Charles McCarry

In 1965 he interviewed Michael Caine about his experience playing a secret agent in the film 'The Ipcress File (1965)'. At the time of the interview, McCarry himself was secretly employed by the CIA.
Originally intended to write a non-fiction book about the Kennedy Assassination, but the theory he posited was so controversial that his publisher told him no one would touch the book. Instead McCarry presented the assassination theory in fictional form in his novel "The Tears of Autumn," which became a best-seller.
Was a deep-cover agent in the CIA from 1957-1967.
His son, Caleb McCarry, is the Bush administration's "Cuba Transition Coordinator," tasked with assisting in the removal of the Communist government of Cuba.
Has worked as a Hollywood script doctor for years. He did an uncredited rewrite on the film 'Breakdown (1997)', when John Frankenheimer was still attached to direct.

Explaining the meaning behind "deep-cover" in deep-cover agent: "Oh it's laughable... What it means is that you have an ostensible occupation, a cover job, and that you don't go about introducing yourself as a CIA agent. You don't work out of an embassy, in fact you don't go near an embassy, and all of your meetings and reporting take place clandestinely."
On his experience being a deep-cover agent for the CIA: "It's one of the most boring occupations in the world, punctuated by moments of ecstasy. You sit around for days, sometimes for weeks, waiting for something you think you have made happen, to happen. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. Or waiting for an agent to show up. They're famous for not doing that, or showing up in the wrong place or on the wrong day, wrong hour."
I worked with Saul Zaentz a good deal, for example. Saul is the sort of man-he is the antitheses of the general idea of what a producer is like. Saul will owe you 25 cents and says he will pay it at 2:16 in the afternoon on the corner of 42nd and Lexington. He will be there with the quarter. He is a man of his word. I forget-he's made six or seven pictures and five have won Best Picture Oscars. Saul is an artist even though he is a producer.

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