We gave Christopher Costa a mission. Should he choose to accept it, it would be of utmost importance to national security. This article will self-destruct in five minutes, so read quickly.
Costa was tasked to go watch “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” with me on Wednesday evening and discuss the film.
Costa is the executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, and a former spy himself. More specifically, he spent decades as a spy handler in the field. The bulk of his career was in the military, where he worked in counterintelligence and with special forces. He ran operations in places including Panama, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. His work in Afghanistan earned him two Bronze stars.
None of that is preparation for having to sit through a near three-hour-long movie with me.
For the uninitiated, the “Mission: Impossible” franchise centers on Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, a superspy of sorts. Hunt spends eight movies commandeering everything from planes to submarines. Punching faces. Taking off disguises. Blowing things up. Keeping things from blowing up. Lusting after beautiful women who can’t help but succumb to his charms. The eighth and possibly final installment of the franchise premiered last week.
During the film screening, which we saw Wednesday afternoon at a Regal theater in Washington’s downtown, Costa occasionally let out a chuckle. Watching spy movies is not something he has been able to do in the past, because of their inaccuracies.
“I used to never be able to sit down with my family,” Costa, 62, said, adding, “I’d talk to the television. I couldn’t take it. My wife would say, ‘This is crazy. Just change the channel.’”
But now, he sees pop culture as an opportunity to educate the public about what spies really do. After the movie, he discussed the “Mission: Impossible” franchise and what it gets right and wrong.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the biggest misconception about spies?
That spies are like Mr. Hunt. That’s a composite character. He’s got all the skills of all the people I’ve ever met in my career. Real spies are in the shadows. They’re not out there. It’s clandestine by nature, which means you don’t see it. You don’t know what happened. Things blow up. Things happen. But you don’t know who did it. It’s like watching paint dry most of the time.
What is actually happening?
You’re developing a source to get access, to answer a question that ultimately turns into a product that might get to the president of the United States or some other country’s foreign leader when it’s another intelligence service.
But you’re out there meeting with an individual. Most of the time you’re alone. You’re in a location meeting with somebody, debriefing them and spending time with them. People always say, “What’s the scariest thing that ever happened to you?” And I say, “Most of the time, it was what didn’t happen after the fact.” While I was meeting with the source, nobody kicked down the door.
What does “Mission: Impossible” get right?
The tooth that had the suicide capsule. [Spoiler alert: In the movie, Ethan threatens to swallow a capsule to die by suicide.] We have that in the museum, a concealment device. Bin Laden was obsessed with the idea that somebody close to him would have had dental work recently, and that some kind of tracking device could have been placed in it.
The other thing is most intelligence officers know how to handle a detention situation, maybe when they’re rolled up by an intelligence service. I can tell you that people are trained — not all the people — to get out of handcuffs. Hunt made a reference to having cuff links that would have some device to help him escape. Our museum is filled with devices that were used by agents during the Second World War, so this is nothing new.
Are all spies very well-trained in hand-to-hand combat?
I would say that arguably they’re not. Some are, particularly if you’re somebody that does human intelligence and special operations.
The best intelligence officers at the C.I.A. and in the Department of Defense that I’ve worked with, don’t look like Jason Bourne or don’t look like Hunt. In fact, they might be overweight.
I want to ask you about a couple specific tropes we’ve seen in the films. How often do operatives infiltrate black-tie galas?
I love that question because my predecessor was a C.I.A. officer, the late Peter Earnest [the former executive director of the museum]. He was legendary and he told his real spy story, and it was right out of a James Bond movie. He wore a tuxedo. He went to a party overseas in some unnamed city in the world and he ducked away from the party, got into a room at the residence and he slapped a listening device. Somebody was coming in to open the door and he hid in the room, left the room, fixed his tuxedo and went back to the party.
I went out to the field to go sit cross-legged with Indigenous people, went out to many, many different meals, sat cross-legged with Afghans, met with Iraqis. But at the end of the day, Peter’s mission was the same as mine. I wore a ballistic vest. He wore a tuxedo.
In the third “Mission: Impossible” movie, Hunt’s computer-hacker accomplice Luther (Ving Rhames) makes a comment about how living this life isn’t compatible with being in love or having friends. How true is that?
You do have friends. You do have a life, but it is insular.
At 3 o’clock in the morning, I would have to get up to go parachute, but when I went home I was like everybody in this suburban Virginia neighborhood. But I wasn’t like everybody else. I couldn’t share any of that with them, so it was lonely at times.
You couldn’t talk to your partner about work. Most spouses do that. How did that affect you?
I was very lucky.
She took care of the kids and the family, and I deployed and could focus on my colleagues, my peers, my mission. Not everyone can navigate that. We had some tough times along the way, but we survived. We’re still married — 40 years, literally, this Sunday. Oh my gosh!
In every film, we see someone pulling off their face as a disguise. Is that a real thing?
I won’t go into the details. I’m certainly not up to speed with where we are from a technology standpoint, but I will say that we have masks that will get you through checkpoints and disguises that could get you, not under close scrutiny, but certainly you can do what you have to do.
Is this is the part where you take off your face and I find out you’re a nemesis from my past?
You wish I would take off my face, right? Unfortunately, this is what I got. Always self-conscious after watching Tom Cruise, same age as me. [Costa and Cruise are 62.] I worked out pretty hard this morning. Maybe psychologically I knew I was meeting you. And I took two Motrin before I came to the movie today. I hurt my back. Do you think that guy ever hurts his back?
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
The post We Watched ‘Mission: Impossible’ With a Former Spy appeared first on New York Times.
