Adventuring Journalists at the End of the Cold War

Role-playing games
1

My campaign is set in March, 1991. After the end of the Warsaw Pact, re-unification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet economy, the Cold War seems to be coming to an end. Indeed, there are those who believe this portents the End of History (the report of Clio’s death turned out to be an exaggeration).

One of two main threads in the campaign are the employment of PCs, and other adventurous persons, with foreign languages, cultural knowledge, experience of travel and good communication skills, to go behind the recently-fallen ‘Iron Curtain’ and recruit former Warsaw Pact or Soviet personnel with valuable skills and training, which are scarce anywhere and their salaries much more expensive in Western countries.

Highly skilled pilots, well-educated intelligence officers, experienced officers of airborne, reconnaissance or spetsnaz units. Some of them are already unemployed, some will become so in short order, others might not wish to leave their current position, but are not able to survive while the ruble collapses and inflation increases the cost of everything faster than real salaries can keep up.

By having recruiters go after them even before they have started to look for foreign jobs on their own, the recruiters are taking some risks, as the GRU and KGB still exist and some of the veterans being sought are already involved in black market dealings or more serious corruption, not to mention their desirability among criminal syndicates.

While no PCs plays an intrepid journalist, some of their fellow recruiters and/or support personnel will be journalists, especially European and British ones who wrote about the Soviet Bloc, particularly those who spent any time in Eastern European or Central Asian countries.

I need some ideas about concepts. Some young, some old. They either need to be experts in a former Socialist or Communist country or be versatile world-travellers with demonstrated ability to figure things out in foreign countries and find sources anywhere. Women are in greater demand than men, because a man and woman travelling together register as ‘normal’ to most suspicious security personnel, while groups of Military-Age Men trigger mental alarms.

Russian fluency would excuse a lot of flaws, while Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian or Serbo-Croat would all be major assets. As would other languages of the former Soviet Bloc, even German or Spanish. Having written about Cold War geopolitics, Warsaw Pact military matters or national security issues around secrecy, security or espionage would all be plusses. A stint as a war correspondent would suggest risk-tolerance and propensity for adventure.

For them to be adult professionals in March, 1991 probably means they’d be born in the 1960s or earlier. That means university education was far rarer in the UK (and most other European countries) when they were educated than it is now, especially for those middle-aged or older.

By ‘concepts’, I mean nationality, rough age, educational background and brief curriculum vitae, as well as their languages and what skill sets they bring to the table. Personality and quirks welcome. Basing them on actual journalists whose work you know or whom you know personally is always good. Any ideas?

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How about somebody who had been approached by the Western Intelligence Services but got told to ‘wait until we know what the new situatioin is like’. Someone who had studied what the service told them they needed, gained the qualifications and experiences needed… And then turned out not to be needed themselves.

I know nothing about spies and their recruitment (though having gone to Oxford there were one or two of my contemporaries I always had suspicions of) but that strikes me as something that must have happened in the time period and would provide an interesting background particularly if the character had started to build themselves a real life and then got pulled back from it.

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Do you mean a European journalist approached by an intelligence or security service in his own country to recruit them as an agent, either in the ethically grey area of passing information on to them or couriering messages for them when they have been in areas of interest for the service, or in the very clearly unethical position of agent of influence, who writes propaganda masquerading as journalism, in exchange for payment?

Both sides made use of unscrupulous journalists in what was above all a public relations war, and while the Western services probably had a bigger budget for this (largely through the CIA), the KGB were much more effective at it, as the free Western press was easy to manipulate once you understood their customs and rules. Which Soviet intelligence officers rarely did, but Western journalists whose ideological sympathy or pathological need for money made them willing to work for the KGB could coordinate easily. The barrier to publishing something untrue as news was not very high. It was meant to prevent mistakes or simple liars making up stuff and had little defence against faux grassroot support or ‘independent confirmation’ which was simply a second liar with a coached story.

Or do you mean someone approached about an actual job with the SIS in Britain, DGSE in France, BND in Germany, etc.? That could have happened at some point before 1988, I suppose, but what prevented the character from going on a training course then?

If they want you, they don’t expect you to study on your own. They expect you to apply, sign a frightful mass of documents, including the Official Secret Act in the UK (and equivalents elsewhere) and make it through positive security vetting. Then go on a training course where you either fail (in which case some services might employ you as an archivist, cipher, clerical or secretarial staff) or pass through to become an intelligence or security officer.

Candidates with the right education, mindset, talents and other traits might be sent to language courses during their National Service, if their country still had one, or they might receive a suggestion that they sign up for a language class, perhaps as a graduate course or as part of adult education classes, to pass the time while waiting to see whether you would pass positive vetting. If you were already working as a journalist, generally, they would expect you to continue to do so while the vetting was in process. After all, the experience is not entirely unlike a job as an intelligence officer and press contacts might come in handy later.

Edit: It occurs to me that a graduate from Oxford or Cambridge, who is perfectly aware that their father’s position with ‘the Foreign Office’ is cover for his SIS career, and has studied Modern Languages, including Russian, might have graduated in 1989 and been sure of being accepted immediately. During their positive vetting, however, glasnost and perestroika might have already had some effect on policy and either a hiring freeze or at least a significantly reduced recruit class might have been instituted.

Or they might simply have failed positive vetting, due to their divorced mother’s not-quite-discreet-enough relationship with a Polish diplomat, or perhaps failed out of the course. In either case, investigative journalism about intelligence and national security might have seemed the next best thing. The end of the Warsaw Pact and the opening of the USSR to all who applied for a visa actually did see many journalists visit and one who spoke Russian would have had an easy time convincing an editor, despite their lack of experience.

If they are unscrupulous enough, they might even continue working for the paper which sent them while also receiving a salary from the mysterious European human resources and consulting companies paying for the recruiters’ work. Of course, the danger with employing a journalist is them turning around and writing about you.

That’s why it might be sensible to recruit such a candidate under a false flag and pretend to be from British intelligence. Have them sign (a faux) Official Secrets Act as well as an NDA as part of a contract with a cover company. The fact that the SIS officially doesn’t exist in 1991 makes it easier to fool even someone who knows quite a lot from snooping on their father. Inventing a fictional Research and Analytics Section answering to the Joint Intelligence Committee makes it less likely that they’ll figure out they are not working for British intelligence by talking to those they know to be SIS.

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A friend’s boyfriend was being put thru University by the Army to do a Norwegian and a.n.other language degree (Russian? All I can remember was it wasn’t German) to become an Army interpreter.
I guess you could use that sort of background to have Army Intelligence and other intelligence agencies squabbling over who gets to have him! “We bloody paid for it!”

I knew a geologist who did a PhD on pterosaurs then went off to work for GCHQ. Presumably not for his awesome knowledge of pterodactyl evolution…?

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That’s it. They’ve found a way into the Lost World and/or the Hollow Earth, where, unless steely-eyed British boffins stop them, Nazis will once more ride dinosaurs!

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Similarly I know someone whom the Navy wanted enough that they would pay for him to do basically any degree he liked, as long as he came back to be an officer afterwards.

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Absolutely. It’s just that such a character would fit into the category of former intelligence or security officers or former military men, both of which are categories which the people hiring the PCs are also interested in. However, not all their fellow recruiters will have intelligence or military backgrounds, and some of them, specifically, will be former or current journalists, successful or otherwise.

I’m looking for some background on such characters. What would make it plausible that someone would seem open to recruitment as a candidate for something secretive and publicity-averse, while counterintelligence people could rule out that they were simply agreeing in order to collect enough information for a major scoop?

How do you find people with journalist skills whom you can trust to help you keep secrets from the press and never, ever reveal them, not even in a memoir decades from now?

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I was trying to provide a background suitable to the period which would provide some ‘plausible deniability’ to cover up who they are really working for. If they even know that themselves.

There is a sort of journalist for whom going to new countries, learning the language and describing the people to the world (especially the readers back home) is just routine. They make excellent spies and have perfect cover for asking weird questions.

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That’s fair.

Note that the PCs are working for actual consulting or human resources companies, are not doing their work on behalf of any national intelligence or security service, and are not looking for the kind of intelligence which the CIA, DGSE, SIS, etc. might value. It’s true that these companies are newly created, quite specialized and secretive. It’s also true that what they do looks a lot like spying. But it is not. They really are just trying to secure human resources with time-consuming, expensive and specialized training at fire-sale prices, due to the end of the Cold War, dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

Tracing the ultimate beneficial owners of the companies which employ PCs as recruiters runs into legal hindrances as the Swiss are still silent as bank vaults in the absence of court orders and the Swiss holding companies are in turn owned by shell companies which exist in jurisdictions where disclosing an ultimate beneficial owner is not a legal requirement for certain types of private companies. In fact, the true nature of their employers and their real goals are not necessarily something PCs need to know. If they ever come to know it, it would mean a change in genre, effectively a sequel series with a radically different premise, even if many characters appeared in both.

The campaign set in 1990-1991 is meant to be a realistic thriller, with only the connections, organization, secrecy, exceptional tradecraft and way-too-risky schemes of the NPCs paying the bills as ‘the one impossible thing’. Nothing the PCs do, know or witness is intended to take the campaign out of the realistic setting of historical Earth. The PCs are meant to navigate intrigue and potential danger in thrilling European locales, on one hand, and in another strand of the campaign in Angola, experience the forging of a military unit with no state supervision, from all sorts of Cold Warriors now out of a job.

However, the bills are being paid by people who know that the supernatural exists, and they are setting up the capability to defend their home region in case they need it, because governments don’t yet know about the threat and might be slow to adapt, too slow to stop a catastrophic outcome for life on Earth as we know it. As yet, the supernatural is subtle and mostly confined to Places of Power, visible only to a select few. In 1990-1991, it hasn’t changed the world in any meaningful way, except in so far that a few individuals in the world know and are investigating.

I imagine that the people employing the PCs might want to employ three types of journalists, for different tasks and under different circumstances.

A) They are desperate for female speakers of Russian, or other Warsaw Pact languages, who can take care of themselves in chaotic circumstances in foreign lands. So desperate, in fact, that they would hire a former journalist as a recruiter, if they can be certain she is truly a ‘former journalist’, and not looking to play them in order to publish an article about these mysterious recruiting efforts.

B) Journalists with experience of covering and even contacts in or at least relating to some Eastern European countries would be useful in helping recruiters track down named individuals they want to offer a job. They can stay employed by their papers, as long as they definitely aren’t going to write about their secret paymasters, who might have hired them while pretending to be intelligence officers from whichever agency the journalist would find most sympathetic.

C) Well-connected editors or respected investigative reporters who will ensure that the true story of what they are doing is hidden by misinformation. These would have to be desperate or despicable journalists, as they’d be taking money to betray every journalistic principle.

In all cases, what I am looking for as the central spine of each concept would be what reason these journalists have to agree to engage in these mysterious shenanigans, some reason which is compelling enough so that even experienced agent-handlers and the former counterintelligence experts consulting for the paymasters would believe they are definitely not ‘double agents’, i.e. still acting as journalists and planning to write about this while pretending to be loyal to their new employers.

Some hook which led those looking for hirelings to decide, “This is the journalist I want to hire, they’ll never write or even talk about this because [insert hook here].”

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The CIA had formal rules in place since 1973 that they were not allowed to impersonate journalists or use journalistic credentials as part of a cover identity. This was done to avoid having real journalists suffer the constant and justified paranoia of unfriendly powers. If security services in authoritarian states can get away with refusing visas for Western journalists, which would be easier if they had any confirmation for the belief that all Western journalists were spies, journalists would essentially be unable to do their jobs in any foreign locale where the authorities feared espionage.

Does anyone know if the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had a similar rule in place to prevent them from using journalist covers? Perhaps only as a matter of custom rather than formal rule? Or did the SIS routinely take advantage of how well-suited the cover of a journalist is to an intelligence officer?

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No such prohibition existed with SIS between WWII and the 60s - The 'secret agents' of the UK press - BBC News - it seems unlikely that they would have changed their MO later on given that they survived that story from Izvestia in 1968 with some strongly worded denials.

Ian Flemings first outside service job was as a journalist for Kemsley Newspapers (who owned the Sunday Times at that time), and Arthur Ransome was a well know journalist who visited communist Russia many times in the 20’s and reported back on it.

You’ll find little evidence of journalists in the 80s and 90s being employed by SIS because there’s every chance they’re still alive and SIS will not talk about them in any way.

Also worth pointing out that the Mi5 website currently says this:

Some intelligence officers may operate under non-official cover to conceal the fact that they work for an intelligence service - posing as a business person, student or journalist for example.

(My emphasis added)
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/how-spies-operate

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Excellent. Then John Logan Gallagher can have worked as an officer under natural cover (these days, as your MI5 note shows, more often described with the American-origin phrase ‘non-official cover’ (NOC)) as a journalist, after having actually been a journalist for a few years.

I will go through his life once I’ve established more to determine if he was ever officially ‘hired’ by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (meaning he became an SIS officer under diplomatic cover) or if his natural cover of a journalist remained valuable enough for him to retain it through his entire working life as an intelligence officer.

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If he didn’t work for SIS then he’s not an officer, he’s an agent. Even if he was working under non-official cover, he’s still employed by SIS and bound by a whole heap of different and specific rules.

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There is a fundamental difference between being an SIS officer who tells friends and family they work ‘for the Foreign Office’, even if you carry out one or more foreign operations without being under diplomatic cover, and being an SIS officer who does not tell anyone in their personal life they work for a government agency, continuing to present themselves as a freelance journalist, photographer or writer.

‘Natural cover’ is more descriptive than ‘non-official cover’ for a situation where an intelligence officer has a past career which make their travel and presence in the area of operations perfectly normal, so they simply use their own name and passport while pretending to work for an employer prepared to help the SIS provide cover, or perhaps a shell company designed explicitly to be cover. ‘Non-official cover’ can describe intelligence officers who use one or more false identities and paperwork, ranging from one extremely elaborate deception like Soviet/Russian ‘illegals’, to single-use identities for an officer who has operated under many different names and legends.

Gallagher might spend ten years as an SIS case officer working under natural cover as a freelance journalist, but then his superiors come to believe that the odds of SIDE being aware of his true affiliation is too great to send him to Argentine without diplomatic cover. As part of the FCO providing him with diplomatic cover, e.g. as an embassy public relations officer, Gallagher needs to change careers in the eyes of the world.

Therefore, for the purposes of what he tells other people about his career, Gallagher pretends he has recently been ‘hired’ by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, saying they must be hoping that his PPE degree from Cambridge and journalistic experience will prepare him for public relations work, even though he, the SIS, and everybody within the British government, Civil Service and Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service with clearance and need-to-know, are obviously aware that his actual employer does not change.

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shrug

As always, it’s interesting how much you on the outside try to tell others how they’re wrong.

I’m very well aware of the differentiations - you were the one using the phrase ‘officially hired’.

I’m going to stop engaging with you in these threads.

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Perhaps you might find the text easier to parse if you think about context clues from typographical symbols. The quotation marks around ‘hired’ were meant to convey that the meaning was different from a sentence which used the word without quotation marks. In this case, to indicate that what would change was that from that point on, he would tell people in his life that he worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and abandon his natural cover as a freelance journalist.