State Security Service

The State Security Service, abbreviated SSS and nicknamed the Secret Police, is the counterintelligence arm of Ostania, charged with rooting out foreign agents and keeping the population under watch. From its base in Berlint the agency runs wiretaps, tails, and interrogations, and ordinary citizens fear it enough to inform on neighbors who merely act strangely.

Director Wyman Wilker commands the organization, which regards Westalis operatives, dissident journalists, and above all the master spy Twilight as its chief enemies. Arrested suspects face harsh questioning; depending on what they give up, they may walk free under observation, be turned into informants, sit in indefinite detention, or vanish entirely. Officers wear dark green uniforms and peaked caps carrying an eye insignia, with rank shown through lapel markings, while the tactical Guard Regiment deploys in camouflage and ballistic gear for major operations.

At least two bureaus and four divisions make up the service. Bureau 2's Division 1, home to First Lieutenant Chadwick Curtis and Second Lieutenant Yuri Briar, handles interrogations, shadowing, and arrests of suspected spies. Division 4 gathers intelligence on extremist groups and runs operatives abroad, including the mole Winston Wheeler, and Division 3 has investigated elk poaching and border corruption. Recruits come from other ministries and must hide their true employer even from relatives; Yuri poses as a Ministry of Foreign Affairs employee, Curtis claims a Ministry of Commerce job, and Wilker's public face is a seat on the Central Committee. The agency also leans on outside help, passing assignments to the assassin network Garden through its leader the Shopkeeper and calling in favors from wealthy civilians like Cavi Campbell.

The SSS threads through nearly every arc of the series. It publicly arrests the city hall leaker Jim Hayward, whom Yuri breaks in interrogation. It guards Foreign Minister Brantz during peace talks, never realizing Twilight has replaced him. It seizes the painting Lady in the Sun to hunt the Zacharis Dossier, only for WISE to swap in a forgery first. Yuri quietly arrests the journalist Franklin Perkin while arranging support for the man's elderly father, and aboard the cruise liner Princess Lorelei, agents defuse a bomb plot without ever alerting the passengers.

Later, the service coordinates the response to the Red Circus bus hijacking under an information blackout, with Yuri's squad storming the second bus. During the Wheeler operation it plants conflicting signals to smoke out a leak, exposing communications officer Jeffrey as a WISE mole and identifying an impostor as Twilight, though Wheeler and the WISE team still escape after Yuri loses his sewer duel with the spy. Subsequent months bring crackdowns on informant networks and anti-government circles, interrogation of the Eden Academy admissions conspirators, and a tense watch over the hijacked broadcast of Five-Year Love Plan that ends with a peaceful surrender.

Wyman Wilker directs the whole service and personally liaises with Garden. Chadwick Curtis leads fieldwork in Bureau 2, Division 1 as a First Lieutenant, with Yuri Briar, recruited out of the Foreign Ministry a year before Operation Strix begins and quickly promoted to Second Lieutenant, as the division's rising star alongside Second Lieutenant O'Conner and officer Chloe.

Division 2 of the same bureau includes First Lieutenant Nicholson and Second Lieutenant Peters. Winston Wheeler served Division 4 as an agent embedded inside WISE headquarters, while Jeffrey, a communications officer, betrayed the agency in the opposite direction. A hardline captain and the veteran Gascoigne round out the known command staff. At an off-duty gathering of Bureau 2 officers, Yuri even brings his brother-in-law Loid Forger along, unaware that he has walked Twilight himself straight into a room full of spy hunters.