The fog rolled off the Thames like it had secrets to keep. Jack Calloway sat in a half-empty diner tucked between a tube station and a butcher shop that hadn’t changed hands since Churchill. The kind of place where the tea came black, strong, and indifferent—just like the waitress who brought it.
He wasn’t here for the tea.
Across from him sat a man whose face you forget the moment he walks away. Let’s call him Eddie Reilly—not his real name.
“They made you in Havana,” his friend from MI5 muttered.
Jack didn’t flinch.
“Let ‘em try. That was five names and three passports ago.”
“But they’re talking,” Eddie Reilly said, tapping ash into a saucer. “The Cubans. The Russians. Even the Chinese. They’re comparing notes. And your prints are starting to rhyme.”
Jack sighed, rubbing the stubble on his chin.
“So they’re doing what we don’t.”
The Brit smirked, but there was no humor in it.
Reilly had broken the rules by telling him what his own people would not tell him. In the Cone of Uncertainty many times you are the last to know the truth about were you stand.
Jack knew the game. American intelligence played it like poker: closed hands, bad bluffs, and no sharing of chips. The CIA didn’t trust the FBI. The FBI barely tolerated Homeland. NSA wouldn’t share a breadcrumb unless it was wrapped in encryption and stamped Top Secret.
He remembered when the Arizona flight school memo hit desks years back. Middle Eastern men wanting to learn how to take off—but not land. That memo got passed around like a cold. Nobody read it. And nobody said anything.
“The towers fell,” Jack muttered. “But nobody lost their clearance.”
Jack drained his cup and stood. Fog pressed against the windows like a thief testing locks. Outside, the rain was fine but constant, misting the yellow glow of the streetlamps and hissing off the cobbles.
He didn’t notice the figure right away.
Two blocks in, he caught the echo—footsteps syncing too perfectly with his own. Too practiced. Jack took a left down an alley by a bookshop and listened.
The sound followed.
“You’re either brave or stupid,” he said aloud without turning around.
Silence.
He ducked behind a delivery van, boots silent on the slick stone. When the figure passed—a tall man in a charcoal coat—Jack stepped out of the shadows.
“You lost, mate?”
The man froze. Jack pressed the flat of a knife against his coat.
“Let me guess,” Jack said, voice low. “You’re not MI6. You’re not FSB. But you’ve been in a room with both.”
The man said nothing.
“Tell whoever sent you that Jack Calloway doesn’t play guessing games. He plays to win.”
Jack disappeared back into the London night, the kind of silhouette the fog welcomed like an old friend. Behind him, the city kept breathing—lights flickering, secrets shuffling from one alley to the next.
The agencies still weren’t talking.
But Jack was.
Two days later, Jack was back in Central London, but this time not in a diner. He was in the shadows of St. James’s Park, pacing the edge of a bench with a thermos in one hand and bait in the other.
The bait wasn’t fish.
It was a USB drive with a falsified transcript of a Russian mole embedded in GCHQ—just real enough to scare the Brits, just vague enough to spark American paranoia. It was the kind of document that could start a turf war or shut one down—depending on who saw it first.
Jack made sure both sides did.
He emailed it to a junior liaison at MI6, a woman too green to sit on it. Then he dropped an anonymous package through the back door of the U.S. Embassy, labeled:
“Read this before Langley does.”
The storm took only hours to start.
By midnight, MI6 and CIA operatives were facing each other in a private room below a fake antiques shop in Mayfair—one of Jack’s safehouses. It smelled like books and dust and betrayal.
Jack sat in the center of the room, feet up on a tea crate, watching both sides squirm.
“You son of a—” the CIA man started.
Jack held up a hand.
“Before you say something you’ll regret—and I record—let me be clear: this wasn’t for fun.”
“You risked a diplomatic disaster!” the MI6 woman snapped.
“No,” Jack said. “I created an opportunity.”
He leaned forward, voice low.
“You two have been playing telephone with blindfolds. Russia, China, Cuba—they’re trading intel like football cards. Meanwhile, you two can’t even agree on what you’re not telling each other.”
Jack slid two real files across the table—intel neither agency had. One from Havana. One from Minsk.
“You want more?” he asked. “Then you work together. Not because your bosses told you to, but because if you don’t, the other side wins.”
The door creaked open. And there she was—Ariel. Petite, deadly, and unforgettable. Mossad’s finest, and the last person anyone expected. Jack just smiled.
Jack said, ‘The Gang is all here’
There was a long silence. A shifting of weight. A crack in the armor.
“So,” Jack said, standing, “consider this my gift. My price?”
“There’s always a price,” the CIA man said bitterly.
“Just this,” Jack replied, slipping on his coat. “Next time someone like me sends you a warning—read it.”
Jack said, ” If I go down, you all go down”
He left them in that room, surrounded by their own egos and the slow, creeping realization that the only ghost they couldn’t track… was the one forcing them to talk.
Outside, London was still wet. Still cold. Still silent.
But for once, the agencies weren’t. It wasn’t magic. It was math.
Jack didn’t believe in luck—only in leverage. And he knew exactly what pressure points to press in both agencies, because he’d installed most of them himself.
He knew they’d come for one simple reason: no one wants to be the one who didn’t show up.
He’d learned that back in Kandahar, when two rival warlords received the same fake tip that the Americans were coming. Neither wanted to believe it—but neither dared stay home. They both showed up with their militias at the same crossroads, and Jack watched the whole thing unfold from a rooftop with a thermos and a sniper rifle he never had to fire.
Same game. Different map.
See, Jack knew MI6 would bite because of Charlotte—the “junior liaison” he sent the email to.
She wasn’t green. She was his plant, years in the making. He’d once pulled her out of a bad situation in Istanbul when she was still an analyst—gave her a new name, a clean file, and a reason to owe him.
As for the Americans? That was easier. The embassy has a dozen points of entry—but only one where the new digital surveillance gear hadn’t been updated. Jack made sure of that two months ago, when he posed as a telecom repairman and swapped a junction chip with one he’d customized.
He knew who picked up the package, and how fast it would be logged—and how quickly Langley would get wind of it and panic.
“They always come when they think the other side might learn something first,” Jack said to himself, watching the Mayfair windows from across the street.
He took a sip of lukewarm tea and smiled.
“Spies don’t fear enemies. They fear being the last to know.”
That’s how he knew. That’s why it worked. And that’s why, when Jack walked away that night, he didn’t need to look back.
He already knew what they were saying in that room.
Because he wrote the script. Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result
🔍 The Cone of Uncertainty in Reverse
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The “cone of uncertainty”, typically used in forecasting (e.g. hurricanes), is here repurposed to describe anonymity in covert operations.
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When you start operating anonymously, you’re at the wide end of the cone—many places to hide.
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But as operations increase across different regions (e.g., Russia, Cuba, Ecuador, etc.), patterns emerge.
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Eventually, your anonymity narrows—foreign governments start sharing information, connecting the dots.
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Individually, countries may not be able to track you, but collectively, they can. You leave Breadcrumbs no matter what you do, you meet people. If you meet them twice you are made.
Oh this is going to make this popular… LOL…
|
Agency Name |
Country | Primary Mission | Approximate Number of Agents | Domestic Focus | Estimated Annual Budget (USD, B) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) | United States | Foreign intelligence and covert operations | 20000 | No | 15.0 |
| Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) | United States | Domestic intelligence and law enforcement | 35000 | Yes | 10.0 |
| National Security Agency (NSA) | United States | Signals intelligence and cybersecurity | 30000 | No | 11.0 |
| Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) | United States | Military intelligence | 16500 | No | 3.0 |
| National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) | United States | Geospatial intelligence | 14500 | No | 4.0 |
| National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) | United States | Satellite reconnaissance | 3000 | No | 3.0 |
| MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) | United Kingdom | Foreign intelligence | 3200 | No | 3.5 |
| MI5 (Security Service) | United Kingdom | Domestic security and counterintelligence | 4000 | Yes | 2.8 |
| Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) | United Kingdom | Signals intelligence and cybersecurity | 5900 | No | 2.5 |
| Mossad | Israel | Foreign intelligence and covert operations | 7000 | No | 3.0 |
| Shin Bet (Shabak) | Israel | Internal security and counterterrorism | 5000 | Yes | 1.5 |
| Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) | Pakistan | Military and foreign intelligence | 10000 | No | 2.0 |
| Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) | India | Foreign intelligence | 8000 | No | 2.0 |
| Intelligence Bureau (IB) | India | Domestic intelligence and security | 25000 | Yes | 1.8 |
| Ministry of State Security (MSS) | China | Foreign and domestic intelligence | 100000 | No | 7.0 |
| Federal Security Service (FSB) | Russia | Domestic security and counterintelligence | 200000 | Yes | 10.0 |
| Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) | Russia | Foreign intelligence | 13000 | No | 5.0 |
| Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) | Russia | Military intelligence | 15000 | No | 8.0 |
| Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) | Germany | Foreign intelligence | 6500 | No | 1.5 |
| Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) | Germany | Domestic security and counterintelligence | 3000 | Yes | 1.2 |
| Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) | France | Foreign intelligence | 5000 | No | 1.8 |
| Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI) | France | Domestic security and counterintelligence | 3500 | Yes | 1.3 |
| General Intelligence Directorate (GID) | Jordan | National security and intelligence | 10000 | Yes | 1.2 |
| Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) | Australia | Foreign intelligence | 1500 | No | 0.5 |
| Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) | Australia | Domestic security and counterintelligence | 2000 | Yes | 0.8 |
| Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) | Canada | National security and intelligence | 3000 | Yes | 0.6 |
| Communications Security Establishment (CSE) | Canada | Signals intelligence and cybersecurity | 2500 | No | 0.4 |
| National Intelligence Service (NIS) | South Korea | National security and intelligence | 5000 | Yes | 1.0 |
| General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) | Saudi Arabia | National security and intelligence | 10000 | Yes | 1.5 |
| National Intelligence Organization (MIT) | Turkey | National security and intelligence | 8000 | Yes | 1.2 |
| National Intelligence Agency (NIA) | Nigeria | National security and intelligence | 5000 | Yes | 1.0 |
| Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS / VEVAK) | Iran | Internal security, foreign espionage, counterintelligence | 30000 | Both | 2.5 |
| IRGC Intelligence Organization | Iran | Strategic intelligence and foreign ops | 15000 | Both | 1.5 |
| Directorate of Intelligence (DI) | Cuba | Foreign intelligence and regional espionage | 10000 | Both | 1.2 |
| Ministry of the Interior (MININT) | Cuba | Internal security and political control | 20000 | Yes | 2.0 |
| General Directorate for External Security (DGE) | Algeria | Foreign intelligence and counterterrorism | 5000 | Both | 1.5 |
| National Intelligence Centre (CNI) | Spain | Foreign and domestic intelligence | 3500 | Both | 1.0 |
| State Intelligence Service (SIS) | Egypt | Internal and foreign political security | 10000 | Both | 0.8 |
| State Security Committee (KGB) | Belarus | Domestic and foreign intelligence | 10000 | Both | 1.1 |
| National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) | Colombia | Counterinsurgency and internal intelligence | 2500 | Yes | 0.7 |
| General Directorate for Intelligence (DGI) | Morocco | National security and foreign intelligence | 3000 | Both | 0.5 |
| National Intelligence Directorate (DINE) | Chile | Domestic security and military intelligence | 2000 | Yes | 0.6 |
| National Intelligence Service (EYP) | Greece | Foreign and domestic intelligence | 2000 | Both | 0.6 |
| Military Intelligence Service (VZ) | Czech Republic | Military intelligence | 1000 | No | 0.3 |
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