quarantine

Boiled down to its essence, espionage is the practice of lying. Deception is the ingredient that distinguishes something like a clandestine operation from a plain vanilla state action. The success or failure of a covert plan hinges on the power of the lie being told, and the most effective lies are lies that can sell a coherent version of the world, lies bolstered by a genuine performance of some orthogonally related truth.