Do intelligence services spread lies? Sir Richard Dearlove, the only time I ever spoke to him, said they don’t set out to do so, but implied that lies may be the consequence of their operations.
Stephen Hadley, Bush 43’s National Security Advisor, begs to differ. This from January, 2005:
[Steve] Hadley went head-to-head with CIA director Porter Goss and some of his analysts and operatives. He wanted them to be engaged in propaganda operations to support the election. But the CIA’s idea of information operations, he thought, was to spread lies.
“Why spread lies?” Hadley asked. “Spread the truth. It’s much more powerful. You don’t get it. You need to find ways to get out the truth in a way it won’t be instantly discredited because it’s from us.”
From State of Denial, Bob Woodward (p.376).
2 responses to “Do spies tell lies?”
Let’s broaden the scope of the discussion: For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. Weiner documents everything from the agency’s formation in the aftermath of WWII to its failure to prevent the events of September 11, 2001, and every misstep, blunder and international incident in between.
Mr. Weiner argues that a bad C.I.A. track record has encouraged many of our gravest contemporary problems: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism. For instance he lauds the agency’s “epic success” against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. But he complains that the C.I.A. “failed to see that the Islamic warriors it supported would soon take aim at the United States, and when that understanding came, the agency failed to act.”
Nice plug for Tim’s book!
Although according to the CIA‘s history staff:
The idea that the “Islamic warriors” CIA supported in Afghanistan would later turn on the United States (page xv) fails to make the basic distinction between the Afghan mujahedin, whom the Agency supported, and Arabs who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s—whom CIA did not support.
Steve Coll has pretty much covered all that territory though in Ghost Wars.
There’s further reading here, although Philip Agee isn’t on the list…