Overt Operative

FYI...

Malory: Most secret agents don't tell every harlot from here to Hanoi that they are secret agents!
Archer: ...Then why be one?

— Archer

"The name is Bond. James Bond."

Is that so, "Mr. Bond"? You don't think that since your job is being a secret agent that perhaps you shouldn't tell everyone your real name!?

Maybe that's why every supervillain you encounter already knows who you are, knows your name, your "secret" code number, what you look like, and how you like your martinis.

Hollywood secret agents seem to have a habit of being remarkably unsecretive, whether it's by using their real names, lack of disguises, waving their weapons and performing stunts in public while dressed in a tuxedo, or merely looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Compare Highly-Visible Ninja and Paper-Thin Disguise. See also The Men in Black, who are also meant to be some kind of covert operatives, but are just as conspicuous. May overlap with Sigil Spam, if the organisation that plasters its logo on everything is meant to be secret.

As a matter of fact, this is often Truth in Television- Real Life spies will deny or cover up the fact that they are spies, but otherwise they will try to keep their cover-story as near to the truth as possible (as permitted by the circumstances). This is for the very simple reason that it's far easier to get caught out in a lie if you are lying all the time, whereas you are more likely to be trusted (and thus do your job better) if a suspicious opponent digs into your backstory and finds that it's everything you said it was. Naturally, this also helps to avert You Just Told Me and related slip-ups that might get you caught out. In addition, spies really do introduce themselves as their real names as James Bond does, because having a fake name is a good way to get caught.

An obsolete version of this is the supposedly-inconspicuous trenchcoat, fedora and shades, or the slightly less outdated black suit, tie, and shades, both of which most modern audiences would describe straight away as "a spy outfit".

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Golgo 13 is known in civilian life as Duke Togo. When using an alias, he goes by... Duke Togo. Or some variation thereof. The general consensus is that, after decades of killing people for money, Duke's untouchable, and he knows it.
• Members of the Black Organization in Case Closed are supposed to be so secretive almost no one knows the organization exists, yet they always wear black suits and/or Conspicuous Trenchcoats and one of its members drives a damn Porsche everywhere. Said Porsche is not a 911, which is fairly common and well-recognized. It is an antique and rare Porsche 356, which is something so unique that no one can possibly miss, even if they are completely car-dumb.
• Full Metal Panic! lampshades this in the case of Sousuke Sagara, who attends school under his true name and makes little effort to hide his past as a Child Soldier adopted by Former Regime Personnel despite the fact that he's supposed to be Kaname's secret bodyguard. There are a number of explanations for this. First, as he explains to Mao, he barely has any actual records under that name. Second, disclosing much of his actual background makes it much easier to explain away suspicious actions related to his mission as just the behavior of a shell-shocked kid acting out, rather than a secret bodyguard, and also gives the school principal a Freudian Excuse to justify her refusal to expel him that has absolutely nothing to do with those anonymous donations she keeps receiving. Third, he just sucks at lying. And lastly, he's actually the decoy meant to keep attention off of Wraith, Kaname's primary secret bodyguard.
• Spy X Family: Agent Daybreak, Twilight's Unknown Rival, craves infamy in a field where anonymity is practically required. When he completes his assignment, he sees fit to actually leave a signature behind. It's so idiotic that Twilight actually blows his cover to call him out on it.

Comic Books

• Jahan Cross, Agent of the Empire, is a James Bond Expy who is naturally fairly open about his identity. Justified, because his real identity is a credentialed member of the Imperial diplomatic service, giving him the perfect excuse to be almost anywhere he needs to be, and if he's caught anywhere he shouldn't be, he can usually fall back on Diplomatic Immunity... within reason.
• Groo the Wanderer: Groo once was given a job as a spy, thus proving that there are, at times, people even dumber than Groo. Needless to say, things do not go as planned. Groo is apt at some things. Being "covert" is not one of those things.
• Jet Dream: Jet Dream and her Stunt-Girl Counterspies are Hollywood Stunt-Girls by day, and private counter-intelligence agents... also by day. Their identities and jobs seem to be, at best, open secrets (if not just plain "open.")
• Partially lampshaded by John Stone in an issue of Planetary: "Can't be the best secret agent on Earth if everybody knows about you."
• The Shingouz in Valérian are by definition Overt Operatives, as they are an entire race of spies and information merchants. Somehow, they still manage to be the best ones in the field, presumably due to their strict work ethics (in spite of claiming to not comprehend the concept of morality), extreme diligence, and insurance that everybody owes them favors all over the cosmos. They even use this status to their advantage, sometimes. In one short story, they con their way into the heart of an incredibly complex government bureaucracy simply by insinuating that they want to sell information concerning a supposed conspiracy that gets increasingly bigger and more convoluted the deeper they go — just to prove a point.
• Nick Fury tends to stand out with his eyepatch, conspicuous Spy Catsuit, and slowed aging. And also the fact that he's quite famous.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Golden Age Steve Trevor was an intelligence agent who often was sent to gather intel in the field, even straight from enemy agents. For some reason he almost always did this in his full USAAF uniform, which helps explain why he was captured so often but not how incredibly effective he was at his job.
• Youngblood (Image Comics), Image Comics' premiere super-team, does covert black ops for the US government and regularly reports to the Pentagon and the White House. Members also have their own toy lines, make talk show appearances, and do other "celebrity" things that make no sense for covert government agents.
• The Black Widow has been a member of two very public superhero teams (the Champions and the Avengers), wears a very distinct Spy Catsuit (which doesn't come with a mask), and has a tendency to reveal who she is on her missions (assuming the people she's interacting with aren't already aware of who she is). She has been the subject of at least two nationwide manhunts and a limited series by Devin Grayson features a scene that shows a gossip magazine reporting Natasha and Daredevil's break up; even her love life is a matter of public knowledge. However, it is also worth noting that she can disguise herself exceptionally well when she wants to.

Fan Works

• In Compass of Thy Soul there is a bunraku caravan stopping by in Konoha that is very obviously spying on the village. They are still allowed to visit because the Uchiha already knew them and did business with them for several years, and because they are very good at puppet theatre.
• TRON: Endgame Scenario: Mercury is well-known as Administrator Ma3a's champion on Encom's Game Grid, considered a star athlete. What's much less well-known is that she serves as Ma3a's top operative and enforcer.
• White Sheep (RWBY): Blake, a former member of the Faunus-supremacy terrorist group the White Fang, tries to sneak into a White Fang meeting and is instantly distrusted due to the sneaky way she is acting. Her teammate Nora, on the other hand, leads the crowd in a song, cheers at everything, and openly asks what the organization's secret plans are. Everyone assumes she's just enthusiastic. Note that Nora isn't even a Faunus, but she bowls through any doubts so well that she makes plenty of contacts and is even offered a leadership position. Blake facepalms at all of this.

Films — Live-Action

• James Bond, despite the description, largely averts this. He frequently uses aliases, and officially James Bond is just an employee of Universal Exports (actually a front for British Intelligence). Usually the villain finds out despite all this; often he's up against enemies who are either themselves spies or connected to some foreign government or intelligence agency, and he is identified that way, or the villain turns out to be a supposed ally or client of MI6. Most people do not know who James Bond is.
  • Double Subversion in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Bond adopts the persona of 'Sir Hilary Bray', a genealogist, complete with his posh accent, a pair of glasses, and a kilt. Bray is actually a real figure who agreed to let Bond use his identity, so they don't even have to worry about flaws in the background check. Blofeld still finds out that "Bray" is actually Bond though, and after exposing him, he points out that the serious Bray would not waltz into the bedroom of the female guests for some Double-0-Rated action, and he also catches him out by tricking him with an esoteric mistake on family records that only a real genealogist would know to correct.
  • In Goldfinger, 007 poses as a dealer in illicit gold, only to end up strapped to a laser-table with Goldfinger greeting him as "007". 007 naturally denies it, responding with his cover name which is - James Bond! Guess it wasn't as well known at the time. Goldfinger knew who he was because he was working for the Reds and one of Bond's "opposite numbers" identified him while he was unconscious.
  • Casino Royale (2006) hangs a lampshade on this while trying to justify it. After spending a scene going over the details of his cover identity with Vesper (while flirting with her), Bond simply checks in to their hotel under his real name. He explains to Vesper that Le Chiffre is a very connected man, so he probably knows who Bond really is anyway, and the fact that Le Chiffre will even continue with the game knowing there's an MI6 agent at the table is a sign that he's either desperate or overconfident. So Bond signaling that he knows Le Chiffre knows him by using his real name serves as psychological warfare. Vesper thinks Bond's just being reckless.
    Le Chiffre: And you must be Mr. Bliss's replacement. Welcome, Mr. Beach. Or is that Bond? I'm a little confused.
    James Bond: Well, we wouldn't want that, would we?
  • Actually used in Casino Royale (1967), where MI6 formally gives the codename "James Bond 007" to every single one of their agents — including the women — in order to confuse people.
  • Bond usually uses aliases, except when he says he is from Universal Exports, which seems to be a cover name for MI6 in general (so he's technically telling the truth). Ironically, there are times he uses real name/fake job description, and he is given away by other means — in Tomorrow Never Dies, Carver's hacker quickly figures out Bond is a government agent from his suspiciously perfect employment record at the bank that his cover identity came with. His name is irrelevant and his cover is otherwise airtight, it's just that absolutely nobody would have a spotless personnel record.
  • The Union Jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me. Way to maintain deniability, unless you're going for the double bluff: "Well, obviously a real British agent wouldn't advertise his allegiance like that!"
  • In A View to a Kill, Bond goes with the aliases of James St. John Smythe, a wealthy man with no real job, and James Stock, London Financial Times reporter. Not only does it take two seconds for Zorin to figure out who he is, but it bites him in the ass when Stacy claims to a police officer he's James Stock, Bond has to tell the cop he's really James Bond, a secret agent, which makes the cop want to arrest him for lying.
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond needs to be covertly dropped via parachute to investigate a sunken British warship near China. The problem? The ship has been deliberately sent off course by Elliott Carver interfering with its GPS system, and sank in Vietnamese territorial waters. Which shouldn't be a problem if he gets caught, as long as none of Bond's equipment identifies himself as being affiliated with the British or American governments. Which it naturally all does, since all of his equipment for this mission was issued out of US military stockpiles and is all marked as such... and his handler only realizes this after Bond deploys out of the plane to begin his mission.
  • In Licence to Kill, Bond is able to infiltrate Sanchez's operation as himself, having just been kicked out of MI6. Sanchez already has ex-CIA members working for him, so an ex-MI6 agent wouldn't be unusual and there's nothing there to make Sanchez be suspicious of Bond's background.
• Austin Powers:
  • Powers spoofed this in the title of the first film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This "secret agent" is at the heart of the Swinging London scene, and everyone knows he's a spy. He seems to operate as more law enforcement than espionage anyway.
  • In Goldmember, Steven Spielberg makes a movie about Austin’s exploits at the end.
• Weather Is Good On Deribasovskaya: A KGB agent is secretly sent to America in order to help them fight The Mafiya — and then is publicly outed to everyone when visiting a restaurant (seemingly by a know-it-all gangster or because of someone's stupid mistake), with his cover story blown for good. He later admits to his American partner that in fact he outed himself, since it's his preferred way of working — being the bait.
• True Lies: Harry Tasker. He does tend to stand out in a crowd. Except his own wife of 15 years had never even suspected him about his double life.
• In the original French movie La Totale, the lead actor Thierry Lhermitte looks a lot more like the everyman and nobody would reasonably suspect this so-called computer salesman from being a top agent in a counter-espionage agency.
• Not an operative, but in Sister Act, Deloris van Cartier, a Reno lounge singer, is an essential witness in a mob case. In order to protect her life until the trial, she must hide in a convent. Her appearance when she first walks in prompts the Mother Superior to exclaim, "That is not a person you can hide! That is a conspicuous person, designed to stick out."
• Agent Sands in Once Upon a Time in Mexico makes no secret of the fact that he works for the CIA. Lampshaded at one point, where he wears a t-shirt on which is printed the words "C.I.A.: Cleavage Inspection Agency".
• Inglourious Basterds:
  • For a famous actress and double agent, Bridget von Hammersmark is a pretty lousy spy, able to make decent small talk but falling apart quickly the moment someone starts pulling on a thread in her act. It eventually gets her killed.
  • The Basterds themselves use incredibly overt and unsubtle methods, have a distinctive calling card of carving swastikas into their enemies' foreheads which makes their movements easy to track, and aside from a handful of members who are native born Germans or Austrians, most cannot speak a word of French or German despite operating in German-occupied France. When they try to pass themselves off as Italians, they have undisguised American accents thick enough to float an aircraft carrier. Then again, their usual line of work is guerilla warfare rather than infiltration.
• While the movie is in many other ways a silly action romp, this is one of the few things xXx gets right. After losing several Genre Blind secret agents to an anarchist cell (the agent that the audience sees is forced to "infiltrate" an underground heavy metal concert in a tuxedo^note His subdued Oh, Crap! reaction implies he wasn't expecting the concert, or was somehow expecting a classical concert, even though Rammstein ain't exactly low-key, and his targets clearly aren't the classical type. Ironically, if he had kept his sneaky black jumpsuit on and just lost the balaclava, he would've blended in a lot better.), the NSA decides to send in a man that's a tattooed, anarchist, extreme-sports fanatic, internet celebrity famous for defying the law. The fact that he could plausibly want to join up with the cell of his own initiative means that he gets much further than the Bond-esque agents ever did.
• General Okoye of Black Panther, commander of Wakanda's Dora Milaje, might be a terrifying warrior, but she's a less than ideal infiltrator. During a covert operation in an underground casino, her warrior's posture and stern expression alone make her stick out like a sore thumb, to say nothing of the ill-fitting wig that's part of her disguise. Sure enough, a guard catches on to her act, and a cover-blowing fight breaks out in seconds.
• Miss Congeniality: As Gracie learns while trying to catch bank robbers at the beginning of the sequel, the fame she acquired from the pageant makes it hard for her to do secret agent work (well, technically undercover work, but it's close enough for our purposes here) without being recognized.
• In Cleopatra Jones, the main character (a CIA agent) runs around in a tricked-out Corvette with "US Government" plates. In Watts. In the mid-1970s. Not exactly conspicuous.

Literature

• The whole idea behind Alex Rider is that his status as a teenager means that he should be more covert because bad guys will think he is Just a Kid, however not only does he keep doing things that clearly a kid would not do, such as parachuting into secret enemy bases, but many bad guys in his books seem quite capable of finding all about his connections to MI-6.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: As soon as the two of them meet, Myne's new attendant Delia tells her she's been sent to spy on her by a higher-up in the temple. Since getting attendants is the result of Myne joining the temple in the first place, she keeps Delia around on the basis that firing her may get her replaced by someone who actually knows how to spy properly.
• In strong contrast, the CHERUB Series agents are so secret even most members of the British Government can't find out about them, the existence of CHERUB is never revealed, CHERUB agents have very strong covers, and while they have exotic training most of the time they do things that any ordinary teenager would do.
• Subverted in the Discworld book Maskerade, with two operatives are extremely overt due to being Corporal Nobbs and Detritus under flimsy cover identities, some of the Watch's best known and least deceptive members - who are there to distract attention from their real agent, who's been there for some time already.
  • Vetinari uses a similar plan in Going Postal when he deliberately has someone tailed by an incompetent agent: if you see Vetinari's spy, it's a spy he wants you to see. As the book puts it, you can normally tell that you're under surveillance by Vetinari by turning around really fast and seeing no one at all.
  • Double Subverted in Jingo. Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs are trying (and failing) to pretend to be Klatchian. However, the Klatchians they are talking to assume that Colon and Nobbs must actually be Klatchians from a different part of Klatch pretending to be Ankh-Morporkians since Ankh-Morpork would not use such obvious Overt Operative tactics. More specifically, Klatchians assume they're from a part of Klatch infamous for the idiocy of its inhabitants.
• Ciaphas Cain: While looking to impress a breathy young chanteuse named Amberly Vail at a fancy party by confirming there's an Inquisitor among them, Cain tells her you can always tell who the Inquisitors are because they always disguise themselves as Rogue Traders. As it turns out, the Rogue Trader really is a Rogue Trader, but he is working for Inquisitor Amberly Vail. She even notes that although Cain was wrong in this instance, it's regrettably true that her imagination-deficient colleagues default to it as a disguise.
• Sir Dominic Flandry uses this trope. By letting his targets identify him as an apparently incompetent and venal Imperial agent, he's able to lull them into a false sense of security.
• Geronimo Stilton: One of Stilton's old friends, Kornelius Von Kickpaw, is a secret agent who always wears a trenchcoat and dark glasses. His sister, also a secret agent, always wears a distinctive perfume.
• Compared to his cinematic alter ego, the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels is portrayed in a relatively realistic manner. Nevertheless, when he's in London, Bond's real name is known, as is his true employer ("Something at the Ministry of Defense.") The precise nature of his job is still unknown, but the fact that he's doing some sort of secretive work is not. This is pretty much Truth in Television (see Valerie Plame, below, for what's actually a rather typical, if unusually widely-known, example, below.)
  • A Discussed Trope in From Russia with Love. Darko Kerim is ostensibly a spice trader but it's well known that he runs the British Secret Service station in Istanbul. M says that such operatives can be useful as anyone hoping to sell information (or in this case defect) can readily seek them out. Given that Kerim also uses his extended (and extensive) family as his operatives, it would be impossible to hide his role in any case.
• In the book Harry The Fat Bear Spy, Harry loses his fake ID for his cover identity and is forced to present his real ID in order to get into the macaroon factory. He spends the rest of the book wearing a nametag that says "SPY".
• A couple of the Matt Helm novels actively used his status as a government assassin who had been around forever and everyone in the trade knew by reputation in order to have him act as a decoy or to intimidate the local baddies. The Wrecking Crew, the second Matt Helm novel, had him using his real name and background, so everyone would think he was a former assassin who had been out of the business for decades (true) and was pretty much useless now (false). The bad guys who assumed this didn't survive to the end of the book.
• In Daniel Silva's series of novels about Israeli agent Gabriel Allon, Allon is actually known to other countries' intelligence agencies as being a participant in the targeted assassinations carried out in revenge for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and is in fact arrested for this in one of the books. Also, while he does have a covert identity as an Italian art restorer, his accent is clearly not that of a native, and this gets lampshaded by having his colleagues remark on his oddness, and one of them jokes that he might be Osama bin Laden.
• Shadowrun Storytime:
  • Shadowrunners are supposed to keep low profiles to avoid any enemies they make on jobs tracking them down in their personal lives. Dervish, whose personal life consists of fighting insane mutants in a bombed out wasteland, doesn't bother and by the end of his career iss internationally famous with a bi-weekly doujinshi about his missions.
  • Trout was the party's first Infiltrator, a role which entails keeping a low profile during the job so he can sneak around. In practice his Criminal SIN's constant broadcasting, nature as a braggart, and utter cowardice turn him into this.
  • The Nightengales are a team of Shadowrunners who have starred in a reality tridshow and released two music albums. It's apparently typical for Vegas 'runners to double dip on profits using the perceived glamour of their occupation. This ends up screwing the team over as it also means all of their weaknesses are public information.
• Zigzagged in The Thrawn Trilogy. One attendee of a covert meeting immediately picks up on the fact that Wedge Antilles^note Ostensibly a starfighter pilot unused to covert operations, though more recent yet canonically earlier works depict him differently is there as backup muscle for the other party... and completely misses the New Republic commando team member also present. Note that this was deliberate on the part of the heroes: Wedge was specifically picked to serve as a decoy.
• All over the shop, over the course of the long run of the Vorkosigan Saga. Lieutenant Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, the extremely visually distinctive son of the former Regent and current Prime Minister of Barrayar, creates the cover identity of "Admiral Miles Naismith" on the fly, purely to try and dig himself out of the jam he's gotten himself into, and it ends up defining his career; as Naismith, he commands a Mercenary fleet that unknowingly serves Barrayaran interests on the Galactic stage, but people pretty rapidly notice that the dashing and tactically brilliant Admiral Naismith is absolutely identical to the son of an important Political figure on Barrayar - particularly after a reporter meets him in both identities on the same planet, in the same city, on very nearly the same day. So Miles frantically invents a fictitious rogue clone of himself, who claims his mother's maiden name due to Betan laws on Cloning making him family, only to actually run into a genuine clone of himself... By the time Miles' military career is over, heavy hints are being dropped that yes, people have figured out, in spite of all the clones both real and imagined, that Vorkosigan was Naismith all along, and that if Naismith ever pops his head over the parapet again there will be consequences. Miles is able to shrug off the implied threat, having a new job by that point.

Live-Action TV

• Jack Bauer on 24 almost never uses an alias, even when working deep cover with drug cartels or right-wing militias. In his case, however, the terrorists never seem to wise up, even though Bauer is undoubtedly one of the best-known people on the government's payroll in the 24 universe (having been mentioned on national TV news at least once). However, the one time he is seen using an alias, after faking his death, it ends up not doing him any good at all. Subverted in Season 8, where Jack actually uses an alias and a different first name ("Ernst Meier"), wears glasses as a disguise, and speaks fluent German! It even works! (For a while, anyway.)
• The A-Team, egregiously. Although they were on the run from military justice, they weren't too big on laying low. Sure, they used disguises when approaching possible clients, but many episodes showed that BA lived in a close-knit urban community where his name was well known, and Hannibal was pursuing his own acting career while a fugitive. Of course, the Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist really was that incompetent, so presumably they just don't need to bother.
• Better Call Saul: In the second episode of season 3, Mike figures out that Los Pollos Hermanos is a money exchange point for employees of the shadowy drug gang who don't want him to kill Hector Salamanca. His way of finding out what goes on in there is to send Jimmy into the restaurant. Jimmy doesn't have police smarts like Mike does, and he very easily stands out with the way he constantly moves from table to table trying to keep his eye on the bag man. Gus immediately takes notice of Jimmy's behavior and observes him conversing with Mike after leaving the restaurant under the pretense of sweeping the parking lot.
• Get Smart:
  • Max Smart has been outed any number of times before friends, courts (complete with juries and an audience), police, etc., KAOS knows not only his identity but his address, and whenever he is near KAOS forces, someone says "That's Maxwell Smart, one of CONTROL's top agents!", and he still continues his career as a "secret" agent. And that's just in the first half of the first season! That's the magic of parody for you.
  • Doubly subverted by Agent 99, who never reveals her real name, even to Max. (On the other hand, she's consequently also routinely addressed in public as "Agent 99".) Until she marries Max and is sometimes introduced as "Mrs Maxwell Smart" giving away her identity.
• In the British show Murphy's Law, despite being a career undercover cop, Tommy Murphy almost always uses his real name. This doesn't seem to cause any problems until the third series when the bad guys get curious about the "Tommy from Belfast" currently testifying in a criminal trial, and even then the matter is quickly dropped.
• The entirety of the Torchwood organization, which is theoretically secret. They barge into crime scenes and restricted areas using their status as Torchwood agents to explain it. In the first episode, someone trying to find them does so by going to a pizza place and asking if one of their agents was a customer, and learned nothing. Then she asked if they'd had any orders from Torchwood. That brought her right to them. In a later episode, someone managed to find their base by going to Cardiff and just asking people in the street where Torchwood was. They have an SUV marked "Torchwood" and get yelled at by name by random old ladies in the street by the second series, so the whole secrecy thing is a half-joke by now.
• SHADO, the alien-fighting organisation in UFO (1970), is supposed to be secret, yet all of its vehicles, vessels, and aircraft are clearly marked with the name. Many of its operatives also wear uniforms with SHADO insignia.
• Scarecrow and Mrs. King: This actually does somewhat better. The Russians know about Scarecrow but know so little about him that they once mistake Amanda for him.
• In the NCIS episode "Shalom", Ziva takes one look at a corpse and said, "He's not Mossad." Really, Ziva? What, did daddy give you the dossiers on every agent in Mossad as a gift for your bat mitzvah?
• Joe Friday occasionally goes undercover as a criminal in Dragnet, which can be unintentionally hilarious, because everything about Jack Webb screams "cop".
• Covert Affairs is a justified version: since the CIA actually gives out real names with an assumed cover identity, nobody is really expecting Annie to not give out her real name. Also subverted in one episode — when she helps her sister with some photography, the agency orders the pictures of her taken down.
• In Alphas, Gary's autism makes him not very good at going undercover. He often refers to himself as a secret agent, often in front of people who aren't supposed to know, and when another member of the team is giving a cover story has identified it as such.
• The Wild Wild West: James West fits this trope perfectly, which is hardly a surprise given that he's modeled directly off of James Bond. His partner, Artemus Gordon, is a bit better at the "secret" part of being a secret agent.
• El Chapulín Colorado: One story features the world's most famous spy. It is a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome as, because of the spy's fame, nobody hires him. Once he gets word of a formula that made things invisible, he decides to steal it so he could use it to gain an edge his fame wouldn't ruin, by being able to enter places without being seen.
• Subverted in the Blackadder episode "General Hospital", where the crew has been put on alert for a spy leaking intel to the Germans. One of the patients at the hospital where they're gathered is a man with a very thick German accent, calling himself "Smith". As it happens, he is one of the British army's own spies, and that he'd just picked up a "teensy veensy bit of an accent" after working undercover for so long. The real spy turns out to be George, who was inadvertently feeding intel in his letters to his uncle in Germany.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Garak is a Cardassian tailor working on Deep Space Nine, and seeing as no Cardassian in his right mind would willingly stay behind after the Occupation with billions of Bajorans out for blood, it's taken for granted that he must be secretly working for the Cardassian government, and people accordingly seek him out when they want a Diplomatic Back Channel or Dirty Business seen to. This leads to a Running Gag where Garak trolls everyone by insisting he's a plain simple tailor when they know otherwise.
• In Alias, K Directorate operatives not only recognize Sydney on sight, they also know her name and appear to be well versed in her latest gossip. This gets her cover blown at least once.
• Psych: This is jokingly pointed out in the episode "One Way, Maybe Two Ways Out". Shawn agrees to meet with a spy whom he and Gus have been encountering late at night in the park. When she arrives, she finds Shawn wearing a coat, reading a newspaper to cover up the fact he is staking out the area, and insisting address him by a codename he picked. She points out that the codename makes no sense since she already knows his name, the coat is too conspicuous, and that him reading a newspaper outside in the dark is too obvious.
• The Peripheral (2022): Played with — the team of mercs hired to kill Flynne and Burton in the first episode have state-of-the-art vehicles equipped with cloaking devices, but underneath the cloaks said vehicles are blacked-out Audi SQ8s, which are about as brash and thuggish as a vehicle can look, and the team members all wear matching black t-shirts and camouflage combat trousers. This means they attract the attention of a cop at a gas station and murder him to cover their tracks. You'd think professional assassins would try and look normal while on their way to a hit to avoid this.

Pinball

• The unnamed agents in Data East's Secret Service, who go around performing their duties in elegant tuxedos and hundred-dollar dresses, while driving around Washington D.C. in an attention-grabbing bright red Ferrari.

Pro Wrestling

• Women of Wrestling employed a UK spy known as Jane Blond as one of its Wrestling Doesn't Pay gimmicks. Still, WOW having only one pay-per-view would have probably been a good thing for her espionage career.
• Kyra's Backstory in the Empire Wrestling Federation and Ultimate Pro was that she became a CIA operative at age nineteen, despite having been the star of a traveling act since age 3 who had become a popular competitor in an underground fighting circuit. Her fairly high profile didn't stop her from taking down 198 drug dealers in four years before she had to be let go.

Tabletop Games

• Game of the Generals:
  • Picture the scene; a suspected Spy has been neutralizing officers left and right, and the opponent knows this since they already lost a 5-Star General to them. Of course, this is downplayed as there are six Privates and a player can only have two, so getting captured by a Private is just as likely.
  • Another scene would be the 5-Star and 4-Star Generals destroying everyone around them. Over the next few moves, the opposing player begins to make a "path" on the opposite side to the Marshal, then a single piece makes its way through. No prizes for guessing who that can be! Of course, False Flag Operation and I Know You Know I Know can still make for some uncertainty (for a 4-Star General as the opposing piece can be a 5-Star General instead of a Spy).
• In Paranoia, many Internal Security agents go undercover as members of another security group; this usually works okay (as long as they're not actually called on to fix a malfunctioning nuclear reactor or whatever), but a few of them are completely incompetent at hiding it; their every word and action practically screams "hi, I'm an Internal Security plant!". They're usually fed false leads and otherwise left alone, lest Internal Security send someone competent in their place. (A few of them act this way on purpose so no one will notice the other Internal Security plant.)
• In Warhammer Fantasy Battles Deathmaster Snitch is known by the name Snitch. Of course being an assassin is a respected profession for a skaven, and as a bipedal rat he can't exactly blend in with other races no matter what he calls himself. It might pose issues with rival clans if skaven weren't in a constant state of paranoia anyway.

Toys

• An obscure late '80s/early '90s toyline that was basically a bargain-bin knockoff of G.I. Joe had a covert agent character who had "Spy" printed on his shirt. This was lampshaded by the bio on the back of his box, which said that no, he wasn't the brightest bulb, but sometimes he succeeded in gathering important intel because he was so obvious about being a spy that enemies didn't believe he was a real spy.

Video Games

• A perfectly viable approach in Alpha Protocol. The game doesn't penalize you for being a heavily-armored, assault-rifle-wielding, grenade-flinging juggernaut who massacres his way through the entire game - beyond your handlers calling you out for being overt and violent.
  • Mike Thorton is only too eager to tell his name to everyone he encounters. (It's implied a couple of times that it may not be his real name, but it's still the name under which he is wanted by the American government for most of the game.)
  • This is similar to the Metal Gear Solid approach below. You can play the suave secret agent who works from the shadows and charms information out of people, but if you'd rather be the tough-as-nails soldier that does whatever it takes to get the job done... more power to you, as long as you get the job done.
  • Also, Steven Heck. Almost every operation he's involved with results in a Cruel and Unusual Death, such as suffocating a Vatican official with wafers. He's still one of the most mysterious characters of the game though. He might not even be working for any agency in particular, and some characters suspect he's just a lunatic who thinks he is a spy. His approach to the final mission if you pick him as a handler is closer to an action movie with three craploads and a half of casualties than any spy flick. And he does it by himself, too.
• In Binary Domain the main character is part of a covert operation infiltrating an isolationist Japan. By the end of the first mission, the team is engaging in full-blown firefights with the robotic defense force. These only get more ridiculous as time goes on, such as having a running battle with a Humongous Mecha the size of three semis down the middle of a freeway. Despite this, the characters still periodically say they need to avoid detection.
  • The operation is meant to be covert, so of course their armor leaves their faces fully exposed and they also use each other's names. And since they're invading Japan after it has expelled all foreign nationals, only one of their members is Asian and none of them have even a fake ID.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition gives us The Iron Bull who introduces himself as an agent sent to infiltrate the Inquisition. Justified because he thinks a group called "the Inquisition" would have figured it out eventually, so he just wants to get it out there now to prevent any potential conflicts. He offers to give info from his handlers in exchange. During party banter, Varric will point out that a hard-partying mercenary is the last thing he expects as a spy and that he should do more actual spying and manipulating. Bull retorts that doing that is exactly what people expect from spies while fighting, drinking, and sending the occasional notes to his superiors is much easier, to which Varric isn't sure whether or not that's good or bad spywork. It's not quite as simple as that. The Boisterous Bruiser persona is largely an act to get your guard down, although depending on how his personal quest goes he may end up Becoming the Mask. If it goes the other way or is not done at all he'll keep up the infiltration for years before betraying you without a second's hesitation the moment his superiors tell him to (even if he's in a romance with Dorian or the Inquisitor).
• Parodied (and perhaps inverted) in Fallen London, where your character can immediately identify spies based on how inconspicuous they are.
  "This fellow is of medium height and build. A forgettable face. Nondescript clothes. Even his moustache is uninteresting. He must be a spy."
• In Gigolo Assassin, you play a hapless prostitute turned super secret agent. The problem? You're, uh, kind of really stupid and you're only wearing bikini briefs down below.
• Mass Effect: For a supposedly super-secret organization, Cerberus sure does like to operate openly. And slap their logo on everything.
• Metal Gear:
  • Solid Snake is normally somewhat overt (although he relies on just not being seen, not false information) and even does a nice subversion in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Disguised as a Navy SEAL, he succeeds in infiltrating the Big Shell with the SEAL team. We in the audience instantly know it's him when he takes his balaclava off, and we expect Raiden to call shenanigans...but it turns out Raiden somehow doesn't actually know what Solid Snake looks like, so it works.
  • Used as a joke at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater when Ocelot laughs about how no one has figured out Adam's identity. It's Ocelot, and his real first name is Adamska... probably.
• By the time of Persona 4: Arena happens, the remaining members of S.E.E.S from Persona 3 form the Shadow Operatives, an unofficial police-sanctioned organization made up of them and other authoritative members. While the group itself does well under the radar, the people in it have no concept of a low profile: Aigis, a Robot Girl, is one of its prominent members (and does a supernatural feat in broad daylight during her story mode), and Mitsuru and Akihiko are wearing a fur coat over a Spy Catsuit and is half naked save for a ridiculous-looking cape, respectively. Naturally, the other characters take potshots at their appearances, and Mitsuru in particular gets defensive about her outfit. To top it all off, they travel around in an eight-door limousine with high-tech equipment inside, which is already severely out of place in a big city, let alone a tiny rural town like Inaba.
• Zigzagged in Red Alert 3: On the one hand, Spies are dressed with an infinitely-recurring Wetsuit Tuxedo and they can only walk in a half-crouch that screams Acting Unnatural. On the other hand, they can immediately disguise themselves as any infantry unit, and so go about undetected unless there's a detector nearby... which then leads to players spotting the suit of Powered Armor swimming across the sea. According to an in-universe interview with a spy, inconspicuous and blending in aren't necessarily the same thing.
  Now we sit outside of a small cafe in Phuket, Thailand to continue our interview. He orders coffee and a pastry, his accent French now. When I comment on his white linen suit and European looks, he points out that being inconspicuous does not always mean blending in.
  GH: It's a matter of expectations. It's important to appear to be what people expect to see. The people here expect to see wealthy Europeans. And the occasional journalist.
• In Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Ada Wong no longer pretends to be an ordinary civilian looking for her missing boyfriend. Instead, she pretends to be an FBI agent and makes no secret of having an interest in the outbreak at Raccoon City, which she helps to sell by wearing a Conspicuous Trenchcoat and Sunglasses at Night.
• Sonic Adventure 2 features a cutscene in which Shadow puts two and two together and realizes that a famous government spy he's apparently familiar with (or has read about somewhere), Rouge the Bat, is the same person as the anthropomorphic female chiropteran (i.e., a bat) who chased them, chose to help their world domination plan and openly refers to herself as Rouge.
• Franklin Drake in Star Trek Online is a variant. The issue isn't that he is open about being a spy because most of his appearances have him working with you on intelligence-related matters, or even that he is a spy for the Federation, but rather about which organization he works for — Section 31 is supposed to be so super-secret that even the Federation government doesn't really know that it exists, yet Drake openly identifies them as his employers (rather than, say, claim to work for Starfleet Intelligence) and provides the intel and resources to back up that claim. Might be explained for a Starfleet captain (he could be angling to recruit them, like with Bashir), but for Romulan Republic commanders...
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, despite being a secret agent it seems that almost all Imperial and Sith know who Cipher Nine is. You can even occasionally pull rank and talk about your position as an intelligence officer. Depending on the mission you're sometimes supposed to do this since Imperial Intelligence doubles as the Secret Police.
• The intro to the remake of Syndicate mentions that the corporations employ covert agents like yourself. With the liberal amounts of firepower you can access and must use, covert you most certainly are not. Miles and his fellow agents even have the Eurocorp logo emblazoned on the shoulders and chests of their nifty black trenchcoats/body armor.
• Team Fortress 2 subverts this. The Spy is obviously a spy, and dresses the part even when off-duty, as seen in the comics. But when he's on the job, the Spy is just as covert as he should be, thanks to an invisibility watch and sophisticated disguise kit that lets the Spy appear to be anyone, from the other eight classes in the game to Tom Jones himself.
• Thimbleweed Park has a group of conspiracy nuts. They draw a lot of attention, but one wouldn't normally know they're part of a secret group. That is, until you get to Chet Lockdown, the younger brother of the group's boss. His job is to wear a full-body pizza costume and hand out pizza coupons with the secret code to their meeting place on them. However, as Ransome and Delores point out if they talk to him, the town has no pizza parlor. So he's incredibly obvious looking.
• Zigzagged in the XCOM games: the titular organization is top secret and never publicly acknowledged by anyone in the Council of Nations that supports it. While its soldiers take to the field in unique equipment that can prominently display the XCOM seal, none of their gear names the organization. But XCOM will eventually become an Open Secret of sorts as civilian witnesses and news agencies notice that someone is dropping into various battlefields with radically-advanced technology on par with the alien invaders', they just tend to attribute XCOM's activity to individual nations' special forces.
• Of the two playable characters in Assault Spy, Asaru at least tries to be covert while Ameila doesn't even try with her headstrong fist firsts approach. She even earned herself the moniker of Assault Spy due to this.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, introduced in Morrowind, the Morag Tong are a Dunmeri (Dark Elf) faction of Professional Killers which are legal within Morrowind as a deterrent to destructive open warfare between the Great Houses. Historically, during the Second Era, the Morag Tong became far too brazen for their own good. When the Tong assassinated Versidue-Shaie, the Akaviri Potentiate who took over after they assassinated Reman Cyrodiil III (and who had hired the Tong in the first place to kill the Emperor), the Morag Tong wrote their name in his blood on the walls of the Imperial Palace. The rest of the nobility of Tamriel promptly made it their top priority to wipe out the Tong, which they considered a dangerous cult, for fear that they would fall victim to the same fate, and destroyed all but a small presence in Morrowind itself.
• In Warframe, the Tenno can be stealthy and sneaky if they want to, and several Warframes specialize in surprise and misdirection, but they are also all just as capable of going on violent, overt rampages. Infiltration and Rescue missions take this extra far, as the Tenno can be blasting everything in sight with high explosives until they get to the door leading to the area that needs to be stealthed through. Even then, the Tenno can just kick in the door and rush straight at their objective if they know what they're doing. One Warframe, Valkyr, can even use her berserker ability Hysteria to scream at the top of her lungs and run right through most security systems to grab the objective and run.
• In Half-Life: Opposing Force, the hostile Black Ops troops you encounter are assault rifle-toting soldiers decked out in black combat gear and night vision goggles, even though you fight most of them in broad daylight in the middle of the desert making no efforts to hide themselves - they even roll into Black Mesa driving all-black trucks and flying Black Helicopters. It's played the straightest by the male Black Ops troops, as all the female assassins - carried over from their parent game - are appropriately quick and stealthy, and on the Hard difficulty have an Invisibility Cloak that their male counterparts lack. The Black Ops' whole mission is to kill everyone and nuke the facility after it's already been overrun by aliens, so covert considerations are largely moot.
• 'Hunt Down the Freeman'': A US National Guard officer who had no involvement in the Black Mesa incident can recognize one of the Black Ops on sight as a 'Black Ops' solely because he's wearing black combat gear, implying that they're some sort of recognized military unit, thereby defeating the whole point of black operations.
• Psychonauts features the G-Men, sinister trenchcoated secret agents who exist in Boyd's mind as an allegory for his extreme paranoia and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, while operating as spies and investigators, the G-Men are blatantly obvious thanks to the fact that their 'disguises' consist of holding up a related single prop (such as a housewife disguise consisting of nothing but a rolling pin, or a sewer worker disguise being a single plunger) and making stilted, unconvincing statements about their disguise in an unflinching robotic monotone. Their straight-faced obliviousness to their blatant incompetence makes them one of the funniest segments of the game.

Visual Novels

• Kay Faraday of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is not as good at keeping her identity as the Phantom Thief Yatagarasu as secret as her predecessor, a three-person group. This may stem from having a pin of a three-legged crow on her scarf and telling absolutely everyone that she is the Yatagarasu. Including Interpol agents who are currently looking for a suspect for robbery. Then again, she never actually steals anything.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius: Ardsley Wooster, after a long but ultimately ineffective (that is, the target knew all along) cover op as Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's manservant, has skipped into this territory with his dirigible-hopping announcement of himself to a foreign power as "Ardsley Wooster, British Intelligence." It was tactically viable, though, and it's not like his cover wasn't blown already.
• Subverted in this Subnormality strip: Most of the strip features an interaction between a Tuxedo and Martini character and a cocktail waitress, but the last panel reveals that the narration was coming from a random background character the entire time.
• Agent Ben and Agent Jerry in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! are extremely obvious The Men in Black anyway, but they also have a big black car and a big black van, each clearly labeled "F.B.I. Undercover" in large, friendly letters.
• The Omega Key: Adam really should have kept his big yap shut. But then, he wasn't expecting that anyone would take him seriously, or that the hot chick he was hitting on was the antagonist.

Web Original

• Kara in Covert Front is clearly not concerned with stealth. Her default costume is a greatcoat which is very conspicuous, especially on a woman, and when sneaking around she repeatedly executes complex acrobatics that would draw the attention of anyone present. There is some justification for the outfit, as it conceals her features somewhat and most of her work consists of breaking into places where any person would be deemed suspicious.
• Sir Thomas Henry Browne in The Dead Skunk becomes known throughout Paris as a British spy — so much so that Sorbonne students prank him with fake secrets.
• Played for Laughs in an Onion homage to Get Smart and similar depictions: "Man Suspected Of Being Bumbling Spy".
• Parodied in Brutalmoose's SPY Fox review with "Undercover Cop Joe." He even goes around wearing a name tag labeled as such.

Web Videos

• Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube. One of the scam scripts as of around 2022 and later is for the scammers to claim that somebody in the target's bank or something of the sort is compromised and so they need the target to become a "spy" and go undercover for them. Unfortunately for them, Kitboga's M.O. upon hearing this particular script is to be this, reveling in the supposed assignment and shouting about being a secret agent and such when he's pretending to be at the bank.

Western Animation

• Archer: Sterling Archer of ISIS tells everybody he meets that he's a secret agent. As early as the third episode, it's revealed that Archer is responsible for the deaths of no fewer than three fellow agents by blowing their cover frivolously in an attempt to get laid.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "The Crystal Empire – Part 1", Pinkie Pie dons a skintight catsuit and night vision goggles to gather information. In the middle of the day.
    Crystal Pony: A spy! [runs away]
    Pinkie Pie: A spy? How did they know?
  • Subverted a scene later where she disguises herself in a perfect replica suit of Fluttershy and maintains her cover by keeping her mouth shut as Flutters would. (Which is quite a feat for Pinkie.)
  • The spy outfits also show up in "It's About Time", where Pinkie, Spike, and Twilight break into the royal library. The guards easily spot them during their patrols, but don't care since Twilight has free access to the public parts of the palace anyway.
• Kim Possible. Oddly, villains never think of going after her family, and even if they do it's usually for reasons unrelated to Kim's job (for instance, Dr. Drakken tried to avenge himself on the people who laughed at him in college, and was surprised to learn that one of them was Kim's father).
• In El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, every hero's true identity is common knowledge, with the exception of one-time hero La Tigressa (Frida).
• WOOHP of Totally Spies! is either very lucky or more skilled than they let on, considering their visible headquarters, MIB-style dress code for internal work and their three most well-known agents are teenage girls in brightly-colored catsuits without anything to obscure their face or codenames. Then again, considering their tendency to work all over the world where people wouldn't know them, it only really bites them in the butt when they start gaining recurring foes.
• Danger Mouse wears a jumpsuit with his initials, and has a bright yellow Flying Car. Taken further in the relaunch, where he's based in a skyscraper shaped like a pillar box that appears to be officially known as Danger HQ, and is a bit of a glory hound who thinks being famous for being a secret agent is perfectly normal.
• Inside Job (2021): Rafe Masters is an MI6 agent who doesn't really do much to act as a spy should, acting very much out in the open with conspicuous parachutes and not even trying to avoid confronting Dr. Skullfinger and his mooks when infiltrating his base. Reagan gets annoyed with Rafe for this on top of his constant referring to her as his girlfriend when they simply had a one-night stand.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: "The Spy Humongous": Rumdar quickly proves himself to be a spy rather than a refugee, taking pictures of the Cerritos and asking to see critical areas of the ship. Luckily for the Cerritos crew, he's also an idiot who couldn't keep a secret if his life depended on it, and inadvertently makes his intentions extremely obvious from the get-go;
  Rumdar: Can I have all your codes now?
• For their Tagline being "Robots in Disguise", The Transformers don't do a good job concealing themselves to avoid human contact; at least in early entries. It doesn't help that the Autobots have to stop the Decepticons on every occasion. However, the Autobots in Transformers: Prime are more in line with their Vehicle Masquerade with human or government assistance.

Real Life

• One interesting factor of the whole Valerie Plame scandal is that she was apparently a covert agent, yet was also an ambassador's wife well-known by a number of important people. Although in her case much of her covert activity had taken place before she'd been married and the CIA was in the process of moving her to "official cover" (that is, she'd be officially working for the US government but not officially the CIA) when she'd been outed.
  • Rather, unofficial cover means your link to the US government is deniable, whereas official cover puts you in the diplomatic corps (or somewhere else in the government, but usually the diplomatic corps), entitling you to diplomatic immunity if you're caught. In neither case is one allowed to admit they work for the CIA, and in either case, it's a crime for anyone in the know to out the officer as a CIA employee, because not only does it place the officer's life in jeopardy, but also the lives of any agents they've ever been in contact with. In both official and unofficial cover, a CIA officer normally uses their real name and identity with only the fact that they work for the CIA being concealed. A completely fabricated cover identity is usually not necessary because (unlike in spy movies) a CIA officer does not personally infiltrate target organizations, instead recruiting locals (particularly those who are already members of the target organization) to either defect to the United States or become double-agents. Revealing someone as a CIA officer therefore endangers all of the double-agents they've recruited.
  • This principle was more or less pioneered by British intelligence, to the point where a fairly significant chunk of the diplomatic corps are actually spies - sometimes referred to euphemistically as being "from south of the river" (the FCO building is just north of the Thames, near Trafalgar Square, while MI6 has its very famous HQ on the south bank of the Thames. What the euphemism will be if they finally get their long-desired chance to move somewhere more discreet is unknown).
• The KGB was very good at finding CIA officers who had these jobs at embassies, because they actually reverse engineered the structure by which they were assigned to embassies in contrast to the professional diplomat foreign service officers.
• Oddly, Carlos the Jackal led a lifestyle similar to that of Bond and was a fairly inept terrorist, and only escaped capture for so long because his Soviet and Arab employers feared what would happen if they stopped protecting him.
• Princess Stephanie Julianne von Hohenlohe. A Jewish member of a German noble family, she acted as a Nazi spy and messenger to sympathizers in the UK and the United States despite being very well-known as a close friend of the Nazi hierarchy.
• Ian Fleming based James Bond at least partially on a Yugoslav playboy named Dusko Popov who was an agent for the Nazis and then turned to become a double-agent for the British and lived a very high-profile lifestyle, particularly in casino gambling.
  • This high-profile lifestyle was not a hindrance to his career, since his 'spying' basically consisted of handing himself over to MI5 as soon as he arrived in Britain, then spending the rest of the war sending the Abwehr fake information from fictitious agents as part of the XX system.
  • Should be noted that the Abwehr at this time was run almost entirely by members of the anti-Nazi resistance, and Popov was just one of many spies encouraged to undermine their own efforts. He was probably recruited precisely for his own anti-Nazi credentials.
  • Eddie Chapman, codenamed Agent Zigzag, was a very similar case: A criminal before the war, he was recruited by the Nazis and ran straight to MI5 to tell them all about it. As with Popov, he was James Bond before there was a James Bond, indulging his love of casinos, booze, and women on a government tab; he also fed the Nazis numerous false reports that their V1 weapons were falling short of London, causing the targeting to be adjusted so they stopped hitting it and started overshooting.
• The entertainer Noël Coward pleaded to become an agent for British intelligence. The British government finally relented, signed him on, and found he actually was pretty good at it since his status as a celebrity entertainer got him into many shindigs where loose lips were plentiful.
  • There have been lots of celebrities who did some spying, with real identities and hidden agendas. This makes it plausible if it's like Noel Coward presenting himself as Noel Coward, the entertainer, who is secretly a spy. Cover in modern intelligence has been described as more like lying about one's job than lying about one's identity — especially with so-called "agents of influence," whose whole point is to build social networks to spread propaganda and influence policy rather than gathering intelligence per se.
• Wolfgang Lotz was a real-life Israeli spy who hung out in Egypt posing as a former Wehrmacht officer running a stud farm for the Cairo elite. His original name was Wolfgang Lotz and he grew up in Germany. Mossad destroyed the documents in Germany that showed that he was Jewish and left the rest in place.
  • One reason Lotz got caught was that he was introduced to a genuine ex-Wehrmacht officer at an Egyptian event; they were supposed to have served in the same unit in the Afrika Korps at about the same time and Lotz failed to double-talk himself out of that fix.
• The Military Liaison Missions were established as a temporary measure to maintain relationships between the occupying powers during the demilitarization of post-World War II Germany and were kept going throughout the Cold War because both sides found them useful for gathering ground intelligence. The teams (which had quasi-diplomatic status and were authorised to travel anywhere in their clearly-marked, olive-drab Opel sedans except in pre-designated special areas) consisted of military intelligence personnel in uniform.
• SIS handlers used the position of Passport Control Officer in British embassies, though, by the late 1930s, it had become a Paper-Thin Disguise. This was compounded by the fact that during the late 1930s, there were large numbers of people wanting to emigrate from Europe, and therefore their fake job took so much of their time that there was none left over for espionage.
• Richard Murphy was an inadvertent example of this trope. A Russian agent assigned to work under deep cover in the US, his cover was blown practically from the time he entered the country and for the next twenty years, he lived his life under FBI surveillance. People who met him immediately noticed that despite having an Irish name and a Canadian passport, he had a thick Russian accent. He also had a surly, stereotypical Russian disposition and apparently no interest in any sort of American culture (he didn't watch sports, he didn't like movies or reading, he had no hobbies). Several times the FBI searched his house, planted listening devices that were never found, at one point he even handed over a laptop he was using to carry stolen information to an FBI agent after having apparently mistaken him for his contact. After he was arrested and deported in a Prisoner Exchange, it was noted that he seemed more like someone who should have been opposing Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in a movie than a real spy.
• Russian spy Maria Butina was known for posing in GQ wielding guns and became known to law enforcement in part because, on multiple occasions, she got drunk and bragged to her American University students about knowing spy secrets.
• One of many FSB agents who had their details leaked by Ukrainian Intelligence, has a Skype address that included "jamesbond007".

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