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How to deceive: a supply-side approach

Ron E. Hassner

Published 2025 in Intelligence and national security

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT The study of strategic warning has focused on deception success. Scholars have argued that deception often succeeds because targets suffer cognitive and bureaucratic pathologies. This paper offers an alternative approach that emphasizes the resilience to deception of intelligence organizations. It proposes that deceiving a rival intelligence organization is a challenging task that requires significant planning, resources, and coordination. The same incrementalist routines that foster resistance to authentic warning indicators also serve as a bulwark against deception. I illustrate this logic by exploring the complexity of several successful Allied deception operations during the Second World War that are often misconstrued as consisting of brilliant ruses. Rival intelligence agencies subjected even these broad deception efforts to great scrutiny. Simpler deception operations failed. Even where deception succeeded, it is not easy to tell whether deception could have been unmasked given data available to decision makers at the time. I propose that successful deception will become even more difficult to execute in the future.

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