I have always thought that Robert Redford’s character and Cliff Robertson’s were both right in their respective arguments in the last scene of Three Days of the Condor. The two squared off on the tension between morality and pragmatism with respect to spying and military adventurism. Nevertheless, the question of competence versus incompetence goes missing in the film in the same way it has been absent from most of the public discussions about national security since September 11th.
To reset the scene – we are seeing Robert Redford’s character, Joey Turner, meeting in Times Square with Cliff Robertson’s mid-level CIA-guy, Higgins, who has arrived in a car with other CIA agents, assuming Turner will get into the car with him. Higgins and his people are ostensibly there for Turner’s benefit, to bring him in out of the cold, out of danger, into a CIA safehouse. But as Max von Sydow’s assassin character (Joubert) has warned Turner, the car almost certainly has a darker purpose, to whisk him away to be killed and silenced. Turner refuses to get in, instead mentioning the possibility that he has a .45 automatic in his pocket and suggests that Higgins “take a walk with me.”
Turner’s whole office full of CIA analysts has, of course, been murdered because he discovered (without realizing it) that an obscure novel printed in English, Spanish, Arabic and Dutch, was actually a template (produced by a different office within the CIA) for an invasion of the Middle East to secure a reliable source of oil.
Turner asks Higgins whether “we have plans to invade the Middle East?” To which Higgins replies, “no, we don’t have plans. We play games: how long would it take, how many men would be needed, how much money … The truth is there was nothing wrong with the plan, the plan would have worked.”
And it is here that morality collides with pragmatism. Turner complains that what Higgins blithely talks about in terms of “games” and “scenarios” has gotten seven innocent people killed. Turner could have gone even further and pointed out that Higgins’ apparent indifference to these deaths is that much more damning because the seven in question were the CIA’s own people.
The immorality Turner sees here is a huge, spreading stain. Sydney Pollack’s CIA is a Byzantine place in which the three not-so-innocent dead, Leonard Atwood, S.W. Wicks and the Marine Gunnery Sergeant/Postman-Hitman, have the wherewithal to play with both the idea of a Middle East invasion and to send a team of assassins (including Joubert and the Postman) to murder Turner and his fellow analysts. While this particular operation is unknown to Higgins (and to John Houseman’s Mr. Wabash) they are not so much shocked by it as they are annoyed and inconvenienced. Joubert, the assassin, even if not known to them personally, is someone within “the community.” And they will use him themselves to kill Atwood when he is “about to become an embarrassment.”
Turner is provoked by Higgins’ complacency in the face of so much horrible, pointless death. “Seven people are dead!”
Higgins, for his part, the voice of efficient necessity, responds that the “company” has its job to do and that the American public doesn’t want to know the gory details about how it gets its oil, or, in “10 or 15 years, food.”
“They won’t want us to ask them,” says Higgins, “they’ll just want us to get it for them.”
This particular line from Higgins hits us hard, whether in the 1970s of the oil shocks or the 2010s of the post-September 11th eternal-war-on-terror. Americans really don’t want to be asked about whether and how they are to be supplied with oil, food, or personal security (even if it is mostly illusory) – they just want it to be supplied to them, with a minimum of inconvenience (to them). We know this to be true and it hurts to hear Higgins say it.
There is yet a way out of the moral box here and it begins from recognizing that Higgins and his “community” are not nearly as pragmatic as they claim or believe themselves to be.
It is difficult not be annoyed by all the world-weary knowingness of Higgins and Mr. Wabash (and of real world figures like Dick Cheney or George Tenet): In their supposed realism they are asserting that ‘We know things the public does not want to know, can’t be allowed to know — we are so hard because we have to be, we need to get things done’ and you, Joey Turner, are too soft and naive to understand this.
But ironically, so much of what the hard eyed realist Higgins is arguing for turns on faith – belief in things not seen. At the end of the film, Higgins is telling Turner that the general public cannot be allowed to know what is going on, that there is an absolute need for all the cloak and dagger stuff, that the unfortunate murder of innocent individuals here and there ensures Americans’ collective safety, protects against the possibility of catastrophic events, such as the running out of oil or food (not to mention the nuclear holocaust hanging over the world during the Cold War).
‘How can you know such a thing?’ Turner might have asked Higgins – How do you know that what you guys are doing is keeping the country safe and supplied with oil and food? And all that the Higginses, Wabashs, Cheneys, and Tenets of the world can respond is ‘you’ll just have to trust us, we are the protectors – we will judge what needs to be done, who needs to be killed, who needs to be coerced or destabilized and overthrown.’
This faith, and the blinders that come with it, runs in both directions – not just the unknowing public but the hard-men-doing-what-must-be-done. Higgins seems to truly believe what he is saying and of the necessity for the nasty business in which his CIA engages. What he misses or ignores in this is the collective incompetence of his “community.” They have built a huge secret world in which assassins are allowed to roam free to be hired to kill people, including people who are themselves assets within the community. Yet, sight unseen, Higgins believes that all this secret-keeping will pay off in the long run.
Believers or not, Higgins and Mr. Wabash are a day late and a dollar short at every turn – S.W. Wicks (wounded but not killed by Turner in the alley behind the Ansonia Hotel), Wicks, who could have told them early on what had happened, is not watched closely enough in the hospital and as Higgins tells Turner “someone yanked him off the life support system.” [Of course they did, Higgins, we might respond – you guys think you’re so slick and yet you’re consistently the slowest runners in the pack.] Turner himself, an amateur — a very talented amateur — but an amateur nevertheless, runs them around for three full days and they never do catch him.
More broadly, Turner might have said to the national security state of 1975 that you guys got the Bay of Pigs wrong, Vietnam-wrong, Cambodia de-stablized, enabling the Khmer Rouge to take power, and you’re about to miss a huge one in 1979 – the fall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Just so the CIA, NSA, FBI, Dick Cheneys failed to see September 11th coming and proceeded from there to double down again and again. And they all adopted the same rhetoric as Higgins – this has to be done, sometimes you have to ‘turn to the dark side,’ waterboarding may be unpleasant but we are tougher and more knowing than you and you are just being a wimpy appeaser when you protest.
The push back against the fictional Higginses and real world Tenets could be more effectively done on the axis of competence instead of morality. We don’t ever need to get to the moral issues Turner raises (“seven people are dead!”) – we don’t have to debate you on morality because you guys are fuck ups – you aren’t to be trusted with this kind of power, not because it is immoral for you to have it, but because you, the ones who are claiming to need it so insistently, are so obviously no good at actually using it – you kill the wrong people, you invade the wrong places, you side with the torturers and murderers and you don’t keep us safe.