I think I was envisioning the debate as something like 1) Do these sets (the sets of altruistic and adversarial actions) occasionally intersect? 2) Does that have any implications for EA as a movement? 

But to answer your question, I think a paradigmatic example for the purposes of debating the topic would be the military intervention in and defeat of an openly genocidal and expansionist nation-state; i.e., something requiring complex, sophisticated adversarial action, up to and including deadly force, assuming that the primary motivations for the defeat of said nation state were the prevention of catastrophic and unspeakable harm. Exploring what the set of altruistic adversarial actions might look like at various scales and in various instances could potentially be a generative part of the debate. 

I relate to the impulse, but I think I disagree on the substance. Public intellectuals are involved in many different types of what we might call cautiously call games, games that we can charitably and fairly assume often involve significant stakes. 'Intellectuals should always be straightforwardly honest', while well-intentioned and capturing something important, would foreclose broad spectra of 'moves' in these games that may be quite important, optimal, or critical at meta-levels. 

To make this more obvious, I don't see that this is all that meaningfully different from 'people need to say what they actually believe.' The problem, as I see it, is with the modal operator. It's obviously pretty easy to generate counterexamples to the implicit absolutism here (when a member of the dictator's security forces has a gun to your head? etc.). 

'It's often important to say what you actually believe', while a little more flexible and thus softer, works better here I think. Then the work consonant with the OP is zeroing in on when people genuinely believe it's tough or suboptimal to be fully honest and identifying when their latitude may be greater than they believe, and why.