Cliff Sims

So is this something that we need to try to talk... If a news outlet is going to publish that, do we need to try to keep them from publishing that and make the case to them of why there could be lives at stake for them to publish this?

In other cases, I just had to say...

ignore it or no comment because it was something that we perhaps were involved in that I just couldn't talk about.

Or sometimes we actually weren't involved in whatever the thing was, but I couldn't say that we weren't because that would expose maybe who was involved.

So it's a lot of different things you have to navigate from a communications perspective.

My favorite story about intelligence community communications.

Do you know the phrase, where the phrase, I can neither confirm nor deny came from?

I don't.

So way back in the Cold War, we find out that the Soviets have lost a sub in the Pacific Ocean.

They don't know where it is, but we do.

So we gotta come up with a way how we're gonna get this submarine.

And we also have to do it in such a way that the Soviets don't know what we're doing.

So some of your former colleagues in the CIA hatch a plan.

We're gonna build a giant ship, and the ship's gonna open up in the bottom, and a giant arm is gonna come out of the bottom of the ship, go down to the bottom of the ocean, and pull this submarine up.

But obviously, that would be quite an operation, so we can't let the Soviets know what we're doing, so we gotta come up with a cover story for what we're gonna do.

So they contact Howard Hughes.

what billionaire, kind of eccentric billionaire, kind of the Elon Musk of his day in some ways.

And they say to Mr. Hughes, we want you to be the cover story for this.

And we want you to say that you are mining some kind of rare mineral off of the ocean floor.

And because you're such an eccentric billionaire, people will buy this.