The Credibility of Three

How Government's Train Operatives To Lie

For a lie to be believed it must be encased in a package of truth. The Credibility of Three. By a feature columnist, Jim Bishop, published in The Miami Herald, February 28, 1980. Freedom Fox was intrigued enough by this concept to clip it then and save it all of these years. The digital age forgets much. An entertaining presentation of an important understanding citizens must have of their government. A technique not limited to spies behind enemy lines in a world war. Used by governments (and their official propaganda outlets, aka Big Media and Big Tech) against their own citizens, especially when they view their own citizens as enemies.

The Credibility of Three

Jim Bishop

Miami Herald, February 28, 1980

  The day Cholly Hubner was accepted by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), I thought Americans would start buying German war bonds. He was a portly man, addicted to wearing pearl-gray spats and a gold-headed cane. His billowy blond hair looked like a turbulent sea on a setting sun. You could hang two hats on his mustache.

  Cholly was a good art director – nutty, but good. I worked on the same magazine, and I used to tell stories to him because I didn’t know that men could giggle. When Col. William Donovan accepted Cholly for the OSS I figured that we were so low in spies that we were using comedians.

  The training program was bound to knock him out. The last real labor that Hubner survived was baked Alaska. He reported to Washington, and from what I heard worked extra hard because the instructors pointed at him in the class and said: “How do we disguise that one?”

  CHOLLY’S GERMAN was next to flawless. They taught him how to make a radio out of a two-burner gas stove; how to encode and decode; how to make parachute drops at night; how to hide; how to gather intelligence.

  Hubner was an intelligent nut, which is the worst kind. He was to war what Gerald Ford is to golf. One of the final lessons concerned the credibility of three, in which you state two facts about a person and lie the third time and are believed.

  The instructor, tapping a rubber-tipped pointer against the blackboard, said “The credibility of three is important if you are in alien territory, and you are afraid that someone has spotted you. Send an anonymous letter to the secret police. Print it. Give them two checkable facts, such as at 8:05 a.m. he leaves his house folding a newspaper under his left arm.

  “Find another that can be checked. Maybe he goes to the post office to pick up his mail. State that he slinks in after carefully looking around. Or that he has coffee at a certain table café and nods vaguely at certain people. Then the third fact: Tell them he’s a saboteur and a radio spy for the British. They’ll pick him up – believe me.”

  CHOLLY WAS enchanted with the credibility of three. One of his bosses told the class of seven men that they all had new names, new addresses in strange American towns, even the labels had been changed in their clothing.

  They must use those new identities from this moment on. The I.D. cards in their wallets were new. His last word was that class was dismissed for four days. They would meet in the lobby of a third-rate Philadelphia hotel near the waterfront. The time was 7 p.m., not a moment sooner.

  They were to sit on sofas near potted palms. A man would be near the cigar stand. He would have a cigar in his mouth. He would strike a match several times, but it would not light. That man was their new boss.

  Cholly Hubner thought he was starring in a Hitchcock movie. He hurried out and tested the credibility of three. He printed a note to J. Edgar Hoover: “The Battleship Iowa is being built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. At 7 p.m., Wednesday, seven German saboteurs will meet in a small waterfront hotel. An eighth man, trying to light a cigar, has been assigned to blow up the battleship.”

   HE WAS there on time. So were the others. The man at the cigar stand tried twice to light a match. Cholly Hubner was sure that the scheme would not work. Then he saw men pouring through the front door, down the staircase, and from the kitchen. They had guns.

  In a half hour, they were in the Philadelphia jail. The local police and the FBI interrogated them separately. The responses were ridiculous. Not one man was who he said he was. Not one address checked out. They didn’t even know what they were doing in the hotel lobby.

  Late that night, FBI headquarters received a discreet call from the OSS. The Office of Strategic Services had a tip that seven of its graduating class had been bagged by mistake. Would the FBI know anything about it? Before morning, there was a lot of shouting between government agencies.

  A supervisor was sent to Philadelphia to bail out the boobs. The important aspect of the massive mess was that it had not reached the newspapers. Cholly Hubner felt safe until he got to Washington.

  An instructor looked at him almost shyly.

  “Cholly,” he said, “you wouldn’t do a thing like that, would you?”

  And Cholly began to giggle. His big face screwed up in a miasma of wrinkles and he giggled until tears squirted from his eyes.

  They didn’t court martial him. Oh, no. He was transferred quietly to the army. He was so good at mopping latrines that he almost made sergeant…

Bonus: 1980 new car ad on backside: