This article outlines concerns about the involvement of intelligence services in public communications, particularly those aimed at affecting public opinion in their home nation. It differentiates the main kinds of activity, assessing their anticipated benefits and disbenefits both for the agencies and for the public. Section 1 considers the kind of communication intelligence agencies can directly address to a public audience, and finds this is mainly limited to public relations statements on the organisation’s own behalf and affirmation of intelligence that governments have already publicised. Section 2 looks at how sometimes positive intelligence is disseminated publicly, as was notably the case as Russian forces gathered on Ukraine’s border prior to the 2022 invasion, and sets out reasons for regarding this as necessarily a limited exception rather than the norm. Section 3 examines the rationale for intelligence agencies to coordinate counter-disinformation activities as part of their counterintelligence mission, highlighting the significant coordinated steps that countries in the NATO alliance have taken to support these. It identifies as a central problem that the definition of disinformation operationalised in this work can include true information if that serves an adversary. This does not help the public become better informed. In fact, as shown in Section 4, because counter-disinformation operations allow the subsumption of reasoned dissent under the label of adversarial interference, they arguably constitute a more real, present and rigorously describable danger than is presented by the alleged problem of ‘disinformation’. For they are largely unaccountable, often unethical, and sometimes illegal and unconstitutional. In the worst of cases, they can support unjust war and crimes against humanity. Accordingly, there are good reasons for citizens, and certainly for academic researchers, to maintain rigorous critical distance from communications of intelligence provenance.

In the West, during the Covid crisis, leading scientists and many physicians publicly voiced their disagreement with the WHO's account of the pandemic, as well as with the health policy management of the crisis by most governments. Under normal circumstances, such criticism would have prompted contradictory debate. But not only did such debates never take place, these scientists were censored and treated as pariahs. How can we understand this? This article proposes some answers, showing 1) that the official account of the crisis has a structure that forms a deceptive but coherent narrative, claiming the name of Science (the author calls this the Covid doxa) 2) that this narrative has been protected at the cost of censorship and ostracization on an unprecedented scale, 3) that this narrative has been imposed as “indisputable truth” by a veritable cartel set up to ensure control of legitimate information, a cartel mainly in the USA and made up of the pharmaceutical industries, the WHO under the influence of Bill Gates’ network, the governments of most countries, the digital giants and the legacy media.