[Spione] Breaking Ron's Heart (James Bond 007)

[James_Nostack]

Yep, running James Bond 007 using Spione as a Cold War Berlin sourcebook.  (This is part of an afternoon pair of one-shots of "Games That Should Not Exist," in which I hope to play Kang the Conqueror in Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space.)

Check it out:
Berlin.  1954.  Operation: Stopwatch (for the uninitiated: the joint project by the CIA and M.I.6 to dig a tunnel into East Berlin and tap a very conveniently located telephone trunk line).  Tone is very much "straight" Bond, without goofy gadgets, puns, or that sort of thing.  The springboard for this is Bond's (in my mind) rather unconvincing lecture at the end of the novel Casino Royale when he supposedly realizes it's the inhuman brutality of the modern industrial nation-state that pushes humans into making terrible moral compromises, and dedicates himself to its abolition.  (In the novel, of course, Bond is only able to condemn the Reds, but he (and the reader) would have to be an imbecile not to realize the principle generalizes.)

Anyway: Bond's best friend Bill Tanner subbing for George Blake, the M.I.6 agent and Berlin bureau chief who is secretly a mole for the KGB and has already told them about the project.  This is being played carefully by Tanner's KGB handler and 1st Directorate boy-genius, Kronsteen.  Kronsteen can't stop the tunnel project without exposing Tanner; besides, it's a great opportunity to funnel disinformation to the West.

On the other hand, if Operation: Stopwatch proceeds too smoothly, MI6 & CIA might suspect disinformation.  So Kronsteen's job, and Tanner's too I guess, is to create just enough chaos and frustration that the construction of the tunnel will in fact be seen as a heroic accomplishment over adversity.

To this end: under the direction of Rosa Klebb (either KGB, Stasi, or an HvA old-timer, I haven't really decided), has run a classic honey pot operation on British mining engineer Desmond Ellis, who has been doing most of the calculations and problem solving related to the actual construction of the tunnel.  The female in question is Greta Schafer, a Grenzgaenger whose mother was arrested in the East Berlin protests a year or two ago and is currently being held in a Stasi prison.

MI6 gets wind that Desmond is ensared in this trap.  Bond is sent in to clean it up . . . discreetly.  Can't get Ellis out of Berlin: need him for the tunnel.  Can't kill Greta (even if one wanted to) since it would invite retaliation against other agents and/or Ellis.  The most obvious solution is for Bond to counter-seduce this girl, but I'm leaving the player to his own devices.  Anything that begins stirring up too much friction, and Klebb herself gets personally involved, up to and including trying to assassinate Bond.  (Again: from Tanner's perspective, all of this, including a possible attempt by the KGB to kill his best friend, is an attempt to keep his cover intact.)

Other stuff is pretty generic spy stuff.  Turns out the electronics inside the tunnel run on vacuum tubes, which generate more heat than predicted; Leiter or Tanner is worried that, on a winter morning with frost, there's gonna be a pretty obvious line without frost running right across the border.  You need refrigeration, but it's got to run pretty silently.  So, Bond has to scrounge that up somehow.  (One possibility: a Nazi war criminal in the Gehlen Org, and one of Bond's war-time enemies, remembers plans of this nature used for the cooling systems of the Fuehrer's underground bunker, which might necessitate crossing the border and stealing some old plans.)

Now, the interesting thing about the James Bond 007 game is that the random encounter system is supposed to feed clues to the player about the mastermind's plan.  In other words, if the player is lucky enough with the random encounters, and smart enough as a spy-fan, it's totally possible that he might realize this whole thing is an elaborate fake-out.  Theoretically, it might even turn out that Bond realizes Tanner has flipped (many years before MI6 realized that the real person in Tanner's spot, George Blake, was working for the KGB).  Once Bond realizes what Tanner's done, and in light of Bond's supposed oath to put simple human decency above the monstrous demands of the state, what will he do?

All of this kind of seat-of-the-pants, since it's meant to be a half-ass one-shot for a single player using systems neither of us know especially well.  But it does kinda all fall into place...

I do want to play the Story Now game within Spione--It's something I've been keen on since reading the exercise in Zero at the Bone--but right now I'm just happy to be able to scratch James Bond 007 off my "haven't played yet" list. 

[James_Nostack]

(By the way, I seem to recall that at one point in time Ron had a policy that all talk about Spione ought to be on the Spione[/i[ forum off-site, except it's spammed to hell, and this is really a post about cannibalizing Spione for purposes less high-minded than unser lieber Herr Edwards originally intended.)

[Ron Edwards]

Abomination of the Year award! Along with the Kang in Doctor Who as a partner, which is hilarious.

I assume you've found the Berlin Tunnel category page at the wiki? The reference that jumps out at me is Trento's The Secret History of the CIA, which I seem to remember is the text which discusses the vacuum tubes (and later debunked or false-debunked, who knows, by someone else).

As long as you're putting in this kind of historical detail, one of the biographies of Wolf describes that he didn't find out about the Tunnel until 1955, implying that the KGB kept the HVA completely in the dark. So if whatsername is an HVA agent, it would have to be a mandated operation that Wolf himself would not be privy to - which at least to my mind seems unlikely.

I bet we could have a grand time discussing the shifts and re-shifts regarding Spy vs. Guy through the publication history of the original Bond stories. Have you seen my comments on them in the wiki? If not, start at Casino Royale and proceed through them chronologically, as listed there. Your own comments would be wonderfully appreciated!

Best, Ron

P.S. Yes, all Spione talk should now go here. Damn it.

[James_Nostack]

Sadly, I have only read Casino Royale after the 2006 movie came out.  Mainly I was surprised at certain characterization techniques, among them Bond deliberately name-dropping all the finest foods in the world during his dinner with Vesper (dating tip: if a guy cannot shut up about how much he knows about wine and steak [and impliedly, how pedestrian your tastes are] he is probably an asshole), and Bond musing that, in rough paraphrase, "all women are in love with semi-rape"  (dating tip: run Vesper run!).  But, charitably, this can be chalked up to 1950's chauvanism and Fleming wanting, perhaps, to tantalize his post-war British readership with fine things they couldn't easily get.

Right now, since I'm not sure this game is going anywhere after this and I've got a tight schedule of other stuff to do this morning, I won't be able to do additional research.  (Still, the amount of stuff you can find on the Internet is amazing: someone has a D&D-style map of Hitler's Bunker.  That is going to see use, by golly.)

Obviously if the game continues, that's a different story.  One of the curious aspects of the James Bond 007 game is that they've got a division of levels--Rookies, Agents, and 00 Agents--a bit like the division in the Dying Earth RPG between Cugel, Turjan, and Rhialto.  So if one is dismayed by the idea of omni-competent super-agents, you can totally downshift into (kinda) bumbling folks caught up in the periphery of the Cold War.  (The game does have some aspects that bug me, but that feature at least looks interesting.)

Thanks for the point about Wolf.  It sounds like he had a very different way of doing business than Mielke and the Stasi in general.  By implication, it would have come as a major operational shift for the HVA old guard who had risen through the ranks prior to his arrival.  Do we know how much internal resistance his reforms faced within his own organization?

edited to fix formatting - RE

[Ron Edwards]

Wolf's early career in the DDR was completely defined by the Soviet administration's disgust with the porous, ineffective, and generally disastrous initial espionage department there. He was brought fresh from KGB-school in Moscow (or wherever it was) to clean house, effectively with "a blank check from upstairs." I don't think he was much older than 30, if that, at that point. He didn't face resistance from the old guard at the HVA because (i) there was no HVA as such (although I should check my old notes about that, in terms of the name), and (ii) because he built his own whole apparatus from scratch, staff and all. This is why the HVA is drawn as an arrow from the First Main Directorate, separate from the Stasi, drawn as an arrow from the Second Main Directorate.

At the beginning, the HVA wasn't even part of the Stasi at all, but I think Mielke's predecessor must have bitched about that and managed to get it folded into the Stasi hierarchy, at least in name. Exactly how "Stasi" the HVA was or became remains a sore point in Germany. According to Wolf, he always kept it separate, according to any number of other people, he didn't, but his story held up in court. Certainly he and Mielke despised one another both personally and professionally, and it's funny to read KGB notes from the time along the lines of "keep Misha and Erich out of each other's face, for God's sake."

Now, it's been a while since I was immersed in these details, so I don't remember exactly when the HVA technically became part of the Stasi - mid-50s, I think. So it's possible that during the Tunnel phase it was still not folded in.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

Gee, so talking actual history, the KGB knows about the tunnel from Blake, more or less simultaneously with the project's start.  Without doing research, that sounds like it could have been '53 or '54.

Meanwhile, the KGB is grooming Wolf to build this kick-ass professional agency pretty much from the ground up.  And according to Wolf nobody told him about the tunnel until much later.  Which seems, at least on very casual research, to be true since the Americans and the Brits got a zillion calls between various East German agencies (and a few KGB calls deliberately placed to seem plausible). 

I wonder why they didn't trust their own boy?  You figure that whoever put him in place would have had a lot of institutional juice for supervising Germany-related intelligence, and thus Wolf's KGB mentor(s) should have known about the tunnel...

Fictionally I will probably play a bit fast and loose with the organizational aspect of this, at least for today.  The trouble with Wolf is that he sounds too sane to be a Bond villain!!

[Ron Edwards]

Well, a few speculative points ...

1. The HVA didn't deal with counterintelligence/security much, except in terms of its own specific operational security. So defending against some spying effort of the Brits or Americans wasn't its problem. Wolf was appointed to conduct operations, i.e., to vacuum Europe of information, not to stop anyone else's.

2. The KGB - or rather, the initials of its overall organization at that moment (NKVD or MGB, it was an exciting moment for the Soviet government in 1953) - was extremely compartmentalized, and non-expert that I am, I doubt that there were any meaningful policy committee meetings at any higher level. I mean, this was the climax of Beria's career and reorganizations of Soviet security and espionage were happening faster than a parrot shits.*

3. Operation Stopwatch/Gold was aimed at the Soviets, not at the DDR. So I think dealing with it would have been way out of the HVA's sphere, even more than the distinction made in #1.

4. As a joint outcome of the above three points, whoever was handling top agents like Blake was very personally powerful and very much in charge of need-to-know within the Soviet spy apparatus. I doubt whoever that was (I forgot who; Cambridge "Five" handlers are well-documented but they are Russian and it's like memorizing the cast list of Anna Karenina) was going to let much knowledge very far from his desk.

Best, Ron

* I always shake my head in amazement at the distinction between the Brit-inspired images of the monolithic, relentless, organized Soviet intelligence apparatus compared to its incredibly normal and disjointed and often internally-confused reality - especially at this exact historical juncture.