years ago, I was recruited by a secret branch of the CIA called SD6. I was trained as a spy. I was a huge Alias fan when that TV show came out in 2001. She liked it for the reasons any fan would. I loved Jennifer Garner as an actress. I liked it for very sort of shallow reasons, like she had cool clothes, she got to go to exotic nightclubs on overseas missions. I liked the way that the show often played with, like,

how people would underestimate her because of her gender. So there were just a lot of things in the show that I just liked. But Jenkins' obsession with the show would go far beyond her fandom. Alias would end up defining her academic research and, in many ways, her career. I ended up writing my dissertation on women's roles in the American spy genre. And then, while researching her dissertation, she came across an article in the New York Times about Chase Brandon in the CIA Entertainment Industry Liaison Office.

I was talking about Alias, actually, and it said, in Chase Brandon, the CIA's Entertainment Liaison Officer provided cooperation and assistance to Alias. And I just paused and I thought, wait, wait a second. I've never heard of the CIA's entertainment liaison officer. I didn't know that they did this. What kind of cooperation are they offering? It's a question you probably haven't really thought about much, if at all.

Who is really talking to you when you're listening to someone speak on a TV show or movie or even a podcast like this one? I'm obviously reading from a script, but who wrote that script? Do I personally believe what I'm telling you? What if in this podcast we told you that, as an institution, the CIA has never permitted the use of torture, and it is not condoned or supported by its officers or affiliates? Same with assassination. Well, what if I told you that CIA officers never go rogue, never break the law, never use illegal drugs? This is exactly what Hollywood producers of popular TV shows and movies did beginning in the mid-90s, as part of secret, or at least not

widely publicized, agreements they entered into with the CIA through its so-called liaison office, established by Chase Brandon. Through the late 90s, as Gary DeVore's disappearance made headlines, with Chase Brandon or the CIA's possible involvement, as a rumor you heard whispered in the background, Chase and the agency were quietly building relationships with key writers, producers, and networks, entering into business relationships and signing contracts which viewers were never informed of. Regarding the CIA's oversight of content in high-budget productions.

It's something Trisha Jenkins would find so compelling that she'd go on to write an entire book about it. Really, the seminal book on the topic. The CIA and Hollywood. How the agency shapes film and television. In it, she traces the Hollywood liaison office to its beginning. What's interesting about the CIA is, so the CIA is formed in 1947, and it is the last major government agency to develop a Hollywood entertainment liaison program. The FBI has been doing this since the 1920s. All of the branches of the Pentagon have been doing this really since the inception of film. The very first film they worked on was Birth of a Nation. And I could find a lot of things about the way that those organizations had worked with Hollywood,

but I couldn't find anything about the way the CIA had. Since its founding in 1947, the CIA has always, in a sense, been a cultural institution. It was born after World War II in the early years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. A big part of that war was for the hearts and minds of people around the world, pitting our propaganda against theirs, in markets and nations everywhere. This took many forms. In the 1950s, the CIA sponsored European art shows promoting American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock to impress Europeans and undercut Soviet propaganda that America had no culture or art. It also promoted and supported tours for famous Black artists like Louis Armstrong

to showcase America's progressive racial values. As Tricia Jenkins dug into her research, she found that as far back as the 1950s, the CIA was covertly entering into the film business too. The primary financial backer of the animated adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm. It's a British animation company that does it,

but it's the CIA that finances it, and they finance it entirely in secret. But the CIA didn't just pay for the film. The agency rewrote Orwell's ending. Benjamin, the main character, rejects communism on the farm. He gets so upset at what he sees. He rounds up all of the other animals that have been oppressed by this new system,

and they overthrow the pigs. So it is calling to action for a violent overthrow of communist leaders in Animal Farm. And that was a difference that the CIA really pushed and could get through because they financed the whole project. One of the greatest horrors in Orwell's most famous work, 1984, is the ability of the government to rewrite news to suit its propaganda needs. Nearly a century before Americans were fretting so openly about fake news, Orwell feared, quote, how easily totalitarian propaganda could control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. No small irony then that one of the CIA's earliest propaganda projects was to rewrite George Orwell. But this propaganda work was

technically within the CIA's mission, which is primarily to collect intelligence from abroad, but also to, quote, leverage the power of information to keep our nation safe overseas, a category that includes using everything from assassination to paying off foreign journalists to financing pro-American media and films. But here's the thing. The agency is only supposed to do this stuff outside of the United States, not at home, on Americans. In fact, by law, the CIA can't collect intelligence on Americans on U.S. soil

or launch operations directed at citizens. This includes manipulating media. By the CIA's charter, they are only allowed to operate overseas. They can conduct surveillance operations on foreign citizens who are living in the United States, but that's the extent of their powers in the United States. By the 1990s, when Chase Brandon was hanging out with Gary DeVore in Hollywood, the CIA had endured a long stretch of bad publicity in the U.S.

Americans were skeptical about its actions. In 1975, the Senate Church Commission revealed a series of shocking allegations, including the agency's role in spying on Americans at home, participating in assassinations abroad, and even a key role supporting the overthrow of certain foreign governments. In the 1980s, the CIA was caught breaking laws again by committing acts of war in Central America, such as mining ports in Nicaragua and smuggling weapons to rebels during the Iran-Contra scandal. Movies like Three Days of the Condor in the 70s and then Gary DeVore's own Dogs of War in the 80s portrayed the CIA in a lawless, dangerous light. The image of the CIA is a group that is a rogue outfit that operates with little oversight, that is obsessed with assassination, that is incompetent or even buffoonish. According to Jenkins, things just got worse for the agency in the 90s. So the first thing that happens is

that the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union collapses in 1991. And all of a sudden, the whole, like, reason, the raison d'etre for the CIA is gone. That's when their budget is being slashed. They've lost 25% of their employees due to attrition. Like, they are not in their strongest position. Also, there was a disastrous spy scandal. Aldrich Ames, who works for the CIA, but basically he is a mole and he is selling the names of every, essentially, CIA asset. I think he gets like, it's about $4 million that he gets from the Russians for selling out information, like who the CIA's assets are working in Russia. This was a major news story in the mid-90s.

The CIA just looked completely incompetent. And so the CIA director and the CIA director of public affairs at the time, they sort of get together and they say, we've got to do something. And part of that something then was to reach out to Hollywood film and television creators to start to change the image of the CIA in the public's mind, to argue that the CIA is indeed still necessary. The story that Professor Jenkins tells, carefully sourced in her book, began independently of Chase Brandon. The idea of reaching out to Hollywood actually began with then-CIA director James Woolsey in

the early 1990s. But it was shelved as impractical and possibly illegal. But then, in 1996, this happened. Thank you, Congresswoman Millinder-McDonald, for giving me the opportunity to talk with members of this community about charges that the CIA introduced crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. That's John Deutch, then the director of the CIA, speaking at a town hall meeting at a high school in South Central LA,

emphasizing that the Central Intelligence Agency is not a drug dealer and did not import massive amounts of cocaine into America's inner cities in the 80s and 90s. It's a rumor that persists today based on the fact the CIA was indeed allied with Latin American drug traffickers at the time. But whether or not they had an actual hand in creating the crack epidemic, this was a really, really bad look for the Central Intelligence Agency. Thank you so much for Mr. CIA official for being here, but I would just like to ask you, how are we supposed to trust the CIA official to investigate themselves? I mean, we are having a problem with that.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. And so, with the CIA's reputation at an all-time low, the Hollywood liaison office was fast-tracked into existence. And soon, this is the type of thing people were hearing about the CIA. One thing we do know working there is there is an orderliness to the place. There is a mission commitment. There are absolutely good people who are nothing if not 100% exemplary patriots, dedicated American citizens, CIA professionals. That's Chase Brandon.

In 2012 on Coast to Coast, that late-night conspiracy theory radio show, which we also heard back in Episode 3. I was given an opportunity to be the first ever overt spokesman for the covert side of the agency. By his own accounts, Chase had spent 25 years on the covert side of the CIA when he took his new job. And for about 15 of those years, he had maintained a friendship with Gary DeVore, which Gary mostly hid from his other friends. One thing about Chase that emerged once the CIA allowed him to speak in public, he's a man with the gift of gab. And he speaks of the CIA with true passion. We have on our major big granite wall inside the lobby of the original headquarters building, we have a galaxy, a galaxy of stars chiseled in the wall for people that went out, did their work and made the ultimate sacrifice, lost their lives. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch.

It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast, The Dinner's On Me. And whether you're a first-time wine drinker or a wine aficionado, you're guaranteed to like America's number one luxury Cabernet. Since 1981, Justin's Vineyards and Winery has been producing world-class

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off your order today. That's JESSE20 for 20% off. When Tricia Jenkins' light bulb moment, while watching that episode of Alias, it turned her attention fully toward the story of the CIA in Hollywood. And she went directly to the liaison office for more context. She tried Chase Brandon first. No luck. Finally, she spoke with Paul Barry, who succeeded Chase Brandon. He told her this. We think this is an important program because we understand that 95% of people get their ideas about the CIA from film and television shows that most people don't read news articles anymore. And so they want a hand in those productions because they recognize that that is basically the source of information that people are using to form their thoughts about the CIA. CIA lawyers actually warned against starting the program, and not because it was technically in violation of the agency's charter.

They had not wanted to develop this program because of First Amendment issues. So the First Amendment essentially, in a nutshell, says the government cannot use its resources to favor some speech because it likes that speech based on its viewpoint. And then also turn around and withhold its assets or its resources to a speaker whose viewpoint it does not like. In other words, if the CIA offers special help and access to one filmmaker, its lawyers worried that by law it would then be obligated to help any filmmaker, even one who wanted to make an anti-CIA film. And yet, the agency went ahead and hung its shingle in 1996. One year after Gary DeVore's last big film, Sudden Death with Jean-Claude Van Damme,

landed in cinemas. He just has the right personality. He's described as a loquacious, charming, kind of free spirit who does well in Hollywood social circles. By the time he took this job, he had already spent 25 years at the CIA doing a variety of different jobs and worked in the clandestine services. So he was somebody who was seen as a knowledgeable authority figure that screenwriters could turn to for advice about their CIA scripts.

Jenkins never did manage to reach Chase Brandon. I don't even think that he rejected my request. He just ignored them. And as far as I know, he's never talked to anybody else about their scholarly research into the CIA's program because I've had other academics who have tried. The U.S. military had traditionally offered giant exotic pieces of hardware, like aircraft carriers and bombers, that Hollywood studios could use for free if the Pentagon approved of the scripts. But the CIA didn't have sexy hardware and couldn't make those types of deals.

But they could bring something else to the party, the promise of information, secrets and stories that nobody else could tell. Here's Chase again. If you looked under the ground, you would see that all the roots are connected in a tangled Machiavellian conspiratorial way, because that's where the clandestine activities take place. That's where the manipulation and the exploitation and the operations are run to gather the information that no other country wants to share with us.

The CIA could use the promise of its secrets, presumably true stories of dark dealings, adventure, heroism, the stuff Hollywood feeds off of. In exchange for a chance to, quote, review the written scripts of films or TV shows it helped on. Allegedly in order to make them more accurate. More likely, to make them more friendly. What they came up with was a list of no-goes. Things that, if put into a script, would cause the CIA to withdraw support.

Professor Jenkins landed a very rare anonymous interview with a CIA official who described the list to her. Two things that he pointed to, torture or waterboarding, as an example of that. Anything where officers were using drugs. Anything where a CIA officer did not protect its own assets, left them hang out to dry. Those were all showstoppers for the CIA. And assassination, that was the other big thing. They were just like, if you just depict a CIA officer as engaging in assassination, that will be an automatic no from our office.

Just to clarify, because at one point I was picturing like some swanky bungalow near one of the studio lots, the CIA liaison office was never a physical location in L.A. where people could pop by for meetings. Chase Brandon worked out of the public affairs office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and would fly to Hollywood as needed to take meetings or visit sets. Damon Reiser, who was at Gary's ex-wife Claudia's house at the time of Gary's disappearance, went on to work as a producer. And he remembers distinctly what inevitably happened when government people would arrive on set. Everybody wants to hang out with them, especially like directors and producers. They all want to be seen with, oh, this is, you know,

this is the guy for the actors, especially if they're portraying an FBI agent. I'm portraying a secret servant agent. And at the end of it, they all become friends with them. Chase seems to have been a true believer in the mission. He loved the agency and what it stood for to him. You're talking about a really remarkable group of people. And it has always been my most extreme sense of pride and privilege to have been part of that great organization. The way Chase would tell it, the CIA is a place of misunderstood heroes who've never been able to tell their stories. And his job, in a sense,

was to finally give them voice, to help the CIA break its silence. And Hollywood ate this up. So they start this program 1996. 1999 and the Company of Spies, that Showtime movie, is the first thing that comes out of that. But all of these other things that they had been working on, which was Alias, The Agency, which ran on CBS, 24, they were all shows that came out in that fall season, and they all featured the CIA. Of that first slate of shows in the fall of 2001, all of them contained variations of the message that the CIA was essential in protecting Americans from terrorists. But as Professor Jenkins found, the agency of those three is the one that is the most positive in its depiction of the CIA. These men are all part of al-Qaeda,

sworn to wage holy war against the United States and any nation perceived to be friendly to us. It talks about how necessary they are and shows them thwarting a whole variety of threats that are coming, not from a post-Cold War situation, but from this new model of rogue states or terrorist actors, and really works to rehabilitate or at least to talk back to the criticisms that the news media is launching against the CIA, and they are able to offer a counter perspective through entertainment

media, you couldn't have asked for better timing when those shows came out as it related to 9-11 and the criticisms that the agency would be experiencing. So, yes, while the CIA was paying Chase Brandon to pitch stories that would show Americans how good the CIA was at protecting them from terrorists, the terrorists actually attacked America. And in a twisted way, this worked to the agency's benefit. Right after 9-11 and the CIA being criticized for its performance, this is where the fruits of the entertainment liaison office start really paying off. Many blamed U.S. intelligence for allowing the 9-11 attacks to happen, specifically for losing two of the hijackers it had been following before they entered the U.S. and staged the attacks. But in theaters and on TV, the early projects that Chase Brandon had advised on were starting to come out,

depicting an agency that was aces at protecting America. Brandon also enlisted Hollywood's help in other areas. He, for instance, recruited Jennifer Garner, the star of Alias, to do a recruitment video for the CIA, which played at college fairs. And? The other thing that he did was he often appeared in special features back in the days of DVD, where you remember you got the film, but then you can click on this bonus material. And he would often be featured in spy films in that bonus section. So in the case of The Recruit, it's actually a pretty long bonus piece. The Recruit was a major Hollywood film released in 2003,

starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, two giant stars at that time. Here's an excerpt from the DVD extra. The writers on this project spent a lot of time with Chase Brandon of the CIA. And most of it is Chase Brandon talking about the recruitment process, but then it talks about all the skills you learn, and it makes it seem like, look how awesome and cool spy life is. We don't confirm or deny that we have a training facility, but we do, in fact, have a secret training site.

We have, in fact, several. That special feature is pretty much a recruitment tool that got distributed on the DVD of that film. Having this mysterious government agency vetting movies and TV shows bothers Jenkins a lot. It's very hard for the average viewer, I think, to spot CIA influence. And even if they wanted to literally spend the time to go through all of the scrolling credits to see if the CIA were to be credited, a lot of times you wouldn't see their name.

When the public is watching a film or a TV show, their guard is down. They're expecting entertainment. And who would expect that a comedy like Meet the Parents had a visual gag about torture removed because it offended the CIA? Which actually has a long history of being involved with torture. With respect to waterboarding, and the vice president is obviously comfortable with it, I consider it to be torture. In 2020, Matthew Alford appeared in a documentary called Theaters of War. The film also features Professor Jenkins, as well as directors like Oliver Stone, all analyzing the scope of the government's oversight. Twenty-odd years ago, the consensus in the scholarly community was that there was just a

couple of hundred of these things. You know, me and our group found, you know, over 10,000 titles, movie, TV, computer games, 10,000 titles that have been manipulated in some way, overseen by the Department of Defense, CIA, and other aspects of the national security state. And it's accelerated a lot in the 21st century. And it turns out there's a term for what the CIA has been doing in Hollywood. Black propaganda is propaganda that is put out into the world, but who the author of that propaganda is, is hidden, it's not known, or it's a lie. So, you know, when the Internet Research Agency out of Russia created Facebook groups for Russian propaganda to circulate, it didn't look like the IRA was the author. It looked like the Heart of Texas Facebook group was circulating this. So that's black propaganda.

But there's also something called white propaganda, which is it's a propaganda message that has gone out, and it's clear who the author is, and that really is the author of the propaganda. It doesn't make it not propaganda. It just makes it more transparent propaganda. In that one long interview he did after he left his job, Chase Brandon veered off script a bit. When asked if the CIA may have been involved in major crimes and conspiracies,

the kinds of things he was trying to keep out of films. Is there anybody that knows everything the CIA does? George, frankly, I doubt it. To include the director, I would hazard a guess that all of us would say, well, who knows what we don't know? And then Chase made a fascinating observation about the fundamental duality of being a CIA officer. I will tell you that if you are a clandestine service officer, you stand on one side of a line that says you are honest, you are accountable,

you have integrity, you follow rules and regulations, you are a team player. And yet, by nature of the work we do, which is to go abroad, lie and steal for the U.S. government. We lie about who we are. An ad for a roommate brought a stranger into Allison's life. That's from the classic 1992 thriller Single White Female. Bridget Fonda posts an ad for a new roommate, and Jennifer Jason Leigh arrives. And then things turn dark. When it becomes clear Jason Leigh doesn't just want to live with Fonda.

She wants to become her. Is that maybe the perfect analogy for Chase Brandon's relationship with Gary DeVore? It was like he didn't just do his job for the CIA. It seems like he started to take on Gary's life, at least in one specific way. Brandon became a Hollywood screenwriter, and his first script, that we know of anyway, was that big Pacino spy film, The Recruit, released in 2003. The script is credited to veteran Hollywood scribes

Roger Towne, Kurt Wimmer, and Mitch Glazer. But when the film came out, Chase Brandon was mentioned. If you were to read the, you know, the press releases or the newspaper articles about Brandon's role on The Recruit, it would be that he helped us find locations to shoot in, and he gave us feedback on what training is like on the farm. And it basically makes him sound like he was a mere technical consultant. The public would never know that the pitch, treatment, and first draft of The Recruit was actually written by Chase Brandon while he was working for the CIA. Tricia Jenkins broke the story in all senses of the word

when she published the revised version of her book, The CIA in Hollywood. But for whatever reason, it was never picked up by the broader media that the Central Intelligence Agency secretly wrote the initial drafts of a major Hollywood film. We only know this because after the recruit came out, another writer vaguely connected to the project sued, claiming that the underlying idea, following a new recruit into a life of intrigue at the CIA, was his. Without anyone ever disclosing if there was any merit to the case, the lawsuit was settled, quietly and under seal. But several hundred pages of emails with attachments that were submitted as evidence became public.

So because of that, I know that Chase Brandon wrote with Roger Towne the original treatment, and they sent it to Disney, who came to be that film's final distributor. So in terms of Chase Brandon's involvement with The Recruit, it was far more involved than what the public record shows. As early as February 1997, Brandon and Roger Towne jointly sent the general storyline for the project to Tom Reed, an executive at the Walt Disney Company. Here's where it gets interesting. In June of 1997, Brandon revised Towne's treatment to basically simplify the original pitch. And he wrote in a fax to Towne and the producer Jeff Apple that Brandon, he says, I am very anxious to make a true palpable start in writing the actual screenplay for this movie,

and that he has now created not just his own 16-page treatment, which he had attached, but also several additional pages of detailed characters. Other documents revealed that Brandon submitted a script with an 80-page Act I. It is not just like plot points. It is full dialogue, direction instructions, costuming instructions, set design ideas. The script also had handwritten notes. By Chase to Roger Towne. A lot of his points from those original drafts of the script make it into the final film. But does anybody know that? Is he credited as a screenwriter anywhere in the film? Nope. If this podcast were only about CIA influence in Hollywood,

then this would be a pretty satisfying climax, with its founding officer not just consulting, he's actually writing scripts. But our story is about Gary DeVore, and those court documents reveal something else related to the whole Brandon DeVore, and those court documents reveal something else related to the whole Brandon DeVore mystery. That their relationship is a prelude and perhaps even a springboard to Brandon starting his rise in Hollywood. And in those court filings are a couple of critical dates in Brandon's rise as a screenwriter that parallel certain critical dates in Gary's development of The Big big steal, and also in his disappearance. In February 1997, Chase Brandon and Roger Towne

sent their jointly written treatment of the recruit to Disney. That same month is a significant date for Gary DeVore, too. It's when his mother died, for one, but it's also when, on Valentine's Day, he sent a fevered fax to RKO Pictures, completely re-breaking his original story for The Big Steal. It was in this fax that Gary came up with a new twist of having rogue CIA officers rob the Panamanian bank for personal gain. This is also when Gary started telling friends

that he was putting real information into his script that would blow the lid off of the CIA. Thanks largely to the research of Professor Jenkins, we now know that Gary's boasts of blowing the lid off the CIA with damning information was completely contrary to the spirit of the Hollywood liaison office. Gary and Chase may have been old friends, but if Gary was getting guidance from Chase on the script, as Chase himself admitted to the LA Times, then Gary completely violated the CIA's rules. One could say that this potentially even serves as a motive to harm Gary.

But we're not suggesting that, at all. We're just pointing out a bizarre parallel. There's also another one, in June 1997. Gary was revising his script according to those breakthroughs he had in February But he got stalled Suddenly in June, he had a new series of breakthroughs And said he was ready to hand in the script The same month that Chase Brandon submitted his revised and simplified treatment for the recruit Saying that he was ready to get going on the script

Given the timing of these two events It's fair to wonder if there could have been a quid pro quo. Did Chase provide Gary with increasingly detailed information on the CIA and Panama in exchange for Gary's help breaking the story for the recruit? Was revising and simplifying the treatment Chase handed in in June? Then, Gary disappears, and three months later, Wendy gets that awkward, bizarre invitation from Chase Brandon. When I spoke with Chase Brandon on the phone, he asked me if I wanted to come to the 50th anniversary of the CIA. That ceremony, by the way, was a memorable one, impeccably timed for a wounded CIA.

So remember when I said like 1999, they're going through employee attrition, their budget is low, morale is low, do they have an enemy? This is the 50th anniversary of the CIA. And they hold a trailblazers ceremony that will honor 50 CIA trailblazers. So officers or directors or administrators, whoever, who have done something really cool, essentially, for the CIA. So Tony Mendez is honored at that ceremony for the Argo mission. Tony Mendez was an exfiltration specialist who played a critical role in helping free the six U.S. embassy employees who weren't taken hostage in Iran in 1979,

using a fake movie production. But his story, prior to 97, was never told. In order for him to get that award, they have to declassify the operation. Once it is declassified, he gets permission to include a section of that story in his memoir called Master of Disguise. A bidding war breaks out for rights to the story. And Ben Affleck ends up directing this film, and Tony Mendez has got a heavy hand, and he goes to the CIA and says, you know, we'd really love to support this as much as possible. And

of course, the CIA is on board because they're the ones who ever declassified the story in the first place, hoping that it would get public traction. Had Wendy gone to that event with Chase, she would have seen Mendez receive his honors, starting the process that led to Argo winning Best Picture in 2013. I had never been around all of this incredible bullshit.

I had never been around it. this incredible bullshit. I had never been around it. I don't read these books. I don't like these movies or didn't. In trying to understand what exactly Chase Brandon was up to when he invited Wendy to that ceremony just three months after her husband disappeared, what he was doing when he arrived at their house unannounced and asked to be alone in Gary's office, we came across another witness who added a new perspective. Wendy's daughter Brittany was traveling in Europe at the time Gary disappeared. This was before most people carried cell phones, especially abroad. So Brittany had no idea what had happened until she called home. I had called home. Someone else answered the phone. I'm like, why is she answering the phone?

I think it was Jean that answered. Brittany is referring to Jean Batman, Wendy's former roommate who had flown in to support Wendy, who had walked into the office startling Chase Brandon as he stood in front of Gary's computer. I remember thinking how very bizarre that was. Like, what is she doing there? And she was like, he's missing. And I said, what does that mean? I said, I don't understand what you're saying. And she's like, he's missing.

I don't know what to tell you. He was on his way home and he never showed up. Brittany got the next flight back to California. And in the chaotic days following, had her own encounter with Brandon. The stuff with Chase Brandon was weird. It's like he just appeared. My recollection is this guy showed up, but there were so many people there at that point anyway that it didn't seem that bizarre.

This is the part of his behavior that struck Brittany. I remember, like, as the night was going on, just thinking, is this guy going to leave? I'm going to bed. And I went to bed and I went to bed in my mom's room that night. But this house was very tiny. So like they were up talking and I heard them. I just remember thinking he was flirting with her. And I remember thinking, I can't tell if he's trying to like charm her into trusting him or what this is, but this is very inappropriate.

And then he spent the night, but then like disappeared in the night. He was not there in the morning, but he was there all night. And he was poking around the house and flirting with my mom who was in fucking crisis. When Brittany later found out that this strange man was a spokesperson for the CIA, she was floored. It was so bizarre to me that he was out there, you know, as their mouthpiece. Like, how is that possible? This was early in Chase's new position as the CIA's Hollywood liaison.

Maybe he really was just nervous that an important Hollywood writer he was working closely with had disappeared and that this would make him look bad. But as Brandon's job with the agency in Hollywood continued, he seemed to fall apart in other ways, too. He officially retired in 2006, after 35 years with the CIA. At this time, Chase Brandon was a GS-15 pay grade, ranking him as the CIA officer equivalent of a U.S. Army colonel. But as Tricia Jenkins suggests in her book, his final act as a CIA officer equivalent of a U.S. Army colonel. But as Tricia Jenkins suggests in her book,

his final act as a CIA officer was to seemingly sabotage the agency, apparently in a bid to start his own career in Hollywood. This is like a weird story, but I will share this. This always kind of raised a red flag for me. So I interviewed Paul Berry at the CIA. Paul Berry was Chase Brand's successor. So when Chase retired, Paul Berry at the CIA. Paul Berry was Chase Brand's successor. So when Chase retired, Paul Berry took over his position as the entertainment liaison officer. And I asked him what that transition looked like. And he said it was very difficult because Chase had

the Rolodex of contacts with phone numbers and names and projects that he had worked on and projects that were in development or in discussion. and that when Chase retired, he literally took every single piece of paper with him and left nothing. But in fact, this damage Barry alleges that Chase had done set the program back so significantly that Barry had to basically start from scratch. Paul Barry's description of Chase Brandon, this guy sabotaged, you know, the future success of our program because he literally took every scrap of paper with him. If these allegations are true, Brandon may have committed a felony. I asked that to Paul Berry. Isn't that the taking of government property? Like, how was he able to do that?

And Paul Berry didn't have an answer, or at least he didn't have an answer that he wanted to give me. And there was also speculation, I remember at the time, that maybe Chase had taken all of these contacts because he himself was maybe trying to create a post-retirement life where he himself would be the main CIA technical consultant that people could turn to, but he would be doing it on a private, four-fee basis. By the time Chase actually opened the liaison office, it sure seems like he was trying to become a screenwriter himself, to remake himself as someone like Gary DeVore. It may well be that Chase's cringeworthy and wholly inappropriate seduction attempts of Wendy weren't merely creepy and tasteless. Maybe it was all driven by some primal desire

to experience all the trappings of Gary DeVore's glamorous life. In reality, Gary DeVore struggled with depression and even a sense of failure. But from the outside, looking into the jewel-like house on the beach he shared with his beautiful wife, as well as the friends, the parties, the office filled with screenplays that had actually been turned into films. It may have looked almost excruciatingly ideal to an outsider like Chase Brandon. After Brandon's retirement, he had a somewhat disappointing career. He attempted to consult on a few more films. He published a novel in 2012, The Crypto's Conundrum, a nearly 600-page doorstop of a tome that details an

impenetrable spy conspiracy that spans a century. It turns out Chase Brandon's other interest is combining CIA stories with sci-fi and alien lore. Some who worked with Brandon described him as struggling in those later years. Our lead writer and reporter Evan Wright spoke to a woman named Jasmine, a specialist in writing proposals for private companies to get defense contract spending. She met Brandon back in the mid-90s. He's a really, really good guy. He's loyal. He's extremely capable. But Jasmine said after Chase left the agency and really began to pursue his creative writing, it was roadblock after roadblock. And he was writing a series of novels,

like fiction, when he left. And he was just having some weird things happen to him. I think he was being harassed, like seriously harassed, for doing any writing. They don't like how people go out and write things. They do. They redact the books, and they tell you what you can and can't write. Not surprisingly, you can't just write about the CIA after you leave. Former employees have to submit anything they write about the agency for review. Many, if not most of those things, are heavily censored or even blocked

from publication. So in the end, it seems Chase Brandon was muzzled by the very agency whose praises he'd spent the last decade of his career slipping into Hollywood movies and TV shows. He still saw himself in the creative arts in some way, shape, or form, but I just don't see a lot of evidence of him being like the lead technical consultant on very many spy movies that came out after he retired. And the liaison office he opened ceased to function months after Paul Barry took over and reported to superiors that everything had apparently been looted. Which really didn't matter all that much. The agency was by this point confident enough in its clout, its allure as this irresistible vault of secrets, to deal directly with certain filmmakers who asked for help.

I would say that 2012 is like the bumper crop for the CIA and its entertainment liaison office projects, because what you have is both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo up for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and both of these are huge CIA success stories. For a decade, Chase Brandon and the entire CIA Entertainment Office tried to censor any production referencing torture or enhanced interrogations like waterboarding. And the CIA, under the Obama administration, prosecuted a CIA officer for stating in the news that CIA waterboarding was torture. John Cariacow served 30 months in prison for saying that the CIA was torturing people in 2007, when it actually was.

And now, in the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which the CIA advised on, its help was a major part of the marketing campaign. Torture, facilitated by cover, was approved of and even committed by CIA officers as a centerpiece of the film, and is shown as a tool that was used to capture Osama bin Laden. As Professor Jenkins said earlier, Chase Brandon's successor, Paul Barry, told her that torture in a film was an absolute deal breaker for the CIA. However, by 2012, when Zero Dark Thirty came out, there actually are instances of the CIA torturing detainees. And it was a huge controversy because people knew it was a CIA-assisted text. And so they were asking, so are you condoning torture now officially because of your cooperation on this movie? And the CIA director had to backpedal from it and say, no, no, no, we don't.

At the 2013 Academy Awards, Zero Dark Thirty was nominated in five categories, including Best Picture, and won the Oscar for Best Sound Editing. Worldwide, it grossed $132 million at the box office. The film was an unqualified success in every way. Given the success of the film, which won a Best Actress nomination for Jessica Chastain, for playing a heroic analyst in a grand hunt to locate and kill America's greatest enemy, the film could be seen as CIA propaganda to help them advance their agenda if their agenda is to make torture more acceptable as an intelligence practice. Whatever the First Amendment issues are here, U.S. taxpayers

spent a decade paying for Chase Brandon and other employees of the CIA to convince the creative brain trust to show the American public that the CIA wasn't in the business of torture. And then at the end of this run, they fully supported a blockbuster film proving that they've been lying to us all along. We tried to reach Chase Brandon for months while working on this series and just didn't get anywhere. But very late in the process, Wendy DeVore found a piece of paper with several phone numbers scribbled on it, including the name Chase Brandon and two 703 numbers, the area code for Northern Virginia, where the CIA is based. Evan Wright called them both, and a man answered one of the phones, but denied being Chase Brandon. A week later, Evan called again. This time, the man admitted it. He was Chase Brandon, but he didn't want to

be recorded. Chase seemed eager to get off the phone, but told Evan that Gary was a, quote, very, very close dear friend, and that he knows a lot about Gary. He said that he was happily retired and mostly just sat on his deck smoking cigars and sometimes shooting squirrels with a pellet rifle. He was proud of the work he'd done for the CIA. He wasn't sure he'd do it all over, but he enjoyed the work. We've called back our Chase voice actor to help capture the flavor. There's no way to explain what the agency does that anybody in the civilian world, especially the journalistic world and the theatrical world, for that matter, ever could comprehend.

And when they do attempt to comprehend it with a movie or a tale or a story or whatever, most of it is utter bullshit. Evan tried a few times to push Chase into an on-mic interview, but he just wouldn't take the bait. I appreciate what you may be trying to do, but I can't help you with that. Then he laughed, good and hard. Well, anyway, that's it. Good luck, buddy. Best wishes for a successful run. Today, more than a quarter century after her husband's disappearance, with decades of time to rethink basically every moment, Wendy still isn't sure what Gary might have been up to, or even what the real nature of his relationship with Chase Brandon was about.

I think that Gary was probably, well, he would have been thrilled to work with an intelligence agency. I think anybody who writes, and especially who writes at a level where it has to be so heavily investigated and interpreted correctly, because it would have given him more access to what he would write about, the types of people and everything. And Chase's one true friend in Hollywood,

Gary DeVore, the guy who apparently always picked up the phone even when Chase was a nobody, a journeyman undercover CIA op who wasn't even allowed to tell people what he really did? Now people suspect Chase of being part of some conspiracy. Possibly even one that led to Gary's disappearance. I think Gary saw himself stronger and more invincible than he was. Yeah.

I don't think he realized either the danger he was in or who exactly may have caused that. It was like the plot of the kind of thriller Chase was always pitching to writers, if only one were interested. And for Wendy, looking back on those last days before Gary took off to New Mexico to finish the big steal, what would turn out to be the last days she would ever spend with him. She just has this feeling now that Gary knew something. One memory in particular stands out. Gary in the bedroom, flipping the blanket on the bed.

I mean, for him to have stopped that night when he was flipping the blanket and said to me, I will always protect you. You will. I mean, I had no idea what he was talking about, but he did. Something about it has really stuck with her. I knew that he knew something was going on, that something bad was going to happen. And I'm sure that's why he said, I will always keep you safe. Because he knew he was getting deeper and deeper into something. Next time on the eighth and final episode

of Fade to Black, we go back to the highway where Gary disappeared and retrace what may have actually happened out there based on new information that's never been heard before. When he made that U-turn, he wanted to get out of there as fast as humanly possible. He gunned it. Because he wanted to make sure that they didn't see him.

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by Evan Wright and Megan Donis. Megan Donis is the senior producer, and Sheba Joseph is the associate producer. The executive producers are Evan Wright, Thank you. mixing and original music by Mark McAdam and Erica Huang. Additional engineering by Blake Rook. Additional music by APM and Blue Dot Sessions. Additional field recording by Devin Schwartz. Fact-checking by Amanda Feynman. Special thanks to our voice actor in this episode, Devin Schwartz, and our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Destiny Dingle, Ashley Warren, and Sabina Mara. The executive producers at Campside Media are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, Matt Scher, and me, Josh Dean.

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