Having looked at this stuff every so often for a while, my conclusion is, you don't know, I don't know, possibly even the people involved don't even know. I think people underestimate the difficulty of working this stuff out in an environment where people are deliberately and systematically trying to fool everyone else about the provenance of actions and such, because we are not used to that environment at all.

It doesn't help that for the same reason, I wouldn't particularly trust any press figure either. We have pretty good reason to believe the CIA has been involved with the press, and it's crazy to think other agencies would never have had the idea to get involved with the press. Is someone connecting person X to organization Y even telling the truth as they see it, let alone the question of whether they even have access to the truth. The odds of a given press figure A: having access to the truth B: deciding to tell you the truth and C: staying unmolested by these organizations even as they tell the truth about them over time strike me as effectively zero.