Sleeper agent
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Sleeper Agents are spies who are placed in a target country, and they take no further action until the correct time. Sleeper agents are also popular plot devices in fiction, in particular science fiction.
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Sleeper Agents in Espionage
In espionage, a sleeper agent is one who has inflitrated into the target country and 'gone to sleep', sometimes for many years. That is, they do nothing to communicate with the sponsor, any existing agents, nor to obtain information beyond that in public sources. They acquire jobs and identities, ideally ones which will prove useful in future, in the target country and attempt to blend into 'the background'. Counter espionage agencies in the target country cannot, in practice, closely watch all of those who might possibly have been recruited some time before.
In a sense, the best sleeper agents are those who don't even need to be paid by the sponsor as they are able to earn enough money to finance themselves. This avoids any possibly traceable payments from abroad. In such cases, it is possible that the sleeper agent might be successful enough to become what is sometimes termed an agent of influence. The Soviets managed to recruit several people after WWI who reached high positions in Britain and in the U.S.
Those sleeper agents who have been discovered have often been natives of the target country who moved elsewhere in early life and been co-opted (perhaps for ideological or ethnic reasons) before returning to the target country. This is valuable to the sponsor as the sleeper's language and other skills can be those of a 'native' and thus less likely to trigger suspicion.
Choosing and inserting sleeper agents have often posed difficulties as it is difficult to predict which target will be appropriate some years in the future. If the sponsor government (or its policies) change after the sleeper has been inserted, the sleeper might be found to have been planted in the wrong target.
Examples
- Otto Kuhn and family were installed in Hawaii by the German Abwehr before WWII. It is not clear quite what was intended as Hawaii was hardly at the center of predicable German interests in case of war, and in any case, they were unmistakably German. However that may have been, he (and his family) seem to have been used primarily to aid an ally—the Japanese—in the period before the Attack on Pearl Harbor. They seem to have been less than useful, even to the Japanese.
- Kim Philby was recruited by the Soviets while at university and may have been a sleeper agent for some years until going to work for the British government. By the end of WWII, he was operating as the liaison between the British Secret Intelligence Service and several U.S. intelligence operations. He was an agent of influence by then, but had not been a sleeper agent for several years.
Fictional Sleeper Agents
In fiction, particularly science fiction, sleeper agents are people who had been captured by enemy forces. These people are worked over by the enemy forces by various tools, or combination of tools. These tools include drugs, torture, psychological conditioning, implanted devices, and even telepathic manipulation. These people are either released, or allowed to escape back to friendly territory. Then these people are used by enemy forces to spy, conduct sabotage, assassinate certain targets, or for other operations the enemy has in mind for them.
Sleeper agents can also be enemy forces disguised to appear as a friendly person. Here, sleeper agents could be enemy forces surgically altered to appear as someone else, or they could even be clones specially built to act as sleeper agents.
Activation of the sleeper is, at least in novels and stories, done by approaching the agent and uttering a long ago memorized password or pass phrase, or by mailing a postcard with a significant picture to the sleeper. Once a sleeper becomes active, counter intelligence agencies can, at least in principle, become aware of the sleeper as intelligence is collected and transmitted, as instructions are passed, and so on.
Examples
There are a number of examples of sleeper agents found in science fiction. Examples of sleeper agents include,
Telefon
- In the 1977 thriller Telefon (IMDB:0076804) a rogue KGB agent (Donald Pleasance as Dalchimsky) steals a file containing the cover identities of KGB sleeper-agents in the U.S. and activates their missions by placing a phone call to each one in which he reads the catch phrase, a line from Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It is up to one Colonel Borizov (played by Charles Bronson) to go to the U.S., find Dalchimsky, and stop him before the politicians learn what's going on and start a full scale war.
The Manchurian Candidate
- One of the more recent uses of sleeper agents in fiction is the remake of the movie, The Manchurian Candidate. Both the original and the remake is about a group of people 'programmed' to be sleeper agents. One of the sleeper agents is in a Presidential election, which if he won would produce a President controlled by sinister forces. This situation is of course fictional.
Star Trek
- Commander Geordi La Forge was once captured by Romulans while enroute to Risa. As La Forge was blind, and used a VISOR - which gave him sight by artificial means - the Romulans were able to tap into his visual implants. They forced images directly to La Forge's brain, and used that to condition him. The Romulans used E-band transmissions to send commands to La Forge's VISOR, which then relayed the commands directly to his brain. Klingon Ambassador Kell, who later was revealed to be a Romulan agent, had been using an E-band transmitter to send orders to La Forge. Commander Data eventually figured out that La Forge had been captured, and was able to stop him from assassinating a Klingon Governor just in time. La Forge and Counselor Troi spent a great deal of time reconstructing his memories of what had truly happened to him during his vacation.
- Later, Commander La Forge was captured by Doctor Tolian Soran and the Duras sisters. Soran made adjustments to La Forge's visor that transmitted everything La Forge seen back to the Enterprise. Eventually La Forge glanced at a monitor that showed shield status. The Klingons were able to adjust their weapons to match the shield modulation, which rendered the shields ineffective. Even though the Klingons were destroyed, the Enterprise suffered so much damage that the battle section was destroyed and the saucer section crash landed on Veridian III. Afterwards, La Forge had his visor replaced with occular implants that looked more like natural eyes.
- While not strictly a sleeper agent situation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was once captured by Cardassians. His Cardassian interrogators used an implant to deliver pain. When Picard's interrogator asked him how many lights he saw, Picard was supposed to answer five lights, despite there only being four. If he answered four, the implant was turned on, which caused Picard severe pain. When Picard was released, his last statement to the interrogator was, "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!" But back aboard the Enterprise, Picard revealed that he had nearly been broken, that he would have said anything to stop the pain, and that he thought he actually could see five lights. It's unclear what the Cardassians would have done had they held on to Picard, if they would have simply kept him prisoner, or further conditioned him to act as a sleeper agent.
- Several examples of people disguised through surgical alteration appeared in Star Trek. It was a common method the Cardassians used to infiltrate their enemies, such as Starfleet and the Bajoran underground. In the closing episodes of Deep Space Nine, Gul Dukat was altered to appear Bajoran so that he could get close to the Bajoran Kai and turn her against Starfleet.
- In the movie Nemesis, Shinzon, who was a clone of Jean-Luc Picard, was featured. He was originally cloned so that he could replace Picard at some point, and act as an intelligence source for the Romulan empire.
Star Wars
- Imperial Intelligence chief Ysanne Isard had a prison facility at Lusankya, a Super Star Destroyer buried on Coruscant. She would use the methods mentioned above to turn people into Imperial sleeper agents. Isard would use them to spy on or assassinate her enemies.
- The X-Wing Alliance game also mentions Imperial conditioning. One of the characters, Commander Kupalo, who had been captured after Hoth and eventually rescued by the Rebels was a sleeper agent. It's not clear where the conditioning had occurred, but he was turned into a sleeper agent during his Imperial imprisonment.
Babylon 5
The Psi-Corps had been heavily involved in the creation of sleeper agents. These people would later be used against the enemies of the corps or the Earth Alliance during the Presidency of Morgan Clark. Examples of their work include,
- Talia Winters, a member of the Corps, was taken at some point by the corps to work in their sleeper program. She was subjected to deep telepathic probes, along with drugs, to create a second personality. This second personality was able to come to the fore to spy on others. This personality was also able to influence the original personality to some degree. She was finally uncovered when Lyta Alexander sent the password into her. The password destroyed Talia's original personality, and the artificial personality took complete control. Talia was returned to Earth, where she was debriefed. The Psi Cop Alfred Bester said she had been disected, but this may have been a ploy to get into the minds of the Babylon 5 staff.
- At the beginning of the fourth season, Michael Garibaldi had disappeared for two weeks. During this time he was conditioned to act as an agent for the Psi-Corps. When he was returned to Babylon 5, he eventually turned against all his friends. Garibaldi also arranged to have John Sheridan captured. After Sheridan's capture, Bester released Garibaldi from his programming. Garibaldi was able to convince his friends that Bester had manipulated him for the past several months. Garibaldi helped free Sheridan, and participated in the final battle against Clark. In season five, Garibaldi found that Bester had not removed all the programming. He was unable to act against Bester, which was part of the reason Garibaldi started drinking again. Eventually, the blocks were removed, and Garibaldi helped bring Bester to justice.
Stargate SG-1
The za'tarc in Stargate SG-1 are sleeper agents who have been brainwashed and had their memories altered. If they fail to accomplish their mission, they will attempt to kill themselves.