Intelligence Agencies & Wikipedia

Last update March 2021: The wikiwatchdog online search tool has finally gone out of existence after long or intermittent periods of downtime, with the William ‘Bill’ Colby article edits previously documented and discussed in this following piece having vanished from the database (the CIA finally has its desired result.)

A 2007 Wired Magazine article on wikiscanner (taken down shortly after this article’s initial publication) exposed the CIA (among others) as anonymous editors of Wikipedia. Deliberate, professionally engineered disinformation (information operations, psy-ops) is a long used tool of intelligence agencies, with a military history to ancient times. Other than CIA, with its’ extensive history of modern media manipulation, other organizations editing Wikipedia would certainly include the the USA’s Defense Intelligence Agency, British MI6, Israeli MOSSAD, other intelligence agencies and numerous corporations. A sort of ‘you are what you eat’ philosophy applied to ‘you will be what you think’ on behalf of CHEVRON, Diebold, Booz Allen, Westinghouse, General Dynamics, the International Chamber of Commerce, NATO and too many more modern gods worshiped at the temple of western military industrial capital to be named.

On the CIA anonymous edits of Wikipedia, there is one of particular interest. The entry on William ‘Bill’ Colby, a former Director of Central Intelligence, had some particularly damning information deleted (information that was never restored.) Using the wikiscanner replacement ‘WikiWatchdog‘, I was able to track down this following CIA edit. The Bold text is text deleted by the CIA:

“Shortly thereafter, an OSS friend offered him a job at CIA, and Colby accepted. Colby spent the next twelve years in the field, first in Stockholm, Sweden. There, he helped set up the stay-behind networks of Gladio, a covert paramilitary organizations organized by the CIA in order to prepare an eventual Soviet invasion, as he later described in his memoirs. According to a November 25, 1990 article by the Danish daily newspaper ”Berlingske Tidende”, quoted by Daniele Ganser in his 2005 book on Gladio, a source named “Q” confirmed William Colby’s revelations in his memoirs about the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavia

“Colby’s story is absolutely correct. Absalon was created in the early 1950s. Colby was a member of the world spanning laymen catholic organisation Opus Dei, which, using a modern term, could be called right-wing. Opus Dei played a central role in the setting up of Gladio in the whole of Europe and also in Denmark… The leader of Gladio was Harder who was probably not a Catholic. But there are not many Catholics in Denmark and the basic elements making up the Danish Gladio were former WW II resistance people – former prisoners of Tysk Vestre Faengsel, Froslevlejren, Neuengammeand also of the Danish Brigade.

“William Colby then spent much of the 1950s based in Rome, where he led the Agency’s covert political operations campaign to support moderate anti-Communist parties. After World War II, Italia was the first ground for the CIA covert operations to stop the Communist from legally taking power, in a strategy later dubbed ‘strategy of tension’ by the Italian press.

“On April 27, 1996, Colby died in a supposed boating accident near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. He reportedly did not mention any canoeing plans to his wife, nor was it normal for him to go boating at night. Colby had left his home unlocked, his computer on, and a partly eaten dinner on the table. Colby’s body was eventually found, underwater, on May 6, 1996. The life jacket his friends said he usually wore was missing. The body was found 20 yards from the canoe, after the area had been thoroughly searched multiple times. The subsequent inquest found that he died from drowning and hypothermia after collapsing from a heart attack or stroke and falling out of his canoe. There is no evidence that Colby went canoeing. There is no evidence that Colby died on April 27, 1996. Colby disappeared April 27, 1996. His body was recovered on May 6, 1996. Hence, the date of Colby’s death is somewhere between these two dates. The Internet Movie Database states Colby died on May 6, 1996. Colby was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on May 13, 1996.

“Conservative news reporter Christopher Ruddy (as part of the Arkansas Project) has claimed President Clinton had Colby murdered because Colby was going to write about a conspiracy between Clinton and Vincent Foster.

“The former CIA director acknowledged to Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp that the scenario described in the documentary, ‘’Conspiracy of Silence’’, is real, which tells of a sex ring that had links to political conservatives in Washington D.C. Not long thereafter Colby turned up dead under suspicious circumstances. John DeCamp has since authored The Franklin Coverup. This all came to public view on the morning of June 29, 1989, when the ”Washington Times’ headline was “Call Boys Took Midnight Tour of White House.””

Bearing in mind this is a single editing incident (according to the WikiWatchdog program) “edit on 2006-06-20 at 18:32:45 by 198.81.129.186 (relay301.net.cia.gov)” [20 June 2006 at 6:32pm] it should be noted since, in a subsequent, unattributed edit (not shown in bold in the preceding), this additional information had been deleted:

“He reportedly did not mention any canoeing plans to his wife, nor was it normal for him to go boating at night. Colby had left his home unlocked, his computer on, and a partly eaten dinner on the table. Colby’s body was eventually found, underwater, on May 6, 1996. The life jacket his friends said he usually wore was missing. The body was found 20 yards from the canoe, after the area had been thoroughly searched multiple times. The subsequent inquest found that he died from drowning and hypothermia after collapsing from a heart attack or stroke and falling out of his canoe. There is no evidence that Colby went canoeing. There is no evidence that Colby died on April 27, 1996. Colby disappeared April 27, 1996. His body was recovered on May 6, 1996. Hence, the date of Colby’s death is somewhere between these two dates. The Internet Movie Database states Colby died on May 6, 1996.”

This second edit had been made since the CIA had learned to cover its tracks, as the edit of 20 June 2006 had been made before the tracking software referred to in the 2007 (now deleted) Wired article had been developed and released. The new ‘WikiWatchdog’ is a subsequent development to the original software which appeared to have been sabotaged. With the WikiWatchdog, this is perhaps a short lived opportunity, WikiWatchdog most certainly will be attacked to prevent articles such as this one (indeed the life of wikiwatchdog does seem to have been short, I notice the links to wikiwatchdog are dead, as this article took off with numerous reads on 15 July 2014, the link has been subsequently restored, but tool’s functionality appears to be disabled; author’s note)

There are several ‘hot button’ issues buried by the noted CIA changes to the Wikipedia article on William Colby, circumstance of Colby’s death, Opus Dei’s involvement with ‘Gladio’, the death of Vince Foster and the ‘Franklin Scandal.’

We can use this following, related, short Wikipedia article (disinformation) on the Franklin Scandal as a point of reference:

“The Franklin child prostitution ring allegations took place between 1988 and 1991 and involved an alleged child sex ring serving prominent citizens of the Nebraska Republican Party, as well as high-level U.S. politicians. The allegations also claimed that the alleged sex ring was led by, “a cult of devil worshipers involved in the mutilation, sacrifice and cannibalism of numerous children.”The allegations centered on the actions of Lawrence E. King Jr., who ran the now defunct Franklin Community Federal Credit Union (FCFCU) in Omaha.

“State Foster Care Review Board submitted the results of a two-year investigation into the physical and sexual abuse of foster children to the Executive Board of the Nebraska Legislature, who were investigating reports of child sexual abuse linked to the credit union. Authorities launched a probe, interviewing a number of claimed abuse victims who said that children in foster care were flown to the U.S. East Coast and were abused at “bad parties.” After investigation, a grand jury in Douglas County (of which Omaha, Nebraska is the largest city and county seat) determined the abuse allegations were baseless, describing them as a “carefully crafted hoax” and indicted two of the accusers on perjury charges.The grand jury also suggested that the abuse stories originated from a vindictive employee terminated by Boys Town, the famed refuge for troubled youths. Later, a federal grand jury concluded that the abuse allegations were unfounded and indicted 21 year old Alisha Owen, an alleged victim, on eight counts of perjury. The same grand jury also indicted multiple officers of the credit union, including King, for crimes related to the embezzlement of funds from the credit union. Alisha Owen served 4-1/2 years in prison.

“Historian Philip Jenkins explored how hot topics such as the Franklin allegations, whether or not they are worthy of attention or credible on their own merits, are seized by political opportunists for their own purposes. He also described how cases such as the Franklin allegations can acquire credibility, even if they lack any credibility inherently, when reported in various media in a credulous voice. Numerous conspiracy theories evolved and persist, claiming that the alleged abuse was part of a widespread series of crimes including devil worship, cannibalism, drug trafficking, CIA arms dealing and links with the first Bush Administration.^“

This preceding is the entire text of the Wikipedia article on Wednesday, 5 February 2014.

Of the several problems with this article, including the missing fact the lead investigator’s private plane disintegrated in mid-air and the grand jury had been mislead by prosecutors, most remarkable is the omission of any reference to the “Conspiracy of Silence” documentary film funded by the Discovery Channel and produced by Yorkshire Television of Britain. This suppressed film contains video testimony of several of the professional participants in the investigation, absolutely refuting the Wikipedia article, as well detailing how the FBI engineered a cover-up of the Franklin Scandal (Author’s note: this video was killed at youtube on 15 July 2014, when this article took off with hundreds of hits. Fortunately, vimeo provides an alternative site to watch)

And then you have:

“What you have to understand, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have” -Former CIA Director William Colby to “Franklin Coverup” author John DeCamp.

Further refuting Wikipedia is the work of Nick Bryant, a journalist who not only penned “The Franklin Scandal” but has unimpeachable credentials:

“Nick Bryant’s writing has recurrently focused on the plight of disadvantaged children in the United States, and he’s been published in numerous national journals, including the Journal of Professional Ethics, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and Journal of School Health. He is the co-author of America’s Children: Triumph of Tragedy, addressing the medical and developmental problems of lower socioeconomic children in America” -franklinscandal.com