Marathe & Steeply, the father and M*A*S*H (pp. 639–640)

Even at maximum candor the frame stays operational. In the middle of confessing the most intimate story he has — his father consumed to death by a television program — Steeply stops to format his own dead father's particulars as a dossier line, volunteering the intelligence because he knows Marathe reports every word to Fortier. The confession is pre-filed; the vulnerability is delivered in the Office's own file-syntax ("Steeply, H.H.: late father a heating-oil-delivery dispatcher"). It's the deepest paradox of the outcropping meetings: candor here is not the opposite of tradecraft but a form of it, a controlled disclosure offered up already indexed for the enemy's report.