Marathe's recursive loyalty
Marathe’s A.F.R. superiors believe he only is pretending to betray them in order to secure advanced U.S. cardiac-prosthetic technology for his wife; but that in fact he really is betraying them (the superiors, his country)—probably actually for that medical tech—and is thus only pretending only to pretend.
Context
Marathe's status stated as the theme's central political knot: the A.F.R. think he "only is pretending to betray them... but... in fact he really is betraying them (the superiors, his country)... and is thus only pretending only to pretend." The nested loyalties are a POLITICAL fact — a man whose relation to "his country" (Leur Rai Pays) is recursively undecidable, the insurgency's cohesion resting on a betrayal no one can fully resolve. (The tradecraft mechanics are surveillance-disguise's; landed here is the country-loyalty stakes.)