Signs Of Unseen Enemies
When you’re a spy, you rarely see an enemy.
After all, you’re hiding from them. You’re infiltrating in a false name. You’re getting the intelligence without them knowing. You’re doing your mission and getting out before they know you’re there.
And if the enemy knows you’re there, they’re surveilling you. Which means they’re hiding from you. They’re following you without being obvious about it. They want to know what you’re doing, but they don’t want you to see them.
You’re hiding from them, and they’re hiding from you. Which means you rarely see an enemy, and the enemy rarely sees you.
But not seeing an enemy before they come at you can be deadly, so you do everything you can to see them before it’s too late.
Which means you look for signs and precursors of unseen enemies.
If an enemy might be surveilling you, you look for the same person separated by time and distance.
If an enemy might be about to attack, you look for the preparation necessary for the attack.
If a friend might turn into enemy, you look for signs of betrayal.
A guy in LA claims women will text him while they’re bored and out with another guy. He says he tells the women to order him some food, have the guy pay for it, and bring it to him after the date is over.
You probably think that’s a terrible thing for the guy to do. He’s getting food from another guy meant for the girl. And it’s a terrible thing for the girl to do. She’s taking from one guy to give to another.
You’d be right — it’s terrible. The guy innocently taking the girl out for a date is being robbed. He’s got two enemies when he thought he had a friend (and maybe a girlfriend). But she’s betraying him.
What are the signs? If the girl was bored and texting another guy while she’s on the date, that’s a sign. She’s ordering more food than she can eat, which is another sign. And who knows how many other signs the guy could have picked up during the date (the Twitter thread about this might be offensive to some people, but to see it, the link is at the bottom of this email).
When business clients ask me to help them with competitive intelligence, we look for signs of unseen enemies. If it’s a big business, we look for customer attrition rates rising. If they have big competitors, we listen to the competitors’ conference calls with Wall Street analysts. If it’s a small business, we watch for new entrants sending direct mail to our market. If it’s an online business, we look for rising online ad rates for our target demographic, because that means other online businesses are targeting our customers.
But there’s a fine line between watching for signs of unseen enemies and paranoia. After all, if you see enemies where there are none, you start to distrust everyone. You might shut down or curtail your business when you don’t need to. You stop doing the things you should. You do less, when you should be doing more.
The story I tell in A Spy’s Guide To Taking Risks is about looking for unseen enemies and avoiding paranoia. It was my first day in alias in a foreign country. On that day, I was in a car wreck, was surrounded by Border Patrol, and spotted what could have been surveillance.
But I still got the job done. I got it done because I looked for the signs of unseen enemies and had a logical way to work through whether they were there or not.
The logic was this: If an enemy is there, they don’t matter unless they act against me. And to act against me, they needed to do several things. Knowing what those things were, I could set up tests. I could experiment. I could know with a high degree of certainty whether an enemy was there or not.
I avoided paranoia.
When you’re unsure of unseen enemies, avoid the paranoia by breaking down the steps the enemy needs to take in order to act against you.
If you’re in business, look for the financing of the other side, outreach to your customers, and offers/products targeting your demographic.
If you’re on a date, look for strange absences, strange requests and the thousand other ways someone signals they’re not interested.
If you’re a spy detecting surveillance, look for the many steps an enemy must take to catch you.
Here’s a link to A Spy’s Guide To Taking Risks.
