Special to WorldTribune.com

Bill Gertz, Inside the Ring, Washington Times

Countering foreign strategic deception operations has been one of the official missions of all U.S. intelligence agencies since the Reagan administration.

But now one of the last units devoted to counteracting foreign lies, deception and denial of information by states like China, Russia and Iran is being closed down, U.S. officials [said]. The counterdeception unit, known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee, is part of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a high-level analysis group of both officials and private sector experts located at CIA headquarters but officially part of the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

For more than 30 years, all intelligence agencies have been required to operate internal units devoted to identifying and countering disinformation and deception operations. The reasons were simple: to prevent strategic surprise and to stop false or misleading information from causing U.S. leaders to make wrong decisions based on false premises.

An example of a successful strategic deception operation has been China’s success in persuading American leaders and the general public that Beijing, despite being a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship that views the United States as its enemy, poses little or no threat. …. According to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, bureaucratic resistance within the intelligence community, combined with the policies of current intelligence agency leaders, has resulted in most of the counterdeception units being eliminated, except for the NIC committee that, until the mid-2000s, was headed by Lawrence K. Gershwin, a longtime strategic intelligence analyst who warned about the threat of campaigns to deceive U.S. policymakers.

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  U.S. intelligence closing unit tasked with countering foreign strategic deceptions