If you're going to excel at spy operations, you'll need to be creative in the field. We've put together three missions based on real-life espionage tests to get your started - and the clock is ticking.
MISSION 1: You’re behind enemy lines with four other intelligence officers. You must collect a sample of local explosives, detonate what’s left, and get to the exfiltration spot so the CIA team can get you safely home. The enemy is about 30 minutes away and knows your location. There’s a gushing, 15-foot wide river separating you and the explosives, preventing you from swimming across it or jumping.
YOUR TOOLS: You must tackle the chasm using what’s available - two sturdy trees on either side of the bank; a discarded barrel with both ends knocked out; and a pile of boards ranging from four to seven feet long. In your rucksack, you have three lengths of rope, a pulley, and a box of matches. How do you cross the river?
MISSION 2: You’re leading a team in enemy territory who have successfully completed an undercover operation at an airfield and are now gathered at a safe rendezvous point in a field. One of your team members, Gus, has broken both legs and from this point onward needs to be carried on a stretcher that you have managed to secure. Your team must get to a second, secret airfield where a plane awaits to extract you, but you only have minutes or the pilot will depart without you. To reach the secret airfield, you must cross a road routinely patrolled by an armed sentry on foot. The sentry walks back and forth and seems to go out of view for about 45 seconds during each of his rounds but time is short. You can't afford to wait around indefinitely. How will you organize your team to get across the road and meet the plane that will carry you to safety?
YOUR TOOLS: You have your wits and the support of a highly trained team.
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MISSION 3: You are the leader of a team returning on foot from an operation where you blew up a bridge in enemy territory about a mile away. According to a prearranged extraction plan, you are to meet a truck in 10 minutes at a meeting point that is another mile away. To get to the truck, you must cross a road littered with mines that cannot be neutralized or dug up. You must cross the road at a specific section clearly marked by white lines that are about 12 feet apart. The enemy are aware of the bridge explosion, but don’t know in which direction you have gone.
YOUR TOOLS: The road is lined with trees and bushes on both sides. There are two logs nearby, one is 12-feet long and another is 14-feet long. There are also some stones, a few two-by-fours about four feet in length, and two lengths of rope. How will you organize your team so you can cross the mined road between the white lines, arrive at the meeting point in 10 minutes, and leave the least amount of evidence behind you so the enemy can’t track your movements?
Time’s up
Do the tests sound like impossible challenges? If so, you’re probably not getting hired. There are actually many solutions to these three problems, all of which were posed by real-life intelligence trainers to teach creative thinking. (See answers below.)
The theoretical river problem, sentry challenge, and road mine problems are based on tests developed by the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency that recruited WWII officers at the secretive ‘Station S’ outside of Washington, D.C. The river test (which in real life involved a babbling brook and no explosives) and other tests are outlined in Assessment of Men, three of the many challenges used by the OSS to measure the creative skills of potential counterterrorism and espionage officers.
Decades later, the CIA is still testing creative skills. If you interviewed with the CIA Directorate of Analysis in 2019, for example, you’d have been asked to imagine a commonly accepted future in the political or technological sphere - then argue for an alternative future.
ANSWERS
1. Solutions to the River Test
There is actually more than one right answer, CIA trainer Nyssa Straatveit said. One team decided to rope a tree with a burning lasso, knock it over, and build a makeshift bridge. Another decided to barrel across. Others challenged the assumption that there was only 30 minutes to complete the task. They decided to buy more time by hiding from the enemy and reappearing after they’d left.
2. Solutions to the Sentry Test
If the group is alert, someone will note the orderly character of the sentry’s beat and regular intervals of 45 seconds when the road could be crossed without detection. Time is of the essence, however. You only have minutes so you might order one of the team to distract the sentry while the group attempts to cross the road unobserved; or you might decide to kill the sentry but you’d need to dispose of the body or risk exposing your undercover operation. There’s more than one way to solve the problem, so candidates are rated on energy and initiative, effective intelligence, and their social relations - either as subordinates carrying out the orders of a superior or as a leader directing a group in meeting an emergency situation.
3. Solutions to the Land Mine Test
The materials at hand can also be used in a different ways. For example, the rope could be tied or looped over a branch of a tree above the road and used to swing over the road. It might also be possible to place one or both logs on scattered rocks to build a bridge to cross the road, and so forth.
Improve Your Creative Problem-Solving Using the Phoenix Test
Isolate your challenge and the timeframe for solving it.
Ask questions using the Phoenix checklist below to dissect the problem.
Ask questions about possible solutions to solve the problem, analyze the solutions, and evaluate.
Questions About The Problem
1. Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
2. What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?
3. What is the unknown?
4. What is it you don’t yet understand?
5. What is the information you have?
6. What isn’t the problem?
7. Is the information sufficient, insufficient, redundant, or contradictory?
8. Should you draw a diagram or a figure of the problem?
9. Where are the boundaries of the problem?
10. Can you separate the various parts of the problem? What are the relationships between them? What are the constants?
11. Have you seen this problem before?
12. Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?
13. Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
14. Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?
15. Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?
16. What are the best, worst, and most probable cases you can imagine?
Questions About Solutions
1. Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?
2. What would you like the resolution to be?
3. How much of the unknown can you determine?
4. Can you derive something useful from the information you have?
5. Have you used all the information?
6. Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem?
7. Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step?
8. What creative thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques?
9. Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see?
10. How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem?
11. What have others done?
12. Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result?
13. What should be done? How should it be done?
14. Where should it be done?
15. When should it be done?
16. Who should do it?
17. What do you need to do at this time?
18. Who will be responsible for what?
19. Can you use this problem to solve some other problem?
20. What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other?
21. What milestones can best mark your progress?
22. How will you know when you are successful?
