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Alford found out that Devore worked at Tonopah Air Force Base (Area 52), and uncovered evidence of his travelling to South America with the military. Devore knew Chase Brandon, the face of the CIA's Hollywood office in the 1980s. Brandon is Tommy Lee Jones' cousin, and met Devore when Devore was Jones' best man in 1981. Devore's publicist, Michael Sands, claimed to work with the CIA, and award-winning AP journalist Linda Deutsch described him as "very tied into the military".These links between politics, the military and Hollywood were assumed to have been weakened. In 1975 it was revealed the CIA had infiltrated almost all aspects of the news and entertainment media as part of Operation Mockingbird, and it had been assumed that since then this had been curtailed. However evidence discovered in recent years by Alford and other academics like Tricia Jenkins has revealed just how prevalent government influence in Hollywood is.Alford says he has been surprised by how much have been discovered. "This nexus of entertainment and politics is so close," he explained. "When I began researching how films represent American foreign policy for my PhD I thought I was putting together two completely disparate things. But actually it has become so apparent that the worlds of entertainment and politics are very closely intertwined and so much closer than we ever believed.""He had been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own government's money laundering."
The Sunday Correspondent article from 1989
Alford does pepper The Writer With No Hands with details of how researching Devore impacted him. At times, the deeper Alford got into tying the threads of the Devore case together, the more his own life unravelled. Alford was one of the perfect people to investigate Devore, an expert in the politics of Hollywood from a background in academia who had the opportunity to devote himself to the case, and even he saw his personal life stretched to the limit by the research.Alford will also be the first to admit that "passionate interest" could simply be the professional way of saying "obsession". The extent to which he devoted himself to Devore was not healthy and the threat of him becoming a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist remains constant throughout the book. When we got deep into some discussions he would catch himself and stop, saying "I'm talking as though it's 2011, 2012 again."[Alford's] so involved that he fails to realize when Westaway makes him the subject of the documentary. While Gary [Devore]'s death raises essential questions about the propaganda machine, the figurative disappearance of Matthew [Alford] reveals the perils of all-consuming intellectualism. Only Hollywood escapism makes one believe that one can catch a fish that isn't even there.