We can draw some other conclusions from the unspoken and unwritten history of the secret services. Why, for example, was the British Special Operations Executive disbanded so suddenly in 1945? One version is that the rivalry between SOE and the established Secret Intelligence Service was bitter, and after the 1945 election SIS lobbied the new government to disband SOE. But we know that when other similar organisations have disbanded they have left ghosts behind. US Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Black Chamber in 1929, with the immortal phrase, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," but that didn't stop the Black Chamber's secrets ending up in Room 3416 of the Munitions Building, there to become the core of the Army's new Signal Intelligence Service.
British governments are less forthcoming-many of Whitehall's deepest secrets are stored in boxes labelled for release no less than a hundred years after the events they describe-but we can guess at similar revenants of SOE surviving the winter of the war, just as we know that many of the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking operation ended up in Cheltenham, at the new (and unimportant-sounding) Government Communications Headquarters. SOE was deeply engaged with resistance operations against the Nazi occupation of Europe during the Second World War; if by some chance the Ahnenerbe-SS were sheltering ghastly secrets, it is unlikely that the subsequent custodians of such knowledge would have joined their comrades mustering out of service at the end of the conflict.
We can extrapolate somewhat from the post-1945 growth of the intelligence agencies. Back in 1930, when William Friedman became the first chief of the US Army Signal Intelligence Service, the new successor to the Black Chamber had just three employees. By the year 2000, Crypto City-the NSA headquarters in Maryland-had a population of 32,000 regular workers and an annual budget on the order of seven billion dollars. The much smaller Government Communications HQ (GCHQ)-Britain's equivalent of the NSA-still has a budget measured in the high hundreds of millions. Information is power, and these agencies wield it without much restraint on the purse strings and without substantial external oversight. We can assume that even a relatively small 1945-vintage occult intelligence operation would have grown over the years into a sprawling organisation with either a huge central office or, possibly, multiple secure sites dotted around the country.
Finally, this brings us back to the Laundry. The Laundry squats at the heart of a dark web, the collision between paranoia and secrecy on one hand, and the urge to knowledge on the other. Guardians of the dark secrets that threaten to drown us in nightmare, their lips are sealed as tightly as their archives. To get even the vaguest outline of their activities takes a privileged trickster-fool hacker like Bob, nosy enough to worm his way in where he isn't supposed to be and smart enough to explain his way out of trouble. Some day Bob will grow up, fully understand the ghastly responsibilities that go with his job, shut the hell up, and stop digging. But until then, let us by all means use him as our unquiet guide to the corridors of the Fear Factory.
Afternote: Two Frequently Asked Questions
While I was writing "The Atrocity Archive," my friend Andrew Wilson (science fiction reviewer for The Scotsman) kept telling me: "For God's sake, don't read Declare by Tim Powers until you finish the novel."
Powers is a remarkable writer, and in Declare he explored an arcane world remarkably close to that of "The Atrocity Archive." The points of similarity are striking: rogue departments within SOE that survive the end of the war, operations in the British secret intelligence community that focus on the occult and run independently of anything else for a period of decades-even a protagonist who, with a special SAS team, tries to take on a supernatural horror.
Luckily for me, I listened to Andrew. He was right: if I'd read Declare it would have derailed me completely. And that would have been a shame, because in tone and attitude the two novels are very different. Declare is perhaps best read as an homage to John Le Carré, whereas the outlook of "The Atrocity Archive" is perhaps closer to Len Deighton, by way of Neal Stephenson. Declare is about disengagement and the abandonment of former responsibility; "The Atrocity Archive" is more interested in coming of age in a world of ghosts and shadows. Declare is about the secret services that waged The Great Game; "The Atrocity Archive" is about the agencies that fought the Wizard War. The two novels are sufficiently far apart that they stand on their own merit. I'll just leave the topic by saying, if you liked this book, you'll probably enjoy Declare.
About six months after the scare over Declare another friend said, "Hey, have you ever heard of Delta Green?"
I used to be big on role-playing games, but it's been close to two decades since I was last involved in the scene to any extent. So the whole Chaosium phenomenon had passed me by. It turns out that Lovecraft's horrors have found a fertile field (or swamp) in the shape of the game Call of Cthulhu. In Call of Cthulhu, gamers role-play their way through one or another 1920s-era scenario that usually involves solving bizarre mysteries before something hideous sucks their brains out through their ears with a crazy straw. "Delta Green" is an almost legendary supplement to Call of Cthulhu that attempts to bring the mythos role-playing game up-to-date. There's a rogue intelligence agency battling to prevent infestations of extradimensional horrors… sound familiar?
All I can say in my defense is, no: I hadn't heard of "Delta Green" when I wrote "The Atrocity Archive." "Delta Green" has such a markedly American feel that "The Atrocity Archive" is right off the map. (Which is odd, because in tone if not in substance they feel a lot closer than, say, Declare.) So I'll leave it at that except to say that "Delta Green" has come dangerously close to making me pick up the dice again.
Charles Stross Edinburgh, UK
April 2003
GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS, ACRONYMS, AND ORGANISATIONS
BA British Airways [UK]
BLACK CHAMBER Cryptanalysis agency officially disbanded in 1929, secretly retasked with occult intelligence duties [US]
CESG Communications Electronics Security Group, division within GCHQ [UK]
CIA Central Intelligence Agency [US]
CMA Computer Misuse Act, the law governing hacking [UK]
COTS Cheap, Off The Shelf-computer kit; a procurement term [US/UK]
CPU Counter-Possession Unit, a specialised team operating across departmental lines within The Laundry [UK]
DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, formerly ARPA, a government scientific research agency affiliated with the Department of Defense [US]
DEA Drug Enforcement Agency [US]
DERA Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, privatised as QinetiQ [UK]
DGSE Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the external intelligence organisation (French equivalent of CIA)
[France]
DIA Defense Intelligence Agency [US]
EUINTEL European Union Intelligence Treaty-fictional [EU]
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation [US]
FO Foreign Office [UK]
FSB Federal Security Service, formerly known as KGB [Russia]