Deception, Convenience, and the Too-Good Source

The material that arrives exactly when you need it, answering exactly the question you asked, and complicating nothing, deserves more scrutiny than the material that fights you. Convenience is not evidence of deception. It is the trigger to run the check.

The check has four parts, from the deception checklists that Richards Heuer and Randolph Pherson set out in Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis. Motive, opportunity, and means: does anyone have reason and ability to deceive you here? Past practice: has this adversary or this environment used manipulation before, and how? Your own sources: which of your channels could be reached or influenced, and how would you know? And the evidence itself: is it consistent with everything else, or only with the conclusion it supports?

None of this settles anything, which is the correct outcome. Deception belongs in the hypothesis set as one explanation among several, scored in the matrix like anything else. An investigator who concludes deception because a source was convenient has replaced one unfalsifiable story with another.

Keep the rejected material. The record of what you tested and set aside is part of the method, and a reader cannot weigh a finding without it.