A novel the CIA spent a fortune to suppress

Autocratic regime holds power over a territory with a long history of violent instability. The regime is guilty of corruption, nepotism, human rights violations, suppressing dissidents, etc. This is I think a requirement for it to hold power given the conditions. If the regime collapses even greater violence and general horrible stuff happens. There are plenty of examples in recent history. The Arab Spring comes to mind.

You have some leverage on the situation. You have reliable information about the bad stuff the regime is doing and you are a member of the press, a public figure, whatever. What do you do? What is the right thing to do?

And one step further and closer to the scenario in the article: suppressing the release of that information to protect the fragile stability and prevent a possible greater evil. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

There really does seem to be an "optimal amount of corruption" in absolutely any sufficiently complex society.

One could argue that. I know an Egyptian that had to leave after critique of previous and current regime but now has some appreciation for the current one whilst still acknowledging it's terrible authoritarianism. Similarly I'm very close Saudi that recognizes how democracy protests were brutally suppressed with beheadings but considers them to have had no chance of success whilst also recognizing the presence of fundamentalists types that led to the grand mosque seizure and it's subsequent effects on the country and is thus somewhat of a monarchist despite supporting democracy in Europe. I imagine there's similar situations all over the world from Armenian views on Russian influence in the light of Azerbaijani threat to Africans choosing between resource extractors.

However those are locals seeing local nuance and not foreign interventionists with something to gain and I'd say the CIA has a horrid track record when it comes to choosing the lesser evil (Perhaps born from a cold war time when allowing non alignment and the like was sadly not considered an option.) to the point where you're better of looking at the interests they represent in a given scenario than any plainly stated claims about goodwill or lesser evils.

Things like the Arab Spring weren't really driven by information such as by well organized Western trained individuals organizing efforts to overthrow their governments. Those groups were largely just waiting for some event to use as a justification for a planned action. And in any large country those events will inevitably happen. This [1] article from the times is quite amusing. In a nutshell, 'No we didn't fund them to start protests, we simply recruited people who despised their government, and trained them in organization, networking, and other forms of advocacy. And then we made sure the protests that did happen received 24/7 positive coverage. But really we played no role whatsoever in these completely organic movements.'

So the point I'd make with this is that information itself is something that should be free. Because it shapes views. Where things get dodgy is in 'inorganic' organizing and promotion. Inorganic is always tough to define both because we live in a global world, and because behind any revolution there are always genuine and real grievances. But I think everybody can agree that the Romanian people overthrowing Ceaușescu after he called everybody into a square for a propaganda rally was completely organic [2], and the CIA overthrowing Iran over oil in 1953 was completely inorganic [3]. Lots of things are going to fall in between those two extremes, but the more foreign involvement (and propaganda), the less organic something is.

But information? Information wants to, and should, be free.

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[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution#Revolution...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#...