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Playing under Moscow Rules
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
Whether they are apocryphal or really are the very principles of a covert modus operandi, they have long been accepted into the folklore of Cold War espionage for at least a half century or so. They may even pre-date the frosty standoff of the two opposing global superpowers that led to their codification.
Whether they were ever hidden in a microfilm dot for easy ingestion (literally) or encrypted in a fabled black book of codes, we can leave to the imagination. However, they are an integral part of the fabric of John le Carré’s spy fiction, as followers of his lugubrious British agent, George Smiley, will know. And given le Carré’s real-life work in counter espionage, we can probably assume with some certainty that they have some factual basis in reality.
For those in the know, Moscow Rules were a set of operating principles that were designed to inculcate effective, covert behaviors in British agents operating behind enemy lines in Moscow during the Cold War. They were a kind of common sense rules for counter espionage agents (“Blend in”), or rules of engagement for spies (“Don’t harass the opposition”).
Even if you are not usually of a paranoid disposition, project management can occasionally get a little bit edgy, especially when corporate politics gets folded into the volatile mix of …
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