WASHINGTON REPORT: Lies, Damned Lies & 'Intelligence'

...The balloon barrage was launched and to everybody's amazement all the balloon-borne radios blew back onto Taiwan and, after five years and who knows how much money down the rat hole, the entire project was dropped...

...The great one, of course, is the Bay of Pigs...

...But the information elicited from Colby, as well as other information dug up chiefly by the New York Times, points to other questions at least as important, in view of the return of reason to American newspaper publishers, perhaps more so...

...To the astonishment of one and all, the invasion was a fiasco, there was no popular rising to support the invaders, who were easily either rounded up or driven back into the sea...

...WASHINGTON REPORT LIES, DAMNED LIES & INTELLIGENCE' When Richard Helms stood outside that courtroom here about a month ago and told us how proud he was to be a convicted, sentenced liar, the statement was puzzling on its face, recalling, as it did, one of the classic paradoxes in elementary logic, one now subject to restatement as follows: All CIA agents are liars and proud of it, said the CIA agent...

...Part of the puzzlement was cleared up between Christmas and New Year's when Helms's successor as CIA head and, presumably, as chief liar, William Colby, came up to the Hill to tell the House Select Committee on Intelligence what he presumably hoped they'd accept as the truth, despite his predecessor's precedents...

...Answer, by coming to believe the lies they were telling Kennedy...

...Maybe we do: I've been on friendly terms with three USIA directors and interviewed another, Ed Morrow, and all four really believed that the best propaganda is the truth...

...That's true but it ought to be clear that perhaps the principal obstacles to trustworthy intelligence are propaganda, lies and an adolescent taste for derring-do on the part of agents...

...If so, should they be dropped or should intelligencegathering be sacrificed for the higher interests of bureaucratic self-protection and preservation of corporate profits...

...To cover all bases, we ought to have an alternative agency, the CIA, which, according to Colby and Helms, believes the best propaganda is lies...

...Question, How did the CIA get the idea that the Cuban people hated Castro and loved Howard Hunt...

...The Agency desperately wanted to run an anti-Castro operation...

...Or, why didn't they ask...

...Or, to view the matter from a practical, rather than a theoretical, angle, if Helms tells everybody he's a liar and proud of it, how will he get anybody to believe him when he proudly lies in the future...

...An instrument for spying on American citizens opposed to CIA wars...

...Those are important questions and the fact that Colby was complaining about the increasing difficulty of obtaining legitimate-appearing journalistic cover for agents indicates that American journalism is recovering from the comic-strip attitudes it had toward the CIA in the 1950s and early '60s...

...Actually, though, the real trouble with the Agency as institutional liar is the same trouble most liars run into eventually: they lose the ability to distinguish their lies from the truth and thus, cut off from reality, are unable to make correct judgments...

...An intelligencegathering and evaluating agency...

...An instrument for the overthrow of governments unfriendly to American multi-nationals...

...A spy operation...

...Obviously, quite a few of the kooks and criminals are still around and obviously, too, they are dictating a lot of the anti-Turner comment in the media, from columnar defenses of Helms to attacks on the Times for dredging up some of this stuff...

...He wasn't just lying, as it appeared to carping observers like this one, to "maximize" his pension, but as part of his professional flair...

...Question, How could the CIA imagine that radios were widely distributed among private individuals in what is manifestly the most rigidly controlled Communist society in the world...

...The two are not exactly the same thing...

...What the Select Committee was looking into was the effects on American journalism of having newspapermen double as agents, of the regular exchange of information between newspapermen and agents, the use of bogus, but authorized, news credentials by agents, the agency's subsidization of ostensibly independent papers and journals of opinion...

...The CIA, Colby revealed, has been in the business of lying for some time...

...From the Agency's point of view, one gathered from Colby's testimony, the trouble there was not that the Agency was telling lies to the American people but that according to the terms of the Agency's charter, it isn't supposed to operate in America on Americans at all and some nervous Nellie might interpret the home feedback of Agency foreign lies to be a violation...

...A propaganda ministry...

...The Agency, pleased with the success of its radio propaganda against the Russians in Eastern Europe, determined to create a kind of Radio Free Asia against the People's Republic of China...

...The results of the lying, said the liar, were very good...

...It's one of the things they do, like steaming open Bella Abzug's newsletter to her constituents, in order to save the country from Communism, or, even worse, the dread threat of pacifist sentiments...

...If the CIA has been in the propaganda business all these years, what has the United States Information Agency been doing...

...The transmitters were erected, studios staffed and programs being beamed when the Agency discovered there were almost no radios in private hands in mainland China...

...Or, why didn't they ask...

...The real trouble with having the CIA in the lying business is not the danger on which the subcommittee focused, namely that of having the Agency's lies made for foreign consumption picked up by American news people abroad and sent home...

...The lies that Colby talked about without actually 20 January 1978: 36 ary budget, ncy of the as if their ible hands y arrive at Given the :d in 1978 ;, environthat while ates, while jffer social )us bombs * Mobilizas of study ions aimed >eace, and nation for York and Session on . Included : proliferaley present s Religious >ro nuclear race, fund ully realizonstructive opics, with s even on 1978 will een in the the things newsletter mtry from of pacifist f his lying jssion...

...In order to right these wrongs, the CIA laid on the Bay of Pigs invasion, with the approval of two Presidents, including the one left holding the bag, Kennedy...

...Another question, with all the meteorology the CIA finances and has its press gang rave about from time Commonweal: 37 to time, how come they didn't know which way the prevailing winds go between the mainland and Taiwan...

...He was a Communist, he had nationalized whatever of American corporate holdings he could lay hands on, and, perhaps worse, had destroyed the substantial property rights in brothels and casinos of the CIA's ally, the Mafia...

...Far from backing off, the Agency proceeded to construct an elaborate scheme to float small, pre-tuned radios across the straits from Taiwan so the Chinese could get the word...

...The most important is the most recurring: What is the CIA supposed to be, anyhow...

...Turner undertook cleansing those stables on the assumption that the nation requires a first-rate intelligence service...

...the wind might change...

...Even more fascinating, in recent days the New York Times uncovered the great Red China radio rally...

...He observers ut as part ; was, for vn fellowries is for partly an r acquired, it actually identifying were not to the Senate but to foreigners, specifically to foreigners reading foreign newspapers unaware that the CIA's lie factory was pumping the pages full of misinformation...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...In several unidentified countries, CIA-initiated lies in print persuaded readers that really quite small and unimportant anti-Communist movements were quite large and important and this misperception helped bring the anti-Communists to power or at least to influence governments all out of proportion to the degree anti-Communism represented the authentic beliefs of the population...

...Do we need two...

...Obviously, the reason Helms was proud of his lying was that it showed his mastery of his profession...

...Lying to the Senate was, for Helms, like eavesdropping on his Georgetown fellowfaculty members, or NBC fellow-media-heavies is for Henry Kissinger, partly a matter of habit, partly an exercise of a professional skill, conscientiously acquired, pleasurably employed...

...In order to lay on the invasion, however, the CIA had first to determine that the Cuban people hated Castro and were anxious to be ruled by Howard Hunt in his red fright wig...

...Answer again, because one touch of reality would have destroyed the scheme they had their hearts set on, because they came to believe the lies they had obviously told White House and/or congressional oversight committees, and because, who knows...

...Admiral Stansfield Turner has been performing yeoman service, indeed, able-bodied service, in getting rid of the "operationals" who, over the years, have spent the taxpayers' dollars on these and similar hare-brained schemes based on a comic book view of America, Communism, espionage and public diplomacy...

...Does any or do all of such extra-intelligence activities adversely affect the intelligence-gathering that the title says is the agency's first concern...

...A couple of examples...