Showtime
James Clapper in a still from executive producer Alex Gibney’s new Showtime docuseries, “Enemies: The President, Justice & The FBI.”
Enemies: The President, Justice & The FBI is a four-part nonfiction series chronicling the clashes—along with their Constitutional consequences—between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department on one side, and the presidency on the other.
Executive produced by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side, about torture in Afghanistan), the series, which debuts November 18 on the Showtime cable network, examines a quartet of scandals that engulfed the White House and how the Justice Department and FBI can—or cannot—hold the President accountable for his actions.
Part 1 of the mini-series, entitled “A Cancer on the Presidency,” opens with President Richard Nixon, who due to the Watergate break-in and cover-up became America’s only commander-in-chief to resign his office. Part 3 deals with the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in connection to his extramarital relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Part 4, directed by Gibney himself, reportedly runs over two installments and examines events relating to Donald Trump—including his firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Directed by Jed Rothstein, the second episode, “That’s What Friends Are For,” documents the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration. It premiered November 13 at the American Film Institute Fest in Los Angeles. Rothstein was present for a post-screening Q&A with Enemies screenwriter Tim Weiner, whose 2012 book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, is the source material for the show.
This episode is stylishly shot and begins with the titles being “shredded”—a clever visual reference to U.S. Colonel Oliver North’s use of a shredding machine to destroy potentially incriminating documents (in some cases done while investigators were actually inside his office, North bragged during Senate hearings shown onscreen). Bob Woodward, co-hero of the Washington Post Watergate reportage that toppled Tricky Dick, is glimpsed stating, “I do not play by FBI rules.” Against a backdrop of sites in Washington, D.C., a voice asserts that America is “a nation of laws, not of men.”
What keeps Enemies from merely being a tutorial in history is how the series is framed to reference current events.
The almost hour-long episode proceeds to recount and probe the sordid Iran-Contra affair, wherein members of the Reagan regime backed the counter-revolutionary so-called “Contras” in their terrorist war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government, which seized power after a guerrilla struggle. In archival footage, Reagan compared Contra “freedom fighters” to our founding fathers in their fight for independence from England and claimed the Sandinistas were providing the Soviets with a foothold in the Americas that would be within striking distance of Texas.
Despite Reagan’s stoking of the anti-communist threat, Congress cut off funding for the Contras—though their counter-insurgency campaign persisted. The episode reveals how this was illegally done: members of the Reagan Administration arranged to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Beirut, where the Iranian government held sway over their captors, Hezbollah. Profits from the arms-for-hostages secret deal were then funneled into arming and financing the Contras.
The Enemies episode introduces viewers to Iran-Contra’s cast of characters: Admiral John Poindexter, who, like North (now president of the NRA), is still alive but declined to be interviewed for the program. On the other hand, Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, now eighty-six, was among those talking heads who agreed to go on camera.
Other relevant figures are glimpsed in the background, such as Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye, a decorated disabled World War II veteran who participated in Senate hearings investigating North and his role in the dubious covert action. Ex-Marine Eugene Hasenfus, whose plane transporting arms to the Contras was shot down by Sandinistas, thus blowing the cover off the clandestine operation, is also seen in vintage footage after his capture in Nicaragua.
The episode also ponders Reagan’s personal role in the arms-for-hostages swap—whether he was just an “amiable dunce” or a witting culprit. Interestingly, the documentary implies that when investigators closed in on North, the National Security Council staffer, despite his bravado, came close to fingering The Gipper.
What keeps Enemies from merely being a tutorial in history is how the series is framed to reference the current showdowns between President Trump, the FBI, the Justice Department, and FBI Director-turned-Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the potential Constitutional crises that could ensue.
“Using the present as a prism, we look back to see which lessons held up, which didn’t and how the current investigation of the Trump Administration might turn out,” says Showtime’s website. Indeed, from time-to-time throughout the Reagan episode, images of and commentary on Trump are rampant.
As a history and even current affairs program, the well-made Enemies educates viewers and keeps them on the edge of their seats.
As a history and even current affairs program, the well-made Enemies educates viewers and keeps them on the edge of their seats. The episode, however, does overlook Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury News 1996 reportage and his 1998 book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
The investigative journalist claimed that the CIA used profits from the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic for weapons trafficking to the Contras’ dirty war, just as the arms-for-hostages covert mission diverted money from Iran to the Nicaraguan counter-insurgents. (Spurned by mainstream media, Webb is believed to have committed suicide in 2004.)
During the AFI Fest Q&A, I asked why this aspect of the Iran-Contra debacle was overlooked in the episode presented. Tim Weiner, who won a 1988 Pulitzer for reporting on the CIA and the National Book Award for 2007’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, dismissed the question and disputed Webb’s reporting, calling it “fiction.” Episode director Jed Rothstein added that it was a matter of time and space. But good writing could have summed up Webb’s purported findings.
Webb had his champions, including biographer Nick Schou and Representative Maxine Waters, whose Congressional district includes South Central Los Angeles, which was especially ravaged by the crack cocaine tsunami. And his whistle-blowing sparked four investigations by the House Intelligence Committee, CIA Inspector-General, Justice Department Inspector-General, and the L.A. Sheriff's Department, as well as two feature films.
As the seemingly inevitable Mueller-Trump showdown over Russian collusion and God-knows-what-else nears, we must resist the temptation to anoint the FBI, the Justice Department, and other agencies of the national security state as saints. Since its infancy, from the Palmer Raids to House Un-American Activities Committee to COINTELPRO to bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond, the FBI has been in the forefront of persecuting American dissenters.
We must resist the temptation to anoint the FBI, the Justice Department, and other agencies of the national security state as saints.
Now is not the time to be naïve. As authors Tricia Jenkins and Dave Robb documented, the CIA and Pentagon have had liaison officers in Hollywood in order to influence screen portrayals of them. The FBI is similarly image-conscious. Hoover had input into the 1960s series The F.B.I., and who knows what’s going on behind the current FBI series on CBS and the pro-military messages on the Hawaii Five-O and Magnum P.I. series, also on CBS?
Having said that, as the Mueller investigation’s endgame nears, Enemies: The President, Justice & The FBI promises to be truly must-see TV. The post-screening Q&A gave the impression that Gibney was putting the finishing touches on the still developing Russia probe story and IMDB currently lists Part 4 as being in “post-production.” As of this writing, the two-parter won’t air until on or about December 9 and 16. It may, if the other episodes are any indication, help us answer the question: Is the President above the law?
Still, when faction fights break out in the ruling class, the left shouldn’t be manipulated into giving cover to elements of the intelligence community. Nonfiction and fiction genres alike can be used for propagandistic purposes. Sure, there may be some individual Feds who are straight arrows, like the kind Efrem Zimbalist Jr. portrayed in the 1960s’ The F.B.I., but intel organizations remain tools of the power elite. The enemy of our enemy, it turns out, is not always our friend.