With this new My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.

#46: Clean Operatives from Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? from GMT Games

Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? from GMT Games is a 2-player asymmetrical Card Driven Game that pits the mighty and powerful United States military and all of its various antiterrorist agencies against the Jihadists in the Middle East whose sole goal is to spread terror, sow the seeds of deceit and ultimately destroy Western civilization.

The Jihadist plays the game from the shadows and must work hard to build up their forces on the board through the placement of their various cells and then attempt to move those into occupied areas to wreak havoc with their Terror Plots in order to weaken the Coalition and cause damage that they will have to work hard to repair. Getting these cells onto the board is not always that difficult but getting them to where they need to be is the chore as moving them into various countries will cause them to be revealed where they will become easy to target for removal by the United States player.

One of the more important cards for the Jihadist player is the Clean Operatives card. It is a 3 Ops Value card that allows for freedom of movement. Thematically, the Clean Operatives are trained Jihadists who have no known connection to terrorist networks or activities and are therefore very hard to identify and track. But the United States player must keep their eye out for this card as it is literally one of the most deadly cards that can be brought to bear against the US, but not in the way you might expect. It becomes even more deadly and worrisome if by chance the Jihadists have captured the WMD stockpiles in Pakistan, Russia or Central Asia. It allows the Jihadist to move two cells automatically anywhere, even into the United States, without having to roll. This means you now have major problems as those cells, if the Jihadist player has access to WMD’s, can setup for a kill scenario where they can place a nuke on US soil and automatically end the game. This card puts serious pressure on the US player and will immediately change their plans when played. Even if the Jihadist doesn’t have WMD’s, this card will change the US plan and cause them to have to use cards in ways they didn’t plan to. That is true power as affecting what the other player is trying to do can change the course of the game!

The phrase “clean operatives” refers to agents or sleeper cells who have no prior criminal record or known links to terrorism, allowing them to cross borders and evade detection. This lack of a traceable history makes them extremely difficult to identify, as demonstrated by the September 11, 2001 hijackers, many of whom were clean operatives before the attacks. 

Clean operatives typically have a lack of digital footprint, using “new” converts to act as go-betweens or “clean men” to connect individuals interested in carrying out attacks with their handlers. This technique helps mask the link back to the core terrorist organization. The use of cover stories is also a key to these cells success as these individuals often have legitimate cover stories and may live for extended periods in a country without raising suspicion. This allows them to blend in with the local population, only becoming active when they receive an order. Terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS have used secretive branches to build global networks of these agents and may recruit individuals who already live in target countries or use online platforms to groom and radicalize new, younger individuals. By sad experience, the 9/11 attacks revealed that traditional immigration and border security measures are not effective at stopping these operatives because they lack any record of terrorist connections that authorities can flag. 

In the next entry in this series, we will take a look at Fidel from Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945-1989 from GMT Games.

-Grant