*[ The White House & the CIA ]* Marchetti: (continued) But basically the CIA is controlled by the White House, the inner circle of government, the inner circle of the establishment, in general. The CIA is doing what these people want done so these people are appreciative and protective of them, and they in turn make suggestions or even go off on their own sometimes and operate deep cover for the CIA. So it develops into a self-feeding circle. FD: Spreading disinformation is done through the newsmedia. Marchetti: Yes. Its done through the newsmedia. The fallacy is that the CIA says the real reason they do this is to con the Soviets. Now, I'll give you some examples. One was a fellow by the name of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. FD: Penkovsky Papers? Marchetti: Yes. I wrote about that in `The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The Penkovsky Papers was a phony story. We wrote the book in the CIA. Now, who in the hell are we kidding? The Soviets? Do we think for one minute that the Soviets, who among other things captured Penkovsky, interrogated him, and executed him, do you think for one minute they believe he kept a diary like that? How could he have possibly have done it under the circumstances? The whole thing is ludicrous. So we're not fooling the Soviets. What we're doing is fooling the American people and pumping up the CIA. The British are notorious for this kind of thing. They're always putting out phony autobiographies and biographies on their spies and their activities which are just outright lies. They're done really to maintain the myth of English secret intelligence so that they will continue to get money to continue to operate. Thats the real reason. The ostensible reason is that we were trying to confuse the Soviets. Well that's bullshit because they're not confused. One of the ones I think is really great is `Khruschev Remembers.' If anybody in his right mind believes that Nikita Khruschev sat down, and dictated his memoirs, and somebody -- Strobe Talbot sneaked out of the Soviet Union with them they're crazy. That story is a lie. That book was a joint operation between the CIA and the KGB. Both of them were doing it for the exact same reasons. They both wanted to influence their own publics. We did it our way by pretending that Khruschev had done all of this stuff and we had lucked out and somehow gotten a book out of it. The Soviets did it because they could not in their system allow Khruschev to write his memoirs. Thats just against everything that the Communist system stands for. But they did need him to speak out on certain issues. Brezhnev particularly needed him to short-circuit some of the initiatives of the right wing, the Stalinist wing of the party. Of course the KGB was not going to allow the book to be published in the Soviet Union. The stuff got out so that it could be published by the Americans. That doesn't mean that the KGB didn't let copies slip into the Soviet Union and let it go all around. The Soviets achieved their purpose too. This is one of the most fantastic cases, I think, in intelligence history. Two rival governments cooperated with each other on a secret operation to dupe their respective publics.