The World Factbook, Explained

The news last week that the Central Intelligence Agency was ceasing publication of its unclassified World Factbook would not, in ordinary times, be a big deal.  We could assume that well-meaning intelligence community leaders, after consulting with the appropriate stakeholders, and balancing the pros and cons, had decided it was no longer worth the money and other resources required.  They would explain clearly why they were deep-sixing one of their most popular and widely-used products, one that connected the CIA with the general public and was widely used around the world.  

But these are not ordinary times.  CIA offered no explanation. Some commentators pointed to Director John Ratcliffe’s commitment to “strict adherence to the CIA’s mission” as a possible explanation.  The Factbook is certainly not central to the Agency’s mission and could arguably be abandoned to focus on higher priorities.  But the Factbook has been publicly available for almost 50 years, surviving through plenty of lean times in the past.  Back in the 1980s analysts like me were tasked to support the Factbook by fact-checking and doing research, but the Factbook has for years been produced mostly by contractors.  Certainly the cost of this project was a rounding error in the Intelligence Community budget.

A more uncomfortable reason can be discerned if we look at how the Factbook was seen by the CIA, and by its many users.  In 2020 CIA described the Factbook as “an authoritative source of basic intelligence that has and will continue to be an essential part of CIA’s legacy.”  The New York Times in its obituary article concluded that “The Factbook, published by the world’s premier spy agency, was long considered an objective source in an increasingly subjective information ecosystem.”

“Authoritative.” “Objective.” We all know that we live in a world where information is easier to get than ever, but reliable information is harder to get than ever.  Anyone can go online or to a chatbot and get answers to questions—often hundreds of answers.  Which ones do you trust?  How do you know?  The CIA Factbook was one of those invaluable tools where you could be confident that the facts it provided were the result of careful research, done by experts, double and triple-checked for accuracy. It is this confidence that longtime users of the Factbook cite again and again.

Unfortunately even CIA insiders seem to misunderstand how today’s world works.  Retired senior Agency analyst Beth Sanner told the New York Times “When it started, it was important, because there was no such thing as the internet,” she said. “Now it’s like, what’s the point?”  The point is that ‘the internet’ is often a cesspool of disinformation and confusion.  A trusted guide is needed.

Who could be against this, you might think.  Who could want to make it harder for ordinary people to get objective information?  Sadly the answer is, a lot of people.  Including a lot of people in the current American administration.  This is an administration built on a foundation of lies.  Lies about elections.  Lies about immigrants.  Lies about the President’s corrupt dealings.  This is an administration that fired the head of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics because it didn’t like the jobs numbers she calculated.

The leaders of the intelligence community have as their first duty to seek the truth.  But today these leaders have unfortunately been active participants in misinforming the nation.  Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reportedly fired senior members of the National Intelligence Council last spring because they accurately reported that Venezuelan gangs were not conspiring with the Venezuelan government to attack the United States.  The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was let go after he questioned the effectiveness of US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. 

At the center of the rot is Trump’s obsession with the Intelligence Community’s finding in 2016 that Russia was intervening to support his election.  Quelling this analysis is a central part of his campaign of revenge against anyone in government who participated in investigating his questionable or illegal activities.  One of the first acts of newly appointed CIA Director Ratcliffe last spring was to do yet another review of those findings.  The review confirmed that the analysis was sound and the conclusions warranted, but Ratcliffe went on TV to falsely claim the Agency had been biased.  

There is an interagency committee charged with uncovering and punishing all those on Trump’s enemy list.  Its chair?  DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

It is unlikely that any senior officer looked at the World Factbook and thought “we need to shut it down in case it contradicts our lies.”  The Factbook dealt with hard data—population numbers, names of obscure ethnic groups, trade statistics.  But it was nevertheless a standing affront to a worldview that asserts the truth is what we say it is.  To a set of leaders determined to paper over inconvenient ‘fake news’ and replace it with self-serving narratives. 

The World Factbook was, compared to much of today’s online world, a drab affair.  It had no influencers behind it, no dancers or singers touting its greatness, no fancy videos.  It had nothing to recommend it but its utility and the credibility that came with the CIA name. Along with thousands of other compilations of carefully scrutinized facts and data assembled the world over by hardworking scientists, bureaucrats, journalists, and scholars, it was one of the vertebrae in the hidden backbone of the modern world, the backbone of a shared reality.  

Observers of tyrants have long noted that one of their strategies is to attack the idea of truth. There is no truth, they say.  All sources are biased.  Everyone lies.  Once enough people believe this, they have no foundation for objecting to what the tyrant says and does.  As the great political philosopher and explainer of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, told us in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics”:  “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.  And for this trouble there is no remedy.”  

For this trouble, the CIA Factbook was, if not a remedy, a corrective.  A sign that your government believed there was truth out there, and you had a right to it.  We will miss you.