I think it's apex global intelligence. Like the apex agents of each notable country.
They have all the data on everyone since forever (complete profiles on everyone online), autonomous AI monitoring/flagging, advanced predictive modeling, unlimited nuclear power as they need it to run everything... unlimited budget basically... And they have broken down human individual and group psyches to literal math.
For example, agents under their rank... they even allow agencies to "spy" on each other, to maintain secrecy from lower level agents... the spying in this scenario doesn't even matter, it's just to create theatre for grunts.. At the apex, the spying is irrelevant because they're all sharing info and working together (even China+USA etc, supposed "foes") Geopolitical strife could be contrived and managed in a similar way to manipulate civilians..
It's all because, the whole game is "How do we prevent 8 billion people from self destructing". Game theory actually indicates, especially post WW2, that apex powers should start co-ordinating while feigning adversarial nonsense, and I'm sure that's what's happening here since then.