"Richie's camp performance concealed considerable intelligence and depth," Nava told me, as well as "smoldering rage".
It even spawned an annual contest since 1991 called the Loebner Prize, where judges hold short conversations with concealed artificial-intelligence programs and humans, and then have to decide which is which.
Talentless chutzpah usually wears thin once viewers see that it's really grandiose self-delusion, but all Rylan's spray tan and Lady Gaga-esque camp failed to conceal an intelligence and grace, which took everyone by surprise.
The reason: The torture confirmed that Zubaydah wasn't concealing valuable intelligence, they argued.
The memo says the Ohrs' relationship with them "was inexplicably concealed" from the intelligence court.
But her sharp intelligence concealed a warmth and involvement that enriched her friends and gave her writing a deep compassion.
Each agency stores its own intelligence and, even though each of them has staff with the highest possible security clearance, even though all of them claim to be willing to work together, all of them try to keep their intelligence concealed from each other.
This system, known informally as the "black budget," concealed secret spending on intelligence activities and classified military programs throughout the cold war.
The names of any Americans were concealed, or "masked," the intelligence community's term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when such intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.
These include parts of a 1950 file about the "indoctrination of Malay Chinese" travelling to China, which the Foreign Office wishes to remain concealed until 2032; Singapore intelligence reports from the 1950s; and a 1960 file concerning Northern Cameroons, both of which the Foreign Office plans to withhold until 2029.
