Was this meant for a different thread?
Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in this one.
The Pale Horse: The Northwest Montana Insurgency and its Aftermath (1987-2002)
- Thread starter XTrapnel
- Start date
Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in this one.
I loved this map when it appeared. Rereading before I catch up on new posts, there seems only to be an illegible thumbnail of the original....
I've tried to heavily and densely footnote the flat barely contextualised references I had gestured at so as to indicate exactly how my post relates to this thread. Chiefly it is using historical comparative examples to examine:
- how the abuse of children is a long contemplated abhorrent conduct, and so comprehensible (even if abhorrent) to the North West Front or Nauvoo Legion: it is in Deuteronomy as a chastisement of the Lord. If you will allow me to make a Modest Proposal it is a literary device which attracts the human mind and is used by authors for just that purpose;
- how historical institutions successfully conduct child abuse and therefore whether Aquino could do likewise or would be destroyed by his allies due to his child murdering;
- that the Aquino cult's internal logic of dying to leave this corrupt world, not abhorrent behaviour causing policing by its allies would make it burn out;
- how transnationality in religious/ethnic fascism works and how it can suddenly intrude in distant places;
- the limits of underground celebrity individuals involved in computing and therefore their usefulness to an AH discussing a Pacific computing culture infiltrated by a gnostic satanic cult; and,
- universal features of highly networked fragmenting online communities which meant that state telecoms wouldn't dictate the social uses of a computing network.
AllThePresidentsMen
Banned
Click into "open image in new tab" - should take you to a full image.
Here's the image link: https://ibb.co/Z2zYSWg
Yeah, but what do the Ustase have to offer the world besides "kill minorities" and "be superficially more Catholic than thou"? There's no Serbs in Montana, and does the Ustase program make any sense without them?
The Northwest has a bit more going for it-- it isn't just arguing that big atheist states despoiling tradition and the natural environment is bad, or some generically "small" libertarian republic is an adequate response. It's trying to discover God's law through the sheriff and his posse, to turn the insurgent into a pious Genevan elder, a role model for the community, a regular feature of it and the best part of it. With such people at the top, surely the piety will trickle down and every wound ever inflicted by Syndicalism or the subtler 19th-century-liberal godlessness that paved the way for it will be healed.
For an Ibn al-Khattab to come to Montana as a true believer from abroad (not just a tangentially related figure who needs initation into the Montana way of thinking), he would need (if he's coming to contribute, not just to learn) experience in at least one other battlefield in which insurgents had come to the exact same conclusions as the NWF-RNL. That kind of thinking might have been prefigured by 1920s-40s Britons, Americans, and French trading their experiences of exile in places like Canada and Australia-- deciding that if they ever return from Babylon to build their Second Temple, they won't incur God's displeasure again by doing things the same as before, they'll learn the lesson they think Syndicalism has taught them. That might have latched onto the more normal Protestant or Catholic missionary activities in places like Latin America, Asia, or Africa. Maybe the Central American war that spit out Bo Gritz was waged against a proto-NWF, or something like it arose elsewhere.
Not that the Montanan-at-heart needs to be a Salvadoran. He might originally be from a much more peaceful country that incubates the ideas finding expression in the battlefields, and uses some of its resources to spread them further. As you've speculated before, he might be a sweaty Australian.
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The Ustase programme makes sense in Australia from 1950-2002 due to migration. There were bombings. The soccer teams had to be renamed in the 1990s. And that's a relatively small diaspora, not one of the great world religions going through a period of demonstrative political worship.
In areas with English Speaking Diaspora migration, particularly reformist or dissenting, NWF concepts will make sense. You're walking down what you think is a Derry Street and suddenly realise you're in Londonderry due to N W F crudely painted over a colourful blockend. You're sitting on the street eating in Burma and post-Baptist fascism rears its head about Catt[h]ies. Being CoE you'd forgotten about that, more or less.
This is even more transnational in its speculation. The polite Mason banker working for a City Firm in a Moscow Pact country sends his postal money order off, and later his second son. It isn't universal throughout dissent or Masonry or new baptist / methodist inspired religious movements. But where there's the combination of a lost past, the failure of Parliament to secure a christian future, etc. He'd bought a perfectly good opium license off the Japanese for the area of china he was working, but he was willing to sell it on when he discovered that someone was doing the proper, fit, upstanding household work of the Lord. There are so many "edges" in the world map that English speaking dissenters with an imaginary lost past and skills are going to be lining up to die on cheap video and early computing network fame. "The Lodge" will probably send the women off to have tea so they can watch the videos of God's Work.
That reminds me; whatever MACV-SOG equivalent the CSA works out in Centroamerica would likely be nightmarish.
For sure. But if they're not just a fresh recruit, if they're coming with experience from a previous conflict, and maybe a personal clique held together by some unique understanding of what it means to actually govern by their principles (not just "raise awareness" by words or bombs)-- it might be worthwhile to see what the NWF's closest older/contemporary cousins look like, and how the Montanans deal with relics who claim to have a higher consciousness than they do. Well, they probably won't be that vain from Day One, but maybe they think they can get away with it.
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The Sinews of Peace (1995-1997)
The Sinews of Peace (1995-1997)
The first real proof that Northwest Montana was beginning to put seven years of constant low-level warfare behind it was the increasing frequency of traffic gridlock at the border crossings with Canada and the Pacific States (still theoretically controlled by the Chicago government, but in practice entirely the Northwest Republic’s responsibility). At Heron, Saltese and Indian Springs, trucks carrying the entire output of a logging or farming collective and driven by men who had very quickly picked up the knack, common in unpoliced border zones, of switching between three different currencies simultaneously, would enter into negotiations with discreet buyers willing to pick up unprovenanced goods at a discount. At the same time, a steady traffic of enterprising people from Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest, cars loaded with cigarettes, would contract with loitering bikers – the last remnants of Hale’s Army who had had the good sense to flee Northwest Montana prior to its final showdown with SATPO – for an escort deep into the Northwest Republic, driven by the 400% profit achievable even after the purchase of armed protection.
By the end of 1995, multiple semi-permanent flea markets had been established close to the Northwest Republic’s borders with Canada and the Pacific States of America, while the shift in goods offered provides compelling evidence of the extent to which the Republic’s surprisingly resilient economy had rebounded after the first, awful winter of 1994-5. In place of the staples which the first trading convoys had offered, it was now common to see cheap electronics (particularly Discmans and CDs) for sale. (The importance of music, particularly Pacifican glam metal, to the insurgents often comes as something of a surprise to students of the period, given public perceptions of dour neo-Puritans hostile to anything more secular than a hymn: a hilarious anonymous essay published in SF Weekly in 2012 about the writer’s visit to the Northwest Republic in 1995, wherein he is able to talk his way through a roadblock by convincing the local militia leader that he is friends with the frontman of Ratt, provides a good entry point for this phenomenon).
The three countries neighbouring the Northwest Republic were happy to turn a more or less blind eye to this, reasoning that a certain amount of unregulated trade was vastly preferable to a humanitarian crisis: the PSA, in particular, had no desire to reopen the Idaho refugee camps which had been shuttered eighteen months earlier. Smuggling was virtually encouraged by the Canadian government, driven by its need to provide cover for its quiet programme aimed at the repurchase of as many of the Starstreaks it had provided as possible (although it should be noted that this programme had been abandoned as a failure by early 1996, the militias in possession of these systems seeing them as insurance against further external involvement in the region).
The Military Council of the Northwest Republic would be confronted by funding issues identical in nature, if grander in scope, to any of the farming or logging collectives under its protection: absent any means of supporting militias in the field or particular motive for them to do more than defend their immediate surroundings, it had been reduced after the negotiated end of the Siege of Butte essentially to the position of a feudal lord, capable of compelling the levy of a small proportion of its territory’s fighting-aged men at specific times within the agricultural calendar. Even after the most egregious instances of banditry had been stamped out, the forces at its disposal were inadequate for anything more than law enforcement on the most heavily-frequented roads in the area.
As it happened, the Military Council had the means to cover its immediate funding needs, at least in the short term, to hand. In the 1970s, at the high point of the relationship between the PSA and the CSA, a joint venture had been proposed between the two governments whose ultimate aim would be the exploitation of the significant metal deposits on each side of the Montana-Idaho border. While deteriorating relations had shelved this plan indefinitely by 1980, a significant amount of preliminary exploration and scoping had been conducted by this point: seventeen pre-feasibility studies and two definitive feasibility studies had been produced for development sites ranging from gold to cobalt to aggregates. It was the exploitation rights to these sites with which the Military Council would fund itself for almost the entirety of its existence.
It is perhaps necessary at this juncture to disabuse readers of one of the more popular myths which have arisen around the Northwest Montana Insurgencies: the largely exploded but oddly enduring idea, particularly prevalent among left-wing observers, that the destabilization of the region was funded and perpetuated by a cartel of mining interests intent on access to deposits denied to international capital by the CSA. In reality, the collapse of central governmental authority in the region presented an unsolvable problem for any miner large enough to fall under an international regulatory regime: no activity in an area best known for the occasional flayings of political opponents could possibly reduce its inherent risk to the level required for investment to proceed. Prior to the Dutch mining conglomerate Billiton Maatschappij’s 2009 acquisition of a controlling interest in the silver/copper producing Troy Mine in Lincoln County, large external institutional investors were only able to participate in the frenzy of activity which resulted from the sale of these mining concessions at a partial remove, through the signature of offtake agreements with the few dozen small-scale Pacifican entrepreneurs who provided the capital that the Military Council so desperately needed.
The best known of these entrepreneurs was Glenn Hubbard, the owner of a regional chain of laundries in Washington and Portland. His acquisition of four silver and one copper concessions, coupled with the signature of several enormous agreements with Seattle’s computing industry, had made him a billionaire by 1997; by 2002, bankrupted ultimately by the collapse of these agreements in the face of the Second Northwest Montana Insurgency, he was working as an employee in one of his former laundries. While his rise and fall (set out in his thoroughly entertaining 2005 autobiography) were unusually meteoric even by the standards of these speculators, multiple fortunes were made and lost in a matter of months, the only reliable winner being the Military Council.
Despite the best efforts of James Gordon Gritz, the Military Council had failed to establish a central treasury: the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion, although willing to recognise his position as de jure head of state, was keen to maintain as much of its independence as it could. Accordingly, the funds raised from mining concessions were split according to an approved ratio between the remnants of the Northwest Front in the North and the Mormons in the South. This compromise, like most compromises, pleased nobody. The Mormons, noting that most of the valuable metal deposits were found in areas under their control, saw funds derived from their assets disappearing into the hands of an organisation they had little more than a vague working agreement with, while the Northwest Front members on the Council became increasingly convinced, based on the apparent level of funds at the disposal of the Mormon leadership, that they had access to some other channel of income.
This mystery was ultimately solved from an unexpected source. In late 1996, Jean-Raymond Boulle, a Mauritian metals trader with interests in Africa and western Canada, voluntarily surrendered himself to the Federation of American States’ embassy in Monaco, requesting immunity from prosecution and protection from his former associates in exchange for information on his activities since the mid-1980s. The story he was prepared to tell was astonishing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The story of the CSA’s Bureau of External Security is inseparable from that of William Sloane Coffin, its Director for the majority of its existence and a fascinating man in his own right. Born into considerable wealth (his grandfather was the founder of a New York department store), a series of financial reverses had reduced his family’s circumstances significantly by the time of the Second Civil War. The early promise of New York Commune impressed itself deeply on the teenager, whose absolute dedication to the cause remained unwavering even as it consumed branches of his family (his uncle was executed as a hoarder in 1938 after a brief trial by the Upper Manhattan Revolutionary Committee). In early 1939, the fifteen year old Coffin attempted to enlist with the New York People’s Militia using forged papers, before being turned away on account of his age: his failure to participate in the Manichaean struggle between capitalist tyranny and socialist democracy would gnaw at him for the rest of his life.
Given the extent to which his family’s decidedly bourgeois status counted against him at the outset of his career, Coffin’s induction in the first intake of employees for the Bureau of External Security in 1945 and his subsequent meteoric rise through its ranks are a considerable testament to the man’s intelligence and linguistic ability, as well to unshaken commitment to the political orthodoxy of the CSA: the first two of these traits provided a measure of protection for a man whose public belief in the radical anarchism of the Civil War meshed poorly at times with the CSA’s evolving party line (although his survival during the Burnham years is more readily ascribed to the fact that a well-meaning senior officer assigned him to a position in the Philippines where he could spend a decade usefully out of the way). In 1970, with the threat posed by the Technocrats receded for the time being, Coffin’s career would culminate with his appointment as Director: while, over the next decade, he would prove surprisingly adept at the political manoeuvring called for by the position, he would ultimately be faced with a considerable dilemma.
The early 80s had seen an unusually severe flareup of the periodic dispute between the CSA’s Bureaux of Internal and External Security: with the increasingly elderly Chairman Meany more interested in golfing than in keeping a lid on squabbling, the better-connected Department of Internal Security had emerged the clear winner in terms of funding. Coffin had spent forty years climbing the ranks of an organisation that he increasingly believed to be the only still-functioning vector for the liberationary and popular Syndicalism to which he adhered: he was entirely unwilling to suffer the humiliation of seeing his life’s work reduced to an ancillary role. Faced with a need for funding, he was willing to employ rather unorthodox methods.
The “ExtSec Triangle”, seen as a way to support the Department’s global interests cheaply, was established in 1982, ostensibly without Coffin’s knowledge: it was a convoluted series of transactions which would ultimately span three continents. Arms were smuggled, via Tanzania, into the Congolese Council Republic, in the hopes that the decade-long stalemate of the Congolese Civil War might be broken in favour of the forces loyal to Laurent-Desire Kabila: in exchange, several diamond mines near Kisangani were placed at the disposal of ExtSec. The resultant diamonds were disposed of by a network of well-placed associates (ultimately overseen by Boulle), with the proceeds transferred to insurgent groups in Peru-Bolivia and Colombia in exchange for cocaine, which would then be smuggled into the PSA and CSA for final sale. This process, initially intended to allow operation on a cost-neutral basis, proved enormously profitable, ultimately allowing ExtSec to build up a significant “war chest” which permitted the Bureau’s continued operation virtually independent of governmental oversight during the transition from Combined Syndicates of America to the Federation of American States.
Coffin’s status as an outsider, if a well-connected and powerful one, shielded him from any suspicion of involvement in 1994’s May Crisis (there appears to have been some discussion within the Haig Clique about including Coffin in the circle of plotters, but Mark Felt’s apocryphal description of Coffin as ‘a fucking Young Pioneer’ seems to have dissuaded any serious attempts at outreach): as a consequence, the first two years of the FAS’s existence saw its most powerful remaining governmental after the Armed Forces helmed by a man largely hostile to the Traficant Administration’s program of market liberalization and increasingly willing to intervene on the political sphere – Coffin’s regular meetings with Dennis Kucinich were widely perceived as exacerbating the split between him and Traficant which culminated with Kucinich’s return to the Syndicalist Union Party.
Even as this impasse continued, a series of political shifts were rendering the ExtSec Triangle progressively less desirable: the replacement of Kabila by the more moderate Ernest Wamba dia Wamba in a palace coup in 1994, followed by peace talks with the Kinshasa government, caused the expulsion of the ExtSec-linked mining operation, while the threat of additional political scrutiny by Traficant allies convinced Coffin to bring the program to a close. Confronted with loose ends - most obviously Boulle, who had enriched himself significantly in the process and whose personal business interests could be linked back, given enough investigation, to ExtSec – the obvious course of action would have been to ensure that the middlemen connected with the operation were in no position to talk. While it is unclear as to whether the assassination of Boulle was seriously contemplated, a near-fatal accident involving the foundering of his yacht appears to have convinced him of the possibility that he was a marked man: under the circumstances, he was willing to incriminate as many ExtSec employees as he could.
The ensuing series of investigations were limited in scope by the secrecy with which the ExtSec Triangle had been planned, the imperatives of national security, and the risks posed by ExtSec to the Traficant administration even at this stage. Ultimately, only two senior former ExtSec operatives – Michael Townley and South American station chief Dan Mitrione – were even subject to a Congressional subpoena, and much of the information they provided about the logistics of the Triangle’s American leg will be classified well into the 2060s. Nevertheless, the identity of some people involved can be inferred by the rash of resignations in the immediate aftermath of the inquiry – it is unlikely, for instance, that Ozark-Oklahoma Governor William Blythe would have cut a glittering political career (and his status as a possible contender in the 2000 Presidential elections) short, ostensibly to focus on his family, absent some internal fallout resulting from his widely-speculated connections to the Bureau.
If the inquiry stopped short of ascribing any direct culpability to Coffin, its general recommendations – particularly around the appropriate level of Congressional oversight for the Bureau – amounted to the destruction of his life’s work that the ExtSec Triangle was intended to prevent. Reduced to a sad, impotent figure in the ruins of his department, Coffin stuck around eighteen months before resigning.
From NorthWest Montana’s perspective, the Boulle Affair’s most immediate impact was the revelation that Boulle’s private activities had included the factoring of sapphires sourced from Rock Creek, close to the Idaho border, where operations had re-commenced in early 1996 at the behest of the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion’s leadership. No attempt had been made to notify the NWF.
The discovery that the Mormons had been systematically concealing funding from the Northwest Republic was one of many small betrayals and areas of friction, each individually insignificant, which were progressively to fray the relations between the various components of the patchwork Republic in the first years of its existence. By the middle of 1997, the working relationship between the NWF and the RNL and deteriorated so much - despite the best efforts of those Council members such as Bentley and Aquino who were not firmly committed to one of the factions – that a single incident could cause it to break down irretrievably.
The first real proof that Northwest Montana was beginning to put seven years of constant low-level warfare behind it was the increasing frequency of traffic gridlock at the border crossings with Canada and the Pacific States (still theoretically controlled by the Chicago government, but in practice entirely the Northwest Republic’s responsibility). At Heron, Saltese and Indian Springs, trucks carrying the entire output of a logging or farming collective and driven by men who had very quickly picked up the knack, common in unpoliced border zones, of switching between three different currencies simultaneously, would enter into negotiations with discreet buyers willing to pick up unprovenanced goods at a discount. At the same time, a steady traffic of enterprising people from Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest, cars loaded with cigarettes, would contract with loitering bikers – the last remnants of Hale’s Army who had had the good sense to flee Northwest Montana prior to its final showdown with SATPO – for an escort deep into the Northwest Republic, driven by the 400% profit achievable even after the purchase of armed protection.
By the end of 1995, multiple semi-permanent flea markets had been established close to the Northwest Republic’s borders with Canada and the Pacific States of America, while the shift in goods offered provides compelling evidence of the extent to which the Republic’s surprisingly resilient economy had rebounded after the first, awful winter of 1994-5. In place of the staples which the first trading convoys had offered, it was now common to see cheap electronics (particularly Discmans and CDs) for sale. (The importance of music, particularly Pacifican glam metal, to the insurgents often comes as something of a surprise to students of the period, given public perceptions of dour neo-Puritans hostile to anything more secular than a hymn: a hilarious anonymous essay published in SF Weekly in 2012 about the writer’s visit to the Northwest Republic in 1995, wherein he is able to talk his way through a roadblock by convincing the local militia leader that he is friends with the frontman of Ratt, provides a good entry point for this phenomenon).
The three countries neighbouring the Northwest Republic were happy to turn a more or less blind eye to this, reasoning that a certain amount of unregulated trade was vastly preferable to a humanitarian crisis: the PSA, in particular, had no desire to reopen the Idaho refugee camps which had been shuttered eighteen months earlier. Smuggling was virtually encouraged by the Canadian government, driven by its need to provide cover for its quiet programme aimed at the repurchase of as many of the Starstreaks it had provided as possible (although it should be noted that this programme had been abandoned as a failure by early 1996, the militias in possession of these systems seeing them as insurance against further external involvement in the region).
The Military Council of the Northwest Republic would be confronted by funding issues identical in nature, if grander in scope, to any of the farming or logging collectives under its protection: absent any means of supporting militias in the field or particular motive for them to do more than defend their immediate surroundings, it had been reduced after the negotiated end of the Siege of Butte essentially to the position of a feudal lord, capable of compelling the levy of a small proportion of its territory’s fighting-aged men at specific times within the agricultural calendar. Even after the most egregious instances of banditry had been stamped out, the forces at its disposal were inadequate for anything more than law enforcement on the most heavily-frequented roads in the area.
As it happened, the Military Council had the means to cover its immediate funding needs, at least in the short term, to hand. In the 1970s, at the high point of the relationship between the PSA and the CSA, a joint venture had been proposed between the two governments whose ultimate aim would be the exploitation of the significant metal deposits on each side of the Montana-Idaho border. While deteriorating relations had shelved this plan indefinitely by 1980, a significant amount of preliminary exploration and scoping had been conducted by this point: seventeen pre-feasibility studies and two definitive feasibility studies had been produced for development sites ranging from gold to cobalt to aggregates. It was the exploitation rights to these sites with which the Military Council would fund itself for almost the entirety of its existence.
It is perhaps necessary at this juncture to disabuse readers of one of the more popular myths which have arisen around the Northwest Montana Insurgencies: the largely exploded but oddly enduring idea, particularly prevalent among left-wing observers, that the destabilization of the region was funded and perpetuated by a cartel of mining interests intent on access to deposits denied to international capital by the CSA. In reality, the collapse of central governmental authority in the region presented an unsolvable problem for any miner large enough to fall under an international regulatory regime: no activity in an area best known for the occasional flayings of political opponents could possibly reduce its inherent risk to the level required for investment to proceed. Prior to the Dutch mining conglomerate Billiton Maatschappij’s 2009 acquisition of a controlling interest in the silver/copper producing Troy Mine in Lincoln County, large external institutional investors were only able to participate in the frenzy of activity which resulted from the sale of these mining concessions at a partial remove, through the signature of offtake agreements with the few dozen small-scale Pacifican entrepreneurs who provided the capital that the Military Council so desperately needed.
The best known of these entrepreneurs was Glenn Hubbard, the owner of a regional chain of laundries in Washington and Portland. His acquisition of four silver and one copper concessions, coupled with the signature of several enormous agreements with Seattle’s computing industry, had made him a billionaire by 1997; by 2002, bankrupted ultimately by the collapse of these agreements in the face of the Second Northwest Montana Insurgency, he was working as an employee in one of his former laundries. While his rise and fall (set out in his thoroughly entertaining 2005 autobiography) were unusually meteoric even by the standards of these speculators, multiple fortunes were made and lost in a matter of months, the only reliable winner being the Military Council.
Despite the best efforts of James Gordon Gritz, the Military Council had failed to establish a central treasury: the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion, although willing to recognise his position as de jure head of state, was keen to maintain as much of its independence as it could. Accordingly, the funds raised from mining concessions were split according to an approved ratio between the remnants of the Northwest Front in the North and the Mormons in the South. This compromise, like most compromises, pleased nobody. The Mormons, noting that most of the valuable metal deposits were found in areas under their control, saw funds derived from their assets disappearing into the hands of an organisation they had little more than a vague working agreement with, while the Northwest Front members on the Council became increasingly convinced, based on the apparent level of funds at the disposal of the Mormon leadership, that they had access to some other channel of income.
This mystery was ultimately solved from an unexpected source. In late 1996, Jean-Raymond Boulle, a Mauritian metals trader with interests in Africa and western Canada, voluntarily surrendered himself to the Federation of American States’ embassy in Monaco, requesting immunity from prosecution and protection from his former associates in exchange for information on his activities since the mid-1980s. The story he was prepared to tell was astonishing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The story of the CSA’s Bureau of External Security is inseparable from that of William Sloane Coffin, its Director for the majority of its existence and a fascinating man in his own right. Born into considerable wealth (his grandfather was the founder of a New York department store), a series of financial reverses had reduced his family’s circumstances significantly by the time of the Second Civil War. The early promise of New York Commune impressed itself deeply on the teenager, whose absolute dedication to the cause remained unwavering even as it consumed branches of his family (his uncle was executed as a hoarder in 1938 after a brief trial by the Upper Manhattan Revolutionary Committee). In early 1939, the fifteen year old Coffin attempted to enlist with the New York People’s Militia using forged papers, before being turned away on account of his age: his failure to participate in the Manichaean struggle between capitalist tyranny and socialist democracy would gnaw at him for the rest of his life.
Given the extent to which his family’s decidedly bourgeois status counted against him at the outset of his career, Coffin’s induction in the first intake of employees for the Bureau of External Security in 1945 and his subsequent meteoric rise through its ranks are a considerable testament to the man’s intelligence and linguistic ability, as well to unshaken commitment to the political orthodoxy of the CSA: the first two of these traits provided a measure of protection for a man whose public belief in the radical anarchism of the Civil War meshed poorly at times with the CSA’s evolving party line (although his survival during the Burnham years is more readily ascribed to the fact that a well-meaning senior officer assigned him to a position in the Philippines where he could spend a decade usefully out of the way). In 1970, with the threat posed by the Technocrats receded for the time being, Coffin’s career would culminate with his appointment as Director: while, over the next decade, he would prove surprisingly adept at the political manoeuvring called for by the position, he would ultimately be faced with a considerable dilemma.
The early 80s had seen an unusually severe flareup of the periodic dispute between the CSA’s Bureaux of Internal and External Security: with the increasingly elderly Chairman Meany more interested in golfing than in keeping a lid on squabbling, the better-connected Department of Internal Security had emerged the clear winner in terms of funding. Coffin had spent forty years climbing the ranks of an organisation that he increasingly believed to be the only still-functioning vector for the liberationary and popular Syndicalism to which he adhered: he was entirely unwilling to suffer the humiliation of seeing his life’s work reduced to an ancillary role. Faced with a need for funding, he was willing to employ rather unorthodox methods.
The “ExtSec Triangle”, seen as a way to support the Department’s global interests cheaply, was established in 1982, ostensibly without Coffin’s knowledge: it was a convoluted series of transactions which would ultimately span three continents. Arms were smuggled, via Tanzania, into the Congolese Council Republic, in the hopes that the decade-long stalemate of the Congolese Civil War might be broken in favour of the forces loyal to Laurent-Desire Kabila: in exchange, several diamond mines near Kisangani were placed at the disposal of ExtSec. The resultant diamonds were disposed of by a network of well-placed associates (ultimately overseen by Boulle), with the proceeds transferred to insurgent groups in Peru-Bolivia and Colombia in exchange for cocaine, which would then be smuggled into the PSA and CSA for final sale. This process, initially intended to allow operation on a cost-neutral basis, proved enormously profitable, ultimately allowing ExtSec to build up a significant “war chest” which permitted the Bureau’s continued operation virtually independent of governmental oversight during the transition from Combined Syndicates of America to the Federation of American States.
Coffin’s status as an outsider, if a well-connected and powerful one, shielded him from any suspicion of involvement in 1994’s May Crisis (there appears to have been some discussion within the Haig Clique about including Coffin in the circle of plotters, but Mark Felt’s apocryphal description of Coffin as ‘a fucking Young Pioneer’ seems to have dissuaded any serious attempts at outreach): as a consequence, the first two years of the FAS’s existence saw its most powerful remaining governmental after the Armed Forces helmed by a man largely hostile to the Traficant Administration’s program of market liberalization and increasingly willing to intervene on the political sphere – Coffin’s regular meetings with Dennis Kucinich were widely perceived as exacerbating the split between him and Traficant which culminated with Kucinich’s return to the Syndicalist Union Party.
Even as this impasse continued, a series of political shifts were rendering the ExtSec Triangle progressively less desirable: the replacement of Kabila by the more moderate Ernest Wamba dia Wamba in a palace coup in 1994, followed by peace talks with the Kinshasa government, caused the expulsion of the ExtSec-linked mining operation, while the threat of additional political scrutiny by Traficant allies convinced Coffin to bring the program to a close. Confronted with loose ends - most obviously Boulle, who had enriched himself significantly in the process and whose personal business interests could be linked back, given enough investigation, to ExtSec – the obvious course of action would have been to ensure that the middlemen connected with the operation were in no position to talk. While it is unclear as to whether the assassination of Boulle was seriously contemplated, a near-fatal accident involving the foundering of his yacht appears to have convinced him of the possibility that he was a marked man: under the circumstances, he was willing to incriminate as many ExtSec employees as he could.
The ensuing series of investigations were limited in scope by the secrecy with which the ExtSec Triangle had been planned, the imperatives of national security, and the risks posed by ExtSec to the Traficant administration even at this stage. Ultimately, only two senior former ExtSec operatives – Michael Townley and South American station chief Dan Mitrione – were even subject to a Congressional subpoena, and much of the information they provided about the logistics of the Triangle’s American leg will be classified well into the 2060s. Nevertheless, the identity of some people involved can be inferred by the rash of resignations in the immediate aftermath of the inquiry – it is unlikely, for instance, that Ozark-Oklahoma Governor William Blythe would have cut a glittering political career (and his status as a possible contender in the 2000 Presidential elections) short, ostensibly to focus on his family, absent some internal fallout resulting from his widely-speculated connections to the Bureau.
If the inquiry stopped short of ascribing any direct culpability to Coffin, its general recommendations – particularly around the appropriate level of Congressional oversight for the Bureau – amounted to the destruction of his life’s work that the ExtSec Triangle was intended to prevent. Reduced to a sad, impotent figure in the ruins of his department, Coffin stuck around eighteen months before resigning.
From NorthWest Montana’s perspective, the Boulle Affair’s most immediate impact was the revelation that Boulle’s private activities had included the factoring of sapphires sourced from Rock Creek, close to the Idaho border, where operations had re-commenced in early 1996 at the behest of the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion’s leadership. No attempt had been made to notify the NWF.
The discovery that the Mormons had been systematically concealing funding from the Northwest Republic was one of many small betrayals and areas of friction, each individually insignificant, which were progressively to fray the relations between the various components of the patchwork Republic in the first years of its existence. By the middle of 1997, the working relationship between the NWF and the RNL and deteriorated so much - despite the best efforts of those Council members such as Bentley and Aquino who were not firmly committed to one of the factions – that a single incident could cause it to break down irretrievably.
So when do the cartels muscle in? Or is Syndie Mexico stable enough that they aren't a thing (or at least not a powerful thing) ittl?
The vignettes of OTL characters lives in this tl are always brilliant; Bill Clinton resigning to spend more time with his family will never not be funny, Glenn Hubbard going spectacularly bankrupt is certainly amusing and William Coffin the spook is very much a one in a million tl thing.
Seconded! The situation on the Canadian-CSA border sounds fascinating. I wonder about the extent to which the Great Lakes were navally re-militarized by both sides, as well.
Welcome back!
"And they're rockin' out in a factory that apparently manufactures sparks. That's all it makes, just sparks."
That is some thermonuclear irony, considering the man's real-life (and presumably ITTL) opinions on the Treasury.
Random thought: is the Space Needle a thing?
Interesting that the RNL was seen as a group worth funding by ExtSec. I know they were based on offshoot doctrines, but did they have any lines of support from Utah proper?
