One interesting effect of the War on Terrorism has been the way it has transformed many of the leading personalities in the Bush administration.

Take President Bush himself, for example. A few short months ago, people spoke and thought of him as if he were a dim, arrogant and shallow man who spoke English as if it were his second language, and who was being led by the nose by smarter men in his administration ... George Cheney, perhaps.

George W still has a little difficulty finding the right words for the ideas he wants to get across, but September 11 has given him a cold, indignant anger and determination that has completely altered our perceptions. Gone are the impressions of shallowness and immaturity. The war has turned him into a bigger man - the unquestioned leader of the United States and, perhaps to a lesser degree, of the alliance of nations fighting terrorism.

The feuds we were led to believe were roiling his staff, especially between Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, have vanished, to be replaced by an impression of unusually gifted people playing calm, effective, well-harmonised roles. They seem right on top of their jobs.

And then there's Donald Rumsfeld, who seemed fussy and maybe a little over the hill in his first appearances as Secretary of Defence in the Bush administration. For a time, in the early days of the War on Terrorism, he resisted the idea of regular press briefings, but was persuaded that they were important. He never had better advice. No one who has listened to one of these briefings can be in any doubt that Mr Rumsfeld has an extraordinary talent for them. He speaks in the same way Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York did after September 11 - simply, openly and directly ... as if he were trying to explain something to a trusted friend. Absent completely is any impression that he is reading from a script written by a committee. Absent completely is the cloak of pomposity that bureaucrats so love to wrap around themselves. Absent completely is any impression of deviousness, or of a hidden agenda.

Isn't it too bad that whatever he's got can't be bottled and sold by the gallon? But one puzzling thing has occurred on Mr. Rumsfeld's watch - he made one of those odd moves a few days ago that leave you with the impression you're watching just one abbreviated step of what is, in reality, a much more elaborate dance.

One of his staff, an undersecretary of defence for policy, Douglas Feith, announced the creation of a new Pentagon agency called the Office of Strategic Influence.

The main purpose of the office, he said, would be to centralise oversight of military information operations, such as spreading messages on a battlefield by leaflet or airborne broadcasts. The office would also explore other ways "of affecting enemies' perceptions" of what the military are doing.

"We have an interest," said Mr Feith, "in the enemy not knowing, not being comfortable about what we are going to do...we're going to preserve our option to mislead the enemy about what our operations."

Well, okay, so far so good...this isn't exactly new, armies have been faking each other out ever since there were such things. It's standard operating procedure for any military unit, from the biggest to the smallest, to work to mislead its enemy. Could the Normany landings have been successful if Germany hadn't been fooled into thinking the Allies were going to land at Calais? Probably not. Is there anybody in the world silly enough to believe that Winston Churchill, asked by a reporter before D-Day where the landing was going to take place, would have told the truth? One hopes not. But the American press didn't seem to get it at all. The Office of Strategic Influence? They called it the Office of Strategic Mendacity and speculated that its job was to spread lies.

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist whose normally iron grip on reality makes her one of the most effective humourists writing today, ended a column on the subject with this: "Our cause is just. So why not just tell the truth?" She wasn't trying to be funny.

She wasn't the only one, there was quite a lot of carrying on in that more-democratic-than-thou vein.

After a week or so, Mr Rumsfeld told reporters that the office would be shut down. He said the outpouring of criticism from the press had made it impossible for the agency to do its job properly.

The Pentagon, he said, would never lie.

Really? Most people define lying fairly broadly. It is the practice of deceiving people by not telling the truth. But to lie, you don't have to say something that is untrue. The greatest triumphs of propaganda, as Aldous Huxley said, have been lies told by keeping silence about the truth.

By that broad definition, governments lie all the time, as a matter of routine. Public relations people are paid to put across, not what you might describe as the unvarnished truth, but a version of the truth that is acceptable to their employers. That's what spin is all about - pitching an interpretation of events to the press and other audiences.

But even by the narrowest definition - that is, a lie being an untrue tale - governments around the world routinely lie in order to advance their cause.

Former President Lyndon Johnson lied when he said North Vietnamese gunboats had fired on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Former President Nixon lied about Watergate.

Former President Clinton fairly recently admitted lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

I don't mean to particularly single out American presidents. It isn't hard to come up with examples of lies, big and small, told by governments both close and far away. Most governments have at least one department, normally an intelligence office, that has a mandate to lie - except they usually don't call it lying, it's propaganda, or disinformation.

A famous example is a lie told by the USSR's KGB. Many people will remember New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whose arrest and prosecution of a local businessman, Clay Shaw, in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy was a hot topic back in the late '60s.

Clay Shaw travelled widely in connection with his business, and had at one time been a CIA source of information about Eastern Bloc countries.

The KGB arranged to publish exaggerated information about Shaw's CIA connection, not in a communist newspaper, but in an independent Italian newspaper, Paese Sera. The story was picked up by Western papers, notably the New Orleans States-Item, and the myth of a CIA connection with President Kennedy's assassination was born ... and lives still.

I'm sure this was an intelligence coup admired by intelligence agencies around the world. They would all like to have been able to plant a little disinformation in the enemy camp that would have a similar effect ... the rueful CIA included.

But here's what puzzles me about the Office of Strategic Influence. Why did the Pentagon feel it was necessary to open yet another office, outside the normal intelligence circuit, to handle disinformation? That's one mystery.

Why make a public announcement about it? That's another mystery.

And why Mr. Rumsfeld would bow to only a week's worth of controversy and pressure and shut it down so abruptly is a third mystery.

Here's one suggestion, plucked completely out of the air: Could the Defence Secretary's announcement that it was being shut down have been its first little disinformation coup?