I’m going to put the disclaimer here in the beginning instead of the end to make sure you don’t miss it: I know very little about any of the stuff I’m about to talk about this month. If it wasn’t something that was voted for, I probably would have written something else this month. There are definitely people who know more about this sort of thing than I do.
That being said, I am going to try my best to cover this topic from a writer’s perspective. It won’t be exhaustive, it won’t be comprehensive, and I’ll probably get things wrong, but I’ll try to cover as much of the basic principles as I can.
Now: clandestine warfare is something which comes packaged with its own ready-made narrative dynamics: there’s the suspense of trying to find hidden hostile agents, the mystery of uncovering plots, and the action of foiling those plots or carrying them out to their conclusion. Perhaps as importantly, conflicts between spies, guerillas, and special operatives tend to exist on a more personal and intimate scale than that of mass combat, where fiction can actually mirror reality when it allows individuals to win and lose entire wars through their actions, virtues, and weaknesses. For better or worse, the Francis Walsinghams, Ivan Popovs, and Kim Philbys of our world have changed history through their decisions, and it’s no wonder that we’d want to write stories about their fictional counterparts, especially if we want to keep our stories authentic enough to reality to make them feel grounded.
The primary thing to remember when writing about this stuff is that the inherent suspense of clandestine warfare comes from the fact that the actors in the conflict lack information: they may not know who their real enemies are, what their objectives are, and the means they intend to use to fulfil those objectives. At the same time, the individual agents on the ground might not know what their own organisation’s real intentions or methods are as well. All of this leads to a potential for a massive number of the unanswered questions which serve as the basis of creating suspense. This also means that you have to be really, really careful about when to reveal information to the audience – even more so than with most narratives, because generally speaking once one side is able to figure out enough about the other to act openly, then the conflict is already on its way to being resolved.
This means that in most stories about clandestine warfare, the main objective of the characters is to uncover information one way or another. A spy story (or a counter-insurgency story) is mostly about gathering information, which means if you want to write one, you’re going to have to be confident in your ability not just to write characters or action, but in your ability to portray the processes of uncovering hidden information in a way which makes it seem engaging and consequential. At the same time, you’ll also have to be good at showing characters in the process of hiding information, either through misdirection, lying, or using the resources at their disposal to silence leaks one way or another.
This also means that you probably don’t want to write from the perspective of too many moving parts in your conflict. After all, if two clandestine organisations are facing off against each other, the plot is mostly moved forward by your protagonist on one side figuring out stuff about what the other side (and their own side) are doing. That means if you show off too many perspectives, you’ll also be showing off their methods, the extent of their resources, their ultimate intentions, and who’s actually on their side. That’s probably too much information to be showing if you want to maintain the suspense of your narrative.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should never reveal more information than you have to. Another way to build suspense is through dramatic irony: showing the audience information which the protagonists don’t have. This is a great way of setting up a tragic narrative arc for a character, by making them act according to their assumptions as best as the limited information they know allows, while simultaneously signaling to the audience that this action is likely to create further conflict or even lead to that character’s unfortunate end further down the line. While the suspense of what happens is lost, it’s replaced by the tension of knowing that something terrible is about to happen: the anticipation of watching an imminent train wreck.
And, of course. At the end of any story about clandestine warfare, you’ll still need to make sure your audience understands enough to allow for a satisfying ending. The information which your characters uncover has to have some relevance to the central conflict, and when that central conflict finally turns up, your audience is going to have to have enough context to know what’s at stake and why it’s important that the protagonist wins. This is part of the reason a lot of spy stories (among others) will have the antagonist exposit their plans at the protagonist, usually when the protagonist is at their mercy. That’s why the old standby trope of “Bond Villain Stupidity“, where the antagonist traps the protagonist, tells them their plans, and then leaves them in a position to escape is such a common standby in the first place: it’s a convenient way to make the protagonist (and the audience) listen, while still giving that protagonist the chance to set up properly for the final confrontation involving the stakes which have just been explained.
But it’s a long path to that confrontation, and the organisations which mark the path to that final end – be it a glamourous showdown between hero and villain, a sordid exchange of revelations and secrets, or a high-stakes raid on the enemy’s strategic weak point – all have multiple parts, ones which all could make the centrepieces of a good story.
For the sake of clarity, I’m going to refer to these three parts as the Spy, the Spymaster, and the Assassin.
The Spy is the one who gathers the information, their primary objective is not to get caught, which means that they often live as unobtrusively as possible. While it is entirely possible for a particularly blinkered or incompetent counterintelligence agency to simply allow an obvious spy to keep operating (Kim Philby was promoted to high rank within MI5 due to his connections and birth, despite the fact that he was more or less an open Marxist-Leninist the whole time), most competent spies don’t push their luck so hard. There’s plenty of interesting stories to be told following the perspective of the spy, but it’s very often a perspective which tries to avoid anything flashy, dramatic, or violent. It’s certainly a different kind of story from the one which usually gets marketed as “spy fiction”.
The information the Spy is able to gather gets sent up to their handler, or from there to that handler’s superior, the Spymasters. These are the characters who take the information and turn it into something which can be used. They could be plotting in a basement in enemy territory, in an analysis room in some hidden black site, or even in lavish, well-appointed offices somewhere in the capital city of the country their agency serves. Usually, there aren’t all that many stories about these folks, if only because they serve as sort of a middle step in the process of intelligence gathering and exploitation. In particular, they’re the ones who take the information gathered, and find a way to exploit it. Usually, they’re the face on the other end of the line for the Spy, or in other cases, the last kind of character.
The Assassin is the figure we usually think of when we think spies in popular fiction. These are the characters who are given the information gathered by the Spy, and instructions on how to exploit that information by the Spymaster. Usually, in fiction, this means they go out and kill someone. Ideally, they don’t do it in broad daylight with hundreds of witnesses around, but the nature of their job means they generally are more obvious than the actual spies are. Whether it’s a gunman in a tuxedo or a killer in a cheap jacket or a team of special forces operators, these characters are the ones who deliver the most tangible results (usually in the form of explosions and corpses), so are usually the ones relied upon to deliver the most exciting story.
I don’t know how well these taxonomies map to real life. Again, I’m not an expert in this kind of thing, nor do I have any professional background. This is just how I see the process and the people involved in it from the perspective of someone who might want to write stories about them.
In many cases, creators have a story which requires them to mix and match these roles – after all, while this is probably rare in real life, fiction can always bend reality for the sake of a good story. Usually this comes in the shape of a character playing both the role of spy and assassin, with or without the oversight or support of a Spymaster figure. This effectively means that a single character can encompass the entire “process” from intelligence gathering to execution. Likewise, in stories which follow less less-resourced operations (like insurgencies and terrorist cells), this might become a necessity simply because there aren’t enough people around to fulfill each of these roles separately. Do what works for your setting and your story.
Speaking of insurgencies, fighting one adds another dynamic into the mix: unlike the clandestine service of a state, an insurgency recruits from the general population, and does so due to the grievances that common population has against the status-quo. As a result, there’s no real way to repress or assassinate your way out of an insurgency. While targeted violence is often necessary to keep the insurgency from acting or operating effectively, insurgencies actually die when they’re starved of fresh recruits to replace their losses with. This can only really come about when the state opposing them is able to address or render irrelevant those grievances, which means in addition to Spies, Spymasters, and Assassins, you also have to add policymakers and their actions into the mix.
This is an often over-looked part of counterinsurgency in fiction, mostly because raids and gunfights tend to be much more exciting. However, it should be understood that raids and gunfights alone act as a pre-emptive defence against an insurgency, and the only reliable way to kill it (short of killing the population it recruits from) is in the hands of those who seek to understand the insurgent’s grievances, those who figure out a way to address or invalidate them, and those who carry out that policy on the ground. This parallels the Spy-Spymaster-Assassin dynamic I’ve already mentioned, and in many ways, the nature of the work of these characters would be the same. However, these characters will also work openly, which means they possess certain advantages, while also being restrained by certain complications – public opinion at home, for example.
There are interesting stories to be told about that sort of thing, and I hope more of them get written in the future.
Hopefully, that should give you some ideas on how to proceed when it comes to writing about any kind of clandestine warfare. For more specifics, of course, you’d probably have to go to someone with more experience in that sort of thing. I’ve tired my best to impart what I know and what I’ve intuited both from writing espionage subplots and from my own reading elsewhere, but as always, don’t take this as authoritative, it’s not my field of expertise.
Paul Wang 