The Club

Operation URIEL

Contents

And these are the names of the holy angels who watch. URIEL, one of the holy angels, who is over the world and over Tartarus.

— The Book of Enoch, 1:20

Just as Uriel was God’s all-seeing eye on the Garden of Eden, so are the members of Operation URIEL the eyes of Project SANDMAN on the fecund Aquarian gardens of 1970s California. But that choice of Uriel as namesake — whom Milton’s Adversary tricked into revealing the location of Eden, after all — is a double-edged sword. Members of URIEL who have passed through its office over the past half-decade have wondered if the codename for the project was chosen as an outright warning to the project team: 

Beware the friendly stranger who seeks to ingratiate himself with the archangels who guard the divine secrets of paradise. That stranger may be Satan himself.

the club

Helix, Charley

“They seemed real. All of it seemed very real. But what was, and what wasn't, at Granite Peak?" Charley shakes her head. “And if they aren’t, what does that mean? What I thought, I didn’t forget about my life before, that it’s imagined too?”

Hort, Mitchell Jefferson

“It’s a real problem,” Mitch says seriously. “People get a whiff of reality, they throw out all their preconceptions, well, some of them, and then they just get a bunch of new ones that account for what they’ve experienced. Sometimes not even well, like, if you’re gonna get a new belief system it should at least hang together, but ...” He shrugs. “It’s an occupational hazard: thinking you have things figured out.”

Martin, Roger

“This too has happened to me before, in Vietnam. When a man’s life is on the line, I cannot just do my own job, and let others do what they do. If I let it happen, again and again, am I not guilty? Do I become a murderer? A torturer?”

Menos, Jocasta

“I live in two worlds. I can see things and sense things outside this world, but I’ve trained myself to be very present in reality. Dosing gives me insight and lets me see things more clearly, but it also makes me alienated from people. Men have abandoned me but I still want their trust and approval. Letting myself drift was what let me access my talents but I needed discipline and focus not to disappear.”

Ransom, Archibald

“You know what we call the ants in these models? Technically, they’re ABCEs, ‘autonomous belief-constructing entities’. But everyone usually calls them ‘agents.’ Which is a little funny, if you think about it.”

Redgrave, Marshall

He opens his eyes and is quiet for a moment. Diners around them chatter. There’s a momentary hush as Mayor Tom Bradley is escorted with his date to a nearby table. “You have a duty, Arch. To humanity. And to URIEL. Above all to URIEL. The club. So what are you going do with this little existential crisis? Will you do your duty?”

Part of being in the club is, you don’t act against the interests of the club.

intra-office psychodynamics

When he’d joined the Service he’d been in Psych Eval, which had involved evaluating operational strategies for psychological impact – on targets as well as agents – but had also meant carrying out individual assessments; who was stressed, who’d benefit from a change of routine, and who was a psychopath. Every organization had a few, usually at management level; and it was handy to know who they were in case there was an emergency or an office party.

— Mick Herron, London Rules

Do you think human nature bends inevitably towards fascism?

  • “Well, first of all, I think it's more important to keep asking the question than to have an answer, if that makes any sense. But the other thing I decided was this:” Archie and Mitch are standing next to each other, both facing the yard, Archie’s family and friends and all the food and drink and patriotic-kitsch decorations. In Archie’s mind this is an Antifa stronghold, just as Mitch said. He claps a hand on Mitch’s shoulder, a rare gesture from him. “MJ — Mitch — it is time for you to find yourself a nice girl.”

  • “I don’t know? But if so, I don’t think we would be here. I mean, the Ontoclysm happened because people are so much more than that. Captain Kirk says, ‘To be human is to be complex. You can’t avoid a little ugliness — from within — and from without.’”

  • “Adorno, and others, identified a spectrum of nine characteristics of the authoritarian personality, that is someone not overtly fascistic or necessarily bigoted but with a personality predisposed to support fascism should it arise. Three traits are of particular interest to our work: conventionalism, which adheres rigidly to middle class values of the in-group; anti-intraception, which resists and even detests the subjective, imaginative, and tender-minded; and stereotypy, which is a disposition to rigid categorical thinking.

    My pedagogy serves as an inoculation against authoritarian indoctrination and a methodology which resists recuperation. It urges that through enchantment we are able to become queer, nimble, creative, inter-subjective and imaginative, tender-minded, and open-hearted. This inversion of traits is capable of eating the edges of fascistic territories. My work seeks to cultivate consciousness so vast that people become immune to blind adherence to structuralized norms and capable of navigating the complexities of power. We aim to be so wild, so queer, and abnormal in our approach that fascism cannot consume what we produce because it is incapable of parsing it. This is how we become capable of deterritorializing the fascist death spiral at the brink of total collapse, through an alchemizing effort that take the ill fit of the monstrous and reads it as information that allows us to move into new shapes with it, remediating and regenerating as we go. Every unnecessary violence, every injustice, and every unrest is a shadow speaking.”

  • “No, absolutely not. Human nature is essentially good. That’s what we do this for.”

    Mitch: “But if human nature is essentially good we wouldn’t need to do this. Definitionally we must live in a fallen world, right?”

    “But extend that metaphor to its biblical source: the world is fallen but the people in it are savable, right? They’re capable of salvation and even perfection. Adam and Eve were not inherently flawed. They were tempted.”

  • “Yes, I think it does. Because that’s how they programmed us, you know? There is something in people that struggles with the directionless of our existence, the constant change, the apparent meaninglessness of it all — that anxiety manifests in a yearning to be controlled, guided, protected. Fascism. But I also believe human nature is malleable. That we do not have to be the way we are. The Gautama Buddha ascended, after all.”

  • “Well, not much to say there. It’s a no, brother. I don't think you can say human nature bends towards any one thing at all, really. OK, right, everybody at some point wants shit to be simple, and fascism, sure, that promises to make it simple. But it can’t be nothing but a lie, always. Nothing’s simple with people, not unless you put some serious blinders on."

    “Here’s the thing with making things simple: the complex people stuff, it doesn’t go away. You can’t make a perfect law everybody will obey, because there’s always somebody different. You go trying to bend them to fit, or pretend they don’t exist, or hell just go killing them off, and resistance will arise. Hell, even if you had all the magic in the world to kill them off, wipe their brains, change their bodies ... you just gonna find some other intolerable difference in those left, and it starts all over again. Say there’s only black and white, and kill all the black, and you’ll start seeing black in the white that remains ... ”

  • “Can we talk about this in about three minutes? I’m trying to do a thing!”

HUMINT

Groups

People

the history of operation URIEL

Leonard

Meet Dr. Andrzej ("Andrew") Bedra, occasionally assigned to the San Francisco SANDMAN operation from 1966-1970 as a medic, "cleaner", and crude sifter through the materials of the human mind.

Andrzej Bedra was born in the Free City of Danzig in September of 1925. His 14th birthday coincided with the German invasion of Poland; neither his older brother nor his father lived to see his 16th birthday. Raised during a brutal occupation with no real role models, he developed into a curious and intelligent but deeply amoral man, resuming his studies after the war and becoming a physician, but drawn to a number of questionable medical practices and obsessed with what he believed to be the structure, capability, and malleability of the human mind.

Post-war Gdansk and Vienna became his two homes, and the presence of not only Western occupiers but fringe elements of the smashed Nazi party and the ambitious Soviet Eastern Bloc gave him ample opportunities to employ his eccentric beliefs about shaping and developing the human brain. Drawn into Cold War psi research circles, and willing to work for anyone who gave him a free rein, he soon made a name for himself in two areas: isolating (and then distorting or even erasing) a person's memory, and developing useful new technologies that implemented or altered latent psi powers.

Soon enough, his mercenary behavior made central Europe a little too hot for him, and his often brutal techniques made him enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. His salvation came in the form of the CIA, who snatched him away to Chicago and assigned him to a number of projects where people needed to have their brains rearranged to their specifications. He worked on Blue Book, CHATTER, MKUltra and its sister programs, Momentum, Midnight Climax, SCORPIONs-1 and 2, and any other program that gave him the chance to tinker with memories and emotions.

Eventually, his talents with proto-brain hacking, creative pharmacology, mind-wiping, and psychotronic engineering saw him attached to SANDMAN; the revelation of ancient gods and alternate histories seemed not to interest him at all except insofar as it allowed him to dig even deeper into the brains he saw as his medium. Traveling to whatever branch needed his 'talents' the most, he eventually found his way to Livermore and SANDMAN's early Bay Area operation in spring 1966.

"Andrew" (or "Dr. Bedra", as he preferred to be called) was not well liked. Amoral even by CIA standards, uninterested in the defeat of the Red Kings except as a pretext for his work, anti-social, and possessed of a number of unpleasant habits -- most especially muttering in a low but nearly constant monotone while sifting through the brains of his 'patients', like some malignant Glenn Gould -- he did not seek to make friends with his colleagues, nor they him. He was, however, ruthlessly efficient, hard-working, and good at his job, such as it was.

Bedra was a smallish man, soft and slight, with the beginnings of a stoop and little care for his appearance. He dressed in cheap suits and brilliantined his tight wavy hair to excess. Gifted with languages (but not fully trained thanks to SANDMAN's ongoing uncertainty about his loyatlies), he spoke with a whisper of an accent while communicating in English. His thin, delicate hands enhanced his abilities as a surgeon, but looked out of place with the rest of gnomic body. Born with poor vision, he wore thick glasses, without which he had trouble reading. He was married, but never spoke of his wife or the rest of his family.

Archie pins the first headshot and Dossier Page 1 to his corkboard. Dr. Bedra. This is the kind of guy Dr. Stanton had in mind a few months ago when he talked to Archie about the guys in SANDMAN who "hit hard." The same type as Dr. Gunn out at the Peak. And he left in '70 under … a bit of a cloud. Archie could never really tell from the higher-ups if the transfer was a demotion, a hiding-him-deeper-in-SANDMAN-to-get-the-heat-off-him situation, or a "retirement." Whereabouts: Unknown. Color Dr. Bedra highly likely OZYMANDIAS. Archie pins an "80%" index card next to his Dossier Page 1.

Brant

The astrologer I envision being a woman, modeled somewhat after Liz Greene, one of the first “psychological astrologers.” Probably herself a psychologist (not a psychiatrist) in the Jungian tradition, got her doctorate in the history of Middle Eastern astrology. A believer and an optimist but also happy to use astrological esmology to “make the world a better place.” I suspect she was pulled from URIEL after her astrological predictions kept coming true …

Next on Archie's hit parade … oh, Mystic Kate. What a pistol she was. Katherine Delmonde (1969-1972), aka Mystic Kate, an Anglo-Canadian syndicated astrologer who was brought in in late '69 upon request by URIEL for "someone more attuned to mystic traditions." Kate moved from Toronto where she'd been managing most of Canadian memetics campaigns in the 1960s through her extremely popular astrological column. Her combination of Jungian psychology, real astrological predictions, esmology, and her talent at embedding memes (but only in astrological prediction form) made her a quirky but reliable asset for SANDMAN in the '60s as the mystical side of society grew and grew. She moved to San Francisco, got a new column, and sussed out lots of potential threats … oh. Oh my, Archie thinks. Not Mystic Kate. That'd be a shame. She was a real pip. She "retired" voluntarily in '72 to do consulting from home in cottage country Ontario; they had a beautiful cake and everything. Archie puts down "40%," — maybe an underestimation thanks to his fond memories of her, he really should write down "50%" — and also writes down "Coat-Trailer also?"

Jeff

Hmm, okay, so there's this small-town midwestern kid, Albert Jayne, classic nerd. He comes out to SF in the early ‘60s, linguistics undergrad at UCSC, then Berkeley's linguistics department for grad school, starts calling himself a philologist in grad school mostly as a joke. Because his knack for linguistic theory — reconstructing Proto-Indo-European and such — meshes very well with esmology, he gets recruited from there into SANDMAN, where he keeps his head down which goes very smoothly, until it goes terribly because Marshall decides he's a depraved homosexual deviant security risk within about twenty seconds of meeting him (Marshall is not wrong, at least not about the homosexual part). I don't know how grim to get, I'm not sure that he's still alive. Maybe he obtained a handgun and forcibly removed himself from the equation before he could be taken to Granite Peak for assessment and long-term reassignment.

He was all of twenty-six or so, no military experience, just a kid.

Albert Jayne. Dr. Albert Jayne. Archie corrects himself. It was hard to think of him, all of 25 years of age when he was attached to Livermore in early 1969, as "Doctor" but there you go. A prize-winning linguist, his super-genius intelligence propelled him to the top of his field in less than 7 years. He'd gained a bit of a reputation on campus at Berkeley in the mid-'60s while still just a grad student as a polymath and polyglot whose linguistic and philological skill dazzled even laypeople: he'd been compared to Chomsky out at MIT more than once: buttons on campus proclaimed him "The New Noam." A genius like that couldn't ignore the source code when he found it, and he did find it.

His recruitment into SANDMAN was put together very quickly and highly coerced; it was like a high school kid discovering how to kit-bash a nuclear bomb in his suburban garage, someone told Archie before the kid arrived. "It was recruit or eliminate," from what Granite Peak said. And in the two years he was attached to URIEL, he was a master at all kinds of expressions of the source code: he could lay in memes, analyze the next few months of market and political behavior from doing a survey of verb frequency in five major newspapers, translate The Lord of the Rings into flawless Akkadian … in his spare time. A genius, a poor tortured kid who maybe saw a little too much too quickly, Archie thinks about his departure under, again, a cloud of controversy. A liability, a weak link, maybe. Not a traitor. "15%."

Rob

Ray Mulligan, born in Bakersfield, California, 1908. Ray joined the FBI (Los Angeles division) during its WW2-era expansion, hunted saboteurs and Reds for a few years, but either quit or got fired in '46. Possibly he was taking kickbacks; he would just say he got a bum deal. Shopping around his expertise (and some purloined files from the old office), he comes to the attention of Billy Wilkerson: gangster or gangster-adjacent developer, thwarted movie mogul, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, and, like Ray, a rabid anti-communist. Ray sells Wilkerson dirt on various Hollywood luminaries and gradually comes to work for him as a fixer, investigator, blackmailer. With Wilkerson's blessing, Ray is one of the ex-FBI agents who publishes Counterattack and Red Channels in 1950. He spins this into a few months employment as an investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, but Wilkerson remains his primary meal ticket. Sometime around 1955, when Carleton Alsop (one of the CIA's men in Hollywood) is establishing or expanding SANDMAN's L.A. chapter, he poaches Ray from Wilkerson with a promise of steady pay and less putting up with the whims of a volatile semi-gangster. So Ray learns the truth about reality, shrugs, and joins the boys at Lookout Mountain. By 1968, he's an old soldier: calm, cold-blooded, and unflappable (I'm partly picturing Mike on Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul). He doesn't subscribe to anything as high-falutin as an ideology; he's just a survivor who hates the Reds and Red Kings interchangeably and does whatever needs to be done.

Next up, one of the Original Three of URIEL, Ray Mulligan. Archie puts up a photo of his grizzled, half-scowling face where he looks every inch the heavy ex-fed, ex-dirt digger he was. Like Archie, he relocated from Los Angeles to help set things up at Livermore in '68. Archie remembers Ray as a profound cynic who patronized Archie more often than not: as the only real field agent for URIEL during its first couple of years, and as new blood to the reality war, he didn't often understand Dr. Bedra or Archie's opaque requests in the field and also didn't respect them as agents and let them know about it in gravelly monosyllables. All Ray brought to the job was a certain implacability as a surveillance and black-bag man and a reliable heavy presence when needed, which honestly wasn't very often. Ideologically, 1968 Archie admired his anti-Communism but did note that Ray seemed to be bearing a lot of secrets and maybe even some psychological scars from his years working street-level intel in Los Angeles. Archie has no illusions that Ray did some dark, violent work in the 1960s out of Lookout Mountain. But he was 60 years old when he got to Livermore and didn't last out the first few months of 1970, taking the retirement option much like Mystic Kate. His whereabouts are unknown — his past in LA meant he rated a retirement under an assumed identity — but that info could likely be dug up with some research in SANDMAN Central records. Could he have been a useful catspaw for OZYMANDIAS? Well, sure, but a lot of that depends on how much/how deeply LA SANDMAN at Lookout Mountain was infiltrated before the team, er, met its end in '71. An interview of Mulligan would be required but Archie is erring on not as likely OZYMANDIAS; Archie doesn't think he was really all that complex a thinker or that political when it comes to SANDMAN internally: call it a 35%.

Brant

We could use a reality archaeologist. I had an idea for one as an alternate PC if Marshall ever like, got shot. There's a lot about "place" in this game that sort of begs for a reality archaeologist. I don't think any of the PCs really check that box — Mitch comes close with Mount Shasta and his tour of the Price lots but I feel like he's coming at it from a different perspective than someone who has the equivalent of a SANDMAN doctorate in the architectural history of retro-created non-existent cultures.

If I hadn't gone with a crazed guru human potential mind-rapist for this game, I would've picked some kind of weird archaeologist. I've been following this Karahantepe site since last October and they keep finding the wildest shit.

Rob

I was actually just ruminating on an archaeologist, a Middle East specialist, Oxbridge or Ivy League trained, sort of stuffy and elitist, and very discreetly gay. But not so discreet that it wasn't in his file and hadn't put a hard ceiling on his career prospects in the organization.

Slot five. Dr. Hilary Postel. Oxford-educated ancient Near East scholar with a specialty in the prehistoric settlements of Asia Minor. Recruited by SANDMAN in the late '50s when he came across some evidence of History B in one of his digs in eastern Turkey, on the border with Syria. He joined the team at the Duncorne Foundation and became one of the archeological boffins there, dealing with the churn of reality shards and fragments of History B that surfaced in the Middle East over the course of the '60s. He came to URIEL in early 1969 to assist on a case using his specific historical expertise, a cult worshipping certain prehistoric gods that supposedly pre-dated the Anunnaki arrival in Mesopotamia by several millennia. SANDMAN wrangled him a job locally, a visiting scholar position at Berkeley, as cover and he assisted URIEL off-and-on for the next two years in a limited capacity; Archie thinks of Hil's arrival in early 1969 as being a bit like Charley's four years later; called in for a specific set of skills then reassigned to URIEL.

So Hil wasn't stationed full-time at Livermore. But the times he did mix with the other URIEL team members, Archie remembers having some fascinating conversations about what humanity was like before the Kings' arrival, if there even was a time before Their arrival, and whether the prehistoric settlements of the proto-Indo-Europeans in Anatolia (Hilary adhered to the Anatolia origin theory of the proto-Indo-Europeans, as opposed to the Steppe Theory favored by mainstream archeologists) were the true "first contact" with the Red Kings due to how badly Indo-European languages are tainted with source code, several millennia before the first ziggurat was built. Did the ancient Anatolians build settlements and temples and menhirs because they were "carefully taught"? What happened in the thousands of years between these proto-settlements and Sumeria? Abstruse and esoteric stuff, to be sure, but as a result Hil thought about History B very differently from most of the boffins at Duncorne. Archie felt for Hil, a sensitive chap without a family or many friends in the Bay Area, always a little overwhelmed by America it seemed. His two-year stint at Berkeley expired at the end of 1970 and he left a couple months later, right after Sophie arrived (Hil and Sophie got along like a house afire) and before Mitchell arrived. SANDMAN kept him in America though after this assignment; he's at the Semitic Museum at Harvard right now.

Could his out-of-the-mainstream theories about the Kings lead him to join something like OZYMANDIAS, with their fatalistic prediction that the Kings are inevitably to return? Archie remembers Hil being angry at what the Kings did to human culture, language, speech, and civilization, herding us into cities, giving us laws and science; at times, his adoration of the proto-Indo-European hunter-gatherers, before they settled into cities like Göbekli Tepe, bordered on a kind of neo-primitivism, even if Hil enjoyed his gin and tonics, cups of tea, and other creature comforts of civilization. "All bought on credit, old chap," he used to say to Archie. "Jet airplanes and penicillin and fancy computers. And they'll come collect someday, just like a bunch of bloody bailiffs." He'd be valuable to OZYMANDIAS, might even end up as a recruit target, but likely wouldn't jibe with their fatalism and might even be virulently opposed to it. Call him a "25%." And he's likely still at Harvard if we felt an interview was justified. He could even be URIEL's ticket into the Boston branch of SANDMAN at MIT.

And now! Slot 6! Appropriately enough, this slot on the board is for the Sixth Man, who was with URIEL throughout calendar year 1972, replacing Mystic Kate and leaving before Jocasta joined up earlier this year.

Archie looks for the file, but can't remember the name of who he's supposed to be looking for.

He tries to think about the Sixth Man's face to find his photo in one of the personnel files, but he can't remember what he looked like.

He's now sweating a little bit, racking his brain for anything about the Sixth Man: his specialty, the missions he contributed to, his favorite meal at the Livermore cafeteria: nothing, nothing, nothing.

Archie's not imagining the Sixth Man, is he? There definitely was someone part of the team from a week after Mystic Kate's retirement party until a few weeks before Jocasta showed up. Archie looks at the clock, 4:45 pm, nearly quitting time. Maybe he's just tired after a … difficult weekend and a very long Monday. Maybe it would be better to think about this tomorrow, get together with the older gang (Marshall, Roger, Mitch) and make sure, ha ha, Archie's not cracking up or anything.