Sleeper Agent - Fictional Sleeper Agents - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

There are a number of examples of sleeper agents found in science fiction and other forms of entertainment. Many times the unveiling of a sleeper agent is an important part of the plot and acts as surprise element and a plot twist. Some examples of sleeper agents include:

• One of the earlier uses of the second type of sleeper agents in fiction is in Richard Condon's 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate, which has twice been adapted to film. Both the original and the remake is about a group of people 'programmed' to be sleeper agents. One of the sleeper agents is part of a Presidential election campaign, which if won will produce a Vice President controlled by sinister forces. One of his fellows would then be ordered to assassinate the President, allowing these forces to control the Executive Branch of Government.
• Another early use of sleeper agents is in the 1977 Charles Bronson film "Telefon (film)." Bronson plays an unwitting KGB agent whose trigger phrase is borrowed from Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
• In the show 24, the villain Habib Marwan commands a network of sleeper agents. His hierarchy is complex and secretive, with families only being able to identify the rest of the family (as well as Marwan) as the only members of their "cell".
• Both the book and film Eye of the Needle demonstrate how a sleeper agent has to operate within a host country - in this case, the German agent Henry Faber in World War II Britain. This story portrays points of view of both the agent and the British intelligence services as the hunt for the sleeper spy continues across Great Britain. Faber discovers the true nature of Operation Fortitude and tries to get the information to his home country.
• The BBC mini series Sleepers centered around two Russian sleeper agents who had so fully integrated in British society that they were keen to avoid being brought back to the Soviet Union.
• The seventh series of BBC spy drama Spooks involved an MI6 operation to put a network of sleeper agents in post-Soviet Russia as the Berlin Wall fell, and a Russian counter-operation to infiltrate Britain. The finale involved a Russian sleeper detonating a suitcase nuke in the heart of London.
• In the Battlestar Galactica TV miniseries (2004), Raptor pilot Sharon Valerii is a sleeper Cylon. She is unaware of her true identity until activated.
• The 1987 movie No Way Out is a cold war themed fiction of US government frantically searching for an alleged mole whose is elusiveness is revealed in his being a successful sleeper agent.
• Martin Scorsese's 2010 movie Shutter Island involved an imaginary plot to create sleeper agents at a Mental Institution.
• In the 2010 film Salt, Evelyn Salt was exposed as a sleeper agent but after finding out her husband was killed by the hands of her own people, she decides to annihilate the missions she was supposed to execute.
• In the 2010 game Call of Duty Black Ops, the main character Alex Mason is turned into a Russian sleeper agent while being captured as a P.O.W. at the real-life gulag Vorkuta in the northern Soviet Union so that the Soviet Union can attack the United States with other sleeper agents, including Mason with the fictional Nova 6 nerve agent.
• Garage-rock band Sleeper Agent derives its name from Cylon sleeper agents in the show Battlestar Galactica.
• In the comic series Assassin's Creed: The Fall, the main character Daniel Cross was a sleeper agent of the Templar Order (Abstergo Industries) assigned to kill the Mentor of the Assassin Order, succeeding in the year 2000 in Dubai.
• In Assassin's Creed Revelations DLC Lost Archive Lucy Stillman was reveled as a sleeper agent, or a triple agent, during a conversation that Clay Kaczmarek (Subject 16) over heard between Lucy and Warren Vidic
• 2012 Tamil movie Thuppakki's plot revolves around the hero Jagdish (Vijay), a captain in the Indian Army fighting a set of sleeper agents terrorizing Mumbai.