The Use of Deception to Snare Al Qaeda
When "unnamed U.S. government officials" leaked the story this fall that al Qaeda computer expert Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan had been arrested in Pakistan, media reports described British and Pakistani intelligence officials as furious about the resulting firestorm of coverage. Officials were quoted as saying that the news had blown a global sting operation by destroying Khan's value as a "double agent" who'd been turned against his al Qaeda colleagues. U.S. senators and British MPs on both sides of the aisle publicly deplored this shocking intelligence "debacle."
What a terrific story. But was any of it -- Khan's purported role as a double agent, the outrage of intelligence officers -- really true? There's a good chance that much of it wasn't.
"You have to take those kinds of reports with a very large grain of salt," says Robert Vickers, a current CIA national intelligence officer and 30-year veteran of the agency. Vickers, who has participated in intelligence efforts to deceive hostile powers about agency assets in the past, notes that spreading a little disinformation is an intrinsic part of the intelligence community's culture. "We don't want our enemies to know how much -- or how little -- we know about them," he says....
the CIA is legally prohibited from lying to the American media, but the prohibition doesn't apply to the agency's contacts with foreign media. The editors at al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, Reuters and the BBC -- all outlets monitored by terrorism's supporters -- also pay attention to the rumors and reports of al Qaeda captures and alleged plots. As such, they present an excellent opportunity to deceive.
Similarly, while America's intelligence agencies generally observe policies limiting the role of deception in their media disclosures, their counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia do not. Before the Falklands campaign, for instance, Britain's Ministry of Defense deliberately misled the media about its intentions, a deception that contributed to the success of the surprise invasion of the islands. It's reasonable to believe that these countries may be using deception, disseminated through the media, as an integral weapon in the shadow war against terrorism.
No contemporary disinformation campaign is likely to match the strategic scale and coordination of the most famous deception campaign of modern times -- Operation Fortitude, the World War II initiative that was designed to fool the Nazi high command about the D-Day landing. With its dummy tanks and aircraft and faked radio transmissions aimed at convincing the Germans that the invasion was planned for another location, Fortitude is widely credited with delaying the arrival of Nazi reinforcements at the Normandy coast and saving thousands of Allied lives. Not surprisingly, military historians record that British and American media were involved -- some willingly, some unwittingly -- in the intricate disinformation maneuverings leading up to June 6, 1944.
Deception and media manipulation were integral to waging the Cold War, too. In the early 1980s, for example, the Reagan White House launched a targeted deception campaign to lure Soviet agents into surreptitiously acquiring cleverly reprogrammed software and silicon chips for use in the USSR's trans-Siberian oil pipeline. This high-tech tampering led directly to the pipeline's violent 1982 explosion. The administration blamed the pipeline's destruction on inferior Russian technology and shoddy workmanship, and the media dutifully reported this explanation.
To be sure, there is no foreseeable D-Day in the global war on terrorists. And non-state actors rarely have billions in targetable assets. Moreover, the media's role is infinitely more complex in an era of blogs, chat rooms and satellite TV. Yet the proliferation of media outlets -- from bloggers in Baghdad to chat rooms in Chechnya -- virtually guarantees any counterintelligence agency seeking to plant or spin a story that it will have a global reach....