It sounds like a scene out of a Jason Bourne movie:
A man survives a near-fatal assassination attempt. After months of recovery, he decides to figure out exactly who was responsible and how and why.
Being rather clever, he has a hunch of where to start. So he picks up the phone, and starts going down a list of secret service agents who have been trailing him for years.
He calls the first person on the list. No response.
He calls the second person, and introduces himself using a fake name.
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “I know exactly who you are,” the other man finally says. Click.
The assassination survivor calls the third name on the list.
“Hello?”
“Konstantin Borisovich?”
“Yes, yes!”
“This is Ustinov Maxim Sergeevich, aide to Nikolay Platonovich Patrushev. I received your number from Vladimir Mikhailovich Bogdanov. I apologise for the early hour, but I urgently require 10 minutes of your time.”
“All right.”
50 minutes later, the assassination survivor has milked the secret service agent for the names and methods and dates behind the failed assassination.
Like I said, it sounds like something you would see in a movie. But it was real, and it happened only last week. The assassination survivor was Alexei Navalny, a leading Russian opposition politician, who was poisoned on a plane back in September.
All in all, this was a pretty spectacular piece of persuasion and social engineering. To put it in context, just ask yourself:
How would you go about tricking a trained secret service agent to open up and reveal secret assassination stuff to you on an unsecured line?
It might surprise you that Navalny did it through standard persuasion techniques. Stuff that’s straight out of Robert Cialdini’s Influence.
I won’t list all the techniques Navalny used. But if you like, I will write about one of them in more detail tomorrow. It’s how Navalny finally got poor Konstantin Borisovich to break down and open up… and it also underlies all of direct marketing.
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