Walk-Ins (Night's Black Agents)

A walk-in, or dangle, is a potential spy agency informant who claims to have information to sell or skills to offer, but in fact is an enemy asset whose sole purpose is to feed the target agency false information. Any spy agency, no matter which government it works for, has this problem. People approach the agency all the time, swearing they have valuable intel to sell. Some are crackpots. Some are idiots. Some are genuine.

Every so often, though, it's enemy action.

In fiction, From Russia With Love's Red Grant, a Cold War British Army motorcycle courier, defects to the Soviets, who spend considerable time debriefing him. Always at the back of their mind is the question: is this defector what he claims to be, or is he someone we should just kill, right now? It's only when Grant is ushered into his interrogator's office and sees an unaccustomed bowl full of red roses on the interrogator's desk that he knows he's accepted. 

In reality, when CIA analyst Brian Regan tried to sell his data to whoever would buy (most likely China, Lybia or Saddam Hussain, he thought) he had to figure out who would be most amenable. He settles on Libya and approached its consulate in Switzerland, only to be flung out on his backside. The Libyans were convinced Regan was either an idiot or an enemy agent, and either way they wanted nothing to do with him. 

It's generally good practice to treat an unsolicited offer with suspicion, whether you're a spy agency or an ordinary person getting enticing emails from iamnotaphishingattempt.com. However if you're in Edom's line of business there's an added complication: that woman who just walked in the door claiming to have seen a vampire may not realize she's lying. She might be under something else's influence.

Imagine if you have to evaluate the sincerity and usefulness of someone who's just walked in off the street and claims to have something you want. The more valuable the thing on offer the more suspicious you ought to be. Still, if the offer's tempting enough ...

The Night's Black Agents Resource Guide offers rules for Thrilling Interrogation, but goes on to say that these rules are expected to be used when the Agents have captured a tougher-than-average bad guy who doesn’t give everything up to a simple Interrogation spend, or for scenes where one Agent has

been captured by the police or some other mostly legal entity (domestic intelligence, corporate security) and you want to play out the cat-and-mouse game between interrogator and suspect. 

There's one other time when Thrilling Interrogation comes into play: when the characters have to assess the honesty of a dangle.

The Little Grey Room

The agents work for X (Edom? CIA? the Vatican? Someone else?) or are freelancers; it doesn't matter which. They're hot on the heels of some kind of Conspiracy Node or plot, and in the middle of the action are approached by a would-be friendly with information to sell. Is this friendly genuine? Is the information reliable? Has the Conspiracy already flipped this asset and are the agents being lured into a trap?

For this example I'm going to use a Cameo from Double Tap as the potential friendly, but don't feel obliged to do so if it doesn't fit the moment. I'm also not going to detail the information the friendly has to offer. Far better if it remain in McGuffinland, to be changed as you see fit.

It's just the agents, the friendly, and a little grey room where they can talk without being overheard ...

Bureaucrat Athletics 4 (gym membership) Lara didn’t expect this job when she graduated from college, but it’s better than living at home with her mother. She epitomizes paper-pusher, working in a basement office that time forgot. Neat, thin, blonde, and pretty, she is officious and far too serious for her age. She still dresses for the job she wants: a little too much personality in the scarf and belt. (Bureaucracy, Flattery, Reassurance) In play: There’s a place for everything, and everything in its place; pick lint off your knees and lap; explain in a patient voice why that can’t happen.

In this example Lara is the runner. She might be perfectly sincere (+0), desperate (+1), and/or under vampiric influence (+2). More likely one of the latter two options, but it's Director's choice. There may be other reasons why she'd get bonuses, and again that's Director's choice. 

The agents are the pursuers. They have +2 base maneuver and probably have a +1 bonus as this is an enclosed interrogation. They may be able to finagle more bonuses, but that's up to them.

The chase ability in Thrilling interrogations is usually Stability. NPCs traditionally aren't assigned Stability. In theory if an asset was being controlled by a supernatural entity the Director could use the entity's Aberrance score, but tactically this is a bad choice. Aberrance is usually fairly high, at least 7 and often higher. This means any runner with high pool is signaling that she's under enemy control, since how else would she get the high pool? 

I would assign the runner a pool equivalent to their highest pool +2. In this case Lara's high pool is Athletics, so total pool for Thrilling purposes is 6. I might adjust that higher if she's under supernatural control, but if so I wouldn't tell the players. I'd assign more points in secret and see if the players notice.

The difference between this Thrilling Interrogation and a standard interrogation is that the facts are not an issue. Lara's perfectly willing to tell everything she knows. Maybe she wants money, or maybe her ego needs a little stroking, (remember MICE),  but she's spilling her guts either way. 

The problem is whether or not Lara's sincere, or lying, or so completely under someone else's control that she thinks her lies are truths. 

For an added Thrilling element, assign a time limit. Maybe there's a bomb about to go off somewhere that only Lara knows about, or maybe a sniper's lining up crosshairs on Lara's forehead, or maybe it's something else again. If the agents don't make the right call before the time limit (ie number of rounds in the Interrogation scene) expires, something bad happens.

The chase begins either at base 5 (the normal starting point) or base 7 (if Lara's sincerity is in question, as it probably will be). If Lara wins the contest, then the agents will never know whether or not her information is trustworthy. They'll just have to decide whether to take it at face value. If the agents win the contest then they know whether or not Lara's bluffing, intentionally or otherwise. What they do next is up to them. 

Enjoy!

Not Quite Book Review Corner: The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

Not a lot of time again this week, so I'll be brief.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's account of Brian Regan's epic pre-9/11 espionage spree is a confounding, astounding account of America's bungler, the spy who didn't know when to come in out of the rain. On the one hand, it's a chilling tale: had Regan succeeded, it would have been the most significant espionage effort ever carried out against the United States. On the other, it's a cartoonish cascade of errors that ends the way you'd expect, as Regan stumbles from blunder to blunder in search of a payout, like a drunk weaving his way through Vegas and coming out the other end in his birthday suit.

It's often said - but perhaps not often enough - that spies aren't the action heroes seen  on the big screen or in four-color novels, blowing up installations, gunning down mooks and seducing beautiful people. Your actual honest-to-Fleming espionage asset is a bitter, disaffected soul who has a need - it might be money, sex, validation, or a dozen other things - that can be used to get them to open up. Such a one was Brian Patrick Regan, a former USAF Master Sergeant and signals intelligence specialist, who decided to sell America's secrets to the highest bidder because he wanted money, and to prove he wasn't an idiot.

Regan comes across as a very familiar type, as I'm sure he would to most of you reading this. He's the one gamer at the table who always has to be right, even when he's wrong - and he's frequently wrong. He doesn't care enough to do the work, but wants to be rewarded nonetheless. Plagued by dyslexia, his spelling is atrocious, but if it was just his spelling that was at fault his story would end differently. He can't manage his finances. He spends money as if it was water, juggling a mountain of debt by bouncing it from credit card to credit card, and his wife and kids are making expensive trips to her home country, Sweden, each year. He's the guy with the plan, but funnily enough his plans never come to anything, either because he doesn't follow through or because it was a lousy plan to begin with.

One day he decides he's had enough. Ball players and celebrities get millions of dollars for what they do - why should he be any different? He has something he can sell, and he needs the money. Thanks to his job he has access to reams of sensitive information any foreign government would be delighted to purchase. Russia's the obvious client, but approaching Russia directly is a fool's errand - he'd be caught straight away. So he decides to sell to Libya instead, thinking that by doing business with the Libyans he will eventually get to the Russians.

He gathers material by the simple expedient of photocopying it, and before long he has stacks of paperwork stuffed in his desk, in his filing cabinet, wherever it will fit. He sends a coded message to the Libyans: if you want to buy what I have to sell, contact me.

That coded message is sent straight to the FBI by an informant in the Libyan consulate.

From there things go from bad to worse, but the tale isn't about how it was done so much as by who, and why. The maddeningly complex and amateurish tradecraft methods Regan uses are bound to fail. What makes it interesting is Regan, the shmoe. The reader watches him fly off on a fool's errand to the Libyan consulate in Switzerland, walking in the door and demanding to speak to someone in charge because he has secrets to sell. Naturally the Libyans throw him out; they don't think anyone so stupid as to say he's a spy can possibly be a spy. Then we see Regan carry his bags and binders full of secrets out to the back of beyond, burying it in several different caches like Captain Kidd with his pirate gold. Half the story takes place after his inevitable arrest, when in one last spasm of hubris he tries to bargain for a lower sentence by holding the US government to ransom, saying that he won't reveal the location of his caches unless they make a deal.

In a way, Bhattacharjee is to be commended for making the story as interesting as it is. In different hands it would have been less a comic opera, more a squeaky fart in an elevator. By the end the reader actually feels a little sorry for Regan, hapless jackass though he may be. Personally I would have liked more about his wife and children, who were the real losers here - but I suspect they may not have been willing to cooperate. After all, Regan ruined their lives as much as he did his own, and shaking off that stigma must be a lifelong effort.

From a Night's Black Agents or Dracula Dossier perspective, what can be done to gamify the material? The most obvious approach is to have Regan approach a Conspiracy asset in his efforts to find a path to the Russians. This might work better in a Dracula Dossier game, where Romania plays a larger role in the narrative. The Conspiracy may be just as mistrustful as the Libyans in its dealings with Regan, but then it does have means of finding out information that other agencies lack. A few nips of blood and mind control later, and they'd know for certain whether Regan's the real deal or a disinformation asset.

Or one of Regan's infamous data dumps could still be out there, moldering in a duffel bag buried in the wilderness. Maybe Regan tries to use it to bargain for more privileges, or maybe the Conspiracy goes looking for it because it contains information vital to its cause. Does Regan know more about the vampires than he's willing to say? Is the FBI using Regan's data dump in some complicated sting operation?

Highly recommended to espionage enthusiasts, particularly if they enjoy a bit of cryptography - though personally I found Regan's code less engrossing than I suspect Bhattacharjee thought the reader would.