Bill Parquette (LinkedIn; Website) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss Denial and Deception. They discuss examples such as D-Day, the Yom Kippur War, and the Persian Gulf War.

Sun Tzu said, “all warfare is based on deception” and so much of the natural world is also based on denial and deception: camouflage, feigning, mimicry, distraction. It is also a feature of our daily 21st century lives: spyware, trojan horses, catfishing, and spear phishing.

With this week’s guest we look at the Denial and Deception Committee, which aimed to discover and mitigate foreign denial and deception operations against the U.S. by coordinating efforts throughout the IC.

Bill Parquette was a former Chair of the Committee. He joined the Committee in 2002 and left in 2015. He was formerly a Lt. Col. In the U.S. Army, starting his career with 10 years in the 82nd Airborne, and is currently Professor of Practice at Penn State University. 

And…

The episode looks at deceiving others but the human capacity for self-deception and denial is VAST – from head in the sand, plugging your ears, living in denial, willful ignorance, and cognitive dissonance through to doublethink. 

"If I have an audience of one or 100, I ask does anyone have children? And the hands get raised. And then I said, okay, did you teach your child deception or denial? And of course not. Do they conduct denial or deception? And they all said yeah, it's throughout nature, it's throughout society…it's a natural thing to deny. I didn't mom I didn't take that cookie." – Bill Parquette

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• Movies to explore on deception include Deception (1946), The Sting (1973), The Usual Suspects (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), Female Agents (2008) and Operation Mincemeat (2021),