Counterintelligence in Everyday Life
James Jesus Angleton, the longtime head of counterintelligence at the CIA, had an unusual intellectual background for a man in his profession. As a student at Yale, he edited a literary magazine and developed a fascination with modern poetry, particularly the work of T. S. Eliot and William Empson. He was interested in ambiguity, hidden meanings, and the curious way in which context can change what a statement actually means.
Later, he encountered the same problem in a rather more dangerous setting.
A piece of information could be true and still serve the purpose of deception. A source could be perfectly honest and yet have been deceived himself. Someone might tell you something entirely accurate precisely because he wanted you to draw a particular conclusion from it.
Counterintelligence, then, was not merely concerned with what one knew. It was equally concerned with how that knowledge had come about and why it had reached you in the first place.
Someone once described Angleton's field with a remarkable analogy:
Counterintelligence is to intelligence what epistemology is to philosophy.
Behind this rather academic formulation lies a simple question:
How do we know what we think we know?
Angleton borrowed an image from T. S. Eliot. He spoke of a wilderness of mirrors, a place where reflections become so entangled that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real from what merely appears to be real.
You don't need to work for an intelligence agency to find yourself in such a place.
Usually, something quite unremarkable happens. I store the information away. Peter is an idiot. I may not give it much thought, but the statement has entered my understanding of Peter.
Strictly speaking, however, I know nothing of the sort. What I actually know is that my colleague says Peter is an idiot.
These are two entirely different pieces of information.
Perhaps my colleague has known Peter for twenty years and has excellent reasons for his opinion. Perhaps they had an argument yesterday. Perhaps they are competing for the same position. Perhaps my colleague would rather I didn't get along with Peter. Or perhaps he is looking for an ally in a conflict I know nothing about.
And, of course, perhaps Peter really is an idiot.
Counterintelligence does not mean automatically believing the opposite of what you are told. That would be equally foolish. It simply means not confusing the statement with the underlying fact.
I once experienced how easily that confusion can arise.
A neighbour regularly told me about a woman who lived in the same building as she did. According to my neighbour, this woman was mentally unstable, behaved strangely, and was almost impossible to live with. She constantly disturbed the peace, and the landlord refused to do anything about it.
Initially, I had no particular reason to doubt her account. Why would I? I barely knew the other woman, whereas my neighbour lived in the same building and dealt with the situation every day.
Gradually, a picture formed in my mind.
Whenever I encountered the other woman, I no longer saw someone I barely knew. I saw the mentally unstable woman my neighbour had been telling me about.
Then the phone calls became more frequent.
My neighbour sometimes called several times a day. There was always a new incident, another disturbance, another outrageous development. She sent me messages and screenshots of her correspondence with the landlord. Without quite noticing how it happened, I had become an audience for a conflict in which I had no involvement whatsoever.
At the same time, the story grew increasingly complicated.
The other tenant was no longer the only problem. The landlord had now become part of it. My neighbour began suggesting that he and the other woman were somehow conspiring against her. Then she mentioned that the landlord had once been her boyfriend.
You might think that additional information would make a situation easier to understand. In my case, it had precisely the opposite effect.
Eventually, I no longer knew what to make of any of it. All I knew was that my telephone kept ringing.
I began ignoring some of her calls.
The situation continued to escalate until, one day, the police appeared. I was questioned as well.
At one point, an officer asked me something along the lines of, "Is the woman living in that building mentally unstable?"
I replied, "Which woman do you mean? There are two."
I admit that my answer was not entirely innocent.
But it was also the moment when something occurred to me.
For months, I had been listening to a story in which the roles were perfectly clear. On one side stood a reasonable woman suffering at the hands of a mentally unstable neighbour. On the other side stood that neighbour, later joined by a landlord who was supposedly conspiring with her.
I had not invented this story. But I had begun to see the world through it.
At some point, the question in my mind had changed. I was no longer asking what was wrong with the other woman. I was asking how I knew there was anything wrong with her in the first place.
The answer was surprisingly thin.
Most of what I knew came from one person who had been calling me several times a day, bombarding me with screenshots, and describing a conflict that seemed to grow more elaborate with every passing week.
Perhaps the other woman really was difficult. Perhaps my neighbour had perfectly legitimate complaints. I still didn't know.
But I had realised something else.
I had mistaken the source for the fact.
That, on a small scale, is the central problem of counterintelligence.
The first question is not who is crazy, or even who is telling the truth. It is something rather more modest: How did the information I now regard as my own knowledge get into my head?
This question can be surprisingly useful in ordinary life.
Why does my neighbour tell me that the woman on the third floor mistreats her children? Why does a colleague tell me that our new boss is incompetent? Why does a friend warn me about someone we both know?
Most of the time, there are perfectly innocent explanations. People talk. We exchange experiences, warn one another, complain, gossip, and try to make sense of the world together. There is nothing particularly sinister about any of this.
But occasionally, it is worth asking an additional question.
Why is this person telling me this particular thing, at this particular moment?
Perhaps he genuinely wants to warn me. Perhaps he wants reassurance that his own judgement is correct. Perhaps he is looking for an ally. Perhaps he would like to influence my relationship with someone else. Or perhaps, by persuading another person to accept his version of events, he hopes to make that version more convincing to himself.
And sometimes people have no clear idea why they are telling us something.
This makes the matter far more complicated than a simple distinction between truth and lies.
After all, a statement can be entirely true and still serve a purpose.
Suppose I tell you that Peter arrived late yesterday. That may be an objectively verifiable fact. But if I mention it five minutes before you are due to interview Peter for a job, an additional question arises. Why have I chosen to tell you this particular truth at this particular moment?
The accuracy of information tells us nothing about why it has reached us.
The same principle applies, on a much larger scale, to the news.
I open a news website in the morning and find a war, a traffic accident, a violent crime, a political scandal, and some celebrity who has said something idiotic.
Every single story may be completely true.
Nevertheless, I have not simply been shown the world. I have been shown a selection of it.
Out of the millions of things that happened that day, someone chose a handful for my attention. No conspiracy is required. Newsworthiness, dramatic images, emotional impact, public interest, and the prospect of attracting clicks are perfectly sufficient explanations.
The interesting question is therefore not merely whether a particular story is true. It is also why this particular story has reached me.
The media are simply the institutionalised version of something that happens constantly in our personal lives.
People select information too.
When someone tells me about his marriage, I am not hearing the marriage. I am hearing his selection of events from perhaps twenty years of living together.
When someone describes a conflict at work, I am not hearing the conflict itself. I am hearing the incidents he remembers, the details he considers important, and the motives he attributes to the people involved.
When someone tells me about an argument, I am rarely receiving anything resembling a camera recording of what happened. I am receiving a story about the argument, already organised into a sequence with causes, characters, and perhaps even a moral.
None of this means the person is lying. He may be telling the story with complete sincerity.
That is precisely what makes the problem so interesting.
We can influence one another without deceiving one another.
And eventually, what we have heard begins to influence what we see.
If someone has told me often enough that Peter is aggressive, a particular expression on Peter's face may suddenly acquire a meaning. Without that prior information, I might never have noticed the expression at all. Perhaps Peter is simply tired, distracted, or thinking about something unpleasant.
But I have already been given an interpretation, and now my perception begins to cooperate with it.
A small wilderness of mirrors has appeared.
Someone else's interpretation influences what I notice. What I notice then seems to confirm the interpretation. And because I have now witnessed the evidence myself, I may eventually forget that my observation had a history.
I know Peter is aggressive. I have seen it with my own eyes.
Except that my eyes were not entirely innocent.
This is where Angleton's old question becomes unexpectedly useful.
How do I actually know this?
Not in every conversation, of course. Nobody could live that way. If we subjected every casual remark to a full counterintelligence analysis, we would soon find ourselves without friends and probably without much of a social life.
But certain situations deserve a little more attention. Someone speaks unusually often and unusually badly about a particular person. A conflict appears remarkably clear-cut even though we have heard only one side. Someone has an obvious interest in persuading us to accept a particular account. Or we suddenly discover that we have developed a very strong opinion about someone with whom we have barely exchanged a word.
In such cases, it may be useful to retrace our steps.
What have I actually observed myself? What was I told? Who told me? Why did they tell me? And at what point did I begin mixing these things together without noticing?
Of course, there is a danger in the opposite direction.
Angleton himself is almost the perfect warning against taking this habit too far. Once you start looking for a hidden intention behind every piece of information, it can become difficult to stop. Every explanation becomes a possible deception, and every contradiction becomes evidence that the deception is more sophisticated than you first suspected.
Your neighbour says, "Lovely weather today."
Interesting.
Why does he want me to think about the weather?
What is he trying to distract me from?
And what, exactly, is going on with those rubbish bins?
By that point, a useful intellectual habit has turned into a machine for producing paranoia.
Counterintelligence in everyday life does not require us to become suspicious of everyone around us. It certainly does not require us to imagine that every conversation conceals a secret agenda.
Perhaps it requires something much simpler.
We might occasionally remind ourselves that between a fact and our understanding of it, there is often a story. Someone saw something, selected certain details, interpreted what happened, and passed the result on to us.
Sometimes that person was even ourselves.
And when a piece of information matters enough, it may be worth looking, just for a moment, not only at the picture.
But also at the mirror.