A brad, or nail without a head.
A headless nail strikes me as a project for the apocryphal CIA job interview, in which the interviewee is subtly confronted with a problem and is expected to solve said problem without advisement and without being specifically told there is a problem.
As a military child I heard talk of this scenario, and the stories were told to me as fact.
An interviewee, when told to enter the room where the interview will be conducted, finds that the door is locked. He then finds the door behind him is also locked. The interview, it turns out, will only go forward if he can pick the lock or otherwise get the door open.
Another story involved a questionnaire to be filled out. The candidate is given the papers for the test, but no pen or pencil are present. Instead the candidate finds a seemingly arbitrary collection of household detritus which, to the skillful agent, could be assembled into a writing utensil.
I do not know if these anecdotes have any basis in truth but I suspect they were informed by contemporary Cold War-era espionage which had a certain mystique at the time, as I suppose it still does.
My mother often commented that turncoats seemed to risk a lot for very little return. She was referring to the money made by spies who got information to the Communists. Published stories of these spies were usually preceded by an estimate of how much money the spies made in return for their deeds. These amounts of money, usually spread over many years, never seemed to amount to much, leading us to question not so much the spies’ motivations but the real value of the information they smuggled.
