Spies lie. It's what they do. Back in the day, when much of the job was performed by humans working in the target country it was a survival mechanism. Now its just a character trait that the spook culture selects for.
From the Daily Mail, January
A former CIA operative has revealed the agency pursues people with a certain mental disorder as it makes them the best agents.
John Kiriakou, who had a 14-year career as a CIA officer, said the agency 'actively seeks to hire people who have sociopathic tendencies,' but avoids individuals with a full-blown disorder.
A 'sociopath' is someone who lacks empathy, disregards the feelings of others and may manipulate or harm people without remorse, often for their own personal gain.
'Sociopaths are impossible to control,' said Kiriakou. 'They slip through the cracks because they have no conscience and they pass the polygraph very easily because they don't feel guilty.
Someone who has some of these qualities tend to rise to the highest levels of the CIA.
'People who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience but are still perfectly happy to work in moral legal and ethical gray areas,' said Kiriakou.
Kiriakou admitted that he falls into the category of having sociopathic tendencies, explaining how he was 'happy to break into people's houses and plant bugs.'
The former officer used the idea that he was part of the good guys and that his country needed him as a way to feed his sociopathic tendencies.
The CIA has admitted that spies have pathological personality features that help them with their espionage efforts, such as a sense of entitlement or a desire for power and control....
....MUCH MORE
As noted in our outro from "Spying is Lying: How David Cornwell Became John Le Carré":
Not to put too fine a point on it, December 13, 2020:
Upon the Death of John le Carré, A Flashback To the Most Interesting Author Interview You Will Ever See
Whenever I hear a spook talk, Brennan, Clapper, Dearlove, Steele, any of them, I am reminded of the John le Carré line:
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”
— Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1963
They lie for a living. They're professional liars, the very nature of their business is lies and trafficking in lies.
[note: le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6, he knew these people]
