[Captain Midnight]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

Try finding some information about British intelligence agencies during the Napoleonic Wars for inspiration. Various organizations often worked at cross-purposes.

Read today's newspapers, and think about the "Pentagon vs. CIA" deathmatches, too. The more things change...

Originally Posted by G. Kashkanun Anderson

To be clear: both the Imperial Naval Intelligence (INI) and the Imperial Ministry of Justice (MOJ) are Imperium-wide in their scope; it's their mandates that are limited. You can find INI and MOJ agents all over the Imperium, even if (officially) they are limited in their duties to specified, separate roles.

There will certainly be concentrations, both in subject matter and in astrographic terms -- I'd be extremely surprised to see an equally heavy INI presence in Gushemege sector as is present in the Spinward Marches, for instance. There will also be questions of specialization; to put in today's terms, if the FBI were to present an evaluation of the capabilities of the Russian Navy to deploy the Northern Fleet for an extended period, I'd wonder about just why they're dealing with that issue. Likewise, you wouldn't expect a detailed Department of Defense report on Mafia operations in New Jersey.

The Scouts, too, have a security arm (which seems to be more concerned with internal affairs) and the famous Detached Duty Office, the debriefing agency that anyone who's been given an old scout ship should be intimately familiar with. The IISS probably knows a heckuva lot more about what's really going on than they ever let on.

Bureaucratic turf-wrangling being what it is, of course, I'm sure there's a tremendous amount of overlap between the agencies -- as well between them and the semi-official groups floating around out there (Imperiallines, the megacorporations, individual major worlds, the Travellers' Aid Society, etc.).

Exactly. The question is what they'd actually do with the information... and that's something you, as the GM, will have to come up with an answer for. If the Scouts are actually the Imperium's chief spies and counter-intelligence personnel, that will be a different sort of game than if Naval Intelligence (or the Ministry of Justice) is the principal weapon against the Ine Givar and their allies. I'd be very interested in seeing what an organization like the Scout Service's Field Branch could do if they were tasked as an intelligence agency -- that mission focus could give very interesting results.