Zero Dark Thirty
================

Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 film dramatizing the Central Intelligence Agency's hunt for Osama bin Laden, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. John Kiriakou recounts its mixed critical reception, framed around the central controversy: whether the film endorsed the false claim that torture, rather than conventional analysis, produced the intelligence leading to bin Laden's capture, and around the CIA's own unlawful involvement in making the film.

Critical praise

Kiriakou cites Time's Richard Corliss, who called the film "a fine movie, a police procedural on a grand scale," and the New Yorker's David Denby, who wrote that "the virtue of Zero Dark Thirty is that it pays close attention to the way life does work. It combines ruthlessness and humanity in a manner that is paradoxical and disconcerting, yet satisfying as art." The New York Times' Manohla Dargis wrote that the film "shows the unspeakable and lets us decide if the death of bin Laden was worth the price we paid."

The torture controversy

Kiriakou says Dargis's review hinted at the deeper problem: whether the film advanced the claim that torture led to bin Laden's discovery. That question alone, he says, generated a wave of journalistic outrage. Journalist Michael Wolff called the film "a nasty piece of pulp and propaganda" and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, "a fetishist and a sadist," disputing that torture had contributed to bin Laden's capture. Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, accused Bigelow of "milking the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked."

Kiriakou himself makes the same charge repeatedly and in blunt terms: the film "perpetuated the lie that the torture program led to Bin Laden's location," when in reality "great analysis led to the location", not torture. He says he could not get through more than about ten minutes of the film, disputing in particular its portrayal of two young CIA analysts "cracking the case" on bin Laden's whereabouts by poring over notebooks, in reality, he says, the lead came from an informant, was passed to operations, and was verified there. He traces the false narrative to the CIA's cover story for Abu Zubaydah's interrogation: when Zubaydah went silent under Mitchell and Jessen's torture, the psychologists retyped Ali Soufan's earlier FBI-derived reporting into CIA channels and presented it as having come from a single waterboarding session, a fabrication Kiriakou calls "the big lie" that Zero Dark Thirty then dramatized as fact.

Kiriakou contrasts Zero Dark Thirty unfavorably with "The Recruit," which he says former CIA officers regard as remarkably accurate for its first half before it "goes off the rails" in the second.

He had not meant to watch it at all. When the film came out he had "no intention whatsoever" of seeing it, and it was Daniel Ellsberg who talked him into it, telephoning to say "you have to see this movie and you have to write a review because you're the only one with the moral authority to do it." The timing made that impossible for two years: the call came about two days before Kiriakou left for prison, and he did not see the film until he got home. "God knows they didn't show us Zero Dark Thirty in prison."

He adds a second-hand coda on the writer's own view of the project: he has a friend who is very close to Mark Boal, and is told that Boal "regrets being involved in this thing at all."

CIA collusion in the making of the film

Kiriakou says the CIA "actively contributed" to Zero Dark Thirty, and that its involvement went well beyond routine cooperation into what he characterizes as likely violations of the Espionage Act. Acting CIA director Michael Morell gave director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal a classified briefing standing over a classified mock-up of the bin Laden compound; several CIA counterterrorism analysts also briefed the filmmakers. Kiriakou asks rhetorically: "How is that not a violation of the Espionage Act? Providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it."

In exchange, Bigelow and Boal gave the CIA analysts and officers who had briefed them tickets to the film's Hollywood (Westwood) premiere; those who could not attend received watches instead, gifts Kiriakou says vastly exceeded the $25 limit CIA personnel are legally allowed to accept and which he calls, flatly, a felony. No one was ever prosecuted for any of it.

Separately, CIA director Leon Panetta gave a classified "attaboy" speech in the CIA's auditorium (which Kiriakou calls "the bubble") celebrating the bin Laden raid, attended by people who had worked on Zero Dark Thirty; in it, Panetta accidentally revealed the name of the Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden, information that had been classified, later dismissing it as an honest accident. Kiriakou notes Panetta was in fact outing the names of all six Navy SEALs who carried out the raid, not just the one who fired the fatal shots, and says the "it was an accident" defense doesn't hold up: "The Espionage Act doesn't say anything about whether it's an accident."

Kiriakou places this pattern within a broader practice: a CIA public affairs office whose job is to liaise with Hollywood so that every on-screen depiction of the agency comes out positive, which he says is how the public ends up with films like Zero Dark Thirty.

The scene he was in the room for

One sequence Kiriakou vouches for is the "this is it" speech, in which the analyst tells a briefing that there is no other cell working al-Qaeda and no working group coming to the rescue. He knew the participants: "I was the chief of one of the branches inside the Counterterrorism Center. I worked with her." The character's real-life counterpart, he adds, "was actually my immediate boss." His verdict on the scene is one word, "accurate", with a note that he was surprised the language was as clean as it was.

He locates the frustration the scene dramatises in the failure that preceded it. "9/11 happened because we failed. 9/11 was the worst intelligence failure in American history. It was worse than Pearl Harbor. 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on one day because we didn't do our jobs."

'Twenty-seven lines'

Reviewing the same episode in 2026, Kiriakou set out the three separate Espionage Act violations he counts against the production, and added a figure for the last. Once it was revealed that Boal and Bigelow had been in the audience for Leon Panetta's speech, the CIA's Office of Security went back through the text and "ended up redacting 27 lines of additionally classified information." Panetta's own defence had been that he had not realised the filmmakers were present, "so, no harm, no foul."

His summary of the film's central falsehood adds a claim beyond the usual denial, not merely that torture did not find bin Laden, but that it cost time: "the worst part of this movie was that it perpetuated the lie that the torture program led to Osama bin Laden's location. It did not. If anything, the torture program delayed the finding of Osama bin Laden. What led to Osama bin Laden's location was really great analysis."

McCain's reaction

Kiriakou's friend Senator John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, said the film left him "sick... because it is wrong."

Panetta's account of the bubble, and what the analysts got

Kiriakou's objection to the briefing session in the agency's auditorium is not that Panetta misspoke but that the excuse does not survive the invitation list. Panetta "later said he didn't realize there were uncleared people in the audience. That was nonsense. It was Panetta's office that had invited them to the event." The office of public affairs afterwards redacted not only the SEALs' names from the speech but "27 lines of otherwise classified information."

The access that preceded it was, he says, itself unlawful: Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal "were able to go to the CIA to receive classified briefings in violation of the Espionage Act over a classified mock-up of the Bin Laden compound."

What closes the episode for him is the thank-you. To acknowledge the analysts who had supplied the classified material, the film-makers "sent tickets to the movie's premiere in West Hollywood and, for the people who couldn't make it to the premiere, bought them watches. If you can imagine anything so corrupt taking place at the CIA. It's just, even in retrospect it's crazy to me."

See also

- John McCain
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Mitchell and Jessen
- Osama bin Laden
- John Kiriakou
- Spy films and television on screen
