Meet the Ex CIA Analyst Who Explained How the CIA Uses Journalists to Spread Disinformation

"The reason we wanted to plant this information was that we were trying to persuade the US Congress that Saigon should…continue to get a great deal of aid."

Meet Frank Snepp (b. 1943).

Snepp is a journalist and former CIA analyst, interrogator, and recipient of the Intelligence Medal of Merit. During his time at the CIA (1968–1976), Snepp rose to become the Agency’s top analyst of North Vietnamese strategy.

Snepp was recruited by the CIA in 1968 while a student at Columbia University. The following year, he traveled to Saigon where he worked as a counter-intelligence officer and managed Agency network activities, including prisoner interrogations and torture (or at least what many would describe as torture).

Years after Snepp left Saigon, he described his work in Vietnam, which he believed paved the way for the CIA’s torture program established during the War on Terror, in an article for the Los Angeles Times.

“As a CIA interrogator in Vietnam during the last five years of the war, I know I put my soul at extreme peril. I am still haunted by what I did, and I suspect that what I witnessed and perpetrated in those years set the stage for the Bush Justice Department’s approach to torture.”

One of Snepp’s many jobs at the Agency was to brief the press on matters of national importance. Or in Snepp’s words, when “we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue.”

Snepp made this statement in a 1983 interview (see above) that I’d encourage readers to watch. In the video, the former CIA analyst discusses how the CIA manipulates journalists with lies and half-truths in pursuit of its own agendas.

“For instance, if we wanted to get across to the American public that the North Vietnamese were building up there force structure in South Vietnam, I would go to a journalist and advise him that in the past 6 month X number of North Vietnamese forces had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail system through southern Laos. There is no way a journalist can check that information, so either he goes with that information or he doesn’t. Usually the journalist goes with it, because it looks like some kind of exclusive.”

What Snepp was describing was one of the most simple tactics the CIA has used for decades to control information. He said the success rate of planting these stories in the media was 70-80 percent.

“The correspondents we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists in Saigon,” Snepp said.

Snepp even offered the names of the journalists he successfully targeted: Bud Merrick of US News and World Report; Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker; Malcom Brown of the New York Times; and others.

Snepp worked his way into these journalists’ trust exactly as one would expect.

“I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravel Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them, to slowly but surely gain their confidence,” Snepp said.

All of this sounds sleazy, but it gets worse.

Snepp goes on to explain how, after gaining the trust of the reporters by giving them “dollops” of truth, he’d be use them to plant stories that were false.

“One piece of data, for instance, that we managed to plant in New Yorker magazine had to do with a supposed North Vietnamese effort in 1973 to develop airfields along the border of South Vietnam. The reason we wanted to plant this information was that we were trying to persuade the US Congress that Saigon should…continue to get a great deal of aid. And that the North Vietnamese were the chief violators of the ceasefire accord. That was printed in the New Yorker magazine under the by-line of Robert Chaplin, as indeed was a great deal of information we tried to circulate.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Snepp openly discussed how the CIA would lie to journalists to gin up support public support for the war effort, which put pressure on Congress to deliver aid for the Vietnam War to combat a new threat that was a complete fiction.

When you look at wars in recent history—Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, just take your pick—one can sees the shadow of these tactics, which presumably have only grown more sophisticated and aggressive since the 1970s. What’s worse, the CIA is no longer content with promoting disinformation campaigns to support military crusades abroad.

I believe America made a grave mistake by not heeding the advice of Harry Truman in the wake of the JFK assassination.

“For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.

…

"There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it."

Frank Snepp, like others at the CIA before him, saw the CIA up close and did not like what he saw. Unfortunately, few Americans today seem willing to acknowledge that the United States, like other empires before it, has a state within a state.