Fabricator (intelligence)

A fabricator is an intelligence agent or officer that generates disinformation, falsehoods or bogus information, often without access to authentic resources. Fabricators often provide forged documents in order to substantiate their falsehoods. It is normal intelligence practice to place identified fabricators on a black list or to issue a burn notice on them and to recall intelligence sourced from them.

A fabricator is often cited as a reliable source behind black propaganda or atrocity propaganda involving disinformation or information that has not been properly vetted but suits the agenda of the disseminating organization. Multiple fabricators are usually used to justify a Big Lie. The process of vetting to weed out fabricators and double agents is also referred to as source validation. Recent examples of this include the case of the Niger uranium forgeries and the mobile weapons laboratory in Iraq. There are numerous cases in which it is alleged that the Soviet Union and its satellite states employed fabricators to pass disinformation to discredit activist emigres in the United States.

Fabricators can be motivated by several factors:

(in historical order)

Virgilio Scattolini was the director of the Social Center of Catholic Action in the Vatican. As a former journalist, he had sold bogus Vatican information to various papers before World War II. During operation VESSEL in the fall of 1944, he was identified as a fabricator providing false intelligence on the Vatican to several agents of the OSS. The OSS acquired his information from two separate sources which eventually allowed OSS counterintelligence officer James Angleton to determine its fraudulent nature, but not before President Roosevelt was provided the reports as genuine.

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