Assassination academy for wizards, and potential class combinations for secret police

[MonkeySage]

I apologize for the jumbled mess below... I am not entirely certain if this belongs in the World Building Section or this section.

My setting involves a recently throned blackguard, and his two associates: a goblin priest whose task it is to assemble an army strong enough to fight off a coming apocalypse(demon cults are trying to summon their "Mother" into the material plane), and a wizard who runs an academy that trains magic users in assassination and espionage.

The three of them are equals to each other, each working together to stave the beast that threatens to devour their world, in their own ways.

The blackguard's main task is to track down and silence cult activity within his empire, a task he employs secret police for... I'm wondering what classes might best serve this end, and what sort of hierarchy I could set up for it.

As for the wizard, I'm wondering what model I may use for his academy; these aren't DMG assassins, these are pure mages(most of them wizards) who are trained in assassination(and I've had an outside friend express interest in playing as a member of this academy, as an NPC the rest of my group will have to face later).

Apologies, again, for the jumbled mess above: I've been wondering about this for a while, but only just now decided to make a post about it.

[Marnath]

You'd have to dip rogue, but Daggerspell Mages out of Complete Adventurer might be worth looking into.

[avr]

For secret police, the important skills are gather info and sense motive, and the most important spells are charm person and some sort of remote sensing magic. If you can choose any class, psions (telepath or seer) would be the best. More likely you're working with what you've got, and the best suited of these would be bards, experts and rogues.

Secret police can be as much a danger to the ruler as the populace. A useful tool to keep them from bonding too closely with the people they're spying on is to move them on to new posts frequently. This is less true of technical specialists (whoever's doing the scrying), more the agents who talk directly to the populace. Keeping their leaders loyal (and competent) is one of a dictators big problems and I don't know any simple answers.

Wizardly assassins/spies ... Unseen Seer might be a useful PrC to aim for on the spying side. Assassination is more a matter of tactics than build.

[Radar]

Wizard assassins will most likely be geared for the typical scry&die tactics. Locate the target with divinations, assess the threat, teleport an appropriate battle group inside, wipe everything in the surprise round and teleport out. This will probably require a variety of specialists in the academy:

1. Diviners most likely focusing on boosts to their save DC in order to use Scry more effectively. They will be also useful as a general information gathering organisation.

2. Blasters for the actual killing. Mailman-type builds would be the most effective with various feats and tricks to conceal casting (Invisible Spell, Still Spell, Silent Spell and so on), if you need to be subtle.

3. Support, which will probably boil down to your regular batman wizards with a wide variety of tools to disable enemies, protect allies, punch through defences and so on.

4. Sneaky people for situations, where you really, really need to be subtle. Alter Self to substitute any relevant person, Detect Thoughts to gain quick informations, illusions for distractions and invisibility, Nondetection against magical sensors and so on. At higher levels you will want them to have Greater Arcane Sight (possibly Widened), so they will notice people with True Sight. A dip in the Mindbender class and mindsight highly recommended.

Optional specialisation: crafters - there is always a need for high quality magical gear and its better to make it tourself then to buy it from unknown sources.

As for the secret police, charisma-focusing Rogues or Bards would be the most useful base classes and a Factotum could make a solid secret agent as well, since the sheer ammount of skill points would allow him to pose as pretty much anyone (if possible, hire changelings and go into Chameleon class).