Как действует секретность. (Ф. Праути "The Secret Team")
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp7.html
It is said that the tens of thousands of Japanese who live on one block in a city such as Tokyo develop the ability to live in close proximity, separated one house from the other, usually by no more than a few scant inches and by rice-paper walls and windows. Without question, families in a given area hear each other and all the usual household noises; yet they all maintain that they hear nothing of what goes on in the neighbors house. The idea is that they are supposed to hear nothing; so they hear nothing. This same mental process that permits the disciplined brain to separate out sounds one from another is not unusual in many other cases. It applies in a sense to people who spend their lives in highly classified work. They actually learn to shut out and to avoid seeking out what the other person is doing. As a result, many of the real agent careerists and the staff personnel who support them really do not know what other offices are doing, and they dont care to know.
This blocking-out process may not apply in a majority of cases, but it is true in many. In other cases, there are men who have spent their lives in the Agency who have never really had any direct contact with actual missions because of the nature of their work and because those who were involved in operations kept such information from them. Therefore, some of these old-timers really do not know what is going on. They may think that they do because they have always been aware of activity of one kind or other, and they have heard the usual rumors of what has been taking place. This is often more of a handicap than a help, because if the man has not actually gotten out on the operation he may have heard a very well laid out cover story and thought it was real. He would have no way to know otherwise. Examples of this in other walks of life are not hard to find. When Ford changes its model lines and is introducing some really new design or engineering feature that it wants to keep secret, it will put several teams at work designing the next model car. At certain check points of development, these teams are told, "Fine, now go ahead with what you are doing, to the next stage." Thus, unknown to each other and to the fairly large staffs who support them, more than one team believes its new model is the one that the company has selected. Only at the last moment, when it is too late for them to continue the bluff and too late for a competitor to gain from discovery of the new design or feature, is the unneeded team told that their model has not been selected and that their work was necessary cover to conceal the real design. It is better to have some teams actually living and believing the cover story than to have some just play-acting the cover story. This leaves the final operational go-ahead options open until the very last moment and assures that if there are leaks, the other side will have the problem of finding out whether the operation they have discovered is real or planned deception.