Tequila, Painted Pearls, and Prada: How the CIA Helped Produce ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

On April 21, 2011, Mark Boal called the CIA to tell them he was going to Afghanistan. The previous year, the screenwriter had been at a dinner when CIA director Leon Panetta asked Boal to alert the agency if he ever traveled to the country. At the time, Boal was working on a movie called Tora Bora, about the CIA’s failure to capture Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.