2 ms·

sounds 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 ago
No. 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 ago
  If someone tells my not-so-voluntary suicide is going to be painless my default stance is going to be doubt.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    In 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 ago
    It 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...

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 ago

No. 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 ago
If someone tells my not-so-voluntary suicide is going to be painless my default stance is going to be doubt.
- mlyle 4y ago
  In 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 ago
  It 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...