Arthur Kent

Reporter-turned-politician Arthur Kent waits for a mujahideen attack in Afghanistan in 1988

Arthur Kent, the former NBC reporter who got the nickname “Scud Stud” during the Gulf War, wasn’t smiling as he left the movie theatre December 27. It was the veteran foreign correspondent’s 54th birthday, and he’d just seen Charlie Wilson’s War on the advice of friends who said they’d seen one of his dispatches from Afghanistan in the film. Kent told his friends they were mistaken — he hadn’t received any permission requests from the film’s researchers or producers. When Kent heard the same story from more friends, he went to see if his reportage did indeed share the big screen with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Sure enough, nearly half a minute of his voice and several of his camera shots appeared onscreen to buoy the film’s depiction of Charlie Wilson, a womanizing U.S. Congressman who beefed up the CIA’s covert anti-Soviet mission in Afghanistan in the ’80s. “I almost didn’t recognize my own voice,” says Kent, who’s currently running for the provincial Conservatives in the riding of Calgary-Currie.

He was “mystified” to see his news footage in the $75 million US film — especially when the credits finished rolling and his name was nowhere to be seen. The names of other colleagues whose reporting he recognized in the film — including one who got killed in the field — weren’t listed either. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather, however, was credited and even mentioned in the script. “Dan, Tom Brokaw [and] Peter Jennings always gave credit to those of us who were actually out there getting shot at, getting the footage,” says Kent. “So I’m sure [Rather] would support me in saying [this is] something that needs to be looked into.”

That night, Kent dug through his records from 1986. He eventually found a story he’d done for BBC Newsnight that sounded like the voiceover he’d heard in the film. (Kent says he’d sold the BBC rights to the story “specifically for a one-time United Kingdom television broadcast.”) The next day, he returned to the theatre and caught the last 15 minutes of the film. “It was exactly, precisely, the story from BBC Newsnight,” says Kent, who dodged bombs from Soviet planes while reporting the story. Again the credits rolled, attributing the news footage not to individuals, but organizations and networks — a gross misattribution, says Kent. “The war in Afghanistan was not filmed by corporations,” he says. “It was filmed by men and women who risked their lives, and we deserve respect. We deserve proper credits.”

Kent, who launched a successful lawsuit against NBC in the early ’90s after a contract dispute, wants an apology and fair compensation from Universal Pictures for using the footage without his permission. (Universal Pictures, incidentally, is a subsidiary of NBC Universal.) He also wants the company to pay his legal costs and give appropriate credit in future distribution forms like DVD. “It is a bit galling that Universal Pictures, a company that constantly moans about the evils of piracy, should be engaging in this kind of light-fingered carelessness,” says Kent. “My lawyers will push for an explanation and of course we’ll have to have a resolution of this situation.” Kent says he’s been in touch with the BBC regarding the situation, but has yet to hear from Universal Pictures. (Fast Forward requested an interview with Universal, but didn’t hear back by press time.)

Kent says that in addition to his footage, the film also uses uncredited video of convoy ambushes shot by British cameraman Andy Skrzypkowiak, who was killed in Afghanistan in 1987. “We all regard [that footage] as among the best wartime sequences recorded in Afghanistan,” says Kent, who’s reported from the war-torn country since 1980. Charlie Wilson’s War also shows Afghans firing heat-seeking Stinger missiles at Soviet choppers, and Kent says much of that footage was shot by young Afghans. “For virtually no payment whatsoever, [they] went into their country to document their people’s war of resistance to the Soviet occupation,” he says. “And their names aren’t there.”

In an article in the February issue of Policy Options magazine headlined “Charlie Wilson’s Whoppers,” Kent also rips into the film’s portrayal of history. The film is marketed as a “true story,” but Kent writes that it’s “emphatically false” in its portrayal of the CIA’s activities in Afghanistan.

The film shows the bulk of U.S. government money and weapons in the ’80s going to Afghan resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud to fight the Red Army. In fact, very little American support went to Massoud. The the CIA “shafted” him, says Kent, and instead directed most of the money and weapons to “the most anti-American elements of the Afghan guerillas.” Kent says this U.S. support of fundamentalist militants in the ’80s “came back to haunt us” in 9/11. “It’s alarming how the American mass media continues to make errors of omission or commission in telling the story of Afghanistan,” he says. “The story of the Afghan war is the story of 9/11.”

Historical inaccuracies aside, Kent is hoping Universal will respond to his request and properly acknowledge him and his colleagues for their reporting. “Hopefully we can resolve this like grownups,” he says. “It’s Hollywood and it’s NBC Universal, so I’m not counting on anything. If they force us to go further, then reluctantly, we’ll have to do that.”