continued . . .
Remember what I said about backstopping in part 1? That’s important now. When a clandestine agency physically terminates an asset it is “tied off.” Oh, there may be some local investigation, but it will end up as just another unsolved murder because the legend is solid. When an external entity outs a spy or backstopped asset this is a serious problem. It places everyone else who was backstopped in the same manner at risk. It places people who have absolutely nothing to do with the clandestine world at risk. In real life, a politician outing a spy should find themselves literally burned at the stake. They have committed a crime against their country which cannot be forgiven and must never be pardoned or have the sentence reduced.
Many of you are going to lay claim that this is a political post. While that may be the seasoning, you are missing the bigger picture. Most of you, as both readers and writers, don’t bother exploring this critical part of the spy world you enter when putting the words down on paper or opening the book. Perhaps I spent too long as an IT analyst, but I think of these things because they are the weakest links.
Really do the math here.
How do you backstop that employment history? There really are only a few possibilities:
- A completely fake company having only a P.O. box and a voice mail phone number. This won’t hold up to a local tire kicker, but will survive a cursory all-from-the-keyboard check.
- Call in favors at large legitimate companies to not only give people do little jobs with massive quantities of away time.
- Create an actual fake company with a token few legitimate employees. Usually this would need to be a think tank or big picture type consultancy.
The more deeply your spy is going to be embedded in the high dollar large target espionage world, the more solidly the company providing the job history needs to be behind them. The show “Covert Affairs” did an excellent job of this. Annie Walker had a museum job she showed up for periodically. This gave her working relationships with actual ordinary people so when tire local kickers came calling they ran into people who knew her on site and had actual stories about evenings out, birthday parties, etc. Her job at the museum also gave her perfect cover to be gone for months to places where rare artifacts would come from. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out there are only so many people who could be backstopped in this manner. It should take an even smaller brain to figure out a work history like that has to be built up over years, hence the expensive part of creating a spy.
A more direct approach is to create a seemingly legitimate fake company where you can run more through. A museum with over a thousand people on staff yet which seems to get nothing done will attract attention. A few dozen to a few hundred high level consulting firms where people are rarely in the office can hire a token few worker bees to actually complete a few high level projects which get press, thus giving the firm legitimacy.
Now you begin to see the danger presented when a pile of excrement outs a covert operative. They don’t just out her, they out her backstop and every other person backstopped in the same manner. The legitimate side of that business will also evaporate as the name of the company winds its way through various news outlets. People who worked there and had nothing to do with the spy side of the business are now tainted in the market place. If they were good at high level international consulting, they will never get another job in that field because they have the outed company on their resume. All of these people become “Collateral Damage.”
Burning a spy is a horrible thing which will cause tragedies years, sometimes decades out. The immediate impact will be ruined lives which never get reported in the press. Given the “star on the wall” code of silence at the CIA, the American public will most likely never find out about those who died as a result of it.
When writing your story, do the legwork and get this too often glossed over detail right.