Methods
In the TV series, thanks largely to the involvements of William Read Woodfield (1928 - 2001) and Allan Balter as the producers, story editors, and scriptwriters, the IMF operated primarily by using confidence tricks, infiltration, and high technology devices on its targets. The agents of the IMF were able to deceive their targets into cooperating with them without detecting any kind of deception until the "impossible mission" was carried out. By that time, the IMF team had vanished from the scene and out of the target country.
Woodfield was a devotee of the book The Big Con, written by the linguist David W. Maurer, and Woodfield and Balter consulted it as one of the "testaments" in their "Bible" for the TV series. Its other "testament" in their "Bible" was a short four-page outline that they based partially on the principles of the writing instructor Lajos Egri, the author of the book The Art Of Dramatic Writing that Egri had published in 1946.
Read more about this topic: Impossible Missions Force
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—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)