David Ignatius Quotes
World War II provides a string of celebrated cases of deception and manipulation.
Ignatius, David. Opinion column. The Washington Post, 2014.
The quotation was given by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld just prior to the war with Iraq, 2003.
A false flag operation is one where a country’s covert operatives attack some asset of the nation and blame it on a foreign enemy—often to consolidate political power or gain public support for a war. For example, the Nazi’s secretly burned down the German parliament and blamed it on the Russian communists.
Hunt was being questioned about his forgery of a State Department cable linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam:
After the report was produced someone had handwritten “Draft” on it. The technique of using government agents to spread disinformation to Americans has always been very controversial. The NYPD claims that despite this report, it is the policy of the department not to allow officers to disseminate disinformation. See {589484}. He did not say that civilian agents or paid informants did not do it for the department.
This covert project — PBSUCCESS — to destabilize Guatemala was exposed by the Guatemalan government. To minimize the embarrassment in the U. S., the PBSUCCESS CIA staff asked headquarters to fabricate sensational stories to keep newspapers and the fledgling TV news busy and distracted from covering the Guatemala story that the CIA was trying to destabilize the government in order to bring about regime change. The CIA was prohibited by law from doing this but the agency at that time ignored many laws. It is not known if the phony stories were actually planted at that time.
Most CIA Directors have not had this extreme attitude, but because Casey did, journalists, members of Congress, other government officials and even Presidents have often distrusted the CIA and their personnel more than was necessarily warranted.
Jacobo Arbenz, 1915-1971, was the President of Guatemala who the Central Intelligence Agency ousted by organizing a coup and providing a CIA airplane to terrify and intimidate Arbenz’s loyal soldiers. Guatemala had never been bombed before and the low flying planes had the desired effect. This quotation is important because it shows that the United States engaged in some terrorism and some officials actually used the term “terror” in describing one of our activities.
David Reynolds Ignatius is an American journalist and novelist. He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. He has written eleven novels, including Body of Lies, which director Ridley Scott adapted into a film. He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and currently Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program. He has received numerous honors, including the Legion of Honor from the French Republic, the Urbino World Press Award from the Italian Republic, and a lifetime achievement award from the International Committee for Foreign Journalism.
