Most of the time, I ask questions during research into roleplaying game relevant information largely to formulate the questions for myself. It’s not that I don’t want answers, it’s just that it’s relatively rare for anyone to know exactly all the information I need. For that matter, it may not be apparent from my initial post what I need, as I am told that most people on the Internet are repulsed by walls of text longer than the average message on the cesspool formerly known as Twitter.
Most answers I get are not in themselves enough for me to run the campaign, no further information necessary. That would be an unreasonable expectation. The most useful answers are generally the ones which spark further discussion, refine the search parameters of the research I am doing, and sometimes include snippets of information I did not know. The nature of roleplaying campaigns, perhaps especially mine, is that I might need very exact historical information, much more precise than peer-reviewed scholarship, but fortunately with more license to embroider and invent in the gaps, for a certain period of time when the campaign is set and the last few months before it. That means March 1991 and the events of the last 15-16 months before it. I would be very happy if the campaign lasted long enough for us to play out the year of 1991, but based on the usual pace of my campaigns and how reluctant I’ve been in the past to do time skips, it would be a miracle if anything which happens 1992 comes up in my campaign and I can safely say that nothing which happens 1993 or later is relevant to what will happen in the campaign, simply because it would take me decades to play out that far. I’ll try to be better about time skips and pacing, but even if I manage to have more time pass during the campaign than I usually manage, the campaign is about taking advantage of a specific moment in time, the End of History, as Francis Fukuyama so infamously put it.
I want to note specifically that just because I have comments on answers doesn’t mean that I don’t value them. I do value them and it costs me nothing to acknowledge that. The rules of courtesy are not universal across all cultures and, believe it or not, Icelanders are usually rather reticent. Or, rather, we often do not state out loud things we feel are evident. That is different from the UK, US and many other places, where gratitude is expected to be acknowledged verbally, even in situations where that would make Icelanders feel awkward and performative.
I do appreciate the answers from @jfs, especially the data that SIS made significant cuts in the area of Middle East and African expertise. A 25% reduction in manning, in terms of any government institution anywhere, amounts to massive cuts, as the usual tendency is for bureaucracies to grow larger over time, not shrink. So, thank you, @jfs.
I still need to figure out when senior SIS officials knew that the cuts would be this bad. Most of them expected politicians to demand budget cuts, naturally. Given how much centrally the menace of the Soviet Union had featured in the array of justifications for having armed forces, intelligence and security services of the size they were in 1988, the implosion of that external threat made for a very difficult task when it came to justifying their existing budget in 1990 and 1991.
At first, some hay might be made with arguments that the uncertainty and weakness of the Soviet Union created unprecedented dangers in areas such as nuclear proliferation, as it was vital to not only keep track of all the nuclear weapons possessed by the Soviet Union, but also ensure that the post-USSR world order did not end up with those weapons distributed between multiple states, which might be much more dangerous than the mutually-assured destruction between two opposed camps had been. While that might justify not cutting loose all Russian-speakers and Soviet experts, it probably would not be sufficient to avoid cuts among SIS personnel focused on other countries of the Warsaw Pact, no longer threats, but potential allies. Or even current allies, in the case of East Germany, re-united with West Germany again.
It may well be that there are no open-source publications on the nuts and bolts of the budget cuts within the UK intelligence community. The CIA is the most commonly cited intelligence agency by clinically paranoid patients mostly because it is the world’s most accessible and open intelligence agency. The American media cover details about the agency and any reorganizations of it in a way that UK media seems to avoid, due to different laws in these matters and perhaps also due to different norms among editors.
Maybe there is no way to figure out how much of the 25% over 12-13 years was spread out, if cuts had already started by 1990, and whether SIS case officers had already started looking for new careers. In which case I’ll have to make it up, as GMs, unlike reputable and careful historians, can’t let ignorance stop them from making decisions about what NPCs do or what background other recent hires than the PCs have.
Making it up is not problematic in itself, but before I make anything up, I like to make sure that it doesn’t directly contradict historical sources. Even if a given NPC is a fictional person, their background should be as historically plausible as the background of some real people. That is one reason why it is helpful to ask questions. Other reasons include details like that Middle East and African expertise was lost during the decade plus of 1989-2001. That is potentially a very useful snippet of data, one I will try to investigate further.
Aside from trying to find out how much of those coming cuts was already evident by 1990-1991, I’d also like to find out if all regions suffered similar cuts, and the Middle East and Africa were mentioned specifically because that was an area where having made those cuts later turned out to have harmed the national interest, or if that region was actually harder hit than all the others by post-Cold War budget cuts. If so, what was it that kept all the Eastern Europe experts and speakers of Bulgar, Czech, Polish, etc. relevant even though the Cold War ended, but eroded capabilities in the Middle East and Africa?
If the Middle East and Africa were uniquely hard hit by budget cuts and reorganizations within SIS, it might have been because much of what they were doing in those areas was focused on countering Soviet influence. With Soviet influence gone, senior Civil Servants and politicians in the UK may have regarded less SIS capability in Africa and the Middle East as perfectly acceptable. Thinking out loud, however, it still seems hard to justify keeping all the Eastern European capabilities intact, given that East Germany went from critical focus point of two opposing ideological camps and the probable ground zero, in every sense, of any cataclysmic war to come, to an economically-deprived region of an allied country with few major security or strategic implications. On the other hand, maybe the fact that the East European / Soviet desk was the most prestigious one during the Cold War meant that they had the most bureaucratic power to resist changes. Definitely something to look into and mull over, try to figure out exactly what happened to all those East European and Soviet experts within SIS.
And figure out how the fictional senior SIS official would reply to the fictional senior CIA one about talented proteges with African or Eastern Europe/Soviet background who might not find much contentment or success in a post-Cold War SIS, but would be great hires for anyone in the private sector looking for intelligence expertise on Africa or Eastern Europe.