Detecting Deception: A Bibliography of Counterdeception Across

676 Pages·2006·3.02 MB·English

by  Barton Whaley

DETECTING DECEPTION:
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF COUNTERDECEPTION
ACROSS TIME, CULTURES, AND DISCIPLINES
— Second Edition —
by
Barton Whaley
editor: Susan Stratton Aykroyd
“I have some few references to make.”
—Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four
(1890), Chapter 2
Foreign Denial & Deception Committee
Washington, DC
March 2006
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April 10, 2006
It is with great pleasure that I present to you this impressive and comprehensive
bibliography by Dr. Barton Whaley on the theory and practice of “Counterdeception.”
Dr. Whaley has been an avid researcher and teacher of military-political deception
studies and theories for nearly four decades. In this latest work, he has done a masterful
job of sifting through the tens of thousands of sources on the subject, and selecting those
works that make original contributions to useful theory and principles, as well as
effective methods of detection and relevant case studies. This guide is most timely in that
it coincides with the release of the National Intelligence Council’s Foreign Denial &
Deception Committee’s new strategy for the coming decade.
This is more than a mere listing of sources: each entry includes his personal commentary,
as well as an overall score for relevance. In so doing, Dr. Whaley has made a thoughtful
attempt to advocate and point the researcher to a theory or specific method for
consistently effective counterdeception. At the same time, this bibliography makes
significant inroads toward breaking down traditional barriers between disciplines, which
only enrich our understanding of deception and its detection. If we are to deal with
deceivers, he writes, we must become good detectives. Therefore, we should not be
surprised that some of the more important books and articles on cognitive and
evolutionary psychology dealing with problem-solving and creative thinking are
included.
As a nation and a community of intelligence professionals, we must strive to reduce our
vulnerability to strategic surprise, mistakes, and omissions across the spectrum of threats
to national security due to foreign denial and deception. This will require innovative
thinking on the part of intelligence analysts and collectors, and a renewed vigor in further
studying and applying the best of counterdeception methods and analysis from across all
disciplines. In “Detecting Deception: A Bibliography of Counterdeception Across Time,
Cultures, and Disciplines,” Dr. Whaley has made a significant contribution to our task of
better detecting and countering the myriad of deceptions directed against us.
The specific evaluations and comments in this bibliography represent Dr. Whaley’s
personal views and do not necessarily represent the views of the United States
Government or the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee.
Dr. Lawrence K. Gershwin
National Intelligence Officer for
Science and Technology and
Chairman, Foreign Denial and Deception Committee
National Intelligence Council
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
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CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION .......................................... vi
INTRODUCTION: Perspectives on Deception and Counterdeception .................. vii
USER’S MANUAL ......................................................... xiv
Search Tips for the CD Version
Key to Ratings and Category Abbreviations
LIST OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES .................................................. xvi
BIBLIOGRAPHY: A-Z ....................................................... 1
APPENDIX A: List of Exhibitions on Fakes, Deception, and Detection, 1878-present ..... 620
APPENDIX B: List of Conferences on Fakes, Deceptions, and Detection, 1915-present ... 639
IN LIEU OF AN INDEX: Categories forcomputer search ........................... 656
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The First Edition of this work appeared in December 2005. It listed 2,146 books and articles.
This Second Edition, published in May 2006, lists an additional 298 items. Moreover, most of the original
items have been revised, mainly by enlarged annotations. Two appendixes have been added. These
cover over 340 interdisciplinary public and semi-public exhibitions and conferences on fakes, deception,
and detection that have been held over the past century. Most of these exhibitions and conferences
produced published catalogs or reports that are described in the appendices. These are in addition to the
titles in the main bibliography except the more important ones for which the reader is referred to the
main bibliography.
For the convenience of some users the CD Version has been formatted for a simple printout in
standard book style. Consequently, several blank pages are inserted in the early parts to preserve the
conventional recto-verso and odd-even pagination.
This Bibliography represents my personal and sometimes even ruthlessly frank opinions and
judgments. These do not necessarily represent the views of the United States Government or the
Foreign Denial & Deception Committee.
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INTRODUCTION: PERSPECTIVES ON DECEPTION AND ITS DETECTION
This book is designed to help achieve three goals:
1) To be the first standard guide to the literature on detection and intelligence analysis in
general.
2) To point the reader to those specific writings most useful for analysis, research, development,
teaching, or training.
3) To alert the reader to the main competing theories and methods used for analyzing mysteries,
particularly where deception is present.
To fulfill these goals this study’s scope was extended in three directions to discover and mine
fresh data and theory on detection and counterdeception. It explored aggressively across 143 normally
separate disciplines and specialties — and discovered dozens of useful theories and effective methods.
However it also found that many of these were unwitting duplications of effort—reinvented wheels,
unnecessarily wasted efforts. It looked into various different cultural and social groups—and uncovered
different values, priorities, and emphases. And it probed back through time—and found that newer
wasn’t always better.
An unplanned fringe benefit of this work is that, in addition to its central topics of deception and
counterdeception, it embodies the essential bibliographies of at least seven closely related major fields.
These specialized fields are Intelligence Analysis, Counterintelligence, Forensic Science, Cognitive
Psychology, Police Investigation, Surprise, and Political-Military Theory.
This bibliography is more than a reference book. It has been designed as a tool to help us
become better analysts of intelligence. And particularly so in the presence of deception. It introduces us
to all the various techniques used by different types of professionals to solve mysteries. These analysts
range from our own political-military intelligencers, through police detectives and forensic lab
technicians, to those “intelligencers of nature” we call physicists and psychologists. It is a spinoff from an
on-going study of over 143 types of analysts and detectives to discover which ones are more consistently
successful and which of their analytical methods are most effective. Moreover, the focus of that study
and this bibliography is on how best to detect deceptions directed against us. But if we are to deal with
deceivers, we must become detectives. And we can do so—because, as literary sleuth David Ketterer
(1979), noted, “An awareness of deception presupposes a detective ability.”
Let’s Define OurTerms
I define deception as any attempt—by words or actions—intended to distort another person's or
group's perception of reality. And to keep matters simple, a lie is any statement made with the intent to
deceive. These definitions avoid confusion with mere misinformation, incomplete information, or the
truth value of statements. But they do permit us to include the authorized lies and deceptions practiced
with our knowledge and approval by stage actors, magicians, and poker players. Moreover, this
definition gets around the worrisome problem of self-deception. Instead, for our present purpose, the
target of a deception is not oneself but always another's mind.
A TYPOLOGY OF PERCEPTION
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This is a convenient model of perception. It avoids the common confusion between deception
and self-deception by setting the latter to one side. Similarly, this typology distinguishes between other-
induced deceptions and the several types of self-induced irrational and psychopathological
misperceptions identified by Lasswell (1930), Jervis (1976), Heuer (1982), and others
The ideal deception makes the victim certain but wrong. Ideal detection reveals the truth behind
the lie, the face beneath the mask, the reality under the camouflage. Good detection spares us from
unwelcome surprises.
Surprise? It’s only in the mind of the victim. Surprise is simply the perception that something
(an event and/or the process by which it changes) is happening contrary to expectations. If we have a
weak understanding of “ground truth” and how it changes naturally as well as how our perceptions of it
can be manipulated by others, we’ll be often and greatly surprised. But, if we have a more-or-less
accurate notion of events and processes we’ll be seldom and little surprised. It is the detective’s, the
analyst’s job to understand these events and processes.
Counterdeception? Counterdeception is merely convenient shorthand for "the detection of
deception" and is now standard jargon among specialists in military deception. This useful term was
coined in 1968 by Dr. William R. Harris during a brainstorming session with me in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. We’d met through our shared curiosity about the role of deception in war. Harris was
then Henry Kissinger’s graduate teaching assistant for the latter’s course on national security affairs at
Harvard's Center for International Affairs; and I was working down the avenue as a research associate in
communications at MIT's Center for International Studies. I wanted a single word to express the concept
of detecting deception and had been toying with "counter-stratagem" when Harris, agreeing that this was
both cumbersome and obscure, suggested "counter-deception" (as a specific type of counterintelligence).
I got the word into print the following year1; and it soon became such commonly accepted jargon that, to
use the lingo of linguists, it "closed", losing its hyphen.
In recent years some intelligencers have extended this simple definition to include playback of
an opponent’s detected deception, turning his detected deception against him. And even more recently,
a few other intelligencers have further muddled matters by entirely excluding the detection phase and
narrowing the meaning to just the playback part. So, while these new definitions parallel those given to
“counterintelligence”, they’reunnecessary. I preferthe term “triple cross” — it’s simpler and clearer.
What Changes, What Doesn’t
Our geographical environments tend to change slowly. Our social and political systems and
institutions shift back and forth. It is only our technologies that have advanced slowly in antiquity, more
rapidly since the Renaissance, and faster and everfaster overthe past two centuries. Intelligence
analysts confront this most dramatically in the ever-growing volume of data, the increasing speed at
which information is transmitted, the evolving technical sophistication of some communication systems,
and the speed-up in long-distance transportation of personnel and materials.
But is this Revolution or Evolution? Although we speak of the Information Revolution or the
Revolution in Intelligence or the Revolution in Military Affairs with even greater awe than a recent
generation did of the Industrial Revolution, we exaggerate. The rate at which new information is
generated was already great enough by the early 1800s that not only new disciplines but entirely new
sub-specialties had to be founded to cope. Thus “biology” didn’t become a recognized specialty until
1819, “psychiatry” until 1828, and “physicist” until around 1840.
But psychology doesn’t change. Or, at most, imperceptibly overthe past two or more
millenniums through the slow creep of genetic mutation. The Greek atomist and Chinese Confucian
philosophers, Italian politician Machiavelli, and English dramatist Shakespeare understood this
1Whaley (1969), 144.
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unchanging nature of human motives, emotions, perceptions, and misperceptions long before our
modern evolutionary psychologists rediscovered it.
Consequently, because deception is a psychological mind-game, it doesn’t change. However,
the technology used to communicate disinformation does change. The only other changes are in our
theories of how deception works and our techniques for detecting deceptions.
Interdisciplinary Synergy, or How Many Times Do We Have to Reinvent the Wheel?
Specialization is one of the main consequences for scientific and intelligence analysts of
increasing technological growth and elaboration. But, while the multiplication of specialties is one way
to cope with the multiplication of information, it becomes dysfunctional unless the specialists
communicate across their disciplines. For example, when around 1910 sociology split off a new field of
“rural sociology”, the two fields began working somewhat independently of each other. As found by E.
Katz (1960), this led to much duplication of research and unshared solutions until the 1950s when these
two groups rediscovered their common interests and began to work together again on appropriate
problems.
The often self-limiting parochialism common among modern intelligence analysts can be
similarly broken by seeking sturdier theories and more effective methods that have already been
researched and developed in other seemingly remote disciplines. For example, we can more effectively
identify, track, and target individuals and cells in criminal and terrorist groups by combining expert
interrogators, intelligence analysts, mathematical graph theorists, social network (Small World) experts,
and computer technicians. Generally, on how to detect deceptions, we have much useful theory to
borrow from, among others, cognitive psychologists, forensic scientists, and epidemiologists; effective
analytical methods from logicians, sociologists, art authenticators, and professional magicians; and case-
study data to mine from dozens of fields.
Cross-Cultural Vistas
Although basic individual human psychology remains unchanged from one generation to the
next, our cultural and social relationships impose constraints on our values and behaviors. Intelligence
analysts as much as invading armies ignore this at their peril. Here we need the knowledge of cultural
anthropologists and sociologists such as Simons (2005).
Mavericks are the Best Solvers of Mysteries
In addition to the deceptions in our private lives and in the workplace, some of us have jobs
where detecting deception is part of standard procedure — military and political intelligence analysts,
security officersversus spies, cops versus crooks, lawyersversus lying witnesses, auditors versus
embezzlers, art collectors versus art fakers. I studied 143 different types of such professional detectives
to discover how their methods may help the rest of us detect deception, to practice the art of
"counterdeception".
I began compiling this bibliography in the mid-1980s in parallel with researching and writingThe
Maverick Detective. By 1987 when it had reached 220 pages, the working title was merely descriptive —
Counterdeception: The Detection of Deception. I switched in the new prescriptive title when the research
began to show that all consistently successful detectives in each of the dozens of separate disciples and
specialties shared three qualities:
1) They are curiosity driven, so much so that they will persist well beyond regular hours,
returning again and again until the mystery is solved.
2) They have a “prepared mind”, one loaded by experience and/or education with a
large enough data base to quickly recognize and evaluate analogous situations.
3) They are intuitive, logical but through pursuing other than direct linear thinking.
Moreover, the logic they following is, specifically, not the familiar Deductive or Inductive
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types, but that less trodden path which for the past 12 decades has been known to
logicians and theoretical scientists as Retroduction (or Abduction). See particularly Eco
(1984) and Haack (2003). Other scientists have called it variously The Method of Zadig,
The Method, Inverse Probability, or my favorite, Retrospective Prophesy. This sounds
like a contradiction in terms for anyone who thinks that any mystery has ever been
solved or any deception ever detected by “connecting the dots.” In fact this is just
projecting backward from an observed or reported effect (outcome) to its most probable
cause (origin). This prime method of detection is not particularly rare. It is common
among all theoretical physicists, most magicians, many mathematicians and medical
diagnosticians, and some police detectives. It is, however, still too rare among
intelligence analysts.
Another finding of The Maverick Detective was that every breakthrough into the detection of
deception can be traced to a single individual working alone, although often drawing directly upon
specialized colleagues without having to go through bureaucratic channels. Does this mean that all
intelligence analysts should be retrained in Retroduction? I think not. At most they only need be enough
aware of that analytical technique to know when it’s time to pass a baffling puzzle to a counterdeception
specialist. Absent a Retroductionist, most mysteries get solved anyway, solved by teams of detectives
and analysts using straightforward methods. Cops and military intelligence analysts are usually able to
solve some 90 to 95% of their mysteries by their routine methods. Its only the rare special cases that
defeat them, the ones involving more-or-less sophisticated deceptions. Unfortunately, these tend to
include the more highly consequential cases of surprise—Pearl Harbor, BARBAROSSA, the Battle of the
Bulge, the Berlin Wall, the Yom KippurWar, the Sino-Soviet Split, 9/11, Iraqi non-WMD, etc., etc.
Why This Bibliography?
A bibliography is a list of sources relevant to a specified topic. Originally a list of books (from the
Greekbyblos) and other written sources, the word has expanded to encompass all written texts, visual
presentations, and oral and other sound recordings. Most bibliographies simply recordthe works
deemed relevant to one particular subject as a check-list for further research. A few others add a
subject-oriented essay or more-or-less detailed annotations to make its list a true guidebook into the
literature. This bibliography does all that — and then goes a step beyond. It attempts to advocate and
teach a viewpoint, a theory, a specific method for the consistently effective detection of deception. It is
found in several disciplines where it goes under a variety of names. It has been called Incongruity
Analysis by British and some American intelligence analysts since R. V. Jones (a physicist), Bill Harris (a
lawyer), and Whaley (a methodologist and epistemologist). Theorists of humor and comedy refer to
Incongruity Theory.
Magicians call it Discrepancy Analysis. Scientists generally speak of Anomalies. But all these
professions have built on older traditions. Thus, in 1880, the great British biologist T. H. Huxley dubbed it
The Method of Zadig. And leading philosophers of science like Charles Peirce and Susan Haack call it
Retroductive or Abductive Inference. This theory echoes in other seemingly unrelated disciplines. Thus
did the founder of forensic science, Edmond Locard, introduce his Exchange Principle in 1920.
Mathematician Von Neumann & economist Morgenstern published their Theory of Games (including the
first theory of bluffing) in 1944. Mathematician Claude Shannon presented his brilliant signals-
redundancy-noise Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948, following it the next year with the
first Theory of Cryptology. And that astonishingly successful Scottish medical diagnostician, Dr. Joe
Bell, called it The Method when teaching it to his med students, including a 19-year-old named Doyle
who, adapting it to detective fiction in 1887, created the world’s most famous fictional detective.
And there are the followers. These include such familiar names as Oxford don Sir John
Masterman, American physicist Richard Feynman, Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, and American
psychologist & statistician David Schum. Altogether they’re an odd lot but you’ll find all their names and
works in this bibliography. I call them the Optimists.
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