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.
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?
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