GOVERNMENT BY FORKED TONGUE: LYING AS POLICY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500001-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 24, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: July 28, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT - r W E D US, 1 -r
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500001-4
JUL 2 81981
Government By Forked Tongue:
STAT
Lying As Policy
Modern administrations
have all faced the
The hearings and the extraordinary statements
of the two ousted former national security aides
raise a phdoeophical question: When, if ever, is it all
right to he in the service of the U.S. government?
Before attempting to answer that question, some
historical perspective may be helpful. All modern
administrations have lied, in varying degree. There
are reasons. The United States emerged from World
War lI as a superpower. With that status came a
huge national security bureaucracy, including the
Pentagon, th~and other in dUjgLnce ncies.
1 the CIA was running covert ocer ns '
Since those operations are supposed to be secret
cover stories" were prepared to protect them in
case of exposure Thus the Eisenhower administra
tionlted about CIA efforts to overthrow Sukarno in
Indonesia. and about its one successful coup in Gua
temala. Under President John Kennedy, lies were
told during the Bay of Pip invasion.
Military control over information also created a
vast temptation to fib. During the Vietnam War,
Lyndon Johnson's version of events in the Tonkin
question of whether to lie.
Experience shows that
it's better not to comment
than to offer falsehoods.
By David Wise . fs 151
THERE CAME a time, as they like to say at
the Iran-contra hearings, when Marine Lt.
Col. Oliver North appeared before the
House Intelligence Committee in August of 1986
and proceeded to tell, by his own admission, a pack
of lies. When he returned to the White House from
his journey to Capitol Hill, he received a now-fam-
ous message from his boss, Rear Adm. John M.
Poindexter "Well done."
The message may have symbolized the Reagan
administration's conduct of foreign policy. Ollie
North lied and is proud of it (and the country appar-
ently loves him). Adm. Poindexter, no less adamant,
told his inquisitors: "I don't have any regrets for
anything that I did. I think the actions that I took
were in the long term interests of the country ...
And I'm not going to be apologetic about it."
For the first time in memory, the president's
men are selling lying as an instrument of national
policy. It is a whole new approach to the politics of
lying, as bold as the revived miniskirt, and appar-
ently to some Americans, just as attractive, if a
good deal less revealing. -
At least most of the time in the past, when high
officials were caught telling something other than
the truth, they waffled, doubletalked and just plain
denied it. The last thing they would do is actually
admit they had lied. (Nixon did, but only at the
end, after the Supreme Court had ordered the re-
lease of his most incriminating taps and the truth
could no longer be evaded.)
One previous eaceptim to the established rule
that the government must never tell the truth
about lying came during the Kennedy administra-
tion, when Arthur Sylvester, the assistant sear`
tary of defense for public affairs, announced -just
before the Cuban missile a'iais - that the Penta-
gon had no information about missiles in Cuba.
Later Sylvester stoutly defended the government's
"right ... to lie" to save itself "when it's going up
into a nudesr war."
His statements caused a fluor that no amount of
later explanations could repair. Sylvester's mis-
take was to say out loud what a good many high
officials believed, and apparently still do.
`The American political
system presumes tension
among the branches of
the government, but also
a basic framework
of honesty.'
Gulf was skewed to fit his policy. Who was the
wiser? There were no AP reporters or TV correspon.
dents on the destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf.
On the eve of the Reagan administration's inva-
sion of Grenada, White House - press spokesman
Larry Speakas called a network report of the inva-
sion "preposterous." The next day, the United
States invaded Grenada.
Political leaders who mislead the.,public and
Congress for political reasons may find' it conve-
nient to cloak their actions in the guise of "nation-
al security." Often, the line between actions taken
for political self-preservation and national security
is blurred, and deliberately so.
During Watergate, for example, there was one
i \ \ k I f?"
147.
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marvelous exchange, captured on the Nixon tapes,
when the president and his aides, John Dean and
Bob Haldeman, were discussing the burglary of
Daniel Ellsberg'a psychiatrist:
Dean: You might put it on a national security
grounds basis.
Haldeman: It absolutely was .. .
Nixon: National security. We had to get informa-
tion for national security grounds ... the whole
thing was national security.
Dean: I think we could get by on that.
Why should not government lie when the prim
is right, that is, when the stakes are high enough?
The answer is not so much moral as it is political
and constitutional.
The American political system presumes tension
among the branches of the government, but also a
basic framework of honesty. It assumes that the
executive branch will not Be to the public and to
the Congress. Public trust between the people and
their government is the basis of a demasaey. Sis.
sela Bok has written of the "presumption against
lying" that forms the basis of trust, without which
"institutions coilrpea"
There is an alNntaiw to government lying. It is
to tell the truth. Or, to remain silent when a mat.
ter is too seoitiw to reveal immediately to the
public. Contrary to the. argument sometimes
heard, a "no comment" a government spokes.
man will not be taken by the puss as confirmation
of a rumor if that reply is consistently given.
The American Vvernment, as Thomas Jeffer-
son wrote in the Dedaration of Independence, do.
rives its powers from "the consent of the gov-
erned." Omciai lying destroys that bond. The
people cannot give their consent when they do not
know to what they are conaserting ? -
David Wiese is the author of 'The Pblitia of
Lyi " (Random House). His latest work is a
snouel
, "The Samarkand Dimat-
W"b
A
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/24: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807500001-4 0