Steeply's deep-cover doctrine — the grotesque field-personae and the "Helen Steeply" disguise

pivotal · YDAU; the field-persona doctrine, standing

• When: standing B.S.S. tradecraft; the "Helen Steeply" persona is the current YDAU assignment
• What: O.U.S./B.S.S. runs its finest field-operatives inside deliberately humiliating personae — casting "men as women, women as longshoremen or Orthodox rabbinicals," Caucasians as caricaturesque Haitians, healthy operatives as the deformed, "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." Steeply is the exemplar: on his current assignment he is "Helen Steeply," a massive woman-journalist for Moment magazine, in prosthetic breasts, blonde wig, electrolysis-rashed jowls, and mangled high heels — assigned "to cultivate some of the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles." His record includes the better part of a year in magenta robes (head shaved, teeth removed) infiltrating a cult-fronted drug-import ring in Seattle. The Québécois cells read the doctrine as something latent and sadistic in B.S.S.'s planners; Marathe reads a need in Steeply, who "craved the humiliation of the field-disguises his B.S.S. superiors requested of him." The disguise is the operational engine of the whole surveillance arm. See the Steeply timeline (the operative's biography).