What is the role of the press in competitive intelligence?
The press is a fundamental component. In order to shape the general wisdom within your country, you need an echo chamber. You need somebody that will go public with this information. If you have a major media outlet quoting anonymous sources assessing the same kind of information that you want to plant in public opinion and the circuit of your intelligence, you have another mirror. Imagine that you’re a policy maker. You have this piece of intelligence that has just circulated throughout the intelligence agencies finding confirmation. Then you leak the same intelligence to a big newspaper. The big newspaper makes headlines of it, quoting anonymous sources. Then you can go on TV, and when you’re asked if it’s true, you can say, ‘Yes. We all have the same intelligence.’ You write that Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress “produced intelligence required by the current policy makers,” and that “this intelligence, whose source remained a secret, would be delivered to the press in order t
