"Good afternoon, domestic female. We are government agents. May we speak to your husbandry?" She furrows her brow at their Department of Weights and Measures ID cards, then tells them that her husband isn't home. "Could we speak to you, then?" She agrees and stands aside.

The two men turn as if to leave, then walk backwards across the threshold. "Thank you, Ma'am." They busy themselves rifling through her living room, inspecting every mundane object as if it were a lab specimen.

"We understand that your husband thinks he saw a rocket crash, last night. That's good. That's exactly what he saw. A rocket crash and nothing else. Did you see anything, Ma'am?"

Her answer is cut off by a siren shriek that emanates from the other agent's mouth as he stares, agape, at the house cat. He draws something what looks like a caulking gun with a flashlight taped inside and retreats rapidly through the front door.

His partner follows suit. Once they're out of sight, one turns to the other and reports, "I planted the recorder under the vase on the mantel. Now, we wait."

The Neuralyzer ruined the Men in Black. Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie, but the whole point of the MiB is that they behave strangely into order to discredit witnesses. If you can just erase people's memories, why bother? Well, we're gonna bother. This month's article combines the fun and magic of pranking with old school, Cold War espionage to protect America's atomic secrets from commie spies.

Majic Murder Bag

In 1950, counterintelligence is serious business. The Soviets just detonated their first nuke and now the race for the H-bomb is on. Klaus Fuchs recently confessed to passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. Alger Hiss was accused of espionage and the Rosenburgs were found guilty of same. McCarthyism is on the rise. To many Americans, it seems like there's a red spy under every bed.

The US military does have more than its share of secrets. They're working on tactical nuclear weapons, cutting edge jet propulsion technology, and high-altitude balloons designed to monitor the Soviet Union for nuclear detonations. On February 13th, a B-36 bomber carrying a (simulated) nuclear bomb is lost over Canada; the first "broken arrow." Plus, there's the war in Korea to worry about.

Notice how I didn't mention aliens. Not once. The reason is simple: there are no aliens, no UFOs, no cover-up. It's all part of an Air Force counter-intelligence program to discredit witnesses and lure foreign operatives into the open. An elite team of field assets has been authorized to carry out this program on US soil; they have no official name, but internal documents sometimes use the term "Majic 12." The public will eventually dub them "Men In Black.

Spy Games

The men and women of Majic 12 defend America from two kinds of threats: accidental breaches of security and incursions by foreign spy networks. When an experimental aircraft, weapon, or surveillance device gets into the open, the cover-up operation is all Majic. They fake UFO sightings and alien encounters to distract the public. They leak forged documents and false eye witness accounts to the press. They harass real witnesses with their signature brand of bizarre behavior: maniacal laughter, walking backwards into buildings, pretending not to know how light switches work, wearing short stilts to appear unnaturally tall... there's an informal competition between agents to see who can come up with the most bizarre gimmicks.

In fact, that competition should be the driving force behind much of your Wushu Skidoo session. Treat the cover-up as a mook: assign a Threat Level and let your players riff up details until they're ready to roll. These can be technical details of how to fake a UFO, role-playing their way through a witness interrogation, or any other component of the cover-up. When the Threat reaches zero, America's secrets are safe.

Such theatrics won't fool serious spies, of course, but they're not supposed to. Majic 12 uses these operations to lure foreign operatives into the open. It might be a reporter who shows too much interest in the wrong things, a bureaucrat acting outside his jurisdiction, or even one of the military personnel who was responsible for the initial breach. Once an operative is identified, Majic 12 may try to turn him into a double agent, feed him disinformation, or simply track him back to his handler and dismantle the whole spy network. This is real counterintelligence work and it requires real tradecraft

Tradecraft

Whether you handle enemy spies as Nemeses or mooks, most of your details should come from grounded, real world spy crap: dead drops, concealment devices, one-time pads, cut-outs, car tosses, brush passes, etc. Make sure both and you and your players know their tradecraft before you begin. I recommend the following Wikipedia articles: Counter-intelligence, Clandestine HUMINT, and the various articles listed under Tradecraft. Feel free to mix in more of the MiB hijinks described above, but it just isn't a spy game without tradecraft.

There are two other classics to add to Wikipedia's list:

• Car Toss - Exactly what it sounds like. An agent literally tosses a communication into a vehicle as it drives past, waits at a stoplight, or whatever.

• Brush Pass - Handing off a message while walking past or bumping into another agent, switching identical bags or brief cases while sitting on a park bench or riding the subway. It takes coordination, but it's very difficult to spot when it's done well

Knowing this stuff is especially important for the GM, since they'll be concocting the enemy spy network on the fly. I'd come to the table with some clever dead drops and concealment devices in mind. You only need a few; once your players trace their way back to the agent's handler, the rest of the spy network is easy pickin's.

Here's a quick example...

Jason Balmer is a tabloid photojournalist, adrenaline junkie, and repressed egomaniac. He fancies himself an international spy, because an old friend occasionally asks him to take pictures of military bases and classified documents. He's perfect for investigating supposed UFO sightings; his sleazy rag will publish anything.

He passes rolls of undeveloped film to his friend by placing them in a dead drop spike, which he leaves in the ground at a park or some other public place. He determines the time and place for these drops and notifies his friend via a coded message in the classifieds section of his paper.

The old friend is a defector-in-place who's been building his own spy network for a couple of years. He works for the U.S. State Department, where he has been passed over for promotion more times than he cares to count. This defector plans to retire to a non-extradition country some day soon, and has been promised an embarrassingly large amount of money by his foreign patron. More likely than not, he'll be liquidated once his cover is blown.

The defector communicates with his handler via a brush pass or car toss with a courier. This cut-out is a diplomat with the foreign embassy. Since he has diplomatic immunity, intercepting him covertly will require some kind of clever shenanigans. Be creative.

For added complexity, make one or both steps in the chain a false flag operation. For example, the photojournalist could think he's working for England, which is just trying to maintain a balance of power with the U.S. In fact, his old friend works for the Soviets. Or the defector may think he's a Russian collaborator, when his handler is actually a French spymaster with assets in the Russian embassy. Wheels within wheels make the world go 'round.

In any case, you should always make sure that some part of all this quiet spy crap gets loud and messy, so the players need to dip into their Majic 12 bag o' tricks. They could get caught hijacking a car with diplomatic plates, taking surveillance photos of a U.S. diplomat, etc. Otherwise, all of the MiB pranking fun will be concentrated in the beginning of your session

Pick Me Ups

Whether or not the Broken Arrow was a live nuke, it was certainly a potential embarrassment for the U.S. Air Force. Majic 12 is dispatched to identify and neutralize anyone who may have witnessed the bomb's aerial detonation and the place crash. Likely suspects include a survey team employed by the Aluminum Company of Canada (scouting locations for what will later become the town of Kitimat), the local First Nation tribe, and any fishing vessels that were in Queen Charlotte Sound that night. Canadian and Russian assets will be hot on their heels, eager to recover any fragment of a nuclear weapon.

Espionage isn't rocket science, but rocket science is definitely espionage. Rocket experiments in the New Mexico desert are a constant security challenge for Majic 12, which has a permanent office at Area 51. Covering up all the bright lights and loud noises requires weekly witness discrediting missions, which also attract foreign intelligence assets. This is the perfect scenario to trot out the example spy network described above.

In counterintelligence, as in all things, the best defense is a good offense. Majic 12 is conducting a mole hunt in the Washington D.C. suburbs, faking alien encounters in order to draw out foreign spies. It works like a charm and, soon, the agents are mapping out your spy network of choice. Unfortunately, some of the locals are taking the whole "alien invasion" thing too seriously and, right when the agents are ready to spring their trap, teams of paranoid war vets start jumping out of the woodwork

Next Up: The horror of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Chambers gets the Planescape treatment!