Lessons in the Arts of Espionage #1 Call Centre Alpha
Oh what a brave new recruitment section, which doth have such people innit
[25-01-27]
First of all, as is tradition here in our Classified-K section, it’s Yasenevo Dossier time.
As I may have intimated, this is quite a substantial dossier, even rivalling the one concocted for the Mitrokhin Deception, and as such it contains a number of different subsections, all of which present the mugshots and, in some cases, names and/or cryptonyms or, as in this case, some nebulous letter-number designation, of a wide range of secret agents.
I thought for this missive I’d delve into the section denoted ‘Cognitive Infiltrators’. Selecting one at random, with the help of a very powerful and trusty D20, we’re going to kick off with this one.
It doesn’t, as it happens, have much info in the way of specific names, unfortunately. That’s nothing to do with any lack of security clearance on my part, I hasten to add. That’s just the way some of these cookies crumble here in the Wilderness of Mirrors. This one only has a curious designation which is merely the number 13-16. That could mean anything of course and my contact genuinely didn’t know. Whether it refers to some department or other, or room number in Thames House or VX perhaps, an operational number, or is some kind of substitution code, well, don’t ask me. Your analysis is as good as mine.
Anyhow, here’s what the mysterious agent looks like.
I’ve been pondering recently, as you do, about the recruitment section of the intelligence services.
You see, they face some serious problems, involving both intelligence and psychology, and they will have surely encountered and confronted this problem already. In the old days, it would not have been so much of an issue because they tended to recruit people from very specific social groups (their own, that is). The proverbial Old Boys’ Network and all that. The Oxbridge set from good families, you know. Of course that’s how people like Philby got in, but we’ll not dwell on that guy too much at this present juncture. Except to say that he clearly didn’t have much in the way of a recruitment process. Indeed, in those days they largely dispensed with any recruitment process at all. Peter Wright notes as much in Spycatcher. Like ‘have you now or have you ever been a communist?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Right, you’re in.’
Today, on the contrary, not only do they cast a wider net, but they feel they have to earn the algorithm’s outlay. That and their latest version of MIDAS (Metadata Analysis Software, to you and me). You could, hehe, perhaps suggest it’s somewhat anal of them, but hey, a spy’s gotta do what a spy’s gotta do and all that. If you have to use unnecessarily convoluted AI and other assorted machine tools, then better accept that as your lot in life.
Anyway, their real problem, like I say, is intelligence and psychology. There’s a great little quote from the ever irascible George Carlin which says something like ‘they want you to be intelligent enough to operate the machines and file bits of paper here and there, but they don’t want you intelligent enough to ask questions.’ And this applies as much to the intelligence services as to the general population.
So what you end up with are two types of intelligence officer. One, the more old-fashioned type of psychopath who has probably been groomed for the role since his abusive prep school days, and the other, well, these have to be drawn from the normal population, shall we say (the Red Bricks, you know – the ones to which we’d never send our own offspring), and as such they can’t possibly be alphas and betas. Why – you already know why – because alphas and betas have an annoying tendency to ask questions.
They also happen to have other qualities. Compassion is one. A sense of the aesthetic is another. A soul. Moral principles. A lively and creative imagination. Because all of that, psychological and emotional and social and spiritual intelligence, is what real intelligence actually is.
So it kind of goes without saying that types like that simply mustn’t be allowed anywhere near the intelligence services.
So what are you left with? As I say, a combination of old-school psychopaths and second-rate actors. They’re not entirely incompetent, of course, this latter group, partly because they follow orders from the psychopaths, but they do need to have watchful eyes kept on them. The use of threats and bribery only goes so far, after all.
Here’s another agent photo. This one must be related to the first one, as it has the numerical designation 13-169. At least that’s what me and my contact have concluded. Maybe this courier is delivering one of those aforementioned threats or bribes? Alas, the Dossier doesn’t say.
One other useful side effect of recruiting gammas to the lower ends of intelligence work (like ‘cognitive infiltrator in the conspiracy theory subculture’, is one example that Springs to mind) is that they have a far higher boredom threshold. This is useful of course when you send them out into the real world for training and experience purposes (and to build up their cover stories).
For example, given they are actors, these low-level agents, they need to learn how to read from a script. And learn Obedience. By repeating the same fucking thing over and over until their brain no longer functions autonomously. That way they won’t pose any problems to the Service.
So what better place to send them than a call centre?
If there’s any more evidence required of the fact that we are living in a dystopian purgatory world then it’s the existence of the call centre. Apparently, or so I hear, there are some 800,000 people in Britain alone working in fucking call centres. If that’s not the sound of Thatcher cackling at you from the depths beyond the grave then I must be sorely mistaken, because it definitely sounds like that fucking bitch to me. I mean, can you possibly think of a worse personal hell than a fucking call centre? Well, if you’re not an alpha or a beta, I mean. If you’re just a gamma then you probably do have enough triggered conditioning to conjure up an alternative. Deltas and epsilons, of course, wouldn’t have a problem. But we don’t consider them, do we?
It's gammas that are the problem. But not in call centres or the intelligence services. Sending them to the former is a great means of mind control programming, whilst admitting them into the latter provides them with a very useful – that’s to say, easily manipulated – Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Once done, give them a little rinse, repeat a few times perhaps, and then send them out on their ultimately unimportant mission. They won’t know it’s unimportant, naturally, and they’ll be provided with a very genteel junior support officer who, if they are lucky, might even offer them a sordid affair or two on the side.
But that’s junior support officers for you. They are very fond of debriefs, after all.
But alphas and betas, hmm, try putting them in a fucking call centre and, well, I suppose you could attempt to utilise it for trauma-based mind control on them, but I strongly suspect it won’t work. Like I said, we’re imaginative and creative types, us alphas. You will, however, totally understand how we would see working in a call centre as a personal hell inflicted on us by gammas almost certainly for reasons of Nietzschean ressentiment, since it would be utterly fucking soul-destroying for us, and something akin to a very effective torture technique, and get to thinking that we wouldn’t last more than a day at most in a bullshit job like that, surrounded by script-reading bullshitters and the occasional MI5 trainee, let alone cope with it for a period of years – wasted fucking years!!! – and you might well think you could grind us down and break our spirits by inflicting that purgatory on us, but – I say – I beg to fucking differ.
Why? Because like I say, we have something called creative imagination. Furthermore, we also haven’t lost our sense of childlike play, or an understanding of the vital importance of play. We are mischievous, in other words. You might think a sense of mischief might go down well in Thames House or VX, and may well you be right. But there are different kinds of mischief. And whereas yours are cunning and monstrous and psychopathic, ours are ironic and offbeat and, yes, perhaps a little postmodern, in the educational sense.
Still, every now and again a sort of crossover appears.
So if I, myself, an alpha, had the misfortune of finding myself trapped in a fucking call centre, I would immediately start conjuring up scenarios to fuck with the whole thing and well, we’re talking coping mechanisms here, ultimately, aren’t we?
As such, I have, believe it or not, already been conjuring up such scenarios – call it a part of IRT201 if you will (that’s Interrogation Resistance Training, to you and me, specifically the ‘how to avoid being tortured’ module).
So without further ado, here’s one that Springs to mind.
There are lots of in-jokes in it, by the way, which may pass over the heads of my non-spook readers. But don’t let that freak you out.
So here’s what kind of strategy I would adopt if I got captured by the enemy and threatened with MK-call centre treatment.
[24-12-05]
Call Centre Alpha
Dring dring. Dring dring.
Dring dring. Dring dring.
“Hello?”
“Ah. Hello. May I speak to Miss Corvid, please?”
“Speaking.”
“Hello, Miss Corvid. My name’s Evelyn. Now listen carefully, Miss Corvid. You mustn’t put the phone down because there’s a bomb in that receiver.”
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“God can’t help you now, Miss Corvid. But fortunately I do have a solution for you. It will, however, require you to provide me with your bank details and put down a deposit on a brand new set of personalised Encyclopaedia Britannicas.”
“But I don’t need a set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas. I’ve got the internet and Wikipedia.”
“Oh no, Miss Corvid. You simply can’t trust Wikipedia. I have a cousin who works for the Circus. Specifically he works in K2/C on Operation Nelson.”
“K2/C?”
“It’s the Miles Mathis Committee. He spends half his working hours mischievously inserting misinformation into Wikipedia. And the other half fucking with genealogy records. So take it from me, Miss Corvid, you simply can’t trust it.”
“Operation Nelson, you say?”
“Yes. As in Nelson Mandela. Of the famous Mandela Effect.”
“What’s the Mandela Effect?”
“It’s when you unwittingly slip into a parallel world and history isn’t quite how you remember it being. I’ll prove it to you. Tell me about Nelson Mandela.”
“Oh, well he was that funny black man with the funny Alan Partridge voice who was in prison for a long time and then he became President of South Africa.”
“No, Miss Corvid, you’re mistaken. Nelson Mandela died in prison sometime in the 1980s.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, see. I’ll give you another example. You remember what you were wearing at your tenth birthday party?”
“Oh yes! It was a lovely pink chiffon dress.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it was!”
“Oh no, Miss Corvid, it most assuredly wasn’t. It wasn’t pink, it was turquoise.”
“Erm, no, I’m sure it was pink.”
“No, it was Turquoise. Don’t you remember your best friend Miriam saying how much she liked it and that she was jealous?”
“I didn’t have a best friend called Miriam. My best friend was Anne.”
“Oh no. Anne was your second best friend. And she was the one wearing the pink dress. Your best friend was Miriam and you were wearing a turquoise chiffon dress. You know why you chose turquoise?”
“Erm, no?”
“Because it’s the same colour as your eyes, Miss Corvid.”
“But I’ve got brown eyes.”
“No, you haven’t, Miss Corvid. That’s the mirror lying to you. According to the photograph of you I have here in your personal file, you distinctly have turquoise eyes. And very lovely they are too, if I may say.”
“Oh, well, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Do you also remember which song you were dancing to in your turquoise chiffon dress?”
“Erm, no.”
“Well, originally it was Madonna’s famous hit parade stormer, Into the Groove.”
“Originally?”
“Yes. That’s the Mandela Effect for you. It wasn’t Into the Groove, it was Papa don’t Preach.”
“Hmm. Oh, was that the one where she wore those pointy tit extensions in the video?”
“Yes! You remember now don’t you Miss Corvid. And what colour were those pointy tit extensions?”
“Blue.”
“Oh no, Miss Corvid. They were turquoise.”
“Well, if you say so.”
“I do say so Miss Corvid.”
“I have to say I’m a little confused by all of this.”
“Of course you’re confused, Miss Corvid. But we’ll soon have that fixed for you. You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve pressed the emergency button and one of my cousin’s colleagues will be with you shortly with his bomb disposal kit. Now, I’ll give you a further example. Tell me about Pi.”
“What kind of pie?”
“What kind of pie do you like?”
“Apple.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking about that sort of pie. I was talking about the ratio of the circumference to the diameter.”
“Oh, I know that one. It’s 3.1415926.”
“Not anymore it isn’t.”
“What?”
“No, it’s changed. It’s now 4.”
“4? Wouldn’t that make things a little wobbly?”
“Wobbly?”
“Yes, wobbly. You’d have elliptical orbits instead of circular ones.”
“Now this is no time to get clever, Miss Corvid. Being clever will set the bomb off.”
“Oh. I forgot about the bomb.”
“Of course you did, Miss Corvid. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Now, all you need to do before the bomb disposal guy gets there is to provide me with your fucking bank details and put down that deposit for the brand new set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.”
“Hmm, I’m still undecided.”
“That’s cognitive dissonance fucking with you again, Miss Corvid. What if I was to tell you they’ve got turquoise covers?”
“Oh, I like turquoise.”
“That’s better. I can also reassure you that this set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas will protect you from the Mandela Effect, providing you with a personal immunity.”
“How do they do that?”
“Well, every time you slip into a parallel world and something in history changes, the Encyclopaedia automatically changes the text to fit the new official narrative. Furthermore, and this is the best bit, because this is your own personalised set, it will send a signal to your brain simultaneously altering your own historical memory. So you need never be confused again.”
“Oh, well, I should like that.”
“You should indeed, Miss Corvid. Now, are you going to put down that fucking deposit or what?”
And that, my darling readers, is how we do things here in this Wilderness of Mirrors.
There shall be more lessons in the arts of espionage to come, my dearest things. In the meantime, stay alert. Your country needs lerts…
I forgot to say yesterday, that those are super cute spies! I think I may have fed some of them. Have you recruited squirrels, too? 🐿
Very nice! But please, please don't call me on the telephone, my brain is confused enough as it is! 😂