Still, I was only a twenty-four-year-old first-time novelist. I was lucky to get off with the light editing Condor received. Hell, I was lucky to be published at all.
Some lucky novels are three books: the author’s original work, the edited published volume, and the story Hollywood projects onto the silver screen.
Casting for Condor locked up Robert Redford before I’d even met my great editor Starling Lawrence in the lobby of his office’s New York skyscraper.
And history that exploded outside in our streets after the manuscript’s acceptance inspired changes for the movie’s creative team.
Already the plot had been shifted from Washington, D.C., to New York because, I was told, Robert Redford had to shoot two movies that year: Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. He and his family lived in New York and he didn’t want to have to uproot them to move to Washington for the year. Of the two movies’ plots, only Condor could be moved to New York.
More important was the MacGuffin.
Just before I left Montana for Washington, the United States got hit with its first oil embargo. The invisible world of petroleum politics suddenly dominated the way we all lived. That change in America’s reality, that change in Americans’ consciousness, was too creatively cool to ignore, so the MacGuffin’s addictive narcotic went from heroin to oil. And instead of my noir ending, the brilliant screenwriters came up with an even more chilling, culturally impactive Lady or the Tiger? climax.
Beyond such meta-changes, the movie absorbed jargon and language just then breaking into our cultural consciousness — dirty tricks from President Nixon’s attack-dog teams and new reportage on the intelligence community. Condor was one of the first movies to show such things as computers scanning documents — a revolutionary concept in 1974.
There’s no way to describe what it’s like for a novelist to walk onto a movie set that has created a three-dimensional, real-life setting from a vision born in the writer’s fevered dreams. The cast and crew welcomed me on the set. I drifted in a surreal daze.
Sydney Pollack showed me around, letting me see the exacting, painstaking detail with which he approached his art, right down to hand-selecting the never-filmed-before guns the assassins would wield. I listened in awe as he described how to create tension in a scene by having nothing happen — except, of course, that the ruthless killer and his prey ride the same elevator surrounded by innocent witnesses. Sydney explained that in film, telling a chronological chase story meant he couldn’t show Redford on the run for six days and night, so everything compressed into three days.
Redford went out of his way to be gracious. He stood outside with me one wintry Manhattan morning on the front steps of the set-decorated secret CIA office made real from my what if and talked about our work while we ignored two mink-coated high society women who’d imperiously breezed through the police lines only to look up and see who was standing there. Those two oh-so-sophisticated Manhattan matrons clutched each other like schoolgirls, hip-hopped past us in gasping glee. I’ve often wondered if Robert Redford has that kind of effect on women, too.
Few other book authors have been treated as well by Hollywood as I was. Dino, Pollack, Redford, and the rest took my slim first novel, elevated and enhanced it into a cinematic masterpiece. I’m so lucky and grateful to have been a first step in that wondrous process. My whole life has been blessed by the shadow of Condor.
But until the KGB story broke, who knew that shadow was so huge?
In the same year that the great American author of my generation, Bruce Springsteen, released his seminal Born to Run, my movie came out, Nixon had resigned, my Senate fellowship had ended, I had two more novels about to be published, and I’d jumped at a chance to join Jack Anderson’s handful of muckrakers. After all, Nixon’s thugs had plotted to murder Jack (luckily, they’d been worse at murder than they were at burglary), and Les Whitten, the man who’d graciously but inadvertently helped inspire my novel about the CIA, was one of my bosses. How cool and lucky was that! Redford arranged for me to see the movie before its 1975 premiere in Washington, so I took Shirley (still my girlfriend) and my Jack Anderson colleagues. I kept telling myself that this was the real world.
Though I’d rushed a traditional novel sequel into a successful and New York Times-bestselling life, I realized that the quintet of Condor novels I envisioned after selling Six Days would have to fly into the culturally branded image created by the great and deserving movie star of my times, Robert Redford. I did not want to compete with that.
So I let Condor fly away.
Until 9/11.
As that smoke cleared, Condor flew back.
First, he made me reveal what happened to Ronald Malcolm, that just-like-me-sixties rebel, but do so in a way that stayed true to the image of Redford — or at least didn’t do it violence.
So in one my favorite novels, 2006’s Mad Dogs, Condor has a crucial cameo in the CIA’s secret insane asylum.
That wasn’t enough.
But now the novella I wrote about our post-9/11 Condor—condor.net—lives as an ebook and, along with the essay explaining its birth, awaits only your eyes.
Condor’s been an angelic shadow on my life.
Even before I knew about the secret KGB 2,000-man division Condor inspired, convicted Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis told me his CIA codename had been Condor, though my work was not the inspiration for that or for the 1970s’ Operation Condor consortium of right-wing South American assassination squads. An assassin dressed as a mailman murdered a former Iranian diplomat inside D.C.’s Beltway in 1980, a tactic that intelligence and police officials insist came from Condor, though the admitted fugitive assassin with whom I made contact in Baghdad after 9/11 said he wasn’t sure if I’d provided his inspiration.
Condor inspired parodies on the TV shows Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Fraiser, King of the Hill, and cultural chatter references on shows like NCIS and Breaking Bad. The avant-garde rock group Radiohead samples the movie’s dialog on a song.
In his January, 2000, Washington Post essay on films of the preceding century, Pulitzer Prize-winning movie reviewer (a great friend and renowned novelist) Stephen Hunter picked Three Days of the Condor as the movie most emblematic of the 1970s, the film typical of its paranoid times. Also, wrote Hunter: “This marks the globalization of the cinema as Tinseltown has surrendered its own natural mantle of world centrality.”
And without Condor — picked by the International Thriller Writers as one of their “100 Must Reads” — I’m guessing I might not have been included with Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and other of my literary heroes on the London Daily Telegraph’s 2008 list of “50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die,” or gotten career awards from France and Italy.