Spies Are Despicable

"We want some kind of guarantee. You're spies, so you're bound to be dishonest, that's your trade. We need to know we can trust you."

—Will, The Amber Spyglass

While spies perform a very important function in modern nations, the means that they use to do so are often seen as dishonorable and/or morally bankrupt, so regardless of how important their work might be, that doesn't mean people are going to like it or them. As a result, in fiction, spies are often depicted in negative ways, such as cowardly, disloyal, possessing Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, etc. Even one working for the good guys may only be seen as morally gray at best, and be characterized as or considered by others on the team to be a Token Evil Teammate.

Compare and contrast with Rogue Agent, CIA Evil, FBI Good, and Sinister Spy Agency. Often this makes a spy a Villain by Default (since, after all, Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil and being a spy involves treachery in the job description), or at least possessing villainous qualities by default.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • One of Envy's jobs is acting as a spy by using their shapeshifting to easily gain access to military intel and keep tabs on the 'sacrifices'. Envy is also one of the most cruel and sadistic of the homunculi and takes any opportunity to Kick the Dog that they can get, regardless of how detrimental it may be for them. Furthermore, they have no other skills to fall back on once people stop falling for their tricks and their combat ability is laughable at best (at least considering the setting).
  • Lust also tries to act as a Honey Trap by seducing Havoc, to gain information and often murders in cold blood with her Femme Fatalons.
• Hellsing: When Walter C. Dornez is revealed to be The Mole for Millennium, he makes a show of pissing off every single one of the heroes as part of The Reveal. From destroying Alucard's favorite gun, to mocking all people whose deaths he helped arrange, to spitting on Alexander Anderson's memory, it's little wonder that nearly everyone hates him by the end of the story, though he does give some genuine well-wishes to a handful of characters.
• Mission: Yozakura Family:
  • Kyoichiro both plays this straight and subverts this. On one hand, he's a Knight Templar Big Brother to the extreme, willing to cage his younger sister Mutsumi within her own home and deprive her of a normal life out of fear for her safety regardless of the toll on her personal happiness. He's blackmailed, brutalized, and threatened to murder anyone outside the Yozakuras who gets remotely close to her and frequently tries to make Taiyo's life hell. Despite this, even his most obnoxious actions are born from a deep, abiding love for his family, and he will do everything in his power to protect his siblings. Woe betide anyone who lays a finger on them.
  • Discussed and subverted by the Spy Federation. While Taiyo is taking his exam to get an official spy license, the proctors note that anyone can become a spy and an amoral monster. But who would hire a spy with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and is Only in It for the Money? Those who pass the Bronze Rank exam must demonstrate both competence and humanity as a display of trustworthiness and professionalism.

Comic Books

• Largo Winch: A consistent ethos throughout the series. The agents of various governments that appear from time to time are bad enough. However, the best example is probably the corporate spy who appears in the second story arc offering damaging information about one of Largo's rival companies. Largo is too disgusted to accept the help of someone who'd betray his employer, which his board of directors believe is putting Honor Before Reason, ultimately convincing him to accept the spy's help. He's then vindicated when the spy turns out to be a Fake Defector, whose misinformation nearly destroys Largo's company.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's take on James Bond is a loathsome rapist with zero charm, who even becomes the Big Bad later on.
• The Losers depicts the CIA as a broken institution running wildly out of control.
  • Big Bad Max is an utterly ruthless and morally bankrupt CIA agent responsible for the heroes being on the run and has left a swath of murder, torture, and devastation in his wake. He's a fanatic in his vision for the United States, and when he believes the US is failing to live up to his personal vision for it, he eventually tries to set up his own New America, complete with threatening to instigate World War III and nuke Washington D.C. if they attempt to interfere with his new nation.
  • Agent Stegler is an old-school agent who is depicted far more positively and shown to be a competent and honorable man, but the team is still reluctant about having to work together with him, and the last act of the comic has the few survivors from the main cast telling him to shove it when he attempts to recruit them again. (Stegler's also shown to be pretty much the only member of the CIA with any of that competence or honor, which is why by the time we meet him, he's considered an outdated relic and a running joke by his peers and stuck in a dead-end career).
• Marvel Knights (2002): The Punisher expresses contempt for spies (or "spooks" as he calls them), viewing them as cowardly and dishonourable compared to "warriors" like him and Helen Kim.
• While Nick Fury has had many heroic moments and a Properly Paranoid attitude, he is also a hard-ass Control Freak who thinks he and he alone is allowed to make the hard choices and know all the secrets and at least 50% of the time S.H.I.E.L.D. has behaved like a Sinister Spy Agency is because Fury commanded it to. This behavior reached its nadir in Original Sin, in which Fury assassinated Uatu the Watcher to steal his eyes, and with them, the Watcher's ability to see everything that happened in the universe. His Ultimate Marvel alternate version was equally atrocious in attitude, although a lot more foul-mouthed in language and his Marvel Cinematic Universe counterpart, while generally a more general-audiences portrayal, is not above resurrecting one of his top operatives through a top-secret and highly traumatizing procedure (one that said operative, Phil Coulson, made clear was against for moral reasons) and brainwashing him to forget it.
• Gale from Saga is an officer of Landfall's intelligence agency, and he finds about every possible way to be a thorn in the side of everyone around, from setting Prince Robot to track and capture initial main characters Marko and Alana, threatening to out two sympathetic journalists from a homophobic world as gay, which would ruin their careers, and generally being a Mean Boss to pretty much anyone forced to work with him. Looking like a Satanic Archetype (huge bat wings, blond hair, blue eyes, dresses in black a lot, Man of Wealth and Taste attitude and aesthetic) doesn't help either.

Fan Works

• Elementals of Harmony: Even Celestia, who has used them for hundreds of years, dislikes spies, or at least their necessity: "Cleanup Step":
  [Celestia] briefly brought her attention back to her spymasters (and that's what they are, she thought to herself, no matter how many pretty terms you invent for them.)
• The Palaververse: At the end of Wedding March, Luna notes her distaste that an ally sent one targeted at her nation:
  “The spy,” Luna said coldly, giving Alloy a look that threatened to wilt him,

Films — Live-Action

• The A-Team:
  • Agent Lynch is an incompetent Psychopathic Manchild CIA agent who goes rogue to steal money in the middle of a war. His team is also depicted as universally incompetent, so much so that sometimes it makes Lynch, who at one point gushes over footage from an airstrike by comparing it to Call of Duty, look like the Only Sane Man among them.
  • What really makes it this trope is that he's treated not just as an isolated case but as representative of the entire CIA. Various characters recall having met CIA agents (also using the "Agent Lynch" moniker) in earlier war zones: none were impressed by them. If Hannibal's correct, the entire CIA leadership is in on Lynch's plans to steal and appropriate the engraving plates. And the appearance of another "Agent Lynch" at the end of the film to sweep the entire mess under the carpet strongly suggests that the problems his predecessor embodied will continue.
• The Death of Stalin: Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB) may be the most extreme example on this page. He's been Stalin's executioner for years, responsible for carrying out the purges and tortures his boss orders while manufacturing whatever evidence is required to justify them. He's also a serial rapist whose victims include children as young as seven, and a Troll who enjoys playing mind games with his fellow Politburo members who have lived in fear of his power and the blackmail material he's amassed on all of them.^note The last one is his least offense, but also the one that leads to his eventual downfall, as after Stalin's death, his peers finally decide they've had enough of him and arrange his removal and execution Given that all the Soviet leaders are shown to be power-hungry, self-centered, cowardly hypocrites with gallons of blood on their hands, the fact that Beria's brand of evil still manages to stand out from the pack is even more remarkable.
• Nimbly, Xayide's spy in the second The Neverending Story film, is fairly sympathetic, being something of a Token Good Teammate for her. Towards the end of the film he has a downplayed Heel–Face Turn and helps Bastian, but is too much of a coward to help Bastian against Xayide, even though he acknowledges that her victory would destroy him and everything in his world.
• Indiana Jones: Played with. Indy frequently crosses paths with spies, works for them, and has even been one in both world wars. However, he almost always ends up regretting it. His experience working for French intelligence in World War One mostly left him disgusted with the work and how it manipulated and destroyed people's lives for goals that were murky at best. His mission to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark was assigned to him by U.S. Army Intelligence, but as soon as he's carried it out, they take the Ark away and betray their earlier promise to let him and his museum study it. In Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, his MI6 war buddy George MacHale betrays him to the Soviets, then FBI agents have him blacklisted as a potential communist (though to his credit, Indy's former boss in the OSS does try to defend him). And in Dial Of Destiny, the CIA turns out to be sheltering former Nazis and are duped for far too long into helping them recover a potentially world-changing artifact. And these are all examples that are supposed to be on his side! The less said about the agents of The Gestapo or Moscow Centre that appear throughout the series, the better.
• The Patriot (2000): Invoked by Colonel Tavington, who calls Gabriel a spy and orders him to be hanged. In fact, Gabriel is an official, uniformed dispatch rider for the continental army, but Tavington doesn't care. He commits war crimes left and right, which does actually get him in trouble with his superiors.
• Cassian Andor from Rogue One is an intelligence officer for The Rebellion, and while he's undoubtedly on the right side in the grand scheme of things he's also much darker and more ruthless than most Star Wars heroes, as his Establishing Character Moment includes him killing a friendly informant purely because he knew that his source would have no chance of evading capture from The Empire, and knew too much. He also nearly goes through with assassinating main character Jyn's father right under her nose until a last-minute change of heart.
  • In Series/Andor we see that his predecessor Luthen Rael was this to an even greater extent. He is willing to use the same tools as the Empire to fight them, which even he views as making him little better than they are. He even admits aloud that his own ego, wrath, selfishness, and inability to yield are as much motivation for him as any desire to do good or any ideological opposition to the Empire's tyranny, possibly even more so.

Literature

• His Dark Materials: In The Amber Spyglass, after Chevalier Tialys and Lady Salmakia are found spying on Iorek Byrnison reforging the Subtle Knife, Lyra and Will describe them to the Bear-King as spies and therefore unreliable and lacking honor. Later, after the knife is repaired, Will insists on them giving their transponders as guarantee based on their job.
• Horus Heresy: The Alpha Legion are something of a deconstruction. Unlike their fellow Astartes legions, who are fairly straightforward Proud Warrior Race Guys, the Alpha Legion prefers to win their battles before they begin using subterfuge and careful intelligence-gathering, and are shunned by the other legions as a result. In practice, of course, the Alpha Legion's operations tend to have a much lower body count than the other Legions', so they come off as somewhat Creepy Good by comparison. While they do ultimately turn traitor in the end, they do so not out of any desire for power or glory, but because they believe that doing so will save the galaxy from being consumed by Chaos. The reader is left to decide whether their actions are justified.
• Jack Ryan: Depends which side the spies are on:
  • On the KGB and Soviet side, this trope is played completely straight. Professional soldiers loathe the KGB, for the simple reason that it's constantly scrutinizing them for signs of disloyalty despite the fact that they're the ones shedding blood for the motherland, and looking for ways to seize prerogatives from them in war theaters despite the fact that they don't have enough training or experience to know what they're doing. The rest of Soviet society lives in fear of them, the populations of occupied nations mostly experience them as an endless fountain of war crimes, and even the leaders of the Soviet Union can't always rely on them, as we see at least one KGB director plotting to overthrow the president and take his place. Gradually, some benevolent examples appear, mostly Sergey Golovko, but the overall portrayal remains negative until the end of the Cold War.
  • The portrayal of the CIA and other American (or allied) intelligence agencies is mostly an inversion. American spies, like soldiers or cops, are generally portrayed in an Eagleland Type 1 flavor as smart, dedicated, and patriotic public servants (though with a strong dose of Good Is Not Soft). Even when the CIA ends up involved in morally questionable actions (as in Clear and Present Danger), the blame is mostly laid on the politicians giving the orders rather than the spies carrying them out as best they can. However, that doesn't mean there isn't still some lingering distrust for them, or that this distrust is entirely unfounded. Front-line soldiers especially aren't always impressed by the information they get from the intelligence community, and are acutely aware that when it messes up, they'll be the ones who pay the price, which breeds some understandable resentment.
• The works of John le Carré often lean towards this, all the more noticeably because their main characters are usually spies themselves. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold may be the harshest example, showing the lives spies are forced to lead and the kinds of moral compromises they have to make in the name of the big picture. The plot concerns MI6 involving itself in a power struggle in the East German STASI between Hans Dieter-Mundt, a sadistic and opportunistic former Nazi, and his more ethical and idealistic deputy Jens Fiedler. The Reveal is that Mundt is actually on the British payroll, and the main character's mission is to discredit Fiedler before he has a chance to expose this. The speech he gives to his love interest justifying the operation is this trope in a nutshell:

  Leamas: What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.

• A Song of Ice and Fire: Varys serves as the Master of Whisperers in King's Landing. People like Ned Stark look down on the mysterious eunuch. He serves multiple kings (Aerys II, Robert, Joffrey) but always retains his own agenda. He claims he is only interested in the good of the realm but is willing to kill or let others die if it suits his purposes, which again he keeps to himself. His own words in A Game of Thrones sum him up: "A eunuch has no honor, and a spider does not enjoy the luxury of scruples, my lord."
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In the X-Wing Series the Thyferra native Erisi Dlarit takes part in an Imperial operation where she infiltrates the New Republic's recently reformed Rogue Squadron. Erisi passes information on to Ysanne Isard including when fellow Thyferran squadron member Bror Jace is returning home in an attempt to get him captured or killed. Erisi also enabled the capture of Corran Horn by providing the codes for his fighter to Isard. While Isard's artificially created Krytos virus was ravaging Coruscant, Erisi learns of a relief convoy heading to Coruscant and tells Isard about it, who then arranges for warlord Zinsji to destroy the convoy so that the price of bacta would increase and hopes would be dashed among Coruscant citizens. Even though Corran was believed to be dead Erisi tried to have Corran's girlfriend Mirax Terrik killed. When Erisi is exposed as a spy and returns to the Empire, Corran Horn and the other members of Rogue Squadron are quite motivated to bring her to justice.
  • Lumiya infiltrates the Rebellion and fakes her own death in order to frame Luke Skywalker for murder. She later becomes one of the Emperor's hands. After the deaths of Palpatine and Vader she spends the next few decades trying to take revenge on the Skywalker and Solo families. Her efforts culminate in helping bring Vader's grandson Jacen Solo to join the Sith.
  • The portrayal of New Republic Intelligence over the course of the novels gradually shifts from a hard aversion of this trope to playing it completely straight. The spies we meet in the Rebellion and early New Republic eras (Bria Tharen, Winter Retrac, General Cracken, Iella Wessiri, all of Wraith Squadron) are very good at their jobs, dedicated to their cause, helpful to their comrades in the military or resistance movements, and, insofar as their job allows them to be, honest and honorable. Starfighters of Adumar shows us our first negative example, Tomer Darpen, an NRI officer who's plotting to help a local despot take control of an entire planet by force, in a plot that wouldn't be out of place for a Cold War era CIA villain. In the New Jedi Order series, the new NRI director, Dif Scaur, is behind the creation of a genocidal bioweapon meant to exterminate the entire Yuuzhan Vong species, something even Luke Skywalker and many of those resisting their invasion of the galaxy are horrified by. His successor in Mercy Kill, Borath Maddeus, turns out to to be a traitor who was part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government and restore the Empire. Since the novel ends with Face Loran, one of the heroes, being appointed Director, there's some hope that the trend may finally be reversing itself.

Live-Action TV

• Airwolf: Either played straight or downplayed. The Spymaster Archangel and his deputy Marella are usually portrayed as highly competent and driven by duty to their country. They have a great many rivals both within "the Firm" and without, however, who are either incompetent or corrupt and who tend to be more interested in careerism and bureaucratic turf wars than in serving their country. Furthermore, the fact that Archangel is a good and patriotic spy still doesn't mean he can be trusted; the heroes are acutely aware that either they or the cause of justice could be deemed expendable in favor of what Archangel considers a higher goal.

  Marella: You know the arrangement we have with Hawke. We're on his side.

  Dominic: Yeah, that was yesterday. What about tomorrow? You people have a funny way of changing sides to suit your needs, you know.

• The A-Team: Not as hard as in the movie, but generally played straight. When CIA agents appear, they're almost always trying to coerce or manipulate the A-Team into carrying off some shady operation or other for them. This becomes the entire plot of the last season when General Stockwell, one of America's top spymasters, coerces them into working for him in exchange for a pardon. The team suspects from the beginning that he isn't being honest about this and is just stringing them along until they're no longer useful. We never learn his true intentions one way or another, but the season ends with them cutting ties to him.
• Combined with Moral Myopia in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett talks about British and German spies:
  Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshal Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
  Melchett: Filthy Hun weasels fighting their dirty underhand war!
  Darling: And, fortunately, one of our spies...
  Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes, risking life and limb for Blighty!
• Much of the cast of Burn Notice are either spies or associated with Intelligence in some way so they are run the gamut as far as what their personalities are like and how sympathetic they are. The best of the spy characters there are generally well-meaning but flawed, while the worst are the absolute scum of the Earth, and there tend to be a lot more of the latter than the former.
• The Expanse has two spies who get focus in the early seasons.
  • Kenzo is like a walking personification of this trope, a loathsome, faux charming backstabber who tries to betray the group at his first opportunity by calling down a tactical team on them. Later, when the situation on Eros goes bad, he then tries to worm his way back into Holden's good graces. Despite being fairly naive at this stage of the show and having a tendency towards Honor Before Reason, Holden doesn't buy Kenzo's attempt for a minute.
  • Cotyar is almost a polar opposite, a former military intelligence officer who Avasarala describes as having a "Robin Hood complex". He's initially despised and distrusted by his reluctant ally Bobbie Draper, a Martian Space Marine who looks down on spies due to her past experience with them and the stereotypes around them. And while Cotyar is mostly portrayed positively, he is also ruthless at times in order to achieve his goals. Most notably, in one case he kills a Nervous Wreck character who had essentially been a Guest-Star Party Member in cold blood simply because he couldn't risk the guy saying the wrong thing when they're about to be taken into custody.
    Bobbie: [after seeing Cotyar expertly handle a gun] You served?
    Cotyar: SIGINT, back in the day.
    Bobbie: [voice dripping with disdain] Ah. Military "Intelligence".
    Cotyar: Yeah, my IQ tested too high to be a marine.
    Bobbie: And your morals tested low enough to be a spy.

• The Equalizer: Similar to Airwolf above, this trope varies between "downplayed" and "played straight." The main character, Robert McCall, is a former agent of "the Company" (a common nickname for the CIA) who became disillusioned with his job, the moral compromises it required, and the emotional toll it took on him; his current career Helping The Helpless is a way for atoning for the sins he committed as a spy. His former superior "Control," who's still in the Company, is generally portrayed as a competent but ruthless spymaster: the two maintain a tense but mutually beneficial relationship, with Control allowing Robert to borrow his assets from time to time in exchange for running the occasional off-the-books mission for him. Most of his peers in the organization are treated with far less respect, however, with Control's position often threatened by ambitious rivals who have neither his competence nor his moral compass.
• Game of Thrones: Varys a.k.a. The Spider is The Spymaster with a network of spies throughout Westeros and beyond. People like Ned Stark don't like him. Other rulers tolerate him as a necessary evil but know that they can't count on him. Being an eunuch and a foreigner contributes to his 0% Approval Rating. He supports Daenerys at first, but then attempts to have her assassinated.
• House of the Dragon: Larys Strong uses his physical disability to appear harmless in a world that values warriors, which gives him access to important secrets, and he is good at manipulating others with that info, like making sure Queen Alicent knows that Rhaenyra lied to her face. Adaptational Villainy applies to make him more despicable than his book counterpart. He has Harrenhal burned down, killing his own brother (the alleged father of Rhaenyra's older sons) and father, to Alicent's horror. Years later, he has so much control over her that in exchange for information she exposes her bare feet at him so he can pleasure himself right in front of her, leaving her disgusted at herself.
• MacGyver (1985) is a rare example that averts this trope hard just as often as it plays it straight. A fair number of the American spies that appear in the series are corrupt, using their status to kidnap foreign heads of state, overthrow democracies, set up dictatorships, etc, often without the approval of their superiors and even if it means killing other Americans. However, the main character, as well as his boss and best friend, are themselves spies in Season 1, and for the rest of the series work for a private contractor that regularly carries out intelligence missions for the CIA and other government agencies, and throughout the series, plenty of the spies they work with also turn out to be honorable public servants. The overall portrayal essentially treats the intelligence community like any other career field: there are both good and bad people.
• Played completely straight in Miami Vice. One of the most common stock plots for the series is to have the heroes spend most of the episode trying to lock up the drug dealer, arms dealer, assassin, death squad, mercenary, deposed dictator, or other scumbag of the week... only for the man to be released at the end of the episode, because the CIA or an equivalent agency insisted that they were too valuable an asset in the Cold War to be held.
• Power Rangers in Space: In "From Out of Nowhere - Part 1", the villains at Dark Specter's gathering all react with disgust when Astronema reveals that the cloaked figure (Andros in disguise) is a spy.
• This is referenced on Sherlock. When Mycroft Holmes, the head of an English spy agency, asks Sherlock and John to investigate a matter involving Irene Adler, John asks Mycroft if he doesn't trust his own security forces. Mycroft's response is golden.
  Mycroft: Certainly not. They all spy on people for money.
• Stargate SG-1: Played fairly straight. The two main sources of spies throughout the series (not counting actual enemies) are the NID and the Tok'ra:
  • The NID is an intelligence agency run from the Pentagon with a major corruption problem. For the first six seasons, the heroes regularly run into unauthorized operations run by rogue NID agents, who claim to be taking whatever measures are necessary to secure the planet... but who in reality turn out to be working for a cabal of business interests looking to acquire and monopolize alien technology for their own profit, often at the expense of the Earth's actual interests and alliances. While the agency is eventually cleaned out in Season 6 and the NID agents that appear later are at least honest, they're still often in over their heads, do more harm than good, and require the heroes to clean up their messes.
  • The Tok'ra are a resistance movement made up of former Goa'uld that's existed for centuries and tends to operate as a spy organization (in contrast to the Free Jaffa's more military approach). While their goals of overthrowing the Goa'uld are good, a combination of paranoia due to the need for compartmentalization and secrecy, and a high-handed attitude towards the "lower races", makes them very difficult to work with. They often withhold critical information from their allies, and are prone to manipulating them without their knowledge whenever a mission needs to be carried out that they don't want to undertake themselves, making them The Friend Nobody Likes in the Earth/Tok'ra/Free Jaffa alliance.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: In "The Trouble With Tribbles" the Klingon spy Arne Darvin qualifies as he poisons a shipment of grain intended for a planet hosting Federation and Klingon colonies. His plans and cover are blown by the Tribbles, but if Darvin's plans had worked as intended probably would have caused the deaths of a number of Federation colonists.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Klingon scientist named J'Dan who is in league with the Romulans uses the Klingon-Federation officer exchange program to get posted to the USS Enterprise in the episode "The Drumhead." He then proceeds to steal highly classified data from the Enterprise and pass it to the Romulans.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has the recurring character of Garak, a Cardassian "tailor" who is left behind on DS9 but is a spy of sorts for the Cardassian government in the early seasons. He has his despicable moments, especially before and during the early seasons of the series.

Multiple Media

• Star Trek: Spies from all of the major races and governments are seen as a necessary evil at best, a source of scorn and In-Universe Nightmare Fuel at worst. Even The Federation has "Section 31", which is allowed to operate with few rules behind the scenes, but in public Starfleet denounces Section 31's actions in order to maintain good publicity.

Tabletop Games

• Basic Dungeons & Dragons adventure DA1 Adventures in Blackmoor. The Iron Duke's spymaster is a Chaotic Evil former criminal named Skandros the Strangler. Skandros is a master of disguise whose appearance is known to few people and he ruthlessly carries out his master's orders.

Video Games

• Played with In Dishonored:
  • Hiram Burrows, the Royal Spymaster, is the mastermind behind the plot to assassinate Empress Jessamine and install himself as Lord Regent in her place.
  • Almost inverted within the actual gameplay, where playing stealthily, gathering intel, and generally causing minimal disturbance among the NPCs (ie: typical spy behavior) can help the player find non-lethal means of taking out their targets for the Low Chaos ending. Brazenly charging through each level with guns blazing like a typical action hero will likely result in a lot of dead mooks and the High Chaos ending. Granted, nothing is stopping you from being sneaky and lethal.
• Red Alert 3: The Soviets call spies cowardly, presumably because they don't have an infiltrator unit of their own (but they can train them via captured Allied or Imperial barracks).
• Sniper Elite 4: Major Hans Dorfmann , actually General Heinz Bohm, is a Double Agent who feeds the Allied Forces non-vital German intelligence while also feeding the German Forces vital Allied intelligence. Even worse, he's responsible for ordering a number of heinous war crimes, from the execution of entire civilian populations, to Cold-Blooded Torture of captured resistance fighters, and even turning other captured resistance fighters into slave labor. As Karl Fairburne tells Dorfmann himself:
  Fairburne: Why would anyone trust a traitor?
• Star Wars: The Old Republic:
  • The Imperial Agent can easily be this, given that manipulation, deception, and backstabbing are practically ingrained in their job description. Becomes exaggerated if one plays them as a dark-side character, which amps up their sociopathic tendencies and disregard for human life. The mistrust inherent in being a spy also bites them hard in Act 2 regardless of your decisions, as their Imperial paymasters covertly implant them with a brainwashing trigger that the Republic agents they're sent to spy on exploit to keep them compliant.
  • Theron Shan of the Republic's SIS is introduced as one of your more ruthless Mission Control characters, encouraging Republic-aligned players to carry out unscrupulous acts of treachery for the greater good. Much later, during the Nathema Conspiracy arc, he invokes this by pretending to sell you out to the Order of Zildrog in order to infiltrate them and learn about their plans. He reasons that given his reputation of being a deceptive spy, you'll have no problem buying into his betrayal, something that you can either prove him right on or express doubts about.
• Team Fortress 2: The Spy receives no shortage of scorn from enemy mercenaries for being a literal backstabber, disguising himself as a member of the opposing team, having access to Sappers which can destroy Engineer buildings in seconds, and generally being a French Jerk. He sometimes even gets this treatment from his own teammates, like when the BLU Scout in "Meet the Spy" (who, ironically enough, is actually the RED Spy in disguise) makes this offhand comment to him:
  I've killed plenty of spies. Bunch of dime-a-dozen backstabbing scumbags. Like you! No offense.
• Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception: Katherine Marlowe is a borderline example. By now, the Hermetic Order she leads is more of an Ancient Conspiracy than a Sinister Spy Agency. However, it was founded by Queen Elizabeth I and her spymaster Francis Walsingham as an intelligence outfit, albeit one with an unusual beat focused on the occult (and in particular the game's Macguffin, Iram of the Pillars), and Marlowe still controls a worldwide network of spies and informants in the present day. She also definitely checks off the "despicable" aspect, being a ruthless manipulator who enjoys turning people against each other, has to use the heroes to lead her to her goal rather than find it herself, and is happy to leave her hired help to die as soon as they've outlived their usefulness.

Web Animation

• Inverted in Heavy is Dead, a Team Fortress 2 video. While the Spy is usually seen as a deceptive schemer, and the Engineer is usually seen as an easygoing Nice Guy, in this video, the Engineer is a lying murderer while the Spy is a hero dedicated to solving the murder.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle has the nation of Pottsylvania, where everyone is a spy, often as neighbor against neighbor. Two of Pottsylvania's spies sent afield to vex the heroes are Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Natasha is mildly evil as a Femme Fatale, while Boris is a Card-Carrying Villain without morals or qualms about wreaking havoc and arranging boobytraps. The pair's boss, Fearless Leader, is even nastier than these two combined.

Real Life

• This has been a long-time view in many nations. For much of human history, someone caught spying for the enemy would almost certainly be put to death as a result, sometimes only after a grisly torture session or two. Even today, the range of protections that are afforded to soldiers under the laws of war do not fully apply to captured spies. Even the appearance of spying can be enough to get your rights as a prisoner of war waived; in the World Wars, for example, soldiers low on supplies and suffering through cold winters often scavenged clothes and weapons from dead soldiers of opposing forces. Being captured by or attempting to surrender to the enemy while dressed in any of their gear/uniform or carrying their weapons, however, would royally piss off the enemy (since it would be assumed that you were responsible for killing the person whose gear you took), and even sides/armies that normally followed the rules of law and treated captives well were almost certain to pretend that someone captured while wearing their gear was a spy attempting to infiltrate their side. The fate of such spies (both actual spies or "spies" like those described above) was frequently a summary execution.

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