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Title: POPSEC: Inglourious Basterds Author: Elle Armageddon Date: May 10, 2017 Language: en Topics: film, security culture, Anti-fascism Source: Retrieved on 22nd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/05/10/popsec-inglourious-basterds-operational-security-lessons-learned-from-scalping-nazis
With fascism on the rise both in the United States and Europe, it’s a
good time to remind everyone of Inglourious Basterds. This movie is full
of people kicking Nazi ass and offers a wealth of entertaining
operational security lessons. The following text is packed with both
spoilers and important takeaways from the film.
from helping you and nothing to gain.
The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds features a confrontation
between a Nazi officer and a French dairy farmer who is hiding a Jewish
family under his house. The Jews have entrusted their safety to the
dairy farmer because, prior to the German occupation of France, he was
one of their neighbors. The farmer has nothing to gain from aiding his
Jewish neighbors besides the fact that offering to hide your neighbors
when they are being threatened with genocide is the only decent thing to
do. Unfortunately, the dairy farmer has three daughters and a vested
interest in keeping them safe from the occupying Germans. The farmer
reveals the location of the Jewish family because protecting them and
protecting his family have become mutually exclusive.
People who stand to gain little from helping us seldom choose decency
over the preservation of their own interests. This doesn’t necessarily
mean we should never place our trust in such people, but it does mean
that we need to have explicit conversations with them about how much
risk they’re willing to take on in the course of providing their
assistance, especially when betrayal carries serious consequences.
Shoshanna is a woman with a plan. To pull it off, she needs complete
buy-in from her counterpart, Marcel, and the services of a film
developer. Her plan is both dangerous and tenuous, and even one breach
in security could land her and her co-conspirator in a concentration
camp (or worse), leaving Hitler and the rest of the Nazi party top brass
free to continue their reign of terror. Fortunately for Shoshanna, she
has two really important things going for her: she is cool as a
cucumber, and she knows better than to share essential details with
nonessential players. Shoshanna never reveals even a single detail about
her plan to the film developer, choosing instead to provide what you
might call an alternate incentive for his cooperation. In fact, aside
from Marcel, whose complete loyalty has already been verified, and whose
collaboration is essential to ensure the success of Shoshanna’s plan,
Shoshanna never breathes a word about her intentions to anyone, leaving
her free and clear to carry out her act of vengeance.
This lesson applies in real life: if you never tell your colleagues
anything more than what is needed for them to execute their part of the
plan, you significantly reduce the risk that they will share damaging
information and ruin your plans.
Lieutenant Archie Hicox is an exemplary soldier and an above-average spy
who understands German fluently. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Hicox speaks
with an unusual accent, and while his knowledge of German film is
unparalleled within the Allied forces, his understanding of German
culture is severely lacking in several regards. Also severely lacking is
Hicox’ awareness of his weaknesses. As a result of this lack of
self-awareness, Hicox first draws attention to his covert meeting by
being overheard speaking with an odd accent, then ultimately botches the
mission, resulting in his own death and the deaths of nearly everyone
else in the room. Fraulein von Hammersmark later tells Lieutenant Rains
that Hicox screwed up by holding up the incorrect fingers to signal
“three” while ordering from the bartender. While this is certainly an
accurate description of events, the truth is that he flubbed the
operation by not having the good sense to shut the hell up once he’d
drawn the attention of an SS officer.
This offers two real-world takeaways: first, be self-aware about your
weaknesses so you can work around them. The second, which is related, is
to be aware enough to know when your operation has failed, so you can
pull back in time to regroup and try again later—or at least so you can
live to fight another day.
Sure, Bridget von Hammersmark made a mission-critical error by choosing
a pub full of Nazi soldiers as the place for her rendezvous with the
Basterds, but her much deadlier mistake was neglecting to clean up after
herself before leaving the scene. It can be damn near impossible to keep
your wits when everything is falling to pieces around you, but if you’re
engaged in something subversive or clandestine, you need to remain calm
during catastrophes to ensure that the trouble doesn’t spread. In
Bridget von Hammersmark’s case, a discarded autograph and an errant shoe
effectively sealed her fate.
In the real world, cleaning up after yourself might be as simple as
wiping chat and text message logs before going out to a risky action, or
making sure your bags do not contain anything you don’t want to be
arrested carrying before you leave the house, or making sure you don’t
leave behind anything potentially incriminating.
The Basterds had an airtight plan for infiltrating the premier of
Fredrick Zoller’s film: send in three operatives all fluent in German to
accompany famed German actress Bridget von Hammersmark to the premier of
Stolz der Nation, and use the event as an opportunity to take out
Hitler. Unfortunately, all the German-speaking Basterds were present at
Frau von Hammersmark’s disastrous basement rendezvous and none of them
survived. Now, most people might face these facts with an air of
resignation, but Lieutenant Aldo Raine is not most people. Raine makes
the extremely ill-advised and regrettable decision to move forward as
planned, posing as Italians rather than Germans. Granted, Aldo speaks
Italian… sort of. And sure, Frau von Hammersmark does tell him that
Germans don’t have a good ear for Italian accents… but reasonably, all
parties involved should have called it quits.
Sometimes, it is impossible to salvage a plan. The best you can do is
call it quits and live to fight another day—whether that means backing
out of a plan to assassinate Hitler, or recognizing that it’s time to
leave an action, go home, and start preparing for the next one.
nothing to lose.
Shoshanna Dreyfus, aka Emmanuelle Mimieux, is a young Frenchwoman who
owns a movie theater. Unbeknownst to everyone but her lover and her
reluctant but loyal collaborator, Marcel, Shoshanna is also a young
Jewish woman whose family was massacred before her eyes, who only barely
escaped sharing their fate. In other words, Shoshanna is clean out of
fucks to give, and is willing to burn it all down in order to get
revenge and prevent others from sharing her family’s fate. Shoshanna is
the epitome of a dangerous adversary because she has decided she has
nothing to lose.
The lesson here is a grim one: you can only defeat an adversary willing
to sacrifice everything to take you down by acting preemptively. In the
best-case scenario, you should not make such enemies in the first place.
In the worst-case scenario, you must neutralize such threats before they
are able to enact mutually-assured destruction.
There may come a time in your life when, like Colonel Hans Landa, you
need to make a deal with your enemies in order to ensure your survival.
The lesson to take away from Landa’s deal with the American military is
simple: make sure you iron out all of the details and don’t trust your
adversary any more than is necessary. Landa, for example, probably
shouldn’t have trusted Aldo Raine to adhere to all the details of the
agreement he had made.
In a real-life context, this means you should never trust the police
when they offer you a deal in exchange for information. Police
frequently assure arrestees that if they cooperate (i.e., answer
questions and give up information), they’ll tell the district attorney
to go easy on them. The reality of the situation is that police have no
control over how a district attorney files charges or tries cases, and a
police officer is never going to get on the stand and testify that a
defendant should be exonerated if the DA instructs him otherwise.
It is also important to be circumspect about making deals with your
adversaries when you are considering accepting a plea deal offered by a
prosecuting attorney. Be wary of plea deals stipulating probation, as
probation frequently carries with it a suspension of the meager civil
liberties offered by the state—sometimes not just for the person on
probation, but also for all those in proximity to that person. If you
are considering accepting a plea deal rather than going to trial, work
with your attorney to try to negotiate a deal that actually protects you
and your comrades.
Always do your best to find out what your enemies stand to lose if they
go back on their word. If it’s negligible—or nothing at all—there’s no
reason to put faith in the deal.