Rose Colored Spyglasses (Night's Black Agents)

Russia's FSB overestimated Russia's chances of success in Ukraine, and Russia's army is paying for that mistake. As the Washington Post puts it:

“There was plenty of wishful thinking in the GRU and the military, but it started with the FSB,” said a senior Western security official, using the GRU abbreviation for Russia’s main military intelligence agency. “The sense that there would be flowers strewn in their path — that was an FSB exercise.” ... the FSB now faces difficult questions in Moscow about what its long history of operations against Ukraine — and the large sums that financed them — accomplished.

How did it come to this? Wishful thinking played its part, but this habit isn't limited to the FSB. Every would-be cardshark who's ever set foot in a casino knows that losing is somehow unthinkable, that the next turn of a card will be exactly the card you want.

Let's assume that they knowingly lied or exaggerated. Why might that be?

If your promotion depends on it, you lie.

If your bosses expect a certain outcome, you lie.

If your budget depends on good news, you lie.

If everyone around you tells you that the lie is the truth, you lie.

If an expert tells you something and you believe the expert, you lie. Unknowingly perhaps, but it's still a lie.

If there are no consequences for telling lies but there are consequences for telling the truth, you lie.

Where else might we see an environment where people's budgets, promotions, depend on lies? Where there are no consequences for lying but there are consequences for telling the truth?

Edom. 

The Edom files make it clear that each of the Dukes has their own department, their own agenda. Hound is the most obvious about her objective, but they all have objectives of one kind or another which may or may not advance the goals of the Edom project. Then of course there's always the possibility that Dracula left a gift behind in the 1970s. Are all the Dukes loyal? Is one of them deep in the enemy's councils?

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Edom has a long-term project it's pursuing in, say, Romania. Not unlike the FSB in Ukraine Edom is going to cultivate assets in the project area, carry out punitive operations against enemy assets, and generally try to gain maximum advantage for minimum effort. 

But.

The people running those operations know Hound doesn't want to hear bad news. They know their budgets, promotions, depend on funneling good news up the chain. They have experts from Edom telling them one thing, and perhaps the situation on the ground is telling them something else but acknowledging that reality would mean admitting the experts were wrong.

Most importantly of all they know that if they keep telling lies there will be no consequences but if they start admitting unpleasant truths the bosses will not be happy.   

If things start going wrong it's natural to assume it's because of enemy action, but what if it's because your own side is letting you down?

Audit Trail

Location: Bucharest

Asset: Romanian Mortician

Task: Evaluation

Summary: an important location (doesn't really matter which, but for the sake of this discussion a Heal The Children office) was the target of a black bag job and the Mortician was assigned to make the initial evaluation. Elvis trusts her evaluation; Osprey does not. The agents are tasked with auditing the Mortician using a second opinion of the black bag job as an excuse. This may be their first visit to Romania; a nice, low-stress bit of fieldwork.

Possibilities:

• The Mortician has given a straight, no-nonsense report on the black bag job that contains one nugget of embarrassing information. Heal The Children is meant to be an Edom asset, but it's been diverting funds - which means Edom's cash - to its own executives to fund a luxurious lifestyle. Those executives have direct, personal connections to Osprey; he helped them get their jobs. If the Mortician's evidence gets out and is believed by Elvis and the other Dukes, that's very bad news for Osprey. He'll do his best to make sure the agents get buried in Bureaucracy, if it looks as if they back the Mortician's story. Osprey would never take direct action against Edom agents, but those Heal The Children execs aren't above hiring a few goons to protect their interests.
• The Mortician's report is pretty basic, and that's because the Mortician knows that Hound has taken a personal interest in Heal The Children and doesn't want to get in the way. As far as the Mortician's concerned she likes her job and wants to keep it. She knows that if she tells the truth Hound will make her life a living hell. What Hound doesn't want the rest of Edom to know, since Romania isn't her territory, is that she was following up on Tradecraft rumors that Heal The Children is connected to some Conspiracy actors outside Romania, in Saudi Arabia. Hound's information is false but by acting she's compromised herself and Project Montsieur, which is something she doesn't want the rest of Edom knowing about. Especially not Elvis.
• The Mortician has told Elvis exactly what he wants to hear, which is that the Heal The Children job was backed by the Conspiracy. Elvis thinks everything in Romania is Dracula's doing. If his agents agree with him they get rewards and promotion; if not, they get punished. The Mortician is only doing what she's been doing for years: telling the bosses what they want to hear. In fact, the Heal The Children job was carried out by the mafia, and only so the mafia could use Heal The Children's computers as part of a crypto scam. Elvis will argue that the mafia's connections to the Conspiracy are well established, which is enough to foozle the other Dukes. Except Hound, who's often wondered whether the Romania desk wouldn't be better under her control.

That's it for this week! Enjoy.

Poisoned and Abandoned: Andrei Zheleznyakov (NBA)

This week's post is inspired by the story of Russian bioweapons expert Andrei Zheleznyakov, poisoned on the job and left to die.

Novichok, aka 'newcomer,' is allegedly the most deadly nerve agent ever created. The novichok variants were created over a period from 1971 to 1993. Its design intent was to be capable of avoiding detection by the 1970s and 80s equipment available at the time, to circumvent NATO biohazard defensive equipment, to be safer to handle, and to avoid classification under the Chemical Weapons Convention. If it made the CWC list, novichok would be a controlled weapon, its stockpiles liable for destruction. It's said that the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skirpal in London is a novichok poisoning.

In 1987 Zheleznyakov was poisoned by novichok, while carrying out laboratory experiments. A vent malfunctioned, spewing a small amount of the bioagent. Zheleznyakov immediately knew he'd been poisoned. "It's got me," he told his workmates. A timely dose of atropine saved his life, but his body was ravaged. When he eventually died in 1993, he'd suffered cirrhosis, toxic hepatitis, nerve damage and epilepsy.

Before dying he broke silence and gave extensive interviews, describing what had happened to him and what was likely to happen next. The material was published in 1992, a year before his death.

It's likely he wasn't the only victim of novichok, but he's the only one known to have died of this bioagent. Other potential victims include a Soviet officer who was convinced that he'd been exposed to the agent deliberately, to see what would happen. There have been assassinations tentatively linked to novichok as well, but nothing conclusive.

Assuming the Soviet officer's account is correct, the Russians aren't the only ones to test dangerous substances on their own people. MKULTRA famously dosed US Army biochemist Frank Olson with LSD, and Olson either committed suicide as a result or was murdered so he wouldn't talk - take your pick. In the 1940s and 50s the UK carried out radiation tests that were extremely hazardous for the military personnel involved, from flying through the bomb cloud to being ordered to sit and wait for the bomb to go off. In both cases the intent seems to have been to find out what close proximity to the blast would do to a human subject. The French did much the same. Ironically, we probably know more about Russian bioweapons research than we do about similar research in other countries, because there have been so many leaks and books over the years. 

Taking a trip down memory lane, and assuming an Ultraviolet game world, what does this mean for vampires and the spies who hunt them?

To begin with, it suggests a very nasty bane. Supernatural and Damned vampires might be immune to science, but it's a good bet nobody else is. Something that rots your organs and shreds your brain is going to do a number on anything reliant on human biology. To take the Perfecti from the main book as an example, the statues could care less, but their human proxies might die like flies.

Of course, it's a bane with significant drawbacks. You can't really target a bioweapon; you just set it off and hope it does the job. If not handled carefully it could be as lethal to the assassin as the target, and any bystanders may get a fatal dose too. Collateral damage makes it a visible kill; Heat will go through the roof. It's not an instant kill, and the effects linger. In the aftermath of the Skirpal attack, for example, three policemen who responded to the report were sent to hospital. One, DS Nick Bailey, was seriously ill for several days, and may be permanently affected. Moreover it requires access to state of the art facilities and considerable technical expertise to manufacture, and in novichok's case has a short shelf life. Edom might be able to pull it off, and so might other government-sponsored agencies. Freelancers haven't a hope.

On top of all that, it might not kill. Going back to the Perfecti, according to the main book their blood has been transformed to alien matter and a Perfecti's being is tuned to extradimensional frequencies. That suggests something like novichok might not kill them. The Perfecti could be sufficiently inhuman to survive an attack, but given they're at least partially reliant on human biology they will suffer damage. Perhaps permanent damage. A vampire whose brain has been destroyed or severely injured is still alive, but it's not much of a life. Even if the damage is temporary, the vampire will take time to recover - perhaps long enough for a hunter to do more permanent damage.

Returning to Ultraviolet for a moment, one of the recurring themes of that series was blood contamination. The vampires were concerned about ways in which the blood supply could be poisoned, specifically through radiation. Given that, vampires might also be concerned about poisoning through other means - like a bioweapon.

Suppose the Conspiracy wished to utilize a bioweapon in one of its schemes. The Persephone Extraction posits such a plot. For it to work as planned it would have to be an agent that did what it was supposed to do, but left the survivors with drinkable blood. If instead it killed off billions and left the survivors with undrinkable blood, that's a huge problem - the same problem that obsessed the undead in Ultraviolet. An issue like that can only be solved by rigorous testing. However tests sometimes go wrong, with catastrophic results. An event like that could easily trigger the agents' involvement, or be the inciting incident for a campaign.

This post started with Andrei Zheleznyakov, so to conclude I'm going to develop a story seed based on him.

Old Ghosts: According to your Network a supposedly dead Russian bioweapons expert has reappeared in Ukraine. Reports indicated he'd been exposed to a bioweapon in 1989, perhaps deliberately in a macabre test. He fell out with the authorities and published a tell-all interview before dying in 1993. Yet here he is in Mykolaiv, a seaport. Perfect for transporting a cargo - a bioweapon, say? Or perhaps his target is one of Mykolaiv's many food manufacture and processing plants. Whatever his goal, it would be very interesting to find out how he's survived all these years. Perhaps the Conspiracy is involved.

Variant: The expert was vampirized in 1993, but it didn't take. The devastating effect of the bioweapon made his unlife a hell, and the Conspiracy recently decided to stop footing the bill for the medicine and special facilities he needs. This might be due to Node infighting, or lack of interest in the dusty recollections of a man who hasn't done any real work since Mikhail Gorbachev was in power. Now the expert's ready to spill his guts to anyone who'll help him, including the agents, but you can't defect from the Conspiracy.

Potential adversaries/interested parties: former highly placed Russians now living in the West, who want to know if the bioweapons expert knows anything about a spate of assassinations that might have involved the weapon he worked on. Russia's Foreign Intelligence (SVR RF), which wants to know who this impostor is - after all, he's definitely dead. It has a certificate that says so. Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service, which wants to know what fresh hell this expert's been brewing on Ukrainian soil.  If serious evidence of WMD production is made public, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, United Nations, or Biological Weapons Convention signatories may get involved.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

The Little Tractor That Couldn't (Esoterrorists, Mutant City Blues)

Sometimes these things write themselves.

Pity the poor farmer whose tractor throws its final wobbly and insists on major repairs, as John Deere may hold that farmer to software ransom. For the full skinny take a look at this article in Vice, but the short version is: as John Deere has installed software on its tractors that can only be repaired at John Deere dealerships, desperate farmers in the US have turned to crackware brewed up by Ukrainian software pirates to keep their tractors free.

And they say there's nothing new under the sun.

I've discussed the potential of unusual hacking and infiltration techniques before. Everything has chipware in it. We are living in Cyberpunk 2020 (except with slightly fewer gun homicides) and we all Love The Computer, yes we do. But how many of you out there realized that tractors were also at the mercy of their manufacturer's chipware?

From John Deere's perspective there's an obvious attraction. Here you have a market that's utterly dependent on your product, but the purchasers insist on carrying out their own repairs rather than hasten to the dealership when there's a problem. Wouldn't life be so much easier, and more lucrative, if they'd just give up their annoying independent ways and become totally reliant on the dealerships?

Meanwhile the purchasers' fears are summed up neatly in the article itself: John Deere could just decide to shut down their tractor remotely and there's not a damn thing they could do about it. It's one thing to have to refer to the EULA when it's an app you bought for $0.99 that went screwy. It's something else again when the product in question costs north of $40,000 and is the only thing standing between you and economic ruin.

In step those nice Ukrainians with their free market dynamic and their oh-so-reasonably priced supplies. Incidentally, perhaps its just me but I had no idea tractors were so complicated. Payload files that program individual parts of the vehicle, allowing the owner to fine-tune the thing like Frankenstein tinkering with the Monster's limbs? Yikes. I in my naiveté figured all you had to do was turn the key, like a slightly more sophisticated Model T Ford.

While I have every sympathy with the farmers in this scenario, it does beg the question: just what might be coming in with that cracked software?

Picture this: some chancer in, oh, let's say Moscow why not, ensures that the crackware coming out of the Ukraine destined for the American Midwest is riddled with custom viruses. Then that same chancer says to Farmer Bob one day, pay me $10,000 in Bitcoin, or your tractor is kaput. Or just decides for a laugh to remote control a dozen tractors and start carving crop circles across Ohio.

Or shuts down the farming industry altogether. After all, once you let someone's hooky software into your industry, it's not just John Deere who can screw with your livelihood.

That's if you're content with ordinary hackers. The Creeper0741 virus I posited for Night's Black Agents could have a field day with this setup. Imagine one gigantic Hive Mind controlling every single tractor in the Midwest. In fact you don't need to do much imagining, since Stephen King's already done the heavy lifting for you.

So what can we do with this, say, from an Esoterrorists or Mutant City Blues perspective?

Well, Esoterrorists is straightforward. A terror cell, possibly with assistance from Ukrainian Esoterrorists, starts using software sourced from the other side of the Membrane to really mess with everyone's day.

The real trick is going to be misdirecting the players. Half of them will, as soon as they get the initial plot hook, suspect that the tractors are the source of the problem. So they are, but it's boring if they guess right away.

So your best bet here is to shoot for something a little more unusual. Say that software was designed to perform a particular magic ritual, but instead brought an Organ Grinder into being - part tractor, part killing machine from the Outer Dark. These things tend to hide in cities, but there are plenty of places across the rural Midwest where something like this could hide out for months, venturing out every so often to claim fresh kills. Often these things are traced by the magic rituals and grimoires used to summon it, but this time it can be tracked via the dodgy forums and black market sites used to disseminate the tainted software.

Or, if your group is comfortable with mature themes, this could be the Snuff Golem of their collective nightmares, perhaps created in collaboration with a farmers-only sex site. 'City folks just don't get it,' claims the site designers. Well, no, they don't - but then, who would? One interesting side note to a creation of this sort is that a tractor-based golem would presumably be less vulnerable to water damage than the standard variety. Not immune, just slightly better protected.

Mutant City Blues is a little different, and hopefully less horrifying.

Oddly enough there are no Powers that directly affect technology, which I can't help but feel is a missed opportunity. However re-writing the Quade Diagram to include them is beyond the scope of this piece.

Judging by the existing background material, it's unlikely that the Heightened Crimes Investigative Unit has a dedicated outpost in the farm belt. I'd have thought it more likely that there's, say, an HCIU representative attached to one of the existing police structures, say the state police or FBI.

What a lonely job that must be; nobody else who shares your duties or unique condition, a ton of paperwork - mostly useless, but it still has to get done - and every time some farmer puts in an insurance claim for dead cows lost to, say, force beams, you've got to rock up with your outdated forensics kit to prove that, no, it really wasn't force beams, so you can take a few zeroes off that claim, Farmer Bob.

Then somebody up and kills you. Wouldn't that just be the icing on the cake.

Ordinarily the police are very proactive about going after cop killers, but the staties and Feebs may not be so quick to get involved when it's the weirdo from the HCIU lying on a slab. So in come the big city boys to play Green Acres for a day, and hopefully avenge their fallen comrade.

Turns out the dead cop was onto something potentially very interesting, because someone seems to have found a way to make the Possession power work on tractors. Or at least so the cop claims in her notes, and it seems pretty clear that she was run over by something that must have been remarkably like a tractor. So who knows? Perhaps the Quade Diagram will have to be rewritten after all.

Possibilities:

1) Actually it was the John  Deere rep, who's been trying to wean the locals off of their Ukrainian tech. He's been using software from the home office to mess with local farmers, and when the HCIU cop caught on he used that same software to make it look as if an illegally modified tractor ran her down. Now he's hoping nobody's a skilled enough computer user to work out who was really controlling the tractor that day.

2) Except no, it was the HCIU cop herself. She was desperate to get out of this dead-end assignment; desperate enough to invent a completely new Power variant, hoping that by doing so she's earn a transfer to somewhere where there's more Starbucks than cows per square mile. She used hooky Ukrainian software to do it, and thought it would add to the realism if she could engineer a near-miss incident with a rogue tractor. Except the miss wasn't nearly near enough, as it turned out.

3) But no again, it was a bunch of bored Mutated kids messing with the HCIU cop for kicks, because she kept interfering in their business. Problem is the joke went one step too far, and now the kids are doing their best imitation of Mizaru, Mikazaru and Mazaru, hoping against hope that nobody will ever trace that dodgy tractor control software back to them.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!