Fabricator (intelligence)
A fabricator is an intelligence agent or officer that generates
A fabricator is often cited as a reliable source behind
Motivations of fabricators
Fabricators can be motivated by several factors:
- Fanaticism or ideology is often cited as the key reason behind fabricator activity. When fanaticism is involved or ideology becomes stronger than morals, fabrication may then be seen as a reasonable means to an end. The fabricator may invent the fake intelligence to help bring about a specific outcome to a situation.[7][9]
- Mental illness, such as confabulation, often combined with alcoholism, causes some individuals to fabricate intelligence, most often done as part of a fantasy of being a secret agent or to gain official attention.[10][11]
- Money is a strong incentive for some fabricators. Often, a reliable intelligence source agent will become a fabricator because of financial problems or greed. When the agent no longer has valid intelligence to sell to the conducting intelligence officer, the agent may decide to sell fabricated intelligence in order to satisfy need or greed.
Notable fabricators
Virgilio Scattolini was the director of the Social Center of Catholic Action in
Luis Manuel Gonzalez Mata-Lledo was a Spaniard who was fired in 1962 after being caught embezzling funds from his employer, the Dominican Republic Intelligence service. In 1963 he began a career as a fabricator. He attempted to sell fabricated intelligence and forged documents implicating Rafael Trujillo in a plot to assassinate President Juan Bosch, both in the Dominican Republic and at the Dominican Embassy in Paris. He later approached the U.S. Embassy in Algiers with another plot involving a "Third [Spanish] Republic Movement". Eventually he started posing as a Cuban intelligence officer peddling fabrications to the Brazilian Government, the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, Venezuela, Colombia and the Dominicans. By the end of the 1960s he was fabricating his own "KGB file cards" and "CIA file cards". By 1973 he had relocated to Paris where he continued to peddle fantastic fabrications.[2]
Lemuel J. Walker was a Liberian who fantasized about becoming an "American Secret Service Agent". From 1963, at age 17, onward he repeatedly crafted forged documents on letterhead of United States Government agencies, including the White House, National Security Counsel (sic), and many others. He used these documents to substantiate wild plots of coups and invasions against African states by American forces.[2]
Yehuda Gil was a Mossad agent who fabricated intelligence which nearly resulted in war between Israel and Syria.[13]
Ahmed Chalabi is an Iraqi politician and Iranian agent who fed and promoted false intelligence reports of weapons of mass destruction to Bush administration officials in order to encourage the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[17][18]
The Government of Iran is known to fabricate events to justify propaganda, some of which is based on lies dating back to the 1930s.[20] The Iranian state owned Press TV is known to diffuse fabricated stories.[21][22][23] Ofcom, Britain's independent media regulator, revoked Press TV's licence to broadcast in the UK[24] and the German media regulatory office (BLM) made a request to SES Astra to have the channel removed from the satellite; a German court later decided that the ban was not justified.[25][26]
Abdullah al-Omar is a Syrian propagandist who defected in 2012 during the Syrian civil war. He stated, "Our job was to fabricate, make deceptions and cover up for Bashar al-Assad's crimes".[27]
In mid-December 2021, it was revealed that the Japanese government had falsified data on orders to the construction industry—the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism had rigged data received from about 12,000 companies since 2013 at a pace of about 10,000 entries per year. Similar concerns were raised regarding Japan's official data on wages in 2018. Japan's prime minister Fumio Kishida expressed regret about the government misconduct, and said that they would immediately scrutinize what measures should be taken to prevent such a thing from occurring again. Saisuke Sakai, senior economist at Mizuho Research and Technologies, said that the biggest problem was not the effect on the GDP per se but the damage to reliability of (official) statistics.[28]
See also
- Disinformation
- Black propaganda
- Atrocity propaganda
- Big Lie
- Our Man in Havana, a book about a fabricator of intelligence for money.
References
- ^ Department of Defense, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, [1], January 31, 2011
- ^ a b c Dr. Robert L. Managhan, Trends in African Forgeries, [2], CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
- ^ Defense Intelligence Agency, Terms & Definitions of Interest for DoD Counterintelligence Professionals, [3] Archived 2013-07-17 at the Wayback Machine, May 2, 2011
- ^ Dapartment of Defense, Instruction Number S-5200.42 Defense Human Intelligence, paragraph 4.i., [4], December 8, 2009
- ^ The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Chapter 7, p. 372, [5], March 31, 2005
- ^ Sidney Blumenthal, Weapons of mass dissembling, [6], Salon, Feb 5 2004
- ^ a b c Joby Warrick, Warnings on WMD "Fabricator" Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says, [7], Washington Post, June 25, 2006
- ^ Judy Feigin, Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, [8], U.S. Justice Department, Office of Special Investigations, December 2008
- ^ Paul Woodward, ‘Fabricated’ Israeli threats provoke escalation in threats from Iran, [9], August 18, 2012
- ^ Arnold M. Silver, Questions, Questions, Questions, [10], CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, May 17, 2005
- ^ David R. McLean, Cranks, Nuts and Screwballs, [11], CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, September 23, 2003
- ^ Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, Counter Intelligence Reader Volume 2, [12] Archived 2013-07-17 at the Wayback Machine, Chapter 3: Counterintelligence in the Office of Strategic Services, p. 208
- ^ Bergman, Ronen. "Operation Red Falcon". Atavist. Archived from the original on 24 July 2015. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
- ^ Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Preliminary Inquiry Into The Sale Of Arms To Iran And Possible Diversion Of Funds To The Nicaraguan Resistance, [13] Archived 2012-12-12 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Senate Committee on Intelligence, Intelligence Activities Relating to Iraq Conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-06-11. Retrieved 2008-03-28.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link), June 2009 - ^ Senator Rockefeller, Congressional Record - Senate, [14], U.S. Government Printing Office, June 5, 2008
- ^ CNN, Iraqi minister: Chalabi will be arrested, [15], January 22, 2005
- ^ John Dizard, How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons, [16], May 5, 2004
- ^ Alfred Cumming, Congress as a Consumer of Intelligence Information, p. 8, [17], January 15, 2009
- ^ Meir Javendanfar, Iranian government stirs up anti-semitism with invented massacre, [18], The Guardian, 27 December 2010
- ^ Iranian Press TV accused of faking drone strike report, [19], The Telegraph, 2 Dec 2011
- ^ Iranian TV station ‘faked’ Somali deaths by US drones, [20], Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 2 December 2011
- ^ Fake rape fatwa story planted by Presstv spread around world by Islamophobes, [21] Archived 2013-06-30 at the Wayback Machine, Islamist.com, 3 January 2013
- ^ Iran's Press TV blames British royals for loss of licence, [22], The National, 22 January 2012
- ^ Minister: Iran to Protest Ban on Press TV through Legal Channels , [23] Archived 2012-04-13 at the Stanford Web Archive, Fars News, 7 April 2012
- ^ Another legal victory for Press TV, [24] Archived 2012-11-05 at the Wayback Machine, Islamic Radio & Television Union, 16 July 2012
- ^ Ivan Watson, Defecting Syrian propagandist says his job was "to fabricate", [25], CNN, October 10, 2012
- ^ Tetsushi Kajimoto and Kantaro Komiya (15 December 2021). "Japan overstated some construction order data for years, PM says". Reuters.