The Mole / Literature

• A Court of Thorns and Roses:
  • Rhysand looks for ways to take Amarantha down from within while forced to serve her.
  • Feyre, after Tamlin's betrayal. She pretends to still be in love with him while manipulating events to turn Tamlin's followers against him and spark a civil war.
  • Tamlin and Jurian both pretend to ally with Hybern over obsession for lovers who jilted them in order to spy and weaken him from within.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Jon Snow is sent far beyond the Wall to infiltrate the Wildlings.
  • Reek manages to ingratiate himself into Theon Greyjoy's occupation of Winterfell before revealing himself as Ramsay Snow, the bastard son of the Starks' nominal ally Roose Bolton.
• Cats vs. Robots: Both the Great Feline Empire and the Great Robot Federation have spies on Earth.
  • The Great Feline Empire has Obi, an elderly cat who lives next door to the Wengrods.
  • The Great Robot Federation has Home, an Artificial Intelligence who runs all the systems in the Wengrod house.
• The Radix: Brynstone's assistant Jordan Rayne is working for a Corrupt Corporate Executive from Taft-Ryder Farmaceuticals. Borgias are working for her.
• Many of John le Carré's novels involve moles in one way or another.
  • Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy focuses on the hunt for a very high-up mole in the British Secret Service. It didn't invent the term "mole", but is largely responsible for popularising it in modern fiction.
  • The main character of A Perfect Spy is a mole.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Brothers of the Snake, the Space Marine Khiron killed another and claimed that he was warp-tainted, but there was no evidence. Another Marine, Priad, talked to him to learn what he could and discovered the daemon had possessed another Marine, who was trying to get Khiton killed.
  • In the Grey Knights novel Hammer of Daemons, Alaric feeds some information to an eldar gladiator. After he leads a Gladiator Revolt, Alaric prevents the eldar from getting on the ship: his captor had learned the information, and it being false, he could only have learned it from the eldar. Whereupon Alaric accuses him of having betrayed the previous Gladiator Revolt — which had been crushed, and games had been held to celebrate that victory, and those games had killed Alaric's friend and fellow Grey Knight. He kills the eldar.
  • In the Space Wolf novel Ragnor's Claw, Gul.
  • In the Ultramarines novel Nightbringer, de Valtos, who appears to be Divided We Fall, and Chanda, who appears to be faithful. Then, when Chanda hands over the governor and the inquisitor, he is Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves.
• In Dead Sky Black Sun, Obax Zagayo. Honsou scorns him not for the treachery but for thinking he could conceal it.
• In The Graveyard Book, the Big Bad The Man Jack takes on the name "Jay Frost" when he's trying to exploit the main character.
• Lester Leith: Leith's valet is a police spy. Leith is aware of this and loves to Feed the Mole or get a rise out of him.
• In President's Vampire the Vice President, Wyman is Shadow Company's mole in the White House, sharing information in exchange for becoming the President.
• Matthew Reilly has used this a couple of times:
  • Ice Station: Snake, Montanna and Sarah Hensliegh are members of the Intelligence Convergence Group, dedicated to covering up scientific breakthroughs by making sure only they know about it by killing anyone else who does.
  • Temple: Nash, Lauren and Troy are only pretending to be DARPA, so they can steal the idol for the army's use.
    • Uli "Craterface" Becker is a German agent pretending to be a Nazi.
    • Martin Race is a DARPA employee secretly helping the army.
    • Troy is also working for a terrorist group.
  • Area 7: Botha and Echo Unit are both trying to steal the perfect vaccine.
• In Bill Granger's The British Cross, fourth in The November Man book series, it is revealed that a russian spy has been working as a mole in the British Secret Services.
• Harry Potter
  • Snape is revealed to be such. When Voldemort made it clear that he would kill Lily Potter, Snape went to Dumbledore and became a Mole for the Order of the Phoenix in the Death Eaters. When he killed Dumbledore, while he made it so that it looked like he was doing it for Voldemort, in fact he was performing a Mercy Kill on Dumbledore's orders.
  • Also, Peter was the Mole in the Marauders. He was spying for Voldemort and was the one who gave up James and Lily Potter's location and then he framed Sirius for it, to boot.
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    • Kreacher was a mole for Voldemort within the Order, though he was limited in what he could say he was still able to betray Sirius to his death.
    • Kingsley Shacklebolt and Arthur Weasley are both members of the Order of the Phoenix and workers at the Ministry of Magic which is doing everything in its power to get in Dumbledore's way while refusing to acknowledge that Voldemort is back.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Despite his Heel–Face Turn halfway through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this is still what Edmund Pevensie is most remembered for.
• TONS in Fablehaven. Starts out with Vanessa, and then the Sphinx, and then Gavin. So much for the Official Couple.
• In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Blood Pact, Gaunt deduces very early that they can trust no one because of the way the raid was carried out. In the end, the Mole is identified as Inquisitor Rime. Also, Xomat turns out to be the inside man for Csoni's planned assault on Urbano's parlour.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Silmarillion: Ulfang and his sons. He was an Easterling chieftain who secretly allied himself with Morgoth while serving under Caranthir, and it was his people's treachery that allowed Morgoth to learn all the secret plans for the Union of Maedhros and crush the alliance in the Nírnaeth Arnoediad.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: Having agreed to betray Gondolin to Morgoth, Maeglin went back to the city and pretended everything was just fine, waiting for the invasion to start. He never once warned anybody. In the original tale, his House's symbol is even a black mole, supposedly because he's "great among quarrymen and a chief of the delvers after ore."
• Wellington Yueh in Dune, betrayer of House Atreides.
• Dain in the first Deltora Quest series was a pretty darn good Mole. He's a Grade 3 Ol, who's known for perfect transformation, and disguised himself as the (fake) heir with a good cover story and infiltrated the La Résistance's organisation as a spy. He managed to fool everyone else even when the Seven Tribes renewed the vow and the Belt seemly pointed him as the heir, when it actually points to Lief.
• Silena Beauregard in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. And Redemption Equals Death. Badly.
• In Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained novels, the human protagonists come to realize that their society's government is riddled with Brainwashed Moles controlled by the alien Starflyer.
• Recurring trope in Dale Brown books. In Flight of the Old Dog one of these allows for the critical damaging of a space station, gives away two stealth bombers en route to the plot-critical Soviet Superscience Wave-Motion Gun and forces the eponymous Airstrike Impossible to get going while You Can Barely Stand... and the whack-a-mole subplot is effectively nonexistent. Day of the Cheetah is centred on one of these getting his hands on a Super Prototype Cool Plane. Act of War has National Security Adviser Chamberlain turn out to be the one giving information away to the terrorists. It's Michael Fitzgerald in A Time for Patriots, though he does a Heel–Face Turn.
• In Shanna Swendson's Once Upon Stilettos, they discover someone was at Owen's desk and hunt for the spy. It may even be an operation to get them all Divided We Fall.
• Police inspector Javert of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables attempts to pass himself off as a revolutionary so he can slip information back to the authorities.
• In Robert E. Howard's The Hour of the Dragon, Conan the Barbarian tells Zenobia to walk with him so he can kill her if she proves to be this.
  • In "Rogues in the House," Murilo was selling secrets to foreign powers. How evil that makes him would rather depend on how evil those countries were.
• In Orson Scott Card's Empire series, Dee Nee proves to be the party responsible for leaking information to the terrorists.
• In Blood of the Mantis, Lyrus.
• Gertrud Becker in The Chalet School in Exile, aka Gertrude Beck, a Nazi spy sent to infiltrate the Chalet School and gather information. However, she finds out very little after the older girls realize there's something odd about the questions she asks and warn other girls to keep quiet, and she ends up having a Heel–Face Turn after running away and being rescued by some French sailors.
• In the Time Scout series The Syndicate is very good at insinuating their agents.
  • They have downtimer terrorists working construction on the new Arabian Nights gate, perfectly placed to start riots and murder their enemies.
  • They put Professional Killers on baggage crews to hunt down and murder people running from those same Professional Killers.
  • They get a Smug Snake Professional Killer head of evil security placed on the search and rescue mission going after those same people.
• The Black Ajah consists of a number of moles operating in the other seven Ajah in the White Tower in the Wheel of Time series.
• In Bad Monkeys, Jane Charlotte is revealed in the last 5 pages of the book to be a mole in an unnamed organization devoted to fighting evil. This revelation makes her account of how she got in the organization that she tells to her psychiatrist (and thus the entire book) only half true.
• Linda Lane in Septimus Heap. Without her spying on the Heaps and gaining their trust, Jenna would have never been discovered.
• Medea Lindenshield from The Icemark Chronicles is a good example of this trope. She is the youngest daughter of the main protagonist Queen Thirrin and her husband, the powerful warlock Oskan, whose Magical abilities she has inherited. So when it's discovered that she has hated her youngest brother for years and has tried to have him killed throughout the entire course of the book, it's painful.
• In the historical novel Wings of Dawn: In order of being revealed: Sir William. Waleran. Isabelle. Geoffrey. Katherine. Waleran. Gervaise. Lord Baldwin. Waleran. Reason being, quite a lot of them were spying on each other before Thomas got involved. (Yes, one of those is duplicated for a reason.)
• In Wen Spencer's Tinker, Sparrow. In Wolf Who Rules, Tinker is able to assure the elves that Tommy is not this because he had information, which he obviously did not pass on.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga novel The Warrior's Apprentice, Tung explains that one of his men did not defect to Miles's forces because he was a Barrayan spy. Tung actually likes spies, as long as the information is unlikely to harm him, because they're reliable, but this one had to spy on the other fleet, so they parted ways.
• In Tom Kratman's Caliphate, Ling is a Chinese agent sent into a brothel where Petra was working. She also becomes a big sister figure for Petra and aids her in coping with living.
• In Song at Dawn they're everywhere:
  • Sanchez is Dragonetz's eyes and ears amoung Alienor's ladies
  • Alis is the same for the Archbishop and Raymond de Toulose
  • Everyone working for Emerganda, Alienor or some other authority figure is implied to be the same for someone somewhere.
  • Dragonetz initially thinks Estela is one of these but determines otherwise.
• Wu Chu-toy, alias Brian Kwok from Noble House.
• Trapped on Draconica: Taurok placed Lydia inside Daniar's group to mine intel, but Lydia herself was unaware of this because she's five years old. As far as she knows, she's helping her grandfather with his work.
• In A Deeper Blue, several Islamics in ordinary positions are used to assist the VX attack on Florida, although one of them only does so at gunpoint once he discovers what he's being told to actually do.
• Conrad Vance in the Sword of the Stars novella The Deacon's Tale for the Zuul.
• The Exile's Violin: Gunslinger was hired by Max to keep an eye on Jacquie and betrays her when Max tells him too.
• This happens twice during The Leonard Regime. First it's Tino, and then later it's Seth.
• There are a few in The Doctrine of Labyrinths. First, Felix finds out that he's been an unwitting mole (there was magic involved) for Malkar; later, Vulpes not only infiltrates the Mirador but also coerces Mehitabel into assisting him.
• In The Underland Chronicles, Henry allied with the vicious rat king Gorger, with the goal of taking over the Underland.
• James Bond
  • Two of Bond's allies turn out to be in league with the Nazi terrorists in Icebreaker. The third also seems to be one at first, but is revealed to be The Mole in the final chapter.
  • A "defector-in-place" variant appears in No Deals, Mr. Bond. A private moment in an interrogation between a GRU official and captured James Bond has him learning that the former has actually been waiting for a chance for defection, but he currently has to put on a facade to trick the KGB men who have infiltrated his department. They then make way for a daring escape.
  • It turns out in Death Is Forever that the agent-network that Bond is investigating had two moles in it feeding information for the Big Bad. The other turns out be a heroic mole looking for the actual mole.
  • In High Time to Kill, someone in the SIS feeds information to the Union about Bond's movements. Tragically, it turns out to be Bond's girlfriend Helena Marksbury, who is being forced to do so, and who is killed after she outlives her usefulness.
• Umbra Domini has several in The Genesis Code
  • Father Maggio, Cardinal Orsini's secretary.
  • Juliette, the nurse that helps Grimaldi escape the hospital and fake a carjacking
  • Tom Drabowski, the FBI Agent brought in to "investigate" the carjacking and help Grimaldi escape police surveillance
• Sebastian/Jonathan in City of Glass. He was the reason Valentine knew what Jace's group was about to do. He killed the real Sebastian Verlac and posed as the Penhallows' cousin in order to get information.
• The Maze Runner: At the end of The Scorch Trials, Thomas finds out that Teresa and Aris has been working for WICKED all along. And Brenda. And Jorge. And, uh..., it seems that WICKED can control anyone wherever they like as long as they have the control chips inserted into their brains. Naturally, this makes Thomas suffer from a very serious trust issue for the rest of the series.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, Longeau, Karyl's loudest opponent in the Garden's Council, is actually a mole of Brokenheart knights, who seek to destroy the Garden. He claims he does that to avoid Fate Worse than Death.
• In The Girl from the Miracles District, it eventually turns out that one of the Bears is spying on the rest and at one point puts them into Forced Sleep so that the villains can kill Nikita. As he explains in his Motive Rant, he never intended to have the Bears hurt and only wants Nikita dead because he holds her responsible for his father's death.
• Played With in River of Teeth. After they are attacked by a feral hippo outside of the Harriet, Archie proposes the possibility to Adelia that the crew may have a mole among them. The natural suspect to turn to is Cal Hotchkiss, since he'd been working for Travers until recently and could have been threatened by Travers into providing him with information. But it turns out that Adelia Reyes has been the mole all along, having been payed by Travers to not only reveal the crews plans but also to kill them all should the need arise.
• Villains by Necessity: Robin, who's been sent to join the heroes as a spy for Mizzamir.
• In A New Kind of War by Anthony Price, Frederick Clinton's counter-intelligence unit has the kind of trouble that has to mean there's a mole; a particularly troubling situation in that all his officers were hand-picked and have passed rigorous background checks. It turns out to be none of the officers, but Colonel Colbourne's trusted assistant, Sergeant Levin.
• Near the climax of Dreadnought!, Piper's friend Merete reveals that she is one of Rittenhouse's loyalists, and Piper realizes that certain things that happened during the book are due to Merete subtlely tipping off Rittenhouse and his people. However, Piper is able to talk Merete out of her loyalty to Rittenhouse through a combination of helping her realize that he's manipulated her from the start and the obvious truth of Rittenhouse and his cronies trying to destroy the ship they're on. The clincher is when an attack causes an explosion that badly injures Merete just as she's about to hand Piper her phaser.
• Gatling: In Border War, part of Gatling's mission becomes uncovering the British agent planted within the metis ranks.
• Star Wars Legends: Ulic Qel-Droma started out as one keeping tabs on the Dark Side. The Dark Side being the Dark Side, however, he can't keep up the charade.
• In Star Wars: Razor's Edge, one of Leia's crew is an Imperial agent, having leaked coordinates for where her ship, the Gamble, would be receiving a transmission to the Empire. When the Gamble escapes the resulting ambush, he spends the rest of the story looking for another opportunity to bring the Empire down on them. Leia and Han would have a much tougher time of things if he was better at his job.
• The Traveler's Gate: Leah was sent to Myria to search for the prophesized Elysian Traveler. Or rather, she was sent out to live on her own because that's a royal tradition, and they decided to have her look for the Elysian at the same time just in case he turned out to be real. Leah actually identified Alin in her first few hours in the village, but eventually dismissed him because he wasn't having any contact with the rebels. The truth is he hadn't come into his powers yet and was completely unaware of his destiny; Leah is rather embarrassed when she finds out how much she messed up.
• In the Xandri Corelel novel Failure to Communicate, the ambassador Marco Antilles turns out to be a member of the Last Hope for Humanity, trying to sabotage the alliance between the humans and the Anmerilli.
• Isaac Asimov's "Let's Get Together": Breckenridge, a spy for "Our" side, has brought back evidence that "They" have Deceptively Human Robots who have been used to Kill and Replace ten of "Our" citizens. They have explosives inside that would allow them to take out part of a city if they're allowed to get together.
• In The Mouse Watch, the team's Robot Buddy Candroid casually reveals that a R.A.T.S. agent has infiltrated the titular Heroes "R" Us organization. Protagonist Bernie Skampersky, a Troubled Sympathetic Bigot mouse who's prejudiced against rats, immediately suspects Jarvis Slinktail (the group's first rat recruit) and is not shy about repeatedly accusing him. She's wrong — the traitor is another mouse. Cue Jerkass Realization, heartfelt apology, and Character Development.
• All loose ends are tied up at the end of James Thurber's The 13 Clocks when the Wicked Duke's spy Hark reveals himself to be a faithful servant of Good King Gwain of Yarrow, sent to watch over Princess Saralinda: turns out the Duke wasn't really her uncle - he kidnapped her from her real parents, the King and Queen of Yarrow. The Duke grumbles that such a tidy ending makes him sick.
• The titular assassin of The Day of the Jackal is hired because the organisation plotting de Gaulle's death is so full of Action Service infiltrators that its head is confident of the loyalty of only two others.
• In Elvenborn, due to his impressive knowledge of tactics and ingenious training methods the reclusive young Kyrtian V'dyll Lord Prastaran is placed in charge of the Elvenlords' side of a civil war instigated by the hated half-human Wizards. Not only would House Prastaran probably be destroyed root and branch if the High Council even had a hint of their attitudes toward human-elven relationships, but by the last fourth of the book he is in active collaboration with the 'Halfbloods'.
• Forever and a Death: Curtis's employee Mark is feeding Jerry and his environmental protestors information about his projects.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars: In The Chessman of Mars, a character suddenly comes to Turan and Tara's aid, and reveals that he was one of the Gathol slaves held captive there.
• In the Robert A. Heinlein novella Magic, Inc., one of the Demons of Hell turns out to be an undercover Secret Service agent. In another novella, Coventry, "Fader" McGee is another Secret Service agent.
• G. K. Chesterton subverts the hell out of this trope in The Man Who Was Thursday: the protagonist himself infiltrates the Central Council of Anarchists, then gradually discovers that the other five members of the Central Council of Anarchists are undercover police agents who aren't aware of each other's existence; he learns this as he confronts one member after another. Eventually the six join forces against the President of the Council, only to learn that he is the policeman who sent them all to infiltrate the council in the first place. Not to mention God.
• The protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night. Sucks for him that the good guys he helped won't admit what he did after the war ends (not that it would have eased his conscience much if they did). After they finally do admit that he was working for them, averting his impending death sentence, he hangs himself out of guilt over what he did anyway.
• In the second half of the Sherlock Holmes novella The Valley of Fear, the protagonist turns out to be an undercover Pinkerton detective.
• In the Space Marine Battles novel Malodrax, Kraegon Thul’s mysterious alien lieutenant Karnak is revealed to be an agent of the Inquisition who worked his way up to a position of power so that he could kill Thul if the chance presented itself. He covertly enables Lysander to escape from captivity, and later entrusts him with a poisoned dagger that can kill Thul.
• The plot of one of the first spy novels, Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, ends with this revelation, via a cameo appearance by George Washington.
• Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town: Agent Gallup's ultimate plan is to send Jim Hopper into the Vipers to find out what the leader's ultimate plan is.
• Words of Radiance (second book of The Stormlight Archive): Shallan uses her illusion powers to infiltrate the Ghostbloods, who had killed her mentor Jasnah, as far as she knew. When they find out, they see nothing wrong with it. "Let Shallan Davar be a Radiant, conformist and noble. Let Veil come to us. And let her find truth." This is all complicated significantly by the fact that the Ghostbloods members include several worldhoppers, and it is totally unclear what their actual goal is on Roshar. Shalan assumes they're bad guys, but everything they ask her to do is directly in-line with what she is trying to accomplish anyways.
• In Warrior Cats, Ivypool becomes one of these after she learns that the Dark Forest, a place where she is training, is plotting to destroy the clans. She stays with the Dark Forest so that she can give their information to Jayfeather, Lionblaze and Dovewing. Also spying on the Dark Forest isTigerheart.
• Richard Adams book Watership Down details how Bigwig allowed himself to be captured by a Wide Patrol and taken to the oppressive warren called Efrafa. There, he's interrogated by the Big Bad General, who learns that Bigwig is a refugee from humans. The General makes Bigwig a junior officer based on his size, to badger and bully lesser rabbits into compliance. Bigwig manages to contact a leader of La Résistance, and devises a plan for a mass escape that would bring many fertile females to Hazel's all-male warren.
• Whateley Universe: The Necromancer's Children of the Night had one: Vamp, who likes to think she's the Femme Fatale.
• The Wheel of Time's Verin. For those who haven't read The Gathering Storm, she joined the Black Ajah (Aes Sedai in service to the Dark One) to study them and gathered every scrap of information about them. She then found a loophole in the oath she made to the Dark One (serve until the hour of my death) and poisoned herself so she could give all the information to Egwene before dying. Her warder, Tomas, was also a Darkfriend.
• In Andy Hoare's White Scars novel Hunt for Voldorius, Malya, forced to serve as Voldorius' equerry, sends information to his foes.
• The Witch of Knightcharm:
  • Emily, who originally attended a Wizarding School called Knightcharm Academy, tries to be this after she 'defects' to Knightcharm's evil counterpart The Scholomance. Her ultimate aim is to undermine the Scholomance by stealing back some powerful magic artifacts, and thus redeem herself for the errors she made at Knightcharm which allowed the bad guys to obtained the artifacts in the first place.
  • Some of the top students at the Scholomance mention rumors that another good witch from Knightcharm infiltrated their school years ago, though they concede there's no evidence to support that theory. They also note that, even if the rumor is true, the infiltrator was probably killed long ago.
• The Place Inside the Storm has Joseph, an autistic man working for TenCat Corp, where he tries to find out which people are going to get the autism-curing brain implant so he can warn them and help them escape.
• Bazil Broketail: The Doom realizes after Thrembode relates a spell which Lessis cast that an agent of the witches is within the Padmasan hierarchy feeding them information on their magic, worrying it deeply.
• The protagonist of Neal Asher’s The Polity novel Gridlinked, Ian Cormac, is introduced having his cover blown as this by the terrorist he's been sleeping with. This establishes his ruthlessness in how willing he is to kill her, as well as his issue of having become too dependent on technology, which is what gave him away.
• In The Secret Life of Kitty Granger, Mr. Pryce's superior, the Old Man, is in league with an organization of Nazis who are planning a False Flag Operation and government takeover.
• Ferals Series: Selina is given the job of befriending Caw and learning of the whereabouts of the other ferals so that Cynthia could ambush them. Subverted as Selina was unaware of her mother's true goals, and joins Caw's group when she learns of Cynthia's Evil Plan.
• The Elemental Trilogy: Aramia in The Immortal Heights joins the heroes on their quest to kill the Bane while secretly carrying a tracer to lure the Bane's forces to them, out of a desire to free her mother.
• Falling With Folded Wings: A big-headed idiot ends up signing a contract with a mysterious outsider to obey all his orders and spy on the colony. There was some mind-control pushing him towards it, but for the most part he's just a giant idiot who stumbled face-first into a trap. He becomes a rabble-rouser, pushing towards an early election to get himself on the council and working to undermine the proper functioning of the colony at every turn. In the end, he has minimal effect; he is found out soon after his betrayal, the attack he orchestrated is defeated via Combat by Champion, and he dies alone in the wilderness after running away.
• Dragonvarld: Someone in the Parliament of Dragons is working with Maristara, the rogue dragon who conquered Seth, and has been eliminating dragons who get too close to the truth. It turns out to be Anora.
• Tempest (2011): The merman Sabyn, who becomes Tempest's trainer in Tempest Unleashed, turns out to be working for Tiamat. He helps her infiltrate Coral Straits, where she destroys much of the town and kills many of the inhabitants, including most of the royal family.
• The Han Solo Trilogy: As part of her work with the Corellian Resistance, Bria goes undercover working as a civilian functionary in an Imperial garrison on Corellia to get intelligence about their troop movements. She's also The Beard to a Moff for the same purpose.

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