Jack Downing Part 7
[This is from early 1997, and may be another part of Downing's notes toward a book]
Day in the Life of a BOpFFOr Agent
Well, do you expect anything unusual? They are government workers, they do their respective jobs, but periodically are appropriated from their respective departments by some higher-up brass connected to the organization. It's easy enough, because the magic word is "National Security". . .you can always shuffle around people, appropriate funds, vehicles, even whole bases if you can convince the right people that "national security is at stake. Think of the NSA, for example, which is one of the most mainstream of the "black" agencies. They spend huge amounts of money, but if you look at the actual allocations in the defense budget, it doesn't look like much. So where is the money coming from? It's a post-budget appropriation from various branches of the Armed Forces (they also use a great many personnel) and from oddball agencies, like FEMA, otherwise committed to "emergency" management, geological surveying, meteorology. You know it was a bit of a scandal a few years ago when a hurricane was detected too late because the early warning post off the coast of Florida was doing something other than looking at weather. ________-The look of the Black Ops Brethren used to be strictly G-man, but in the past couple of decades it's been uniformed, either as reps of ONI or Air Force Intelligence. Sometimes just black fatigues. People get a visit or two, warnings, and nowadays are simply killed off if they won't shut up. Usually it's by "disappearance" or a bizarre accident. There are still some who prefer the "cat and mouse" approach. Crive a person crazy with microwave voice transmission, some other kind of harrassment, and let them do the job themselves.___Those black helicopters, from SpecOps, that has no specific connection to BOpFFOr. And the Black Ops Brethren wouldn't have used helicopters to do anything except interstate travel. The copters people are saying harrass them are from another agency. SpecOps people appropriated by another agency, doing some kind of mindfuck. It seems that the militias and separatist groups are getting buzzed by these helicopters more than anybody else, so it's probably a different agency. You know, there are several, and they have competing agendas. There have been skirmishes between the Black Ops Brethren/BOpFFOr and groups like AQUARIUS, ROWBOAT and some others. They have different hierarchies, different visions for national defense. Some of these guys, like Dames, Alexander, I feel strongly are affiliated with another agency.___The Black Ops Brethren would, as I said, come together on a rotation basis. They'd be on standby, which for them is the most useful time, because that is when these experts would be compiling what they know, teaching their colleagues, studying the history and doctrine, doing drills, etc. It's like the National Guard, in that they have to put in their time learning the ropes.__When a crisis arises, a "fire" that needs to be "put out," the team assigned to it would look over the facts, come up with a strategy for suppressing the spread of whatever information seems to need to be suppressed, then gather up their gear and go. It is regional, so they usually don't need to travel far.They have some people even in US military bases in England, Germany, Italy, and so forth. Not France though. I guess nobody believes anything that comes out of there, and information is thus controlled by a credibility deficit. Just kidding. They have their own teams. Our man Herbert O. Yardley, the godfather of Black Ops in America, got the basis of his method from observing France's "black chamber" of crypto specialists. ___And on the Kalo Lowve: The Kalo maintained facilities back before the changeover to BOpFFOr. Ironically, because of the blackness of the ops, the facilities were simply dropped off the books. BOpFFOr didn't close them down, they simply stopped using them. So the Kalo, as soon as the money stopped rolling in, just took things over for themselves. They started doing their own operations, though with some involvement with former Black Ops Brethren who'd dropped out of the government and gone private. What they were doing at that point had nothing to do with National Security. It was more . . .occult. And thereby hangs another tale that diverges somewhat from mine.__
The elemental people related to the Black Ops Brethren from the 40's to the 70's, then things broke off. I am loath to go into much detail about their activities except to say that some people had very close ties to them. The renegade Brethren and the Kalo Lowve still maintained some connections to the elementals after the big split.___There were many reasons for the breakup and reorganization. As I've mentioned, the Black Ops Brethren had been at war with some other agencies. This did weaken the organization. Then some top posts were taken over by people with very different ideas about how to run things. Some positions were grabbed up by Mormons and Scientologists. This is significant a) because they are religions and b) because as such, they were born and bred on American soil. The government is filled with Mormons and Scientologists. Especially the CIA. It is often thought that the government is against these two groups, but nowadays that's just a show to placate the Christian majority of voting citizens.___So the Black Ops Brethren was taken over by "hostile" persons. They disapproved of the old way of doing things. They didn't like the deliberate failures in our approach, they didn't like the calculated incompetence. They disapproved of our policy of allowing 5% of our visitees to recall and reveal their MiB visitations. And they simply didn't understand our tested and true approach to the "hall of mirrors." So, everything was rearranged. Many old-timers left. I was still a probationer, so I was kept on. But the stress of my father dying, which happened about that time (deliberate?) and other things caused my drinking to increase, and I was getting very insubordinate. I was undertaking my own operations, talking too much to the wrong people. Loose lips sink ships, right? I did not intend to sink any ships. In fact, my actions were not really a threat to national security. Security was just they magic word to appropriate resources, remember? My actions actually contravened only the newly revised agenda of BOpFFOr. Because of the reach of the agency, I was effectively drummed out of the government. Blacklisted entirely, virtually erased. Not easy for a career intelligence person. I had nothing I could put on my resume. So, after kicking around for a while, I decided to go freelance, intelligencing reports of supernatural infestations.
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