The Vetting Choke Point: Why Every Movement Collapses Here
Every doctrine warned you to watch carefully. None told you what to watch for.
Every underground movement, from occupied Europe in World War II to modern activist groups, collides with one choke point: vetting. Who do you trust? Who gets in? Who stays out? This problem is not just an issue; it is literally the issue.
If you fail here, no amount of training, ideology, or discipline will save you.
History is littered with proof. The French Resistance fell prey to Gestapo penetration. The IRA was riddled with informants. American militias in the 1990s were turned inside out by undercover agents. Groups in the early-to-mid 2000s also struggled with near-constant infiltration. Even tiny activist circles have been cracked wide open because someone couldn’t tell the difference between a “committed volunteer” and a “paid infiltrator.”
And that’s not even counting the unpaid, unaffiliated bad actors: sociopaths, unstable personalities, drama addicts, secret users, and validation seekers. Everywhere you look, someone dangerous is trying to get in.
Doctrinally, everyone recognizes the vetting problem. Louis Beam, Martino, John Mosby, von Dach, and movements like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) all built frameworks to address it. Each of them contributed critical lessons. But none delivered a complete doctrine.
That is not a knock on them. It’s partly because the research wasn’t available at the time, and partly because solving the vetting problem requires synthesis across disciplines that at first glance seem unrelated: military doctrine, psychology, trauma research, and counterintelligence.
Each contributed a fragment:
Beam amputated the vetting problem by amputating the organization itself.
Martino warned you to keep it small and cautious.
Von Dach codified a no-tolerance culture.
Mosby demanded discipline and performance.
ELF/ALF hardened security culture into near-paranoid ritual.
All of the above is true and important. But none of them integrated into a survivable system.
This is where The Grey Cell Protocols (GCP) enter. Building on my work at The Shepard Scale, GCP is my attempt to synthesize historical and modern resistance writing with psychology, trauma research, behavioral profiling, and deception analysis.
Where earlier doctrines warned you to “watch carefully,” Grey Cell hands you the tools to orient properly, measure, analyze, and act.
The Spectrum of Vetting Doctrines
We can visualize vetting as a spectrum.
The first thing to note is that the spectrum has nothing to do with political leanings. Political beliefs are irrelevant when assessing doctrine. The only questions that matter are:
Is the doctrine itself oriented to truth?
Is it effective?
Is it survivable?
Any other questions added to this list will introduce bias, including those about the viability or even morality of the doctrine holder’s belief system.
Today we will study thinkers and groups whose politics you may despise. That’s irrelevant. We are after truth and effectiveness.
At one pole of the spectrum sits Fragmentation. This is where we find:
Ulius Louis Amoss’ 1962 essay Leaderless Resistance, later plagiarized and repurposed by Louis Beam in 1983.
The autonomous cell structures of ELF and ALF.
Their model achieved infiltration resistance by eliminating the structures that required trust. No structure = no vetting = reduced risk.
At the other pole sits Discipline and Cohesion: von Dach, Martino, and Mosby. They demanded small units, strict discipline, and behavioral caution. They assumed infiltration was coming or already present and sought to neutralize it.
Between those poles lies the unresolved gap.
Both ends sacrifice something essential:
Beam and ELF/ALF sacrificed group cohesion.
Von Dach, Martino, and Mosby sacrificed scalability and resilience.
The Grey Cell Protocols sit as synthesis. GCP offers survivability without giving up cohesion. It also is built to use structural trust instead of emotional trust, and it integrates disciplines these earlier doctrines never touched: psychology, trauma research, behavioral profiling, and deception analysis. The result is a survivable, resilient group, and while nothing human-based is perfect, GCP can get your group to a place that is pretty close to unhackable.
Fragmentation: Beam, Amoss, ELF, and ALF
Louis Beam is often credited with articulating “leaderless resistance,” but the concept was first written by Ulius Louis Amoss, an OSS veteran, in 1962. Amoss saw that authoritarian regimes could easily penetrate hierarchical undergrounds. His answer: lone actors and small, autonomous cells with no central command.
Beam’s 1983 essay simply republished the concept as his own, replacing Cold War language with his white supremacist cause. It was plagiarism, but it spread among the far-right extremist groups.
The insight was simple: infiltration is inevitable, so eliminate the structures that make it possible. Lone wolves and cells of two or three, loosely united by ideology but without leadership or rosters.
This approach spread far beyond Beam’s circles. The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF) adopted nearly identical decentralized models even though they were far-left environmental terrorists.
Their security culture became infamous:
No recruitment.
No boasting or discussion outside the cell.
Compartmentalization to the extreme.
No romantically-linked couples in the same cell or on the same operations.
The effect was undeniable. Even FBI campaigns like Operation Backfire struggled, because there was no hierarchy to go after. Tagging a cell meant you got three to five people, with no knowledge or connection to a network.
Strengths of Fragmentation Doctrine:
Infiltration-resistant by design.
Simple to replicate.
Survivable under heavy surveillance.
Weaknesses:
Tactical wins only.
No cohesion or strategic coordination.
Vulnerable to irrelevance; no scaling without collapse.
Beam and Amoss gave the world a model that achieved tactical survivability by amputating strategic capacity. ELF and ALF proved its longevity. But survivability without cohesion is still failure.
Von Dach and Militarized Paranoia
At the opposite pole we find Major Hans von Dach and his 1957 manual Total Resistance. Written for Swiss civilians in case of Soviet invasion, it was later translated in 1992.
Von Dach’s context was existential. Assume tanks are rolling, secret police are everywhere, and betrayal is certain. His prescriptions were uncompromising:
Total compartmentalization. Nobody knows more than they must.
Personal scrutiny. Study recruits’ habits, debts, addictions. Anything exploitable makes them a liability.
Zero tolerance for loose talk. Remove anyone indiscreet.
Test before trust. Small, low-risk tasks first.
Assume betrayal as baseline. Everyone will break eventually. Structure accordingly.
This is paranoia codified into doctrine. Everyone is a potential traitor until proven otherwise—and even then, you keep your hand on the door.
Strengths:
Brutal clarity, no illusions.
Works under occupation conditions.
Provides hard rules to prevent rationalizing risks.
Weaknesses:
Too rigid for modern contexts; applied literally today it leaves you with a group of one, and then you’re back to Amoss’/Beam’s camp.
Military framing leaves no nuance for subtle manipulation or trauma-driven sabotage.
Offers rules, not analysis.
Von Dach set the baseline for paranoia. His posture echoed through Martino and Mosby.
Martino: Pragmatic Minimalism
Bruce N. Martino, in Resistance to Tyranny: A Primer (2010), translated von Dach’s paranoia for modern civilians. His book speaks to survivalists and liberty-minded activists rather than a conscripted nation.
Martino’s principles:
Keep groups small and highly selective.
Trust behavior, not ideology.
Avoid recruitment except within trusted circles.
Enthusiasm is a red flag.
Trust is provisional, never final.
Strengths:
Practical, accessible, survival-focused.
Behavior over rhetoric—a vital distinction.
Weaknesses:
Still instinct-driven; “watch carefully” is not a method.
Not scalable; small cells die with their members.
No accounting for internal manipulation or trauma liabilities.
Martino is von Dach stripped of his uniform. He provides pragmatic minimalism: lean survival rules for civilians. Useful, but still posture without process.
Mosby: Tactical Discipline
John Mosby’s Reluctant Partisan volumes represent the modern insurgent-prepper perspective, steeped in small-unit tactics and community-level insurgency preparation.
Mosby doesn’t bother with hypotheticals. His stance is blunt: infiltration is not a risk, it is an inevitability. If you are forming groups, assume you already have informants inside. His answer to this is tactical discipline and cultural cohesion. Mosby’s doctrine resonates because it’s rooted in lived insurgency realities. It deserves that respect. But without psychology, it leaves the manipulative infiltrator unspotted.
Mosby’s principles:
Micro-units only. No large groups, no big tents. Stick to small teams that can operate semi-autonomously.
Behavior > slogans. Mosby explicitly warns against mistaking loud ideological agreement for loyalty. He filters through demonstrated reliability and competence, not words.
Culture > optics. Groups must be bonded by shared discipline and trust culture, not by superficial labels, flags, or politics.
Performance under pressure is the test. The only real way to evaluate someone is to see how they act in training, in stress, and in the field.
Strengths of Mosby’s Approach:
Practical realism. He isn’t interested in romantic theories. His model is rooted in hard, lived realities of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Cultural filters. Mosby emphasizes that groups need strong internal culture and discipline; people self-select in or out based on whether they can keep up with the training, which is intentionally highly physical and incredibly difficult.
Performance-driven vetting. Skill and composure under pressure are hard to fake for long.
Weaknesses:
Skill-focused filter. Mosby’s method catches the incompetent, but not the manipulative. A skilled infiltrator who can shoot, move, and stay quiet will slide through his vetting process.
Blind to psychology. Like Martino, he doesn’t integrate trauma, manipulation, or emotional leverage as infiltration vectors.
Tactical ceiling. His doctrine is excellent at building small, competent cells, but it doesn’t solve the broader problem of infiltration in networks or movements, and it ignores the internal threat.
Mosby essentially modernizes Martino. Where Martino told civilians to be careful, Mosby tells them to be disciplined. He focuses on small-unit culture and operational performance as the keys to survival. His voice resonates strongly in modern prepper and militia contexts because he’s speaking their language: tactics, culture, and discipline. He’s definitely earned his position on this list of influential voices when it comes to vetting doctrine.
But Mosby, like Martino and von Dach, leaves the core vetting problem unsolved. He shows you how to filter for skills and discipline, but not how to filter for psychological instability, covert manipulation, or long-game infiltration. His doctrine is valuable and real, but incomplete.
The Shared Blind Spot
On the surface, these doctrines differ radically. Beam amputated structure. ELF/ALF hardened paranoia. Von Dach militarized suspicion. Martino minimized for survival. Mosby modernized for tactics.
Together, they share one blind spot and a wide open gap.
The blind spot was never infiltration itself. Everyone agreed infiltration would happen. The blind spot was how infiltration actually works.
Across the spectrum, four problems remain:
No psychology. They treat infiltration as external, ignoring how trauma-driven needs or instability inside members are just as dangerous.
No deception analysis. They warn you to “watch,” but never define what to look for in language or behavior.
No structural vs emotional trust. They rely on smallness and discipline, but don’t distinguish between personal bonds and system resilience.
No survivable scalability. Beam sacrificed cohesion. Von Dach, Martino, and Mosby sacrificed growth. ELF/ALF survived but they’re now irrelevant.
Every doctrine before contributed to the field but none of them offered a complete doctrine. That’s where The Gray Cell Protocols begins.
Grey Cell stands on their shoulders, but it closes the blind spot none of them could.
Next week, I’ll show you why vetting isn’t a checklist, a gut instinct, or a posture of paranoia. It’s something else entirely.
Everyone agrees vetting is the ultimate choke point. Nobody has solved it, until now.
On Sept 14, paid subscribers will get the first release of The Grey Cell Protocols: a complete doctrine for survivable resistance. If you are looking for an actionable, accurate way to create and maintain survivable, effective resistance, this is it. Subscribe now so you don’t miss the first module.