Witness to War
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
16:48 · 96K views · Oct 1, 2017
Former CIA officer Frank Snepp describes how, working in Vietnam from 1969 to 1975, he planted stories in major newspapers to support Agency goals. He notes that some younger reporters refused to take the bait.
Cited as a first-hand account of how intelligence agencies have placed stories in the press.
4 comments from Hacker News
I quit the CIA in a fit of anguish and published a memoir, “Decent Interval,” about botched intelligence and the abandonment of our Vietnamese allies. Prosecutors in the Carter Justice Department hauled me in for allegedly violating CIA secrecy agreements and an invisible “trust” by publishing my book without agency approval. They did not accuse me of revealing any secrets, classified or otherwise. No secrets, period. My offense, as they saw it, was procedural: I’d deprived the agency of the chance to sort out whether my writings might expose secrets before the damage was done. [..] [The Supreme Court] decreed that I be gagged for life – required to submit to agency screeners anything I might write about what I’d learned “as a result of” my government service [..] Some journalists decried this penalizing of nonclassified disclosures in the absence of proven harm, and warned of serious damage to the First Amendment. [..] The cigarette manufacturer Brown & Williamson learned that a former employee, Jeffrey Wigand, was about to expose what he claimed was a company cover-up of the true hazards of nicotine. Invoking the Snepp ruling and other case law, the firm’s lawyers threatened to sue CBS if it aired a Wigand interview, which they said would violate a nondisclosure agreement he’d signed on the job. CBS buckled and canceled his appearance. The author of that piece, ex-CIA agent Frank Snepp, also has a very revealing interview about how the CIA would plant stories in the most in
It is likely with low confidence that the source you were most certainly replying to is referring to the front of shaping "Public Opinion" in which intelligence agencies highly likely with low confidence took part in [0] and with still many reports with low confidence most likely still are. It is certainly interesting to learn about the Anglo-American intelligence jargon, however without detailed historical/geopolitical/technical/operational context it is nearly impossible to adequately weigh their content. The article even goes into the intricacies of communication (the assessment itself taking influence on the situation) but does not mention one of the main operational goals of publicly communicated intelligence: managing the narrative. [0] this video
Several years after Nixon's resignation,[0] Carl Bernstein published a piece in Rolling Stone alleging that over the course of 25 years, the CIA had tasked more than 400 journalists for special assignments, including Pulizer Prize winnders and a publisher for the New York Times. "Some of these..relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services-from simple intelligence gather to serving as go-betweens." Laundering information. [0] [LINK] [1] CIA Officer Frank Snepp discusses planting stories in Vietnam: this video
Wild that they would go to press even with a single intelligence source. We know the CIA has used journalists to spread lies in the past, why wouldn't they be doing it now? For reference: this video