Wednesday 24 June 2009

Moles, Manipulators and Masters - The 3 Ms of a Mean Machine (Part II)

(June 24th, 2009)

In any information campaign you have to provide a minimum of 90% of good, sound revealing facts about yourself.

If you want to guarantee sucess, it should be a higher percentage. It has to guarantee enough resistance to checking, cross-checking and rechecking. Only then will trust be gained.

Voluntary moles are people who do what they do normally out of pure conviction. Very rarely, although it does happen, do you see a "sell-out" amongst these people. They volunteer, driven by their firm beliefs, to undermine the adversary’s willingness to fight. Some call them traitors, I call them brave.

This volunteer thing does not happen with the other moles, the involuntary ones. These only realize that they are what they are long after they have done the damage they were designated to do. You feed the adversary with good information has I've said. He picks it up and as skeptical as he is tests it. It proves to be true. It must. He will use it and have good results. Then you feed him some more. The results evolve from good to better then good, on their way to excellence. He begins to trust your source as a good one. In journalism, a "deep-throat-scoop". And so on, until you’ve become to him, a totally trusted and irrefutable source, and he, in turn, is seen by those around him as an excellent fountain of information.

Someone they can REALLY trust to come up with key information right on time. Because that's exactly what he does. At this point there has been no damage in the enemy lines while, with the information you have provided, by him through you, there has been quite some to yours. He is a hero, you, apparently a traitor. He has now achieved the stage where he can be activated.

This is when from you start to provide him with false information with one of two goals: either to make the enemy act the way you want him exactly to; or to shatter the mole’s credibility.

The first has the obvious reason of allowing you to inflict the greatest, decisive damage possible. With the information before, he was able to win battle after battle. But moving like a mouse after peanut-butter on a trap, he's headed for doom. Total defeat, unconditional surrender. The mole’s role was to undermine the perception of truth about that last given information: what was false was taken for the truth. With disastrous results.

The second goal seems, at first, to be a contradiction. Total nonsense. You've gone about constructing a reliable source within the enemy camp, with quite damaging effects on your own and then you decide to “waste” all that hard work by destroying his credibility. Why? It all boils down to perception. Provide him with a piece of information that will prove to be disastrous. So scandalously false that will make him lose face among his friends.

Obviously it can’t be a blatant lie, but something that will swallowed whole as the whole prior information fed, but once gone through the natural filtering will reveal him as the fraud that he doesn’t even know he is.

So what’s to gain from that? By this exposure, all his previous "truthful" information will be questionable. The apple principle. Yes, it was true, but has come from a mole. A disgusting being. So, from then on all that was thought reliable has now a high probability to have been planted, as, by the way, was.

So when you said you’d go left, as you really mean to go, the other side NOW wonders why that piece of information got to him, via the mole, an ex-hero, now a repulsive being, and thinking that he can outwit you, starts to prepare himself for a move from you to the right.

You’ve muddled up all his perception capabilities. He is lost in the sea of information before him incapable of deciding which, of all the apples, those that are healthy, and those that have to be contaminated.

The higher the stakes, the less risk he is able to take. So he discards the whole basket and goes and gets his apples from somewhere else. From your side of the fence, well, you’ve just managed to convince your adversary that a whole lot of pretty truthful information is “false” and can act, now, accordingly.

The problem with using moles is what is common in all human activity: the fact that they are human. With all their flaws. Two very important ones: vanity and ambition.

Qualities when moderate, but in excess they’re intolerable shortfalls. Especially in this activity. (to be continued... next week)

4 comments:

  1. Is Levy the problem or is it Joana?

    ReplyDelete
  2. If your question has to do with you reading that I'm treating DL as a victim, thus the accuser is the evil one... do read again.

    If your question is to cast doubt about Joana, then the problem is YOU, and people like you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Trust no one, consider all sides. Watch carefully. Keep an open mind to all possiblities.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anon, wise words, although I don't agree with most.

    Trust yourself. Trust your instincts. I'll give my opinion on this later on...

    All possibilities should be considered, I agree, but the sentence is incomplete. Some possibilities, sometimes, are simply non-existent and shouldn't waste one minute of ours. An example, if somebody tells you that you can lie stark naked on snow for one whole hour, then I strongly advise you to ignore completely that possibility.

    But that's up to you.

    Thank you for your comment, it was food for thought.

    ReplyDelete

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