Rule number one is this: No one is capable of operating in a vacuum.
Every single espionage plot that I have ever read is predicated off of 3 basic ideas.
1) We heard about a thing, and we’d like to know more.
2) We’re doing a thing, and we want to make sure that the other side can’t find out or stop us.
3) a thing happened and now we’re all scurrying around going WTF?
What this means is, it is simply not possible for world leaders or heads of conspiracies to move money, political power, personnel, or large scale tech like ships and doomsday weapons without someone noticing. There are records. There are satellites. There are people who talk. There are people on the inside who might have doubts. No operational group is airtight. Kim Jong Un has exactly no means of covertly taking over South Korea that won’t be noticed. He might use spies to infiltrate. He might use his army to attack, but there are no means to attack that can’t be seen ahead time by someone. Even if he’s got a goddamn death ray, It took scientists. It took parts. It took experiments. Those experiments needed operational security. That means soldiers. Soldiers are humans. They talk. Maybe to their wives. Maybe to their friends. Maybe to foreign agents for money and bootleg Brittany Spears CDs.
No one can operate in a vacuum.
To think otherwise is play unfairly with your players.
It’s one of those things that tends to bury any real talk about how conspiracies can do anything and nobody ever knows. Oh sure, the government was capable of filming the moon landing on a soundstage. and nobody has ever talked about it...But I can read about how generals can plan covert operations in hot zones. only to have operational details and exact coordinates tweeted to girlfriends back home.?
People are always the weak link in a conspiracy.
Which is not to say, that there aren’t cover-ups. Oh sure. Cover ups happen all the time. I mean, If I were a Senator or something like that, And I happened to slide my Lamborghini into a busload of special needs children with a head full of coke and the cooling corpses of two indeterminately sexed Thai hookers in the back seat...Well. Who am I going to call? MY WIFE? My feckless, gormless children?
No. I’m going to hit up my friend, who I was in Skull and Bones with, and who is now a federal judge, and I’m going to skate.
And that's how the morally gray world of espionage works. To believe that there are conspiracies that stretch across the globe and are monolithic, unstoppable, and almost too subtle to perceive...Is to impute them with supernatural powers.
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