"During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor."
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth", H.P. Lovecraft
Prior to the raid, a team of U.S. Treasury Department agents under the command of Special Agent Wade of the Secret Service conducted an investigation of the townsfolk of Innsmouth . Their findings prompted President Calvin Coolidge to authorize a raid under the code name Project COVENANT. The Department of the Navy, in the form of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agents, U.S. Marines, and U.S. Coast Guard troops, provided both firepower and manpower. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, under director J. Edgar Hoover, was brought on board for its legal authority to seize “suspected aliens and seditionists” for deportation.
ONI captured approximately 200 Deep One hybrids; a copy of the log of the Sumatra Queen, the ship of Innsmouth’s most prominent merchant-captain and founder of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, Captain Obed Marsh; a Marsh family history dated 1862; two copies (one badly burnt) of the Ponape Scripture; five conical stone tablets inscribed with glyphs (weighing about fifty pounds each); and incomplete translation notes for the strange glyphs, compiled over many years by Robert Marsh, who was killed by Marines while resisting arrest. Rumors persist that a submarine fired torpedoes off of Devil’s Reef at an unknown target.
The stone tablets were turned over to the Black Chamber signals intelligence and cryptography unit in April, 1928. By November, 1929, the translation was completed as the Book of Dagon. The Office of Naval Investigation moved their Project COVENANT veterans and artifacts to the ONI’s P Division.
Marine Colonel James Whelan headed up P Division and quickly recruited the Black Chamber cryptographers who worked on translating the Book of Dagon. The captured hybrids were moved to a prison facility in southeastern Arizona disguised as a Naval air station. From 1929 to 1942, P Division acquired:
P Division successfully disrupted a pair of Deep One colonies. In 1930, depth charges were dropped on a coral reef near a small island in the Philippine archipelago infested with hybrids. Captured cultists and hybrids were taken to the secret Arizona containment facility. In 1933, the Pacific coast of Nicaragua was found to contain a fishing village with a growing Esoteric Order of Dagon. The village was destroyed, along with all the villagers and artifacts. Along with the requisite dropping of depth charges on nearby reefs, P Division used an invocation found in the Ponape Scripture to lure Deep Ones into deadly ambushes.
The invocation was then attempted near the ruins of Innsmouth to capture Deep Ones for study and to learn the locations of other colonies. While the former goal was achieved, the latter was not. The Deep One threat appeared to have been neutralized.
Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is ™ and © the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©Raymond H. Rich, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property and those attributed to the sources listed above.
