The SCIF (Night's Black Agents, Delta Green)

Fair warning: this link to the Washington Post is behind a paywall.

Governments hide secrets as best they can. That sometimes means only allowing a person entitled to see a file to view it in a secured area, or sensitive compartmented information facility - the SCIF. Once in, it's eyes-only; no devices, no cameras, and you don't take anything out of the SCIF. It's you and the file. Happy reading.

I'm now going to invoke the sacred formulae of Fair Use for this graphic, borrowed from the Post article:

Which goes some way to explaining the layout. It also explains why you might find a SCIF anywhere; you don't need much space. Several high-level government types are known to have a SCIF at their personal residences (Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump) but it can as easily be on a ship, a plane, a truck.

From the Post article:

The point of this meticulous construction is what the intelligence community calls “security in depth” — overlapping layers of protection that slow down adversaries and detect intrusions long before a breach actually occurs.

“It is not just ‘close the door’ — it’s ‘lock the door with a sophisticated lock, and shield the walls against any kind of external monitoring,’” said Steven Aftergood, a classified information expert.

Which poses an interesting dilemma in any modern espionage setting where supernatural spooks are on hand. You can TEMPEST protect your system against electronic intrusion, but what are you supposed to do when actual ghosts can be used to infiltrate the system? Or remote viewers? Or Renfields, the possessed, Serpent People with Consume Likeness - and so on and on.

The other interesting point is that this version of the SCIF is merely the latest iteration. People have been squirrelling away secrets in quiet, secured rooms for donkey's years. You could import the idea to almost any setting, including games like Swords of the Serpentine, but I'm only going to consider Delta Green and Night's Black Agents here.

Why use a SCIF?

First, as set dressing. There's often a scene in Delta Green where the latest Mr. or Ms. Green sets up a secure meeting to introduce the characters to the scenario. Rarely does the scenario consider what that meeting space looks like. It's just assumed to be there. But how cool would it be to have the briefing in a SCIF on the back of a semi? Or in a military base, a Coast Guard ship, a military cargo plane? As Director you've always got to bear setting flavor in mind and nothing sets the tone more than a clandestine meeting in a heavily secured facility.

Second, as a means of disseminating specialist information. In Delta Green lore there's a whole research section devoted to studying esoteric texts and peculiar finds. Delta isn't going to let just anyone have a look at its copy of [insert Mythos text] even if the information in it is relevant to the agents' current investigation. It's going to take place in a SCIF or SCIF-equivalent, with a goon on the door and a nervous researcher in the room making sure nothing gets out of hand, or out of the room. There's probably half-a-dozen SCIFs in Vietnam during Fall of Delta Green, most likely in Hanoi but some will be out on a firebase somewhere in the field. In the 1990s game there are bound to be older SCIFs that Delta doesn't use anymore, for ... reasons ... hidden away on some all-but-decommissioned military base or in some nondescript government offices somewhere. 

In a game where psychic powers are a thing you could have a SCIF that's entirely a mind-creation, a shared dream or delusion where the psychic powers-that-be keep their deepest secrets. An actual mind palace, with God alone knows what guarding the door. You could do something very similar in a Supers game like Mutant City with some Professor X-a-like using his mental powers to create a secured space that only he and other psychics can access. Again, a means of disseminating information - but what an evocative bit of set dressing!

Third, as a scenario location. Any SCIF that's been around longer than a few months is, in any game involving supernatural activity, bound to pick up a certain amount of supernatural residue. Even if the SCIF isn't, say, dedicated to EDOM there's bound to be a couple EDOM assets or agents who 'know the truth' about it and want to protect it at all costs. Or capture it. Or prevent someone else being infected by its malevolent parasites.  

Night's Black Agents presupposes two scenario types that could be all about the SCIF: 

• Sneak. The agents must infiltrate a secure location.
• Defend. The agents must defend a secure location against infiltration.

Either one could be meat for an entire evening's worth of play. EDOM's crack team defending a SCIF against vampire incursion while the Dukes hold secret conference; EDOM's crack team infiltrating a SCIF held by the Conspiracy or its assets to extract the information inside - or even recover the fabled Dracula Dossier ...

Finally, a seed:

Lost But Not Forgotten

An EDOM friendly or former asset has died. The circumstances may or may not be suspicious; that's for the higher-ups to determine. The bigger issue is the information kept at their SCIF, located in [their home/Ring/the Seward Asylum/somewhere else]. That has absolutely got to be cleared out and forensically cleansed; there can be absolutely no material left behind. 

Two problems: nobody's sure how to get in, but everyone's convinced the doors are locked; and second, the Jack who's normally assigned to guard the door has gone AWOL ...

Options:

• The Jack has been taken out by OPFOR who now intend to use the Jack's corpse (necromantically revived or otherwise) to get access to the SCIF. If the agents want to prevent this enemy team from using the Jack's biometric data to get into the SCIF they will need to act quickly.
• The SCIF is locked, magically or otherwise, by a device that only EDOM old-timers like the Boffin remember. If the agents want to prevent explosive charges from destroying the SCIF when they attempt entry, they'll need to find one of the old-timers who remembers how the device works. The Jack is trying to do exactly that, for reasons of their own.
• The SCIF contains data that can be used to uncover one of EDOM's darkest secrets - the true identity of the 1970s mole, say - and someone else knows that this information exists. That someone else has suborned the Jack in hopes of recovering the information before the agents do. However, the Jack isn't nearly as reliable as they seem; blood dependency will do that to you ...

That's it for this week. Enjoy!