I've been reading a book titled "The Spy and The Traitor" by Ben McIntyre, and it's a fascinating story about a KGB officer who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Britain in the cold war and passed top secret info to the Brits. A shocking block of information was about *Operation Ryan.
The short hand version of the tip is this: Never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. And it has application in a many areas. However, in this context, here's the entire paragraph and its application to the story told in the book:
In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. Hitler had been certain that the D-day invasion force would land at Calais, so that is what his spies (with help from Allied double agents) told him, ensuring the success of the Normandy landings. Tony Blair and George W. Bush were convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that is what their intelligence services duly concluded. Yuri Andropov, pedantic and autocratic, was utterly convinced that his KGB minions would find evidence of a looming nuclear assault. So that is what they did.
McIntyre tells readers of the book that Andropov believed it, and his spies sought to prove it.
*Operation RYAN was the code name for raketno-yadernoya napadeniye which represented the erroneous belief by Yuri Andropov that the U.S. intended to launch a preemptive nuclear strike to obliterate the Soviet Union.
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4:04 PM 7/8/2019
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