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CNN Live At Daybreak
New Movie Depicts CIA Operation to Stop Terrorist Strike
Aired May 23, 2002 - 06:39 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: A new movie depicts a CIA operation to stop a terrorist strike. CNN's David Ensor talked to the spy experts to see how the Hollywood version played.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That is not Chalinski (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Busted. It's Chalinski (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, you're thinking Chapiski (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, I'm not.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It ain't Chapiski (ph) either.
DAVID ENSOR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The new Tom Clancy movie stars Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, a young CIA Russia analyst who literally saves the world. Do they get the CIA right? Well, this CIA Russia analyst helped brief Affleck for the role. He declined to be shown or identified, because he sometimes works overseas.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As I sat there looking at that, I thought this was amazing. This is my job. I never believed that anybody would be making a movie about what I did for a living.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm an analyst, but I'm not trained for this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just be my eyes and ears.
ENSOR: But in the real world, CIA desk analysts do not get into rubber boats for a living, only a CIA operations officer would carry a gun and sneak into a hidden Ukrainian bomb factory, even Jack Ryan knows that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hawk.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No. I'm not going in there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) just stay here and make sure no one steals my boat.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't imagine a desk-level analyst accompanying an operations officer on a mission that dangerous.
ENSOR: That said, our CIA analyst loved the movie, so did a former CIA director, James Woolsey, who joined me at a special screening.
On Air Force One in the film, the president and his advisors debate whether to take out Russian offensive nuclear weapons after two mysterious attacks on U.S. targets.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you advocating we launch a first strike?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is not a first strike! There has already been a first strike and a second! Don't you get it?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, I don't get it! I don't understand why we have to nuke them, for god's sake! It's not reasonable.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get it!
JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: The one or two things that rang sort of false to me were the excited and very emotional behavior of the president and his senior advisors in the crisis. I don't think that's the way they would act in any administration.
ENSOR: Terrorists in the movie are trying to start World War III. They steal a nuclear weapon, blow it up in a Baltimore stadium and try to make it look like the Russians did it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE), the bomb is in play (ph).
ENSOR (on camera): Should Americans today be worried that something like this could happen, that a terrorist group in fact could use a nuclear weapon inside the United States?
WOOLSEY: Sadly, that's what gives the movie much of its very similitude. That we are all worried about that now.
ENSOR (voice-over): Real terrorists would have a much tougher time, say Woolsey, getting their hands on material to construct a nuclear weapon, but it cannot be completely ruled out. And if they did, smuggling a bomb, as shown in the movie, could be all too easy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And the crate was put on a cargo freighter headed for the east coast.
WOOLSLEY: We have a lot to do to protect ourselves against exactly this kind of threat.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And if you shut me out, your family and my family and 25 million other families will be dead in 30 minutes!
ENSOR: Could the sum of all fears really happen? No, say experts, but the movie does come close to reality in some ways that should worry Americans.
David Ensor, CNN, Washington. (END VIDEOTAPE)
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