Imperial Belhavian Intelligence
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| File:IBI.png | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | April 4th, 1946 |
| Preceding agencies | |
| Jurisdiction | File:NB flag in Pardes.png Belhavia |
| Headquarters | Provisa |
| Employees | Classified |
| Annual budget | Classified |
| Agency executives |
|
| Parent agency | Imperial War Ministry |
Imperial Belhavian Intelligence, more commonly called by its acronym IBI, is the primary foreign intelligence agency of the Empire of Belhavia. The headquarters of the IBI are in the Government District of Provisa.
In contrast to the Department of Internal Security and Enforcement (DISE), the IBI is responsible for external intelligence and espionage activities. This includes all forms of intelligence-gathering, in particular gaining strategic (socio-political-economic and diplomatic) intelligence on foreign nations, gathering information on military developments overseas, coordinating actions to counter terrorism, and working with the Imperial Special Operations Force (ISOF) in conducting black operations.
The IBI works in cooperation with the Imperial Armed Forces' Military Intelligence Division. It is also authorized to coordinate counter-terrorist actions and intelligence-sharing arrangements with foreign intelligence agencies. In addition, it provides analysis of collected intelligence and circulates that information to the President and His Majesty the Emperor.
The IBI has faced controversy for its use of overseas targeted killings and assassinations.
History
Founding
The IBI was created in the aftermath of the fall of the Galarian Autocracy. The agency's predecessor, His Majesty's Imperial Intelligence Service, functioned as both a foreign and domestic intelligence and state security apparatus. It was co-opted under General Zachary Galarian as a tool of repression against malcontents and dissidents.
With the fall of Galarian in the Stein Coup, the HMIIS was abolished without a successor organization. A year later, the President proposed and the Provisional Assembly passed the Foreign Intelligence Reorganization Act of 1946, bifurcating intelligence efforts between foreign and domestic: foreign intelligence would be handled by the new agency (initially called National Belhavian Intelligence, which was later renamed to Imperial following the 1949 Imperial Restoration) while domestic intelligence was concentrated in the nascent Department of Internal Security and Enforcement (DISE).
Cold War
The IBI grew rapidly in size, budget, and scope during the global Cold War involving contention between the nations of the Free World and Communist World powers such as Tule and the DSRA. During this so-called "cold conflict," the IBI was on the front line in aiding resistance movements and anti-communist rebels against hostile and leftist-oriented regimes.
Less than a year after its founding, the NBI intervened into the Estovnian Revolution (1946 - 1948) with covert operations such as Operation Blue Scarf. The IBI started to grow its intelligence network globally by the early 1950s, leading joint and allied espionage and counter-espionage operations against Otterup Pact member-states as well as Belhavian expatriate antigovernment groups such as the Belhavian Democratic Liberation Front, a terrorist group that emerged in 1982.
Post-Cold War
After the fall of the DSRA and most of the Communist World, the IBI turned its activities increasingly against anti-CDI antagonists, such as PECA and its successor, RCO member-states such as Rodarion, Tarsas, and Ulthrannia despite long-standing favorable bilateral ties between Belhavia and some of the leading RCO powers.
Since the mid-2000s, the IBI has fought more frequent and sophisticated Rodarian cyber-attacks and growing Ulthrannic expansion into South Ashizwe.
Organization
The IBI is headed by the Director of Imperial Intelligence, a presidential appointee that must be confirmed by the Imperial Senate. By convention and practice, the IBI director is either an experienced agency insider or a retired military commander of note. The agency's headquarters are located in the Government District, Provisa.
The Director oversees and directs the IBI. Its current head is Evan DeWeese. Under the Director, the agency is organized by "desk" - which can be a geographic location (the Taveria Desk) or specific operational duties (the Covert Operations Desk). The number of "desks" remains classified, but former IBI agents have said anywhere from 12 to 18 desks exist.
Operations
Espionage doctrine
The senior officer of the IBI organization in a nation is known as the station chief. He usually has an official cover as a senior diplomat of a Belhavian embassy, however, in some contexts, the local IBI contingent is detached from the embassy. His identity is usually disclosed to the host nation if relations are friendly, or kept secret if relations are cold or hostile.
Under the station chief's supervision are "agents", who are the primary actors in HUMINT operations and intelligence-gathering. Their primary task is to recruit and subsequently handle "informants."
In a scenario where an agent is implicated or detained by foreign authorities during his operations, the agent is usually protected by diplomatic immunity and that individual is declared persona non grata and deported by the foreign authorities in question. In more rare cases, especially black book operations, agents who refuse to acknowledge their status as employees of IBI are imprisoned by foreign authorities detaining them.
Functions
- Intelligence gathering: The primary general role of the IBI is to collect information and extract intelligence from it for use in the offensive and defensive protection of Belhavia and its interests, policies, and national goals. This includes, broadly, the collection, analysis, evaluation, classification, and dissemination of foreign intelligence, and the performance of covert actions to retrieve and in reaction to such intelligence.
- Offensive intelligence: The pro-active "offensive" covert actions to gather and react to intelligence. This includes activities such as espionage, psychological warfare, assassinations, targeted killings, subversion, extraordinary renditions, sabotage, enhanced interrogation techniques, and the covert funding and training of foreign allies.
- Counter-intelligence: The "defensive" counterintelligence actions to counter foreign intelligence efforts against Belhavia. These include infiltration of opposing foreign intelligence services to gain information on their intelligence collection capacities, thwarting efforts of opposing services to do the same to the IBI and other government bodies, and to manipulate these expected foreign actions through double agents and disinformation.
Relationship with the DISE
Being sister organizations organized and created at the same time by the Foreign Intelligence Reorganization Act of 1946, both DISE and IBI often cooperate on matters of shared importance, though they have clashed on jurisdictional lines commonly as well. Initially created by purposefully divvying up the domestic and foreign intelligence and security duties that had been granted to their predecessor, His Majesty's Imperial Intelligence Service, owing to much abuse of its state security-like powers during the Galarian years.
During the escalation of the early Cold War in the 1950s, the IBI and DISE started to coordinate more closely on national security matters.
With the rise of foreign-aided domestic leftist terror groups as well as some far right political violence in the 1960s, the IBI and DISE teamed up in so-called "Special Joint Task Forces" on matters that intersected both organization's jurisdictions, to defeat the unlawful activity. Since then, the two organizations have created permanent "Joint Task Forces" on interrelated matters.
Since the 1980s, they have teamed up often on targeted killing of authorized targets by the President of Belhavia under the Overseas Combatants Act.
Major operations
- Operation Blue Scarf (1947): The successful assassination of high-ranking Solidarity Front leader Eðvar Arnbörgssán during the Estovnian Revolution in March 1947 during a revolutionary rally near the Esto-Belhavian border.
- Defeat of the attempted attack on the 1956 Civitas Tarsae Summit (1956): The IBI was tipped off to a planned terrorist attack on the Civitas Tarsae Summit in early January 1956 finalizing the agreements to form the World Council. Working with local Tarsan security forces and Arthuristan SIB operatives, IBI operatives intercepted Emmerian anti-globalist far right and paleolibertarian activist Rashid Diya and his confederates and killed or apprehended all but one of them and their weapons and explosives. The last terrorist was found two days later dead, purportedly at the behest of the Tarsan criminal cyndicates.
- Assassination of Gong Jung-hoon (1978): The IBI reportedly assassinated Anikatian Ministry of State Security operative Gong Jung-hoon in April 1978. He was dispatched by the DSRA to instigate communist terrorism in the Belhavian crown territory of New Shelvoy. The event sparked the subsequent April 17 Incident.
- Assassination of Howard Lifshitz (1987): The IBI orchestrated the targeted killing of fugitive Belhavian communist insurgent leader Howard Lifshitz in Goredemabwa in June 1987 in the midst of the South Ashizwe Border War as he aided local Goredemabwan communists in their war effort. This was allegedly in retaliation for his assistance to the BDLF in its 1985 bombing of the Belhavian embassy in Loweport, Arthurista.
Relationships with foreign intelligence agencies
In popular culture
Fictional depictions of the IBI exist in many books, films and video games. Some fiction draws, at least in parts, on actual historical events, while other works are entirely fictional.
The popular cultural hit film and television series Asher Frum glamorizes a fictional IBI secret agent named Asher "Ash" Frum who is "cool," sophisticated, deadly, and a prolific womanizer. The Frum series has achieved worldwide fame and celebrity, and has indirectly presented a more positive image of the intelligence agency both in Belhavia and abroad.
In 1983, edgy Anikatian tabloid magazine Munhwa Weekly controversially accused the Romulan Catholic Pope of being a secret Belhavian Jewish IBI spy. The 1989 critically acclaimed film Orange Sunset portrays a loosely-accurate story based on true events descripting several IBI agents whose intelligence operations aided Belhavian security forces in the July 1987 multi-city pacification campaign bringing a final, but bloody, end to the Urban Enclave Crisis.
Several DSRA-era films in Anikatia portrayed the IBI as an insidious, cruel, and ruthless enemy bent on the destruction of the Anikatian state through any means necessary, even mass murder.
In 2011, a Rodarian spy thriller L'ultimo Violet (The Last Violent), which portrays a fictional near-future nightmare scenario where Rodarion and the CDI are at war, has a character who plays a sympathetic Rodarian Jewish IBI operative who assists the main character, a gruff but noble Rodarian ISI agent, in defeating an Arthuro-Belfrasian ploy to detonate a nuclear weapon in Romula and end the war.