Dev Diary: Counterintelligence II

What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.

Counterintelligence - the art of hunting spies - is the backbone of real intelligence world, Cold War history, and spy fiction. Therefore, it should be also an important part of any video game implementing espionage mechanics. This, however, isn't the case and there are simply no games that explore counterintelligence in depth. Espiocracy will change that. This diary and the next diary will explore counterintelligence (CI) mechanics in the game.

The first diary about CI from early 2022 already defined the topic as a critical part of the game world. "Counterintelligence mechanics naturally emerge from all the other systems." After this fundamental assumption and multiple iterations, we can now move to mechanics dedicated specifically to counterintelligence.

Counterintelligence Investigations

Foundation is simple and obvious (unusual feat in the espionage world!): within your intelligence community, you manage a counterintelligence agency or a counterintelligence department, with a defined impactful chief (think: Beria, Hoover, JJA, Canaris), and assigned units/officers inside.

In the background, they implement standard tools of CI, such as surveillance or background checks. In the foreground, their main work is organized into investigations - this is where it gets complex.

Any foreign espionage activity leaves traces in the game world - documents, devices, signals, unusual behaviors, observed meetings, and so on. Sufficiently skilled CI officers (against sufficiently low-skilled or clumsy perps) can pick up these traces just through background CI activities. However, most traces in the game remain dormant and inaccessible until they are actively unearthed. One of the most common such events of the Cold War and of the game is a defection. Defecting intelligence officer brings a treasure trove of CI data (traces) for the receiving agency - naturally, a defection also pushes officer's former employer into shutting down all the potentially compromised activities. Other active trace acquisitions include invasive operations (eg. kidnapping and interrogation), intelligence programs (eg. illegally penetrating embassies), agents, moles, tips from actors, intelligence shared by other agencies, and fruits of previous investigations.

(If you are recognizing previously described mechanics here, you are correct, "traces" are just an extension of intelligence materials from DD#54.)

From a trace or a group of traces suggesting foreign espionage activity, CI officers launch an investigation.

Investigations progress step by step forward in a way similar to foreign intelligence operations (DD#34). If successful, they usually follow breadcrumbs from traces all the way to foreign officers implementing the activity, while also uncovering foreign agents (recruited but not employed by a foreign agency) and structures (such as undercover companies or propaganda establishments) along the way.

Then, what your officers actually do with these discoveries, is defined by the objective set for the investigation. Investigators autonomously pick the objective, based on the nature of traces, situation of the intelligence community, and 0-10 aggressiveness slider for CI (you can also adjust it manually for every investigation). Five exclusive objectives are:

• Maximize Operational Gains - Turn agents, feed false intelligence, identify more enemy officers, find vulnerabilities inside the enemy agency etc

• Exploit For National Intelligence - Collect local intelligence on the opposing country, its leaders, and related strategic intelligence (eg. their agency spying on our nuclear program can reveal how advanced their nuclear ambitions are)

• Stop By All Means - Fast investigation that engages as many officers as possible, narrows down most likely perps, and then rushes the teams to intercept relevant people (sometimes by killing them)

• Prepare Trial - Collect or forge evidence, find the opportunity to arrest the perps, and then hand them over to justice system

• Silence - CI investigation ultimately is a study of a failure of the counterintelligence in the first place, so sometimes it may be more beneficial to keep a lid on it (for instance when trust of the government is low... or results could be really embarrassing for the intelligence community)

Here's an example of full chain from the perspective of a Yugoslav player: CI officers receive a tip from Tito's acquaintances that about his secretary and her unusual foreign trips -> the officers begin an investigation with "Stop By All Means" goal since it may be a grave danger to the prime minister -> she is put under intense surveillance, slightly isolated from Tito (her "position" as an agent is lowered), and officers await the next foreign trip of the secretary -> on the trip, the officers determine that she's meeting known GRU operatives -> immediately upon returning to Yugoslavia, the officers arrest the secretary, which concludes the investigation.

What happens further? In this case, unless the subject pulls off Trigon's move, further interrogations extract more useful traces and wider intelligence. Then, you can directly decide about the fate of a person in custody: send to trial, stage show trial, disappear, negotiate spy swap, or even simply release (which happened in the history of the Cold War, confusing and making suspicious all sides).

Naturally, details can differ a lot between cases. For instance, a spy may be an attache with diplomatic immunity, and therefore "stop by all means" may mean covertly suggesting they should leave the country (if they spied for an allied nation), demanding recall which may be temporarily obstructed by stronger countries (before Vienna Convention), declaring them persona non grata (after Vienna Convention), or a risky attempt at disappearing them (in hostile-enough situation).

More Kinds of Counterintelligence

In addition to investigations, there are three more areas dedicated to CI in the game. Quick summary:

• Officers assigned to internal counterintelligence observe other officers in the intelligence community, prepare a list of most suspicious officers, collect and investigate any red flags in own espionage activities, and ultimately try to hunt down the moles.

• Countercounterintelligence attempts to interrupt foreign investigations, make their objectives impossible, and waste resources. It's a very active part of CI world - it includes spectacular complex exfiltrations just-in-time, sending fake walk-ins ("dangles") into foreign embassies, recruiting foreign counterintelligence officers etc.

• Nuclear states also implement special nuclear counterintelligence, which includes various unusual actions such as physical press censorship (destroying issues that reveal nuclear secrets, as happened in the Cold War USA) or domestically impersonating foreign officers to recruit recruitable members of the nuclear program before actual foreign officers recruit them (pretty common FBI method).

Final Remarks

This diary covered the basics. In the next dev diary we'll enter the true wilderness of mirrors: false intelligence, identity split, doubling/tripling/etc, rogue operatives, tapping into live activities of other players, and other angles. To be published on June 5th.

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---"As early as 1943, the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO), suspected that Wennerström was working for Germany and in 1947 there were indications that he had connections with the Soviet Union, but the suspicions couldn't be proven. The counterintelligence operation centered on him was intensified towards the end of the 1950s and his household maid was recruited by SÄPO. In June 1963, the maid reported that she had found some film rolls hidden in his attic. The films contained photographs of secret documents"- historical 20-years-long counterintelligence investigation