In Thomas’ line of work, paranoia and care were oftentimes indistinguishable. It was time to take a vacation to try and put some distance between himself and the Agency, and close the distance the Agency had put between him and Harriett. Somewhere spectacular with an opportunity for isolation and also indulgence in equal measure. They took a luxury flight to Las Vegas. His plan was a couple of nights sampling the Vegas sights while spoiling her, some time alone in the Grand Canyon then maybe home via Los Angeles. Variety was the spice of life, especially for people such as themselves, both of whom had seen and done so many different things already.
The burden of his concerns and uncertainty in his vision weighed heavily. In James and Sal he could find no better partners, but they had their limits. Thomas was scared by the darkness he contemplated almost daily while the pace of their progress was measured in years.
“I know you’re looking for just the right spot, Tom. I just don’t know where or when you’ll find it.” Harriet knew there was more to hiking than hiking.
“Actually, I think we’re in the right spot, right now.” He was at the stern of the kayak as they paddled down the Colorado river. “Relax, darling, I can do the work. I’d like to talk to you about something.” The one thing he was banking on was their shared history and her sensitivity for the work. They’d met during his stint in Bletchley Park when he’d returned from France. He’d crossed paths with Turing’s team while he was updating in crypto techniques before his next stretch in the field. Harriett was posted there as a Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) analyst and interpreter, privy to sensitive operations and communications on both sides of the war. It was at a casual dinner where Turing introduced her as his “fieriest friend on the Park”.
Harriett turned to face him in the boat and laid down her paddle. Scuppering them was one thing Tom wouldn’t do. Her wide brimmed woven hat kept her porcelain skin from the sun but couldn’t contain her auburn hair in shadow. Thomas quietly delighted in its tonality, exacerbated by the contrast from shade to light as it snaked free, down to her waist.
“This is a one-way moment, isn’t it? Your helmsmanship is proven, darling. I have to trust that you’ve picked a sensible spot.” She knew that what was coming would be irreversible. The river canyon was high-sided, difficult ground. Anyone on foot would not have been able to traverse it, high up or low down, at the speed they made on the water. Any viewing point would have limited time on them, would need a long range mic and cumbersome recording gear, be limited in battery time and be a general pain in the ass to organise for one team, never mind the many it would take to surveil them on their spur of the moment river cruise for two, assuming that either of them were under suspicion.
It wasn’t Harriett’s trust he was gambling on, it was his own judgement to break security protocols for selfish needs. He needed her more than ever. If her judgement had been to stop, he would have. Probably. He began to tell his story. An outline at first, to give her the mission overview. That was massive in itself. Then he would begin to drill down.
“From ‘47 to now, we haven’t made significant breakthroughs with artefacts or entities. They tell us that we don’t know what we don’t know. I think there’s two messages the entities are giving us: we’re not the apex predator in this place; there are limits to what we can do, and those limits will or can be imposed by them at their whim. The spin offs from that have been, as you might expect, varied. The Agency is now a law unto itself, from the shadows. I’ve seen the evidence, I’m watching it expand. It’s empire building, with the latest tools and techniques and an eye on some non-human empire that we have only glimpsed. It’s done this without direct contribution from COATHANGER. Imagine what would happen if we cracked that technology and power.”
He recounted the project hierarchy inter-relations. The scope of the darkness involved, what he felt were the motives and objectives, the skew of human politics and petty desires. Harriett could not have been ready for the scale of his revelations but she did well to remain stoic, listening intently, studying him and his narration, analysing him like he wanted her to.
“So, here we are. This is, I think, a key juncture for me. You are my juncture. Nixon has turned ‘Nam into a sprawling mess. Since Bobby Kennedy went a year ago, there’s no one left with peace, love and harmony on their agenda any more. Where’s the balance? Me and the fellas have established ourselves in the right positions to span key areas: exotic, domestic and foreign intel, organised crime. We’ve spent the last three years since the MLK assassination setting up ways to build up cash and starting to tap streams of it. It’s a mixture of Agency fronts and the best examples of criminal laundering. We’ve got the structure all set up and the pathways proven, but we’ve yet to go full tilt operational on skimming, laundering and some pseudo legit options. There’s no other way to get resources on the scale we need them, no matter what we choose to do next. As we build those resources, we can work out ways to use them.”
It had taken him the best part of an hour to give her the big picture. He had barely scratched the surface detail of how PAPERCLIP had lead, ultimately, to MK ULTRA and more. He was confessing to the love of his life that he was a criminal and had been for some years.
Harriett’s analysis began to kick in. “Assuming your objectives are good or right enough - and few will actually be there to judge that - you will always have a staffing problem, and that will always stop you from acting. How do you act? If you must operate sub rosa and remain so, you are going to need to come up with indirect ways of acting that are somehow effective. Can you even do that?”
“Honestly, I don’t think so. Not if you mean directly opposing the status quo.”
“Then it’s your objective we need to talk about. If that’s not good enough or you can’t make it good enough…” She looked around the full vista. He said nothing, waiting for her to finish her sentence. “…then extract while your cover is intact. At it’s core, I think it feels that simple.”
She was right. It was a relief to lay bare his 15 years of burden to her British critique. It was extremely dangerous to remain in his closed Agency box. Harriett would be judging not just him but also the Agency in the bigger political context as she saw it, from the relative outside. A second moral compass was needed. She was sharp, and got to the heart of the matter. If he couldn’t do anything good, why do anything at all? Why remain in the Abyss? Transfer to leave on good terms to pursue other interests.
“Tom, love, it sounds to me like you’ve done what you were trained to do: gather intel. That’s your core. You’ve largely been monitoring, for good reason. In the war, the next stage would be to plan missions off that intel. The difference here is the scale of targets is as big as the globe and the timeframes are… I don’t know. That depends on the mission.”
“Is that really your judgement of me and the actions I’ve admitted to?”
“Everyone in intel is a shady bastard, love. Do you think I’d have ended up with the likes of you if I wasn’t morally flexible myself? Everything I did was illegal to the Germans or whichever nation I was listening to and directing actions against. I was just doing it inside a country that said I wasn’t a criminal in its eyes, for reasons I believed in. If the enemy is within, then it takes agents on the inside to deal with that enemy, and you’re certainly as inside as you can get. There’s a key difference here. Do I have to say it?”
“You might as well. If anyone’s listening, they haven’t shot at us yet, doll. You might draw them out and we can both get all of this shitty business over with!” It was gallows humour. He wanted her to beg him to stop so that they could run and float on a river that became the sea. Doll. His term of affection’s meaning went deeper than it sounded.
“The fucking aliens!” she laughed, pulling a warped face with crossed eyes to emphasise the goddamn craziness of the revelation. She was abreast of the news reports of sightings and denials, he made sure of that. It was his way of saying, “I’m keeping an eye on this stuff,” by folding the paper to stories that gave her a feel for his areas of interest. They’d had plenty of “normal”, unclassified discussions about those articles, like any husband and wife. Full-on confirmation wasn’t such a leap for her. She wasn’t prone to panic, thank Christ.
They landed on a tiny pebble shore wrapped in dense trees that backed up against a sheer cliff. He quickly set a small camp, cast a couple of lines into the water and set out their lunch. His job was to listen to her analysis and answer her questions. She was his handler now, one who was prepared to share her analysis rather than just issue instructions and targets. She saw that everything was too big; too big for one man or a few; too big for humanity itself. His curse was his knowledge, which compelled him through morality to act somehow. For whose benefit? The objectives would determine what he, they, would have to become. That would begin to define methods. It already had. Some of the methods were legal, some weren’t and all required subterfuge. If direct conflict was not an option, asymmetry of purpose and method was the obvious alternative. Lunch had turned into a sunset hidden from view.
“Why haven’t you said anything about stopping, leaving?” he asked her. The firelight turned her hair darker, to browns and, in dancing shadows, hints of black that became the darkness beyond.
“Because I haven’t finished the hard bits yet. The easy options come at the end, love, otherwise the agents stop thinking right at the start.”
Her suggestion was an intermediate objective; a junction or branch that would lead to another outcome. MK ULTRA was a perversion in pursuit of powers the entities pointed to. This was an inevitability because of the nature of humanity and unchecked power in the context of fear and paranoia. ULTRA’s results served a tiny minority; the power to poison, kill, control and enslave targets had little widescale application to mankind and wouldn’t, as far as she could see in the next decade, morph into widescale benefit. It was shameful. He felt filthy by association although she expressed no direct judgement and spoke only in distanced and rational terms to her agent, being careful to avoid alienating him.
“What if you could turn the Agency’s focus and resources to something that looked as though it could serve its power agenda, but had the possibility of empowering mankind? That would maintain your a cover as a servant, give you more funding in the open, all while you ran a parallel operation trying to determine whether what you discovered could benefit many?”
This was just one of the reasons he loved her more than his own life. His quizzical look begged for more detail.
“Do MK ULTRA but by other means and methods, love. You could probably get a few years and the funding to… internalise ULTRA.” He still didn’t quite get it. “This NoVeL Comms… it comes from the entity, into you. It’s something that’s internalised. No one is taking drugs, taking poisons, you’re not being lobotomised in strobe lights. Gottlieb is doing all that, getting no results and yet NoVeL Comms is happening between humans and non-humans. Doesn’t that mean its internal to the entity and to you?”
“Yes, the ULTRA drugs and techniques are our attempt at fumbling in the dark and making up reasons to justify crazy objectives for crazy purposes. Sadly, it’s the small view of small men.”
“OK, so find a way to explore the internal side of NoVeL Comms. Invent a reasonable justification or potential application to the Agency and military so you can sell it. Speaking of selling, I’ve suddenly got a hankering to go into business…”
“Sir, our assessment is medium high confidence.” James had presented a threat assessment, but no solution yet.
Director Richard Helms had come up through the operational management ranks. He was not a bureaucrat, he was an operator turned pseudopolitical manager. Bullshitting the guy wasn’t an option. James and Sal had to believe in what they were telling the Director. Their belief had to convincingly trace through the intel and analysis and then the Director would have to take them seriously. He was a handsome, dark-haired, immaculately presented man. He reminded James of a slimmer Nixon with a much better nose and no jowls. Looks aside, he was skilled and capable.
Art Schumer was the Russian desk representative, sat beside Sal. He’d laid out the suspicion that the Russians were weaponizing the electromagnetic spectrum against human targets. Not RADAR to detect objects and jamming to block the RADAR but the projection of energy at people to achieve outcomes, like affecting them physically or interfering with their perception.
“This term, ‘psychotronics’…” the Director mused. “Is that their term or ours?”
“Ours, Sir,” replied Schumer. “It’s our hybrid catch-all term.”
“It has a nice ring to it! Imagine Mattel’s latest range of psychotronic toys. Parents could get their kids to behave, and kids could get more pocket money out of their parents!” They laughed at Helms’ off-the-cuff humour. He was likeable and they respected him.
“I’ll get on to Science and Tech Directorate right away, Sir,” James said. “Director’s authorised commercialisation of psychotronics! What’s your cut, Sir? The usual 25%?”
“That plus another 25% of all the extra pocket money!” Helms joked back. The reality was that Helms was well aware of the interlocking relationships of BLUEBIRD, MK ULTRA and the domestic and foreign picture. He might have needed a nudge back to COATHANGER. That was all in the pipeline. “Gentlemen, thank you for this work. Pass my gratitude on to your teams. This isn’t new or a surprise in some senses, not since Moscow in ‘53, although that wasn’t this kind of level…” He recalled Russia’s use of microwave energy for eavesdropping and signal jamming that the Agency had misinterpreted as some form of mind control. “…In some respects, we’re still on that wild goose chase, aren’t we?” A reference to BLUEBIRD and ULTRA. “Nonetheless, things move on and we have a duty to keep up and move ahead. Let’s get together again in a week, to give me time to get into these details and refresh myself on the bigger picture. Bring any proposals to that meeting, then give me another week for a decision.”
Helms authorised James and Sal to set up an equivalent to the Soviet’s suspected ‘psychotronic’ research, which would involve experimentation into the effects of electromagnetic energy on the human mind and body.
“This is a bit like shoving a battery up Gottlieb’s ass,” Sal said. More experiments on human subjects, more of the same external agenda. But they had to give in order to get. Their payoff was SCANATE - their first step on an alternate branch that traced straight back into COATHANGER.
SCANATE was focused on the potential for “remote viewing” that was intimated by the entity in somewhat indirect terms. Could a human learn how to project themselves to another place and watch events remotely, without physically moving? Was this what the entity did when it sat still for long periods, and was such a skill how it came to know of activities it had otherwise not physically witnessed? By ‘72 the work on SCANATE had been formally but secretly outsourced to Stanford Research Institute under Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. Helms had been specific - be ready to use Targ and Puthoff as a discrediting operation to bring external research success back in-house.
Targ and Puthoff claimed to have been achieving a 65% success rate for remote viewing, which covered anything from “guess what’s in the envelope” or “guess what’s in the room down the hall” to “map out this distant location”. They’d taken to widely researching the skills of psychics, which had connected them to Uri Geller. Then the three of them all hit the fundraising circuit together. No one saw the CIA in this, which was the point. When Geller was outed as a remote viewing fraud, that was the point at which the public research narrative became a complete distraction from the fact that in-house work was progressing. Work continued in Stanford but did not connect to the Agency.
From this kernel, Thomas, James and Sal were able to spin wider and long running projects into the broader areas of extra-sensory perception. The internal cover was military and intelligence applications; their underlying intent was to determine whether the expansion of human consciousness and capabilities could one day deliver wide and far-reaching benefits to mankind, just like Harriett had suggested. Only Thomas knew where that objective had come from. He kept that secret just for them, along with his pet name for all of the work.
Harriett was a capable, resourceful and independently-minded woman. Men who saw her full abilities found her intimidating but they were like a siren’s song to Thomas. The war and their connections through intelligence operations bound them as distant colleagues long before they became lovers. Thomas possessed an expansive and flexible intelligence that mixed the technical with the human, which allowed him to move out of Signals Intelligence and into direct OSS field operations. Harriett kept operatives at arms length, wary of their front and easy charm. Inherently, they were untrustworthy given that subterfuge was in their job description, so she kept her heart away from Bletchley Park. The one man who fascinated her there was Turing, who was clearly a genius and ill-suited to military environs. His unkempt appearance, shyness that gave way to outspokenness backed up by his intellect and expertise, and seeming disregard for the power his position could command set him apart. She gauged their growing friendship in part by the reduction in his sometimes heavy stammer. That women weren’t his thing made it easy to spend time with him instead of others at The Park. His characterisation of his Universal Machine as an attempt to “build a brain” stuck with her.
“Tommy, it strikes me that you’ve got a recruitment problem that needs fixing, but you’ve got a trust problem that gets in the way of fixing it. Fancy a hand with that?” Harriett was fluent in German, French and Spanish and was busy with work for government, UN and private customers. In her mind, it was perfectly legitimate for her to spread her wings and enter the private intelligence business. She had the operational knowledge, background, credentials and a defunct British clearance and mint record. Her marriage to Thomas meant she had been vetted. She could start gently, then branch out with a bit of investment. “I could grow the language capabilities first. Recruit more heads on that front,” she started. “That’s not even intelligence, but it’s a fundamental basis for it in the future. Meanwhile, I have my own ideas about building field kit. That’s going to need some external investment.” Thomas’ efforts had led to the build up of cash in front companies, some of which could be rebranded as venture capital. Money was already spinning through them into the markets. Accountancy was about spinning a story with numbers that passed the smell test and didn’t draw attention. “It doesn’t matter what we sell or to whom. What’s the difference between a bug and a hearing aid? We can play about with this, and if someone’s dumb enough to give us government contracts on a legit basis, we start working our way in from that angle…” Thomas laughed. “What’s so funny, love?”
“I won the lottery and I never even bought a ticket.” He moved to embrace her and gaze into her deep brown eyes. In his being, she was the world and all that lay beyond. That kiss was like their first and their last in one, filled with longing and trepidation and utter heartbreak. His tears smeared her cheeks and she withdrew, cradling his face and stroking his hair. His arms rang with electricity, like she was full of charge that clamped his arms around her but became stinging pain. The contradiction between letting go and gripping her uncontrollably filled him with a sense of mortal fear. “No!” He tightened around her, burying her face into his shoulder and his into her neck. She gasped in surprise at the momentary violence of his shift. She could feel a fear, some flood of emotion that took them to the end that neither had imagined. “Fuck this, fuck all of it!” he sobbed, “you’re not some asset! You’re no one’s pawn, least of all mine or theirs! I swore to protect you and make you happy, not expose you to danger because I led myself into the dark.” The strength of his fear, his sudden outpouring of unguarded expression scared her.
“How much danger is there in a legit business built on perhaps a bit of nepotism and my own ability? I’m not suggesting anything crazy, and actually, I’ve got an idea that Alan Turing told me about that could end up being bloody useful. Give us a chance, love.”
Knowledge without the means to act was Thomas’ chief torment but the truth was that he had been acting and getting results for a long time. The constraints he endured made for slow work that was out of kilter with the far flung objectives in his mind. He struggled to balance practical patience with idealistic urgency as he perceived the creeping dread and the death of the nation he had fought for in the war. It was Harriett that made the difference. She wasn’t sympathetic and bound to support him out of blind love. She was coolly analytical, had empathy for his role in the bigger picture, and grasped the nature of the Agency.
His achievements to date were just motivating enough. To those above him, he was the small man, and yet he wielded enough power from the inside to bend and pervert their control structures and turn fear back upon them for his own ends. Unlike a mole, he was his own master. Unifying his knowledge across the Agency had begun to generate a power that was meant only for those at Director level.
Between them, Thomas and his friends began to build a picture of not just US political and practical control, but also a sense of how humanity might fit into a much bigger but heavily obfuscated and redacted picture. Directors and deputies came and went. They were dependent on Thomas, James, Sal and Bart to do the work, achieve results and tell the Directors stories about it all. That’s where their normal power lay - in the stories that they told the Directors - but their efforts since JFK’s assassination sought to transcend constraints and enable them to compete on their own terms. If they could escape the government’s spiral of control, they could counter what they saw as the dimming of the beacon on the hill.
MK ULTRA was largely killed off by ‘73. Helms, being the consummate professional who lived and breathed the Agency, initiated a burn of the whole programme’s documentation in order to protect himself, his colleagues and the Agency. Thomas, James and Sal did as thorough a job as that order required. Only small amounts of documentation from the extensive programme remained. Gottlieb’s identity and involvement ultimately came to be known, and he bore the brunt as what someone would later come to label him, “The CIA’s Poisoner-in-Chief”.
Hall Associates was the innocuous name of Harriett Allard’s burgeoning private translation company that she incorporated in the spring of ‘74. She built a bank of staff by first mining her wartime contacts then placing ads in Washington and New York state. She aggressively drummed for business via her existing client base, making it known that she was interested in any and every drop of work, none of which had anything to do with intelligence or required a clearance. All she was looking for was cashflow and a margin. There were relatively few overheads unless the translation needed to be done in person or over the telephone. As the head of the Company, she focussed on the quality of the output, personally checking every translator’s work where she was able, and crossing work between two translators to compare the results. Then she began to offer a real-time telephone based translation service to business and government that had the resources to employ two lines and two phones on the call.
The CIA took heat from the Church Committee’s scrutiny of its methods and scope in ‘75. Even though Senator Frank Church denounced the Agency’s techniques and growing capability to monitor and surveil domestic and foreign targets, its power to embed effective controls over the Agency was marginal. President Gerald Ford’s executive order to ban political assassinations just meant that the Agency had to step up its game to preserve plausible deniability. The Church Committee ultimately led to the exposure of the Agency’s involvement in the death of Frank Olson while working with Gottlieb in the ‘50s on ULTRA-related work. Gottlieb had covertly dosed colleagues with LSD. It triggered a negative spiral in Olson who later “jumped or fell” from a 13th story window in 1953. Olson’s family eventually came to take action against the government more than 20 years later. By anyone’s reckoning it was a shitshow and stain on the Agency’s public reputation but Helms’ pre-emptive record destruction, technically illegal though it may have been, limited fall out.
A year after its launch, Hall Associates needed two days a week of managerial work and whatever hours Harriett felt like putting in to the translation work. She had enough staff on the books to handle most of the general custom and a consistent client base. She pushed into the publishing sector, trying to get book translations that would lead to consistent blocks of work for her most capable people. Her medium term game was two-fold, as she had explained to Thomas. If Hall Associates caught the eyes of people in Washington, they might approach her to provide one or two staff to one of the military agencies. That could be a way for her get some form of clearance and get her back into the periphery of the intel game, in a way that looked innocuous and completely in keeping with her background. That would be means to tap into the dollars that were flying around since Nixon’s termination of Bretton Woods. Hall Associates had little reason to spend cash, so it could afford to sit on it and wait for investment in the right kind of product.
SCANATE and ESP projects started to bounce around different agencies as well as continue via Stanford, requiring far less sinister and distasteful experimental practises than ULTRA in service of Thomas’ nobler covert objective of one day expanding humanity’s capabilities. The Agency retained oversight access to projects and applications spread throughout various services that all unknowingly fed Thomas’ COATHANGER desk.