The Counter-deception Blog

Jigsaws are for the Deception Planner

Connect the Dots? Jigsaw Puzzle?

People have told me to avoid the phase "connect the dots" when describing counter-deception, because it drives some of the Intelligence Community crazy. And others in the Community use the jigsaw puzzle as a logo. This quote describes how a master deception planner from World War II saw the question, and so 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.