The Secret History

This history of the programs comes from Jason Rice's account.

1.

There is not one secret space program. There are dozens, and they are compartmentalized so strictly that even the people at the top of one program do not know of the others. A person may spend a career assembling one component of a spacecraft without ever learning what it is for; such a person is a member of a program and does not know it. The history that follows is therefore the history of one program, the Interplanetary Defense and Reaction Forces, and of the two powers whose rivalry produced it. It covers some eighty years.

Advanced technology is not new to the planet. In the 1800s, newspapers are already printing articles about ships seen traveling up and down the West Coast of the United States and as far east as Texas, and a good deal is being written about anti-gravity. But the history of the secret space programs begins in Germany.

In the 1930s, Germany is a nation consumed by esoteric mysticism and by alternative views on life, energy, and the connections between things. German researchers and explorers search the entire planet for clues and hidden knowledge. Within this culture there are a number of secret societies, and one of them, the Vril Society, has a channel: Maria Orsic, who receives information from extraterrestrial beings. At first what she provides is met with doubt. The doubt ends when the society begins to build what her drawings describe. They are engineering drawings, with sizes, dimensions, and information on materials, and they contain everything needed to recreate an anti-gravity craft.

The original societies are interested in advancing the human experience. They are not interested in conquering or controlling other people. Their misfortune is to be located in a country set on world domination. For their own survival they turn over what they know, and by the late 1930s the German state has absorbed them into its research and development programs. The result is a period of technical invention without equal before or since. Between 1938 and 1945, Germany is working on television, nuclear weapons, lasers, and microwaves, and these are only the projects the public later hears of. By the late 1930s, German engineers have saucer-shaped craft that can travel outside the atmosphere, and by the end of the decade they are flying them into space.

Two very different sources stand behind this progress. The beings who speak through Maria Orsic are positively oriented. They want the human race to advance, and they share the knowledge of anti-gravity while deliberately holding back anything destructive. The weapons come from elsewhere. In 1936 and 1937, the Germans enter into direct contact with the Draco.

The Draco are a reptilian race, eight to fourteen feet tall, with some variations that are shorter. Some of them have the remains of tails and wings. They are highly psychic and several hundred thousand years ahead of humanity, and they are entirely oriented toward service to themselves: they conquer, they control, they dominate. They have signed a number of intergalactic treaties that forbid them from interfering with a native population or its planet. They do not follow these treaties so much as find ways around them, and their preferred way is the proxy. Humans make excellent proxies, because the human shape is a common blueprint in the galaxy and humans look far more like the inhabitants of other planets than the Draco do. The Draco also see no reason to lose their own soldiers when others can be made to fight in their place. The conquest of Earth has long been one of their goals, and they pursue it through human groups that serve them, some willingly and some without knowing it.

To the Germans, the Draco offer direct and individual help: with their projects, with medicine, transportation, and communications, with weapons, and with a technology that will later matter more than any other, the erasing of memory. They also tell the Germans that the remains of an advanced and abandoned civilization lie under the ice of Antarctica.

In 1938 and 1939, the Germans send an expedition south aboard the ship Schwabenland. It claims a section of Queen Maud Land, chosen with a military eye: a line of mountains closes it off and gives the territory protection and depth of defense. Behind these mountains the Germans place their first base, Base 211. The expedition leaves Antarctica in February 1939 and is back in Germany around April. In September, Germany invades Poland. The dates are close together for a reason. The Germans were told that something was there, they confirmed it, and what they confirmed fed their plans for world domination. The Schwabenland itself is later said to have been sunk by the Allies in the deep waters of the Atlantic with a cargo of chemical weapons, in a place that remains classified. In fact it survives, and decades later it is used as a reference ship in the training of soldiers.

2.

Hitler wants to use the saucers in the war. He cannot, and the reason is basic physics. A conventional weapon fired from a craft that hangs in the air pushes the craft in the opposite direction, so the saucers cannot shoot and hold their position. The correction for this does not exist yet. German engineers work on energy weapons through the early 1940s, with the Draco assisting, but the war on the ground is fought without the saucers.

In exchange for their help, the Draco require the Germans to build a base in Antarctica. Through the early 1940s the Germans build and stock a settlement under the ice that can house and feed between 300,000 and 400,000 people. Thousands work on it, most of them native Germans, and the work is compartmentalized so that few understand the whole. Geothermal heat from under the mountains supplies the first power, and more advanced sources are developed later. The real purpose of the base is not explained to the Germans at the time. The Draco want the technology of the abandoned civilization, and their treaties prevent them from digging it up themselves, so they need a proxy in place to recover it. Antarctica is ideal for the purpose, because nobody is there to see. Much of what the Germans uncover looks like rock, and they do not know what they have.

Around 1940, the Germans make their first visit to the Moon in the craft Haunebu I. In the same period the German Navy commissions auxiliary cruisers, which are converted civilian ships. One is named Pinguin and another Atlantis, and they serve the route to the south. Both are sunk by 1941, but by then Germany has enough U-boats that it needs no surface ships for the base. The U-boats on this route carry advanced technology. They do not have to surface, and they are among the first uses of stealth.

The war itself has a financial cause. The Cabal, the group of central bankers and old families that controls the world's money, has lent Germany the funds for its rebuilding in the 1930s and for its military expeditions in the early 1940s, and Germany is paying the loans back. Then Germany decides that it does not need a central bank. It begins to trade directly with other countries by barter, so that it does not have to use a centralized fiat currency, money printed by a central bank. This is a direct threat to the bankers. They bring other countries in, and the world is at war. In 1941 the United States declares war on Germany.

In 1944, the Germans return to the Moon, this time to look for a place to build a base, and they make their first scouting visits to Mars.

When the war ends in 1945, the group in Antarctica is relieved. It is glad to be free of what it sees as a self-destructive government, and it is now able to run its affairs as it wishes. From this point on it is a separate civilization, the Antarctic Germans. It concentrates on the defense of its base and on its technology, and by 1947 it has mastered the mobile weapons platform: the problem of recoil is solved, and its anti-gravity craft now carry weapons. From that moment the Antarctic Germans outclass everything else on the planet. Some of the UFO sightings of those years, the years of Maury Island and Roswell, are their craft.

They do not tell the world where they are. The world finds out through espionage, and through the capture of people traveling in and out of South America. The United States in particular finds out, and within a year of the end of the war it is planning to send a fleet to Antarctica and remove the Germans once and for all. The result is Operation Highjump, which sails in November 1946 under Admiral Byrd, with a fleet of warships and close to 5,000 men. Officially the purpose is to test operations in Antarctic conditions. The size of the force, and how soon it comes after the war, say otherwise.

The fleet arrives, sets up its base, and finds the German one. What follows is a small action. A few German craft, armed with directed energy weapons, destroy one ship, kill a number of men, and send the entire fleet back to the United States. Highjump ends in February 1947, and the ships reach Washington in April.

Admiral Byrd carries two things home. One is the statement he is reported to have made to a newspaper, about an enemy capable of incredible feats. The other is a message from the Antarctic Germans, who demand a meeting to negotiate a ceasefire. Their reason is practical. They have a fleet of anti-gravity craft, but it is not large enough to take on the entire planet, and they need time to build up their forces. They also know that the Allies have nothing that compares to their technology.

Highjump changes the position of both sides. The United States has learned that the strongest navy in the world cannot approach the German base. The Germans have learned that they can defend themselves, but also that they have been found, and that they are a few hundred thousand people facing a planet. Neither side can remove the other. From this point the conflict is carried on by negotiation, by infiltration, and by demonstrations of force, and it is hidden from the public by both.

3.

The year 1947 is a busy one in Washington. In March, President Truman signs an executive order under which the FBI examines the loyalty of every federal employee. It is the beginning of background checks in the federal government. The public reason is the fear of communists. The real targets are Antarctic German infiltrators. In July, the month of the Roswell event, the National Security Council and the CIA are created. The CIA takes over from the wartime Office of Strategic Services, which the military ran, and with this change these matters pass out of military hands and into civilian ones, where they can be controlled. In September, Majestic 12 is created to deal with alien politics and with recovered craft and technology. In December, Operation Windmill is presented to the public as the building of a base in Antarctica. It is in fact part of the negotiations with the Antarctic Germans. The following year Operation Mockingbird begins, under Frank Wisner of the CIA: people inside the mainstream media are paid to say what they are told to say. After Roswell, nobody in Washington wants another incident of that kind. Mockingbird becomes public in 1972, and it does not stop when it becomes public.

In February 1948, a second Operation Windmill ends with a ceasefire between the Antarctic Germans and the Cabal. The Germans expect a formal treaty to follow.

The ceasefire recognizes the Antarctic Germans as a sovereign nation, and it keeps their existence secret. Each side has its reasons. The Germans have threatened to make their technology public, and the Cabal cannot allow this, because control of technology is control of the world. The Cabal also fears its own populations. If it became known that the Nazis had survived, the citizens of the planet might well decide to destroy them once and for all, even at the price of nuclear war, and the politicians would no longer have a choice in the matter.

The Germans' demands go further. They establish embassies in every country. They require that between one and five senior executives from their civilization be placed in each of the world's major corporations, in aerospace, automobiles, petrochemicals, and every other main industry, and then also in defense contractors, agriculture, banks, research hospitals, engineering schools, and the great universities. They have some 300,000 people to employ, and their plan is to infiltrate the rest of the planet so that their own people are in place everywhere. As a consolation, they give the Cabal basic theories, though not technology, so that the Cabal must do its own development. Since the executives who receive these theories are often Germans themselves, the Germans are in effect giving the knowledge to their own people. Those people rise quickly. A man who arrives with advanced knowledge is soon on the fast track to the top of his company.

The public part of this infiltration is Operation Paperclip. It brings German scientists, technicians, and engineers into the corporations of the Western world, gives them passports, homes, and jobs, and opens every door for them. It is only the first stage. Between 1945 and 1948, the Germans place their people in the armies and the politics of the Allies, so that they become deeply embedded in the Allied governments. The United States is the main target, because its manufacturing capacity and its resources are far larger than those of any other country. The Antarctic Germans have the more advanced science, but they are few, and they have no industry to compare with that of a large nation. Placing their people inside the companies of the United States gives them the use of that industry without the need to conquer it.

After Admiral Byrd's return, the sightings increase, and so do the reports of abductions. Many of those abducted are of German descent, as are many of those who later serve in the programs. Whether the abductions of the 1950s and 1960s belong to the Germans' own testing or to agreements with other races is not known.

4.

In the late 1940s, the Antarctic Germans begin to build away from Earth, and they start with the Moon. There they learn two things. The first is that the Moon is an artificial construct. It was not originally part of the Earth. It was brought from somewhere else as an escape ship, and it is built out inside. The second is that most of it is already occupied. Dozens of alien races have bases on the Moon, and each guards its territory closely. There is no fighting among them, but any race whose land is taken has the right to defend itself, and the Germans do not have the technology for a fight of that kind. They must find a race that is willing to give up some land.

Only one race will deal with them. The Draco have made sure of this, by bribery, blackmail, or manipulation, so that the Germans have nowhere else to turn. The negotiation is over twenty acres, which is not much land; the only way to use it is to build deep. The Draco first ask for 225 females and fifty years of first refusal rights, which means the right to claim any technology the Germans uncover in Antarctica before anyone else. The Germans reject the demand for women at once. A young civilization needs every woman of childbearing age it has. After six months the two sides agree: the Germans will hand over 150 males and 75 females and grant twenty-five years of first refusal rights. In return they receive a lease of one hundred years and assistance with technology. The Draco do not hand over advanced technology itself. They only help the Germans with it.

The price is paid in Antarctica. The people are taken from the Germans' own citizens, the only population they have at that stage, and they are told nothing: not what has been agreed, not where they are going. They are led into a cavern under the watch of fifty-three armed guards. For the men who negotiated the exchange it is all business, and none of their own families are among those chosen.

The Draco arrive in full battle armor and switch on a device that freezes every person within its field. Then, into the minds of all who stand there unable to move, they send images: mutilation, assault, and cannibalism, done by humans to humans, and done to the captives' own families. There is nothing the captives can do. They cannot run, they cannot turn away, they cannot close their minds to what they are shown, and it goes on for as long as the Draco choose. It serves no purpose. The Draco do it because they find it funny.

Three guards are standing outside the field when it comes on. One is caught by it as he runs for the exit. The other two get out, and everything known about that day comes from them. They are never the same again. For about a year neither can remain conscious without falling into extreme distress or psychosis, and some five years later both take their own lives. The guards inside can do nothing in any case. Their weapons are useless against the armor, and they have been sent there to hand the people over.

The Germans had agreed to give 225 people. Counting every guard, the exchange costs them 278. They ask repeatedly what became of them, or where their remains are, and they never receive an answer. The Draco have many uses for human beings: experiments, manipulation, slave labor, their own forms of entertainment, and food.

This is what the Germans have paid, in people and in twenty-five years of everything they find under the ice, for twenty acres of the Moon. And they have been cheated even in this. They learn later that at least six other races would have given them twice the land for a single year of first refusal rights and not one person. They vow never again to trade their own citizens. When they next need people to trade, they will take them from the rest of the planet.

The twenty acres become the Lunar Operations Command. It is built between 1947 and 1952, mostly downward, and about a thousand people die in the work. Some die because the enclosures cannot yet be made to seal. Others die because work in a vacuum requires remote sensors that are still being developed. The Germans of this period combine extremely advanced technology with the ordinary technology of the 1940s, and they learn quickly because their lives depend on it.

At the same time they look for land on Mars, where the difficulty is of another kind. Large parts of the planet are highly energetic, with charged particles in the atmosphere that make electronics useless, so that only certain areas can be built on. These areas are occupied, not by the Draco but by other alien races. To win the site of their first city, New Berlin, the Germans must establish a foothold and fight. The campaign lasts about ten years and costs more than 17,000 lives. As a share of their population, this equals all the losses of the Allies in the Second World War, and it falls on the youngest, fittest, and most productive members of their society. The cities the Germans build on Mars are large, and they are underground. Much of what they consume is recycled, and part of their water comes from the ice of the planet. They are not alone there. Other beings besides humans live on Mars.

5.

The losses on Mars leave the Antarctic Germans with a shortage of people. They need workers for the positions their own citizens can no longer fill or do not want, and they need the formal treaty that would deliver them. So they increase the pressure on the Cabal. This explains the wave of UFO sightings in the early 1950s. Craft shadow civilian and military aircraft. Military pilots report that the pilot of such a craft looked human, and that he gave them the finger before flying away. In 1950 there is a mass sighting over New York of a large craft of the Andromeda class, and in 1952 there are mass sightings over Washington itself, across two weekends. It is a show of force, and it fails. The Cabal still does not come to the table.

From 1948 to 1954, the Cabal plays for time, because it knows it cannot face the Antarctic Germans on equal terms. In 1949, the Soviet Union tests its first nuclear bomb. There is evidence that the United States gave the Soviets the plans, on the reasoning that the more powers stand against the Germans, the better the chance of holding them. In the same year the communists take control of China. In 1950, the Korean War begins, and the Cabal argues that it cannot conclude a treaty while it is fighting a war. From 1950 to 1954, the Red Scare led by Senator McCarthy searches the United States for communists, and what the government is really looking for is the spies of the Antarctic Germans. The Cabal also makes a gesture of good faith. It knows that the Antarctic Germans still love their homeland, and with the London Debt Agreement it forgives the war debts of Germany from both wars, back to the First World War. In modern money the sum is close to a thousand trillion dollars.

The Germans have told the Cabal many times that they possess nuclear weapons. The Cabal does not believe it. The Germans therefore stage a demonstration. They choose a single heavy cruiser of the US Navy that is returning from one of the United States' own nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. Four saucers take up position sixty kilometers above it, about 200,000 feet. They drop a device of small yield, close enough for the electromagnetic pulse to disable the ship, but not close enough to burn it. An electromagnetic pulse is the invisible field of energy released by a nuclear explosion, which interrupts electronics and melts wires. Three of the saucers remain at altitude. When it is safe, the fourth descends in five seconds to a hundred feet above the ship. The crew fires at it with the weapons that still work and cannot hit it. It takes twelve hours to get the cruiser moving, and it returns slowly to Hawaii.

The Germans expect the United States to claim that the ship was simply too close to Bikini. They have filmed the whole operation, and they send copies of the film to almost every leader in the world: to the President of the United States, to the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to the head of the German government, and to every royal family in Europe. Nobody can now say that no message was received. The world's leaders know what the Germans are capable of and what they want. This brings the Cabal to the table.

The Antarctic Germans are often taken for a part of the Cabal. They are its enemies. They blame it for what happened to Germany after the First World War and for the loss of the Second, and their name for it is "the Earth's shite royals." Nothing makes them prouder than the fact that they are not part of the Cabal and can dictate terms to it. They do not destroy it, because they need it. They have no manufacturing capacity to equal that of Earth, and no comparable range of research. By taking over the corporations of the planet from the inside, they put all of this at their own disposal. The relation between the two powers is therefore a balance. The Germans are stronger in technology and weaker in numbers and in industry. The Cabal controls the money, the governments, and the factories of Earth, but it cannot protect any of its secrets from the Germans. Each needs the other, each works against the other, and both need the public to know nothing.

In 1954, the campaign on Mars ends. In the same year the Antarctic Germans develop their own memory-wipe technology.

6.

Antarctica is about the size of the United States, and it holds every natural resource, from oil and coal to uranium, gold, and silver. Corporations drill in the deepest oceans and break open rock to reach oil and gas, and yet not one of them works in Antarctica. The reason is the Antarctic Treaty, which is negotiated between 1955 and 1959. It has two parts, a public one and a classified one.

During the negotiations two expeditions travel south, Operation Deep Freeze I and II. They are presented as exploration. In fact the Cabal uses them to build its own base in Antarctica and to conduct the talks. It takes more than four years to agree on the wording, and one member of the Cabal dies of a heart attack during the talks, from fear of what is about to become public.

The classified part confirms once more that the Antarctic Germans are a sovereign nation. It grants them between 150,000 and 200,000 people from the rest of the world, to be collected at a time and place of the Germans' choosing. The Germans set specific requirements of intelligence and physical fitness. This is the "brain drain" of the late 1950s and the 1960s. The Germans assure the leaders of the world that these people will be paid, housed, fed, and given proper medical care, that after five years they may become German citizens, and that those who do not wish to will be sent home. It does not happen. When the five years end, people are returned and then abducted again, or reported dead with false papers, and the Germans keep about ninety percent of them. They work in the factories and in housekeeping, in the jobs that the Germans themselves are too busy for or do not want.

The treaty also extends the Germans' hold on institutions. They now have seats on the boards of directors of the companies where they already have executives, between one and five in each and more in the largest, across thousands of corporations, universities, medical research centers, and banks. They also receive a permanent position for life in the executive branch of every government on the planet. The United States has several. Inside the companies, their people rise from vice president to president without difficulty, because they bring advanced technology with them. The company earns a great deal of money from the new product, and the person who brought it is promoted. The system feeds itself, and it continues today.

The Cabal is worried by all this, but it thinks in the long term. It has survived wars and changes of regime for close to a thousand years and has kept its control through all of them. By some accounts its plans for world domination go back to the American Revolution. It accepts the treaty because the only alternatives are destruction or exposure, and it begins to plan. Secrecy suits both sides. The Germans do not want the world to unite against them, and the Cabal would lose its power if the truth were known.

After the treaty, the Germans stop their flights over cities and their shadowing of aircraft. Through the 1960s the two sides play a game of cat and mouse. The Cabal wants a space program of its own, and it uses the American effort to land a man on the Moon to move millions of dollars into black projects. The Germans, however, have people in every position and know about every advanced technology under development. When a project shows promise, they use their citizens in government to remove it from the budget. It is then either closed or taken private and moved to German facilities, away from the public. This is why so many promising technologies disappear from the record in the 1960s, above all in advanced physics. The Germans decide which technologies are released to which governments.

Both sides also continue their work on mind control, with technology and with drugs. The Third Reich had pioneered this field, and its scientists and doctors carried the work to Antarctica. The Cabal starts programs of its own. The known experiments with LSD on prisoners are only the surface.

Away from Earth, the Germans build their second city on Mars, New Wurzburg, and their first carrier group, whose carriers are long ships shaped like cigars. They spread through the solar system, to Ceres, to the moons of Saturn, to the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, where the resources are so great that a base and a small planetoid supply everything needed. In the same period they acquire jump gate technology.

In 1972, the twenty-five years of first refusal rights end, and the Germans may keep whatever they find under the ice. Their outer colonies and factories now have enough workers to sustain themselves, and they turn to technology of their own. They start to build a fleet of interstellar ships. They also experiment with time travel, and they find that the past resists change. When they go back and keep a person from crossing a street where a car would have hit him, the person dies in another way within a short time, or the result they tried to avoid arrives by another road. They find themselves with several problems in the past in place of one, and they stop.

7.

Through the 1970s the Cabal continues to buy time. It knows that it is infiltrated, and it can do little about it. The Red Scare was one attempt, and it achieved little. Senator McCarthy dies three years after it ends, in the naval hospital at Bethesda. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, had died there in 1949. He had been Kennedy's mentor, and in 1945 he had taken the young Kennedy to Germany to see the German technology. He wanted to make what he knew public, at the very time when the first agreements with the Antarctic Germans were being made. He was confined to the hospital and was reported to have killed himself by a fall from a window.

The Space Race of these years is a cover. At the highest levels, communication between East and West is friendly, because the Soviet Union and the United States have a common enemy in the Antarctic Germans. Both use their enormous space budgets to pay for secret projects, with the aim of building their own means of travel in space. The Cold War is a way to move money into these projects.

In the 1970s the Cabal learns of the Germans' memory-wipe technology. The name is not exact, because the memory is not destroyed. It is isolated and locked away. In importance it equals the Manhattan Project: a person who remembers nothing has nothing to tell and is no risk to security, and a government that owns the technology can be certain its secrets are kept. Without it, the Cabal cannot develop anything in secret. Every program it starts is known to the Germans, who can close it or take it over as they choose.

In 1979, the Cabal obtains it, in a joint operation of the CIA and the KGB. Thousands of people around the world take part without knowing the purpose, as more than 100,000 worked on the Manhattan Project and only a handful knew what it was for. Only five know the whole plan, three officers of the CIA and two of the KGB, and they are guarded day and night until it is completed. A member of the Antarctic German security forces is persuaded to change sides. The team boards a German shuttle, disables the crew, and takes one of the wands used for wiping memory. The shuttle is then made to destroy itself, probably by a bomb placed on the outside of its fusion bottle, and it disappears high over the Pacific in a ball of white plasma. The team has probably left it by parachute, in a jump from high altitude with a low opening. The loss looks like an accident, and nothing connects it to the Cabal.

It takes three years to copy the technology. The scientists who do the work are its first victims: their memories are wiped, and they never know what they achieved. Of the five who knew the plan, three die in unexplained ways soon after the wand is delivered. The two survivors, both from the CIA, spend the rest of their lives in hiding.

The Cabal can now run secret programs with some confidence. This accounts for the technical advances of the early 1980s and for the first ships of Operation Solar Warden, the space fleet of the United States. Its purpose is to do what the Germans have done: to develop its own technology and to project power onto other planets and through the solar system. President Reagan refers to it in his diaries when he writes of a shuttle able to carry 300 men. The United States builds its fleet and, in time, gains a base on the Moon.

In the same years, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 pass Jupiter and Saturn. What they record shows the Cabal how far the Germans have built and how many alien races move through the solar system. It frightens the Cabal. It had planned to bring the world under its control over a century or more, and now it shortens the schedule. The methods are to create a disease together with its cure, to poison food, to lower the level of education, to keep promoting fiat currency, and to stage false-flag attacks so that people themselves ask for more security. The goal is a single despotic world government.

The Germans have never accepted the loss of their shuttle as an accident. It takes them years to establish how it was done, and longer to establish by whom. In 1986 they respond. They move all their manufacturing and research away from Earth to their facilities on Mars, and they send two messages. The first is the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. The second, two months later, is the destruction of the cooling towers at Chernobyl. Both strikes are made from an orbital platform. Engineers who worked at the Kennedy Space Center at the time say long afterward that the Challenger accident should not have happened. President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev each receive a plain brown box. Inside is a memory-wipe device that does not work, marked with the Antarctic German coat of arms, and on the outside are stamped the date and time of the shuttle explosion of 1979. The Germans would have done more, but they fear that Reagan, whom they regard as a cowboy, might answer with nuclear weapons. So they stop there, and each strike can still be explained as an accident.

8.

With the move of most of their civilization to Mars, the Antarctic Germans become the Mars Germans. They simply call themselves Germans. Since they became independent they have altered their own genes. They are usually stronger and faster than people from Earth, with quicker reflexes and higher intelligence, and as a people they are known for their arrogance, though they vary as any population does. They teach this history to their own citizens, mixed with propaganda, but far more openly than anything that is taught on Earth. About three million of them are said to live on Mars, though they guard all information about their two cities closely.

By the late 1980s Solar Warden is fully active, and the Cabal needs a base on the Moon. It meets the problem the Germans met forty years earlier: the Moon is occupied, and land can only be had by payment or arrangement. The Mars Germans, for their part, want distance from the Draco. In 1990, through another transfer of technology, they obtain new land on the Moon, away from them. Their old lease has been paid in full for its hundred years, but it contains a condition. To leave, they must find a new tenant, and the Cabal is the obvious one.

The Cabal has a second reason to agree. The Germans now have twelve carrier battle groups and send them on long exercises, and the Cabal fears them greatly. Two such forces in the same space could easily have come to war.

The agreement of 1991 settles both matters. The Cabal takes over the Lunar Operations Command without paying for the lease. In exchange it provides two divisions of soldiers, 24,000 men, to be used where and when the Mars Germans need them. They are drawn from every country that has a central bank. To be released from their lease, the Germans must also place ten of their twelve carrier battle groups at the disposal of the Draco. The Draco describe the purpose as "border patrol." In practice it means the conquest of planets.

This treaty creates the Interplanetary Defense and Reaction Forces, IDARF. Its ground forces are four divisions. Two are made up entirely of Mars Germans, and two, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, mix soldiers from Earth and Mars. Every officer from lieutenant colonel upward is a Mars German, and no soldier from Earth may rise above major. In the eyes of the German command, a soldier from Earth is at a disadvantage from the start. Failures are blamed on the Earth units, and the old hatred of the Cabal is turned on them as its nearest representatives. The Germans have copied the units, symbols, and uniforms of the German army of the Second World War, and one dress uniform looks like the black uniform of the SS. The Americans wear it only under orders. About 5,000 people a year pass through the program. No soldier may become an instructor before he has completed at least one combat tour. The reasoning is simple: whoever has survived has earned the right to teach others how to survive.

One condition is attached to the use of some of the technology involved. Every soldier must be returned, at the end of his service, to the time and place of his departure, and everything possible must be done to achieve this. A soldier who becomes inconvenient, because he has understood too much or has spoken out, cannot simply be made to disappear. His memory is locked instead, and he continues to serve. For security, the memories of all soldiers are locked before they are sent home. Thousands have come back in this way. Many suffer from depression or from the effects of trauma and do not know the cause.

The soldiers are told that they are going to help native populations defend their planets against an invader. This is propaganda. The invaders are controlled by the Draco, as IDARF is, and the Draco direct both sides of each war. The wars exist to make a planet's people accept in ten years the single government they would otherwise have resisted for a century. During a war, the use of advanced technology is restricted, so that the losses are as high as possible. After it, every door is opened, and the flood of new technology breaks up the religion, the families, and the towns of the people who have survived. A small number of families are then given the government of whole regions, as on Earth. People are moved from the countryside into cities, where they receive jobs, housing, taxes, and fiat currency. The Cabal has no part in running the conquered planets. It supplies soldiers as payment for its base. The decisions are made by the Draco, and above the Draco by the artificial intelligence that gives them their orders. Evil, in this system, is given out like a franchise.

The Cabal does not supply its soldiers without protection for itself. One of the nanite enhancements in each soldier contains a code that kills him when a signal is sent, and munitions are hidden aboard the ships. The signal can reach them if the fleet ever comes within 500 light-years of Earth.

With ten German carrier groups kept outside the solar system, the Cabal acts more boldly at home. There is no open fighting between the Cabal and the Mars Germans. But Earth is where the Germans come from, and their long-term plans may well include a return.

In the early 1990s, the Cabal informs the leaders of the world that it has a space program. The Soviets already know, having observed new craft that were unlike the usual UFOs. Other nations, and some wealthy families, now develop, steal, build, or buy programs of their own, from a few shuttles to large ships, and the poorer countries join together and share. The United States has several programs, among them those of the Navy and the Air Force, and Solar Warden remains the largest. No body governs them all. What most have in common is the Cabal. The exception is most of the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, whose independent programs have united into a force too large for the Cabal to destroy at once.

The programs compete, and alliances form. The group known as the Alliance consists largely of people the Cabal has hunted or betrayed, who have joined together to survive. Some were members of the Cabal and came to reject its actions. Some are families with money to contribute in place of power. Not all are innocent. Many took full part in the Cabal's operations and joined the Alliance only to save themselves.

Around the group that meets at Bilderberg, a wheel of connected people and companies controls the media, education, and national defense, and ten companies own most of the world's media. Those who work inside this system often do not know whom they serve. The planners can afford to think a century ahead. Medicine that can extend life to 150 or 180 years is available to them, and perhaps the transfer of consciousness into a new body.

The Cabal is also bound by its agreements with alien societies to disclose information. It meets this duty with partial truths, half lies, and stories released through science fiction and the films of Hollywood, so that it will one day be able to claim that it had been telling the truth all along. The gradual disclosure now under way was designed by the same people who kept the secret for eighty years. Technologies long since paid for through black budgets are passed to companies and universities, which then announce them as inventions of their own. Transparent steel is one example, and the control of several drones at once through a link to the brain is another. Disclosure of this kind can be continued for generations.

Full disclosure, when it comes, will contain two kinds of news. Some of it will be exciting: advances in medicine, transportation, and energy that change daily life. Some of it will be very hard to accept. It will include lies, fraud, theft, and murder, carried on for more than eighty years, and committed against the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, and the sons and daughters of the people who learn of it. Nobody likes to be lied to. Individuals, and then whole societies, will pass through the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Those who ask for the whole truth at once may be able to bear it themselves, but they should consider their families, their neighbors, and the people they work with. New technology alone can turn a civilization upside down, from the family to the government. When advanced sources of energy are released, the energy industry will be obsolete, and the millions of people it employs will need other work.

The alternative to a disclosure planned by the Cabal is a plan of transition made in the open, with the participation of ordinary citizens, that covers medicine, transportation, the environment, and energy. The world is waking up at a rate that increases every year, and when enough people are awake, they will be in a position to demand it.