I find it fascinating how, today, it has become a compliment and a badge of intelligence to be called a "conspirationist".
What does that even mean? They are the one who "see through". Or so they think.
The modern obsession with conspiracies protects the power structures they pretend to "expose". Conspiracy thinking trains you to:
- look for villains instead of systems,
- search for intentions instead of architectures,
- wait for revelations instead of mapping constraints.
As long as you believe power operates this way, you will continuously miss how it actually operates.
That is our topic today: conspiracy, just not how you think but how it's actually used in the world of intelligence.
In what follows:
1) You will understand why the image you have of a "conspiracy" is wrong,
2) We will move from conspiracy as a story to conspiration as a condition as defined by the KGB,
3) We'll get into what the "human factor" is in the context of an operational conspiration,
4) and finally to why the Grey Zone is built to remain non-narrative.
Let's start.
The image you have in your head is wrong.
When people hear the word conspiracy, they imagine that there is someone, somewhere, that knows something about what is going on, somehow.
"They" have been secretly coordinating an operation with a precise goal. "They" are behind the curtain and pulling the strings.
It feels sharp and dangerous, it feels like knowledge. The problem is... it has little to do with how power and covert action actually operate.
It is operationally fragile. Intelligence services do not scale operations through centralized secret coordination. Because it creates single points of failure: one arrest, one leak, one defector can collapse the entire chain.
That is why serious covert systems tend to look boring from the outside: distributed roles, compartmentalized knowledge, ordinary motivations.
So yes, conspiracies exist. But what the public calls a conspiracy is rarely what operational doctrine means by conspiration.
First fracture: conspiracy as a narrative
The conspiracy you imagine is basically a STORY. A narrative that assumes identifiable actors, intentional coordination, secrecy as concealment, and a truth that could, in theory, be revealed.
It allows your brain to ask simple, comforting questions:
Who did it?
Who knew?
Who is responsible?
Closure feels close. And this is what your brain needs.
But that is not how large systems behave in real life.
Walk into any large organization and observe quietly: people protect their position, their incentives, the relationships that keep them safe.
No secret meeting is required for alignment to happen. When people face the same pressures, the same risks, and the same rewards, they move in the same direction on their own. That creates convergence. This alignment of interests produces coordinated outcomes without any coordination.
What looks like a plot from the outside is often just a system following its incentives.
Read that again.
When the public is asking the right questions and starting to build a story around it, it means pattern visibility has already emerged. In counterintelligence terms, visibility equals vulnerability.
You might need to kill the mission.
Conspiracy isn't a story.
What the KGB actually meant by "conspiration"
In a Soviet document from the 1980s, konspiratsiya is used as a dry, technical, and unforgiving concept. I like it.
That's where the full analyses, frameworks, and case studies are. Subscribing gives you access to the entire Grey Zone library, not just the public signals.
Before we even touch doctrine, we need a clarification. Many phenomena attributed to conspiracies are not coordination. They are convergence under similar incentives: people facing the same constraints often make similar decisions without ever coordinating.
Intelligence doctrine starts from this reality, not from fantasy.
The KGB doctrine states - explicitly - that: