[1] The name is borrowed from that of a powerful chess formation used by former World Champion Alexander Alekhine in a match against fellow grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch.

The game features eleven missions which are set in Austria, Cuba, Florida, Germany, New York City, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Texas.

The game allows players to choose between straightforward shootouts or more subtle stealth-orientated gameplay with the use of items such as poison and garrotes and by staging "accidents" as distractions or means of eliminating targets.

[3] On November 22, 1963, CIA officer Vincent Rambaldi commits suicide after his family is murdered an hour after President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

In 1943, Strogov had infiltrated Bergenhus Castle in Norway, occupied by Waffen-SS forces conducting experiments to develop a "super-soldier serum", and eliminated German scientist Dr. Hans Heinrich and his handler, SS commander Martin Fichtner.

A year later, Strogov is sent to a hotel in neutral Switzerland to identify and kill a mole in Soviet intelligence and retrieve stolen information from Paolo Minelli, an Italian diplomat and Abwehr contact.

Upon finishing the mission, he discovers Rambaldi outside and learns that he also sought the documents but was misled by a captured Soviet operative about where Minelli was staying.

Strogov and Vera, posing as a married couple, travel to New York and make contact with Rambaldi, who is working on exposing an anti-government conspiracy within the CIA to trigger a war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Vera and Strogov rendezvous with Rambaldi, who takes them to his safe house, where he and Pearson have put together a small team of trustworthy CIA agents.

He requests that Strogov go to the Red Dragon, a social club in New York's Chinatown, where mafia soldier Paul Capello and CIA analyst Terrence Shaw are meeting to review details of the operation.

Strogov goes to Miami, where he kills the boss and consigliere of the Cataldo crime family, both of whom are involved in the conspiracy, while framing their rivals for the murders.

Forced to act alone, Strogov foils a plot by Cuban saboteurs and a disgruntled Navy captain to blow up an aircraft carrier and frame the Soviets.

Pearson reveals that the two primary leaders of the conspiracy are Admiral Bruce Gardner, a senior Kennedy administration official, and an unnamed German man with ties to the Department of Defense.

Stepping inside, he is held at gunpoint by the man, who turns out to be a former high-level Nazi officer who once ran the Bergen operation that Strogov dismantled in 1943.

He used this position to resurrect his primary goal of bringing about a new world order by manipulating the United States into declaring war on Communism.