CIA Director Casey’s alleged quote about disinformation is, itself, a falsehood

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

This quote, attributed to the late CIA Director William J. Casey, is being widely and unreliably circulated as a Casey policy statement.

The quote is false. It was willfully fabricated.

The sole source claiming to have witnessed and exposed the quote was Barbara Honegger, then a low-level White House domestic policy researcher. Honegger in 2014 first claimed that she had been present at a cabinet meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room in “early February” of 1981.

No person and no written or recorded evidence substantiates the claim.

Let’s look at the facts surrounding Honegger’s alleged Casey quote.

The quote has no known origin

The quote has no documented origin. The first known reference to the quote is cited, secondarily, from Mae Brussell, a radio figure and host of the show, “Dialogue: Conspiracies.” Research infers, through Reddit, X, and other discussion forums, that Brussell read the alleged quote on her program at an undermined date in the late 1980s.

The supposed Casey quote, with Brussell as a reference, appears in The Conspiracy Reader: From the Deaths of JFK and John Lennon to Government-Sponsored Alien Cover-Ups, a 2012 anthology assembled by Mark Koernke under the pseudonym Al Hidell. The book is poorly referenced and offers no information on the primary source.

Honegger claimed in a November 25, 2014 post on Quora that she was the originnal source of the quote. This is the full text of what she said:

I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration.

The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the ‘intelligence’ that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines.

As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.

Barbara Honegger

Honegger never produced the notes that she said she wrote at that meeting.

Spectacular news story went unreported

Sarah McClendon was a legend in 20th century political journalism. She began as a White House correspondent in 1944. An aggressive reporter who asked tough questions and demanded real answers, the legendary McClendon remained on the job for nearly 60 years, grilling every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

Was the very senior McClendon a “close friend and colleague” of low-level White House staffer Honegger? We do not know. Honegger has referred to McClendon as her “godmother,” an apparently in the political and not familial sense.

Research finds no record that McClendon, representing her own McClendon News Service, never publicly asked questions about Honegger’s Casey quote, and never wrote about it.

Sarah McClendon died in early 2003, at age 92, more than a decade before Honegger’s purported revelation.

The CIA director’s quote about disinformation would have made a spectacular news story, if it was real. McClendon certainly would have been on it had she deemed it credible, presuming that she even received it at all.

The next thing to do is to see if the source would have been in a position to hear Casey’s quote.

Source was never in a position to attend the meeting

It is all but impossible for Honegger to have attended a Reagan cabinet meeting as she had claimed.

From January 1981 to March 1982, Honegger worked in the White House as a researcher and policy analyst for Martin Anderson, who was Reagan’s Assistant for Policy Development. Anderson dealt only with domestic policy.

A White House researcher and analyst is a “minor official” who would not have been near the West Wing, let along the Roosevelt Room, during a cabinet meeting. Honneger would have been in what was then the Old Executive Office Building, since renamed the Eisenhower Building.

Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s National Security Adviser at the time, later said Honneger “was nowhere in the policy loop.” Honegger, said Allen, “couldn’t possibly have known what was going on.”

Having been in the Roosevelt Room for the first time with President Reagan in 1984, I recall, and reference from photos, that about eight people could sit on each side of the table, for a total of about 16 with the president on the end. Along the walls, as many as 20 or 30 chairs, if squeezed tightly together, could accommodate guests or, in a cabinet meeting, senior staff. Reagan had 13 cabinet members in 1981.

Other officials like Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, Presidential Counsel Edwin Meese, National Security Adviser Allen, and others would have been in the room, plus note takers and immediate support staff.

There would have been no space or need for a low-level researcher like Honegger, whose boss, had he attended, would have occupied one of the chairs along the wall for senior staff.

Even if, for the sake of argument, Honegger had been in the room, there would have been many eyewitnesses.

Nobody ever corroborated Honegger’s claims to have been at the meeting, or verified what she alleged that Casey had said.

No CIA issues on cabinet meetings that month

Reagan held four cabinet meetings in February, 1981. The official record does not show whether Casey did or did not not attend any of those meetings, but it does show that issues pertaining to the CIA were not discussed. A CIA director’s presence would have been a waste of time.

Honegger said that the cabinet meeting took place in “early” February, in the “first couple of weeks” of the administration. Reagan was inaugurated on January 20.

The first cabinet meeting, on February 4, dealt with a regulatory task force.

The February 10 meeting was about a grain embargo, government personnel, inspectors general, an economic program, special prosecutor legislation, reorganization authority, and cabinet procedures and schedules.

No foreign policy or intelligence matters were discussed in early February.

The February 13 cabinet meeting discussed operations of departments on George Washington’s birthday, cabinet council, placement of personnel, budget issues, economic programs, and “remaining issues” that President Reagan directed.

The last meeting of the month, on February 26, covered the bailout of the Chrysler corporation, agriculture, a program of economic recovery, taxing Social Security benefits, and cabinet councils.

Nothing related to the CIA at all in February, or anything that would have required Casey’s attendance at a cabinet meeting.

Casey is on record has having attended one large meeting at the White House that month. It was a National Security Council meeting on February 6 of cabinet-level principals, including the secretaries of State and Defense, and NSC staff with the Executive Office of the President.

A presidential assistant for domestic policy development, let alone his junior researcher, would not have attended an NSC principals meeting.

Motives

After serving as a domestic policy researcher, Honegger was promoted to head the Reagan administration’s gender discrimination agency review. She quit in 1983 in a policy protest.

A few months later, she defected to the campaign of Jesse Jackson, who sought the Democrat nomination to run against Reagan’s reelection campaign. Jackson was a polar opposite of Reagan on nearly every issue and was considered the most radical national figure in the Democrat party at the time.

Clues to determine validity

In attempting to determine the validity of a controversial piece of information, one should be wary of:

• An unsubstantiated quote;
• An unsubstantiated quote that first circulated on a conspiracy theory radio show;
• An unsubstantiated quote from a purported but unproven sole source who had quit in anger and had reason to discredit her former employer;
• An unsubtantiated quote that circulated for years among discussion groups on Reddit, X, and other social media, and published in a poorly sourced compendium titled “Conspiracy Theories”;
• An unsubstantiated quote later claimed by someone who purported to have been there and taken notes, but never produced the notes;
• An unsubstantiated quote later claimed by someone who purported to have been there and taken notes, and given the information at the time to the influential dean of the White House press corps, who never wrote about it despite its sensational news value;
• An unsubstantiated quote later claimed by someone who claimed to have been there but, shortly after allegedly hearing it, did a 180-degree political reversal to join the far opposition to defeat her former employer;
• An unsubstantiated quote later claimed by someone who thought 9/11 was a government conspiracy to let terrorists attack the country.

Honegger’s other stories don’t stand up to scrutiny

Honegger apparently said nothing of her claims until 33 years after the purported cabinet meeting where she said Casey made those words.

By then, the purported quote had circulated widely on social media and in books that never revealed the primary source. She sat silent for years as the quote circulated, never claiming credit until 2014. Did she even originate the quote at all, or was she simply seeking attention decades after the fact?

Honegger’s 2014 claim followed years of wild allegations and theories so far on the fringes that even her ideological allies disclaimed her work.

In her 1989 book, October Surprise, Barbara Honegger was one of the early proponents of the conspiracy theory alleging that members of Reagan’s 1980 campaign made a secret arrangement with the ayatollahs of Iran, in which the regime would wait until the election against President Jimmy Carter to free the American hostages.

The purpose, Honegger alleged, was to prevent Carter from rescuing the hostages from their ordeal and claiming credit before the election.

Two congressional investigations found no conclusive information to support the October Surprise theory. Even the late Christopher Hitchens, then still a left-winger writing in The Nation, called Honegger’s 1989 book, October Surprise, “a classic demonstration of how not to write about that nagging problem of our time, criminal covert activity among the governing elite.” Hitchens wasn’t trying to discredit the October Surprise theory; he believed in it.

The Los Angeles Times, reviewing Honegger’s book, said that “her obsession to uncover secrecy and show the dark side of the men around Reagan has made her reporting so devious and convoluted that the final product is a discredit to her own story.” Honegger used an Iranian source so disreputable, the Times said, that “Virtually everything he says is either false or foolish.”

“Honegger’s work is definitely in the conspiratorial mold and as such it is likely to become an addition to the library of conspiracy theorists and buffs,” the review continued. “More sober readers will be certainly disappointed with Honegger’s transformation of a potentially serious case of foul play by a governing elite into a confused and unconvincing tale.”

9/11 Truther

After October Surprise, Honegger dabbled more in politics, ran for Congress, and fell into obscurity. She emerged after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With her previous fame, she became a prominent 9/11 Truther. She alleged that the al Qaeda operation was a government conspiracy that deliberately allowed, or even orchestrated, the attacks. She has stated that no hijacked aircraft hit the Pentagon, and that the destruction was caused by explosives placed there in advance.

Separately, she once told a reporter that she had been guided by “channeled information . . . as if it were from the future.”

Conclusion

No evidence exists that the William Casey quote about disinformation is real.

Of the dozens of people who would have been in the room when Casey allegedly made the statement, not one has corroborated the story.

Confidence is very high that Barbara Honegger, the sole purported witness, never attended the 1981 cabinet meeting at all.

No news contemporary accounts contain or refer to the quote, even though Honegger claimed to have given the quote to the most senior White House correspondent, a tough journalist whom Honegger claims had been her “good friend and colleague.”

Written sourcing of the quote cites Mae Brussell on her 1980s “Dialogue: Conspiracies” radio show, and offers no primary source information.

Honegger proved over the years to be an unreliable fringe source on important historic events.

The purported quote from CIA Director William Casey, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” is, indeed, false.