There would certainly be persons around "in the know" but who are still just playing the system for whatever they can get out of it (position, prestige or whatever) - or at the very best, are not prepared to take the consequences of doing otherwise. These could be found at all levels in the organisation. Truth be told, I have known a few of them myself!
This situation is by no means unique to the Jehovahs Witnesses, either. An interesting read for me was Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich. Speer occupied a very privileged position within the Nazi heirarchy, yet was not exactly a fool. Certainly by the latter part of the Nazi era (if not before), he saw through it all as evil. Yet, he readily admitted going along with it simply for what he could get out of it.
- i.e. Speer's background was only that of a humble architect. However, by playing the Nazi system for what he could, Albert Speer got to be Hitler's Minister of War Production - a position that placed him fully in charge of all manufacturing activities throughout occupied Europe, and answerable only to Hitler (at least until his own conscience and the Allied War Crimes Tribunal caught up with him, anyway!)).
Others who lived under communist rule in Eastern Europe tell of similar experiences. By the early 1970s (if not earlier) everybody knew communism was complete nonsense. However, nearly everbody still pretended to go along with it, because they , likewise, were not prepared to take the consequences of doing otherwise.
In addition to this, you can get the situation whereby if people hear enough lies told for long enough (whether told by themselves or others), then they can end up believing it themselves. An example of this was the Englishman, Robert Ford, who was captured during by the Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet. Ford correctly figured that if he ever expected to get an early release from prison, then his best course of action was to pretend to go along with the communist indoctrination process (the so-called "Brainwashing" procedure). This ruse did work for Robert Ford. However, he afterwards said it was also quite scary; towards the end of his period of incarceration, he found himself actually starting to believe the nonsense they were telling him.
I could believe a similar situation to be found amongst at least some of the JWs, and that this could well extend all the way to the top:
- i.e. some have heard the same lies repeated for so long that they now have difficulty differentiating between fact and fiction.
Sad,mad, bad - plus a lot of other things besides!