'A BODYGUARD OF LIES'
Christopher Hitchens surveys
the American government's addiction to falsehood
Washington THE straightest man in the Reagan admi- nistration is undoubtedly Mr George Shultz. He is no brighter than he looks, but compared to some of the wide boys and wild men on hand in Washington, he is a model of sobriety and rectitude. It was he who single-handedly destroyed the Presi- dent's plan for mandatory lie-detector tests by saying publicly and angrily that he would never agree to submit to one. If he wasn't trusted, he said, he had a perfectly good boardroom to go back to. The prop- osal to plug all bureaucrats into the poly- graph was substantially amended.
Some day, I want to write about the American faith in the polygraph, and about the whole idea of a machine that tells or can tell the truth. For the moment, it's enough to note that if there was such a machine the President would have to avoid it like the plague. He lies with such ease and artistry that it has almost become part of his notorious charm. When Mr Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua for all practical purposes wearing a US Army uniform, Reagan denied categoric- ally that he had any connection with the United States government. Shultz, invited to answer the same question, could not bring himself to lie so boldly. In a more scrupulously-worded reponse, he simply said that he had asked the Defence and State Departments, and they said they knew nothing.
The difference in style was also illus- trated the previous week, when the Washington Post revealed that much of the 'evidence' about Libyan terrorism which it had been printing was the result of a government-sponsored disinformation effort. A copy of the secret memo com- posed by the mysterious Admiral Poindex- ter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, showed an extensive planting job, designed to convince the American news media that Colonel Gaddafi was sponsoring a new wave of terrorism. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and ABC and CBS news have all apologised to their readers and viewers for passing on untreated gov- ernment waste as if it were the result of an on-the-level, off-the-record briefing. Confronted with this, Reagan denied that there had been any attempt to deceive or disinform. Mr Shultz, less bare-faced, implicitly confirmed the whole story by recalling Churchill's declaration that in wartime truth was so precious that it had to be secured by 'a bodyguard of lies'. To which one questioner asked why, in that case, there was no declaration of war on Gaddafi. 'There damn near is', replied the hopelessly honest Shultz, as yet another yowling pussycat squirmed out of the bag.
State Department and CIA spokesmen are never happier than when pointing out the unfairness of it all. Here are the Russians, they say, with their closed socie- ty and their KGB 'active measures'. While we have to fight this implacable foe with Congress and the press breathing down our necks. There are, arguably, two dimen- sions missing from this reasoning. The first is psychological. Can it be healthy to regard an open society as in some sense a disadvantage in the ideological combat? The second is more practical. When, in fact, have Congress and the press failed to take the Administration's word for it? In the most obvious instance, which is that of Vietnam, it took almost fifteen years for scepticism to become general. And the Reagan administration has, with the glar- ing exception of South Africa, had an almost uninterrupted run of indulgence from the other two Estates. In fact, seeing how eagerly the American press ingested every other and earlier horror story about Libya, there seems to have been no occa- sion to mount a special Poindextrous disin- formation job on it.
There have, in recent history, been four successful CIA manipulations of the Amer- ican press. At least, there have been four that we know about. Morton Halperin, who was a senior aide to Henry Kissinger until he found that his boss was tapping his home telephone, told Congress in 1978 of the four episodes known to him.
The first was an attempt to discredit domestic and foreign critics of the Warren Commission. That Commission, set up to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, relied heavily on the CIA for its generally reassuring and often contradic- tory conclusions. The agency gave a num- ber of scurrilous background briefings, defaming those who had cast doubt on the findings. In testimony before the House of Representatives Mr. Halperin said: One of the things they succeeded in getting which I do not mention in my statement was an article in the Spectator, a distinguished British publication, which apparently,
• according to the documents, was written in Langley, Virginia at the CIA headquarters, • placed in the magazine by assets of the CIA in Britain. Now that is obviously a magazine widely read by Americans and one which could not have helped but to influence the debate within the United States on the Warren Commission report, as well as abroad.
Makes you proud. Mr Halperin took pains to stress the circulation of the Spectator in America because the CIA's charter forbids it to carry out domestic operations.
The other occasions involved a briefing to Time magazine containing alarmist and derogatory material about the newly elected Salvador Allende of Chile; the exploitation of the murder of a CIA agent in Greece in order to derail a Senate investigation, and the circulation of black propaganda about a Greek dissident leader named Elias Demetracopoulos.
Since 1980, the climate has changed appreciably. The image of the CIA under Carter has become an analogue of the conservative image of America itself — a gianecompelled to fight with one hand tied behind its back. Under William Casey's stewardship, the leash has been slipped and the old firm is doing business at the old stand. You can tell this from minor touches, such as the fact that Mr Eugene Hasenfus was carrying a calling card from a little-known outfit named the Office of Humanitarian Assistance, while his aero- plane was loaded with lethal weaponry.
The point about this administration's 'bodyguard of lies' is that most of them are unnecessary. Nobody doubts or denies that the United States is directly involved in arming the Contras. For, the President to pretend shock at the very idea is laughable, and reduces his already slim chances of being believed when he chooses to tell the truth. The same goes for the effort to destabilise Gaddafi — an enterprise which if openly admitted could actually have recruited considerable popular support. For Mr Shultz's Churchillian comparison to be dignified, one would have to have a people who were sure about their cause and its justice, and prepared to believe that their government was acting in principle for the best. No such assurance is available in the case of the dubious battles in Libya and Nicaragua, and so the lying there is nothing more than the inadvertent' revela- tion of an uneasy conscience. If Mr Shultz and Mr Reagan are like any recent politi- cians in British history, they resemble Anthony Eden and Selwyn Lloyd in 1956 much more nearly than Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in 1940.
Previous page
