Intelligence reporter Jeff Stein delivers a collection of tidbits that makes you wonder just what’s in the water at the CIA. Exhibit 1 is a scrapped 2003 plan to make a gay sex video with a fake Saddam Hussein, for distribution in Iraq (I’m sure there would be an audience somewhere for it, though I can’t say I understand that audience). Then it gets weirder yet:
The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.
Which, one imagines, to Arab ears would be approximately as convincing as Borat posing as Barack Obama and embracing Indonesia and Kenya as his simultaneous places of birth.
The CIA offers some awesome spook-speak in reply:
“While I can’t confirm these accounts, if these ideas were ever floated by anyone at any time, they clearly didn’t go anywhere,” the official said.
They did have some pretty hilarious success, on the other hand:
According to histories of the 2003 invasion, the single most effective “information warfare” project, which originated in the Pentagon, was to send faxes and emails to Iraqi unit commanders as the fighting began, telling them their situation was hopeless, to round up their tanks, artillery and men, and go home.
Many did.
