Jasper Knight was a chess master and soviet spy killed in 1979 by then-ICA operative Erich Soders.
In HITMAN™, an actor portrays Knight during a reconstructed training exercise that serves as a final exam for Agent 47's induction into the agency.
Background
Knight was a world-famous chess master who murdered the Soviet ambassador to the US. The ambassador was planning to defect to the West, and Knight, a Soviet spy working under order from the KGB, ingeniously poisoned the ambassador with ricin-coated chess pieces during a private match.
Knight then fled to communist Cuba, awaiting safe conduct across the Iron Curtain. When Langley discovered what had transpired, they hired the International Contract Agency to eliminate Knight.
The assassin, ICA's training director Erich Soders during his active years, caught up with Knight at a remote airfield in communist Cuba where he was meeting his KGB contact and assassinated him.
Trivia
- If the player disguises as the KGB Officer and gets Knight to follow Agent 47 into the communications, room, he will use the alias "Blind Tailor", a reference to Tommy Clemenza (Tommy the Tailor) from Hitman: Absolution
- His name might be a reference to former soundtrack composer for all the previous Hitman games Jesper Kyd.
- It is possible he was loosely inspired by real life Cold War-era chess masters Viktor Korchnoi and Lev Alburt, both chess masters who defected from the USSR.
- In HITMAN ™ 2, if Knight is eliminated by tampering with the ejection seat, Diana will say that she hopes that the actor's parachute will deploy properly. This is a retcon of the original version of the mission from the previous game, where the surrounding actors’ reactions imply that Knight’s actor was actually killed by the ejection seat launch.
- In HITMAN™ 2, Janus' intel states that he arranged for Knight's assassination to cover up activity surrounding one of Janus' spy schools.
- Dialogue between Tamara Vidal and Diana Burnwood in HITMAN™ III confirms that 47 passed his test using the rigged ejector seat.
