Its seems too ridiculous to be real.
The whole thing of being completely unaware before some activation phrase makes you follow all your programming is just hollywood shit and bullshit claims from hypnotist snake oil salesmen.
If you try and look at all the separate claims for how that type of stuff is supposed to work its just total calvinball, one person will say its something you need to basically prepare a person for from infancy in order to be able to program them, and then another guy will just say some shit like "Nah you just gotta be good at hypnosis, I actually did this all the time back in WW2 before any of these other guys even came up with the idea."
Also then you google the second guys name and find out that what he actually did back in WW2 was send fanmail to J Edgar Hoover about hypnosis and also tried to set up his own freelance counter-espionage circle at some university, while impersonating an FBI agent, until some student told his parents and they complained to the actual FBI.
Not even hyperbole, google "George Estabrooks" and check out the FOIA material on him on The Black Vault, its extremely funny, he starts mailing random ideas about submarine defense that Hoover has to tell him to send to the Navy instead. Eventually the FBI documents start including a note that if he tries to talk to the director of the FBI, to instead send him to someone who knows how to use a lie detector.
There are real sleeper agents who infiltrate countries and live there as normal, but the average r*ddit-brained liberal thinks The Manchurian Candidate was a documentary.
I think it's reasonable to assume that countries have 'assets' who they stay in touch with, but don't engage for riskier activities until down the track, it's probably just that during certain periods (counterrevolution, coup, terror) the foreign actor would seek to push them further along the informant/asset/agent pipeline at a faster rate that makes it look like they were 'sleeping' previously.
The material conditions may also lend themselves to pushing those assets through faster if they're willing to take on riskier activities for higher reward that they wouldn't normally ("We'll give you citizenship"/"We'll ensure your safety"/"We'll help you profit from the conflict")
just consider this an open offer mr xi: if you offer me chinese citizenship ill do whatever you want
You don't even need to offer me citizenship, Xi, I'll just do whatever you want no strings attached
Like Huldra said, the Hollywood trope of a person having zero idea that they're actually an agent until receiving some activation phrase is silly. However, PointAndClique pointed to a much more mundane scenario that would be considered sleeper agents. The latter definition reminds me of Operation Gladio.
Yes a boogie man thing, agencies of various kinds from governments to business may hire people to look a part for a while in order to get something from the competition, but generally all parties are in the know, they may not know 100pct of everything but everyone knows why they are there, or there's
to look out for, and what everyone wants or think the others want, there's no sleeping nor mystery phrases, just more notable action.
