Lauren Chiu
Name: Lauren Margaret ChiuAge: 29
Gender: Female
Nationality: British Citizen, British National (Overseas)
Ethnicity : Cantonese
Rank: Intelligence Officer
Lauren Chiu was born in Kowloon, halfway between the Tianenmen Square Massacre and the handover from the UK to the PRC. Her father David, ostensibly a self employed entrepreneur, was a "White Fan" Sun Yee On triad organiser in actuality and already doubly concerned with the looming prospect of authoritan government even before the birth of his daughter. The family, with the help of the wider triad, moved to London within two years and embedded in a local tong.
Despite a decline in circumstance and a difficult, rule-breaking nature Lauren's academic and athletic performance was consistently stellar, being able to attend grammar school on strong 11 plus results and naturally finding her way to University College London. Through the course of her early adult life she began to channel her impulsive, thrill seeking nature into constructive pursuits, developing a life long love of martial arts and motorcycles especially. Near graduation, having rejected offers to continue into academia in favour of a career in criminal profiling, she was instead approached by the SIS who found her completely unable to resist the allure of working in the spy world.
While successful as a profiler, her proffesional background, personality and aptitude, not to mention underworld ties, made her an ideal intelligence officer candidate and natural choice to embed in Hong Kong. Lauren's career in MI6 is defined by her excellent use of varying covers and identities to infiltrate and navigate organised crime in the course of identifying and obstructing PRC agents at home and abroad, even turning several. She was also found to be unafraid to dirty her own hands where necessary and completely willing to abuse her affinity for understanding what makes a person "tick" to manipulate them for ruthless ends. She played the game for the love of it.
In late June 2019 Lauren's various identities and operations were compromised by a UK data leak involving a high profile state contract with Chinese firms. With the extent of her operation revealed she quickly found herself an extreme priority for PRC intelligence, her contacts disappearing and the net closing. To horror of her handlers, Lauren went dark almost immediately. She was not the only operative compromised, and the concurrent intensifying mass protests in Hong Kong severely hampered conventional methods of even identifying what had happened, let alone recovering her. Almost a week passed, with the official decision to burn or admit to her activities, in order to make official overtures for release, looming Lauren eventually resurfaced in the hands of the Australian Maritime Border Command who had responded to an anonymous drug-trafficking tip off. Lauren was the only detainee, found bruised, exhausted and with blood under her fingernails on a small fishing vessel with a missing lifeboat. Further details of this episode have not been made available to the ICO.
Debrief was extensive, subsequently she was retrained and reassigned to the Eastern European theatre. Despite a more backseat role, Lauren remained enough of a priority to the MSS their dogged investigations and targeting affected operations at home, in her new area and for other assets even vaguely associated with her, though her personal performance was still satisfactory despite the difficulty of working far from her usual element, even making a positive impression on the CIA whom she was briefly seconded to. The latter may have contrubuted to the decision being eventually made to offer her a role in the burgeoning ICO as part of Britain's contribution, with their diplomatic weight and a demonstrative shift in interest hopefully enough to get Chinese intelligence off of her, and the service's, back
