RPG doodle

I've been contemplating an idea for a game that resolves around spies, but with a grounding in the purposes behind their nefarious operations.

In essence, the concept is that the players start play as various officials in (possibly different) intelligence agencies. There's some sort of world situation which they all want to see change somehow.

As they resolve to have certain actions taken, play drills down through the ranks until an actual operation gets called, and the players sit down as the spies employed to take action.

Ultimately I'd like to see this as almost a more competitive board game-style RPG. Somehow the role of referee either doesn't exist or falls to some player as the drill down occurs.

At the highest level I picture some sort of status board, which probably incorporates areas of ignorance and crisis. As officials, the players have a game-level goal to achieve. Possibly their separate positions have certain things to gain. A core idea, I think, is that the condition of the board can only be altered by operations, which have to be carried out by the players as spy characters.

Somewhere in here is the idea that the players take many sides, either because as officials they (collectively) play all of the sides in their world. So as (say) the Executive of the US, I might call for an operation to infiltrate Middle Eastern Terrorist Network A.

As we drill down to the US intelligence community, including a British and French representative, the player of the head of METN-A becomes (say) the Chief of the NSA. The conflict, of course, is between needing players to take on different roles, and them having an incentive to take on roles that are mutually antagonistic.

On some level, I want the actual operations to be stories of a whole other kind. That the likelihood of failure-through-incompetence should be almost nil. The eventual ops should be good stories in their own right, but with everyone completely on the same side, unless they betray one another.

Thinking...