The Tal Shiar

1. Overview

The Tal Shiar is the intelligence service of the Romulan Star Empire. It gathers intelligence abroad, watches the Empire’s own people at home, and carries out the work the Empire will not admit to doing. Romulans fear it. Senators fear it, Fleet officers resent it, and ordinary citizens are careful about what they say in its hearing. Every account Starfleet holds of the service agrees on one point: the Tal Shiar does not explain itself to anyone below the very top of the Imperial government, and it rarely explains itself even there.

For a Federation reader the service has a short public history and a long private one. Starfleet first dealt with the Tal Shiar by name in 2369. Two years later the service was almost destroyed at the Omarion Nebula, when it joined the Cardassian Obsidian Order in a strike on the Founders’ homeworld and lost nearly everything it had sent. It recovered enough to be led in 2375 by Koval, a member of the Continuing Committee. Since 2379 it has rebuilt itself a second time, and in 2393 it is back on the Neutral Zone, smaller than it was and with something to prove.

This article is written from the Federation’s side of the line. Much of what follows is assessment rather than fact, and where that is so, the article says it.

2. Purpose and Powers

2.1 What the service is for

The Tal Shiar has two tasks, and Romulans do not seem to separate them. The first is to know what the Empire’s rivals intend: the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and any other power whose ships come near Romulan space. The second is to keep the Empire loyal. Dissidents, disloyal officers, careless senators and the wrong kind of friendship with outsiders all fall inside its remit. Starfleet analysts have long noted that the Tal Shiar treats a Romulan who talks too freely and a foreign agent who listens as two halves of the same problem.

A third task follows from the first two. The Tal Shiar acts where the Empire wants a result and does not want its name on it. It carries out arrests that are never announced, sabotage that is never claimed and operations abroad that are never acknowledged. This is the work Romulans mean when they speak of the service with lowered voices.

2.2 What the service may do

The service’s legal powers have never been published, and Romulan law is not a subject the Empire discusses with outsiders. What the record shows is the practice. A Tal Shiar officer embarked aboard a Fleet warbird could give orders to its commander. In 2375 a senator was arrested and removed from public life after being accused of a plot against the service’s chairman. Romulans themselves, when they speak of the service at all, speak of relatives and colleagues who were taken by it and not seen again. Taken together, this describes a service that can reach into the Fleet, into the Senate and into ordinary homes, and that answers for what it does only to the highest levels of the state.

The service also commands its own ships. The fleet lost at the Omarion Nebula in 2371 was built in secret and crewed by the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, not drawn from the Imperial Fleet’s line. In 2393 the service again fields vessels of its own, among them a counter-infiltration warbird variant described on its own page, the Serrath-type Warbird.

3. The Tal Shiar, the Fleet and the Senate

3.1 The Fleet

The Imperial Fleet and the Tal Shiar serve the same Empire and do not trust each other. The Fleet is the Empire’s open strength: its warbirds, its sector commands, its officers with known names and published ranks. The Tal Shiar is the hidden strength, and it watches the Fleet as closely as it watches anyone. The clearest picture Starfleet has of the relationship comes from aboard the warbird Khazara in 2369. There, a Tal Shiar officer with the rank of major, embarked on the ship, held authority over its commander, Commander Toreth, on any matter the service chose to make its own. Toreth obeyed, and made her dislike of the service plain. Starfleet’s analysts treat that arrangement as normal Romulan practice rather than an exception. See The Imperial Fleet.

The Fleet’s view of the service has, if anything, hardened since. The Tal Shiar’s Omarion venture spent ships and lives on a plan that failed. During the Silence of 2379 to 2382, it was the Imperial Fleet, not the Tal Shiar, that held the Empire together by refusing to take sides among the houses. Fleet officers have not forgotten either fact. On the Chaltok Sector border in 2393, the Fleet’s sector command keeps its order of battle and patrol assignments, while Tal Shiar and other compartmented forces sit outside the Fleet’s view altogether.

3.2 The Senate and the Praetor

Under the old Senate the Tal Shiar was a power in Romulan politics in its own right. Its chairman in 2375, Koval, sat on the Continuing Committee, the small inner body at the top of the Imperial government. A senator who was accused of plotting against him that year did not keep her place. The old Senate died in 2379, when Shinzon’s coup killed it in its own chamber, and the service’s footing in Romulan politics went with it for a time.

The Restored Senate that first sat in 2382 is smaller than the old one and more afraid of its own security services. Its members remember what the Tal Shiar could do to senators. The service’s chair has not been publicly named since 2384. The Continuing Committee still exists, but who sits on it is not public, and whether the Tal Shiar’s chair sits there again is not known.

Praetor Ardhal tr’Vesuin, who has held the praetorship since 2389, is the Praetor who sent the patrols back to the Neutral Zone, and the Tal Shiar came back to the line with them. Most Federation analysts conclude that the service answers to him, and that his chief voice in the Senate, Proconsul Mevrek tr’Annai, speaks for a government that relies on the service rather than restrains it. That conclusion is assessment. The Empire has never said where the service’s orders come from. See Government of the Empire.

4. The Record: Operations Known to the Federation

4.1 The Omarion Nebula, 2371

The Tal Shiar’s greatest operation was also its greatest failure. In 2371, after the Dominion had shown itself in the Alpha Quadrant, the Tal Shiar and the Cardassian Obsidian Order joined forces to destroy the Founders before the Dominion could move against them. They built a fleet of Romulan and Cardassian warships in secret in the Orias system. Enabran Tain, the former head of the Obsidian Order, came out of retirement to lead the venture. The fleet passed through the Bajoran wormhole and attacked the Founders’ homeworld in the Omarion Nebula.

The homeworld was empty. The Founders had left it, and a far larger Jem’Hadar fleet was waiting. The joint fleet was destroyed. The senior Tal Shiar officer with the fleet, Colonel Lovok, was revealed to be a Changeling: the Founders had placed one of their own inside the Tal Shiar and used it to lead the service into a trap. The Obsidian Order did not recover from the loss. The Tal Shiar did, slowly, but Federation analysts regard the Omarion Nebula as the event that has shaped everything the service has done since. It had been penetrated at a high level, and it had not known.

4.2 The Dominion War and Koval

The Romulan Star Empire signed a non-aggression pact with the Dominion in 2373 and entered the war on the Federation’s side in 2374. During the war the Tal Shiar was again a working service with a seat at the top table. In 2375 its chairman was Koval, a member of the Continuing Committee. That year a conference on Romulus brought Federation and Romulan officials together. During it, Senator Cretak, who had served as the Empire’s representative on Deep Space 9, was accused of a plot against Koval, arrested and removed from public life. Koval kept his place. What became of him after the war is not part of the Federation’s public record.

4.3 Shinzon and the Silence, 2379 to 2382

In 2379 Shinzon, a human raised among the Remans, seized power in a coup and killed the Senate. What part, if any, the Tal Shiar played in the coup or in resisting it has never been made public. Shinzon died soon afterward. In the Silence that followed, with no Senate and the great houses and provincial governors running their own affairs, the Tal Shiar does not appear in any record Starfleet holds as an actor in its own right. Federation analysts take that absence to mean the service was damaged, divided or both. When the Restored Senate first sat in 2382, the Tal Shiar still existed. It was not, by most accounts, what it had been. See History of the Romulan Star Empire.

5. The Rebuilding (2382 to 2393)

The service that has emerged since 2382 is the second Tal Shiar Starfleet has had to learn. It is smaller than the one lost at the Omarion Nebula, younger, and more technical. Federation analysts give three reasons for the change. Many of the service’s experienced officers were lost at Omarion or in the years after 2379. The service that survived appears to have rebuilt around technical collection, which needs fewer officers and leaves fewer of them exposed. And the lesson of Colonel Lovok has made the service suspicious of its own people in a way the older Tal Shiar perhaps was not.

The rebuilding was quiet. Under Praetor Sorrel t’Keleth, from 2382 to 2389, the Empire turned inward, and the Tal Shiar’s attention seems to have turned inward with it, toward the houses, the provinces and the Remans. The change came under Praetor tr’Vesuin. When the patrols returned to the Neutral Zone in 2387, the Tal Shiar returned with them. The listening posts on the Romulan side were manned again. Starfleet began to see, along the line, the signs of an intelligence service at work: probes, contacts and incidents that pointed at a purpose without ever showing a hand.

Starfleet’s analysts describe the service of 2393 as having something to prove. It lost its fleet in 2371, it lost its political footing in 2379, and it has watched the Fleet take the credit for holding the Empire together. The border offers it a chance to show it is needed. That makes it, in the judgement of most Federation officers who serve on the Zone, more dangerous than its size would suggest.

6. Methods

Everything in this section comes from the record of past incidents, from what Romulans themselves have said, and from what Starfleet has seen along the border. None of it has been confirmed by the Empire.

6.1 Surveillance

The Tal Shiar’s first tool is watching. At home it watches officials, officers, families and anyone with outside contacts. Abroad, and along the border, it uses the Empire’s long experience with sensors and with concealment. A cloaked ship that sits on its own side of the line for a week and is seen leaving only when it chooses is, in Starfleet’s assessment, often a collection platform rather than a warship on patrol. Sensor buoys and listening posts gather what passes within their range. The service is assessed to collect signals of every kind and to keep them for a long time, on the reasoning that a fragment of no value today may complete a picture years later. See Romulan Technology.

6.2 Informants and agents

The Tal Shiar relies on people as much as on machines. Inside the Empire it is understood to keep informants in every house, every ship and every office of any importance, and Romulans learn early that anyone may be one. Outside the Empire the Romulans have a long record of patient deep-cover work. In 2367 a Romulan agent who had lived for years as the Vulcan ambassador T’Pel faked her own death aboard a Federation starship and was taken off by a Romulan warbird at the Neutral Zone. The service that ran her was never named, but the method is the one Starfleet expects from the Tal Shiar: years of preparation for a single result.

6.3 Interrogation

Romulan interrogation is feared on both sides of the line, and with reason. Accounts agree that it is effective, and that it leaves the people who go through it a former shadow of themselves. The methods are assessed to combine long isolation, psychological pressure, and medical and technical tools. In 2368 the Romulans showed that they could condition a captured Starfleet officer over a few days to carry out an attack on command, and that he would remember nothing of it afterward. That operation was not attributed to the Tal Shiar by name, but Starfleet regards the capability as one the service holds. The general state of Romulan medical and interrogation technology is covered in Romulan Technology.

6.4 Deniable work at the border

On the Neutral Zone the Tal Shiar’s work takes the form the Empire prefers: nothing that can be proved and nothing that can be answered. The patterns Starfleet has recorded since 2387 are familiar to every officer on the line. A buoy develops a fault and drifts across. A distress call comes from a place where no ship should be, and may or may not be a trap. A Romulan ship lingers close to a Federation route and leaves before anyone can decide what it was doing. Any of these may be the Fleet, the Tal Shiar or simple chance. The service’s skill lies in making that question impossible to answer.

Starfleet’s standing assessment is that the purpose of most of this activity is learning rather than harm. The Tal Shiar wants to know how Federation crews react, how long they take, whom they call and what they will tolerate. See The Neutral Zone (2393) and The Romulan Side of the Zone.

7. What Is Not Known

The service’s size is not known. Estimates exist, and they disagree with one another by wide margins. Its budget is not known, and neither is the share of the Empire’s shipbuilding it commands. Its leadership after 2384 is not known: Starfleet does not know who chairs the service, how that person was chosen, or whether the chair is a single officer at all. Its internal structure is not known beyond the fact that its officers carry military-style ranks, as the major aboard the Khazara did in 2369.

Its relationship with the Restored Senate is not known in detail. The Senate fears it, and the Praetor relies on it, but the terms between them have never been published, and the Empire does not publish the decisions of the Continuing Committee. Its role in 2379 is not known. Whether it opposed Shinzon, served him, or simply outlasted him is a question Romulans do not answer.

Nor is it known how far the service’s work reaches into the Remans’ affairs. The Empire is believed to have used biogenic weapons against the people of T’Met in 2391, and tens of thousands died. Whether the Tal Shiar had any part in that decision or in carrying it out has never been established. See T'Met and The Remans.

Finally, it is not known how much of what Starfleet sees on the border is the Tal Shiar at all. The Fleet uses many of the same methods, and the Empire is skilled at letting one arm of the state take the blame for another. When an officer on the Zone says “the Tal Shiar”, the honest meaning is often “someone on the Romulan side we cannot see”.

8. The Tal Shiar in 2393

The Tal Shiar of 2393 is a service that was nearly destroyed once, lost its political standing a second time, and has spent more than a decade rebuilding. It has returned to the Neutral Zone with the patrols, and on this border its operations are never acknowledged. It is quieter than the service of the 2360s and, by every sign, more patient.

For a Starfleet officer on the Zone, the working rules that follow from all of this are simple. Assume the service is watching. Assume that any contact may have been arranged and any incident may be a test. Never assume that a Romulan officer speaks for the Tal Shiar, or that the Tal Shiar would tell that officer what it is doing. For the wider setting see The Romulan Star Empire, Romulans and the Federation and Dissidents, Splinters and Unification.