CHERUB: A HISTORY [1940-1996]
1940 Charles Henderson, a British agent working in Nazi-occupied France, sent a report to his headquarters in London detailing how he’d used children to wangle information out of German soldiers. Upon his return to Britain, Henderson was given permission to form a small undercover detachment of children, under the command of British Military Intelligence. Henderson’s Boys were given basic espionage training before being parachuted into occupied France. They gathered vital intelligence in the run-up to the D-Day invasions of 1944.
1946 Henderson’s Boys disbanded at the end of the war. Most of them returned to France. Their existence has never been officially acknowledged.
Charles Henderson believed that children would make effective intelligence agents during peacetime. In May 1946, he was given permission to create CHERUB in a disused village school. The first twenty CHERUB recruits, all boys, lived in wooden huts at the back of the playground.
1951 For its first five years, CHERUB struggled along with limited resources. Its fortunes changed following its first major success: two agents uncovered a ring of Russian spies who were stealing information on the British nuclear weapons programme.
The government of the day was delighted. CHERUB was given funding to expand. Better facilities were built and the number of agents was increased from twenty to sixty.
1954 Two CHERUB agents, Jason Lennox and Johan Urminski, were killed while operating undercover in East Germany. Nobody knows how the boys died. The government considered shutting CHERUB down, but there were now over seventy active CHERUB agents performing vital missions around the world.
An inquiry into the boys’ deaths led to the introduction of new safeguards:
(1) The creation of the ethics panel. From now on, every mission had to be approved by a three-person committee.
(2) Jason Lennox was only nine years old. A minimum mission age of ten years and four months was introduced.
(3) A more rigorous approach to training was brought in. A version of the 100-day basic training programme began.
1956 Although many believed that girls would be unsuitable for intelligence work, CHERUB admitted five girls as an experiment. They were a huge success. The number of girls in CHERUB was upped to twenty the following year. Within ten years, the number of girls and boys was equal.
1957 CHERUB introduced its system of coloured T-shirts.
1960 Following several successes, CHERUB was allowed to expand again, this time to 130 students. The farmland surrounding headquarters was purchased and fenced off, about a third of the area that is now known as CHERUB Campus.
1967 Katherine Field became the third CHERUB agent to die on an operation. She was bitten by a snake on a mission in India. She reached hospital within half an hour, but tragically the snake species was wrongly identified and Katherine was given the wrong anti-venom.
1973 Over the years, CHERUB had become a hotchpotch of small buildings. Construction began on a new nine-storey headquarters.
1977 All cherubs are either orphans, or children who have been abandoned by their family. Max Weaver was one of the first CHERUB agents. He made a fortune building office blocks in London and New York. When he died in 1977, aged just forty-one, without a wife or children, Max Weaver left his fortune for the benefit of the children at CHERUB. The Max Weaver Trust Fund has paid for many of the buildings on CHERUB campus. These include the indoor athletics facilities and library. The trust fund now holds assets worth over £1 billion.
1982 Thomas Webb was killed by a landmine on the Falkland Islands, becoming the fourth CHERUB agent to die on a mission. He was one of nine agents used in various roles during the Falklands conflict.
1986 The government gave CHERUB permission to expand up to four hundred pupils. Despite this, numbers have stalled some way below this. CHERUB requires intelligent, physically robust agents, who have no family ties. Children who meet all these admission criteria are extremely hard to find.
1990 CHERUB purchased additional land, expanding both the size and security of campus. Campus is marked on all British maps as an army firing range. Surrounding roads are routed so that there is only one road on to campus. The perimeter walls cannot be seen from nearby roads. Helicopters are banned from the area and aeroplanes must stay above ten thousand metres. Anyone breaching the CHERUB perimeter faces life imprisonment under the State Secrets Act.
1996 CHERUB celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with the opening of a diving pool and indoor shooting range.
Every retired member of CHERUB was invited to the celebration. No guests were allowed. Over nine hundred people made it, flying from all over the world. Among the retired agents were a former Prime Minister and a rock guitarist who had sold 80 million albums.
After a firework display, the guests pitched tents and slept on campus. Before leaving the following morning, everyone gathered outside the chapel and remembered the four children who had given CHERUB their lives.
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CHERUB: Dark Sun Page 7