Deep Cover (NBA)

A team of investigators claim to have unmasked a deep-cover spy from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who spent a decade posing as a Latin American jewelery designer and partied with Nato staff based in Naples. 

The investigators say the woman went by the name of Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, and told people she met that she was the child of a German father and Peruvian mother, born in the city of Callao, Peru. 

In fact, she was a career GRU officer from Russia, according to research by Bellingcat … 

You may recall a recent example of legend failure when Russian deep cover agent Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov managed to completely balls up an infiltration of the International Criminal Court. Here we have an example of a more successful agent, Maria Rivera, who for more than a decade managed to pass herself off as Peruvian even though the Peruvian authorities rejected her application for citizenship. Despite this setback she travelled on a Russian passport, claiming to be a Peruvian who happened to be born in Moscow thanks to an accident of travel. 

As has happened to us all, I’m sure. Airports are full of pregnant women who, through unforeseen circumstances, have to have their babies in foreign shores and promptly abandon them to the vagaries of fate and charity. There’s special charter flights for this sort of thing, you know. Nothing but screaming newborns for eight hours at a time. Or at least eighteen hours if you happen to fly via Singapore. 

This is exactly the kind of scheme a Night’s Black Agents Conspiracy would love to get away with. The Dracula Dossier was made for this sort of thing: a deep-cover mole in place for [however long], hoovering up data and passing it on to their shadowy bosses. 

Ideally if you’re the shadowy boss in this scenario you’d like to limit the possible connections between you and the operative, which is why Rivera tried to get Peruvian citizenship rather than rely on a fib an eight-year-old would reject as being too cheesy. Flimsy or not, that fib worked, but you can imagine the kittens Rivera's Moscow bosses were having.

In Dracula Dossier terms you’d prefer the deep cover operative to have no vampiric or supernatural connections whatsoever. No nibbling the hired help, basically. No working your witchy wiles on the watcher. If you agent has an adverse reaction to garlic it bloody well better be an actual allergy. 

Which is an interesting dilemma because one of the things the Conspiracy does very well is force its victims to behave through supernatural means. If that’s off-limits then you’re forced to rely on the traditional MICE – Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. Those do work. They work very well. They’re just not as reliable as alien mind control. 

Which, if your Conspiracy is the micromanaging kind, might be a problem for the powers that be. They understand mind control. They like Renfields. What they don’t like is the uncertainty that comes with having to rely on more traditional methods.  

Imagine what happens when a helicopter parent is also your boss. Plus, blood-drinking psychopath paranoiac.

The Atlantic

One other thing the Rivera story illustrates is how much better it is to be on the periphery. The socialite who runs a jewelry store is much easier to overlook than a postgrad student trying to get direct access to the ICC. One option requires detailed security checks; the other meets you at a nice little bistro round the corner for a cocktail. Direct access to the ICC would have been infinitely more valuable to the Russians, just as direct access to Ring would be infinitely more valuable to Dracula’s people. But then, you can’t always get what you want. 

Sometimes it's better to have the barmaid at the pub round the corner where the lads go after work on your team than it is the new hire with the dodgy CV. The barmaid gets less scrutiny and will probably hear a lot of juicy information once the drinks start to flow.

Finally consider these words of wisdom from the Edom Field Manual:

Edom is the player characters’ day job, but they have lives outside it. Include a scene or two every session which explores the player characters’ personal lives, their family and friends (especially if the Agents suffered a significant Stability loss that session). You can use these scenes to give an external perspective on Edom activities — they get to see what their cover-ups and intrigues look like from the outside. This gives them the conspiratorial frisson of knowing that, say, the recent fire in the London Underground was actually the destruction of Count Orlok, or who really pushed the Icelandic Diplomat over the falls at Barnafoss. 

It’s considered gauche to put a player character’s dependent NPCs in jeopardy too often, but in a Fields of Edom campaign, it’s almost obligatory. After all, you have the perfect literary antecedent; Dracula targeted the spouses and partners of his enemies in the novel, so you should do the same. If the Agents don’t take steps to protect their loved ones and keep them hidden, they’re fair game for attacks by Dracula, his minions, the Opposition, rival vampire programs, or even rival Dukes.

Why endanger those friends and family directly when it might be much more interesting to have someone on the sidelines taking down their every unguarded word? The fellow journalists down at the Frontline Club just having a natter, the waitress at the trendy little French place not far from Seward's Asylum, the Sculptor, almost any of the Legacies ... any one of them could have been bought off by sinster forces and be patiently waiting in the wings. If those friends and family learn more than they ought, will they tell that friendly face all about it?

Finally a scenario seed:

Background Checks

Someone close to your agents - a Civilian in every sense of the word - vanishes from the social scene one week and reappears a week later. An unexpected holiday perhaps, or an illness. The agent might think nothing of it but their bosses (and perhaps an unfriendly Duke who they've upset or burned Bureaucratically) calls them in demanding an explanation. This person was seen in Romania in the week they were away and has a Romanian passport. Why? What do they know about current operations?

Options:

• The Civilian is really Romanian but passes themself off as English because they've been treated badly in the past by xenophobes. They claim to be English when asked to avoid conflict. This was an innocent trip abroad by someone with nothing to hide, but it doesn't look that way to the Dukes and treating this as anything less than serious will cost the agent Bureaucracy. 
• The Civilian is an enemy operative who's been milking the agents' friends and family for [however long], managing to get one or two interesting leads. They went to Romania last week because the agent let slip something that the enemy operative needed to report on, soonest, and they couldn't rely on the usual means of communication. This will negatively affect the agent's career, if it comes out.
• The Civilian is an enemy operative who was called in by the Fanged Powers that Be, who still don't like having someone on the team they can't supernaturally control. The Bosses demanded an in-person report. This, and other instances of micromanagement, has pissed off the enemy operative to such an extent that they're ready to Flip, if approached with subtlety and discretion. Subtlety and discretion are what your agents are known for, right?    

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Rose Colored Spyglasses (Night's Black Agents)

Russia's FSB overestimated Russia's chances of success in Ukraine, and Russia's army is paying for that mistake. As the Washington Post puts it:

“There was plenty of wishful thinking in the GRU and the military, but it started with the FSB,” said a senior Western security official, using the GRU abbreviation for Russia’s main military intelligence agency. “The sense that there would be flowers strewn in their path — that was an FSB exercise.” ... the FSB now faces difficult questions in Moscow about what its long history of operations against Ukraine — and the large sums that financed them — accomplished.

How did it come to this? Wishful thinking played its part, but this habit isn't limited to the FSB. Every would-be cardshark who's ever set foot in a casino knows that losing is somehow unthinkable, that the next turn of a card will be exactly the card you want.

Let's assume that they knowingly lied or exaggerated. Why might that be?

If your promotion depends on it, you lie.

If your bosses expect a certain outcome, you lie.

If your budget depends on good news, you lie.

If everyone around you tells you that the lie is the truth, you lie.

If an expert tells you something and you believe the expert, you lie. Unknowingly perhaps, but it's still a lie.

If there are no consequences for telling lies but there are consequences for telling the truth, you lie.

Where else might we see an environment where people's budgets, promotions, depend on lies? Where there are no consequences for lying but there are consequences for telling the truth?

Edom. 

The Edom files make it clear that each of the Dukes has their own department, their own agenda. Hound is the most obvious about her objective, but they all have objectives of one kind or another which may or may not advance the goals of the Edom project. Then of course there's always the possibility that Dracula left a gift behind in the 1970s. Are all the Dukes loyal? Is one of them deep in the enemy's councils?

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Edom has a long-term project it's pursuing in, say, Romania. Not unlike the FSB in Ukraine Edom is going to cultivate assets in the project area, carry out punitive operations against enemy assets, and generally try to gain maximum advantage for minimum effort. 

But.

The people running those operations know Hound doesn't want to hear bad news. They know their budgets, promotions, depend on funneling good news up the chain. They have experts from Edom telling them one thing, and perhaps the situation on the ground is telling them something else but acknowledging that reality would mean admitting the experts were wrong.

Most importantly of all they know that if they keep telling lies there will be no consequences but if they start admitting unpleasant truths the bosses will not be happy.   

If things start going wrong it's natural to assume it's because of enemy action, but what if it's because your own side is letting you down?

Audit Trail

Location: Bucharest

Asset: Romanian Mortician

Task: Evaluation

Summary: an important location (doesn't really matter which, but for the sake of this discussion a Heal The Children office) was the target of a black bag job and the Mortician was assigned to make the initial evaluation. Elvis trusts her evaluation; Osprey does not. The agents are tasked with auditing the Mortician using a second opinion of the black bag job as an excuse. This may be their first visit to Romania; a nice, low-stress bit of fieldwork.

Possibilities:

• The Mortician has given a straight, no-nonsense report on the black bag job that contains one nugget of embarrassing information. Heal The Children is meant to be an Edom asset, but it's been diverting funds - which means Edom's cash - to its own executives to fund a luxurious lifestyle. Those executives have direct, personal connections to Osprey; he helped them get their jobs. If the Mortician's evidence gets out and is believed by Elvis and the other Dukes, that's very bad news for Osprey. He'll do his best to make sure the agents get buried in Bureaucracy, if it looks as if they back the Mortician's story. Osprey would never take direct action against Edom agents, but those Heal The Children execs aren't above hiring a few goons to protect their interests.
• The Mortician's report is pretty basic, and that's because the Mortician knows that Hound has taken a personal interest in Heal The Children and doesn't want to get in the way. As far as the Mortician's concerned she likes her job and wants to keep it. She knows that if she tells the truth Hound will make her life a living hell. What Hound doesn't want the rest of Edom to know, since Romania isn't her territory, is that she was following up on Tradecraft rumors that Heal The Children is connected to some Conspiracy actors outside Romania, in Saudi Arabia. Hound's information is false but by acting she's compromised herself and Project Montsieur, which is something she doesn't want the rest of Edom knowing about. Especially not Elvis.
• The Mortician has told Elvis exactly what he wants to hear, which is that the Heal The Children job was backed by the Conspiracy. Elvis thinks everything in Romania is Dracula's doing. If his agents agree with him they get rewards and promotion; if not, they get punished. The Mortician is only doing what she's been doing for years: telling the bosses what they want to hear. In fact, the Heal The Children job was carried out by the mafia, and only so the mafia could use Heal The Children's computers as part of a crypto scam. Elvis will argue that the mafia's connections to the Conspiracy are well established, which is enough to foozle the other Dukes. Except Hound, who's often wondered whether the Romania desk wouldn't be better under her control.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.