Marathe & Steeply, the outcropping
there was something latent and sadistic in the Bureau des Services sans Spécificité’s assignments of fictional personae for its field-operatives—casting men as women […] nondeformed U.S.O.U.S. personnel made not only to pretend but sometimes to actually suffer actual deformity, all for the realism of their field-personae.
Context
The B.S.S. disguise doctrine stated as A.F.R. received wisdom, and it is darker than mere tradecraft: the Office assigns personae designed to humiliate — men as women, Caucasians as "caricaturesque Haitians," the healthy made to "actually suffer actual deformity" — because the mortification is judged operationally useful. This is the theory the whole cross-dressing apparatus rests on, and it inverts the ordinary logic of cover (blend in, attract no notice): the more grotesque and unswallowable the persona, the better the Bureau likes it. Disguise here is not camouflage but a discipline of self-abasement, and the plan routes exactly this material to us — the apparatus itself, not just the prosthesis-diction dd kept next door.