Now imagine a world where they did land on the moon just a year ago (for real!), and we enter 1970 and heading for the less pleasureful high time of the cold war. But suddenly, a POD (Point of... divergence, where the time-line start altering in a way notable) appears. It does have the appearance of a true evil mastermind (insert favorite Bond-Villian-B-Movie-Copy here), which is going to... do the usual things: building a doomsday device, claiming world supremacy, maintaining not railed walkways over shark pods and so on.
But just popping up and claiming he (or she) is now the state of art supervillian would not work, or trigger a rather embarrassing group laughter at the world leaders site. So will have to work your way up from nothing to the most feared human in existence, creating your secret hideout somewhere no one would find it and collect stuff and staff to build your doomsday device....
And that's where the headache starts
Because, in a environment, where the two major players in intelligence are kind of worst enemies, its unlikely that these will work together well to stop your evil mastermind in a combined action. If something goes wrong during such an... exercise, they would blame each other and maybe use every opportunity to claim "the other side is supporting that evil being, lets nuke them!".
Or wouldn't they?
I mean, all that evil guy need to accomplish is staying under the radar of both major factions (lets call em East and West), secretly building his (or hers) doomsday device and taking the world by surprise. If that device is a threat at the same level as the mutual destruction by nukes, at a given point no one could do anything against this. Alone. Well... at this point, East and West may find together to battle their common enemy and may end up as best buddies (for some weeks or so).
But the time before this, when the evil mastermind is frail and vulnerable, he can easily escape any super-agent by wandering off in the other sides sphere of influence. I doubt, they would share information about somebody who did prestige damage to their mutual enemy.
Or wouldn't they?
While I'm a fan of Tom Clancy's work, his stories were sometimes pretty... way off compared to how it worked out in the real world. Okay, sometimes he was kind or right, but that's not the question here. Still, all these stories about that time doesn't tell me how East and West will handle corporation.... even more, reality told us, that one side sometimes ended up supporting enemies of the other side (like offering Stinger-MANPADS to Afghan warriors to fight choppers).
What kind of threat a third party - not a nation, a single island filled with the most advanced stuff available to mankind, picked from both sides best guarded facilities to produce ... a "LASER" cough - so... I lost my thought. thinking
How may co-operation between not even best friend alliances intelligence agency - especially in the field - does look under such circumstances? Or better: what does that evil mastermind need to do to make them share intelligence and work together, before he can use his doomsday device.
For the sake of calculus maximus, let's claim he needs stuff that can be transported by small planes from at least six (three on either side) well guarded location, like:
- that famous smiling lady picture (Mona Lisa) from that art gallery in Paris,
- good old Area 51 saucer pieces,
- a secret anti gravity formula from the desk locker of the Red Place security officer in charge, some
- jade Buddha from a hidden village in central china,
- the Pope's hat,
- a frozen neanderthaler's shorts and...
- a coin from El Dorado.
- And so on.
To be honest, I have no idea what kind of doomsday device might emerge from this collection, but I'm no evil mastermind.
At some point both parties will look for help from the other side, but... how, and why, and when?
Well, that does not mean that we do invite speznaz to Langley and show them our latest spy gadgets, but... you get the point I hope.