The Good Shepherd Plot
In 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion into Cuba fails due to an as of yet undisclosed leak. Afterwards, a photograph and an audio recording on reel-to-reel tape are anonymously dropped off at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a senior CIA officer.
The narrative flashes back to 1939: Edward is attending Yale University and is a new member of Skull and Bones, a secret society that grooms future U.S. leaders. As part of his initiation, Edward must reveal a secret about himself: he reveals that as a young boy, he discovered his father's suicide note. After the ceremony, a fraternity brother tells him that Edward's father, an admiral, was to be chosen as Secretary of the Navy, until his loyalties were questioned. He asks Edward what the suicide note said, and Edward tells him that he never read it.
Shortly after the Skull and Bones ceremony, Edward is recruited by an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin), who claims that Edward's poetry professor, Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), is a Nazi spy. Edward is asked to help expose the professor, which he does, resulting in Dr. Fredericks' deportation. It is also heavily implied that the professor is homosexual (taboo in this era), and that the professor has an attraction to Edward, which would aid Edward in exposing him.
Edward begins a relationship with a hearing-impaired student named Laura (Tammy Blanchard). However, while attending a Skull and Bones retreat on Deer Island, Edward meets Margaret 'Clover' Russell (Angelina Jolie), his friend's sister. General Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro), who is not a member of the Skull and Bones Society, asks Edward to join the OSS, offering him a post in London. Soon after, Clover aggressively seduces Edward, and they have sex in the woods behind the Skull and Bones club house.
A few months later, while Edward and Laura are at the beach, Clover's brother arri..More
In 1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion into Cuba fails due to an as of yet undisclosed leak. Afterwards, a photograph and an audio recording on reel-to-reel tape are anonymously dropped off at the home of Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a senior CIA officer.
The narrative flashes back to 1939: Edward is attending Yale University and is a new member of Skull and Bones, a secret society that grooms future U.S. leaders. As part of his initiation, Edward must reveal a secret about himself: he reveals that as a young boy, he discovered his father's suicide note. After the ceremony, a fraternity brother tells him that Edward's father, an admiral, was to be chosen as Secretary of the Navy, until his loyalties were questioned. He asks Edward what the suicide note said, and Edward tells him that he never read it.
Shortly after the Skull and Bones ceremony, Edward is recruited by an FBI agent (Alec Baldwin), who claims that Edward's poetry professor, Dr. Fredericks (Michael Gambon), is a Nazi spy. Edward is asked to help expose the professor, which he does, resulting in Dr. Fredericks' deportation. It is also heavily implied that the professor is homosexual (taboo in this era), and that the professor has an attraction to Edward, which would aid Edward in exposing him.
Edward begins a relationship with a hearing-impaired student named Laura (Tammy Blanchard). However, while attending a Skull and Bones retreat on Deer Island, Edward meets Margaret 'Clover' Russell (Angelina Jolie), his friend's sister. General Bill Sullivan (Robert De Niro), who is not a member of the Skull and Bones Society, asks Edward to join the OSS, offering him a post in London. Soon after, Clover aggressively seduces Edward, and they have sex in the woods behind the Skull and Bones club house.
A few months later, while Edward and Laura are at the beach, Clover's brother arrives and privately talks to him. The brother reveals Clover is pregnant with Edward's child and asks if he will "do what is expected." Laura, able to read lips, sees this and walks away. Edward marries Clover, and during the wedding reception, a U.S. Army courier arrives, reiterating General Sullivan's offer for a position at the OSS London office. Edward accepts, whereupon the courier then hands over his orders, requiring him to be in England in one week. Clover is to remain in the US. To his surprise, Edward's former professor, Dr. Fredericks, is also in London; he is actually a British intelligence operative. While at Yale, he had sought to infiltrate a Nazi organization, causing the American authorities to suspect he was a Nazi spy. Edward's betrayal of his professor ruined two years of espionage work. Despite this, Fredericks recognized Edward's gifts and recommended him to be trained in counter-espionage methods in London.
Soon after, a British intelligence officer, Arch Cummings (Billy Crudup), tells Edward that Fredericks' indiscriminate homosexual relationships pose a security risk and asks Edward to deal with his former mentor. As they walk, Fredericks refuses Edward's chivalrous suggestion to protect himself by returning to teaching, and he, in turn, advises Edward to "quit the dirty work . . . while you still have a soul." However, he understands if Edward wants to "tie his shoe" (a signal to watchers that the meeting went badly). Edward delays, which prompts Fredericks to kneel down and tie Edward's shoe for him. As their meeting ends, Fredericks leaves Edward, and, after turning a street corner, is killed and his body dumped into the river.
The timeline moves to post-war Berlin, where the Allies and the Soviets, in a race for technological superiority, are vying to recruit as many German scientists as possible. Edward encounters his Soviet counterpart, codenamed "Ulysses", who praises Edward as a formidable adversary. They and their subordinates meet in a bombed out church in Berlin and exchange scientists to the other side---the Soviets asking for German Nazi and Slavic scientists, while the Americans asking for Jewish scientists.
Edward interviews potential German informants with the aid of a female interpreter, Hanna Schiller (Martina Gedeck), who wears a hearing aid. When Edward makes a rare phone call home, he inadvertently learns from his young son, Edward, Jr., that Clover is seeing another man. After the phone call, Hanna enters Edward's office and invites him to her house. After cooking dinner, she asks him to stay, and they end up having sex. Afterwards, Edward realizes that Hanna can hear him without the use of her hearing aid, exposing her as a Soviet operative who has infiltrated OSS activities. Edward has Hanna killed and notifies Ulysses by having her hearing aid planted into his tea pot.
After six years in London, Edward returns to the United States and is greeted by Clover (who now prefers to be called Margaret). Edward presents his son with a miniature model ship he made that is inside a glass watch casing. He learns from Margaret that her brother was killed in the war, and she confesses that she was seeing another man. When she asks if he had any relationships, Edward replies that, "it was a mistake." She suggests they sleep in separate bedrooms until they become reacquainted, to which Edward agrees. General Sullivan approaches Edward again to help form a new foreign intelligence organisation (the CIA) where Edward will work with his former colleague, Richard Hayes (Lee Pace), under Phillip Allen (William Hurt). Edward accepts, hiding the details about his job from his wife's friends and other acquaintances.
Edward's first assignment deals with an unnamed Central American coffee-growing country where the Russians are trying to gain influence. Edward spots Ulysses in the background of some stock footage of the country's leader, but chooses to conceal this information from others in the room. An agent, also a Skull and Bones member, is sent undercover as a representative of the Mayan coffee company. In order to intimidate the Central American leader, Edward arranges for airplanes to fly over and release locusts during a public event where the Russians (including Ulysses) are present. Edward later receives a can of Mayan coffee, presumably from Ulysses, containing the severed finger of the American agent.
Edward interviews Valentin Mironov, a Russian requesting asylum and claiming to be a high-ranking official who knows Ulysses. While attending the theatre with Mironov and Cummings, Edward unexpectedly encounters his former sweetheart, Laura. Edward and Laura leave the theatre separately, then meet at a restaurant and discuss old times before having sex at Laura's house.
Sometime later when Edward has gone ahead to a Skull and Bones dinner, Margaret anonymously receives photos of Laura and Edward getting into a taxi together and kissing. A distraught Margaret confronts him at the dinner. Edward ends the relationship with Laura by sending her jewelled crucifix to her by messenger, which he had kept from their college romance days.
Edward receives a call from a Soviet defector (Mark Ivanir) claiming that he is the real Valentin Mironov, and the person they know as Valentin is an impostor whose real name is Yuri Modin, a KGB operative working for Ulysses. Edward does not believe him, and agents torture the Russian in an attempt to uncover his true identity. The defector never changes his story. He is beaten, stripped naked, and even endures a form of waterboarding. Eventually, he is administered liquid LSD, because of its alleged truth serum properties, which ultimately causes erratic behavior. But he solidly clings to his stated identity; he calmly states that he is Valentin Mironov and commits suicide by hurling himself through the window to the pavement several stories below. This is apparently based on[citation needed] an actual event when U.S. Army scientist Frank Olson died in a similar way, allegedly as a result of unwittingly participating in CIA-conducted LSD experiments called MKULTRA. The first man claiming to be Mironov, who witnessed the ordeal from behind a two-way mirror with Edward, offers to take LSD to prove his innocence.
Edward visits his son, Edward Jr., at Yale, where he has also joined the Skull and Bones society and has been approached for recruitment by the CIA. Margaret (Clover) pleads with Edward to persuade their son not to accept, but Edward Jr. joins anyway, believing it will bring him closer to his loving, but distant father. This widens the rift between Edward and Margaret, and she eventually leaves him and moves to Arizona to live with her mother. Later, while at a Skull and Bones retreat, Edward discusses the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion with Hayes. Edward Jr. inadvertantly overhears the discussion and a reference to "Baha de Cochinos", Spanish for "Bay of Pigs." Edward suspects that Edward Jr. may have overheard the conversation and warns his son not to repeat anything that was discussed.
Time passes, and the Bay of Pigs invasion fails. The CIA thoroughly analyzes the photograph (which depicts a Caucasian man and a woman of color making love) and the edited version of the tape that was anonymously dropped at Edward's house earlier in the movie. From visual clues such as the ceiling fan's brand name and the church bells and other sounds heard on the tape, CIA specialists deduce that the photograph may have been taken in Leopoldville, Congo. Edward goes there and finds the room. He realizes that the photograph and tape are of his son Edward Jr. when he sees the model ship in the glass watch casing that he gave his son is sitting on the nightstand; its blurred image was the one object in the photo that the CIA team was unable to identify. Ulysses has apparently been awaiting Edward's arrival. He plays Edward an unedited version of the tape, which reveals that Edward Jr. repeated "Baha de Cochinos", the classified information he overheard his father discussing, to his lovera Soviet spy. It is that information that led to the Cubans' and Soviets' knowledge regarding the CIA landing at the Bay of Pigs. Ulysses reveals that the woman spy has truly fallen in love with Edward Jr. Ulysses encourages Edward to spy for the Soviets in exchange for them protecting his son. Edward is non-committal, however; he confronts his son, who says that he is in love with the woman and plans to marry her. When Edward tells him she is a spy, Edward Jr. refuses to believe him.
Edward exposes Valentin as a Soviet spy after finding evidence hidden in the book binding of a copy of Ulysses: inside are a passport with his real name and an escape plan. Arch Cummings is also exposed as a co-conspirator. In an earlier scene, Cummings gave the book to Valentin as a seemingly clever benign gift, playing on Valentin's knowledge about Ulysses, the Soviet spy. Arch Cummings flees to the USSR. After this, while meeting in the Air and Space Museum, Edward declines to run counter-intelligence for the Soviets. Edward explains that the Soviets have won in Cuba and that it is not necessary to hurt his son. Ulysses makes a reference to Edward doing him a future favor, having placed Edward in a compromising position. Ulysses notes of Edward Jr.'s fiance: "neither of us can be sure about her", and asks Edward, "Do you want her to be part of your family?" Edward says nothing. Shortly after this, Ulysses' aide asks him for change to purchase his daughter a souvenir from the gift shop. Edward asks how much it is, and, upon hearing it is a dollar, hands him a one dollar note, commenting that a cardinal rule of democracy is generosity. This appears to be a reference to a scene from the film's beginning, where a young boy on a bus asks Edward for change for a dollarwhen Edward returns to his office, he matches the bill's serial number to a CIA asset codenamed "CARDINAL". So Edward is, in fact, returning the "marked" dollar to the asset, who is Ulysses' aide.
Edward and Margaret arrive separately in the Congo for Edward Jr.'s wedding. His fiance boards a small plane to travel to the ceremony. In mid-flight, she is thrown out the door by the co-pilot. When she fails to arrive at the church, Edward informs a worried Edward Jr. that his fiance is dead. Edward Jr. tearfully asks his father if he had anything to do with her death, to which Edward denies any responsibility. Edward Jr. reveals that his fiance was pregnant; this news shocks and saddens Edward.
Edward then meets with fellow Skull and Bones classmate Hayes (loosely based on Richard Helms) at the new CIA headquarters still under construction. Hayes tells him that Allen is resigning under a cloud of financial improprieties, and that the President has asked him to be the new Director. The President has directed him to do some "house cleaning" and he tells Edward that he needs someone he can trust, saying, "after all, we're still brothers" and that Edward is the "CIA's heart and soul". He then shows Edward a wing of the CIA that will be Edward's "part of the world" and tells him he will be the first head of counter-intelligence.
Edward is then shown opening a floor safe in his closet and pulling out the suicide note that his father, Thomas, had left before killing himself. Edward finally reads the note, in which his father's words reveal that he had betrayed his country. He left loving words for his wife and son, particularly urging the latter to grow up to be a good man, husband, and father and to live a life of decency and truth. Edward burns the note.
The movie ends with Edward leaving his old office moving to his new wing in CIA.
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