dropped to 3.7 million in 2016 from a peak of 5.1 million in 2013. The explosion of secret programs during the War on Terror required unprecedented numbers of people to be cleared for those secrets. For years, a Top Secret clearance has been a virtual guar- antee of steady, high-paying employment.
But not every person cleared for state secrets proves willing to keep them. Many don’t know how to keep them in the first place.
The pace of damaging leaks, from the White House’s 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the daily leaks from disaffected civil servants in 2017, are a constant reminder to both the Program and the Outlaws. Every new person who learns a secret, no matter how well vetted or how well trained, increases the risk of its revelation.
» 29 JUN 2014: Having asserted control of large portions of Iraq and Syria, ISIL declares itself a caliphate.
» 17 JUL 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shot down over Ukraine with 283 passengers
and 15 crew aboard.
There are no survivors. Dutch investigators later determine that a Russian missile, transported to pro-Russian separatists the day of the shooting, brought down the flight. Early reports indicate separatists at first thought they had shot down a military flight.
» 22 JUL 2014: The Program mounts an ambitious mission to locate for - mer Delta Green agent Avery Mitchell in rural South Carolina, hop
- ing to gain intelligence for an attack on the Disciples of the Worm. Four army Humvees and an Apache Longbow gunship descend on an old Disciples site, Devereux Mansion, under the pretense of a classified JSOC exercise. They stumble into an ambush by an unnatural monstros
- ity that destroys all four Humvees and the helicopter before an agent destroys it. There are no survivors. The Program reduces activity on all other operations while it covers up the disaster, and sharply re
- stricts such costly military assets in other U.S. operations.
» 31 OCT 2014: The NSA completes the Utah Data Center, with 9,000 square meters of data center space and more than 84,000 square me
- ters of technical support and administrative space. Its initial stor
- age capacity is estimated at three to 12 exabytes. NSA whistleblower William Binney says the facility is meant to store the full contents of domestic communications for purposes of counterterrorism data min
- ing without warrants. The NSA denies this. A sign near the entrance reads, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”
» 3 SEP 2014: Exalted Circle leader Engvald Brasseur, sidelined by his rivals, dies of a stroke.
» 20 DEC 2014: The ambush killings of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu inspires the Blue Lives Matter pro-police movement. » 28 DEC 2014: Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 crashes into the Java Sea
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// Delta Green: Handler’s Guide //
from surveillance. Even the encrypted text exchanges that modern-day terrorists adopt are off-limits.
When protocols slip, details could wind up in NSA server farms, saved to some investigator’s thumb drive, or exported by a foreign intelligence service thanks to some undetected computer worm. It’s up to every case officer and cell leader to make sure agents know what’s at stake.
So far, the Program and the Outlaws have avoided seeing a whistleblower go public. They choose who sees their secrets very carefully. Indeed, both organi- zations are so small that the lack of resources often interferes with the mission. Agents often complain about the rigorous communications security that both groups demand. No operational details are allowed in any communication but face-to-face, someplace secure
DISINFORMATION
THE TRAIL
The seeds of revelation are already out there. The massive leaks by Manning in 2010 and Snowden in 2013 included communications by agents of the Program. Others wound up online in 2007: Program-related email on a personal computer went online when an agent’s teenage son opened the hard drive to a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Most of the leaked communications were vague. Five of them, sent hastily while in
danger, mentioned specific times and places. Two mentioned unnatural entities and rituals by name.
Those data points could easily lead to the agents who sent them. Those agents were frozen out of the Program immediately after the leaks, had all ties to other personnel severed, and were warned explic- itly to pretend insanity, drug abuse, or some terrible crime if that’s
what it takes to halt an investigation. So far, no investigators or journalists have pieced the data together. If they do, it may fall to
some active team to make sure the damage is contained.
DISINFORMATION OPERATION TIKI BAR
In 2013, the Program launched Operation TIKI BAR, which mined unnatu - ral data points from illegal NSA intercepts, social media posts, com
- puter worms, and mobile devices. Its servers flagged items likely to require action. The system generated many false alarms.
Six months after TIKI BAR launched, an analyst in the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) was placed on indefinite psy
- chiatric leave. TAO was a cyber-warfare unit, suspected in the 2010 sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities. The analyst, Soong Hsin-ying, had learned of the mythological bat-god Tsathoggua by unwittingly following TIKI BAR’s digital breadcrumbs. Becoming obsessed, she modi
- fied TAO solutions to seek hints about Tsathoggua. TAO deployed dozens of software and hardware tools with Soong’s modifications before other analysts spotted them. The Program hurriedly shut TIKI BAR down, but Delta Green Agents could someday learn of an NSA surveillance team following remnants of the Tsathoggua code.
// The Past //
// Delta Green: Handler’s Guide //
TOP SECRET//SAR-DELTA GREEN
» 5 JAN 2015: ISIL-related terrorists ambush and kill two border guards and injure one in Arar, Saudia Arabia, on the Iraq border. ISIL-re- lated attacks will kill 1,020 and injure more than 2,100 in the Mid-
dle East, Europe, and the U.S. by the end of 2015.
» 7 JAN 2015: Terrorist attacks today and on 9 JAN 2015 kill 17 and wound 22 in the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper and elsewhere in Paris, France.
» 23 FEB 2015: ISIL militants loot and bomb the public library in Mo- sul, Iraq, destroying over 8,000 rare books and manuscripts.
» 4 MAR 2015: The Exalted Circle arranges the destruction of the Lon- don-based Dorian Grey Society, another former branch of the Cult of Transcendence. Exalted Circle saboteurs seize records that would give the Circle leverage over the Society’s members and then reveal its leaders’ many crimes to the police. Henry Nemmers, a U.S. col- lege professor and leader of the New Potential Movement, is revealed
as the Dorian Grey Society’s leader. Nemmer vanishes before po- lice find him.
» 25 APR 2015: An earthquake in Nepal kills nearly 9,000 and leaves hundreds of thousands homeless.
» 29 APR 2015: Samples test positive for Zika virus in Brazil. A Sep- tember report finds Zika-related microcephaly cases rising sharply. » 3 MAY 2015: The Solomon Islands report an outbreak of 302 cases of
Zika virus beginning the month before.
» 14 MAY 2015: The Director of the Program orders its security direc- tor to launch Operation SOMERSAULT. Run without the knowledge of the operations director, who handles most actions, SOMERSAULT combs U.S. medical records for DNA profiles indicating Innsmouth ancestry and sends kill teams to eliminate “tainted” individuals.
» 17 JUN 2015: White supremacist Dylan Roof shoots and kills nine and wounds three at an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.
» 17 JUN 2015: Software engineers at Google describe using neu- ral networks to examine, classify, and generate images. Two weeks later, they release the open-source program DeepDream. It enhanc-
es image patterns by algorithmic pareidolia, often with hallucino- genic results.
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» 14 JUL 2015: The NASA deep-space probe New Horizons flies 12,500
km above the surface of Pluto and sends high-resolution photo - graphs to Earth.
» 15 JUL 2015: U.S. Special Operations Command sponsors Jade Helm 15, a realistic military training exercise involving JSOC, other special operations forces, and other military units coordinated from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The exercise runs in states across the U.S. southwest and southeast until 15 SEP 2015. A map of the exercise that designates Utah and Texas as “hostile” and New Mexico as “uncertain (leaning hostile)” leads right-wing conspiracy theorists at
Infowars and Americans Against Covert Enemies to suggest that Jade Helm is part of a larger plan to wage war on the American people.
» 23 AUG 2015: ISIL militants destroy the 2,000-year-old temple of Baal Shamin in Palmyra, Syria. They destroy Palmyra’s 2,000-year-old tem
- ple of Bel not long after, along with many other ancient sites. » 10 SEP 2015: An international team of researchers formally describe
Homo naledi, a new species discovered in 2013 in South Africa’s Ris- ing Star cave system.
» 1 OCT 2015: Student Christopher Harper-Mercer shoots and kills nine
and wounds nine at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, be - fore committing suicide.
» 16 OCT 2015: Colombia reports a Zika virus outbreak that eventually
reaches 27,000 cases. Zika spreads to other South American and Cen - tral American countries over the next few months.
» 20 OCT 2015: Hurricane Patricia forms, the most intense tropi - cal cyclone recorded in Western Hemisphere and the second-most in
- tense worldwide.
» 31 OCT 2015: Metrojet Flight 9268 explodes above the Sinai, killing all 217 passengers and seven crew, most of them Russians. A branch of ISIL claims responsibility.
» 11 NOV 2015: The Brazilian government declares a national state of emergency due to the Zika virus.
» 13 NOV 2015: Coordinated terrorist attacks kill 130 and injure 368 in Paris, France.