Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-86.46.22.35-20130403153709/@comment-64.33.250.214-20140817214821

Weedle McHairybug wrote: 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. So The Patriots have multiple agents within these organizations, with different levels of access to their information. Doesn't mean they control them. To have complete control, they'd need to have everyone on their side. There'd be no one not working for them. Say Konami had insiders working within Nintendo. Konami would hold influence, but wouldn't control Nintendo. Even according to conspiracy, the Illuminati doesn't control everything. Rather, they manipulate the power structures.

A number of agents, including Solid Snake, left the CIA because of trust issues. Were every CIA agent on Cipher's payroll, no one would leave or be allowed to leave. The fact that Solid became displeased with the system tells us Cipher compromised the CIA. If the CIA were under Cipher's complete control, it should have been a larger adversary in the games. To my knowledge, from what I've read on this website, it's not specifically stated that either the CIA or KGB are branches of Cipher. What we know for certain is these groups contain Cipher spies.

It's possible Solidus was hired by Cipher agents within the CIA, but not the organization itself. There's a huge risk present in hiring a clone, or anyone who looked like Big Boss. Any non-Cipher CIA member who found out could relay this information to other sources outside of Cipher's domain. Even more suspicious would be drawn by hiring a teen. Someone on another website suggested that Solidus was 14 when he worked for CIA in Liberia, based on the LET project timeline and when he first met Raiden.