Plot Summary (Three Days of the Condor) Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Joe Turner reads books for the CIA and notices a pattern no one wants him to notice
The American Literary Historical Society occupies a brownstone at 55 East 77th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It is a CIA front. The staff of Section 17, Department 9, read everything published in the world — novels, newspapers, magazines — and feed plots, codes, and scenarios into a computer that checks them against actual CIA operations. They look for leaks and new ideas. Joe Turner, codename Condor, is the section's most restless reader. He arrives late by bicycle, solves a colleague's puzzle about an ice bullet in a murder mystery, and then raises a question that nobody at any level of the CIA wants to hear: why has a particular mystery novel been translated into Turkish, Arabic, Dutch, and Spanish but not French, Russian, or German? Turner files a report about the anomaly. His supervisor dismisses it. CIA headquarters at Langley dismisses it. The report enters the system with Turner's name on it. (wikipedia)
A hit team massacres the entire office while Turner is out buying sandwiches
Turner slips out the unauthorized basement exit to pick up lunch at a nearby deli — a habitual rule violation that saves his life. While he is gone, a team of assassins led by Joubert, a French Alsatian contract killer, enters the brownstone disguised as a postal delivery. They kill everyone in Section 17 systematically: Jennings, Mrs. Russell, Dr. Lappe, Harold, Ray, and finally Janice, whom Joubert asks to step away from the window before shooting her. A seventh colleague, Heidegger, who called in sick, is killed separately at his home. Turner returns with sandwiches to find every person in the office dead. He takes a .45 automatic from Mrs. Russell's desk drawer and stumbles to a phone booth to call the CIA. (wikipedia)
Turner calls in and the CIA tries to kill him
Turner contacts the CIA's emergency line, identifies himself as Condor, and begs to be brought in. He is told to find a secure location and surface again in two hours. At CIA New York headquarters, Deputy Director Higgins counts six bodies and identifies the missing seventh as Condor — "researcher, codename Tidepool, likes to read comics." Turner discovers agents staking out his apartment and calls back demanding a meeting with a familiar face. Higgins offers Sam Barber, Turner's friend from their City College days. The rendezvous is set behind the Ansonia Hotel at Broadway and 73rd Street. But the CIA sends Wicks, an armed operative carrying a .45 that would match Turner's gun in any ballistics test. In the alley, Wicks draws on Turner. Turner fires and hits Wicks by luck — a half-inch above his flak jacket. Wicks shoots Sam Barber dead and tells the CIA that Condor shot them both. (wikipedia, movie-locations)
Turner kidnaps a stranger and goes underground
Desperate and wounded, Turner kidnaps Kathy Hale at gunpoint outside a sporting-goods store after overhearing her address and learning she lives alone. He forces her to drive to her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where he ties her up and uses the apartment as a safe house. Turner reveals his real job to Kathy — he works for the CIA reading books, not as a spy — and shows her his business card. She verifies the phone number against the CIA listing in the phone book. The six o'clock news reports the alley shooting as a dispute between insurance company employees; no mention of the CIA. Kathy realizes the cover story proves CIA involvement: they had to be there to change the report that fast. (wikipedia)
Joubert hunts Turner while the conspiracy takes shape
Joubert, working for Leonard Atwood — the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East — assesses Turner as an amateur who is dangerous precisely because he is lost and unpredictable. He volunteers to kill Wicks at the hospital for free, since Wicks could talk under questioning. Turner traces the chain of phone calls that brought Sam to the alley and drives to Mae Barber's apartment to warn her. In the elevator, Turner and Joubert ride together without recognizing each other, separated only by party guests who crowd in at the last moment.
Turner fights, investigates, and closes the distance
A second assassin, posing as a mailman with an insured package, attacks Kathy's apartment. Turner kills him in a brutal hand-to-hand fight. The dead man's possessions yield a business card for Five Continents Imports and a hotel room key. Turner traces the key to Room 819 at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street, calls the room with a provocative question about condors as endangered species, and records Joubert's outgoing call to his handler. He feeds the number through the CIA's own Langley computer and gets a name and address: Leonard Atwood, 365 Mackenzie Place, Chevy Chase, Maryland. Turner breaks into a Brooklyn telephone switching station and wires together fifty phones to make his call to Higgins untraceable. He gives Higgins the hotel location and drops Atwood's name. (wikipedia)
Kathy infiltrates the CIA and Turner kidnaps Higgins
Kathy enters the CIA's World Trade Center offices posing as a job applicant, navigates to Higgins's office, and delivers Turner's message demanding Higgins accompany her to the Nassau Street exit. She adds her own editorial: Turner has a huge gun and is watching right now. In a van, Turner interrogates Higgins. Wicks is dead — someone pulled him off life support in the hospital. Turner's report has vanished from CIA files. Higgins suggests Turner draw fire while the CIA picks up the shooter. Turner refuses: a penny arcade bear parading back and forth. After Higgins is released, Turner asks Kathy the question the film keeps circling: maybe there is another CIA inside the CIA.
The conspiracy is about oil
Turner parts with Kathy at the Hoboken railway terminal and takes a train to Washington. He breaks into Atwood's house in Chevy Chase and forces a confession at gunpoint. The translation pattern Turner noticed was a communications network for a rogue CIA operation to seize Middle Eastern oil fields. Turner connects the dots: a book in Dutch, a book out of Venezuela, mystery stories in Arabic — all components of a covert network that Atwood, as Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East, was running off the books. Seven people in a brownstone were killed to protect a plan about oil. (fee)
Joubert kills Atwood and the system cleans itself
Joubert enters Atwood's study, disarms Turner, and shoots Atwood. He stages the scene as a suicide. The Company hired Joubert back specifically for this job — Atwood had become an embarrassment. The institution authorized the rogue operation, profited from it, and now eliminates the man who ran it. Every level cleans the level below. Joubert drives Turner toward Washington and delivers a warning: one day Turner will be walking on the first sunny day of spring, and a car will slow beside him, and someone he knows will get out and smile. Joubert offers Turner an alternative — flee to Europe, become an assassin, live without causes. Turner refuses. He was born in the United States and misses it when he is away too long.
Turner bets on the press and the film refuses to say whether the bet pays off
Turner meets Higgins on a cold Manhattan street and walks him past the New York Times building. He asks directly: do we have plans to invade the Middle East? Higgins describes contingency games, what-if scenarios. Atwood took the games too seriously. Then Higgins delivers the argument the film takes most seriously: it is simple economics — today oil, in ten or fifteen years food or plutonium — and when people who have never known hunger go hungry, they will not want the CIA to ask permission, they will just want the CIA to get it for them. Turner points at the Times building: they have all of it. He told them a story. Higgins asks the question the film ends on: "How do you know they'll print it?" Turner walks away into the crowd. The camera freezes on his face — defiant, uncertain, alone — and the credits roll.