Directorate Officer
Intent: To provide the Directorate with guerrilla-like advisory troops and intelligence gatherers
Image Credit: "Sarge" by Steve Hird for MotorStorm Apocalypse (Source: http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-17/msa-sarge.html)
Role: Intelligence, guerrilla warfare
Links: Gir Quee, Directorate, Lantillian Spacers Brotherhood
GENERAL INFORMATION
Unit Name: Directorate Trade Agents
Affiliation: Directorate
Classification: Special Forces
Equipment: fringer street clothing, Massiff Blast Armor, thinsuit, Bantha Modular Load-bearing System, Vornskr Blast Helmet, thermal detonators, various heavy personal weapons commonly found on independent spacers, (typically heavy blaster pistols, flechette launchers, slugthrowers, etc), one light freighter or shuttle per team of 4-8 agents
COMBAT INFORMATION
Availability: Uncommon
Deployment: Minor
Strengths & Weaknesses:
Intelligence Acquisition: Directorate Trade Agent's primary mission is to gather intelligence while posing undercover as free traders, bounty hunters, and other less reputable spacer types. This allows them to access the criminal underworld and neutral information brokers, locals, and other people who would otherwise be inaccessible for a traditional military unit.
Guerrilla Organizers: Directorate Trade Agents undergo training in unconventional warfare, particularly specializing in the ability to recruit and train effective guerrilla movements. These movements can then conduct an almost gang-like type of warfare, carrying out assassinations, industrial sabotage, raids on facilities, and ambushes of enemy personnel before fading away to blend back into the populace.
Limited Combat capability: Directorate Trade Agents do not fair well in conventional fighting because their limited numbers, lack of heavy armor and weapons, and because their training focuses on guerrilla actions, not conventional warfare.
Limited Intelligence gathering: While Trade Agents can access information otherwise unavailable to the Directorate, most of the information they gather is second-hand. They are not suited for infiltration into facilities or for deep cover missions. Because of that, they are unlikely to gather particularly accurate rare or restricted information about specific institutional secrets in the manner that a conventional spy or hacker might acquire.
Description: Following the revelation that the Directorate had managed to entangle itself into a conflict with an unknown and apparently far-reaching criminal syndicate, Gir Quee quietly sequestered some trusted Directorate officers and contacts within the Lantillian Spacer Brotherhood to form a group designed to gather information through underground channels and form and lead local guerrilla movements. This broad concept was tailored both by their foe and their Brotherhood contacts to form the Directorate Trade Agents.
To the public, Directorate Trade Agents appear to be normal freetraders, smugglers, and other common spacer types traveling around on small tramp freighters in small groups. Most of the operatives actually are and continue to be small time independent freighter crews who act as sleeper agents, acting on the behalf on the Directorate only as needed. However, there are a smaller core of agents are actual professional Directorate intelligence operatives who act full-time as agents, using their trading voyages and small time jobs to provide consistent cover as they seek out information and train and/or equip friendly political movements. Regardless of their origin, Directorate Trade Agents have two priorities :gather information and create or suppress guerrilla movements.
Rather than acting as deep cover spies to ferret out dark secrets, Trade Agent teams cover a broader and shallower area of information gathering by casually coming across useful bits of information or negotiating with others (such as crime lords and infochants) to acquire other bits of information. Such contacts may provide them with knowledge about personnel movements, construction, cargo moving through an area, enemy patrol patterns, and local rumors. Directorate Trade Agents also work closely with local guerrilla and political movements, obtaining and transmitting intelligence to and from them. While trade agents can sometimes piece this information together on their own to figure out deeper secrets, most of this information is simply gathered and sent off through a disguised tightbeam transmissions or via couriers to Directorate Intelligence, which then compiles and analyzes this information. Based on this analyses, the Directorate may send in deeper-delving intelligence assets or even military assets.
Directorate Trade Agent teams also train and enable friendly, local political and guerrilla movements. In many instances, their casual intelligence gathering will point them towards friendly local figures, who then they develop special relationships with. Sometimes it's a simple exchange of goods and funds for information and basic civilian actions (attending or not participating in protests), while other times it's more complex and involved. This may mean direct action on the behalf of the trade agent team in either combat (rescuing a prisoner) or support (smuggling items), or even acting as an intermediary through the Directorate with another power. The most involved of these operations involves training and equipping local movements. As travelers with a ship and a host of illegal contacts, trade agents often have little difficulty smuggling in potential contraband, such as weapons and armors, to these movements. Some of this contraband may be produced by Directorate companies, while other items may have different origins. This helps to disguise the Directorate's involvement in these operations while simultaneously allowing them to provide high quality equipment to their allies. As trainers, trade agents do not focus on training their recruits for conventional warfare, but rather broadly cover guerrilla tactics and then on how to apply them to the specific locale and operational needs. As an example of this, agrarian settlers in the outer rim may learn how to conduct hit and fade raids on a local warlord who has 'claimed' their world, whereas a resistance team in the Sith Empire may learn how to sabotage factories and transport infrastructure. But the Trade Agents work isn't wholly offensive either, it may train or equip allied political movements in relatively friendly areas of space as well, such as police, militia, and other irregular fighters who might be forced into conflict with separatists and guerrillas of their own. In these instances, a more “it takes a thief to catch a thief” philosophy is utilized, with actions frequently focused on upsetting relationships between the enemy fighters and their support network.
Because of the nature of their work, Directorate Trade Agent teams are not considered to be tactical combat units by Directorate commanders. Instead, they are viewed as strategic assets that can augment tactical actions by either providing intelligence or mobilizing local allies. In this respect, Directorate Trade Agents are often compared organizationally to the old Alliance Special Operations. Like that group, Directorate Trade Agents have special privileges and access within the Directorate military and to many of its corporate sponsors for supplies and support, though this is often only sparingly used because they are frequently on long-term deployments.
