The Counter-deception Blog

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.