Zlatan, I got your note about the secret mission!
"As a spy, you don't have to explain yourself much. You can disappear for a month and nobody asks questions. For a certain kind of person, that's one of the perks of going into the intelligence business. As a civilian, you don't have that luxury. Eventually, people expect a good explanation when you disappear, whether or not you have one."
—Michael Westen, Burn Notice, "Friends and Enemies"
A variant of The Con, when Bob pretends to be a secret agent; the purposes of the con can vary from theft, to concealment of some greater crime, to seducing Alice.
The advantages are manifest: unlike some other forms of The Con, this one doesn't require Bob to invent an elaborately detailed cover story; in fact, this is one of the rare type of cons where a lack of detail helps to sell it. Furthermore, most people are so thrilled to think that they're somehow taking part in a spy story that they don't bother to check further, and for those that do, the con artist simply Hand Waves any gaps in his story by citing "need to know", "I don't want to put you in danger" and the classic standby, "I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You." Depending on the object of the con, Bob may also pretend to be a big-time criminal or an elite soldier, anything that involves danger and justifies him telling Alice not to ask questions. It usually involves some appeal to All Girls Want Bad Boys, Elites Are More Glamorous, Patriotic Fervor, or all three.
Since Alice usually doesn't ask to see a badge or any other credentials, it can sometimes cross with a Bavarian Fire Drill and No Badge? No Problem!. Often comes with a lot of Playing Up the Stereotype, since most members of the general public have no idea how a "real" secret agent is supposed to act, but having seen plenty of Spy Fiction, have no idea that they have no idea. When the con is exposed, this frequently leads to invocations of Saw It in a Movie Once, Taught by Television, or You Watch Too Much X.
Compare and Contrast:
- Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You, a popular excuse for a Disappeared Dad making use of this trope.
- False Flag Operation, when an agent of Agency or Country "A" pretends to be an agent of "B" to trick his target into doing what the agent wants.
- Mistaken for Spies, which can cross with this trope if Bob inadvertently stumbles into the masquerade because someone else is convinced he must be a spy.
- Wannabe Secret Agent, where Bob really wants to be a secret agent, and sometimes is deluded enough to believe he is one. In this trope, Bob doesn't actually think he is, but pretending to be one is necessary to uphold the con.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Film — Animation
- Cars 2: The entire plot of the film happens due to Mater playing this trope by complete accident. Despite having no intent to or any idea what he's doing, he successfully fools two professional spies (and a literal army of mooks) into thinking he's a master spy who insists on staying in character as a hillbilly tow truck.
- The Man Called Flintstone: Agent Rock Slag gets injured on the job and Fred is chosen to go on a mission in his place while posing as him since they look exactly the same.
Film — Live-Action
- Mr. Holmes: The elderly Sherlock Holmes visits Hiroshima in Japan to investigate the rejuvenating qualities of royal bee jelly made from the prickly ash plant. He swiftly deduces that his host, Tamiki Umezaki, knows very little about the plant, and Tamiki admits that he lured Holmes there under false pretenses: his father left his family when Tamiki was young, but wrote his son a letter, explaining that Holmes and his brother Mycroft had recruited him to work on behalf of the British government. Tamiki is devastated when Holmes says he never met the elder Umezaki, who abandoned his family and sold his son a story to cover his own cowardice and selfishness, and would hardly be the first man in history to have done so.
- Although this trope is probably Older Than Feudalism, the Ur-Example is probably Simon in True Lies, a used car salesman who pretends to be a secret agent to "get laid." Simon tries to seduce Helen under the pretense that they have to have sex for the sake of some top-secret government mission. In reality, he's a used car salesman who has presumably been using this "secret agent" story to bed women for an unknown period of time. It doesn't go well for him, seeing how Helen's husband is a real spy.
Literature
- Burn Notice: In the first novel based on the series, The Fix, Michael's client of the week is a wealthy Miami widow who wants help finding her missing husband, who used to be with Special Forces in Afghanistan. Five minutes into a conversation with her, and Michael lays some Brutal Honesty on her, that the man is a con artist who has been hustling her. Among the tells in her description are: the man called himself a "spook" (which real covert operatives never do), refused to allow himself to be photographed, even in private with her, and hand-waved any questions she might have about his behavior or his odd comings-and-goings, by saying that knowing too much about him might put her in danger. The woman admits that her life in Miami as a socialite has been so boring, and she found it terribly exciting to be the wife of a dangerous man. Michael brutally informs her that the man is not her husband, has never been in Special Forces, and the only person to whom he has proven to be dangerous is her, just not in the way she thought.
- The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth: The Big Bad is a corrupt oil millionaire trying to gain control of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves with the help of a disgruntled ex-Army colonel and Arabist. A potential Spanner in the Works is a young banking executive noticing the Big Bad's money laundering to bankroll his illegal scheme, so the colonel approaches the bank's president under his own name and claims to be working on behalf of the CIA. Publicly available information makes clear that the CIA does not recruit retired military officers, but the president has read too many cheap spy novels and falls for the deception hook, line, and sinker. He is only too thrilled to fire the young executive and keep absolutely silent from then on, for the sake of serving his country and assisting the colonel with his secret mission (the details of which, the president understands, he can never be allowed to know).
- Parker Pyne Investigates: "The City Clerk" involves a man desperate for excitement in his life asking Pyne for help. Pyne arranges for him to escort a Ruritanian princess to England after meeting her in Switzerland. In actual fact, he's bringing secret plans for a weapon to Switzerland, with everything happening on the return trip (a break-in, an abduction, a chase scene) being a Massive Multiplayer Scam by Pyne and his employees.
- The Quest for Karla by John le Carré: Zig-Zagged in the second volume, The Honourable Schoolboy. Sam Collins, a disgraced former member of the British SIS, was assigned to Vientiane in Laos during The Vietnam War and one of his jobs was recruiting a small shuttle airline ferrying supplies to pro-American rebels. Part of this "recruitment" was seducing the young Englishwoman, Lizzie, who worked as a secretary in the office, pretending to be a smuggler. A few months later, as their affair was "cooling off", Sam decided to put some romance back into their affair by revealing to Lizzie that he really was a British secret agent, and she and the airline were doing their patriotic duty. The plan went horribly right: Lizzie (the ultimate ditz) was so thrilled that she immediately shared the news with her boss, her parents in England, and all of her girlfriends in Vientiane and back in England. A horrified Sam had no choice but to drop her and the airline and leave Vientiane immediately. In this case, Sam wasn't masquerading as a secret agent (he really was one), but he revealed the truth to Lizzie for the same reasons other men pretend to be secret agents: he had no legitimate reason to do so, he only hoped it would make him sexier to his paramour.
- Sharpe by Bernard Cornwell: Zig-Zagged in Sharpe's Havoc with "Colonel" Christopher, an agent of the British Foreign Office assigned to Portugal during The Napoleonic Wars. He has been tasked to assess the possibility that Marshal Nicolas Soult will break away from Napoleon and declare himself the independent King of Portugal, but quickly decides to use the situation to his own advantage: namely, stirring up officers in Soult's army who might rebel against him if he were to take such a step, then "shipping" these officers to Soult in exchange for a monopoly on the port trade in French-occupied Portugal. He also plays up his role as a secret agent for Britain to romance the 19-year-old daughter of a recently-deceased English port merchant, whom he "marries" in a sham ceremony. Whenever his Portuguese servant, Sharpe, or his "wife" says that his actions look an awful lot like he is betraying his country, Christopher just waves his hand and says it's all part of some greater scheme that he can't tell them about (and they probably wouldn't understand if he tried to explain it).
- Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series: deconstructed in Explosive Eighteen. Stephanie's latest skip is her archenemy Joyce Barnhardt, who wants her to find a key left behind by her recently deceased boyfriend Frank, a jewelry store owner. Joyce believes Frank was affiliated with an international gang of jewel thieves, the "Pink Panthers", and the key will lead her to a fortune in stolen gems. But when Stephanie questions Frank's widow at his funeral, she drunkenly confides that her husband became obsessed after watching True Lies and discovered that, despite being middle-aged, flabby, and balding, he could "score" with hot women by pretending to be a big-time jewel thief. For added humiliation, Stephanie's detective boyfriend, Morelli, confides that the "Pink Panthers" probably don't exist either, that was just another part of the masquerade. Joyce is severely let down when she finds out the truth, but admits that This Explains So Much, including why the jewelry Frank gave her turned out to be paste when she tried to pawn it.
Live-Action TV
- The Agency: Played with. Mossad was having trouble recruiting informants in Hamas due to widespread hatred for Israel among Palestinians, but they managed to find a Palestinian who was enamored with America, so one of their agents pretended to be a CIA agent to recruit him with the promise of being allowed to live in the United States (which they kept). Unfortunately, when he found out his family was in danger, he went to the CIA for help, and because they had never heard of him, they dismissed him as a crackpot.
Haisley: Our front gate is a grand central station for lunatics.
- Burn Notice: Exploited in several episodes; Michael is a covert operative, but sometimes his cover identity involves playing up the "international man of mystery" role that people associate with spies.
- Notably used in the first season episode "Family Business", when he plays up his role as something between an ex-spy and an Arms Dealer to get in with a family of same.
Michael: You'd be surprised how often covert operatives pose as "international men of mystery". Fantasies about glamorous, covert ops can be extremely useful to exploit, though some secret agent fantasies are more useful than others.
- This was also used against him, when he finds out he was "burned" and disavowed by the U.S. government because he was framed for the actions of rogue agent Simon Escher; as he explains to his mother Maddie in "Friends and Enemies", "I spent my entire career officially being nowhere, so it's not hard to pin things on someone whose job is to never have an alibi."
- Notably used in the first season episode "Family Business", when he plays up his role as something between an ex-spy and an Arms Dealer to get in with a family of same.
- Castle (2009): In "Fool Me Once", a career con man uses the cover of being a CIA agent to explain away inconsistencies in his story to the rich woman he's looking to marry. He was planning to come clean with her after he fell in love with her for real but his partner murdered him.
- Criminal Minds: Played for Laughs in the Cold Open of "Open Season", when a guy pretending to be an FBI agent to impress women tries to pick up Prentiss at a bar while she, Garcia, and JJ are having a girls' night. He can't answer any questions related to his job, because that information is classified. Including his badge, when the girls ask to see it. They all then pull out their own FBI badges, and the guy bolts like the place is on fire.
- CSI: In the episode "Disarmed and Dangerous", a pair of FBI agents arrive to assist with the case of the week (and the LVPD does not finds this suspicious because the case is a potential Federal offense), until real FBI agents arrive in the final act of the episode. Turns out that the "FBI agents" who have been helping the crime scene investigators were a habitual liar and a friend of his with a history of identity theft who has decided to follow the liar along to keep him from walking into something even more dangerous.
- Elementary: In "Turn It Upside Down", one of Moriarty's agents pretended to be a CIA agent to get a research scientist to help design an online questionnaire that could be used to identify sociopaths, ostensibly for national security, but really to identify potential hitmen.
- Father Brown: In "The Missing Man", a Royal Air Force pilot comes back from the dead eight years after being declared missing in action during WWII. He tells his 13-year-old daughter and everyone else that he's been abroad working undercover for the Secret Service. The truth is more mundane: his father told him to disappear when he discovered his son was a Cross Dresser, but now he's come back because he wants to claim his share of his deceased mother's estate, and stop his wife from remarrying. His daughter doesn't dwell on the glaring fact that her father left her to be raised by his brother and has only reappeared in her life now for purely selfish reasons. This masquerade comes back to bite him hard when he climbs in the door of his bedroom dressed in drag, and his daughter, mistaking him for a late-night intruder, shoots him dead.
- Growing Pains: Zig-Zagged; in "Bad Day Cafe", Luke's Disappeared Dad George comes back and wants to be a part of his son's life again. To the Seavers' protests, Luke brushes off his father's earlier absence, explaining that George was a secret agent who had no choice but to leave his family. But when he mentions this to George, his father asks him how the heck he ever got that idea — he was just a young man who didn't feel up to raising a family and decided to leave, but now he's changed his mind. Luke is devastated — either his mother sold him a story, or Luke subconsciously made it up himself, because the truth was so much worse.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: In "Annihilated", a married man was dating a woman and pretending to be a CIA agent so he could explain his prolonged absences (time with his real family) as being on overseas missions. When his web of lies started unraveling, he killed his girlfriend, his wife, and his kids.
- NCIS:
- In Season Four's "Dead and Unburied", a Marine who went UA ("Unauthorized Absence") from his unit in Iraq was juggling four women back in the States, at least three of whom claim to be his fiancée. The Ditziest of the three tells the NCIS team that her fiancé explained his frequent absences and secretive behavior by saying he was a Special Ops soldier; in reality, he failed several tests during basic training and worked as a supply clerk. When Ziva objects that there is no evidence of the Marine being in Special Ops, his fiancé says he wouldn't tell her any details because "he didn't want to put me in danger." She also insists that her fiancé isn't really dead, because she would "know in her heart" if he was; she doesn't believe otherwise until Ziva takes her to view his corpse in Autopsy.
- Zig-Zagged in Season Eight's "Dead Air": Ziva, an ex-covert operative for Mossad now working as an NCIS agent, puts her old hat back on to pose as a rogue ex-spy selling her services as a bomb-maker to the domestic terrorist group the team is tracking.
- Will Trent: In "Floor is Lava", a member of an Alias fan forum going by "Cutter" pretends to be a CIA handler and tricks other, vulnerable members of the forum into believing they've been recruited for the CIA too, in order to steal and sell stealth drone tech to a foreign power. This leads to the fake agents murdering innocent people under the delusion that they have immunity and a license to kill.
Theatre
- Mrs. Hawking: Vivat Regina features an interesting inversion and exploitation of the trope. Mrs. Hawking, Mary, and Nathaniel take the case of Mrs. Johanna Braun and her maid Emma Mason; Cristoph Austerlitz, a German agricultural attache, has raped Emma (and several other maids in his career), but his diplomatic immunity prevents him from being arrested or even investigated. Nathaniel eventually discovers a logbook in the German embassy revealing that the nation's spies frequently move through the building. Mrs. Hawking then realizes that if Austerlitz was found guilty of being a spy, Germany would have to disavow him and leave him to England's mercy, so the team plants fake evidence of stolen state secrets in his luggage before he leaves the country. In this case, Austerlitz genuinely isn't a secret agent, but Team Hawking convinces the world that he is, which is enough to see him locked up.
Visual Novels
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies: Played With. The Phantom is a super spy who was sent by some unknown client to sabotage the Cosmos Space Center and steal some valuable space rocks. However, in the final trial, when his identity as the Phantom is about to be exposed, he claims that he is actually a different undercover agent who was assigned to track the Phantom, only to be coerced into working for him. Phoenix manages to shoot down his lies and prove that the man standing at the witness stand really is the Phantom.
Web Animation
- The Champions (2018): A non-self variation and inversion: Then-Chelsea manager Frank Lampard reveals that — as a motivational tactic, he's convinced Christian Pulisic that if he plays well this season, he'd get him a job with the Queen's Secret Service. Unfortunately, Pulisic takes it too seriously, forcing Lampard to create an elaborate fake spy mission that involves Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Sergio Ramos, and the rest of his Chelsea teammates to try and convince him to drop the spy charade, even participating by dressing up as the Queen himself and having Pulisic rescue him/her. After Pulisic completes the fake mission, Lampard realizes that he's pushed Pulisic too far into a spiral of self-delusion and, attempting to at least restore some semblance of normalcy, gives him another mission to be a deep cover Chelsea footballer, with no spy work whatsoever. As it turns out, Pulisic actually is a spy for Her Majesty's Secret Service, as the actual Queen Elizabeth calls him on his watch to congratulate him on a successful mission and comments that Lampard doesn't suspect anything at all.
Western Animation
- Ducktales (1987): In "Double-O-Duck", Launchpad is recruited to impersonate a recently-captured agent of F.O.W.L.note who he happens to exactly resemble. Downplayed in that Launchpad is given a crash course in espionage by the Duckberg Intelligence Agency.
- TaleSpin: The main premise of "A Spy in the Ointment."
- In the opening, Rebecca is scolding Baloo for entrusting her car to a thief masquerading as a parking valet, and he should have asked to see credentials:
Baloo: "Credentials"? Like what, a badge? The guy parks cars!
- Then a rabbit in a trench coat, fedora, and Jack Webb affect bursts into Higher-For-Hire and says he's on a top-secret mission and needs a plane and a pilot. Rebecca is swept away, ignoring Baloo's protests that they need to see credentials. For her, Jack's hat, coat, and repeated use of the phrase "hush-hush" is as good as a badge.
- By the end, it's revealed that Jack is a mailman, trying to reverse a botched product delivery that he made to the High Marshall of Thembria and his wife, before anybody finds out his mistake.
Rebecca: (grabs him, livid) BUT THE TRENCH COAT!
Jack: Would you have helped me if I said I was a postal worker?
Baloo: You should have asked for credentials!
- In the opening, Rebecca is scolding Baloo for entrusting her car to a thief masquerading as a parking valet, and he should have asked to see credentials:
