In regards of the spy story, guess it won't hurt anyone now to share a few bits and let everyone to learn from the story.
Honestly, I still remember how paranoid BoM and hellisfun was being about it, despite picturing himself a "RL professional" in profiling people. He constantly kept trying to get info from us, promising anything from a butt-kick to 72 virgins, and whenever we randomly picked a name from BoM (first just to give him a lesson, without expecting anything to happen), that player has been shortly kicked out and been turned against (we later sometimes even picked a 'spy' from the rest of BH, checking what is going to happen). Just to understand how much damage did BH leaders do to their own tribe, just by simply trusting hostiles more than their own members, that's how did they manage to backstab - amongst others - their biggest player on K55 when we were just starting to expand on the borders. We never even imagined it would happen, as that was like giving free entrance to the K for us. All that for a sentence like "yes, you're right, he is a spy, that's why we managed to take his first some towns.". Yes, you're right assuming he was simply losing villages due to the lack of support from his own mates and was fighting hard against us all the time. Could have been checked pretty easily on a variety of ways if their leaders take the time for it, instead of promptly promoting him to be a scapegoat.
I think BoM (and the whole Brotherhood) was wanting to believe in the spy story so much that you made anything just to be able to prove it's not fiction, and that way the only thing you've proven to your members that you don't trust them and that there is nothing between the leadership and most members to turn your branch into a community. That was showing people how pointless it is to remain loyal to you - there has been a week when we were receiving 5 different offers from two of your branches for spying (which we declined as we didn't need their help nor we wanted to leave their villages alone).
On the other side, HIF was also trying to prove we are having spies in [BA]; well, we know that we've had a 'spy' helping his friends in the MOJO war, so does another in the Storm war. We've also had a spy at the Corridor, giving free access to Wisdom to everything for months. It still didn't help any of them, right? Simply, starting a witch-hunt after spies would have caused more issues than occasionally having some info leaked. We sometimes internally warned the spies that it would be time to end playing for two teams, but never let these issues to grow above us.
As for these 'spies', two are active and loyal players now. One - the Corridor spy - has been rimmed by his masters. All cases are closed on a way or another.
Witch hunts are only able to destroy a tribe's internal integrity (thus eliminating the community feeling) and have the leadership waste too much time on it. The results of the different approaches are, once again, pretty clear. [BA] is still a community, people are working together, and the occasional leaks are easily covered or even can be ignored due to their low impact on the results, while in BH everyone is afraid of spies and barely trusting the other. Spies are not that much of a problem, and you can never find a way to really have 100% protection against info leaking. Handling them on the wrong way is much more dangerous - that's the first thing we have internally agreed on in [BA] years ago about this subject.