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.”[1]
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.”[2][3]
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.[4][5][6][7][8][9] 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.[10] 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.[4]
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.[11]
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.[4] 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.[12][13][14][15][16] 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.”[16]
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.[12][17][15][18] No one was ever prosecuted for any of it.[12]
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.[19][20][21] 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.”[21][20]
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.[5]
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.”[3]