Diksha Sundriyal
The past comes calling in Prime Video’s ‘Jack Ryan: Ghost War,’ threatening to upend everything. Jack had retired from the CIA, but a new mission leads Jim Greer to seek him out. What is initially painted as a simple pick up from a meeting turns into a full-fledged war against a dangerous organization named Starling. As details about the group, particularly its origins, come to light, the protagonist discovers that his friend, Greer, is to be blamed for all the mess they have to clean up now. As Greer talks about what led to Starling’s creation and where things went wrong, a rather familiar picture emerges for the audience. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Fictional Starling Has Parallels With Real-Life Cases
In ‘Jack Ryan: Ghost War,’ Jim Greer reveals that he and his MI6 counterpart, Nigel, set up a black ops team called Starling in the aftermath of 9/11. He described it as a turbulent time when extreme measures were necessary to ensure the safety of their country and people, or at least, that’s what they told themselves. Starling was created to push the boundaries of what a normal agent would do to get the job done. These soldiers were taught to be ruthless, especially when it came to extracting critical information, particularly through interrogation. With no limits, the black ops team eventually went too far, leading Greer to take the blame for the death of a prisoner who died in captivity following an extremely intense round of interrogation.
While Starling is a fictional black-ops program created to serve the movie’s plot, it seems to have drawn on a real-life case that emerged in connection with the agency. Reportedly, following the 9/11 attacks, the agency allegedly created “enhanced interrogation” techniques, in which they would put the prisoners through hellish torture to get information out of them. Reportedly, more than a hundred people were held captive between 2002 and 2008 in the CIA’s black sites, where they were subjected to brutal torture techniques that weren’t legally approved of. In later investigations, the names of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen came into the picture for allegedly building the program.
Reportedly, one of the prisoners died due to hypothermia because of the torture without having been found guilty of anything. In the movie as well, a prisoner dies of a heart attack due to the intense torture he’s put through during an interrogation. This is when Greer realizes that things have gone too far. This is not what the agency stands for, and if they continue to do this, there would be no difference between them and the bad guys. So, he takes responsibility for the man’s death and disbands Starling. In real life, too, the torture program went through an investigation leading to a Senate hearing and revealing shocking details to the public. With the parallels between the real and the fictional case, it is fair to assume that the writers may have drawn inspiration from reality to infuse the plotline with a grain of truth.
Read More: Where Was Jack Ryan: Ghost War Filmed? All Shooting Locations
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