Where States Lie: A Historical Sociological Investigation into the Art of Cover Storying in a Secret Cold War Intelligence Operation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Secrecy and deception are integral components of ruling, yet remain under-researched and under-theorized sociologically. This thesis draws on two complimentary literatures with the goal of advancing a conceptual framework and agenda for the study of secrecy and deception in government: governmentality studies and dramaturgy. The usefulness of this framework is demonstrated by analyzing the cover storying practices of military officials in Cobra Mist, a secret radar intelligence station built in England in the late 1960s. Based on a theoretical understanding of cover storying, six interrelated themes are developed and substantiated empirically: i) scripting and rehearsing a suitable cover narrative; ii) going public via press release; iii) backstage struggles over cover storying and information leaks; iv) strategies for managing information leakage; v) secret site closure; and vi) the production of mystery. In conclusion this thesis reflects on the methodological limitations of research on government secrecy and offers four possible avenues for future research on cover storying.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".