Delta Green
Genesis

Delta Green was officially founded in 1942, but its origins go all the way back to 1927. That winter, a joint effort involving the Treasury Department, the Secret Service, and the FBI raided the sleepy Maine port town of Innsmouth, supposedly to round up communist elements. While there, they found widespread mutation of the local populace, as well as numerous bizarre artifacts connected to some sort of cult. This put everyone involved on edge, but the Coolidge administration decided to wait for everyone to compile their reports before taking any sort of action. In the meantime, all materials recovered, including an extensive Marsh family history and 5 conical tablets inscribed with strange glyphs, were handed over to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

In 1928, the military's cryptography unit, MI-8, codenamed Black Chamber, was making all kinds of waves decrypting Japanese communications. Impressed, the ONI handed them copies of the conical tablets, and by late 1929 had received a translation known as the Book of Dagon. As disturbing as the contents were, it had the bad timing to hit President Hoover's desk just after the stock market crash, causing him to personally order the disbanding of Black Chamber as a frivolous waste of time and money. Fearing a backlash, J. Edgar Hoover quickly swept under the rug all evidence of the supernatural from the Innsmouth raid. The ONI did likewise, but still recognised the threat a hostile aquatic civilization would pose to the US. Thus, they quietly shuffled veterans of the raid off to their P4 division, commonly called P division.

P division's stated goal was to investigate the strange and inexplicable. Assuming Innsmouth to be just a single data point, they set out to find more evidence of similar activity, and were soon awash in mythos treatises and evidence of other undersea horrors. So, they decided to try a more active approach, by conducting deep-sea bombings at suspected Deep One lairs in the Philippines in 1930, and outside Nicaragua in 1933. In the latter, the Navy discovered a spell to summon Deep Ones, and used it repeatedly to set up ambushes (the book later on mentions that as a consequence of this, the distrustful Deep Ones will now ignore any uses of the Call Deep One spell by PCs).

In 1942, the head of the recently created Office of Strategic Services, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, was briefed by P division for the first time. They decided to ease them in by starting out with evidence of Nazi interest in the occult. They'd manage to turn up disturbing information concerning SS Chief Heinrich Himmler's personal staff, the Ahnenerbe, specifically an occult-focused division known as the Karotechia. If nothing else, they had solid intelligence that some of the Nazi higher-ups were susceptible to psy-ops based around fortune telling, remote viewing, and other sketchy intel-gathering methods. Donovan was intrigued, and moved to incorporate P division into the OSS. The new department was given the security clearance DELTA GREEN EYES ONLY, which quickly got them the nickname Delta Green.

Delta Green wasted no time launching counter-ops against the Karotechia, primarily focused around obtaining and destroying artifacts they were interested in, particularly in the Middle Eastern theater. They ended up wiping out more than a few sites of great cultural significance, but the oldest members still remembered Innsmouth and were more than a little afraid of what could happen if the wrong artifact fell into Nazi hands. Seeing as how closely connected Karotechia was to high-ranking Nazi officials, information was hard to come by, but in 1942, they were fortunate enough to stumble upon and halt an attempt to use a mass sacrifice of war prisoners off the coast of France in an attempt to catch the attention of the Deep Ones.

The surrender of Germany was no cause for rest, either. Delta Green was forced to get boots on the ground quickly to capture former Nazi researchers and files before Stalin's forces could (this met with mixed results). What data they did recover showed that although the SS was planning to surrender, Karotechia was going to go over their heads with an attempt to recreate a failed mythos experiment on a much larger scale. It was immediately clear that for all the Karotechia learned about the power of the mythos, how to control it properly was not something they had even remotely mastered. For three terrible months in 1945, Delta Green fought the last remnants of German resistance, and were just barely able to prevent the uncontrolled opening of a massive, non-euclidean dimensional rift. They had won, but before long, they found themselves disbanded with the rest of the OSS. This would not last long.

In mid 1947, something crashed in the New Mexico desert, and a group of former Delta Green members were the first ones called in to investigate. To the shock of everyone involved, it appeared to be an alien spacecraft, complete with several dead occupants...and one survivor. As a long term solution to deal with this new development, president Truman created a new division, Majestic 12, whose sole mandate was to study the craft and its inhabitants, and to cover up evidence of extraterrestrial life and activities (we'll talk about them in more detail next chapter). The old guard of Delta Green also used the incident as leverage to get themselves reinstated, this time officially under that name. Their new mandate: keep paranormal and alien artifacts out of the hands of the enemy, whomever that might include.

The new Delta Green wasted no time executing this mandate, starting with operation SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY, a broad effort to hunt down and execute former Karotechia members in hiding in South America. This met with significant success, and led to a strike on a Karotechia archaeological dig in Antarctica. The strike team and the diggers completely wiped each other out, though a cleanup team later went in and dynamited the site, burying whatever the former Nazis were attempting to uncover.

1955 started as Delta Green's worst year yet. Daniel Freis, one of the original Black Chamber cryptographers, suffered a severe mental breakdown and went on a rampage in Delta Green's central archives. Before he could be stopped, he had managed to burn almost all of the materials from the Innsmouth raid (including smashing the stone cylinders with a sledgehammer), as well as badly damaging the archives of P division. In an instant, Delta Green had lost everything they'd worked the last 14 years to build.

To survive, they began casting a wide net over other other governmental organizations, military and security divisions, and private research groups. Not only did this help bring in new blood, but resulted in a program to deputize 'friendlies'. Under this, civilians with useful knowledge who became wrapped up in mythos events could be temporarily brought in on 'need to know' ops in order to help, and then have their file flagged with a green triangle sticker as a possible asset in the future. This made Delta Green much more decentralized before, and began to foster a 'cowboy' attitude of act first, get clearance later.

What followed were several more significant Delta Green ops, primarily investigating suspicious ship sinkings and attacking suspected Deep One nests. While these met with relative success, things took a turn for the ugly in 1969, when a mission was launched against an apocalyptic cult in Cambodia. It was an unmitigated disaster, with over 300 military personal dying in action. Worse still, when the US officially invaded in 1970 and met with a well-prepared Viet Cong, it was Delta Green who got the blame for giving them early warning. It wasn't long at all before Delta Green was disbanded again, and all evidence of their existence swept under the rug.

Later that year, 40 former DG-cleared federal officials met secretly in Washington to discuss the ongoing paranormal threat to the US. Some were worried that MJ12 was unprepared for all that was out there, while others feared they would see the supernatural powers as things to be harnessed, not destroyed. They decided to made contact with other former members, and start operating again under the rader, off the books. Initially, there was no organization to this new group; members contacted who they needed when they saw something that needed doing, and funds and supplies were skimmed and stolen by those with proper clearances. This was inefficient, and fatal to many; without any information sharing, agents were charging at threats with little to no foreknowledge. The old guard didn't particularly care; they were tired of being held back by bureaucrats, and just appreciated being able to act unfettered. This went on for over a decade. Little is known about this period today.

The group received a huge shock in 1994, when retired Major General Reginald Fairfield, a member of the Delta Green old guard and major booster of the new group, was assassinated in his home by an MJ12 wetworks team who felt he was learning too much about their activities. Delta Green found themselves with no clear way to react. They looked around and saw their membership was dwindling, and operations were more scattered and haphazard than ever before. They now had a new threat, MJ12, who was apparently hunting them actively. If they were going to survive, they would need to completely change how they operated.

Taking their cue from OSS-sponsored European resistance groups from WWII, Delta Green reorganized themselves into a 'cell' structure. Every member was now to be part of a 3-man cell of active field agents. To minimize the risks of an agent being captured and pumped for information, an agent will only know the other agents in their own cell. They will be able to contact the leader of the cell one above and below theirs in the cell structure, but will only know them by a codename. Cells are titled alphabetically, for a total of 26 cells in existence at any given time. For further security, all communication between cells is to be done via secure phone/email routing servers (the physical locations of which are known only to A cell, and no one member knows every location). In practice, though, things are a bit looser than this. Almost every cell has more than 3 members, and members tend to share more about their personal lives than they are supposed to.

Delta Green 'friendlies' are still in play, as well. Most know little to nothing about Delta Green, simply taking their cover identities at face value (in other words, they believe they're working with agents of a legitimate government agency on a routine job). Some end up seeing too much and get let in on some secrets, becoming de-facto part time agents, and sometimes even being brought in full time. For the most part, though, a friendly will never hear more than an agent's code name, at best.

The system has worked well thus far. Captured agents would have little to reveal, and any investigation into Delta Green would get bogged down chasing down wide networks of friendlies, keeping them from finding the actual agents. Still, DG knows MJ12 is out there, and actively striking back at them. Their current hope is the cell structure will buy them enough time to build a blackmail portfolio on MJ12 to force them to back off.

At present, Delta Green has 3 core objectives:
-Protect US citizens from paranormal threats
-Protect US security from paranormal threats
-Gather intelligence on paranormal phenomena
At the highest levels, there is also an unofficial fourth goal: investigate the extraterrestrial elements collaborating with the government, and eliminate any threats they may pose to US sovereignty (referring to MJ12). This is kept quiet because, on the whole, all information about MJ12 is considered 'need to know'.

Many agents (particularly the old guard) would like to see Delta Green go legitimate again one day. After all, they are still doing this all for the love of country. Others, however, prefer the ability to act on threats immediately, with no need to confer with a command structure. Still others think the only way to get enough resources to truly fight the threats they face is to go public with what they know (these agents are in the extreme minority, and Delta Green actively discourages recruiting agents with this mindset).

Delta Green agents are typically government employees by day, often part of a law enforcement agency. This has the benefit of providing plausible cover to any DG ops they run ("I'm here with the DEA, ma'am..."). When recruiting, they look for 'lifers' with at least 10 years of exemplary service. Recruits don't need to have any experience with the paranormal; in fact, it's often preferred to throw recruits at mythos threats under the guise of a routine mission as a test to see if they can cut it mentally. Requirements to be a 'friendly' are far different. In essence, anyone DG needs information from, from civil servants to retired army personnel to New Age corner store owners, can be brought in as needed, and if they are particularly helpful, they may be earmarked for further use later (earmarked where? On Delta Green's secure servers. Copies exist on all of them. Yes, this makes them more likely to be discovered and targeted than agents. Yes, this is intentional. And of course, no, the friendlies have no idea they are being shoved out front as fodder).

The first tenant of DG's operating procedures is to simply cover up their activities. This can't just involve taking sick days; that would raise too many questions if an agent were killed on a DG op. So, whenever possible, they try to cover up their DG work as something official, but as vague as possible. A black op from the CIA, say, or a hastily thrown together, informal information gathering mission from the FBI; anything that would show they were just doing their job if investigated. Oftentimes this is done for them; if some state police find some a dead body covered in fungal growth, all DG has to do is get their department to give them jurisdiction, and they can go in to investigate legitimately (mostly). This can also be used as a smokescreen to get legitimate law enforcement involved when greater numbers and firepower is needed (as an example, the book uses Waco: DG suspected the Branch Davidians of mythos worship and, knowing they were heavily armed, chose to just tip off the ATF and FBI about the more mundane problems and let them handle it. This is not meant to be a 'best case' example).

Lastly is the question of "how much does Delta Green know". In broad strokes, that's mostly up to the GM. A couple consistent things: of course, Delta Green has all knowledge of Deep Ones that was previously mentioned, though they aren't sure what their overall plan is. They're aware of the Greys, the creatures that crashed at Roswell and are communicating with MJ12 (we'll get to that soon), but they suspect they aren't who they say they are, and are fairly certain they're playing MG12 and the government for their own needs. Besides this, information on specific mythos creatures is sketchy, and can be hard to correlate to current investigations quickly. And for those who have been asking the broad question of why anyone would bother trying to fight the mythos, the simple answer is this: Delta Green has no idea what the mythos is. Deep Ones, as far as they know, are monsters, and the things they worship either don't exist or are just bigger monsters. They haven't given any more credence to stories of Cthulhu than they have to Bigfoot. That's what has kept them going for all this time: they have no idea what they're up against. And god help them, they think they can win.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the GM at 06:59, Wed 03 Aug 2016.