A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies: Patriot Games
(This movie plus eleven more are in A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies. It’s on Amazon here.)
Somewhere, someone doesn’t like you.
A competitor. A rival. Someone who lost when you won.
Are they a threat?
A spy answers that question by looking for two things: capability and will.
For a threat to be real, both must be present.
Capability is what someone can do. Will is whether they want to harm you.
Most people only look at capability. Armies count weapons. Security teams control access. But capability without will is just potential. Will without capability is a man with a plan he can’t execute on.
Yet.
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In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford plays Jack Ryan. Ryan is in London with his family when he stumbles into a terrorist attack. In the fight, he kills one of the attackers. A young man named Patrick Miller.
Patrick’s brother, Sean Miller, watches him die.
Patrick was part of Sean Miller’s Endgame. The world he was fighting for.
When someone destroys a piece of your Endgame, you develop the will to attack. Miller’s cause used to be a united Ireland. Now his cause became revenge. Zero-Sum. Ryan loses, or he does.
But will alone isn’t a threat. After the terrorist attack, Miller is in custody. He can do nothing. A man with will and no way to act on it.
Then the capability starts building.
Miller’s allies break him out during a prison transfer. That’s capability: soldiers, organization, resources. He gets weapons. More capability. He gets a training camp in North Africa. More capability.
Then the network starts watching Ryan’s family.
They photograph his wife and daughter. They map the routines. Which road. What time. Which car. Surveillance is capability-building. Before you can act on a target, you have to know the target. For weeks, Ryan’s family is watched. Nobody notices.
A spy is trained to notice. Vary the route. Check for repeated faces. Mark the car that’s been parked too long. Surveillance is the most visible precursor there is. It puts a person near you, again and again, before anything happens.
Every step leaves traces. Capability always does. It takes money, people, infrastructure, time. Which means you can see it coming.
If you’re watching.
Ryan isn’t watching. He’s gone back to his life. The attack in London was an event, and the event is over.
That’s how most people think about threats. Something happens, it ends, you move on.
But a threat isn’t an event. It’s an overlap. And the will didn’t end in London. It started there.
The attack on Ryan’s wife and daughter is the moment capability and will meet. Miller has the weapons, the men, and the plan. And he has the will that’s been driving him since his brother died. Both conditions true at once. That’s when a threat stops being potential and becomes real.
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After the highway attack, Ryan works the problem from both sides.
He works the capability side. Finding the camp. Tracking the network. Cutting off resources.
And he understands the will side. Which is what most people miss. Miller isn’t fighting for a greater cause anymore. His game is personal. Which means degrading the organization won’t end the threat. Miller will rebuild. New weapons. New allies. New plans.
Because will builds capability. Time and persistence are all it takes.
A man playing a Zero-Sum game to protect his Endgame can be reasoned with. He has something he’s building toward. He has people, places and things to protect. Miller’s Endgame has a hole in it. He’s given up on it. The Zero-sum game of revenge is all he has left.
The organization loses its camp, its people, its structure. But Miller keeps coming.
The threat doesn’t end until the will does.
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Most threats you’ll face won’t involve weapons. But capability and will are what form threats anywhere.
A competitor has the capability to enter your market. Do they have the will? Does their Endgame require what you have?
Someone in your organization has access and influence. Have their circumstances changed in a way that makes going after you advance their position?
Two things to check this week:
First: Whoever you’re worried about, separate the two conditions. Capability you can count. Resources, position, access. Will you find by reasoning backward from their Endgame. Do they need what you have? If not, the capability is just potential.
Second: The reverse. Somebody with no capability today but a fresh reason to want what’s yours. That’s the one nobody watches. That’s the Sean Miller.
Capability is visible. Will can be hidden.
The hidden one is the more important.
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Sean Miller was a threat Jack Ryan didn’t see forming.
The Threat Framework is how you see them. Mapping capability. Finding will. Reading the precursors before they overlap.
Spy’s Guide Briefing members get a free PDF download on the full Threat Framework. Plus, twice a week, the Briefing takes a framework like this one and applies it to what’s happening right now. And to what’s happening around you.
Get the Spy’s Guide Briefing here.
The Threat Framework is in A Spy’s Guide to Strategy.
-John Braddock
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