The disappearance of the photographers' vehicle

[Charles Drago]

The question is how complicit were the SS, if at all, or were they manipulated by someone higher up?

I would submit the qualified answer of "yes."

I've written often about the dangers inherent in referencing THE Secret Service or THE CIA or THE military in our analyses.

So to, for another example, THE U.S. government.

When we use language that would promote the inference that those organizational entities were/are operationally and ideologically monolithic, we obscure rather than illuminate the conspiracy's structure.

Am I splitting hairs? I don't think so.

Compartmentalization, the need-to-know. It's how the Defense Industry, the Pentagon, the intelligence community and the Mafia all function. The Manhattan Project was enormous but the secret was kept because every little worker did his tiny, compartmentalized job, didn't ask questions, and wasn't allowed to see the whole picture.

Indeed. Compartmentalization, as you usefully point out, is a highly critical and effective security tool.

But I'm referencing a deeper, almost always unacknowledged factionalization -- fault lines arising from irreconcilable ideological and agenda differences within ostensibly monolithic entities.

The intelligence community's Yankees and cowboys, for good example.