In ‘Zero Dark Thirty ' the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden/ Washington Post

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★In ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ she’s the hero; in real life, CIA agent’s career is more complicated

Alex Wong/Getty Images - After the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year, the CIA has experienced internal frictions as operatives compete to claim credit for the mission’s success.

By Greg Miller,

Dec 11, 2012 01:18 AM EST

The Washington Post Tuesday, December 11, 10:18 AM

She was a real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaeda leader serves as the dramatic core of a Hollywood film set to premiere next week.

Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed.

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The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

She has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didn’t deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said.

The woman has also come under scrutiny for her contacts with filmmakers and others about the bin Laden mission, part of a broader internal inquiry into the agency’s cooperation on the new movie and other projects, former officials said.

Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. But the developments have cast a cloud over a career that is about to be bathed in the sort of cinematic glow ordinarily reserved for fictional Hollywood spies.

The female officer, who is in her 30s, is the model for the main character in “Zero Dark Thirty,”a film that chronicles the decade-long hunt for the al-Qaeda chief and that critics are describing as an Academy Award front-runner even before its Dec. 19 release.

The character Maya, which is not the CIA operative’s real name, is portrayed as a gifted operative who spent years pursuing her conviction that al-Qaeda’s courier network would lead to bin Laden, a conviction that proved correct.

At one point in the film, after a female colleague is killed in an attack on a CIA compound in Afghanistan, Maya describes her purpose in near-messianic terms: “I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.”

Colleagues said the on-screen depiction captures the woman’s dedication and combative temperament.

“She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama bin Laden,” said a former CIA associate, who added that the attention from filmmakers sent waves of envy through the agency’s ranks.

“The agency is a funny place, very insular,” the former official said. “It’s like middle-schoolers with clearances.”

The woman is not allowed to talk to journalists, and the CIA declined to answer questions about her, except to stress that the bin Laden mission involved an extensive team. “Over the course of a decade, hundreds of analysts, operators and many others played key roles in the hunt,” said agency spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood.

Friction over mission, movie

The internal frictions are an unseemly aspect of the ongoing fallout from a mission that is otherwise regarded as one of the signal successes in CIA history.

The movie has been a source of controversy since it was revealed that the filmmakers — including director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal — were given extensive access to officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

Members of Congress have called for investigations into whether classified information was shared. The movie’s release was delayed amid criticism that it amounted to a reelection ad for President Obama.

The film’s publicity materials say that Maya “is based on a real person,” but the filmmakers declined to elaborate. U.S. officials acknowledged that Boal met with Maya’s real-life counterpart and other CIA officers, typically in the presence of someone from the agency’s public affairs office. The character is played by Jessica Chastain.

Her real-life counterpart joined the agency before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said, and served as a targeter — a position that involves finding targets to recruit as spies or for lethal drone strikes — in the CIA’s station in Islamabad, Pakistan.

She was in that country when the search for bin Laden, after years of being moribund, suddenly heated up. After Obama took office, CIA operatives reexamined several potential trails, including al-Qaeda’s use of couriers to hand-deliver messages to and from bin Laden.

“After this went right, there were a lot of people trying to take credit,” the former intelligence official said. But the female targeter “was one of the people from very early on pushing this” courier approach.

Lashing out in an e-mail

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those recognizing people who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Over the past year, she was denied a promotion that would have raised her civil service rank from GS-13 to GS-14, bringing an additional $16,000 in annual pay.

Officials said the woman was given a cash bonus for her work on the bin Laden mission and has since moved on to a new counterterrorism assignment. They declined to say why the promotion was blocked.

The move stunned the woman’s former associates, despite her reputation for clashing with colleagues.

“Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” the former official said. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”

The targeter’s contacts with the “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmakers have also been examined as part of an inquiry, apparently by the CIA inspector general, into the information that agency officials shared with outsiders about the bin Laden raid.

Internal e-mails released this year under Freedom of Information Act requests showed how the agency set up repeated visits for Boal, allowing him to tour the “vault” where the raid was planned and even see a mock-up of the Abbottabad compound.

Former CIA officials said agency enthusiasm for the film has been tempered as details about it have surfaced, including the fact that the movie opens with a harrowing waterboarding scene in a secret CIA prison.

Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

by The Washington Post

★A Tale of Two Women

By MAUREEN DOWD

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WASHINGTON

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Rarely have there been two such intriguing women at the heart of such a dramatic true story.

The first, a smart, prickly, compulsive C.I.A. operative in her 30s, is the real-life Carrie Mathison (minus the slutty behavior at work).

She started at the agency out of school, just before the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11, and worked in Islamabad tracking terrorists with the monomaniacal zeal of Captain Ahab. Like Carrie, she’s a talented analyst but not, according to colleagues, Miss Congeniality.

The Washington Post’s Greg Miller wrote about the young woman who spent years messianically hunting down Osama bin Laden, convinced that they could find the fiend by trailing the couriers who hand-delivered messages to him. The inspiration for Maya — the character played by Jessica Chastain in the new Kathryn Bigelow/Mark Boal movie, “Zero Dark Thirty” — the C.I.A. operative was allowed to share her story with Boal for his screenplay.

She is described in the movie as a “her against the world” lone wolf and “killer” whose bosses learn life is better when they don’t disagree with her. She was working in Pakistan as a targeter, recruiting spies and finding drone targets, when President Obama put bin Laden’s capture back on the front burner.

“The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the C.I.A. thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history,” Miller writes. Who do you have to kill to get a raise around here?

Miller continued: “She has sparred with C.I.A. colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didn’t deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said,” since they had tried to obstruct her.

We’ve become obsessed with the vicious undermining and murderously competing fiefdoms in the Stygian world of “Homeland.” And Miller offered insight into the real thing, noting the “waves of envy” the movie has generated as operatives wrangle over credit for felling Osama. As a former C.I.A. associate told the reporter, the agency is “like middle-schoolers with clearances.”

In “No Easy Day,” the account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, one of the SEALs who went after bin Laden, the female operative is called “Jen.” She wears expensive high heels and ribs Bissonnette about being part of “the boys’ club” that shows up at the very end “for the big game.”

When Bissonnette asks Jen to give him the honest odds that Osama is in the compound, she shoots back: “One hundred percent.” After the terrorist is killed and brought to a hangar in Jalalabad, she is overwhelmed and begins crying.

Bigelow, the driven director who tells the story of the driven operative, says she felt as if she’d been dealt “a royal flush” when they discovered a young woman at the center of the Osama hunt. You can say they undermine their heroine’s story of relentless, patient data crunching by leaving the impression — a false one, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — that waterboarding played a crucial role in getting Osama. Or, as the blogger Spencer Ackerman points out on Wired.com, you can say the film boldly depicts torture as “the intersection of ignorance and brutality.”

Bigelow, too, sets off waves of envy in her insular community. The glamorous 61-year-old, the first woman to win a best director Oscar, for “The Hurt Locker,” has become Hollywood’s unsentimental premier chronicler of war.

After worrying about criticism of their C.I.A. access from the right, Bigelow and Boal are now the toasts of the right.

Some who have seen the movie say the harrowing repeated opening sequences of waterboarding, beating and degrading a detainee in a C.I.A. black site to elicit intelligence puts “a thumb on the scale for torture,” as Slate’s Emily Bazelon writes. But the debate flares about whether this is merely “a problem of emphasis and degree, not absolute falsity,” as Bazelon argues, or whether it makes the film “borderline fascistic,” as the New York magazine film critic David Edelstein referred to the “unholy masterwork.” He also named it the best movie of 2012.

Bigelow told Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker that she was taking “almost a journalistic approach to film,” while Boal told New York magazine that he uses a “hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic.”

So did they gild, or in this case, waterboard the lily? Torture, after all, is a lot more “filmic” than poring over data.

As The Times’s Scott Shane and Charlie Savage have written, “the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.”

On a conference call Tuesday organized by Human Rights First, Tony Camerino, an author and former Air Force interrogator, said he was puzzled over why Boal created “a piece of fiction” when “the real story” would be “just as exciting.” And he objected to a central character who’s complicit in torture “and yet is still viewed as a heroine.”

Boal told TheWrap.com that despite the gruesome torture scenes, viewers who come away thinking torture was the pivotal tactic in nabbing bin Laden, rather than one method used in a decade-long hunt, are “misreading the film.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 12, 2012, on page A39 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tale Of Two Women.