Re: “Reporters Dish on How Politico Protected Biden: ‘Don’t Write About the Laptop, Don’t Talk About the Laptop’” – Jon Miltimore, Substack January 25, 2025
https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/reporters-dish-on-how-politico-protected?utm_medium=web
Jon, Since you persist in resurrecting my comments about CIA disinformation tactics made in 1983 and keyed to my long-ago experiences in Vietnam, and treating them as if they were gloss on current government practices, I would direct you to a two part commentary which I penned for Spy Talk in response Edward’s Snowden’s own exploitation of my remarks. (See the links below .)
Missing from both his discussion and yours are context and an appreciation of why I spoke out in 1983 — an escalating effort by Reagan officials to roll back prohibitions on the manipulation of American news media handed down by the two previous administrations. One such diktat, dating from 1977, barred the CIA from using news organizations as operational cover except under extraordinary circumstances. Despite the caveat, this was a major step in the right direction, and I did not want to see it reversed.
Since then, as you doubtless know, the threat of malign “influence” (propaganda) operations by forces far less accountable than the CIA has grown to proportions inconceivable even ten years ago and extends to entire media ecosystems like Musk’s X and Trump’s own Truth Social or whatever he calls it now and the messaging he delivers once again from the Oval Office.
One defense against the new breed of truth usurpers is absolute clarity about the unique dangers they pose — and the need to make the perpetrators, including platform owners, liable for the lies they spread through their media.
It was in anticipation of the metastasizing of fake news that I raised such a ruckus about past versions of it in 1983 and continue to call out those who traffic in it.
For the record I have done extreme penance for my own efforts on the CIA’s behalf to affect public coverage of the Vietnam war. Even while employed by the Agency and operating discreetly, I pushed back hard against my own missteps and those of others by ensuring that the unvarnished truth, as reported by our best sources, got to officials (and some journalists) at the time with the power to make a difference. After the war, distraught over our many sins in Vietnam, and especially our failure to rescue countless valiant Vietnamese allies, I wrote a book aimed at shaming official Washington into interceding, covertly or diplomatically, to save whoever could still be saved.
The Carter administration prosecuted me for publishing my memoir Decent Interval without official approval – i.e. without submitting to CIA censorship – and I was repaid with a vicious Supreme Court decision that cast me as the author and agent of “irreparable harm” to the nation, even though the government had officially acknowledged that I had betrayed no secrets. .
So, if I am a bit insistent about refining interpretations of my actions that ignore the facts and the unique circumstances behind them, perhaps you can understand.. At my age I tend to make every moment count and to cut through the bullshit at every opportunity.
The Spy Talk edition of my two-parter about Snowden’s take on my interview appears at:
https://www.spytalk.co/p/ed-snowdens-act-two?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.spytalk.co/p/ed-snowdens-act-two-part-two?utm_source=publication-search
I have republished it on my own archival website Frank Snepp Exclusives