What Country/Institution?

[jeregenest]

chrislehrich asks about setting. A very good question. To which I have the following answer.

This game is the later part of the Cold War, basically lets say 1969 to 2004. My original intent was to let the characters choose the country and organization they were working for. While in my mind MI6 (the Circus) has figured prominently in a lot of my development, I’m quite comfortable playing just about anywhere. Okay, Red China might be hard for me, but I’m willing. I saw a neat book on their espionage practices recently that I’d love an excuse to buy.

Which probably means two prep sessions. One to discuss this sot of stuff and make sure everyone’s clear on the rules, and the second as outlined in the rules for character creation. Or is that too much? Folks know me, I’m a process monkey and also I love to get people over to our house. Especially if they’ll hold the baby or play trains with the boy.

Though we could probably iron out agency/country on-line. In which case this is the place to do it.

Comments

[bluegargantua]

Hmmm...

I say MI6, but I'm thinking CIA. I say MI6 because that's sorta been the baseline soure material for the game. But I think CIA because, well...I'm American, I have a better grasp of how a background could be constructed.

KGB would be very weird. Probably very enlightening but weird.

Red China (is it Pink China now?) would be interesting but only from a bit earlier (1950-1970) for the various conflicts in the region. I don't think it had quite the same role after that.

Part of me really wants to do some oddball, third-world country, but it's not like Chad had a world-spanning intelligence agency.

That's a big part of it right there. If you're going to paint the Cold War, then you need to be part of agencies that have the global perspective needed to cover the thing. Obviously the US and the USSR, as the main combatants, are the obvious choices. Britan looks good because there's Le Carre and Bond and the British Empire and stuff so it feels like they've got the global reach (oh and we share a similar language). China just isn't it.

But I wonder if maybe France might not be an interesting pick. France always plays by its own rules. It's nominally on the side of the US, but it's always looking out for itself first and foremost. France has Angolia and Vietnam under its belt. And France has a fabled espionage tradition. There are language/cultural bars that are a little higher for players, but I think there's a real story in France.

France...huh...I like it
Tom

[bryant]

I'm interested in playing an American expat who has reasons not to return to the States; thus, works for MI6. (Or another Brit agency.)

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm playing or anything, but an international NATO team might be a cool idea so that people can play characters of varying national backgrounds. I don't think there are any historical analogues, but I know in the earlier season(s) of Danger Man, a fictional NATO intel agency was John Drake's patron.

[bryant]

There's a NATO Intelligence Division, but it has no intelligence gathering capacity.

I used to have a guy working for me who had once run operational NATO HQ security, which is probably the closest they come to active intelligence work -- his team did a lot of counter-intelligence work. Unfortunately, he couldn't tell me any good stories. But again, he was US military personnel on duty to NATO rather than working for NATO directly.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

NATO doesn't do intelligence, and oftentimes its faulty sharing between member nations have lead to some interesting issues. Sort of mirrored by the current problems of infrmation sharing we are seeing amongst EU members.

The major hesitation in my mind about using NATO is the SPYFI pulp factor. While DangerMan is better than James BOnd its still pretty much on the SPYFI whizz-bang side of things, one man's fists and superior intellect against the rest of the wrld that wants to tear us down sort of thing. Add to that that all that comes to my mind is UNIT and I get scared. Damn Daleks (hmm I wonder if UNIT will appear in the new Dr Who....)

[chrislehrich.livejournal.com]

Advantages/Disadvantages, as I see them:

CIA
+ We're American too, and thus know the culture pretty well. It's exceptionally easy to look things up, if we need to. If state diplomacy matters at some point, it's easy to know who the president was and from that also what sorts of big events are happening (Vietnam, Cambodia, Watergate, fillintheblankgate, etc.)
- The CIA, rather like the FBI used to be, has a reputation for fanaticism, techno-philia, and a sort of cowboy approach to black operations (attempts to assassinate Suharto with bombs, the Grenada incident, the Bay of Pigs, etc.). The internal politics are highly bureaucratic, with less of that cozy dysfunctional family thing that le Carre is so interested in. America has a less clear class breakdown as well, making snobbery and such less apparent on the basis of birth. As we know lately, the CIA's technophilia tends to encourage them not to bother with human intelligence, i.e. agents on the ground. They also have a bad habit of not using people with linguistic abilities (note that as of 9/11, my understanding is that there were only 3 data analysts with any Arabic).

MI6
+ LeCarre's world, thus close to baseline. Christopher Andrew's book Her Majesty's Secret Service and Peter Wright's Spycatcher are excellent and readily available nonfiction sources. The British secret world is very small, so everyone ends up knowing something about everyone, and it's also extremely incestuous, which produces tightly-wound characters. Their fields of operation are relatively constrained as well, so that we could all end up working in the same operational theater at any given time.
- We don't want to do a knock-off of LeCarre, and there is a certain temptation to create variants of his indelible characters. If it turns out to matter, knowing who the PM is isn't necessarily going to tell you much about the government or its interests.

France
1. SDECE: Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage [External documentation and counter-espionage service], like the CIA with counter-intelligence; now replaced by DGSE
2. SA: Service Action, basically LeCarre's scalp-hunters, but they often work in teams (read The Day of the Jackal); subsection of SDECE/DGSE
3. SR: Service de Renseignements. Rather like the NSA, but handles agent-running as well; mostly an analytical service.
4. Deuxieme Bureau, or G2: The general "hat" that includes almost all intelligence and counterintelligence work.
5. DST: FBI with a very strong arm. Note that it means "Direction of Survellance of the Territory."

+ Almost as tightly wound as the British services. Secretive to an obsessive degree. Douglas Porch's The French Secret Services is an excellent survey, readily available. All that class, status, national pride combined with recognition of a small role, etc. that's in LeCarre is in France too. It rarely matters who the President is (apart from DeGaulle), because they're all the same. Several interesting and distinctive opponents, notably the various sides of the whole Algeria issue. Very interesting and complicated perspective on the Middle East. Don't trust the Americans farther than they can throw them (and they're right!).
- We're not all French, and don't know the culture well. If you don't read French, some research may be difficult. The French upper-middle class is divided into two blocks, rather like the Japanese. One half is nationalistic (even fanatical), right-wing, disturbingly unconcerned with citizens' rights, and so on; these people run the government and big corporations. The other half is not terribly nationalistic, very left-wing, extremely concerned about rights, ecology, diplomacy, and so on; these people run everything else (like the parts of the Academy that aren't entirely government-run).

You don't want to do China, trust me. You'd be guessing all the time -- there's very little reliable information around.

I have no comments about the Russians; I just don't know enough about their services.

---

My inclination is to go with England or France.

Chris

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I have a few good sources on China, but I agree. Its really outside the pale. We'd have both the cultural barrier and a real shortage of information.

Excellent points on the other three.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Christopher Andrew's book Her Majesty's Secret Service and Peter Wright's Spycatcher are excellent and readily available nonfiction sources.

Too which I'd add Stephen Dorril's MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service. Which reminds me I really should resubscribe back to Lobster (http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/index.htm) sometime.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

The history/culture/language/et cetera barriers propell me towards endorsing the CIA. James Ellroy novels don't lie to me, surely -- there's a lot of incest and private vendettas and such going down in American intelligence circles of the 60s and 70s.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Is one of the design parameters that everyone is in the same agency? Could you do a "special relationship" thing with both MI6 and CIA? Or do they only work together in the movies?

The Special Relationship

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

If thats what folks want to explore, than yes we could easily play a game about the relationship between British and American intelligence in the later half of the Cold War.