Muddying the Historical Waters with Conspiracy Theories

Gary North - August 14, 2019

"James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence, once told me that when the CIA pulls off something, it muddies the waters by placing different and conflicting stories in the media. The result, he said, is that there is too much to investigate, and people end up arguing with one another over which story is correct, and the facts of the event are never investigated. Today with the Internet all sorts of stories can be put into play in order to cover an event in confusion." -- Paul Craig Roberts (Aug. 12, 2019)

The moment I read this, I knew it was true. Yet the thought had never occurred to me before.

I trust the source, Paul Craig Roberts. He's a free market economist. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan. He was one of the authors of the Reagan tax cut in 1981, the largest percentage tax cut in marginal tax rates since 1914.

What about Angleton? Although his Wikipedia entry does not mention it, he was a member of Skull & Bones. He was one of the founders of the CIA. He ran Operation CHAOS, which was a secretive CIA program that illegally spied on American citizens from 1967 to 1974.

Angleton was in charge of the CIA's investigation of the Kennedy assassination. This appears on the CIA's website.

Whatever genre they work in — history, journalism, literature, or film — observers of the intelligence scene find James Angleton endlessly fascinating. The longtime head of counterintelligence (CI) at the Central Intelligence Agency has been the subject, in whole or substantial part, of dozens of books, articles, and films, including five in the past three years. Beyond the vicarious appeal of looking at the shadowy world of moles, double agents, traitors, and deceptions, the enduring interest in Angleton is understandable, for he was one of the most influential and divisive intelligence officers in US history. He shaped CIA counterintelligence for better or worse for 20 years from 1954 to 1974 — nearly half of the Agency’s Cold War existence — and his eccentricities and excesses have been widely portrayed as paradigmatic of how not to conduct counterintelligence.

Angleton’s career ended abruptly amid controversy over damaging disclosures about Agency domestic operations that forever changed the place of intelligence in the American political system. Angleton’s real and perceived legacy still influences counterintelligence practices in the US government and public perceptions of CIA.

It is a long defense of Angleton. Here is how it ends.

But the raw details of CI operations are among any service’s most closely guarded secrets, and properly so. Angleton reportedly once said that “if you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service.” The same may well apply to a historical understanding of CIA counterintelligence. Necessary restrictions on information about the enterprise that he considered the foundation of all other intelligence work probably will prevent us from seeing the reality of him and instead consign us to continue looking at shadows and reflections. Angleton may remain to history, as he fancied himself in life, an enigma.

In short, he was a major figure in the CIA from the very beginning until he was let go in 1975. He is still respected by the CIA.

Here is the logic of the CIA's strategy of muddying the waters. If there are multiple competing conspiracy theories, none of them is going to be able to gain traction sufficient to overcome the official view of the government. It is easier for the general public to believe the government's view than it is for them to do the research necessary to decide on which of the competing conspiracy theories is the correct one.

I have long understood this problem with respect to revisionist history. But what had not occurred to me is that some of these theories have been deliberately planted in the media by the CIA. The important thing to consider is this: if the CIA does this, it is because it is attempting to conceal the activities of the CIA.

The CIA is the probable source of the phrase "conspiracy theory." Ron Unz, who runs the best clearing house website of alternative viewpoints, offers evidence.

These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America was Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.

Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.

During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.

But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.

Whenever the CIA itself is the source of one or more of these conspiracy theories, then if one of its theories is exposed as a fraud, this does not hurt the CIA in the slightest. The discovery of fraud has also called into question the plausibility of other competing theories of the particular event, one of which is probably closer to the truth than the others. Result: the government's view prevails by default. But the government's view is itself a conspiracy theory: the most successful of all the conspiracy theories of the event. It is the outcome of an organized conspiracy at the top. What does not get public attention is the CIA's connection with one of the theories: the accurate one.

But there is a downside to this strategy. With the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, it is now possible for multiple competing theories to gain millions of adherents. This erodes confidence in the government's official view. The adherents of one or another conspiracy theory are able to call into question the plausibility of the government's version. This does not prove "who done it." This proves that people should not trust the government's identification of "who done it." This leads to a loss of legitimacy for the government.

We have entered into the twilight zone of competing theories, each of which calls into question the main conspiracy theory, namely, the government's official explanation. This is going to be positive for freedom in the long run.

This video by James Corbett has had over 3 million hits. It is an anti-Establishment video, not a solution to the historical problem. But it works just the same.