Brian's Job
From Sokushinbutsu
People age out of what can be called active jobs in The Bureau quickly compared to regular police. There are a lot more assholes. There are people taking the job and their vision of the job to heart. I am talking about mostly men who are armed and asked to complete common goals, team tasks for an entity they see as important, or importanter than they as individuals are. It's true believers. It’s people who operate well in a system wherein they are asked to follow orders without knowing what the bigger picture goal is. There is a preference for people with military service, people who go to church and believe in God, people who played sports and got good grades, people who understand that compliance is situational.
Part of the interview process in the mid late seventies was to remind recruits that they might be asked to do things they won't want to do. A high schooler is used to this kind of restriction. Even early in the seventies college kids got a little more difficult to bring into the fold, to continue to do as they were told for a greater good, for a bigger cause than what they might be privy to past twenty. Everyone was pretty sure it was LSD.
Some FBI agents referred to LSD as, “the one that got away”.
Agents were assholes playing a power game with each other, some enjoying it, some suffering, some accustomed to sufferage from childhood or combat service, some just college jocks who were never required to reign it in, as it were. Brian had a place, but he was an uncommon shape. People tend to be brought in off active assignments relatively young.
Brian didn’t look very good running. He was assy and top-heavy. His legs looked just too small under his body and even when he could keep up a good gate, it looked cartoonish next to the middy college football players, and down right dopey next to ex Service Marines.
They put him behind a desk just as soon as they could at The Bureau. He did like sitting down and it meant a raise in pay. He was meant to interact with teams as a leader, but he could tell that people didn’t want to listen to him and rather than taking some tack that might advance his ability to deliver to the co-workers who were essentially under his command, he just flattened. He got crushed and remained crushed.
He’d put a transparency on the overhead and recite the details of a mission and mechanically answer questions with bookish, logical responses. He imagined it was like teaching high school.
He hated it. And under his milquetoast grip a department went a little rogue. Everyone knew he didn’t have to cajones to stand up if something was a little less than perfect.
Someone higher up the food chain took notice and he was summarily promoted to heading an entire division that may have been a bit roguish by reputation.
At this position he got to occasionally roll on big busts. He’d be the guy in the suit who came in after the location was secure and asked a lot of questions. He didn’t mind that part, but he sure hated the morning meeting. He regularly wondered how he’d ended up with a command but so did the vast majority of his peers.
Way up at the top there was a retired full bird Colonel named Marks who loved Brian, for all of the reasons- he grew up poor, he hated meetings, he was an awkward bigger kid, he clearly didn’t want command. Brian’s inability to stand up to his first little group of agents he bossed, read as an implicit trust of his agents, read as- he knew they would get the job done and within a wide swath he did not mind much how. To certain aspects of a bigger command this is a desirable quality.
To Brian, and in fact to the people he commanded the assessment that he was anything other than a pushover seemed inaccurate. He knew what boundaries he absolutely needed to maintain and how the paperwork was meant to be processed, but he didn’t want any of his guys coming into the office to talk to him. He could monotonously run a meeting and if you paid attention you got the information you were meant to have, but while he was at The Bureau offices in the command wing he was a shadow.
He’d come in early and leave late so nobody on the wing would see him come or go. He’d just be in his office. He had the North East corner office on the 7th floor.
He was just doing his time.
He was 34. He wore a suit and a hat to work every day. His hairline was quite far back but he wasn’t going bald. He had a sweepable dollop of hair that centered his forehead and two parabolic bows of shiny head skin, one to either side. He slicked his hair straight back in a way he’d seen black and white movie stars do as they doffed their hats, when he doffed his. He water slicked it in the bathroom sink.
Brian got a lot of alone time in the company bathroom. It didn’t seem to him that any of his co-workers in command consumed any water, or ever peed or pooped unless they were hung over.
Afternoons, Brian could spend as much time as he liked getting his hair just right.
As his 35th birthday approached, after a long stint in the john, Brian returned to a manila envelope on his desk that wasn't in his in box. It was laid akimbo on his blotter.
This did not thrill Brian. There was a little too much spy versus spy, intra departmental bullshit for his liking and he did everything he could to just not let it get on him. But this looked pretty undeniable.
He went to the water cooler and filled a restaurant glass he’d stolen with water, returned to his desk and opened the envelope by unwinding a bit of string from a circular tab holding down the unglued flap of a 9 x 12 manila clearly in its first use.
The memo the manila envelope held detailed a position he had been pre considered for at the recommendation of Colonel Marks.
It was an invitation to become, through further training, a non-affiliate field agent recruiter under the obfuscating title, Subproject 24.
He would learn. He would travel. He’d work primarily alone. He could use his managing and command communication skills to navigate in the world where he’d been before- interacting with cops and other agents. He’d have a higher clearance.
He was a grown ass man of thirty five.
Subproject 24 was essentially a slush fund to provide currency for projects to expand social influence. This preceded subproject 30 which focussed on media [music and television] in and around the hippie scene in Southern California.
24 was more generally aimed at utilizing social engineering through some Ideas Work. It had been around a little bit longer. 24 and 30 crossed paths at some point during 1974 and there was a meeting of the minds in the top brass. Funds continued to be issued via financial operations in the subproject headings under which they started. 30 made its way into homes via episodes of Hawaii five-0 and the network news and payola forwarding hits on FM radio. 24 stayed on the ground. 24 was people changing people, one at a time.
The Colonel trained Brian to recruit young men to present messaging to influential individuals concurrent with short sexual relationships. These maneuvers would be subproject 24 operating as designed.
The methods were pre-viral information campaigns injected right into hives of radical liberal thought- protests, rallies, rainbow gatherings, loosely organized disaster relief efforts, migrant farm workers and, socialists, unionists, churches of a certain size, the NAACP, but really most effectively in drug scenes. LSD was an amazing tool, but really anything that makes you unreasonably joyous and a little distracted can be used to aim you down a cattle shoot. The British didn't invent Gin to enhance the party, if you know what I mean.
The rate of inflation during the Carter administration really worked a treat for some of these clandestine funding efforts. The dogs may have become too strong for their leashes.
The president got left out of the killing decisions. He was a Christian man, and a full-on peacenik. The military brass on capital hill really didn't like him. From a certain perspective a man who preaches peace cannot be reasoned with.