4 ms·
I suspect it's a matter of "fast, painless, compact, reliable - choose three".
by tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
I suspect it's a matter of "fast, painless, compact, reliable - choose three".
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoif it's agonising death, agent won't take it, so it is no longer reliable. They folled themselves. Too clever by half
- krisoft 4y agoIt is not like the agents will know if it is agonising or not. You just tell them it is painless. It is not like they are going to test it on themselves. If someone somehow ends up whitnessing a usage and they complain you tell them “this is very concerning, we are going to investigate. Maybe a bad batch? Or enemy action?” and then you classify the whole thing for 150 years. If there is such a widespread leak that you can’t do the above (for example one of your agents swallows poison direct on camera broadcast publicly) then you say to your agents: “Turns out it is not working as painlessly as we thought. Obviously we are not monsters, we couldn’t test it on live subjects. Discontinue old formulation, new painless formulation is being distributed.” And then you give them new pills with the same or nearly the same poison and visibly new packaging/concealment. But that is a last resort, only if there is too much grumbling amomg the rank and file.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 4y agosounds like your main strategy is 'assume everyone working as a CIA agent is an idiot' and they don't catch on after working for many years?
- vintermann 4y ago"I work for an agency that routinely gains people's trust in order to betray it, but I trust them and they would never betray me" seems to be the default belief for this lot, so maybe it isn't so far fetched.
- krisoft 4y agoNo. I’m assuming 3 things: - the actual use of poison pills is very rare. If our agents need to pop them all the time we suck and our organisation is hemourhaging valuable resources and we need to improve our trade craft. - things done in missions are murky, especially murky when the mission went so horribly wrong our agents commited suicide. Most often the agency notices that something went this wrong by an agent failing to report in. It is not like the agent who died a painfull/painless death will complain about it at the “illegal undercover agents anual ball”. Information spreads slowly by default under these circumstances and through unreliable narrators. - the business of inteligence agencies is to keep information compartmented and on a need to know basis. They have processes with teeth to enforce this. Keeping information available to one part of the organisation away from other parts of the organisation is their bread and butter. Keeping the truth about a possibly painfull poison pill is not a special case there, you can use the same aparatus to keep this info locked down you use to keep other information within the agency.
- peteradio 4y agoIf someone tells my not-so-voluntary suicide is going to be painless my default stance is going to be doubt.
- mlyle 4y agoIn either case, the actual information on whether it is painless is immaterial to the choice. The only thing that can factor into an agent's decision is the information that he learns about the suicide agent, and the agency has a lot of control over that information.
- andrewflnr 4y agoIt would be pretty easy to tell a plausible lie, though, especially if you can think of a plausible less-painful poison to pretend you used. Tell them it's something moderately painful, so you can still tell them, "look, it's still better than torture". Just don't remind them about the edge-case scenarios where it really has to be fast and reliable, and they probably won't question it too hard...
- swayvil 4y agoSo tell them it's a blissful death. Who's going to say different?
- ninkendo 4y agoPainless, compact, reliable? Doesn’t need to be that fast.
- denton-scratch 4y agoPainless, reliable: that'll be barbiturates like Nembutal. But it takes about half an hour, and you need about 10g. So not compact or fast. Maybe ricin?
- DuskStar 4y agoCarfentanil, maybe?
- quickthrowman 4y agoOpiate overdoses are easily reversible with naloxone. I suppose it’s possible that carfentanyl is strong enough that it would take an unreasonable amount of naloxone to reverse.
- michaelmrose 4y agoWhy not both carfentanyl plus insert fast but awful poison and hope nobody gives your spy naloxone in time.
- Khaine 4y agoCyanide?
- denton-scratch 4y agoAFAIK cyanide is unpleasant; you die struggling to breathe because your muscles don't work - not because you became unconscious.
- Khaine 4y agoThanks. I never knew that. I always assumed from movies that it was a quick and easy (hence painless) way to go.