Operation Trust

Debriefing the Collapse of Trust in Society

Context – 

This is the introduction to my work on Trust in Society. 

In telling how the Russian Revolution gave birth to the Secret Intelligence Service, the Cheka, we get an outline of the major elements that make up trust in society and we get a warning about what happens if that trust disappears entirely. From there, we start narrowly exploring trust in the senses and the self, and build on that foundation to broaden the scope to include trust in other people, communities, morals, authority, and institutions. 

Here's what to expect – 

1. Operation Trust: Debriefing the Collapse of Trust in Society ← You are here

2. Axiom of the Mind: Trust in the Senses and Self

3. Lying Eyes: Believing is Seeing

4. Rhetorical Color: Signals and Emotional Shades

5. From Me to Us: Character

6. Friend Vs Foe: The Prospect of Trust

7. From Us to We: Communities

8. Status: Ability, Morality, and Culture ← Writing Now

9. From We to Them: Culture Clash

10. Fashion: Police Authority

11. Organizations: Brain of the Firm

12. Economic Geography: A Pattern Language

13. Let's Play a Game: The Map of Trust

Operation Trust 

From the moment they seized power in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in October 1917, the Russian Soviets faced a critical challenge: how to convince the rest of the Russian population that they were, in fact and not just in name, the new rulers of Russia. This sparked The Russian Civil War and is often cited as the origin of modern covert action, marking the birth of the Cheka, the precursor to the KGB and now the FSB intelligence service. In an uncanny twist of history, the Cheka named its first campaign of deception, misinformation, and propaganda — Operation Trust¹.

Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, was the architect of the Trust. Recognizing the threat posed by émigré leaders of the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Red, White movement, he sought to neutralize them through an elaborate deception. To this end, he established a honeypot: a fake anti-Bolshevik resistance organization called the "Monarchist Union of Central Russia" (MUCR). To lead this front organization, the Cheka turned to (or coerced) Aleksandr Yakushev, a former Imperial (i.e., White) bureaucrat who was then serving as a trade minister. Yakushev's position allowed him to travel abroad, making him an ideal double agent.

Through Yakushev, the Cheka was able not only able to feed misinformation to the émigrés leaders abroad, they were also able to identify who the émigrés were still communicating with within Russia itself. Yakushev would make contact with those sleeper cells and in the meeting, he would also introduce them to a local MUCR contact, who was, in reality, a Cheka agent. While much of The Trust's success came from disrupting information flows and hindering the White opposition's attempts to organize, it also achieved more direct victories: luring one émigré to return and exposing one British Intelligence agent, both of which led to their deaths².

Operation Trust lasted from 1921-1926, during which time, it expanded to hundreds of agents, thousands of people. Comprising 37 volumes of files, filled with code names, new code names, double agents, and interlocking operations such that in the 1990s when John Costello and Oleg Tsarev reviewed the files they described it as "the complexity of a symphonic score”³. To this day, even Russian historians struggle to separate fact from fiction within Operation Trust — which was precisely its intention. In the aftermath, the scattered pockets of White resistance were left in a state of paranoia, distrusting everyone, especially those claiming to be fellow Whites.

Operation Trust serves as an illustration of the cascading effects when trust in a society crumbles. It demonstrates how the erosion of trust not only cripples the ability to organize but also undermines our capacity to discern truth from falsehood. Yet, by examining its antithesis, an operation designed to destroy trust, we can more clearly define and understand the elements crucial for maintaining a trusting, functional society.

Friend or Foe? 

The central question of trust is simple - friend or foe? Are you with me or against me? If there was one truth Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka understood it was this: you can not persuade a person who is principally opposed to you as another person. Russian Whites correctly saw Russian Reds as their enemies, because power is a zero-sum game for the Whites to win the Reds must lose, and vice versa. This dilemma is why the Cheka needed to set up a 3rd organization, the Pinkish - MUCR. 

Organization 

The second but no less important function of the MUCR was to provide a structure for these Whites to operate within, fulfilling a crucial need for organization among the scattered opposition. If you are the Cheka, and your goal is to intercept information and feed in misinformation, the easiest way to do that is to set up the communication lines yourself. Ironically, the very existence of this Cheka-built communications network lent credibility to the MUCR in the eyes of the Whites. During the Civil War, the ability to transmit information through and around enemy lines was a clear signal of competence and capability. But whose capability was it showcasing? 

Status

When the turned agent Yakushev introduced himself to émigré leaders abroad, he didn't present himself merely as a fellow White sympathizer. Instead, he positioned himself as a peer—the leader of the MUCR. This equality in leadership status allowed Yakushev to be taken seriously by other leaders in exile.

The trap was baited to perfection when the émigrés discovered Yakushev's unique ability to send mail, a capability they lacked. In the émigrés' minds, Yakushev became an invaluable equal—someone who both wanted their alliance and whom they desperately needed. This perceived mutuality of need and status formed the bedrock of their misplaced trust.

Communities 

While Yakushev headed a fictitious community organization, the émigrés led real communities of anti-Soviet Whites. The Soviet Reds, despite their control, only numbered 200,000-300,000 members in a country of 140-150 million people. 

The precise number of Whites was hard to know because they were spread throughout the country. This geographical dispersion was both a strength and a weakness for the Whites. It made it challenging for the Reds to identify and neutralize them all, but it also limited the Whites' ability to communicate and organize effectively. This scattered distribution created isolated pockets, making it difficult for the Whites to build a cohesive nationwide network of allies.

Yet reality is a numbers game; if enough people believe it, it’s not crazy.

 This fragmentation is what the MUCR exploited. Its purpose was to prevent the number of Whites from reaching a critical mass in any one location, allowing the Reds to neutralize them piecemeal. When Yakushev delivered genuine messages from émigré leaders to these isolated communities, he simultaneously provided a way to send return messages—through strategically planted MUCR/Cheka contacts. This approach allowed the Cheka to monitor and control the flow of information, effectively managing the growth and connections of these communities.

Messengers

While high-status individuals like Yakushev might make impactful appearances, their reach is limited by time and space. To extend their influence, the Cheka embedded double agents within target communities as organizational and informational nodes—essentially, as influencers. 

Trust, while not directly transferable, can be cultivated through reputation. This reputation stems from a mixture of high-status connections, rare abilities, and access to unique information. Unlike the stark friend-or-foe dynamic, messengers often present as fellow community members, allowing for more nuanced judgment over time. Leveraging their special access to (mis)information, these Cheka agents were able to gain the trust of their assigned communities over years, often ascending to quasi-leadership roles. This long-term infiltration demonstrates the power of persistent presence in building trust.

Signals 

While MUCR and its agents rarely told the truth, their approach was masterful in its manipulation of signals of trust. As Geoffery Bailey describes Yakushev’s approach in his book “The Conspirators”⁴ : 

...his patriotism seemed so genuine and what he said resembled so little the gloomy reports that had been his listeners' main diet since they fled their country; it was so hopeful and corresponded so completely to what they wished to hear, and what they wished to believe, that...he seems to have had little difficulty in convincing them that he was telling the truth.

In retrospect, it is obvious that what Yakushev was selling was too good to be true. He played on the ego’s of the émigré leaders, telling them — You are the hero of this historic narrative. However, it would be unfair to call the émigré leaders especially egotistical, every human being is susceptible to this type of confidence game. This vulnerability stems from a fundamental aspect of human cognition: everyone believes their own — this is a technical term — bullshit. A person can not understand the world apart from their own perspective of the world. You believe what you believe because that helps you make sense of the world. 

Yakushev gained the émigré leaders' trust not by presenting himself as a savior, but by affirming their existing beliefs and encouraging them to trust themselves. This "trust of the self" became the primary target of the Cheka's manipulation.

Information 

If friend or foe is the central question, it comes with a prerequisite — Do you trust yourself? 

Most modern neuroscientists describe the human brain as a prediction machine. We trust ourselves in familiar tasks because they're easily predictable. However, our self-trust in unfamiliar scenarios is based on our perception of our abilities—our self-confidence. Trust is primarily subjective less about true/false, and more about judging goodness and badness. As I will explain in the next three chapters, humans depend on other humans to help refine their predictions and explanations of the world. This is why we need to make predictions of trust - how much do we believe other people’s senses vs our own? 

Yakushev’s mere existence served as a confirmation of the émigré’s existing belief: the Russian People(tm) were against the Soviet Reds. Feeding that confirmation bias is also what Yakushev’s plants did in each of the satellite communities, giving them hope that victory was around the corner but keeping themselves out of harm’s way until the crucial moment when they would all become heroes. That was the narrative for 5 years, until one day in April 1927 when Edward Opperput, the financial head of the MUCR, defected to Finland and revealed the operation’s true purpose. 

In one instance, the White MUCR organization was shattered. Its leadership and members were all discredited, and the communities scattered with Cheka agents on their heels. The destruction of the Trust network rendered everyone suspect, discrediting all information about the Whites, whether positive or negative. 

This collapse of trust had a profound effect: The Whites literally could not trust their own judgment and they quickly dissolved. When self-trust crumbles, trust in others becomes impossible.

Start at the End

Operation Trust's endpoint serves as our starting point for a deeper investigation of trust in society. Before we can understand organizations, status, communities, messengers, and signals, we need to understand this most basic and fundamental question — 

How and why do you trust yourself? 

That is the topic of our next chapter - An Axiom of the Mind. 

1. CIA. A Digest of Evidence on the Red Army Offensive Plans and Related Matters. Central Intelligence Agency, declassified document, 1950, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-03362A002200040004-7.pdf.

2. Harris, Steven. The Trust: The Classic Example of Sovite Manipulation. Defense Technical Information Center, 1985, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA161389.pdf.

3. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy. Crown Publishers, 1993, Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Illusions-Dossier-Reveals-Stalins/dp/0517588501.

4. Bailey, Geoffrey. The Conspirators. London: Gollancz. 1961, Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/Conspirators-GEOFFREY-BAILEY/dp/B0000CKYH2

Highly recommend this book, it is a great early history of spycraft.