Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-86.46.22.35-20130403153709/@comment-1672596-20140817000243

64.33.250.214 wrote: Weedle McHairybug wrote: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the CIA and Cipher opposing forces in MGS? I'm pretty sure they're working against one another. Knowingly recruiting a clone and allowing him access to CIA information would be a huge risk. Especially when said clone is the perfect clone of Big Boss. Unless, the CIA didn't know he was a clone. If they did know then that's stupid on their part. In either case, hiring a teenage clone isn't of much asset. Solidus would be of more use once he physically matured."

Actually, Cipher was implied to have manipulated Hot Coldman's forces in Peace Walker (who most certainly were not CIA especially when Coldman, the only actual CIA member among the group, is heavily implied to have been demoted to such an extent that they literally had to place him as CIA Station Chief simply to have an excuse to ensure he doesn't harm them even if he does talk about whatever mission it was he was in the know about, presumably Operation Snake Eater), plus it's heavily implied in Ground Zeroes (in the side ops, heck, even the main story to some extent) that Cipher even manipulated the CIA into making the base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a black site, so no, they most certainly were not enemies. That tells us the CIA was corrupt, and had Cipher agents working within the organization. Which is true of any intelligence agency. There's always spies working from the inside. If they were really on the same team, why the need for triple agents like Ocelot and Paz, who worked for both CIA and Cipher? There's a difference between manipulation and control. Cipher planting agents in other intelligence agencies doesn't mean they control them. KGB also had CIpher agents (again, Ocelot and Paz), but they weren't exactly best friends with the CIA. For the record, even in 2009 where the Patriots had near-total control of America as it is, they still kept most of their agents in the dark about there being other agents among them, as evidenced by how Richard Ames not only didn't even know Revolver Ocelot was a fellow Patriot agent, but was even convinced by the Patriots that his cover story was fully intact (both he never even realized until literally the last minutes of his life that Ocelot is a Patriot agent [heck, it even acted as his unfinished last words], and that the Patriots lied to him about the airtightness of his cover story), not to mention the Patriots, despite clearly having a large amount of control over virtually all of America as it is, still found it fit to have Ames secretly be a Patriot member while holding DIA membership. Heck, Paz didn't even know Miller was even a contact for Cipher (I'm not going to say "Agent" since that implies membership, while Miller made clear that he was not a member at all in even the secret call between him and Zero), and she was high enough up in the ranks to not only get orders directly from Zero, but even meet Zero face-to-face, so their having agents within groups they are technically allied with, many not even knowing of the others' existence, isn't exactly news. Heck, even countries that are firm allies with us nonetheless place agents that feed on our information. And that's not even getting into the illuminati, which was so secretive that even mentioning affiliation with the Illuminati casually is grounds for getting yourself killed by them.