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[Dean_the_Young]

A couple of different posts. Not a developed/organized project, but key elements are there.

 

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I'm of two minds about conspiracies.

On one hand, I really don't like the ones that go into the 'all powerful Illuminati conspiracy' angle. Deus Ex, Mason conspiracies, basically anything that supposes that there's a huge, invisible alliance of forces that have perfect OPSEC and are either to perfectly prevent the truth from breaking out or prevent it from being believed... I think those conspiracies are stupid. At best, they're over-romantic and presume the masses are a monolithic block that can be easily predicted and manipulated by intent.

At worst, they become self-righteous Truther conspiracies where only an ennoble, awakened, and aware few tragic heroes are fighting to protect the stupid sheeple from their own pitiful delusions.



ON THE OTHER HAND...

A subtle, measured conspiracy can be totally worth it. If it's small, if it's specific, and if it's time-limited (ie, not an ageless group of masterminds), a cabal can totally work. Especially if the actors are limited, so that there aren't many arguments between competing interests, or if the conspiracy actually does break down internally.


I think my favorite sort of conspiracy story would deal from the Cold War alliances: not the Tom Clancy/James Bond spy stories, but the raising of allies and client states, and the covert agreements and penetrations that exist within them.


Take, for example, the FVEY alliance: Snowden talked about it during his leaks, about how the intelligence agencies of the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are fingers in a single glove. By what the New York Times puts out, this is one of the most unappreciated intergovernmental alliances in history... and we barely know anything about it, past that it exists. We don't know how it came to be, who exactly created the rules for it, or how it's managed. Everyone thinks that it's just an intergovernmental relationship... but who really knows how it's directed? Who knows where the information shared really comes from?

And dude, what follows is totally, 100% made up by me.

This is the sort of context I could see a secretive cabal forming in. An alliance of interests and resources, and already inclined to keep secrets, and an alliance in which deniability is incredibly plausible. A curious reporter finds evidence of evidence from torture in a UK report? They got it from the Americans. A US congressional investigation wants to investigate the source of a report? Sorry, that came from one of the other partners.

It's the five men in a dark room murder mystery, only espionage. That would be compelling enough if there were only five men... but what if the dark room had a sixth?

Imagine if the twist was that the FVEY alliance had a cabal directing it: 'managers' appointed by the source nations with the purpose of directing it, and using the layers of deniability to create a sixth intelligence agency? The FVEY agency?

No one below the lowest levels knows it exists, maybe not even the employees: they think they're employees of the CIA/MI6/your choice, operating on behalf of their own nation. FVEY is a system, not a body... and while they know someone is pulling the strings, if they're a good employee they're not the kind to ask above their clearance. So they do their spy work, working in the FVEY system, and never realize that they've fallen off the books.

FVEY spy rings. FVEY spy satelites. FVEY Black Prisons. Shared and operated for the benefit of all... but owned by none. And when any part of it is found, it's passed off as belonging to one nation or the other as one of their secret facilities, with no one the wiser of the centralized cabal behind the scenes.




That's only half of it, though- the other half is the scary thought of penetration. It's been said that the Soviets ran the intelligence agencies of the Warsaw Pact, down to the leaders of the agencies. When a spy agency is that compromised, how can it ever be cleaned without being purged from the start? Even if the former foe has fallen?

Thing of this as the 'infection' cabal: a system of compromised agencies that are connected by one compromising another to the extent that they own each other. This could be done in the context of a centralized controller: the masterminds, the russians who have compromised the rest. Each agency reporting to a central node.

But the Russian state and agency could be gone. Fallen for whatever reasons, and then their own agencies compromised by their former foes. Reverse the flow of infection.

Now we can have a decentralized infection: A is compromised by B is compromised by C is compromised by A. Who started it is past and academic: what matters is that these agencies, through corruption rather than alliance, are feeding off of and supplying eachother in a different sort of network.


Imagine Adam Jensen searching for a mastermind that is working through all the intelligence agencies, only to find himself searching an Ouroboros loop? Or, better yet, finding that the ring, masterless, has taken a life of its own?



There's actually an anime, Darker than Black, that toys with this. In a world in which space has been lost, super-powered contractors serve as spies, and everyone is trying to figure out the paradigm-shifting advances behind these, it starts as a setting in which all the intelligence agencies are competing, along with a separate organization called the Syndicate. We learn that, in a secret but bloody war awhile ago, the USA lost its status as the superpower when the Syndicate rose to power. At multiple times in the series, we see the Syndicate and the CIA still fighting each other of artifacts and such.

We learn even later, in the first season finale, that the Syndicate isn't just fighting the CIA and other agencies... the Syndicate is composed of members in key positions. Spy chiefs of multiple agencies are Syndicate. As much as they fought eachother, the Syndicate grew from each victory and each defeat. Which brings the question... did they make the Syndicate, or did the Syndicate make them?



If the FVEY Cabal is a centralized conspiracy out of a decentralized alliance, the Syndicate could be a decentralized conspiracy born out of mutually compromised agencies.


How tripped out is that?

[Dean_the_Young]

One, for the FVEY universe- if I ever do a FVEY conspiracy, I'm also going to include a counterpart conspiracy of mine: that the best way for a foreign government to undermine a liberal democracy is to support advocacy groups pushing moralistic regulations.

No, seriously- think of it like you were the enemy. How many better ways are there to cripple an economy's energy and industrial potential than to support environmentalist movements? The Environmentalist Movement is so fractured that you'd have people opposing any strategic project- anti-nuclear pandering, protests to close fossile fuel plants in favor of renewables, protests against said renewables because air turbines kill birds / solar panels are ugly and urban blight / thermal could increase the risks of earthquakes. Or pushing for increasingly drawn out 'environmental impact studies' or insisting on ever more 'precautionary testing' on largely settled science due to unfounded claims of disaster.

Or, from an enemy's perspective- aren't social welfare states a wonderful thing? Think of all the money not only not spent on more competitive activities, like new industries or research, but even actively taken away from military budgets and strategic capabilities? Long term capabilities traded, at great cost, for inherently temporary, less competitive gains!

You can also say the same thing about organized self-interest groups, like some unions. Empower them enough that they are no longer meaningfully checked by other groups, and their natural inclinations can easily distort, weaken, or help destroy large institutions.



The point isn't that advocacy movements are bad, or even wrong- people can have completely legitimate fears and reasons to push for regulations, social policies, and so on. You can make incredibly well-balanced arguments on enlightened self-interest, long-term thinking, and general not-being-a-******-to-fellow-mankind.

The point is that you can take a reasonable movement, and push it to unreasonable extents to the point that it becomes detrimental... and by cloaking it in terms of moral virtue, you can convince well intentioned but biased/unaware people to weaken or destroy their own interests.

Which, to a purposeful, unfettered group like a FVEY conspiracy, would be more than enough reason to keep themselves as the unfettered and to act in what they see as the public's greater interest. Because they would 'know' that the movements that would restrict them are being supported and influenced by foreign enemies... though naturally the difference between 'directed by' and 'taken advantage of' would be hard to see from their perspective.





 

[Dean_the_Young]

In which the conspiracy gained a backstory.

 

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So, back to the FVEY conspiracy idea-

I stay up to date on the news. Kinda of a part of my job, you know? And I don't rely on the three-letter news media- bunch of trash, all of them. BBC excluded, of course. So rather than a single news source, I go to a news portal for a taste of a bunch of news sources- Real Clear World. If you have time and interest, I highly recommend it.

http://www.realclearworld.com/

The real clear portal (not as pretensious as the name suggests) has a bunch of different sub-portals for topics- US Politics, global energy trends, science, etc. And one of them is history.

Today I read a fascinating history on the basis of the idea behind the Manchurian Candidate- real world indoctrination of POWs during the Korean War by the communists.

http://www.realclear...re_fiction.html


One of the sad parts of that war, and one of the enduring conspiracies from it, is that it's believed a large number of POWs were never returned by the communist countries. That they were taken, and never released or acknowledged. Just... disappeared.


I thought on it, I was sad, and then I had an idea to tie that into the FVEY idea- a sort of historical genesis for how the FVEY cabal became autonomous and, well, trans-national nationalist.

What if those unknown POWs had been freed, and became the hidden core for FVEY?



Imagine this as a backstory. The Korean War is over, and has been for years.. The coalition countries, all involved to some degree, know that their soldiers are being held in secret Chinese prison camps, where they are getting the distopian but real authoritarian attempts to procure loyalty and cooperation- coercion, benefits, wives. The FVEY, using atmospheric intercepts, knows it. They want to act, to free those left behind.

But they can't. But the nations can't act. The war is over- invading China at this point would be a declaration of war that no one wants.

But the FVEYs- the people within them, cooperating on this, they disagree. They know they can pull this off, and so they pull strings and play the bureaucracy. Shuffeling the shells and hiding the originator, they mask the origin of the idea and convene elements of a number of their special forces to conduct a liberation raid of epic proportions. And... it works.

It's not just that they rescue the POWs. It's not just that they get away unnoticed. It's what else they bring back with them- the families, wives and children included, of the POWs.


It's the greatest prison break of all time, and it can never be revealed. Letting the prisoners free to be noticed would be an admission of complicity. Letting the unvetted wives free would be a security leak, even worse. It would be a diplomatic incident of mammoth proportions. So... FVEY hides them. Shuffles the shells, moves them around. A small city is constructed in the Australian outback- Soviet satellites believe it's a listening post, and never realize how much of it is underground.

This is the Hovel, and it is the hidden city of the FVEY. The POWs are now largely willing employees for the FVEY as a whole. Their wives, some reluctant and some grateful, employees. And the children?

They're raised, some would say indoctrinated, in the FVEY. Taught to be grateful and loyal to all Five, and to consider them all their nation. Some stay at the Hovel, living there their entire lives. Some join the Five Eye intelligence agencies. And some leave and go undercover, using their ethnic background to infiltrate Chinese, Korean, and Soviet Asia.

Some of them even rise towards the top of the FVEY, and become directors and key bureaucrats for the alliance.

These people, the lost children of the lost soldiers, become the bone and sinew of the FVEY cabal, the multi-national nationalist conspiracy.