The
9/11 tragedy served as a recruiting magnet for the CIA
and the FBI. In The Recruit, directed by Roger Donaldson,
Walter Burke (played by Al Pacino) is the recruiter, James
Clayton (played by Colin Farrell) is the recruit. Burke
tracks down Clayton, who graduated at the top of his class
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presumably
specializing in computer software technology. Yet Clayton
is merely a waiter at a bar, without a girlfriend or a
job appropriate to his qualifications. Burke dangles the
prospect of a CIA job (and a paternalistic mentor) before
Clayton, hinting that Clayton's father was a CIA spook
who died in Perú during 1990. Accordingly, Clayton
turns down a lucrative offer from Dell Computers and instead
swallows the bait. He then goes to the CIA facility in
Langley, Virginia, along with two dozen other recruits.
Although most CIA employees work at a desk, a few operate
undercover; the latter are known as "spooks." Burke
tells recruits that they may be able see their medals but
never take them, and that the public will never know about
CIA successes, just the failures. For rigorous training
as spooks, the recruits are transferred to a Defense Department
facility nearby, where they can learn how to use a pistol
with considerable accuracy and how to lie successfully
during lie detector tests. One exercise is to be captured,
interrogated, and tortured until a recruit cracks, but
evidently only Clayton undergoes that exercise to the fullest
extent among the new recruits. Yet another exercise is
to be told that one has been washed out of the program,
only later to be brought back in. Burke, however, has a
hidden agenda, and the suspense in the last half of the
film revolves around his agenda, when he pretends that
as trainer he can give an actual assignment after graduation
to one or more recruits. Nevertheless, the CIA is misrepresented,
and the entire plot is bogus. Torture training is indeed
a part of some military training, but CIA spooks are civilians.
As Burke repeatedly says, "Nothing is what it may
seem." MH
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