The Counter-deception Blog

Examples of deceptions and descriptions of techniques to detect them. This Blog encourages the awareness of deception in daily life and discussion of practical means to spot probable deceptions. Send your examples of deception and counter-deception to colonel_stech@yahoo.com.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

 

Connect the Dots? Jigsaw Puzzle?

People have cautioned me to avoid the phase “connect the dots” when describing counter-deception, because it drives Intelligence Community people crazy. Others in the IC use the jigsaw puzzle as an methaphor for analysis; one IC organization even uses the jigsaw puzzle as its logo. [Which one, I leave as a counter-denial exercise to our readers.]

This quote describes how a master deception planner from World War II [Brigadier Dudley Clarke] saw the question, and so the quote is more than an historical curiosity:

[World War II Allied Deception-master] Dudley Clarke kept on his office wall a “careless talk” poster showing a swastikaed hand fitting together a jigsaw puzzle with the caption “Bits of careless talk are pieced together by the enemy.” (Actually, the common mosaic and even commoner “jigsaw” analogies are inexact. It [intelligence analysis] is a process of connect­ing dots, discerning a pattern or Gestalt, having more in common with crossword puzzles—or, indeed, with reading Rorschach blots—than it has with jigsaw puzzles.) An intelligence officer … deduces the enemy’s capabilities and intentions and other relevant information from a rumor here, an ob­servation there, a captured document somewhere else. …
The art of implementing a deception consists in knowing the enemy’s methods, breaking your story into bits and pieces, and feeding him those bits and pieces through selected channels and according to a precise timetable, designed to lead him to draw the desired conclusion for himself. Some pieces may be very significant; others may be “merely corroborative detail, to add artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” to quote from The Mikado.

Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War, Scribner, 2004, p. 78.

For my contribution to the analogy / methaphor debates, see http://counterdeception.blogspot.com/2004/10/puzzling-thru-crossword-counter.html

PS: Xmas shopping tip--Holt's book should be in the library of every true fan of deception and counter-deception. I keep my copy right at hand--one can always learn from the masters.

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