Throw the Rulebook Out the Window
Pilot Charlie Earhart flew around arranging conspiracies for the government in 1932. Yet he never got a single bravo (possibly because people were always spelling things out for him). Rule Alpha, he knew, is that only Paris is worthy of Rome; only Rome is worthy of Paris. Charlie's problems persist to this day.

Mission 1:

An expedition to add magnesium salts to the water supply accidentally ended up in the most populous city in Thailand. The mission was redirected but the pilot found himself in the first industrial city. The mission was finally aborted after a last ditch effort was only able to treat the water of the City of Lights.

Mission 2:

Messages got crossed and aliens attempted to land in the city with the busiest airport (by aircraft movements) on Earth. The incoming ship was rapidly reassigned but went off in the direction of the city where the first synagogue in the Americas was built. A series of garbled communiques resulted in the alien ship going toward the intellectual center of Estonia. However, the pilot misheard and instead headed for the Capital of Latin America. Frantic requests that the alien ship land somewhere else led the aliens to redirect to the capital of Hebei. One last attempt to land in the birthplace of the current pope resulted in the aliens just giving up on everything and going home.

Mission 3:

A new mind-control bioweapon was to be tested on a largely isolated population center but somehow was nearly released in the Eternal City. Another misunderstood mission alteration led it to be sent to the city with the most visited art museum. The weapon was moved to the city on the banks of the Vishwamitri River where it would have been deployed except that the operator thought HQ had changed their minds. The window of opportunity closed and the fallback location of the largest city in Ecuador was targeted. En route to this locale, the weapon somehow ended up in the largest amusement park in Scandinavia where it wasn't detonated because of a misheard order to drop it in the mail. The weapon mysteriously was lost in the mail, but its last known location was the city where the printing press was invented.

Mission 4:

A new scheme to harvest all of the metadata from the City of Broad Shoulders met with a similar end. The system was to be tested in the only city-county in California. The conspirators were perplexed when they only received metadata from Mount Baodu, and eventually just went back to harvesting everyone's metadata the old fashioned way.