If the historical record was comprised solely of Hollywood movies, one could be forgiven for thinking that the CIA did not exist for the first decade of the Cold War. From its creation in the National Security Act of 1947 up to an all-too-fleeting reference in Hitchcock's North by Northwest in 1959, buried amidst an ‘alphabet soup’ of other US intelligence agencies, the CIA existed without even a dim flicker of explicit recognition from the silver screen. It was not that the Agency went entirely unnoticed by the American public. Although certainly, relative to today, where the Agency features in American culture like a Leviathan – a metastatising cultural hieroglyph for all that is malignant with American foreign policy – it kept a remarkably low profile. Yet the image of the CIA that did make it, on occasion, into the public domain – an image that is, which the CIA endorsed – was a long way from the narratives of romance, action and intrigue that Hollywood had traditionally created.

On 3 August 1953, Time Magazine ran its cover story on Allen Dulles, who would become the CIA's longest-standing and most charismatic spy-chief. The image on the cover perfectly evoked the iconoclastic purpose of the article within, which sought to point out the difference, at least as Allen Dulles and Time Magazine saw it, between the myth and reality of America's first peacetime centralised foreign intelligence agency. In the background was the archetypal sleuth, with dagger pulled and cloak drawn to conceal the bottom half of his face. Beneath his brimmed black hat gazed a single uncovered eye, leering with nefarious intent. In the foreground, in sharp relief, was the instantly recognisable profile of Allen Dulles, puffing on his trademark pipe. His placid smile and neatly trimmed grey moustache and hair were reassuringly avuncular – giving a sense of a man at ease with the world, and his profession. His slightly skewed bowtie, along with his dated rimless oval spectacles, lent him a professorial air. Indeed, it was no coincidence that North by Northwest's CIA chief, played by Leo G. Carroll who would later reprise the same role in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., was named only ‘The Professor’.