Line #30 Main/SpySchool


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7	[[quoteright:350:[[Film/CarveHerNameWithPride https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/SOE_copy_5405.jpg]]]]
8	[[caption-width-right:350:[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive SOE training]] in ''Film/CarveHerNameWithPride'']]
9
10	->'''Homer:''' Marge, I think that guy's a spy!\
11	'''Marge:''' Of course he's a spy! We just saw him go through spy school!
12	-->-- ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS3E20ColonelHomer Colonel Homer]]"
13
14	Pretty much any training program for spies, assassins and related CloakAndDagger types. The primary purpose is to train new spies, but some spy schools might also include further training for experienced agents. Sometimes an experienced agent might retire from the career and become a trainer, or might be invited to be a guest lecturer from time to time.
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16	Most spy schools are for adults, although there is a growing genre of series like ''CHERUB'' and ''Spy High'' that depict schools with university age, teenage or even preteen students. Such schools may be the origin of the TeenSuperSpy.
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18	The exact training program varies greatly, but most include a wide variety of espionage, commando and generally unconventional dirty trick training. Some are MildlyMilitary, and many programs emphasise martial arts and weapons training to equip their agents to be an ActionHero. However, most give foremost importance to the ability to think outside the box, interact with people, and be a well-rounded GuileHero. The school might have classes oriented toward being a MasterOfDisguise and a CunningLinguist.
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20	If you're looking for the middle grade book series, click here: ''Literature/SpySchool''
21	----
22	!!Examples:
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24	[[foldercontrol]]
25
26	[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
27	* ''Anime/PrincessPrincipal'' introduces "The Farm" in a late episode. Only two of the main characters -- [[BadassDriver Dorothy]] and [[MasterActor Ange]] -- have gone through it however. That same episode confirms that Ange has been TheAce from the beginning, being the top student in their class.
28	* ''Literature/SpyClassroom'' Despite the title, this actually averts this trope as the spies are a group of girls who were at the bottom of their respective spy academies and were sent to a special location for hands on training by an accomplished spy.
29	[[/folder]]
30
31	[[folder:Comic Books]]
32	* ''ComicBook/WonderWoman'' [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Vol 1]]: Holliday College is not explicitly a spy school, and most of its students just seem to be there to attend college, but there is a whole slew of students, ComicBook/EttaCandy most prominently, who get to brush off classes for espionage missions for the US Army, this group of students gets to go on armed learning expeditions with their professors, and there's an underground base in which Paula von Gunther designs things for the Army and Wonder Woman hidden on campus.
33	* In ''ComicBook/{{Zero}}'', the titular character and his fellow agent, Mina, went to one run by the Agency. Student deaths were not unusual.
34	[[/folder]]
35
36	[[folder:Fan Works]]
37	* In ''Fanfic/AllGuardsmenParty'', Inquisitor Oak's fleet gathers personnel from throughout the Imperium and trains them to act as low-level Inquisition agents. He then assigns them to Interrogators in need of field experience before their promotion and sends them on missions. [[spoiler:Unfortunately, the Interrogators are a collection of dysfunctional idiots and psychopaths who other Inquisitors dumped on Oak to try and salvage]].
38	* In the Literature/{{Discworld}} of Creator/AAPessimal, the Assassins' Guild School rounds out the education of students on the Black with practical training in these matters. It is largely administered by Monsieur le Balouard, portrayed as a semi-retired James Bond who is keen to pass his experience in Flamboyant and Energetic Espionage to a new generation. Doctor Perdore, a far more shadowy member of staff, teaches in intelligence gathering and evaluation. In [[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6093110/18/Clowning-is-a-Serious-Business Clowning Is A Serious Business]], we see a class of senior students being taught how to conduct an interrogation of an interesting person, whilst avoiding the somewhat ''inelegant'' and unproductive physical stuff. Assassin interrogation is rather more ''psychological''.
39	* In Red Witch's ''[[WesternAnimation/AdventuresOfTheGalaxyRangers Galaxy Rangers]]'' Fanfic ''Sins of the Father,'' Miss Abercrombie's Charm and Finishing School looks like a snobbish prep school, but is really a covert training academy for espionage agents from Earth's wealthiest and most well-placed families. The other three Rangers are surprised to find their team's BadassNormal had initially been assigned as TheMole, but screwed over his bosses to side with them.
40	[[/folder]]
41
42	[[folder:Film]]
43	* ''Film/TheAmateur'' is a 1981 film about a codebreaker who blackmails the CIA into letting him go into Czechoslovakia and kill the terrorists who murdered his fiancée. To buy time while they find the CIA decrypted files he's stolen, they send him to The Farm for training in assassination techniques. At the end of a TrainingMontage that cuts between the CIA searching everywhere he might have hidden the files and the protagonist training, he tells the CIA to stop screwing around and send him in as he's never going to pass the course anyway.
44	* ''Film/BarelyLethal'' has ''Prescott Special School for Orphans'', where they teach little girls to become secret agents and assassins.
45	* ''Film/CarryOnSpying'' was set, at least initially, in a spy school.
46	* ''Film/CarveHerNameWithPride'' is a movie about a female SOE agent being trained and deployed.
47	* ''Film/{{DEBS}}'': The heroes attend a secret academy for the title organization, a government agency.
48	* ''Film/FromRussiaWithLove'' opens with a scene in the SPECTRE training academy: a spy school for bad guy spies.
49	* ''Film/GetSmart'': CONTROL had a training school.
50	* The 1993 Russian comedy ''Film/GunWithASilencer'' has two American spies, apparently, being trained in a mental hospital to infiltrate Russia and locate nuclear missile silos in order to prove that all those talks about nuclear disarmament are bullshit. The movie makes it ambiguous as to whether they really are spies or are merely escaped mental patients who think they're spies. On one hand, one of them clearly has a split personality and their "training" is woefully inadequate (one of them learns the wrong language); on the other, they are provided everything they need to actually get into Russia to do the mission. The ending even features a typical PrisonerExchange on a bridge, except the two prisoners are in straightjackets and, possibly, lobotomized, and the vehicles are ambulances.
51	* ''Film/KingsmanTheSecretService'': The stately manor that is Kingsman HQ is also a fully equipped training facility for new recruits.
52	* ''Film/TheRecruit'': The majority of the plot takes place in one of these.
53	* ''Film/SchoolForDanger'' (a.k.a.: ''Now It Can Be Told'') is a 1947 docudrama that follows a pair of SOE recruits through training and on their first mission. The two protagonists were played by former SOE agents.
54	* Used for exposition in ''Film/TheSoldier'', which opens with the HeroesRUs foiling an assassination, then cuts to a KGB spy school in Minsk where the KGB spymaster is asking his students to analyze what went wrong, and warning them about the Soldier and his operatives.
55	* ''Film/SpiesLikeUs''. The protagonists are meant to be expendable decoys for the real CIA agents, so they're rushed through spy training and the entire thing is PlayedForLaughs.
56	* In the ActionPrologue of ''Film/WhereTheSpiesAre'' (1966) KGB agents abduct and kill a British agent. We then cut to a lecturer at a KGB school (implied to be DoubleAgent Kim Philby) discussing British Intelligence techniques and spy gadgets, some of which were recovered from the dead man.
57	[[/folder]]
58
59	[[folder:Literature]]
60	* A large part of Viktor Suvorov's novel ''Literature/{{Aquarium}}'' (and the subsequent Polish-Russian TV miniseries) focuses on the training of new GRU operatives in the secret facilities. Also counts as a RealLife example.
61	* Played with in ''Literature/BelisariusSeries''. There is no spy school as such. However the princess was trained by her body-guard and tutor in Indian, Ninja-like martial arts.
62	* Novgorod from the ''Literature/TheBourneSeries''.
63	* In Nelson [=DeMille's=] ''The Charm School'', the titular school is an immersive training center run by the KGB for [[DeepCoverAgent deep cover agents]] who will be sent to the United States. In a twist, the school is staffed largely by American [=POWs=] from the Vietnam War, in the thought that the best way to learn how to act like an American would be from actual Americans.
64	* [[Literature/CherubSeries CHERUB Campus]] is the training ground of the TeenSuperSpy James Adams in Robert Muchamore's books.
65	* The Creator/DaleBrown novel ''Day of the Cheetah'' opens in a KGB school for [[DeepCoverAgent deep cover agents]]. Unusually, the students are not only being trained to blend in to American society in general, but also to perform a DeadPersonImpersonation of specific American citizens following a KillAndReplace scheme.
66	* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' has the Assassins' Guild School, although it plays with the trope. Not all students actually become assassins; the school was where nobles sent their children on the principle that you had to think like an assassin if you wanted to avoid being killed by them, and then, because so many nobles were invested in it, it became the most prestigious school in Ankh-Morpork and now has graduates who "probably had a note from their mother saying they were excused from stabbing."
67	* ''Literature/EmilyTheStrangeStrangerAndStranger'': Not an official school, but Venus Fang Fang agrees to train Emily in covert operations.
68	* One of the B-plots from Creator/TomClancy's ''[[Literature/JackRyan Executive Orders]]'' has veteran field agent (and resident paramilitary badass spook extraordinare) John Clark training a new batch of agents at The Farm to rebuild the CIA's HUMINT[[note]][=HUMan INTelligence=][[/note]] assets (read: agents) after years of downsizing in favor of SpySatellites and other technical intelligence gathering methods. Other books in the series explicitly state that this is his regular job: While he may be the CIA's go-to guy for 007-type missions, ops like that are not done very often.
69	* In ''Literature/TheInvisibleLibrary'', the first chapter opens with Irene cleaning the floors of a [[OneGenderSchool boy's boarding school]] that is implied to be this. She states that she doesn't think the students need any protection, as they are probably the most dangerous thing there. Since Irene is undercover as a servant in order to steal a book from that school, things get dangerous pretty soon. Irene also mentions that this school reminds her somewhat of the school she herself went to, and throughout the book it is hinted that the curriculum at her old school involved more self-defense than girls tend to be taught at regular schools.
70	* Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women in ''[[Literature/TheGallagherGirls I'd Tell You I Love You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You]]''.
71	* The Red Room in the ''Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse'' TieInNovel series, ''Literature/BlackWidow''.
72	* ''Literature/TheQuestForKarla''. The Circus has a combination interrogation centre/training ground at Sarratt.
73	* In ''Literature/{{Bequin}}'', the Maze Undue is a secret institute that trains teenaged [[AntiMagic untouchables]] to become agents of the Inquisition. Pupils are regularly sent out on “functions” where they pass themselves off as other people in order to test their disguise and infiltration skills. [[spoiler:Unbeknownst to the pupils, the Maze Undue is actually run by the Cognitae, a heretical secret society opposed to the Inquisition.]]
74	* The Alien Investigation and Removal Agency school in Gena Showalter's ''Literature/RedHanded''.
75	* There is a grotesque scene, of the protagonists walking through a Medieval spy training camp, in one of Andrzej Sapkowski's non-[[Literature/TheWitcher Witcher]] novels. Among the highlights are propaganda [[TheCon shills]] [[NoIndoorVoice HONING THEIR VOICES]], and an old spy teaching young ones what to do if you're uncovered. [[spoiler:Cry that the Jews have poisoned the wells and leave when everyone's gone to do some pogrom.]]
76	* The temple of the Many-Faced God in George R. R. Martin's ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire''.
77	* The book ''Literature/SpySchool'' by Stuart Gibbs is set in one, obviously. It follows middle-school aged kids being trained spies and is very much PlayedForLaughs.
78	* A large part of the Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse novel ''[[Literature/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineAStitchInTime A Stitch in Time]]'' is about Garak remembering his days in an elite school for future government officials, military officers, and [[StateSec Obsidian Order]] operatives. Guess which one he becomes, considering his father is the head of the Order. Much of the curriculum involves infiltration and hiding.
79	[[/folder]]
80
81	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
82	* ''Series/{{Alias}}'': In the backstory, Sydney went to a training school run by the SD-6.
83	* ''Series/TheAmericans'': The Center, the KGBC origin of operations, operates at least one, teaching everything from combat to seduction. Turns out the administration also lets the teachers rape the students. And the students are coerced into sex with complete strangers as part of their seduction training. Both Philip and Elizabeth go through this, and are equally traumatized, though in different ways. Later Elizabeth starts homeschooling Paige with this in mind.
84	* Marcie Ross from the early ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' episode "[[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E11OutOfMindOutOfSight Out of Mind, Out of Sight]]" gets sent to one of these by TheMenInBlack after she [[{{Invisibility}} turns invisible]] and goes AxeCrazy. This doesn't seem to bother her much.
85	* ''Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits'' is a HistoricalReCreation involving a group of contemporary civilians being given the same training as members of Special Operations Executive during [=WW2=]. As in the real school, the trainees could be washed out if they didn't make the grade.
86	* ''Series/CovertAffairs'' starts with the female protagonist being transferred from the training center known only as the Farm to the CIA earlier than her peers thanks to her linguistic skills. In another episode, she meets an experienced foreign operative who quickly figures out that she's too young and inexperienced to have completed full training and also deduces her skill in languages.
87	** In a later episode she goes back to training, officially to receive proper weapons training, but in reality because someone was leaking names of potential agents to foreign intelligence agencies.
88	* Parodied on ''Series/{{Friends}}.'' When Sean Penn's character realizes he has been deceived: "There's no such thing as the top secret school for the children of spies!"
89	* ''Series/TheManFromUncle'' went to the "Survival School."
90	* ''Series/MIHigh'' is about a spy school underneath a [[TheGoodOldBritishComp Good Old British Comp]].
91	* ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'': Joel once claimed that all spies attend a special spy school, where they learn (among other things) [[BondOneLiner post-kill puns]].
92	* ''Series/ISpy'': The Department has a training school on a military base in the San Francisco Bay Area, featured in the episodes "Anyplace I Hang Myself Is Home" and "Tag, You're It".
93	* ''Series/TheSandbaggers'' are trained at the "Field School."
94	* Several RealityShow-style programs have been based on the premise of putting contestants through mock spy training, typically with former spies and/or special operations personnel acting as trainers and judges. They follow the usual reality show format, with the contestant pool becoming increasingly smaller as some flunk out of training or are otherwise deemed as unsuitable candidates. The few who remain will then generally face a "real world" exercise in the final episode. Some examples:
95	** ''Spymaster'' (2002), with former [=MI6=] officers as the judges.
96	** ''Spymaster USA'' (2003), hosted by a former Delta Force operator, and with former [=SEALs=] and intelligence operatives as trainers and judges.
97	** ''Spy'' (2004), a follow-up series to ''Spymaster''.
98	** ''Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits'' (2017), which put its contestants through UsefulNotes/WorldWarII-era spy training, and included an SOE historian among its judges.
99	[[/folder]]
100
101	[[folder:Video Games]]
102	* ''VideoGame/AlphaProtocol'''s headquarters features one of these, though it is rather abbreviated as compared to a proper training program. It also has the effect of starting with a drugged recruit awakening. [[JustifiedTutorial It primarily exists to serve as a tutorial]], [[spoiler: thought the same path will again be repeated in the final mission.]]
103	* ''Franchise/AssassinsCreed'':
104	** It is stated that Desmond grew up in such a place in South Dakota and it was the training/lifestyle that caused him to leave in the first place (leading to the Templars finding him in the first game). It was called the Farm.
105	*** ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedRevelations'' has Desmond relive some of his childhood memories at the Farm.
106	** In ''AssassinsCreedII'', Desmond uses the Animus machine to relive his ancestor Ezio's training to be an assassin, and learn the same techniques himself through the "bleeding effect". Ezio, in turn, is trained in swordfighting by his uncle, inconspicuous travel from the courtesans, etc.
107	* ''VideoGame/PerfectDark'' has the Carrington Institute, where Joanna Dark learns and trains her spy skills, and practice her accuracy with the weapons. It serves as a tutorial.
108	[[/folder]]
109
110	[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
111	* The Institute's School in ''TabletopGame/AgeOfAquarius'' combines SpySchool and WizardingSchool. Justified, because this particular school trains TheMenInBlack.
112	[[/folder]]
113
114	[[folder:Web Animation]]
115	* ''WebAnimation/AssassinSchool'': The entire premise of the show.
116	[[/folder]]
117
118	[[folder:Webcomics]]
119	* Sara goes to one of these in ''Webcomic/ErrantStory''.
120	* In ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' all of the Smoke Knights as well as Tarvek and Martellus were "trained in the ways of the smoke" in lessons and classes, the proper Smoke Knights had to attend more lessons than the Storm Knight hopefuls though.
121	[[/folder]]
122
123	[[folder:Western Animation]]
124	* ''WesternAnimation/AmericanDad'': Haley was shown to have been sent to a spy training school in her younger years. It is also implied that Steve was also in one.
125	[[/folder]]
126
127	[[folder:Real Life]]
128	* The Farm: An alleged CIA training school at Camp Peary, Virginia, depicted in such works as Creator/TomClancy's books.
129	* SIS (aka [=MI6=]) has a school at Fort Monckton in Hampshire
130	* The British UsefulNotes/WorldWarII era [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive Special Operations Executive]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYfXJwyuPd4 trained]] at a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SOE_establishments variety of locations]], including Aston House, Wanborough Manor, Beaulieu in Hampshire, and the commando training at Arisaig in Scotland.
131	* [[UsefulNotes/MoscowCentre FSB Academy]] in Moscow.
132	* The National Intelligence University in the United States, which is run by the Department of Defense and provides a graduate education in intelligence collection. To be fair, most of their students are already employed as analysts by federal government agencies, but they also offer scholarships for non-government employees looking to work for U.S. intelligence agencies.
133	* Several schools have begun offering degree programs or concentrations in Intelligence and Security Studies, the goal of which is to familiarize students with the workings of intelligence analysis, typically with the goal of working for their country's diplomatic corps or spy agency.
134	[[/folder]]

Context Main / SpySchool