Spy

"If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it."

– Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri paraphrasing Sun Tzu

"Knowledge is Power."

– Sir Francis Bacon

As long as people have been fighting, people have been trying to fight dirty in order to win. One of the oldest means of which is to use a spy. Or rather a "fucking spy", as literally everyone hates spies, even other spies.

The History of Espionage

Spies aren't new; you can find some in the bible, along with instructions for what you should do to them when you find them.

But the modern art of intelligence gathering owes a great deal to England under Queen Elizabeth. Not thanks to the Queen herself, but rather the extremely talented pool of ministers who were dead set on keeping her alive so they didn't have to deal with a replacement who might turn out to be Catholic. At the center of this web was Francis Walsingham, formerly the English ambassador to France and Elizabeth's Principle Secretary. His partner in crime was Lord Burghley (William Cecil), who served as Secretary of State and later as Lord High Treasurer. The two were absolutely ruthless in executing a policy of keeping Elizabeth on the throne. For over thirty years, Elizabeth dithered about the fate of her half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots. As long as Mary lived, if Elizabeth died without heir, England would return to Catholicism. Establishing a network of hundreds of spies, they sniffed out multiple plots against Elizabeth (most famously by the Duke of Norfolk) until eventually Elizabeth was persuaded to order Mary's execution (an order which she attempted to rescind but Walsingham and Burghley had anticipated her change of heart and moved too quickly to be stopped).

Their interests however were not confined simply to countering conspiracies. Walsingham demanded regular, detailed reports of goings-on from England's continental ambassadors, at a time when ambassadors were mostly expected to simply attend the royal court, and had spies watching his own ambassadors without their knowledge. And he actively encouraged expeditions to investigate the northwestern passage. In his view, all knowledge was power, and everything was in scope, from daily gossip in Paris to accurate maps of the new world to comings and goings of Catholics in English ports.

And as for direct actions, after the Throckmorton Plot the Bond of Association was enacted, allowing Francis's spies to hunt down and assassinate anyone plotting to assassinate the monarch or usurp the throne, wherever they may be. It is unknown how many people were killed in England or beyond under this order, but the basic effect of it was to settle all accounts and get rid of people who'd been problems for decades.

And going even further, this coincided with the first golden age of Piracy. Rather than fighting actual wars, the English simply issued letters of marque and let greedy English captains feast on the Spanish.

Basically all the pieces we consider part of a modern national intelligence operation were present in their government, from counter-intelligence, to mapping and monitoring of enemy activity, to the use of direct action activities as a form of statecraft, to providing assistance to insurgents and criminals as long as they pick the right targets.

Spying as Job

What popular media thinks of as a spy is actually called an operator, and they're quite rare. The normal job of being a spy is simply to be a person in a position to learn things. Throughout history, this generally meant low income people close to people of power; maids, janitors, bartenders, (apostles,) etc. People who hear things and can be bought off. If caught, the only thing they "know" is who their handler is (the person they're selling info to).

Operator as Job

Operators are much more clearly defined. They are almost always members (or former members) of their nation's military. The Geneva Convention isn't too friendly to infiltrators; soldiers caught behind enemy lines out of uniform are liable to be shot on sight to this day. In the US for example, spy plane pilots resign from the military to INCREASE their legal protections should they be shot down in enemy territory, since technically they aren't soldiers.