Sunday, October 17, 2010

The Disappearance of Gary Devore

From Cryptogon.

As he drove through the small hours of the Californian night, Gary Devore insisted to his wife Wendy: “I’m pumping pure adrenaline.”

“This was not a normal phone call… I felt he was warning me,” Wendy later recalled. “I love you,” she had said, expectantly.

“See you later,” Gary mumbled. It was the last time Wendy Oates-Devore would ever speak to her husband, the 55-year-old Hollywood screenwriter who’d worked on major projects with stars such as Kurt Russell, Christopher Walken and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had vanished. Swallowed, it seemed, by the desert highway.



But for me the most interesting part of the linked article from ForteanTimes is the end which mentions the CIA planting real information in Hollywood scripts. Information which will later turn out to become a real event.

In the mid-1990s, the Agency established its entertainment liaison office, headed by Chase Brandon, supposedly as part of its more ‘open’ remit. In truth, the CIA’s role in Hollywood remains decidedly clandestine. In the case of CIA-assisted productions like Bad Company (2002), 24 (2001–), and Spy Game (2001), not even isolated comments exist from anyone involved to indicate what happened on set (although we do know the CIA withdrew its endorsement from the latter). Others are less bashful, as with Alias (2001–6) star Jennifer Garner, who appeared unpaid in a recruitment ad for her friends at Langley.

The CIA may even have used entertainment for psychological warfare purposes and to develop real-world scenarios, as Texas State Professor Tricia Jenkins heard in a series of sensational interviews for her forthcoming book For Our Spies Only. Michael Frost Beckner, creator of the TV series The Agency (2001–03), recalls that Brandon phoned him to suggest a plotline involving biometric identification technology. When Beckner questioned Brandon on the story’s realism, Brandon told him to “put it in there, whether we have it or not. Terrorists watch TV too. It’ll scare them.” For another episode, Brandon suggested using a Predator drone outfitted with a Hellfire missile to kill a Pakistani general, asking Beckner to “see how it plays out, how you could make it work”. One month after the show aired, the CIA assassinated a Pakistani general using Hellfire missiles from a Predator drone. “I’m not a big conspiracy theorist,” says Beckner, “but there seems to have been a unique synergy there.”


Could one of the best examples of this be the prediction of 9/11 which aired on the Lone Gunmen episode of March 4, 2001?

2 comments:

  1. Yeah George, I loved (and identified with) Lone Gunmen and always use it as my response when somebody brings up the "unimaginable events of 9/11." There it all was, right on the idiot box for all to see, just a few months before it came to pass in the real world. Thanks to Chris Carter, wonder what's he's doing now?

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  2. It's downright creepy how this foreshadowed 9/11. So...who IS part of Overlord? That might be the 5,000,000 dollar question.

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