The purpose of this website is to make sense of the liars whom I’ve lived and worked for, among, and against. There are moments when I shake with rage at the memory of trust broken; I also quiver with shame at the memory of breaking trust.  We deceive and are deceived by others and ourselves. It is this topic of deception––state-to-state and person-to-person –– around which this website dances.

This web log addresses denial and deception, its dozens of synonyms in English (and Russian), how deception (and its synonyms) is defined, applied, and sometimes countered in the twentieth century.

How best to address deception –– in fiction or non-fiction, in novel or memoir?

I am writing a set of five novels about four protagonists: one American, Michael Richard Belisle; one Canadian, Marie Jeanne Charbonneau; and two Russians, Danton Larionov and Ekaterina Soroka, each practicing deceptive arts.

It is a puzzling life.

As intelligence was professionalized as a military and diplomatic force multiplier, so were intelligence countermeasures, i.e., counter-intelligence, of which deception (and its synonyms) is a subset. I am revisiting twentieth-century history with an eye to where purposeful deception might have impacted events. I will eventually write a non-fiction book on this research, but as of yet, I have not even an outline.

One does not exclude self-deception from an examination of the deceptive arts.  I will examine the extent to which the deceived is gullible, and how the deceiver, an opportunist that he must be, uses the gullible.