In Wheeler Auditorium

Admission: $2.50

On Company Business is a three-hour film on the Central Intelligence Agency and American foreign policy, its purposes, goals and methods. Using no narration, the film is structured entirely out of live material and news film of past CIA operations or CIA-created propaganda, and interviews with former Agency employees ranging from accountants to Directors, contract agents, Ambassadors, and others with first-hand experience of Agency methods and operations. Philip Agee, Victor Marchetti, and John Stockwell are three of the better known former CIA employees featured. Others go public for the first time.

“Frightened by the Watergate break-in and what it revealed of a bigger operation aimed at subverting the American republic, Congress in 1975 initiated an 18-month investigation into the CIA and the FBI. In self-defense, the CIA was forced to reveal its ‘family jewels,' and the selected highlights from 30 years of secret history provided True Confessions, CIA style.
“In the midst of the national identity crisis which ensued, we pored over the existing historical record on film - thousands of hours of governmental and news library material - in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Paris and London. Those three years of film research, combined with the filming of 50 interviews, gave us an opportunity to examine the myths, premises and forces which brought Americans the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine, the Korean War, Cold War skirmishes in Iran and Guatemala, the failed Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba, full-fledged military coups in Brazil and Indonesia, the 20-year agony of Vietnam, the brutalization of Chile, and finally, Iran again, this time with a different outcome.
“Many months of looking at footage in the news libraries made it clear that these events were not just accidentally linked.... Always there was a deliberate, methodically conducted and carefully implemented policy at work. We found no ‘rogue elephant' rampaging through history....
“On Company Business is on the scale of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity and Patricio Guzman's The Battle of Chile.”