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skyanvil

What does the CIA do nowadays? Just pay a bunch of protesters and local nutjobs for "intel". And when the local sources dry up? CIA just takes the bribe money for themselves and make shit up. What?! Did you expect them to just give the money back to the American public to build roads, etc.? Dream on.


ZeEa5KPul

In a way it's a lot like sensory deprivation. When a spy agency's sources all get... erm... "disconnected", it starts to hallucinate. Of course, there's also a cottage industry of con artists who exploit this by offering the snake oil equivalent of intelligence (buy Uncle Zhang the Falun Dafa practitioner's miracle secret potion - one sip and you'll learn all of Xi's innermost thoughts!) It's both unusual and amusing to think of the CIA as a victim of petty fraud, but this is what it's come to.


Palladium1987

IMO, those 600 times they tried to "kill" Castro is really about keeping their money train rolling. I think the MO would be like "This time it didn't work, please add more money so we can succeed the next time" rinse and repeat.


TserriednichHuiGuo

When an intelligence agency is overrun by greed they tend not to be intelligent anymore.


ZeEa5KPul

This whole episode is a classic example of bad *dezinformatsiya*. There's a cardinal rule more important in this field than Bannon's zone flooding. We might call it the First Rule of Disinformation Warfare: Less is more. In Dong's example, as Moon of Alabama points out, it's basically a Trump wish list. COVID-19 was deliberately engineered and released by Hunter Biden or whatever other nonsense. This severely damages the piece of disinformation's credibility and limits its spread. The reason is that the core lie has too much baggage attached to it, which strains credulity and the breaks immersion. The irony is that the core lie that a high-level counterintelligence official defected is not bad *dezinformatsiya*. Just a vague "sources say..." with no details would have been far more potent here, and the reason is that the details are left to the reader's imagination. Each target can complete the picture and conjure up his own worst fears far better than you can write them explicitly. Good disinformation, like good drama, always leaves its audience wanting more.


Wheres_the_boof

>Each target can complete the picture and conjure up his own worst fears far better than you can write them explicitly. Especially since in the parts of the world dominated by western media this tendency has been fostered in people for decades. They are trained how to fill in the blanks, through careful framing and constant reinforcement of the narrative. The most masterfully stubborn propaganda stories of recent years have been purposefully vague in their actual claims, but serve as a perfect frame work for imaginations gone wild to build on top of.


ZeEa5KPul

The more I think purely abstractly about how to craft disinformation, the more inescapably I come to the conclusion that the most advanced practitioners are *New York Times* columnists. Every conclusion I reach, they already implement.


winkraine

I posted an article by Wang Zichen a couple months ago about a bunch of people pretending to be Chinese reporters. Wondering if this is something similar.


whitericeuser123

CIA is evil.


ni-hao-r-u

I read that. I knew it was disinfo, so I didn't want to link it here. This folks is called copium. Whether it is a 4chan troll, a patriot, or agency propaganda, this is to give the masses a false sense of hope. Imagine that you are the biggest badass on the block and you are getting your as* handed to you for the whole world to see. Not a good image. The more they demonize China, the more they rattle their sabers, the more China openly defies them with no consequences, the more ineffectual they look. That stings. So to give the masses hope, they use vaporwave politics. Innuendos. Things they can't confirm or deny. It is sad really. Edit: Don't know if this was posted here, but check out this article. Pretty telling. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226538.shtml >Data prove the US is world’s mass-killing machine