Udo Ulfkotte is a former editor for a major German daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2014 he published a best-selling book claiming that "members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for spinning the news in a way that supports U.S. interests," and that "some German outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO."

Some critics have thrown doubts on Ulfkotte's personality and background. But as I know from my own foreign affairs experience, the U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies do try to influence media reporting with what they themselves describe as black or gray information. Usually they operate on a "scratch my back" basis — you publish the information we give you and we will give you insider contacts and information.

But at times they are more direct, for example in the way they were able to plant a media story of a nonexistent massacre in China's Tiananmen Square — "machine guns mowing down students in the hundreds or even thousands" — even as independent witnesses in the square insisted they saw nothing of the sort. (What they did see was wild revenge shootings in the streets after anti-regime crowds had fire-bombed and killed quite a few soldiers sent to clear the square.)