The Agency

Before he was a writer, before he was a junky and even before he worked the exterminator circuit, William Lee did some contract jobs for the agency.

The outfit was known as the Dark Hand. Lone wolves who operated with no apparent connection to the agency apparatus. As far as official records go they didn’t exist. They were a sub outfit within a sub outfit, a wheel within a wheel. They reported to no one directly but rather took their directives from graffiti left in subway toilet stalls or, interpreted through certain configurations of pigeons in Union Square.

This was all so the agency could perform domestic operations with a high degree of plausible deniability. Infiltration, espionage, evidence tampering, false flags, kidnapping and assassination. All a part of the Dark Hand’s dirty little playbook.

They lied, cheated, stole, impersonated, defrauded, falsified.

Lee was a natural. With his dry Midwest drawl, old world manners and deep well of arcane knowledge he made a perfect company man. Capable of moving effortlessly from low to high society. Anonymous to a fault, with skin the grey of newspaper. Such was his ghostly reputation the street kids in Tangiers took to calling him El Hombre Invisible. It is said he once faded out of a mugshot as it was being developed.

In return for his cooperation Lee had a number of crimes expunged from his permanent record. Most notably the accidental shooting of his common law wife in 1951 and a number of narcotics charges.

But the agency never lets you go, not really.

Should Dark Hand operations ever be uncovered the agency would move quickly to paint the operative as an unseemly saboteur out to destroy the fabric of American society. A narrative would be disseminated to the media. Jackbooted men would kick down doors on the Lower East Side. Within they would find drug paraphernalia, unlicensed firearms and banned french pornography. Along with ingredients for explosives written on bar napkins, long strange poems that didn’t rhyme and unpublishable private literature detailing a fascination with sodomy.

The Fiction Department

All this evidence would be cooked up by the FICTION department. A team of artists, writers, scientists and technicians whose sole job was to construct props, sets, characters and story lines so that culture might be more accurately manipulated by the agency.

Who runs the FICTION department is a mystery. But its influence is said to spread tentacle-like into every aspect of society. So that no one, perhaps save the great puppeteer himself, can really be sure of what is fact and what is fiction.

There are not many in this world who would enjoy being informed that the patriotism which forms the bedrock of their convictions is perhaps also a product of the FICTION department. A department whose powers, if they are as astounding as we’ve been led to believe, may extend into the past, just as they now permeate the present and shape the future.

Who can even say for certain what year it is?

Lee left the organization in 1969. But no one ever really leaves.

“I’ve been interested in the Mayan system, which was a control calendar. You see, their calendar postulated really how everyone should feel at a given time, with lucky days, unlucky days, et cetera. And I feel that Luce’s* system is comparable to that. It is a control system. It has nothing to do with reporting. Time, Life, Fortune [now there’s a trinity to ponder over] is some sort of a police organization.”



– William S. Burroughs (1965)

*Henry Robinson Luce (1898 – 1967) was an American magazine magnate. Publisher of Life, Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.