Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_.original_ [18]
An eighth kind of inter-state lie is where leaders mislead to facilitate spying or sabotage during peacetime, as well as to limit the international fallout if caught in the act. For example, the United States engaged in lying after the U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in the spring of 1960. At the time, President Eisenhower was about to go to Paris to enter into serious negotiations with Premier Khrushchev over a nuclear-test-ban treaty, and he had made it clear that he did not want any complications from the controversial U-2 flights. After the spy plane was brought down, the president was told that the U-2s had a self-destruct mechanism, which guaranteed that neither Powers nor the plane would survive. So after Khrushchev announced the downing of the U-2, the Eisenhower administration declared that it was not a spy plane but a NASA weather-research plane that had accidentally wandered into Soviet airspace. When the Soviets then produced Powers, the State Department said that he had probably lost consciousness from a lack of oxygen and drifted into Soviet airspace. Finally, Washington was forced to admit that Powers was on a spying mission over Soviet territory.
But that was not the end of the lying. The Eisenhower administration then put out the story that although the president approved of the surveillance program, he was not personally involved in the planning of the overflights. In fact, Eisenhower later admitted that “each series of intrusions was planned and executed with my knowledge and permission.”27
The infamous Lavon affair involving Israel provides another good example of this type of inter-state lying. In 1954, Israel set out to damage Egypt’s relations with Britain and the United States by setting up a spy ring inside Egypt that would sabotage American and British facilities, but make it look like the Egyptians were responsible. After bombing the U.S. Information Service libraries in Alexandria and Cairo as well as a few other targets, plans went awry and the saboteurs were caught. Not surprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett maintained that it was all a “wicked plot hatched in Alexandria,” indeed a “show trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who have fallen victims to false accusations.”28
Ninth, states lie to gain advantage in the course of conducting military operations in wartime. During World War II, for example, the British mounted a massive deception campaign against Nazi Germany in which lying was commonplace. Indeed, it was in the context of these operations that Churchill made his famous statement that “in war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”29 The British were hardly an exception in this regard, as Roosevelt made clear when he said in May 1942 that he was “perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.”30 In fact, all of the participants in World War II mounted strategic deception campaigns against their rivals. Moreover, this stratagem is employed in virtually every war.31
The tenth kind of inter-state lying involves leaders attempting to get a better deal for their country when they are negotiating treaties and other formal agreements. They might lie to their bargaining partners about their own assets or capabilities, or, more likely, they might bluff about their reservation price—the price above or below which they would not be willing to cut a deal. One would expect to find examples of this kind of lying in a wide variety of circumstances, including arms-control and war-termination negotiations on the security side and international debt, trade, and monetary dealings on the economic side. After all, that is what happens when individuals negotiate