Ysanne Isard is a human female from Coruscant, Director of Imperial Intelligence, and the principal antagonist of Michael A. Stackpole's X-Wing: Rogue Squadron (Bantam Spectra, 1996) and the novels that follow it. She is a Star Wars Legends character with no counterpart in current canon, and she is the closest the Expanded Universe came to writing a villain whose weapon is paperwork.
How she got the job
Isard succeeded her father, Armand Isard, as Director — by denouncing him. When one of her own operations on Darkknell failed, she accused him of the treason and secured his execution, then took his desk. It is the single most efficient piece of characterisation in the X-Wing books: everything she later does to strangers, she has already done to her father.
The Lusankya
The Emperor gave her a second Executor-class Star Dreadnought, the Lusankya, buried under the surface of Coruscant. It functioned as a prison and a re-education facility holding millions, among them the Rebel general Jan Dodonna. The idea that the Empire's most powerful warship spent the war underground being used as an interrogation block is the whole thesis of the character in one image.
The Krytos virus
Her masterstroke is a defeat she engineers on purpose. Anticipating that Coruscant will fall, she seeds the population with the Krytos virus — a plague designed to kill only non-humans — and lets the New Republic capture the planet along with the epidemic and the bacta bill. The new government inherits a capital it cannot treat, a non-human population it cannot save, and a species grievance it cannot argue away. It is biological warfare aimed at a political coalition rather than an army.
The Bacta War
Isard then withdraws to Thyferra, installs herself as Head of State, and takes control of the galaxy's bacta supply — which is to say, the cure. Rogue Squadron resigns its commissions to go after her without dragging the New Republic into a war it cannot politically afford, and the resulting campaign, The Bacta War (1997), is the most satisfying thing Stackpole wrote in the series.
Death, and the clone
She is shot by New Republic Intelligence agent Iella Wessiri in 9 ABY, and Stackpole then spends a whole later novel, Isard's Revenge (1999), unpicking which Isard that actually was. Both the original and her clone are killed in the course of it — an unusually literal way of admitting that a character this useful is hard to put down.
Why she matters
Because she is the Expanded Universe's argument that the Empire did not fall in one night at Endor. Somebody had the files, the prisons and the informants, and the story of what that person does next is more interesting than another Star Destroyer. Almost every later "Imperial remnant" plot in either continuity is downstream of Isard.
