The technique of injecting lies to discredit a story

by Stephen Hewitt | Published 2 October 2024 | Last updated 3 October 2024

The idea of discrediting an otherwise true story by revealing lies previously infiltrated into it is illustrated here with actual reports that might represent applications of this putative technique.

The false accusation

Alistair McAlpine was the treasurer of the Conservative and Unionist party at a time when its leader, Margaret Thatcher, was prime minister. He was given the title Lord McAlpine. He wrote several books. One of them, The new Machiavelli, with a subtitle “the art of politics in business”, carries an endorsement from Margaret Thatcher on its front cover: “...shrewd commentary on Machiavelli's timeless principles of skullduggery.” In a section on how to deal with the media is the following:

“Another useful ploy is the false accusation. First, create a situation where you are wrongly accused. Then, at a convenient moment, arrange for the false accusation to be shown to be false beyond all doubt. Those who have made accusations against both the company and its management become discredited. Further accusations will then be treated with great suspicion.” [1]

This kind of accusation can be thought of as contaminating public discussion and raising the noise level, making genuine discoveries harder to hear. From the point of view of this analysis it can be classified as a special case of a the more general technique. A different application of the technique might be simply to reveal that some of the evidence used by the accusers is false.

Forged documents

Here are two examples of possible (but not proven) historical applications of the technique using forged documents .

The first is from a 1974 book [2] (“The first book in American history to be subject to subject to pre-publication censorship” according to its back cover). One of its two authors worked for the USA's CIA from the 1950s until 1969.

On June 2, 1961 (less than two months after the CIA's humiliating failure at the Bay of Pigs), Richard Helms, then Deputy Director of the Clandestine Services, briefed the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on communist forgeries. Helms discussed thirty-two fraudulent documents “packaged to look like communications to or from American officials.” Twenty-two were meant to demonstrate imperialist American plans and ambitions; seventeen of these asserted U.S. interference in the affairs of several free-world countries. Of the seventeen, eleven charged U.S. intervention in private business of Asian nations. One was a fake secret agreement between the Secretary of State and Japanese Premier Kishi permitting use of Japanese troops anywhere in Asia. Another alleged the American policy in Southeast Asia called for U.S. control of the armed forces of all S.E.A.T.O nations. Two forgeries offered proof that the Americans were plotting the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno; the remaining two were merely meant to demonstrate that the U.S. government, despite official disclaimers, was secretly supplying the anti-Sukarno rebels with military aid.

These last examples concerning Indonesia are especially interesting. A cursory examination of the documents, as submitted by Helms, indicates that they were indeed rather crude forgeries, but their message was accurate. Not only did the CIA in 1958 support efforts to overthrow the Sukarno government, but Helms himself, as second-ranking official in Clandestine Services, knew it well. And he knew that the “official disclaimers” to which he referred were deceptions and outright lies issued by U.S. government spokesmen. ...

More recently, after publication in 2005 of a book Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe[3] by a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the government of the USA published a web page with the title ‘Misinformation about "Gladio/Stay Behind" Networks Resurfaces’. The sub-title was ‘Thirty Year-Old Soviet Forgery Cited by Researchers’. [4]

The web page said that Daniele Ganser, author of the book, had cited a forged document, “a Soviet forgery purporting to be Supplement B to the U.S. Army's Field Manual 30-31”, and so too had Kleanthis Grivas, author of an article ‘Terrorism in Post-War Europe’ in a Greek newspaper, To Proto Thema, on 18 December 2005.

It stated:

Field Manual 30-31B, also known as the “Westmoreland Manual” because it was purportedly signed by General William Westmoreland, was exposed as a “total fabrication” in February 1980 hearings before the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The web page gave the reference: “Soviet Covert Action (The Forgery Offensive), Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, 96th Congress, Second Session, February 6, 19, 1980, p. 86”.

A court case

A similar technique of contamination can be used with organisations, court cases, groups and ideological, political or scientific positions.

For example, in 1969, when a USA district attorney brought a criminal prosecution following the murder of their president JF Kennedy in 1963, “The prosecution was turned into a nationally publicized farce” as the Los Angeles Times recalled in 1992. One of the prosecution witnesses ... “said under cross-examination that he fingerprinted his daughter each time she came home from school to make sure that a spy hadn’t taken her identity.” [5]

References

[1]

Page 176, The new Machiavelli the art of politics in business Alistair McAlpine, ISBN 0-471-29564-7, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Copyright 1998 Alistair McAlpine.

(Acknowledgements to Lobster Magazine Issue 70 for pointing this out)

[2]

The CIA and the cult of intelligence, Victor Marchetti, John D. Marks, Dell Publishing Co. Inc. New York, 1975 (first published 1974 by Knopf, NY).

[3]

Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Daniele Ganser, Frank Cass, London and New York, 2005.

[4]

Misinformation about "Gladio/Stay Behind" Networks Resurfaces, USA government State Department website, 20 January 2006

(All details are taken from the copy at archive.org in 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20080328042037/http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Jan/20-127177.html )

[5]

Media No Longer Laughing, Jim Garrison Says: Judge Revives View of JFK Assassination, Austin Wilson, Los Angeles Times, 12 March 1989.

In 2024 this was available at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-12-mn-900-story.html