Feed The Mole / Live-Action TV

Feeding the Mole in Live-Action TV series.

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• Andor: In the Season 1 finale, Mon Mothma takes advantage of the fact that her driver is an ISB mole by having a conversation in hearing range of him about her husband's gambling problem, which provides a legitimate explanation for the money missing from her accounts (which she'd actually been funneling to the emergent Rebellion).
• In Ashes to Ashes (2008), Hunt and Drake know there is a mole in the department, so they set up a sting, telling each member of the team slightly different information, and then wait to see which one will act on it, revealing themselves in the process. Heartbreakingly, it turns out to be Chris.
• Subverted in Bionic Woman (2007 remake). Jaime overhears her colleague talking on the phone to an assassin planning to kill an African dictator. Jaime is told to feed him false information on the dictator's movements. This leaves the dictator wide open — instead of following the false information, the assassin is following her original plan as Jaime's colleague isn't in cahoots with the assassin, he's just trying to warn her off (she's a former Love Interest turned Rogue Agent).
• In the final season of Borgen, Nyborg and Katrine use a Canary Trap to discover which of the New Democrats leadership team is leaking information on their policies and campaign plan to the Moderates.
• Done on Burn Notice when Sam was being blackmailed by the government into squealing on Michael. Michael took advantage of this and simply told Sam what to tell them. Was dropped entirely by the second season, though.
  • Discussed in the episode "Hot Property" in one of Mike's narrations:
    Mike: When a spy finds a listening device, the last thing he does is turn it off. A bug can be a direct line into the mind of your enemy. It’s delicate, but in the right hands, it’s a weapon that can turn almost any situation in your favor.
• Caprica: Agent Duram, suspecting that the GDD is infiltrated, gives his superior a false name for his informant in Clarice Willow's household. Turns out his superior is the mole and the false information causes the innocent Mar-Beth to be murdered by Clarice.
• In the second episode of Doctor Syn ("The Scarecrow"), Syn learns that one of his smugglers, Ransley, plans to betray him to General Pugh. So on the next smuggling run, Syn (as the Scarecrow) secretly gives him barrels of seawater, not brandy, knowing that Ransley will try to sell them for his own profit so he can flee. Then when Ransley is arrested, Syn brings out this fact in court by asking that the brandy be examined and saves Ransley (and more to the point, his sons) from hanging.
• Doctor Who: In "Last of the Time Lords", Martha does this to ensure the Master finds her, making sure the mole knows where she intends to stop for the night on her journey.
• After The Mole is outed on Dollhouse, it's implied that DeWitt plans on doing a version of this should the NSA come looking for them — via Mind Rape and/or Fake Memories. Which she coolly tells the former spy about beforehand.
• In Elementary, Sherlock's father Morland Holmes attempts to expose a potential mole in his company by giving the suspects each a slightly different version of the same contract; since each contract has a unique typo in it to distinguish it from the others, Morland reasoned that he would be able to identify the mole based on which copy of the contract was given to his business rivals.
  • In this case, it was indirectly subverted; the mole worked out what Morland was doing when he saw one of the other contracts and abandoned his plans.
• Game of Thrones: In "What is Dead May Never Die", Tyrion smokes out who is feeding the queen her information by telling three different members of the Small Council that he is marrying off her daughter to a different person. When Cersei angrily confronts him about her daughter being shipped off to marry one of those men, he has his mole.
• The Good Wife: Drug dealer Lemond Bishop, believing that there is a leak in Florrick/Agos, the law firm representing his legitimate businesses, tells four different employees that he has to pick up a delivery on a certain day and that he needs them on call, but tells all four a different time. When he's pulled over by the DEA at 3 o'clock, and smugly reveals that the only thing in his car is pancake batter, he discovers that the leak is Alicia, although indirectly, as her phone is being tapped.
• Hogan and company once (in the pilot) fed a mole... pretty much the entire truth about their operation, knowing that he would never be believed.
• In the third season finale of The Mentalist, Patrick Jane does the first type to root out Red John's mole in the CBI. He tells each suspect that Madeleine Hightower, who Red John wants dead, is hiding in a different room in the same hotel, hoping that The Mole will get Red John to send an assassin to the room they've been given.
  • And the plan doesn't work as intended because the assassin goes to the "wrong" room deliberately, planning to climb to the correct room OUTSIDE. The CBI comes in to arrest her and she jumps from the balcony. It takes Jane until the next day to realize the truth, by which point they'd already tipped off the real mole to Hightower's actual location, thinking they'd cleared him. Fortunately, everyone survives except the mole himself.
• Mission: Impossible:
  • The classic episode "The Mind of Stefan Miklos" is based on this trope; the IMF have to deal with two enemy moles in the CIA. Mole A is being fed false information, but Mole B has discovered this and reported it back to his superiors. The KGB know that the two moles are rivals, and are sending the titular agent Miklos to investigate; the team must convince him that Mole B is lying and that Mole A's information is real.
  • Used in another episode when an American agent (who's undercover as an senior enemy intelligence officer and under threat of being exposed) conspires with the IMF team to feed information to his assistant, who they know is spying on him for a rival.
• This is the strategy used to trap the titular "Assassin" in the NUMB3RS episode of that name.
  • This was also part of Colby's mole operation. Under the guidance of his handler, Colby fed information to genuine mole Carter in hopes that Carter would eventually reveal the identity of his contact. He does. Unfortunately, it's not until after said contact had figured out Colby's true allegiances.
• In the Murder, She Wrote episode "The Cemetery Vote", Jessica suspects Carroll of being The Mole in Jim's office who tipped off the gambling ring before the last raid. To confirm this, she tells said person about a planned raid in two hours. After she leaves the room, they make a call to Mrs. Gunnerson, who helps run it — and get Caught on Tape by the state police.
• The Punisher (2017): In the seventh episode of Season 1, Dinah Madani realizes her office has been bugged as that's the only explanation for how Gunner Henderson got tracked down and killed so quickly by Rawlins's commandos (as he overheard her talking about him with Sam Stein). After an hours long search, she and Sam find the bug, and decide that the best course of action is to stage a conversation that leads Rawlins and Billy Russo to think Madani is setting up a sting to bust Frank Castle as he meets with a gun buyer at an abandoned warehouse. Actually, it's a sting to capture them, but it goes badly as Russo recruits some private military contractors to come with him to the meet. It ends in a fatal shootout with Russo's men all being killed, and Russo killing five DHS SWAT officers (including Sam).
• Stargate:
  • Stargate SG-1: The Tok'ra do this with a supposedly converted Goa'uld. This exchange occurs when the spy finds out:
    Tanith: I don't understand. Why have I been excluded from such important information?
    Teal'c: [matter-of-factly] The Tok'ra did not wish Apophis to be informed.
  • Stargate Atlantis: Played for Laughs. Sheppard is captured by the Wraith and placed in a cell with another human prisoner, a frightened young woman. However, he becomes suspicious when she asks a few leading questions about Earth, he's right, she's a Wraith-worshipper, so he tells her about the terrible enemy that they're at war with: clowns.
    Sheppard Oh yeah, the clowns. We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens. We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
• Star Trek: Voyager does this a couple of times. The first is part of a running subplot. Janeway and Tuvok suspect that Seska still has a mole on board feeding her info, and so they enlist Tom Paris to exaggerate his rebellious tendencies and stir up animosity with the unsuspecting Chakotay knowing that the mole will feed this information to Seska making it more believable when Tom "defects" and joins Seska.
  • And the technique was originally used to expose Seska in the first place. She and another suspect are told that a piece of Voyager's technology has been recovered from a Kazon vessel. Seska tries to fabricate evidence that the other officer stole the device in the first place, but Tuvok is monitoring the computer program to see if this will happen, even anticipating that the other suspect was trying to do this to Seska.
  • Janeway suspects that a defector she has granted asylum is faking, and feeds him misleading information about where she is hiding the refugees and where their escape wormhole is located, to buy time for the refugees who are already booking it to the wormhole in hidden shuttles.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: When the Klingons (who are the Federation's allies) go to war with the Cardassians (who are in an uneasy not-quite-alliance with the Federation at that point), Sisko knows he can't directly warn the Cardassians without ending the Federation-Klingon alliance, so he has a meeting about the attack while having his measurements taken by the local exiled Cardassian tailor with the shady background. This is an unusual case of a Guile Hero feeding a mole genuine information in order to help the mole's side.
• Three Kingdoms follows the novel (mentioned in Literature) broadly faithfully in adapting the Battle of Chibi arc, specifically the Cai brothers and Jiang Gan, although Cao Cao's belief in the Huang Gai defection instead comes entirely from the Cai brothers' report, without mention of Kan Ze who in the novel acted as Huang Gai's messenger.
• The Wire: After Burrell is surprised to learn about the bug in the Barksdales' back office at Orlando's during Season 1, Daniels realizes that Carver was Burrell's informant on the detail, since Carver had been at an in-service training that day. Subverted in that in that Daniels wasn't actively trying to figure out who the mole was.

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