If you must deny, sound plausible

The important thing is we maintain plausible deniability. Richard M. Nixon.

The accepted definition of the term ‘plausible deniability’ is the ability to deny knowledge or responsibility for actions taken by others, even if one was involved or at least wilfully ignorant. It’s often used by high-ranking officials to avoid blame when illegal or unpopular activities become public. What a carefully crafted definition this is and how nice for those high-ranking officials that they can stubbornly stick to stout denial with impunity when some wrongdoing or the other comes to light. And not an iota of guilt sticking to them so long as there is a readily available fall guy to carry the can. In India, we call them bakras, or sacrificial goats. One comes across increasing use of this expression (plausible deniability, not bakras) in American or British political thrillers that keep many of us engrossed in front of our television sets. I am not sure if there is an Indian vernacular equivalent for ‘plausible deniability’ but its import and application is something we witness on a regular basis in our country’s rapidly evolving and changing political and corporate scenario. More often than not, the political and the corporate go hand in hand. Or hand in glove, come to that.

Let me attempt to illustrate this through an imagined situation in a government office. An under-secretary in a sensitive ministry decides to import some contraband material through mail order, an act which is clearly illegal. One assumes his motives were sound and in the national interest, to give him the benefit of the doubt. Though every precaution is taken to keep the matter under wraps, truth will out and the minister in charge of the concerned department comes under the scanner as the buck stops with him. However, he is now in the happy position to vehemently deny any involvement in the matter as he is genuinely unaware of what has taken place. If it was brought to his notice later on that one of his underlings was the culprit, he himself shall remain blameless. Pure as the driven snow. When the media searchlight is trained on him, he will be snug as a bug in a rug. And smug as well, I shouldn’t wonder.

That is the theory behind a denial being plausible in high places. In practice there is a more than even chance that everyone up and down the chain of command is secretly aware of the crime, notwithstanding the soundness of the reason for the act. In such a situation, the only real sin was to have got caught with the proverbial hand in the till, a mixed metaphor but a handy euphemism in this case for something more sinister. The fall guy’s lips are sealed as he takes the rap and lives in denial. While he does time in the cooler, he and his family are well looked after till the cows come home. In this case, it is more properly the chickens that have come home to roost. A small price to pay in the long-term interests of the country. Incidentally, I quoted former U.S. President Richard Nixon at the top of this piece who also said, apropos the Watergate scandal, ‘I am not a crook.’ There was not even the slightest hint of plausibility in his denial! If you must lie, keep a straight face.

Nowhere is this situation more apparent than when international spies, for all their cloak-and-dagger cleverness, get caught eavesdropping or peeping through bedroom keyholes at the enemy’s defence minister making nice with a blonde femme fatale. The sort of stuff Frederick Forsyth describes so vividly in The Day of the Jackal. Such a situation, naturally, is ripe for blackmail and the spy from a foreign country is only doing his job. Not very well, one might add. The Peeping Tom analogy is no longer applicable in the advanced technological age in which we operate today. Far more sophisticated equipment can be employed and one can spy unseen and unheard. Which is a shame if you get off on peeping through keyholes, but hey, you can’t have everything.

However, as we are here only to make a point, if the voyeuristic spy is apprehended and sweetly claims he was only getting cheap thrills, he will be frogmarched to the nearest dungeon. After the tried and tested method of gaslighting fails to yield results, they will pull his nails with pliers, apply electric shocks into unmentionable anatomical apertures and give him the waterboarding treatment for good measure. Through all this, he will stick to his story that he was grossly ill-treated as a child, that his nanny lusted after him, all of which led to his perversions, ogling through keyholes being one of his lesser fetishes. Mercifully, for his government that is, he can take the torture no more and dies in his dank cell having kept his country’s honour intact, his lips Fevicol-sealed forever. After he is buried in an unmarked spot, his minister at HQ, on being questioned about the mysterious disappearance of his cultural attaché in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Toronto, Karachi, London or wherever, can claim he hasn’t a clue who or what they are talking about. Thank God for plausible deniability, as we are witnessing almost every day in real life.

It all then boils down to the vital issue of burden of proof. When it comes to international skullduggery, nothing is ever proven. Only deep suspicions remain and innuendoes strewn about like confetti. No government has ever been unduly worried about suspicions and innuendoes. So long as they can deny plausibly, all will be well. Life goes on. The cardinal thing to remember, even at the cost of repetition is that old axiom, ‘Do not get caught,’ a dictum that some of our own George Smileys have failed to follow. We all know that in the world of intrigue and espionage, spies crawl out of the crumbling woodwork like white ants. They have been thoroughly groomed to blend in with the locals and ensure that their credibility is beyond question. In spite of all this, if they make a false move and blow their cover, on their heads be it.

Spies from different countries rotting in foreign jails are legion. It is cold comfort for an Indian spy to be contemplating a bleak future in a prison cell in Paris or London, daydreaming that the  Champs-Élysées or Lord’s is just three blocks away. His ultimate boss will be speaking nothing less than the truth when he shrugs his shoulders and claims, à la Manuel from Fawlty Towers, ‘I know nothing.’ The same cannot be said of his immediate boss who knew everything but chose to keep things from his big boss, for the latter’s own safety. Plausible deniability in full swing.

I will leave you with a sequence from Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun featuring the peerless secret agent James Bond, which best captures the concept of plausible deniability. Bond’s boss M, is in the chair.

M: “What do you want?”

Royal Navy Officer: “We’ve picked up Goodnight’s signal, sir.”

M: “Well, that’s something.”

Officer: “But there’s something rather curious, sir (points on map). Our sector’s here, and we’re receiving her signal from somewhere off this coastline here. Now, here it is on a much larger scale. That’s where she is. In this group of small islands.”

M: “That’s all we need! Red Chinese waters.”

James Bond: “We could stray inadvertently into them, sir. I could fly low under their radar screen.”

M: “Absolutely out of the question. If the PM gets to hear of this, he’ll hang me from the yardarm.”

Bond: “Officially, you won’t know a thing about it, sir.”

There you have it. Plausible deniability, in a nutshell. Even now I can visualise the style icon of the 60s, Sean Connery delivering those lines laconically in his characteristic Scottish brogue though it was, in fact, Roger Moore who starred in The Man with the Golden Gun as Bond. Along with Moore, many others have played James Bond in subsequent films. Moore and Daniel Craig came close to challenging Connery’s pre-eminent position as the definitive James Bond. Take a poll and we all know who will win hands down. ‘The name is Connery. Sean Connery.’ Legend. Undeniably.