How to be deceived 1

HOW TO BE DECEIVED

Carl Grove

The easiest way to be deceived is actually to be a normal human

being. People can only deceive us by exploiting the weaknesses of
thought and emotions that are common to everyone. All kinds of
deceivers, from conjurers, con men, cult leaders, politicians,
advertisers, and bigamists to the intelligence communities of all nations,
know about these mental weaknesses and know how to recruit these in
their operations. The odd thing is that we all know we have irrational
tendencies, a desire to confirm our belief systems, and an over-
dependence upon emotion, but we still fall prey to the deceivers. What
is going on?

If there is one single, convenient label for the whole art of

deception it is probably disinformation. All deception comprises two
stages: the first stage involves feeding certain information -- it may be
verbal, it maybe something concrete, it may be a picture -- to the victim.
The second involves eliciting from the victim the desired response --
handing over their money, ditching their girlfriend, joining the cult, or
whatever. It is during the first stage that the bait is laid, a bait designed
to be appealing to the poor sap. This is the vital stage: if the target fails
to note what is going on at this point, he or she will be lost.

Disinformation is an art, not a science. There may be textbooks in

the headquarters of the CIA and MI5, but deceivers are born, not made,
and disinformation techniques have been used all through human
history in an informal way by crafty and sociopathic persons. How does
it work?

Let's say A lusts after B's girlfriend, and wants to break up his
relationship. A is a plausible liar, but he is also clever, and he knows
that simply going up to B and saying "Your girl is having an affair with
two hundred other guys" is not going to work -- unless B is a total
cretin, of course. So he has has to plant seeds of doubt that he can build
on. "I saw Angie the other day -- she was with her brother. He seems
like a nice guy." Now Angie may have no brother, or A may know that
her brother is in Budapest, or is ten years old -- it doesn't matter, just so
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long as the image of Angie with an unknown man is embedded in B's

mind. And he doesn't have to say anything else, but if B asks he can say,
"Oh, I just assumed it was him; wasn't it?" Innocently, of course.

If A is a bit more subtle, and less anxious to get results, he may

even decide to wait for the moment when he does see Angie with a man,
in a completely innocent situation, of course. This gives him the chance
to add specifics and means that if Angie is questioned by B, in a rather
paranoid manner, she will in turn get rather paranoid and naturally the
relationship will be further strained.

A lot of malicious people seem naturally good at this sort of thing,

and do it to "stir things up" and cause misery to others, without any
more specific aim in mind. The more sophisticated deceivers prefer to
present the disinformation indirectly and leave the victim to "discover
it himself" or draw conclusions from it, as desired. Much of the work
of, as it were, the professionals in this field -- such as the Double Cross
or XX Committee, who fed false information to the Nazis, ostensibly
from their own agents, during WWII -- falls into this category. But the
Soviets were the experts, and it was they who coined the term "dis-
information." Even completely true and verifiable assertions may act
as disinformation, because of the emphasis, or context, or because of
some personal quirk. (This is true, for example, of children: if they ask
you awkward questions, you can reply with complete honesty, but at
such length, and in such a tedious manner, that their eyes will glaze over
and they will lose interest long before you get to the embarrassing bits.)

Disinformation works because all people, especially those who

claim loudly to be "rational," are actually anything but. Formal logic
works fine on paper, but in the real world, with huge numbers of
variables, many unknown and uncontrolled, it fails miserably. The
transcript of any famous trial should convince anyone of that. And with
information that is genuinely ambiguous, the mind is prone to do its
thinking with emotion; you prefer what you want to be true. This gives
us a clue to one of the key factors: the human tendency to want a belief
system to immerse oneself in, rather than to make a real effort to find
the truth. "Belief is the enemy," as John Keel puts it.

Attempts have been made to list specific deception techniques but it

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is probably more productive to mention a few general approaches taken

by those in Intelligence agencies, and keep one's eyes open for specific
instances of their employment.

The Staged Debate

An agency with huge resources can often influence public opinion

in a very subtle way by stage-managing debates between apparently
opposed schools of thought. If there is some idea or approach that they
wish to marginalize they can do so by promoting what is essentially a
false choice between two extreme viewpoints. This works well because
we have all been trained by our culture to think in simplistic terms:
"true or false," "innocent or guilty," "good or evil," and so on.
Historical example: the Rosicrucian Manifestoes.

False Association

If there are ideas that you want to obscure you can do this by
giving them a lot of publicity, but making sure that they are always
promoted by unstable or clearly deranged characters, who present them
in a ludicrous and exaggerated manner. Recent example discussed by
Nick Cook: the Philadelphia Experiment. Obvious absurdity scares off
the rational types, because they are afraid that other rational types will
consider them crazy to take interest in them.

Arousing Emotion

While some examples of this -- Hitler's huge Nazi rallies for

example -- are perhaps too obvious and too crude to count as good
examples of deception, the arousal of emotion can be intrinsic in the
topics under discussion, because our Western culture actually likes
emotion and opposes dispassionate analysis. Example: in the 1960s a
senior British General wrote an excellent book about Intelligence in
WWII. As we all now know, the greatest triumph of Allied Intelligence
was the breaking of the German high-level ciphers, and the distribution
of this information via a network of Special Liaison Units operating on
all major fronts. How did the good General manage to write a history
of intelligence during the war without mentioning this? Basically by
describing the great work of the SLUs (without of course giving away
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the source of their information), and then explaining why it is no longer

possible to study their operation: because both public records centers
holding the files independently decided to create more storage space by
destroying them. "What idiots!" you scream when you read this.
"With people like that in charge, it's a wonder we won the war." And
that is exactly what you were supposed to think. If Anthony Cave Brown
had not broken the story about the "Enigma secret," that is probably
what we would still be thinking. But within a few more years
officialdom not only admitted the truth but permitted historians to
study the records that had been so foolishly "destroyed." And sadly,
"all the records have been destroyed " is still a standard, though no
longer credible, ploy used by all Intelligence agencies. Emotion does
not have to be extreme to interfere with one's critical faculties.
Indignation is quite sufficient.

Exploit your Victim's Weaknesses

Groups and individuals are all prone to personal and cultural

defects, although they might not regard them as such, which can be
exploited by a skilled deceiving agency. Our culture, for example,
accepts certain things and rejects others, for no other reason than that
our parents and forebears decided that was how things should be. By
linking an idea that you want to put over with the accepted values and
associating ideas that you want ignored with the rest, your message
sinks in. Advertising and propaganda rely on such techniques. With
disinformation that is aimed at specific groups more refined methods
may be employed. Example: when the Soviets heard about the
development of remote viewing methods by the CIA and later on the US
Army, they employed assets in US universities to condemn such
activities as "unscientific." This is the scientific equivalent of a
particularly blunt accusation of heresy in the Catholic church, and it
scared off quite a few researchers -- and also, incidentally, illustrates
how similar belief systems are, whether supposedly "religious" or
"intellectual." Eventually the CIA were forced, publicly at least, to back
off from what was clearly a useful intelligence-gathering tool, and the
Soviets, who were already making use of psychotronic research, had the
field to themselves again.
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Confusion reigns

A fully-fledged disinformation package -- for want of a better term

--will always include true information, false information, irrelevant
information, and a quantity of ambiguous, absurd, and downright
confusing material. Confusion is one of the more subtle elements of the
mix. It may have many functions, including (a) muddying the water
and making it harder to focus upon the key factors; (b) producing a
sense of disorientation in the victim, which makes him more likely to
seize upon anything offered by the deceiver that seems to clarify the
situation; and (c) raising doubts in the victim's mind about things that
he previously considered beyond question.

The Importance of Feedback

Feedback on the victim's reaction is a vital requirement for the

disinformation source. Obviously, where the deceiver is a con man or a
malicious "friend," this poses no problems -- he or she can get an
immediate response. Where the two parties are, say, rival intelligence
services, monitoring reactions is harder. With spies in your rival
agency, it is easier; the XX Committee were able to get feedback via the
Enigma decrypts. If you don't know whether the bait is being taken,
you won't know what to put into the different phases of the operation.
It is not difficult, even reading second-hand accounts of what you
strongly suspect to be a disinformation exercise, to make intelligent
guesses about the identities of the "friends and associates" of the
victims who are actually working for a coercive agency -- but it is
probably best not to name names, if you don't want to face a lawsuit.

We now have a good idea of the major principles of disinformation;

we know how to be deceived. But how do we avoid being deceived?
Here are a few guidelines:

1. Be careful -- be very careful -- if a message appears to confirm

your most cherished beliefs.

2. Be aware of any strong emotional response to the message.

3. If you feel impelled to take some immediate action in response to

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the message -- don't. It will both get you into trouble and give useful
feedback to the manipulators.

4. Look out for things that are not present in the message, things you
might have wished to see, or that could clarify or throw doubt on it.
Why are some things mentioned but glossed over or cursorily
dismissed?

5. Look beyond the words and ask yourself if the source is really
trustworthy.

6. The message may contain information which seems absurd or

unlikely, but when you check it out, it turns out to be 100% true. This is
"chickenfeed," a basic tool of disinformation. Don't assume that
everything else in the message must therefore necessarily be true.

7. Sometimes the message drops hints which, when you follow them
up, maybe using a lot of effort, lead to exciting discoveries. Naturally,
you want the credit for the great discoveries, and may tend to inwardly
downplay the role of the message in this process. You may be doing
exactly what the deception agency wants.

8. Constantly monitor your reactions and ask yourself whether you

are being manipulated through your own belief system and your
emotions.

CONCLUSIONS

Disinformation, as I have learned from examining numerous

dictionary entries, cannot be precisely defined. It is not just a more
sophisticated form of misinformation. Disinformation must prompt a
specific response in the victim. I would define it as a complex message
structure designed to influence in certain specific ways the thought
processes and behavior of its intended target(s). In a sense the nominal
"true" or "false" items are merely individual elements in the web of
deceit.

One of the most infamous disinformation programs of recent years

illustrates some of the complexity of the mixture; the Majic 12
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documents. Rolls of undeveloped film were sent to minor players in the

UFO research field. When processed, they revealed copies of
typewritten documents purporting to describe the activities of a top
secret US government UFO study group, Majic 12 (or Majestic 12),
replete with descriptions of crashed alien vehicles, alien autopsies, and
so on. Naturally, the ufologists who were convinced of the extra-
terrestrial nature of the UFO phenomenon (in the US, a huge majority)
saw this as vindication of their beliefs; the self proclaimed sceptics
viewed it as a hoax. A long and complex debate ensued, which focused
upon subtle issues such as the typeface, the date format, US modes of
classifying secret material, the whereabouts of committee members and
political figures at the times of Majic 12 meetings, and so on.

But we need to ask what the point of all this was. Encouraging
belief in extraterrestrials among a community of persons who already
believe it may have some strategic long term aim, but the immediate
effect was to paralyse serious research activity and divert attention
away from alternative lines of thought. And there is lots of evidence of
similar programs involving alleged alien abductions, the retrieval of
technology from crashed UFOs, and the mysterious goings-on at Area
51.

Focusing on simplistic interpretations of such materials is a basic

error. If, as Vallee has suggested, various covert groups are seeking
some long-term change in society through manipulating ideas about
alien visitation, then we need to consider that one of our principles of
disinformation, the staged debate, is being employed. And so far it has
been hugely successful: 25 years ago it was almost impossible to get the
subject discussed publicly; now it dominates the headlines.

If we don't want to end up in a form of society that may be even

worse -- if that's the right word -- than the one we have today, we need
to be aware of how easily we can be influenced by words and images
that clever people have manufactured for precisely that purpose.

CARL GROVE, May 17th, 2011

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Selected References

Cave Brown, A. Bodyguard of Lies, 1975.

Cook, N. The Hunt for Zero Point, 2002.
Masterman, J. C. The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945,
1972.
Pilkington, M. Mirage Men, 2010.
Sweeney, H. M. Twenty-five ways to Suppress Truth, published online,
2000.
Vallee, J. Messengers of Deception, 1979.
Vallee, J. Revelations, 1991.

© Carl Grove, 2011