The Moscow rules are rules-of-thumb said to have been developed during the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

to be used by

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and others working in Moscow. The rules are associated with Moscow because the city developed a reputation as being a particularly harsh locale for clandestine operatives who were exposed. The list may never have existed as written.

The rules

CIA officer

Tony Mendez Antonio Joseph Mendez (November 15, 1940 – January 19, 2019) was an American technical operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who specialized in support of clandestine and covert CIA operations. He wrote four memoirs ab ...

wrote:

Although no one had written them down, they were the precepts we all understood for conducting operations in the most difficult of operating environments: the Soviet capital. By the time they got to Moscow, everyone knew these rules. They were dead simple and full of common sense.

In the

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, the Moscow Rules are given as: * Assume nothing. * Never go against your gut. * Everyone is potentially under opposition control. * Do not look back; you are never completely alone. * Go with the flow, blend in. * Vary your pattern and stay within your cover. * Lull them into a sense of complacency. * Do not harass the opposition. * Pick the time and place for action. * Keep your options open.

The rules

References

Further reading