A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(This movie plus eleven more are in A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies. It’s on Amazon here.)
The DADA Chain is simple: Data feeds Analysis. Analysis feeds Decisions. Decisions feed Actions.
If the data is poisoned, the analysis, decisions and actions are wrong.
It’s worse if the person making decisions doesn’t know the data is poisoned. They think they’re analyzing reality. They think their decisions are sound.
But poisoned data means they’re taking the wrong action.
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In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman plays George Smiley. It’s the early 1970s. The Cold War is already old. The men running British Intelligence are older.
The head of British Intelligence is called Control. Control believes there’s a Soviet mole in his organization. One of five men. One is Smiley.
Control sends an officer to Budapest to learn the mole’s name. The officer is killed.
Control is forced out. Smiley, his deputy, is out, too.
Then Percy Alleline takes over. And Alleline has a prize: A stream of Soviet secrets codenamed Witchcraft. It’s from a source they believe sits high inside Moscow. The intelligence is extraordinary. It’s consistent. It’s exactly what the British ministers want to read.
Based on the Witchcraft intelligence, Alleline’s analysis is sound. The decision to promote Witchcraft as the service’s priority intelligence makes sense. The actions - cutting out skeptics, reorganizing the service around the source - all follow logically.
Alleline is executing the DADA Chain perfectly.
The problem is the first step.
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Witchcraft isn’t good intelligence. It’s poisoned data. Written by Moscow. But British Intelligence doesn’t know it.
The moment poisoned data entered the chain, everything downstream is poisoned, too. Analysis of the data can be good. Decisions based on the analysis can be right. But it all points in the wrong direction.
There’s a researcher in British Intelligence named Connie Sachs. She’s sharp. She knows the files. And when Witchcraft arrives, she sees something off about it. Not a smoking gun. Just a pattern that doesn’t fit. A detail that suggests the source isn’t who he claims to be.
She raises the question: what if the data isn’t real?
She’s pushed out.
Not because she’s wrong. Because in a DADA Chain built on poisoned data, the person who questions the data challenges the rest of the chain.
People making decisions based on poisoned data don’t like questions about the data. Sometimes, they protect their decisions by removing the people who ask questions about it.
So Connie is pushed out.
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Then Smiley is brought back, quietly, to answer the old question: Is there a mole?
To answer that, he works backward through the DADA Chain.
He looks at the actions taken. Alleline’s rise. The old guard scattered. Skeptics like Connie pushed out. Then he works backward from those actions to the decisions that caused them. Who decided Witchcraft was reliable? Who decided to cut out Control’s people?
Then backward again to the analysis. What analysis would produce those decisions? The analysis has to say: Witchcraft is real, it’s consistent, it’s valuable, it justifies reorganizing the service around it.
Then backward one more step. What data would produce that analysis? The Witchcraft data itself. The next question back: Who verified the Witchcraft data?
The mole is someone who could make the Witchcraft data look real.
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In your DADA Chains, the data probably isn’t poisoned by a spymaster in Moscow.
But people are always pushing you to accept data that will benefit them.
Sometimes it’s a salesman telling you about a product, and the information serves the sale. Sometimes it’s a partner in a negotiation, and the data he shares is the data that gives him more value from the deal. Sometimes it’s the news telling a story that supports a certain narrative.
From there, the analysis looks sound. The decisions look rational. The actions look competent.
Until there’s a mistake. A misfire. An action that blows up in your face.
Which means it’s time to work backward.
Back to the decision that led to the action. Back to the analysis that led to the decision. Back to the data that fed the analysis.
And when you get there, ask Source Analysis questions: Who gave me that data? Who benefited if I believed it?
The answer tells you whether the data was ever real. And remember Connie: if you’re the one asking the questions, be careful because the decision-makers may try to push you out.
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Smiley caught the mole by working the chain backward from action to data.
By the time he found the name, he already knew the mechanism. Bad data. Sound analysis. Big decisions. Efficient action. All of it pointed in the wrong direction.
The DADA Chain doesn’t guarantee people do the right things. It only works if the first link is good.
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Read the Briefing for a month and you’ll see what’s behind the news. You’ll see the players. You’ll see why they’re making moves. And the Endgames driving their strategies.
To build your intelligence, get the Spy’s Guide Briefing here.
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The DADA Chain is one of six frameworks on the Spy’s Guide frameworks page, and it’s from A Spy’s Guide to Thinking.
-John Braddock
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