Diplomatic Cover Spy

Leia: The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this. When they hear you've attacked a diplomatic—
Vader: Don't act so surprised, Your Highness. You weren't on any mercy mission this time. Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by Rebel spies. I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.
Leia: I don't know what you're talking about. I'm a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan.
Vader: You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor. Take her away!

— Star Wars: A New Hope

Embassies are the perfect place to run intelligence operations from, at least in fiction. The host nation can't really get in there, everybody is protected by Diplomatic Impunity and they have lots of excuses to move around and talk to various political and economic players. In addition, such a role grants the local spy network a secure line of communication back to their home nation - any intelligence they gather themselves or get passed to them from spies without cover can be placed in the diplomatic bag and couriered home without fear of search or seizure. There is a tendency for these diplomatic spies to lurk on the second rank of the diplomatic hierarchy, on the attaché level. Attachés are less visible and more easily replaced than ambassadors while still having the clout and diplomatic immunity to be difficult for the host nation to get rid off unless they're caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, making them (again, at least in fiction) the ideal cover job for a spy. Their official job roles also tend to be somewhat nebulous and ill-understood (how many people can say that they actually know what a cultural attaché does, for example?), making it easy to write them into just about any situation imaginable.

This type of agent is also sometimes known as a "legal spy" or "official cover spy".

The entire concept relies heavily on Diplomatic Impunity. Because the host nation is generally aware of this trope as well, there is a tendency for such a spy to be an Overt Operative. And depending on how the character in question is portrayed, Ambadassador or "Ass" in Ambassador can often apply.

See also Covert Group with Mundane Front. Contrast the Deep Cover Agent, who are also spies but don't have diplomatic cover and present themselves as someone who is from the country being spied on.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Spy X Family:
  • WISE (the Westalian intelligence agency) operates out of their country's embassy in Ostania, and Twilight's Handler is officially an attaché at the embassy.
  • The premise involves the aforementioned Twilight having to pretend himself as a sufficiently upper-class Ostanian and part of the nuclear family. His "wife"'s brother Yuri is a civil servant at the Ostanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Twilight opined that Yuri's occupation already had him on high alert because it is the perfect cover job. Sure enough, Yuri is actually an officer of Ostanian Secret Police.
• Tales of Wedding Rings: In the backstory, Prince Marse of the Giseras Empire was sent to Maasa, the kingdom of the dragonfolk, so he could spy on them. One of the kingdom's twin princesses, Saphira, fell in love with him at first sight. This made his job easier at first, but then he fell in love with her too, and he couldn't bring himself to spy on her people anymore. Noticing this, the Emperor recalled Marse from his post.

Comic Books

• Wonder Woman (1987): Issue #195 introduces Jonah McCarthy, a Harvard educated lawyer who joins Diana's embassy staff. After having her sight restored, Diana begins to grow suspicious of Jonah and it is ultimately revealed that he is a spy working for the organization Checkmate.

Fan Works

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: The Shining Concord's Ambassador to The Dark Empress is justified as this, but everyone involved knows what's going on, so it's not a secret information channel.

Film — Live-Action

• Sneakers: Gregor is a Russian agent (originally for the KGB, now for one of its successors) working undercover as a diplomat.
• In Thirteen Days, during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Kennedy Administration is alerted to Alexander Fomin, officially a counsul at the Soviet embassy in Washington but actually the highest-ranking KGB spy in the US. Fomin has regular monthly lunches with John Scali, an ABC News correspondent and through which the idea of a deal to resolve the Crisis peacefully is raised (US promises to never invade Cuba, Soviets agree to withdraw missiles) to the White House. There is concern that the offer isn't genuine, due to both the opaque nature of the entire Soviet government's bureaucracy (especially when it comes to spies) which makes it difficult for the Kennedy administration to determine who exactly Fomin is speaking on behalf of — the KGB? Khrushchev himself? Just completely making it all up? — and the backchannel nature of the whole thing making it deniable. A late-night search of the FBI's archives on Fomin reveals circumstantial evidence that Fomin and Khrushchev both served near Moscow in 1942 during the Great Patriotic War and both had tended to rise through the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy in step with each other in the years since. With the idea that you don't become the Soviet Union's top spy in the US without knowing someone, O'Connell makes the call that Fomin is acting as Khrushchev's messenger and that the offer is genuine — Kennedy then makes the call for Scali to meet Fomin again with the message "The US is ready to make a deal". Ironically, declassified Soviet documents confirmed that the Real Life Fomin was acting on his own.

Literature

• Honor Harrington:
  • In Mission Of Honor, the new Havenite government is surprised when the Beowulf embassy's naval attaché turns out to be the station chief of their intelligence service only because they actually suspected the commercial attaché of holding that job.
  • Valery Ottweiler, introduced in the Shadows sub-series, is a Mesan diplomat who gets heavily involved in the plan to set up a shooting war between the Solarian League and Manticore.
• The Fifth Elephant: Wando Sleeps, the head of the Ankh-Morpork consulate in Uberwald, is this kind of diplomat. The embassy turns out to have a hidden room full of spy equipment and files, and Mr. Sleeps himself has been busy sneaking around and poking at the conspiracy building up in the area. Unfortunately for him, the local werewolves don't really believe in Diplomatic Immunity.
• Good Omens: This trope is so prevalent in London's St.James Park that the local ducks have learned to recognize the various diplomat-slash-spies and go for the ones who usually bring the best bread.
• Red Rabbit: Once the US confirms they have a potential defector, the plan is to get him out via their CIA network in Bulgaria. Unfortunately, before that happens, a chance encounter burns the CIA station chief, a minor diplomat at the US embassy in Budapest. Since he has diplomatic immunity, the Hungarians can't hold him without causing an incident, but they do banish him from the country, effectively putting the entire station there out of business. The Americans then have to get the defector (the titular Rabbit) out with help from the British. This book also features the chronologically first appearance of Ed Foley, who is CIA's Chief of Station in Moscow, whose cover is press attache to the local US Embassy, a role he continues through the chronologically later but earlier written The Hunt for Red October (where he is mentioned but never appears) and The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
• Subversive Activity: The secret agent Reddon is officially stationed as the British embassy's "information officer", whose job is to give the locals information about Britain when they ask for it. The protagonist notes that this is essentially the opposite of his real job.

• X-Wing Series: Starfighters of Adumar: Wedge discovers that the agent in charge of the New Republic's intelligence assets on Adumar is Tomer Darpen, the official head of the New Republic's diplomatic mission to the planet.

Live-Action TV

• The Americans: A regular character was Arkady Ivanovich Zolov, the KGB resident in the United States. He likes his comfortable life and does most of his work out of the Soviet Embassy. He has regular meetings with a Vasili Nikolavich, a ranking official of the Soviet Embassy.
• Burn Notice: Michael deals with a number of foreign or domestic spies with diplomatic or corporate covers.
  • In "Wanted Man", Michael contacts a group of Libyan agents attached to a team negotiating with some South American oil companies, exchanging the names of terrorists who blew up a Libyan gas depot for the Libyans rattling the cage of the man who burned Michael.
  • In "Trust Me", Michael deals with Waseem Ali Khan, a Pakistani ISI agent serving as security chief at the Pakistani consulate. Michael steals documents and blackmails Waseem into getting him a dossier on his handler Carla.
  • In "Comrades" Carla's cover in Kurdistan turns out to have been an agricultural rep. Michael narrates that this is a pretty useful cover, as it gives you a legitimate reason to be virtually anywhere, in the field or in the boardroom.
  • Diego Garza, a recurring character in the third season, is a CIA officer who runs an import/export company as a front for the Company. Michael contacts him hoping that Garza will help him get his old job back.
• Death to Spies: Fire Road: The series is set in World War 2 Russia and starts on the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As soon as war starts the Gestapo tries to arrest a Soviet trade attaché because he is actually a spy master running a network of Soviet spies in Germany. He destroys all records of the spy network and kills himself before the Germans can get to him. Volkov is a Soviet intelligence operative who is working as a diplomatic courier officially transporting emeralds bought by the Soviet government but is also carrying the only copy of a list of the members of the spy network. When the war starts, his diplomatic protection goes away and he has to fight his way across enemy lines to deliver the list to his superiors.
• The Professionals
  • In "A Hiding to Nothing", CI5 arrest a supposed Spanish journalist for spying. He turns out to be the cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy.
  • In "First Night", an Israeli minister is kidnapped, and the Israelis are implied to have 'specialists' on hand in their embassy to take direct action if needed. Some of them try following George Cowley to find out what CI5 knows.
    Cowley: Oh, those were your people trying to follow me.
    Israeli ambassador: Oh, yes. But they were intercepted by a police patrol and told—most politely—that they were exceeding the speed limit.
    Minister: Even with diplomatic plates, one is expected to conform with the laws of the land.
  • In "The Untouchables", an Arab 'cultural attaché' is assassinating Former Regime Personnel who've taken sanctuary in Britain. The British government assigns CI5 to deal with him, and it would have been a lot more merciful if they had just given him the boot.

Video Games

• Establishing embassies in several Civilization games is often one of the first ways players can gain information about the going-ons of other empires. Depending on the particular game's mechanics, spies can act as diplomats, or diplomats can be converted to spies, though they can't be officially both at the same time.

Webcomics

• Code Name: Hunter: Max O'Connor and Ruby Pyrenees are RCSI agents from Great Britain, sent to the island nation of Astoria as diplomatic attachés. Their mission is to retrieve a mage, and also ransom another agent that had been captured.

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