Basic Information
Espionage or Spying is the art and act of gathering information that is secret, private, or confidential.
But, of course, it's also much more than that. It's a genre of those who engage in these sorts of tasks, but also often including assassins and mad scientists and other "cloak & dagger" trappings that go beyond merely gathering information. Agents, spies, whistleblowers, and eavesdropping technology is employed by goverment agencies, private industry and individuals, all with their own motivations. Big Brother is watching, and so are a few of his siblings.
Espionage is frequently a government conspiracy.
Espionage Equipment & Technology
- Cipher
- Gyrojet Weapons
- Laser Microphone
- Microdot
- Motion Detection
- Public Key Encryption
- SCIF
- Smart Dust
- Sound From Ultrasound
- Spy Catsuit
- Spy Satellite
- Video Analytics
- Video Motion Detection
Espionage Locations
Famous Spies
- Beethoven Was An Alien Spy - trope
- Aldrich Ames
- John Andre
- Benedict Arnold
- Belle Boyd
- Howard Burnham
- The Cambridge Five
- Eddie Chapman
- Julia Child
- Roald Dahl
- John Dee
- Daniel Defoe
- Fritz Joubert Duquesne
- Ian Fleming
- Frederick Forsyth
- Klaus Fuchs
- Oleg Gordievsky
- Graham Greene
- Nathan Hale
- Virginia Hall
- Mata Hari
- Ernest Hemingway
- Ursula Kuczynski
- John Le Carre
- Christopher Marlowe
- Peter Matthiessen
- Ana Montes
- Melita Norwood
- Henry Okah
- Allan Pinkerton
- Jonathan Pollard
- Harold "Kim" Philby
- Sidney Reilly
- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
- Jules C. Silber
- Robin Stephens
- George Stoker
- Sir Francis Walsingham
- William Wickham
Famous Intelligence Agencies
- CIA
- Deep State
- FBI
- KGB
- NSA
- Pinkertons Agent
- Réseau AGIR
- Red Orchestra
- Secret Police - see List Of Secret Police Organizations
Spy Types
This list is a mix of actual espionage terms and positions as well as character tropes from the espionage tropes list. They should get you started on generating the characters you'll need for your game.
- Access agent
- Agent of influence
- Agent provocateur
- Assassin
- Case Officer
- Confusion agent
- Deep Cover Agent - trope
- Double agent
- Double Agent
- Facilities agent
- Fake Defector - trope
- Honeypot
- Illegal agent
- Intelligence agent
- Manchurian Agent - trope
- Master of Disguise - trope
- MiB - trope
- Operational Targeting Officer
- Operations Officer
- Principle agent
- Re-doubled agent
- Sleeper agent
- Spy Couple - trope
- Teen SuperSpy - trope
- The Mole - trope
- Triple agent
- Tuxedo and Martini
- Unwitting double agent
Espionage in the News
- Arsenal of Concealed Weapons siezed from North Korean Assassin
- Blurred Out - 51 Things You Aren't Allowed To See On Google Maps
- China Enacting A High-Tech Plan To Track People
- CIA, FBI push 'Facebook for spies'
- FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'
- Halliburton says radioactive material was stolen
- Laptops took thousands of images
- October Surprise
- Putin - The dark rise to power
- Sensitive Guantánamo Bay Manual Leaked Through Wiki Site
- Sibel Edmonds Deposition - Ignored by U.S. Media
- 'Smart dust' aims to monitor everything
- Soviet Union Wanted To Topple Honecker In 1987
- The Hack Of The Year
- The Mysterious Death of George S. Patton
- Top Secret America
- Turkey's Secret Power Brokers
- U.S. Jet Shoots Down Iranian Drone Over Iraq
- Woman posed as FBI agent, 'hired' neighbors
See Also:
- Assassination
- Confidence Game
- Conspiracy Theory
- Crime
- Espionage Tropes
- False Flag Operation
- Secret Police
- Time Spying
- Espionage Genre Sources
Sources
Game and Story Use
- Espionage, it's themes and character types can be incorporated into many role-playing games. From over-the-top James Bond to all-too-real Wiki Leaks, there's a great deal of territory that could fall under an espionage banner. Most of the links above lead to pages that have their own game use ideas.
- There's essentially a sliding scale in the espionage genre (leaving out silly things like child spies) ranging from larger than life stuff like cinema Bond and the Mission Impossible series, through more realistic (but still far too exciting) material like the Bourne series and the Bond novels to material closely based in reality like Le Carre's work. Make sure you know which end of the scale you're at before starting play as standard practice in one will be a war starting game over in another.