Why Leaders Lie (15 page)

2
. This kind of selfish behavior was on display during the Iran-Contra scandal, when senior members of the Reagan administration were investigated and some were charged with breaking the law. See Eric Alterman,
When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences
(New York: Viking, 2004), chap. 5.

3
. Threat deflation is another possible kind of strategic lie. In this case, a leader lies to his public to make a threat look less serious than it actually is. This behavior might come into play when a leader is determined to avoid war in the face of intense public pressure to the contrary. Threat deflation is not considered in this book, mainly because it rarely occurs.

1
. Quoted in J. A. Barnes,
A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23.

2
. Sissela Bok,
Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life
, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), xxiii.

3
. Quoted in Avishai Margalit, “The Violent Life of Yitzhak Shamir,”
New York Review of Books
, May 14, 1992, 23. Another Israeli prime minister, Moshe Sharett, once remarked: “I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism. These are historical facts that cannot be altered…. In the end, history will justify both the stratagems of deceit and the acts of adventurism. All I know is that I, Moshe Sharett, am not capable of them, and I am therefore unsuited to lead the country.” Quoted in Simha Flapan,
The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 51–52.

4
. Of course, this does not mean that leaders should axiomatically assume that foreign diplomats and statesman are lying to them, because that kind of paranoia would lead them to misread the
many situations in which they are being told the truth. Stalin exhibited this kind of thinking in the spring of 1941, when he foolishly dismissed warnings from Churchill and others about an impending German attack on the Soviet Union. See Richard K. Betts,
Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1982), 34–42; Gabriel Gorodetsky,
Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 8; Barton Whaley,
Codeword BARBAROSSA
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).

5
. Charles Lipson, “International Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs,”
World Politics
37, no. 1 (October 1984): 1–23.

6
. Quoted in Anthony Marro, “When the Government Tells Lies,”
Columbia Journalism Review
23, no. 6 (March/April 1985): 34. See also Arthur Sylvester, “The Government Has the Right to Lie,”
Saturday Evening Post
, November 18, 1967, 10, 14.

7
. Jody Powell,
The Other Side of the Story
(New York: Morrow, 1984), 223. It should be noted, however, that Powell did not think government leaders had to lie often—he only did it twice in his four years in the White House—and he deeply regretted that it was necessary on those occasions (ibid., 223–40).

8
. Regarding the Rhineland, the historian Alan Bullock writes: “Years later, reminiscing over the dinner table, Hitler asked: ‘What would have happened if anybody other than myself had been at the head of the Reich! Anyone you care to mention would have lost his nerve. I was obliged to lie and what saved me was my unshakeable obstinacy and my amazing aplomb. I threatened unless the situation eased to send six extra divisions into the Rhineland. The truth was, I had only four brigades. Next day, the English papers wrote that there had been an easing of the situation.’” Alan Bullock,
Hitler, a Study in Tyranny
, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 343. See also Michael Mihalka,
German Strategic Deception in the 1930s
, Rand Note N-1557-NA (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, July 1980); Arnd Plagge, “Patterns of Deception: Why and How Rising States Cloak Their Power” (working paper, Yale University, March 18, 2009).

9
. Gorodetsky,
Grand Delusion
, 115–18, 126–30, 207–10; Jiri Hochman,
The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 6; Adam B. Ulam,
Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–73
,
2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1974), 241–43, 252–53; Adam B. Ulam,
Stalin: The Man and His Era
(New York: Viking, 1973), 502–3.

10
. Edgar M. Bottome,
The Missile Gap: A Study of the Formulation of Military and Political Policy
(Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), chaps. 2, 7; McGeorge Bundy,
Danger and Survival
(New York: Random House, 1988), 416; Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush,
Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), chaps. 3–5, 9; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 6.

11
. Holger H. Herwig, “The Failure of German Sea Power, 1914–1945: Mahan, Tirpitz, and Raeder Reconsidered,”
International History Review
10, no. 1 (February 1988): 68–105; Paul M. Kennedy, “Tirpitz, England and the Second Navy Law of 1900: A Strategical Critique,”
Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen
2 (1970): 33–57; Paul M. Kennedy,
The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), chap. 13, especially 223–27; Paul M. Kennedy,
Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight Studies
(London: Fontana, 1984), chaps. 4–5; Jonathan Steinberg,
Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet
(London: Macdonald, 1965), intro., chaps. 4–5.

12
. Quoted in “Report: Nixon Feared Israeli Nukes Would Spur Arms Race,”
Haaretz
, November 29, 2007. See also Avner Cohen,
Israel and the Bomb
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Seymour M. Hersh,
The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy
(New York: Random House, 1991).

13
. Bundy,
Danger and Survival
, 392. See also Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow,
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 78–80; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali,
One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964
(New York: Norton, 1997), 222–23, 252–53; Zubok and Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War
, 266.

14
. Trevor Wilson,
The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988), 341; Ernest D. Swinton,
Eyewitness: Being Personal Reminiscences of Certain Phases of the Great War, Including the Genesis of the Tank
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1933), chap. 12. See also B. H. Liddell Hart,
The Real War: 1914–1918
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), 249, 255;
B. H. Liddell Hart,
The Tanks: The History of the Royal Tank Regiment and Its Predecessors, Heavy Branch, Machine-Gun Corps, Tank Corps, and Royal Tank Corps, 1914–1945
(London: Cassell, 1959), 1:3, 1:47, 1:53–56.

15
. Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman,
Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It
(New York: Dell, 2000); Jeanne Guillemin,
Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Matthew Meselson et al., “The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979,”
Science
, November 18, 1994, 1202–8; Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad,
Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

16
. Quoted in Bullock,
Hitler
, 329. See also ibid., chap. 6; Ian Kershaw,
The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 5; Ian Kershaw,
Hitler: 1889–1936; Hubris
(New York: Norton, 1999), chaps. 11–12; Ian Kershaw,
Hitler: 1936–45; Nemesis
(New York: Norton, 2000), chap. 1; Mihalka, “German Strategic Deception.”

17
. Quoted in Joachim C. Fest,
Hitler
, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 556.

18
. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa,
Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 108. See also 33, 39, 46–47, 56, 86, 91–93, 190–91.

19
. Richard M. Nixon,
Six Crises
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 353–57; James P. Pfiffner,
The Character Factor: How We Judge America’s Presidents
(College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2004), 22, 24.

20
. Powell,
Other Side of the Story
, 225–32.

21
. Marc Trachtenberg,
A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), appendix 2, also available online at
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/
trachtenberg/appendices/appendixII.html

22
. Norman Rich,
Friedrich von Holstein, Politics and Diplomacy in the Era of Bismarck and Wilhelm II
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 2:745. See also ibid., 2:678–745; David G. Herrmann,
The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996),
chap. 2; Gerhard Ritter,
The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth
, trans. Andrew and Eva Wilson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 96–128; L. C. F. Turner,
Origins of the First World War
(New York: Norton, 1970), 2–5. It appears that the Moroccan Crisis is the only known case of a country making an empty verbal threat for coercive purposes. Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing,
Conflict among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 213–16.

23
. Bob Woodward, “Gadhafi Target of Secret U.S. Deception Plan,”
Washington Post
, October 2, 1986. See also Gerald M. Boyd, “The Administration Denies Planting Reports in the U.S.,”
New York Times
, October 3, 1986; Leslie H. Gelb, “Administration is Accused of Deceiving Press on Libya,”
New York Times
, October 3, 1986; Alex S. Jones, “Initial Report on Libyan Plots Stirred Skepticism,”
New York Times
, October 3, 1986; Jeffery T. Richelson, “Planning to Deceive: How the Defense Department Practices the Fine Art of Making Friends and Influencing People,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
59, no. 2 (March/April 2003): 67–68.

24
. After discussing the problems presented by strategic nuclear parity, Henry Kissinger writes, “The answer of our NATO friends to the situation I have described has invariably been to demand additional reassurances of an undiminished American military commitment. And I have sat around the NATO Council table in Brussels and elsewhere and have uttered the magic words which had a profoundly reassuring effect, and which permitted the Ministers to return home with a rationale for not increasing defense expenditures. And my successors have uttered the same reassurances and yet if my analysis is correct these words cannot be true, and if my analysis is correct we must face the fact that it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide.” “NATO: The Next Thirty Years,”
Atlantic Community Quarterly
17, no. 4 (Winter 1979/1980): 468. See also Dana H. Allin,
Cold War Illusions: America, Europe, and Soviet Power, 1969–1989
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), chap. 4; Robert S. McNamara, “The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misperceptions,”
Foreign Affairs
, Fall 1983, 79.

25
. William Carr,
The Origins of the Wars of German Unification
(London: Longman, 1991), 144–203; F. Darmstaedter,
Bismarck and the Creation
of the Second Reich
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 351–63; Lothar Gall,
Bismarck: The White Revolutionary
, trans. J. A. Underwood (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 1:346–59; W. N. Medlicott,
Bismarck and Modern Germany
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 78–84; Otto Pflanze,
Bismarck and the Development of Germany: The Period of Unification, 1815–1871
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), chap. 18.

26
. Barbara Demick, “‘Intelligence Fiasco’ Stirs Up the Korean Peninsula,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 24, 2005; Dafna Linzer, “U.S. Misled Allies about Nuclear Export,”
Washington Post
, March 20, 2005.

27
. Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Waging Peace, 1956–1961: The White House Years
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 546. See also James Bamford,
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency; From the Cold War through the Dawn of a New Century
(New York: Doubleday, 2001); Michael R. Beschloss,
MAYDAY: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair
(New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Ted Galen Carpenter,
The Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the First Amendment
(Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1995), 55–56; David Wise and Thomas B. Ross,
The U-2 Affair
(New York: Random House, 1962).