 Man, turns out that there are some awesome benefits to being a complete lunatic. Especially after Top Gun Maverick, but also as the Mission Impossible series comes to an end, Tom Cruise has arguably solidified himself as the last true movie star, and perhaps the greatest action hero in cinema history. His eternal youth is a bit of a meme at this point, but even his movies keep getting better and better over time. If you go back and watch the first Mission Impossible film from 1996, it still holds up. It's a great story. There's good performances from Ving Reims, John Voight, John Renault, and lots of cool spy craft stuff. But other than a couple tense moments and a few decent twists, in comparison to what the series looks like today, it's almost quiet. Particularly since Ghost Protocol, Mission Impossible has become one of the most exciting blockbuster franchises out there, and I'm really looking forward to Dead Reckoning, Parts 1 and 2. That said, these movies paint a ridiculously unrealistic picture of intelligence and counterintelligence agencies worldwide. And I'm not talking about the hyper-advanced gadgetry, over-the-top catastrophes, or even the fact that all the agents are incredibly attractive. I'm talking about the assumption that these agencies are both as generally benevolent and as extremely competent as any organization depicted in the Mission Impossible films. As usual, there will be some spoilers for all of the Mission Impossibles that have been released so far, so consider yourself warned. Then, your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to join me on a globe-spanning tour of intelligence agency malfeasance, failure, and outright atrocities on this episode of Out of Frame. If you haven't seen the Mission Impossible movies, or if it's just been a while, here's a quick recap. Our hero, Ethan Hunt, is a key member of a highly secretive intelligence organization called the IMF, or, and I'm not making this up, the Impossible Mission Force. It's never been totally clear to me whether the IMF is a private agency or an official branch of government like the CIA, but either way, they primarily work for and report to the US government. Hunt works with a small team in order to pull off, well, impossible missions of vital importance, such as preventing the identities of CIA secret agents from being leaked, thwarting nuclear arms deals, stopping bioterrorists, and so on. These missions tend to involve some elaborate disguises, aerial hijinks, high-speed car and motorcycle chases, digital attacks, and of course fistfights, gunfights, and so much running. About half the time these films also seem to involve the bad guys framing Ethan Hunt for treason. And yet, despite some fairly formulaic plot beats, the Mission Impossible movies continue to be extremely entertaining, and at times even emotional. But there's also something unique about Ethan Hunt and his team that you don't find in a lot of other modern action movies. He's actually a pretty good guy. Obviously, Ethan Hunt is not above some deception and subterfuge, but he rarely rushes to violence and works really hard to keep collateral damage to a minimum. He's not really a womanizer or even a jerk to his teammates like James Bond, and he's also not running around torturing and harming random people to get what he needs. Looking at you, Jack Bauer. For the most part, Hunt puts himself on the line and never asks anyone else to risk more than he does to complete his mission. That's a pretty serious hero right there. And his team is a tight-knit group of ultra-competent specialists who all believe in their missions and in their leader. That's what sets the IMF apart. The other spy agencies in the Mission Impossible universe aren't nearly so virtuous, and that puts them at odds with real-world deep-state bureaus like the NSA and the CIA. The fifth and sixth installments, Rogue Nation and Fallout, demonstrate this fact pretty overtly. Much of the premise of Rogue Nation centers around a congressional oversight committee reprimanding the IMF based on the CIA's claims that they're a loose cannon and, ironically considering the source, lacks transparency. The head of the CIA cites the IMF's supposed obsession with mercenary terrorists known as the Syndicate as proof, arguing that the CIA itself couldn't even find evidence of its existence, even though Ethan Hunt is literally their prisoner. And, of course, instead of questioning the competence and motivations of the CIA, the committee dissolves the IMF and takes over its assets. The rest of the film involves all the IMF agents loyal to Ethan striking out on their own to not only prove that the Syndicate exists, but also to capture its leader and bring him to justice. Their eventual vindication appeases Congress, but makes them even more enemies inside the CIA. At the start of the next film, Mission Impossible Fallout, the IMF and CIA have been grudgingly coordinating their efforts to mop up the remnants of the Syndicate. They've been fairly successful, but a handful of the best and most dangerous members of the terrorist organization are still at large. Unfortunately, these final holdouts have managed to get their hands on everything they need to construct a couple of nuclear bombs. The plutonium for these bombs was supposed to be intercepted by Ethan and his team, but he failed to do so by choosing to save his team members' lives instead of securing the package. This leads to a soundscolding for caring about individual lives, and naturally, it was just another frame job for treason. The rest of the movie is spent attempting to recover the plutonium, neutralize the remaining Syndicate members, and save the world. All of this firmly establishes a few things. First, the IMF is there to do what the rest of the intelligence world can't or won't do. Second, the organization, and Ethan Hunt in particular, is concerned with the well-being of individual people, not simply nation states. And third, all the other intelligence agencies hate the IMF, which is probably the most realistic thing about the films. The reason the IMF seems so far-fetched is because it is. On a purely practical level, the outlandish gadgetry is often way over the top. Stunts like scaling the outside of the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai, or surviving a halo jump in the middle of a thunderstorm, are obviously insane. But what's probably most unrealistic of all is the very existence of an agent like Ethan Hunt, and an organization like the IMF. There is no spy agency anywhere in the world that's as competent or as heroic. In fact, none of these agencies are even very good at all. Now, before we really get into this, I'm not here to make judgments about every single individual who works at the CIA or MI6 or even Russia's FSB or China's Ministry of State Security. What I will say is that the incentive structure for government agencies does not typically reward anyone for prioritizing individual rights, human life, political sovereignty, or personal morality. Instead, agents get rewarded for following orders and executing their mission, even if that means torturing and assassinating people, meddling in other people's political or economic systems, and generally treating civilians as expendable. There's a reason people like Ethan Hunt only exist in fiction, and looking at what some of these organizations have actually done throughout history, callous disregard for the individual and refusal to stray from orders no matter how questionable or morally repugnant is probably the only explanation. For example, in 1978, Bulgarian playwright and political dissident Georgi Markov defected to the West and worked as a broadcaster criticizing Bulgaria's communist regime and the Soviet Union. One day, while walking across a bridge in London, Georgi was poked in the leg by an unknown man with an umbrella. The next day, he was dead. He'd been injected with a tiny metal ball laced with ricin. Though only strongly suspected at the time, it was later revealed that the Soviet KGB had ordered and carried out the assassination working with the Bulgarian secret service. And Markov was by no means the only dissident who's been assassinated by the KGB, its predecessor the NKVD, and its successor the FSB. The Chinese Ministry of State Security is notorious for stealing data from business IP to government secrets. They also frequently target dissidents both inside and outside their own borders, especially anyone even tangentially involved in pro-democracy protests. Even if all they did was help protesters with their bills. Even if all they did was acknowledge that something happened. And that's to say nothing of what the Stasi did to anyone who even remotely challenged the Nazi government. But to be clear, it's not only communist and fascist regimes who commit atrocious acts internationally and against their own people. Did you know that Great Britain's MI6 actually does issue a license to kill? Well, that doesn't always get used for good. They've also done their share of torture. And they apparently even have the right to just commit crimes domestically too. Same deal with Israel's Mossad, which has carried out several international assassinations that we know of. Using spy agencies to hurt and murder people in the name of the state is one of the things that virtually all governments have in common. And that brings us to the United States. I bet you already know a little bit about the enormous domestic surveillance program run by the NSA and exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. What you may not be aware of is the fact that despite the huge media impact, the government's surveillance of innocent Americans without due process never actually ended. If anything, the U.S. surveillance state has only gotten bigger. The enormous advances in both technology and government reach, especially since the turn of the 21st century, has made it easier to observe more of what more people are doing more of the time. But it certainly didn't begin there. The American government has been spying on its own citizens and everyone else for a long time. Take Project Mockingbird, for example. That started in 1963 when President Kennedy ordered the CIA to wiretap various journalists for allegedly revealing classified information. It laid the groundwork for the mass surveillance of the anti-war movement in the late 60s. Then there was Operation Condor in the 1970s and 80s in which the CIA backed several right-wing dictatorships in South America simply because they weren't communist. Of course, the Soviets were doing the exact same thing at the same time, promoting socialist and communist leaders, supporting military coups, and arming satellite states against the U.S. But going back further in time, in the years following World War II, both the CIA and the FBI actively recruited a thousand or so Nazis as Cold War spies, including some who were almost certainly war criminals. Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA ran a string of covert programs like MKUltra and MKDelta, which combined various forms of torture with high doses of LSD in an attempt to discover methods of brainwashing and mind control. And speaking of torture, it's pretty well known by now that the CIA tortured terrorism suspects without a trial at Guantanamo Bay and lied to Congress about it, which incidentally is also still open. Oh, and we can't forget the fact that the CIA funded its fight against the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s by trafficking cocaine into Los Angeles. The U.S. government is also the world's largest known arms dealer, providing weapons to all sorts of political groups around the world, including many that turned out to be not so good. I actually talked a lot more about these kinds of examples in the episode I did a few years ago about the boys, so go check that out if you haven't seen it. While these piles of misdeeds and scandals can certainly make it seem like maybe the CIA and the NSA are the worst of the lot, I do want to make something clear. All of this stuff, the murders, the spying, the torture, the secret hot and cold wars, is just an incomplete list of the things we know about. And as much as the U.S. agencies hide behind national security and top secret classifications, thanks to freedom of information act requests, public hearings, and periodic declassification of information, as Americans, we still enjoy far more transparency than almost any other country. Seriously, in the years since the Soviet Union collapsed, we've learned about all sorts of unspeakable horrors committed by their various intelligence services and other government bureaus. Forced starvation, cannibalism, shockingly inhumane treatment in the gulags, involuntary medical experimentation. We only know about a fraction of what the Soviets did because so many of their records were destroyed before glassnosed. But what we do know often makes the U.S. spy program seem downright friendly by comparison. It turns out most of this stuff isn't really like Mission Impossible at all. And the question I have in all this is, how is all this torture and assassination actually helping anyone? I understand the arguments that these agencies make in favor of their own existence. They're necessary because other, more dangerous, less benevolent countries are going to engage in assassinations and spy craft. So we need the means to defend ourselves. Heck, they even make these claims in spy movies. And they're not wrong. There are plenty of threats out there. But I'm not so sure that's a justification for what we actually have. Do we really need hilariously unaccountable government-run bureaucracies like the CIA, the NSA, or the FBI running around killing people, propping up cartels and terrorist groups, running guns to other countries, fabricating domestic threats, and generally committing crimes all over the world in the name of national security? None of that makes me feel very safe. And it all seems like a good way to start new wars that create even more problems in the future. Maybe I'd feel differently if they were consistently effective at getting and sharing accurate information, but they're not. Our spy agencies have a history of failing to thwart major disasters. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor might have been prevented before it was able to sink a bunch of critical warships and kill 2,300 people, were it not for agencies that didn't talk to each other. During the Korean War, South Korea could have been better prepared for North Korea's invasion, and we might have known more about China's involvement in backing. There were a ton of blatant intelligence failures regarding the Vietnam War. In fact, the CIA's evaluation of their own performance is brutal. And while that was happening in 1973, intelligence services failed again with the Yom Kippur War. Right up until the Arab coalition attacked, both Israel and the U.S. were convinced that such a thing couldn't happen. Instead, we narrowly avoided a nuclear apocalypse. Twice. Just six months before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the CIA said, Iran is not a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation. The 9-11 Commission admitted that the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. should not have been a surprise. The terrorist actually gave plenty of warning that they were planning to do what they did. And even recently, the CIA utterly failed to anticipate how quickly and completely the Taliban would regain control of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. If you're interested in a more detailed look at many of these examples, you can read Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. But again, I want to know why we are allowing these organizations to have so much power inside the government. Why do we give them the authority to commit horrible acts in the name of the United States people? Why do we trust them at all? As much as I love the Mission Impossible movies, I'm going to lay a little bit of the blame on everyone who's been involved in that series, first on TV in the 60s and on the big screen today. Same goes for Ian Fleming's James Bond, Born Identity, and all the other awesome spy movies we've gotten over the years. They're thrilling and fun to watch, but they often distort our perception of reality. Real spy agencies aren't the IMF. They aren't heroic. They aren't all that competent. They aren't even particularly exciting or cool. They mostly seem to alternate between being extremely boring and utterly horrifying. I don't want to imply that there are easy answers here. The world is a mess, and it's absolutely true that other, often much worse governments, are constantly trying to undermine the more free parts of Western society. Anyone who thinks that the US is the only country that medals in other people's elections or backs political coups is fooling themselves. Don't be that guy. But you're also fooling yourself if you think that the CIA is some kind of ultra-competent agency that successfully executes every mission and is out there night and day saving lives. It's not. Go enjoy mission impossible dead reckoning for its thrilling story and incredible stunts. I'm certainly planning to. But please, don't let it fool you into thinking that the only thing standing between you and dangerous international threats is some agent of the deep state. None of these groups is the IMF and no one is Ethan Hunt. That job is already taken. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. No, I'm kidding. But I'm not kidding about the fact that Out of Frame is going to end in a couple months. It's been an amazing run for these last five years, but I have a new job and we're winding down the series. However, there's still going to be new content coming out on this channel and we've already put out a few experimental shorts to see if a slightly different kind of content will work. Check those out and leave a comment letting us know what you think. In the meantime, I just wanted to say thank you to all our patrons and subscribe star supporters over the years, especially to our associate producers. Y'all have been incredible. For everyone else, definitely still subscribe to the channel, click that bell icon to get notifications for the final few episodes of this show and all our new content coming up and follow us on all the social media. I'll see you next time.