The United States government dispatches an agent, a former ambassador, to an African country that is rumored to be selling uranium to a crazy dictator.
The governor of Massachusetts dispatched an agent to Nova Scotia with a secret, treacherous message: if the rupture with the federal government turned violent, the state was willing to help defend Canada in exchange for British military assistance.
Spurred by the possible involvement of the super-terrorist Osama bin Laden, the FBI lost no time in dispatching an agent to Aden, where he could be seen in starched white shirt, speaking fluent Arabic to Yemeni officials.
At one point, though, the home secretary dispatched an agent to Somerset to investigate reports that the two poets and their friends spoke in French-sounding accents, caroused and engaged in suspicious practices, among them "washing and Mending their Cloaths all Sunday".
From a purely instrumentalist point of view, Fowler, the expatriate newsman so beautifully realized by Michael Caine in the current film version of "The Quiet American," is doing the world a favor when he helps his Vietnamese friends dispatch an American agent provocateur.
Shortly after he took office as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House approval, ordered his assassination and dispatched an undercover agent with poison.
He didn't send a cameraman, he "dispatched a ground agent".
A prime example occurred in 2002, when the FBI dispatched a special agent, armed with a camera, to a peace rally to search for terrorism suspects who might happen to be there, just to "see what they are doing".
After Jim Foley's abduction, in November, 2012, it took two weeks for the F.B.I. to dispatch a pair of agents to Antakya to interview his friends.
He may have been dispatched as an agent by the Taliban — whose leaders still deny there are any peace talks — or the double-dealing Pakistani intelligence service.
