“American Actor and Filmmaker Kevin Costner Visits Cuba” (Cuba Si)
“Díaz-Canel meets with Kevin Costner in Havana” (Cuba Si)
The Cuban leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received the renowned American actor, director, and producer Kevin Costner this Monday at the Palace of the Revolution.
The CIA maintains an office in Hollywood specifically for recruiting A-list actors to assist them in the gathering of intelligence.
Why A-list actors?
Because of the unique entrée movie stars enjoy due to their celebrity; access that extends to foreign dictators hostile to the United States.
CIA calls such voluntary assets “access agents.”
A thumbnail context: What the CIA once called the Domestic Operations Division is now their National Resources Division (known as NR), a domestic spin-off from the National Clandestine Service i.e., the operations/spying directorate.
From about a dozen stations around the country (including San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago), CIA officers with cozy jobs recruit academics, scientists, businessmen and, yes, movie stars, to travel to sensitive foreign destinations and vacuum up information.
“JFK files expose family secrets: Their relatives were CIA assets” (The Washington Post)
Read here about some of the people who were Access Agents for the Domestic Operations Division
The health and mood swings of foreign leaders are of special interest. But all observations and especially offhand utterances by foreign leaders are welcome.
Upon returning home, access agents sit down with CIA debriefers and unburden themselves with whatever they have gleaned.
There can be little doubt that at least a few of the Hollywood celebrities you read about as having ingratiated themselves with foreign leaders are likely to have done so on assignment for the CIA.
Let’s start with Nicolas Cage.
Playing himself in the action-comedy film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Nic becomes entangled in a CIA operation for which he is recruited by intelligence officers to help them ensnare one of the world’s most dangerous criminals.
Might he have been drawing from true life experience?
In July 2017, Newsweek magazine published a photo of Cage posing in traditional Kazakh garb with Sara Nazarbayeva, wife of Nursultan Nazarbayeva, then the autocratic president of Kazakhstan—and undoubtedly of high-interest to the CIA.
The Hollywood star was reported to be visiting the former Soviet republic for the Astana Film Festival.
And maybe a little patriotic moonlighting on the side?
The Ubiquitous Sean Penn
Sean Penn is another such famous actor who turns up in the oddest places at the oddest times. Only days after Russia’s brutal armies invaded Ukraine, there was Sean, filming a documentary—oh, and meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
A few years before his Ukrainian misadventure (he had to flee by road to Poland along with thousands of Ukrainian refugees), Penn met with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of the deadly Sinaloa cartel, at El Chapo’s secret hideout in Mexico to interview him for Rolling Stone magazine.
For such access, the famous thespian used this criminal’s own vanity against him because (as Penn wrote in Rolling Stone). El Chapo was “interested in seeing the story of his life told on film” and believed Sean might play him. (The CIA is banned from using journalists as agents, but Penn—it could be rationalized—is really an actor, not a professional journalist.)
And maybe the actor was indeed playing El Chapo. Because soon after Joaquin’s encounter with Penn, El Chapo was captured precisely where they had met—and a Mexican law enforcement officer indiscreetly told Associated Press that the actor’s meeting helped them pinpoint the fugitive’s whereabouts.
So concerned was Penn that El Chapo’s murderous cartel associates would blame him for their boss’s capture, his lawyers later tried to prevent the airing of a Netflix documentary about Kate Del Castillo, the Mexican actress who had organized the Penn-Guzman seven-hour powwow. Clearly concerned for his safety, Penn’s lawyers put Netflix “on notice that blood will be on their hands if this film causes bodily harm.”
Del Castillo has claimed that the actor deceived her and El Chapo by misrepresenting his intentions. Critics panned the resulting interview in Rolling Stone as superficial and self-indulgent.
Question: What happened to the movie?
Answer: Absent of any further involvement or interest from Sean Penn, El Chapo is said to still be laboring over his life story at ADX Florence, a maximum-security penitentiary in Colorado where he is currently serving a life sentence.
Another question: What was Sean Penn up to before El Chapo?
Well, according to The Washington Post, “In 2002, he traveled to Iraq. In 2003, after the invasion of U.S. troops, he went back, this time to write about the experience for the San Francisco Chronicle. Penn enjoyed the experience of playing reporter enough to try it again in 2005, this time in Iran. Reporting, he told the New Yorker, was just like acting.”
Interesting because, well, I liken my own undercover operations/ruses for FBI Counterintelligence to… acting.
Christmas 2005 found Penn in Cuba, a trip that led to a midnight meeting with Fidel Castro.
Out of that experience, the movie star managed to cultivate a close relationship with Hugo Chavez, the late dictator of Venezuela, who at that time was a sharp thorn in America’s side and certainly a high-priority CIA target.
Sean even joined President Chavez, who claimed the Agency was trying to assassinate him, on the campaign trail to help him get reelected (unnecessary since the outcome was most assuredly rigged in his favor).
Other “fans of Fidel” who spent time with The Bearded One in Cuba include…
Robert Redford: The actor/director and Cuban leader reportedly scuba-dived together in 1988 after which Redford was said to have been questioned by “U.S. officials.” They met again 16 years later when Fidel came to visit the actor at Hotel Nacional, after which the actor was quoted as saying about the dictator, “He seemed in good health, good humor, good spirit.”
Jack Nicholson called the Cuban dictator a “genius” after meeting him in 1968 and added, “we spoke about everything.”
Steven Spielberg said he spent “the eight most important hours of my life” dining with Fidel Castro until 2:30 am, explaining that they discussed art, history and cultural exchanges.
Usually it is A-list celebrities who are fawned over; in this case, such celebrities are fawning over (or ingratiating themselves with) a deadly dictator.
To whom might one, two or all three (or none) of these A-listers have been reporting thereafter?
I am not outing Sean Penn (or anyone else) as an access agent for the CIA.
I am simply raising the question, given the scenario Nic Cage provided in his movie along with the Agency’s “access agent” program as context.
Dennis Rodman & His Bestie
And what about Dennis Rodman, the basketball Hall of Famer, who managed to create a “bromance” (Rodman’s term) with North Korea’s tinpot dictator Kim Jong-un?
Said “the Worm” bout his unique relationship with the 5’5” monster who continues to test nuclear missiles while threatening to one day launch them at the USA: “We laugh, we sing karaoke, we do a lot of cool things together like skiing and riding horses.” Rodman even led a “Happy Birthday” singalong to North Korea’s “dear respected leader” on 8 January 2014, telling reporters who covered the event, “I love my best friend [Kim].”
So, this question: Is Dennis Rodman a loyal friend to Kim Jong-un—or a loyal American/CIA access agent?
Steven Seagal, Puppy-killer
Perhaps most interesting is the very odd case of Steven Seagal, best known for his egotistical action movies—chuckle, oink, barf.
On the one hand, mega-macho Mr. Seagal fancies himself as a crime-busting law enforcement officer and, as such, over a decade ago was sworn in as a “Reserve Deputy Chief” with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office (JPSO) in Louisiana—until he was forced to resign over an internal affairs investigation.
This followed a $1 million lawsuit filed by swimsuit model Kayden Nguyen that accused Seagal of sex trafficking in addition to groping her.
Steven also joined a “posse” (civilian force) belonging to Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona (“on loan from Louisiana,” he claimed, denied by JPSO) and starred in his own A&E reality TV series, Steven Seagal: Lawman. (The sexual abuse complaint and subsequent resignation brought that series to suspension then termination.)
A couple years later, Seagal moved his law enforcement obsession first to Hudspeth County in west Texas and then to Dona Ana County in New Mexico.
Taking part in a cockfighting bust on behalf of Sheriff Joe and theatrically costumed in SWAT gear, Seagal drove a tank into Jesus Lovera’s house—and killed the family puppy dog (resulting in another lawsuit).
What happened to the roosters Mr. Seagal “saved”?
All of them euthanized.
The martial arts-trained actor (who made a 1998 movie called The Patriot) has become buddy-buddy with psychopathic Russian dictator Vladimir Putin—a friendship that remains strong even after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
On Good Morning Britain, a popular UK television broadcast, Seagal called the Russian tyrant “one of the great world leaders” and even went so far as to support his buddy’s bloody military incursions into Ukraine as “very reasonable.”
Putin returned the favor in 2016, bestowing by presidential decree a Russian passport (and thus citizenship) upon the puppy-killer. Their common bond (always important in establishing a relationship) is a mutual love of judo.
And there’s more: Seagal ingratiated himself with the world’s second most brutal dictator, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. Seagal noted at the time he had “long dreamed of meeting” a man known within his own country as Potato Fuhrer.
As Vlad Putin’s Number One Stooge, Mr. Lukashenko rules with an iron fist, murdering his political opponents and, more recently, allowing Russian forces along its southern border to stage attacks on western Ukraine.
A few years ago, Seagal ran afoul of the US government—specifically, the Securities and Exchange Commission—for “unlawfully touting a digital asset offering.”
Translation: As “brand ambassador” he publicly endorsed and promoted a digital investment product without disclosing he received payment from the company, Bitcoin2Gen, which defrauded investors of $11.4 million. (Like the title of his 1988 movie, maybe Seagal thought he was Above the Law.)
Seagal “settled” the SEC case for $330,000. But now the actor is delinquent in his payments, having coughed up only $75,000. Perhaps this explains why he now resides near his putrid pal Putin in Moscow.
After Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Seagal showed up in the Donbas, now occupied by Russians, spewing Kremlin propaganda about Ukrainian “Nazis”
A retired senior intelligence officer told me working in Hollywood is the worst job at CIA.
Why?
Because the poor soul must spend all his time stroking the oversized egos of his big-headed agents.
Cloak & Corkscrew
You can’t make this stuff up.
But I did. Not in this column, but in my novel Cloak & Corkscrew, serialized here on Substack last year .
Dare I say, it would make a very good movie.
Perhaps Sean Penn might fancy optioning Cloak & Corkscrew—either for burying it or starring in the lead role.
We can thank Larry David for giving us this hilarious clip of Sean Penn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpiUjP49IyI