My next GURPS campaign is set on Earth and begins in March, 1991. There are no historical changes from our world, aside from inserting the PCs, any fictional NPCs, and any events, individuals, structures or objects featured, or implied, in their backstories, and which are not already historically attested. Thus, if something wasn’t available on our Earth in March, 1991, it isn’t available to the PCs.
The PCs are going to be entering countries which until recently were part of the Warsaw Pact, some of which are still nominally Socialist Republics, and most of which are in considerable turmoil, with uncertainty over the future looming large.
Long-simmering ethnic tensions have started resurfacing in the absence of the all-encompassing power of the State, rioting is endemic, there are calls for free elections and the end of the one-party system, and numerous Soviet Socialist Republics appear to be demanding independence, at least if public demonstrations are considered indicative of the will of the people. And response from the Kremlin has been late, muted and reflective mainly of the fact that there is no plan or policy for this situation.
Hand-in-hand with demands for independence comes uncertainty about basic things, such as policing and security, as well as who is or will be in charge of military forces stationed on what might soon be foreign soil, composed of men from what might be different countries in a matter of days, weeks or months.
Many people in those countries are not sure whether their life savings and pensions are still secure, or even if the State will pay them their next paycheck, not to mention whether the currency they will be paid in is going to have enough purchasing power to feed their family. This includes the people who make up the intelligence, military, police and security services.
The PCs are not there to spy on the Soviet Union or any of their former satellite countries. Or, at least, they are not there on behalf of any Western government and they are not interested in information to be used against the USSR or any Central Asian or Eastern European country. The PCs are effectively corporate headhunters working under contract and they are there to find and recruit people with expensive training in a very particular set of skills and hire them for much less than they would need to pay Western people with the same set of skills.
They are, technically, looking for several different sets of skills, but, in short, they are looking for pilots, technicians, airborne pathfinders and razvedchiki, as well as the other specialists required to establish a forward operating base from which to stage helicopters, both transport and attack helicopters, in territory they don’t yet control, or may never intend to control, as was the case during Eagle Claw (1980).
Other contractors, which may or may not include PCs, will be buying military supplies, ideally by dealing directly with the conscripts, praporchiki and officers guarding supply depots, while they have no idea if they’ll receive salaries and pensions worth anything. Best case scenario would be if they could then fly the supplies out in cargo planes bought the same way, complete with fictitious flight manifests filed fraudulently.
It would be great to have as much accurate technological detail as possible. I mean the computers tech support people in Vienna, Berlin, Helsinki, Stockholm, Istanbul or Kars might be using, the high-quality printers used to make fake official documents that look as much like the real ones as possible, the communications used between people on the ground (if any technological solution exists that would be safe enough) and their communications with their support HQ.
I’d also like to know how to equip a van driven to Berlin in order to provide support for as many of the following as practical, visual and audio surveillance, tapping into phone lines, electronic interception, Van Eck phreaking, emergency forgery of further documentation, and computer-aided intrusion, research and data searches of all kinds.
One of the things which will prove challenging is to find full names of Soviet military, intelligence and security service men with the right skill sets, based on the report from one defector or another about someone who served with them maybe a year ago, maybe a decade ago, for some of them only serving together for one operation. They have lists of hundreds of names of possible recruits, but not all of them are full names and more than half of them may be spelled differently. They’re going in there with information which comes from primary sources with excellent access. It’s just that most humans don’t remember the full names of every good helicopter pilot, scout or airborne officer they served with over a twenty year career, even if they are absolutely sure about some of the details about that operation. Memory is malleable, unreliable and sometimes the only available evidence.
Once the they’ve found the right person, they’ll need to find find phone numbers, if they have phones, and addresses for the targets. They may need to find these things in Soviet records, archives of which will mostly be on paper, but if anything like a central registry of military personnel exists in computerized form, it would simplify things greatly if access to a terminal which could access that registry could be arranged. That way, they might also identify new recruitment targets with skill sets they need and try to arrange transport to an area where many of them live, to avoid the need for long trips just to talk to one possible recruit, given the vast distances between different regions in the USSR.
The equipment to be used must be commercially available, though that may be taken to also mean anything which an expert could assemble it from commercially available components. I suppose anything Soviet which could have been acquired as part of the severance package of a defected KGB-man would also pass muster, but would imagine that by this time, commercially available Japanese radios and other electronics were far superior to top-secret Soviet electronics.
PCs who fly in to the target country with commercial airlines may have their luggage expertly searched or they may be just waved through. They’ll plan for the first and hope for the second, expecting something in between. They absolutely cannot travel with anything that gets them arrested and they should not travel with anything that alarms security services enough to break through the chaos that must reign there now and causes them to put a tail on this foreign tourist, journalist, academic, etc. If they find themselves in a situation where the best plan is using electronics which cannot be safely transported openly into the country, there are alternative methods of smuggling open, but this is, of course, much more complicated, expensive and time-consuming.
The PCs would want to have some way of communicating with each other and with a support team in the nearest safe country, including experts in Soviet technology, military procedure and capabilities, and a wide range of subjects related to their intelligence and security services. Those experts declined to come with the field teams to the USSR or other countries still nominally Socialist, something about them technically having defected from the KGB and being worried some of their former might have hard feelings about the separation package they got. Real-time would be best, but that might be impossible with the commercially available technology of the day, especially as it also needs to be fairly secure.
Among those supporting the recruiters and procurement specialists who go in the field are several tech support experts, each with their own preferences. All of them will have fairly liberal budgets when it comes to setting up temporary headquarters and they will also have influence over where to station those HQ. A balance will have to be struck between distance from the team they support, considering the range of any comms used in the field, and how good the infrastructure is in the area of the temporary HQ.
Some of those tech support people are going to be helping academics and analysts find exact information about some extremely niche subject, which may be classified. Research, aided by tech skills for database management, indexing and search functionality, will often be the most relevant area of expertise they bring. However, sometimes, PCs might need or think they need to do something which means that such a search is going to have to happen on a network where they do not legally have access.
I’d like to know what kind of setup different tech people might want in such temporary HQs, to be ready for as anything, as much as is possible. Manufacturer of the hardware, models if you know, operating systems, database storage and solutions for making searches faster and more accurate, etc.
Also, would you suggest that field recruiters and procurement specialists make use of newsgroups, BBS or other Internet precursors for their communications? Could they even find places to connect to them in the USSR? What about if they were in Poland or the Baltics?
Also, 1991 is probably too early for Area Knowledge (Internet), but how would a character represent being an active member of many tech newsgroups, BBS and networked communities, especially in being able to post a query about some arcane tech issue and get responses, sometimes in just a few minutes, some times days later?
What about being able to have someone else with access to a mainframe or supercomputer have a crack at solving your issue by brute forcing it? Is it a Contact, Contract Group or a Claim to Hospitality which allows for access to a computer instead of a guest room? Because the mutual aspect of the Claim to Hospitality very much applies, at least if you want to be able to continue to take advantage of the generosity of others with their time and electronics homes.
I’m also curious about commercially available military electronics. A lot of the Soviet equipment of the time was perfectly good military equipment, if you simply add modern electronics where they are sorely needed. Better radios (or at least add radios), better frequency-agile tactical communications, better sensors, better targeting systems, etc.
The military contractors can obtain legitimate end-user certificates, at least from Namibia and Angola, which Israel, at least, would recognize and agree to sell tactical radios, drones, FLIR and night vision devices for helicopter pilots, drivers and individual soldiers. As the MPLA in Angola was the UN recognized government at the time, even before an election, some countries who would not sell to Namibia might sell to Angola and vice versa. They might convince Finland, Japan, Sweden and some other countries to sell them dual-use things which are not too obviously meant for military use, such as radios and electronics parts, navigation systems, emergency, rescue and medical technology.
What were the best military electronics and technology which Israel might sell in 1991? What kind of NVDs (and the level of GURPS Night Vision, as well as the drawbacks of the device)? How good is the Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) on a Search-And-Rescue (SAR) aircraft in 1991?
How good are commercial radio communications at this point in time and which manufacturer and models do you want for performance and security, in the different roles you need?
The roles would be:
- Genuinely concealed earpiece comms for clandestine operations (most likely of these not to exist in a practical form in March, 1991)
- Clandestine and encrypted (ideally OTP, but might be too cumbersome for the HQ to be of any help) communications from field team to HQ in the next country, which might be 50 km, but is more likely 150+ km
- Individual tactical radios for military communications
- Vehicle tactical radios
- Multi-channel, multi-role tactical radio command centers which can talk to anything from the soldiers on the ground to helicopters and scout aircraft in the air, as well as reach the HAG/FOB home base (determined by the range of the aircraft)
- Aircraft radios with long range
Please, no one feel obligated to try to reply the whole thing at once. I’d be happy if someone finds at least a single subject on that long list which interests them, and to hear the thoughts of people far more technologically-inclined than I will ever be on their one pet subject.
