Old and interesting #6: OSS Morale Operations Field Manual (Part 3)
Freedom stations, bribery, and blackmail
This is the third installment of the series on the Morale Operations Manual, an Office of Strategic Services publication. The first was about rumors, while the second was about forgeries and false pamphlets.
Freedom (i.e., radio) stations
Running a radio station or producing any public-facing work requires an audience to have a significant impact. Not surprisingly, the Office of Strategic Services was aware of this fact. In fact, it provided a list of tips to help freedom stations garner a larger audience. Here are three of the most interesting suggestions, with my running commentary.
Tactic 1:
Emphasizing the very mystery and danger of being a "Freedom Station," changing frequencies suddenly, or breaking off transmission and returning at a later period.
This tactic is very common among users of YouTube, TikTok, and other media platforms. The headline, typically capitalized, warns us that the video or audio will soon be censored or deleted. We should believe that the content creator, the aptly named tRUTHTELLER3fR9J7LbA2, is doing a public service by exposing an inconvenient truth an authority figure (e.g., the medical establishment, the fitness industry, the government) wants to withhold from us.
Needless to say, sometimes the authorities do indeed withhold relevant information. Reporters, activists, and whistleblowers operating in autocratic regimes can attest to this sad reality. It’s much more common, however, for the average content creator to lack the noble goals typically associated with brave reporters. In most cases, the content creators just try to capitalize on people’s fear of missing out.
We bump into the fear of missing out in all sorts of places. The person struggling to lose weight clicks on a link promising him THE SHORTCUT TO LOSE WEIGHT THE FITNESS INDUSTRY DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW. The child gets upset when one of his five toys is taken away, even though he had no interest in playing with that toy all afternoon. The tourist suffers an emotional breakdown because he can’t visit a monument that he learned about just five minutes earlier.
Tactic 2:
Using slang, vulgarity, and pornography when consistent with cover, giving gossip and "dirt," e.g., describing the sexual life of prominent enemy officials or their wives.
The manual recognizes that the actual self frequently triumphs over the ideal self. Many desire sophisticated preferences, like tuning into radio programs discussing the evolution of human language or the physics of tectonic movements. Yet, they frequently find themselves watching videos about someone commenting on someone else’s comment on a mid-level celebrity’s life as a divorcee—and about similarly edifying topics. Given the usual audience sizes for high-brow content versus gossip, the manual seems to offer the right recommendation.
Tactic 3:
Predicting military developments.
If you want to make a correct prediction, it’s easy. You predict A today, and the opposite of A tomorrow. One of the predictions will be true; the other, forgotten.
Even though this model sounds somewhat flippant, I don’t think it is conceptually too far from how many pundits operate. Key to this modus operandi is the population’s short-term memory. If people don’t track the pundit’s predictions, only his successful ones will be remembered.
This means that the way to increase the number of correct predictions is to churn out predictions (the vaguer, the better) at an industrial rate. Employing this strategy will lead to almost only inaccurate predictions. Fortunately for the pundit, there is no reason to panic. The inaccurate predictions can be silently relegated to the dustbin of history. Alternatively, on those rare occasions a pundit is questioned about one of his particularly salient and inaccurate predictions, he can generously offer a convincing-sounding narrative to assuage the audience’s doubts.
Occasionally, someone like Professor Philip Tetlock, of the University of Pennsylvania, comes along and tracks alleged experts’ predictions for decades. After demonstrating that the so-called experts are not very impressive at making predictions, the audience nods intelligently and decides to be more skeptical of experts’ unquantifiable and vague predictions in the future. This skepticism then quickly fades, just as the evening news features the stock expert of the day making a grand pronouncement about this week’s hot stocks, prompting the listener to speed dial his stockbroker’s number to avoid missing out on the investment of his lifetime.
For the freedom station, the short window following a successful prediction is particularly valuable. Enjoying the peak of its credibility, it has a much better chance of successfully introducing rumors, implanting false hopes, or encouraging acts of sabotage.
Blackmail and bribery
Cross-country differences
Today, data about corruption perceptions is widely available for practically all countries. However, collecting this type of data is a relatively recent undertaking. For instance, one of the major organizations in this domain, Transparency International, was founded a mere 30 years ago. This doesn’t mean, however, that people in earlier times were blind to possible cross-country differences:
Bribery and blackmail must be adjusted to the social customs and expectations of the recipient. In some areas of the world (particularly in the East) and among some classes of people, bribery is almost as common as tipping in the United States; in other areas and among other classes of people, the mere suggestion of bribery is highly insulting.
Foot-in-the-door technique
It is often desirable for the first services purchased to be of a minor character, and one not involving great risk on his part. Once the initial bribe has been accepted, and evidence of such bribery has been obtained, the demands can become successively greater.
Agreeing to a smaller request now makes it more likely that the person will agree to a larger request later. This is the basic idea behind the foot-in-the-door technique, which helped finance beautiful second homes for generations of salespeople.
First, a salesperson approaches a customer and asks her to accept a free product sample. No big deal, the customer thinks, so she accepts it. A week later, the salesperson is back. This time, his request is larger: he asks for feedback and gently suggests that the customer sign up for monthly product delivery.
While the worst outcome of a regular sales transaction might be unwanted products (and possibly embarrassment), a bribed official is on the hook for an illegal act. Motivated by short-term self-preservation, he complies with the next, somewhat larger request. After a couple of iterations, he finds himself taking substantial risks to meet increasingly large requests, all while attempting to conceal his prior illegal acts.
Context matters
Instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, bribery should be tailored to the person’s individual circumstances:
To carry through successful bribery it is essential to have full intelligence on the character of the recipient - his needs, weaknesses, grievances, fears, hopes, honesty, and integrity. What he feels deprived of in the way of goods and services should be known.
Local scarcity and inferring intentions
In many cases money may be less effective than goods or services, particularly in areas where certain goods and services are relatively inaccessible while money is plentiful. The following may be useful depending on the needs and susceptibilities of the recipient: food, medicines, drugs (this may involve first inducing a dependency in the individual upon a drug), clothes, liquor, employment, escape to neutral countries, transportation of letters to friends and relatives outside, release of relatives or recipient from prison, protection, business tips, social and political favors, especially aid to the recipient's family.
Some acts of bribery seem less wrong than others. For instance, the official who looks the other way in exchange for a loaf of bread for his sick child seems less morally wrong than another who accepts a bottle of perfume for his mistress. In other words, we judge an act of bribery, at least in part, based on the perceived intentions of the person.
As someone’s intentions are not written on their forehead, we use situational cues to guess them. One of these cues is the reasonableness of a desire. Wanting a bottle of water in a desert seems very reasonable. Wanting to cement your legacy as the greatest African statesman by spending your country’s resources on megalomaniac projects doesn’t. The reasonableness of most desires, however, depends on the context.
For instance, clothing or letters to relatives seem trivial to us now. But if they were used for bribery during WWII, it was precisely because people valued them in that historical context. Without realizing that clothing may have been scarce in a specific context, we may call the bribed official’s desire to have an extra pair of trousers unreasonable and attribute a bad motive to him, like feeding his greed or vanity. However, if we are aware that clothing is scarce, then his interest in securing a pair of trousers seems eminently reasonable. In other words, the same act can signal very different intentions depending on the context.
In practice, we frequently forget that what is abundant in one context may be scarce in another, and vice versa. We should seek to understand local scarcity conditions before we judge the intentions of people who live in a context we aren’t familiar with.
Some things never change
A study of the individual's character should suggest special vulnerabilities (drugs, alcohol, women, luxury, power), which may be exploited and result in transgressions.
In the preceding paragraphs, I wrote about desires that are context-specific. Contrast this with the above quote, which presents some desires as quasi-universal: the desire for drugs, alcohol, women (or men), luxury, and power. The way to reconcile this apparent contradiction is to realize that the two excerpts from the manual refer to slightly different things.
The abstract desire, like gaining power, is constant across contexts. What varies across contexts is how people try to live out this abstract desire. In some contexts, the desire for power manifests itself as earning a lot of money, while in others power may mean deciding who will get a new pair of shoes or who will be sent on a dangerous military mission.
Indirect bribery as an off-ramp
Like everyone else, those who accept bribes want to think of themselves as good people. When an ordinary person takes a bribe, he experiences cognitive dissonance: he considers himself a good person, yet here he is, engaging in bad behavior. To help the bribed person minimize cognitive dissonance, the undercover agent may frame the bribe as a fundamentally different type of transaction—one that doesn’t involve immoral behavior.
Indirect or covert bribery may be used where it will reduce the danger of exposure and avoid the possibility of insulting the recipient. Covert bribery involves the use of such techniques as the following: selling goods below their value; buying goods above their value; losing to the recipient at gambling; making unwinnable bets with him; presenting him with expensive gifts; making heavy "loans"; granting monopolistic rights to certain revenues, products or services; establishing "philanthropic" organizations as fronts; subsidizing corporations.
Rules, and more rules
Threats to reveal infractions of rules - especially military regulations- constitute a good hold on a man. In wartime, regulations are so numerous, complex, and severe, that it is difficult for any one not to break some of them, or to fear one has broken them.
Even if we make the rather charitable assumption that every rule makes sense individually, the cumulative effect of laws is frequently very harmful. Instead of considering only the direct costs of an extra rule, we should also think about how it interacts with the existing web of rules.