Movie Lawyer, CIA Asset? Or Conspiracy Thinking in American History

Plus: Jeffrey Epstein Makes a Cameo

Samuel Pisar, 1970s

If a movie executive and the KGB were going to sign a truce on ending the Vietnam War, they needed to avoid anyone in the room interested in sabotaging the agreement. The problem was the entertainment lawyer present. “[He] speaks Russian too well to be an ordinary lawyer in Paris. Obviously, he is CIA.”

Let me back up.

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One of the key research inquiries for historians, no matter what they work on, is an attempt to determine who has agency. To put it crudely, different historians come to different conclusions by arguing for prioritizing certain individuals or groups as having an effect on history. If you’re studying a marginalized class for example, you are likely making the case that rather than simply be subjects of history, they can drive history. My advisor, Laura Isabel Serna, made that point in her first book: rather than see Mexicans as subjects of a colonized film culture forced upon them, the men and especially women who went to see early silent Hollywood films remade their own culture through going to the movies.

Agency has its drawbacks depending on what you study. If you are trying to find or create or argue for a secret source of agency, and often material power, you can easily fall into conspiracy. Perhaps the most memorable example of this is the New Lefter turned historian Martin J. Sklar, who founded some of the most important publications of his day. His book, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916, weaves a truly epic and well documented history of how business would eventually co-opt the antitrust movement of the Progressive Era. But Sklar was too easy to see conspiracy in everything, and his evolution political evolution suggests as much.

But finding sources of power can only get so far, particularly when you need to connect things at the very top to the very bottom.¹ When you end up researching influential people (or simply think about people as influential), you can easily begin to assume that the reasons for those actions, rather than the effects, are themselves malicious forces.²

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Back in 2020, I began researching the National General Corporation. I had been drawn to the company as one of the foundational conglomerates in America that worked to rebuild what the Paramount Antitrust Decrees had taken away: the ability to produce and distribute films while owning theaters.

At the core of my article for Film History was Irving H. Levin, who had previously done the same thing for Ida Lupino’s famed company The Film-Makers. NGC was at a much bigger scale, worth billions, and the fact that it got away with its consolidation was a sign of the bigger issues at the core of how and why the Paramount Decrees became essentially null in the 1980s.

At one point, I looked into Pierre Salinger, whose name came up as a hire for National General. This was a bit odd to say the least. Salinger was best known as the press secretary under John F. Kennedy and then briefly under Lyndon Johnson as well. What did he know about movies?³

According to his memoir, Salinger thought it would be fun to help produce movies for the company that mostly owned theaters. And he had a great idea: why not make a movie in the Soviet Union?⁴ It would be a filmed ballet of Boris Godunov. Leonard Bernstein would conduct it. “I planned to ask the Russians to provide the Bolshoi Ballet, the orchestra, and all the other actors and singers in the film. What’s more, I would suggest we use their cameras and cameramen. National General and the Russians would then negotiate a worldwide agreement governing distribution of profits.”

Obviously this being 1965—only a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis—this was no ordinary task. But NGC sent Salinger to Moscow along with the real protagonist of this story: Samuel Pisar.

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Salinger’s memoir notes that Pisar was working for National General, but in truth Pisar was the go-to lawyer for international relations. I had encountered him in the archive before as part of the offices of Kaplan-Livingston, the largest entertainment law firm in Hollywood in the 1960s, corresponding with other attorneys on issues for clients like Gore Vidal and Kirk Douglas as they worked on films in Europe.

Pisar was a Holocaust survivor, and published one of the better known books on his experiences in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other camps in the 1980s.⁵ In the years following the war, he was still a teenager and spent his time hustling in the black market while becoming fluent in several languages. He would eventually find distant family and end up in Australia before attending Harvard Law in the 1950s. In 1957, he wrote a note for the Harvard Law Review analyzing the development of international business in Moscow and the potential for trade. “In so far as traditional rules of private international law are inadequate to deal with state trading monopolies, they must give way to the legitimate interest in the free flow of commerce.” Afterwards, Pisar went to work for UNESCO in Paris before entering private practice.

Although Pisar had not spent much time in the United States, he was cited to the Judiciary in 1960 to be a citizen through a special act, as he had a wife and child in Los Angeles (this was before the 1964 Immigration Act). He had already served on a task force for Kennedy administration and assisted on commissions in the Senate, but according to one letter of support had his “greatest ambition is to become an American citizen….in what he regards as the greatest legal system yet conceived by man.”

Pisar’s specialty was international business, and more than anyone, he seemed to believe that the necessities of the market as a globalizing force that would erase the need for political differences. As he told one Congressional Hearing, “Mankind is groping toward unity, not in the matter Wendel Willkie envisioned, nor through the established of world government, but through the mundane, pragmatic, yet highly compelling, process of the marketplace.” He often noted that as the Soviet Union expanded, its business practices would essentialy bring capitalism to the country. Throughout the 1970s, he organized deals for oil magnates, hotel companies, and banks.⁶ He attempted to get McDonald’s into the 1980 Soviet Olympics, but failed when the Soviets wanted the chain to use locally grown food.

Pisar seemed to be the ultimate neoliberal figure, not necessarily falling from one party line to another.⁷ His 1971 book, Coexistence and Commerce is more of a “how to” about negotiating deals with communist industries than a theory of the case. As he suggests as one point, only Americans saw the struggle as one of good and evil; “Europeans consider the question as utterly devoid of moral content. Whether this view reflects acute perception born of a richer historical experience or expedient rationalization of material self-interest, has become a rather academic issue.”

Did Pisar care about business more or diplomacy more?

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Salinger and Pisar showed up to negotiate the film, and the deal got done quickly. Exceedingly quickly, in Salinger’s mind, taking only the matter of hours.

Salinger decided to call his old friend, Mikhail Sagatelyan, who had previously been the Washington Bereau Cheif for the Russian State News Agency TASS during the Kennedy agency. He was also a member of the KGB. After a long dinner and an inivtation to his home, Sagatelyan asked Salinger about his mission. The American was surprised. “I’m not even in politics anymore. I just came to make a film deal.”

But Sagatelyan revealed that the Soviet Export Film Corporation had been ordered to quickly close the deal. Instead, he told Salinger, “Your mission is to discuss with us how to bring an end to the Vietnam War.”

Sagatellyan explained the outline of the deal. It would end the bombing campaign of the Americans and the Soviet Union would directly intercede with the North Vietnamese. Salinger was to not involve Pisar out of suspicion that he was a CIA asset and might attempt to sabotage any agreement.

The next day, Salinger contacted the state department in Paris, and was told to proceed. Sagatelyan brought in other top agents, all working simply with this private citizen before the deal went cold. According to Salinger, he thought the deal was spiked when the USSR demands the recognition of Cuba by the US, an obvious non-starter. Suggestions in the Johnson papers suggest that once the outlines reached the North Vietnamese “Cold water was thrown on it.”

Perhaps more importantly, however, Salinger suggests that when he returned to Paris and met with the State Department, he learned that the man he was negotiating with was the head of the USSR’s department of disinformation.

Salinger claims he did not mention a single word of these meetings to Pisar. Pisar’s name is entirely missing from the state department records. And at least within the available CIA documents that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act, his name is absent. Did the Soviets have information that he was CIA? Even if the deal was fake, would Pisar be able to recognize the men from the disinformation department?

Pisar continued to be adjacent to politics. Within his position for the International Olympics Committee, he negotiated with the North Koreans at the request of the Reagan Administration during the lead up to the 1988 games in South Korea. After the publication of his Holocaust memoir, he was more public intellectual than lawyer.

But most notably he was the closest confidant and attorney for Robert Maxwell, a British magnate who also worked with the Russian mafia and, at least according to many reports, acted as an agent for Mossad (Pisar claims he was unaware of such a relationship). Maxwell spent most of 1991 trying to make under the table deals in the former Soviet Union, the kind that Pisar’s expertise almost certainly was essential to building an oligarchical state that has defined the country since the Berlin Wall came down. Although the record does not necessarily involve Pisar, it’s hard to imagine one would hire such an attorney otherwise given his expertise in building such deals. In some KGB minds, Maxwell was a “second Kissinger” in his authority of state power.

In August 1991, Maxwell died under mysterious circumstances on his boat named for his daughter, Ghislane.⁸ Pisar was the last person he spoke to, and would performed the Kaddish in Israel. Pisar led much of the investigation to uncover more about the murder, though other sources speculate on his involvement.

In 2021, Pisar’s stepson, Anthony Blinkin, was appointed as Secretary of State under the Biden Administration.

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This is where I turn back and tell you none of this matters.

It doesn’t matter whether Pisar was CIA or Mossad. The deal to end the Vietnam War was mostly just some mid-level foreign policy guys who may have just been screwing around. The movie never got made anyways.

When I first started diving into this rabbit hole, I was trying to figure out what mattered. And the problem was none of it really did. The connections of everything here—Hollywood, globalism, Vietnam, Epstein—all feel huge because it is easy to apply importance to them.

But what does putting it together make us see differently?

The problem with conspiratorial historical thinking is that it’s nihilistic in manner. More importantly, it usually suggests a New World Order that gives way too much credit big picture thinking when most people usually do not have a plan. I found it hard to even tell what Pisar thought about the Soviet Union, even as he became a public figure.

Pisar escaped the gas chambers, mostly by sheer dumb luck while losing his entire family. Did he care about business because of ideological reasons or did he just realize that the Soviets liked a good deal as much as any other force? When I write about characters in history, an Occam's Razor approach usually makes sense. Making a movie in the Soviet Union as part of a diplomatic strategy is normal business. Pisar's involvement with Maxwell is messier to understand, but it seems generally related to his expertise in organizing business internationally.⁹ Pisar worked with the rich and powerful in part because they were the ones interested in such kinds of business.

Pisar’s connection with Hollywood was mostly structural. He understood international business law, so he would often get pulled into deal making as an expert. He certainly played a role in reshaping the multi-national corporate world, but his motivations, at least to me, seem less murky. After all, Coexistence and Commerce is a 588 page door stopper of dense legalese, not the kind of treatise you would instead get from a Galbraith or a Keynes on political philosophy. He is a critical figure of history because you can understand a lot about how/why neoliberalism formed the way it did by following his actions and writings. But that is not to say he himself is the one pulling any of these strings.

If we want to assign credit to anything, my records can indicate one thing: he helped ensure Gore Vidal as the sole credited writer Myra Breckinridge without any credit to Parker Tyler.

1. I find this particularly difficult when discussing the influence of government on culture. Sometimes you get an obvious connection—I used to show students the Hulk documentation by the Department of Defense. But if you read it all, you don’t see that much difference between what the producers were going to do anyways. The more problematic material is when you just assume that X movie is the product of CIA/anti-Communist influence just because it has pro-American values. Sometimes screenwriters like pro-American values.

2. This is where I recommend the classic essay by Richard Hofstader on the Paranoid Style of American Politics. “A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop.”

An addendum to this is that of course there are bad forces often controlling our lives, and the point is to see those as different from malicious unless they are. I just completed one of Mike Davis’s lesser known books, Late Victorian Holocausts, about the genocides of the mid 19th century as a result of not just climate change, but colonial rule disrupting the order of agriculture throughout India, China, and Brazil. Davis painstakingly details how every choice in reshaping the political structure and geological infrastructure of these locales for a global network of economic growth essentially led to the deaths of tens of millions. But Davis looks at this without malice; simply people driven by capital profits and disinterested in the livelihoods of inferior races.

3. In general, the political ties of the “new” moguls of the 1960s and 1970s is an underrated feature of current Hollywood scholarship. My mentor Steve Ross has detailed much of the earlier mode between the Republican Party and the first moguls, but not as much has been tied to this second generation of insiders (as opposed to the Belafontes and Fondas who were on the outside). Most notably of this era is Arthur Krim of United Artists, who acted as the finance chairman for the DNC in the 1960 election. Krim was an avid Zionist—he tried to get Robert Flaherty to direct a film about Israel in 1950, and later produced films like Exodus—and thus latched himself to the new Democratic Party. Krim held parties at his house, which JFK would regularly attend. Even after Kennedy’s death, he remained quite close with Lyndon Johnson. Johnson told attorney Abe Fortas that he saw Krim every week and “let him see every damn document that comes in.” In return, Johnson would proudly stand with Israel in the 1967 war; documentary evidence shows that Johnson would use Krim —not the state department—to often manage affairs with the Israeli government.

4. Soviet Diplomacy over cinema had been thawing for some years. There had been an exchange during the Eisenhower Administration with Marty premiering there and The Cranes are Flying premiering in Washington, DC. In the late 1950s, Krim and Kirk Douglas tried to get a film made in Soviet Union too. That went all the way to Nixon, who wrote back “No picture made by an American motion picture company in the Soviet Union could possibly show the Soviet Union in any but a favorable light.”

5. When Leonard Bernstein wrote lyrics to a symphony entitled “Kaddish” and got torn apart by the critics, he would ask Pisar to rewrite it.

6. This was particularly controversial in the 1970s when the Soviet Union had posed an emigration tax for Jews hoping to go to the West. Pisar, given his credentials as both an expert on trade and a Holocaust survivor thus became a go to source for those who hoped to ignore the laws. Pisar told a symposium, “The present leaders of Soviet Russia are not racists,” which is very much usually opening more questions than answering.

7. In understanding Pisar’s place politically, one incident is notable: he became the attorney for the Black Panther-turned-conservative Eldridge Cleaver and his surrender to the FBI after spending time in Cuba among other places. Writing to the National Security Office, Pisar told them that Cleaver “no longer wants to tear down the American system; he wants to come home and live with it….He has come to realize the importance of democratic institutions and processes in the life of a nation.”

8. Again, as a film historian, you do not expect your archival research to connect you to Jeffrey Epstein.

9. The fact that Blinken is now Secretary of State is just sheer old questions of access. Pisar was rich and famous; he got his kid into the best schools and the best jobs. The only difference is Americans assume there are no dynasties when there are plenty.