The Cthulhu Wars

by Kenneth Hite

  On November 23, a small unit of Tibetan Chushi Gangdruk rebels led by two CIA officers entered a network of caves in Nepal providing access to an isolated portion of the Ü-Tsang Plateau in Tibet. Their mission was to locate and awaken an NRE worshiped locally as the deity Tsaugnar Fon, which they believed would attack Chinese troops when it emerged.

  The entire unit went missing, and both CIA officers were declared dead in 1960. However, in 1981 two men claiming to be those same CIA officers were captured by the People’s Liberation Army in China’s Yunnan province. Turned over to the United States after two years of interrogation, both men claimed that they had been in the mountains for less than 11 days when they were captured.

  THREAT REPORT: PRE-HUMANS

  “The new dates from Ngandong and Sambungmacan are surprisingly young and, if proven correct, imply that H. erectus persisted much longer in Southeast Asia than elsewhere in the world.”

  –Swisher, Rink, et al. “Latest Homo erectus of Java,”

  Science 1996 Dec 13; 274:1870–4.

  The Pnakotic Manuscripts maintain that the Earth has hosted, or will host, no fewer than 13 sentient species from the crinoid Megarkarua to two arthropod races (coleopterans and then arachnids) that are destined to succeed humanity. The humanoid species that currently share the surface with mankind are, for the most part, pre-human, although Miskatonic University scholars debate some details. Evolutionary competition with Homo sapiens has forced them into fringe environments: deep caves; remote islands; mountains; and rain forests.

  Paleontologists and occultists working under MAJIC have identified four of these species with significant populations. Given the anomalously long lifespans of many NRE species, even an isolated colony might well be self-sustaining or even capable of demographic breakout if the human pressure were removed.

  Parviraptor valusiani: Called the “serpent folk” in von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, this intelligent bipedal species probably originated at some time in the Jurassic Period, or even as early as the Permian. By the Cenozoic Era, their population had been severely depleted, either by wars with other species, or by some global mass extinction event. Master sorcerers and poisoners, they primarily pose an intelligence threat – their ability to shape-shift and to teratogenically “morph” or remold humans has triggered at least one MAJIC mole hunt.

  Gigantopithecus lemuriensis: Part of the genus Gigantopithecus which evolved in South Asia roughly 9 million years ago, G. lemuriensis stands 3m tall and weighs 540kg. Their name derives from the lost continent of Lemuria, where they either ruled or served as the warrior caste until its destruction around 400,000 years ago. Their psionic powers still conceal their ancient city of Shamballah somewhere in the Gobi Desert – the US Military Mission to Mongolia has one MAJIC-cleared NCO, but projecting force in this tense region between China and Russia remains difficult.

  Homo hirsutus: This furry hominid species (called the Voormii in the Book of Eibon) evolved in the Pliocene (ca. 3.5 MYA), establishing a roughly Bronze Age-level of civilization in Greenland during the Bramertonian Interglacial Stage about 1 MYA. The return of the ice and a civil war between worshippers of Tsathoggua and Itlaqqa destroyed the Voormii civilization; they mostly survive as primitive remnants in the Himalayas (yeti), Caucasus and Pamir (almas), and the Pacific Northwest (sasquatch). Unless a given H. hirsutus actively serves an NRE, it poses little strategic threat, although troops of almas have badly mauled unprepared patrols in Afghanistan (both Russian and NATO) and Chechnya.

  Homo erectus malevolens: Descended from the hominid species dubbed Java Man, H. erectus malevolens is better known as the Tcho-Tcho (from the Yi word meaning “to eat”). Tcho-Tcho tribes survive and even thrive in the military chaos of the Cambodian, Burmese, and Malaysian interior. Chinese intelligence indicates that Tcho-Tcho also survive in Tibet. Cannibal worshipers of the Twin Obscenity Nug–Yeb, the Tcho-Tcho show an almost innate talent for irregular warfare.

  Only H. erectus malevolens maintains any real military presence, and with the destruction of the buried city of Alaozar in 1905, even they present no direct threat to humanity or the United States. That said, none of these species has any great reason to be fond of their H. sapiens successors, and the Necronomicon and Book of Eibon state that individuals of all species are capable of sorcery. When a single wizard can potentially manifest the equivalent of a gigaton nuclear strike, the only true safety may lie in the complete extinction of these pre-human races.

  Congo

  When the Democratic Republic of Congo (later Zaire) achieved independence from Belgium in 1960 and installed a left-leaning prime minister, the CIA and Belgium’s General Intelligence and Security Service (SGRS) cooperated closely to prevent a feared Communist takeover. While the Belgians backed an authoritarian military coup led by Joseph Mobutu in 1961, the CIA instead recruited assets from among an underground NRE cult, the Army of Holy Temperance Unleashed (AHTU).

  Headquartered in a long-abandoned temple complex first described in 1765 by the British explorer Sir Wade Jermyn, the AHTU raided Cuban and other Communist outposts with troops of killer white apes. While initially effective, the AHTU proved more interested in nihilistic violence than in the agendas of either Mobutu or the United States.

  Vietnam

  Beginning in 1961, The CIA recruited, supplied, and trained battalions from several Indochinese indigenous peoples for paramilitary warfare against the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army, and allied Communist forces. The Tcho-Tcho “Armée Inconnu” rapidly slipped the CIA leash and by 1968 had revealed themselves as a threat to the stability of South Vietnam – and the US presence in the country – equal to the Communist North.

  After supposedly friendly Tcho-Tcho ambushed, killed, and then ate a US Army patrol, the US responded by bombing several religious sites considered holy to their obscene twin cannibal deities Nug and Yeb. These raids were followed up by Operation Bulldog, a series of punitive ground attacks against Tcho-Tcho settlements in Cambodia in August 1968. Although the Green Berets inflicted serious casualties on the Tcho-Tcho, their priests’ ability to summon and control several kinds of lesser NREs – including at least one creature described in intelligence after-action reporting only as an “oblong swimmer in darkness” (possibly a terrestrial sub-species of the flying polyps) – forced the US to airlift its few surviving troops out of harm’s way only a few weeks into the campaign.

  Recon Team (RT) Rhode Island served as the main MAJIC strike force within the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG). By August 1968 and the launch of the Operation Bulldog strikes against Tcho-Tcho ritual sites in Cambodia, MAJIC theoretically had full CIA cooperation and planning assistance, which in practice meant strategic paralysis and a piecemeal approach to anti-Tcho-Tcho operations. This August 13 mission in Kampong Cham exemplifies these weaknesses: a “heavy” RT of 12 men inserted into a Neolithic Mimotien ruin, a target identified from sensor overflights without on-site intelligence of any kind, as RT Rhode Island’s indigenous Hmong fighters unanimously disavowed any knowledge of such a place. The Tcho-Tcho attack the Mimotien “ring” earthwork, supported by a Mythos entity known as the “Swimmer in Darkness” – possibly a form of Flying Polyp, or the formless spawn of a local NRE such as Nug-Yeb or Sau-gaja (the “elephant of Saturn”). The Tcho-Tcho use blowguns and sacred bronze swords in this attack, although they eagerly used M16s and other American-supplied arms elsewhere in Indochina. This apparently ritual requirement saved the life of the three men (Special Forces Staff Sergeant Omar Crawford and two Hmong commandos) manning the machine gun in the (entirely unrecorded) temple ruin overlooking the site. They held off the Tcho-Tcho all night, destroyed as much of the ring and temple as practicable at dawn, and were exfiltrated by helicopter.

  Nicaragua

  In 1987, the CIA began an operation to awaken Qol’corotz, a sinister, black-winged, toad-like NRE, to assist the Nicaraguan Contras in overthrowing the leftist Sandinista regime. Sat
ellite imagery had located a site believed to be the legendary pre-Mayan “Temple of the Toad” in Honduras, not far from a Contra camp on the Nicaraguan border. Rather than risking American lives in the attempt to rouse the slumbering deity, CIA operatives supplied the Contras with several incantations from the Projekt Leo copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten smuggled out of East Berlin in 1961.

  The Contras had apparently unleashed something by March 13, 1988, but once more it proved uncontrollable, rampaging through the Honduras-Nicaragua border region for five days before a rapidly deployed US airborne force drove the unidentified creature back into hiding.

  Other Operations

  Not every occult CIA mission ended in disaster, at least not immediately. CIA assets among the Kheshthaogha-worshippers in western Iran aided the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, and CIA assets used a hyperspace “tunnel of Nyogtha” to move between West and East Berlin for most of the Cold War. The CIA also traced Czechoslovakian support for the Starry Wisdom “urban guerrilla movement” in the 1970s. Starry Wisdom had a distressing ability to locate and bomb MAJIC safe houses and black sites, although its motives for the November 1970 bombing of the bronze replica of the Liberty Bell in Portland, Oregon remain murky. CIA remote viewers also uncovered the identity of the terrorist who assassinated an Israeli NRE expert posted in Washington to liaise with MAJIC in June 1973.

  A Cia Snake Hunt

  The vulnerabilities of the CIA’s NRE program were not limited to foreign intervention. MAJIC agent Felix Ritter, temporarily detailed to the CIA in order to support the agency’s Project Artichoke mind-control program, identified a potential mole within the CIA’s ranks in 1971. In November 1970, during a briefing on the progress of Project Often – meant to harness black magic and “the forces of darkness [to] challenge the concept that the inner reaches of the mind are beyond reach” – Ritter noted several references to incantations, spells, and entities that did not come from the CIA’s limited library of NRE-related material. At first suspecting a leak within MAJIC, Ritter eventually concluded that at least one key member of the CIA team had gained separate and extensive access to a vast library of original and complete Alhazredic documents.

  Threatened with losing the whole NRE program, CIA counterintelligence officials mounted an extensive investigation into Project Artichoke. By early 1971, investigators had accrued enough odd and discomfiting evidence to reach a disturbing conclusion: at least one critical staff member was not actually human. The evidence, when shared with MAJIC, seemed to suggest that the group (and potentially the rest of the CIA) had been penetrated by one or more Parviraptor valusiani, the secretive “serpent folk” mentioned in von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Although the serpentine infiltrator or infiltrators were never formally identified, it may be significant that Dr Sidney Gottlieb suddenly retired in early 1972, just as the investigation was reaching its full swing.

  THE GLOBAL WAR ON HORROR (1991–)

  “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.”

  –Francis Fukuyama, The National Interest

  The ancient Near East was the cradle of civilization, with complex human cultures springing up for the first time thanks to the concurrent advent of urban settlements and writing. By the 4th millennium BC, Mesopotamian trading networks stretched from India to Spain, and the men of that epoch knew beyond the shadow of doubt that they were not alone in the world. They had, after all, built their civilizations on the ruins of cities built by older beings. But as the epochs passed, their heirs sought the favor of gods that their forebears had instead known to appease, bringing ruin upon their cities and settlements until at last their true nature was hidden or forgotten, with only a scattered few bearing the truth and the power that came with it.

  Specialists Van Kauran and Carter reconnoiter the slopes of Nanga Ranik near Nuriab during a MAJIC liaison mission with the local chief Amir Barzai Agah in Kunar Province, Afghanistan in 2009. (PD)

  Around 2600 BC, a secretive sect of priests founded temples on the banks of the Euphrates dedicated to the most powerful of these dreaming deities. As the old Assyrian Empire rose around them, the temples grew into cities. Both were called Tuttul, in honor of the god known to MAJIC as Cthulhu. The largest stood on the site of present-day Hit, Iraq until terrified invading Medes and Cimmerians burned it to the ground in 614 BC. The other (also dedicated to the god Dagan, or Dagon) still stands above a rocky Syrian village called Tell Bi’a, nine miles north of Ar-Raqqah. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the closing years of the 20th century, the United States found its security interests so closely tied to the stability of the old centers of NRE worship in the Middle East, Africa, and Southern Europe.

  The HAARP facility in Gakona, Alaska. Although scheduled to be shut down in summer 2014 and then again in summer 2015, it remains open, officially under the control of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. (PD)

  A New World Order

  By the 1990s, Iraq had come to represent a particularly dangerous source of human-enabled NRE activity, with an increasingly isolated regime more than willing to employ Mythos weapons in the service of its national interests. During its long war with Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime had uncovered a prehistoric shoggoth left behind by Deep Ones in the Tigris delta. The Ba’athists deployed weaponized shoggoth quasi-matter against its own people at Qandil and Soka in 1985 and 1987, respectively, to quell local unrest. In addition, limited intelligence reporting suggested that teams of Iraqi archaeologists working under Republican Guard command had uncovered several more lost Mythos sites – including the famed “city of the bells” of the daemon sultan Azathoth – that had the potential to significantly alter the regional balance of power.

  MAJIC saw Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as an indication either that the regime believed other items or sites of power could be found in Kuwaiti territory, or that Saddam’s magi believed they had already amassed enough power to ensure that a more aggressive regional policy could not be easily halted.

  As a result, when the United States decided to intervene, specially trained teams of MAJIC officers embedded with infantry and armor units crossing into Iraq from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in February 1991. MAJIC officers directed precision air strikes against half-excavated temple sites and ziggurats, and quietly removed stockpiles of ancient tablets, scrolls, and grimoires from underground bunkers while the “normal” war raged around them.

  With the Soviet Union on the edge of collapse, MAJIC for the first time openly used weapons developed since the 1940s for a broader global war against a similarly armed superpower. They rooted serpent folk infiltrators working for Saddam out of coalition ranks using techniques developed during CIA snake hunts in the 1970s, neutralized Iraqi-bred shoggoths with repurposed Megarkaruan technology, and used electro-magnetic “keys” developed during MAJIC’s study of the Mi-Gö to close toroidal stargates that the Iraqis had opened beneath ancient Uruk and Lagash.

  HAARP

  Pinched by shrinking defense and intelligence budgets, MAJIC had to partner with the Air Force, the Navy, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in order to construct the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Alaska in 1993.

  MAJIC intended to deploy this complex energy weapon terrestrially against Itlaqqa, and in the ionosphere against the flying polyps and the Mi-Gö. The additional requirements levied on the array by MAJIC’s well-intentioned but unqualified partners lengthened the development cycle and left its core functionality weakened.

  The first HAARP strike against Itlaqqa was worse than ineffectual, causing a major Arctic outbreak in early December 2000 that temporarily drew Itlaqqa to the north and west of the continental United States. Before a second, corrected test restrained the ancient being in the far north, confused civilian authorities fielded a flurry of murder cases involving cannibalism and a drastic uptick in Homo hirsutus activity i
n the same areas.

  Keeping The Peace

  MAJIC’s official support dwindled as the Pentagon mistakenly conflated the end of the Cold War with the end of the Cthulhu Wars. MAJIC officers operating alongside NATO forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina prevented a degenerate Serbian sect from sacrificing a squad of Polish UN peacekeepers at an ancient black monolith in the ruins of Buŭim Castle in October 1995. Although the ritual failed, MAJIC nevertheless called in air strikes that failed to destroy the black stone, but badly damaged the ongoing peace talks. With no apparent ongoing threat, critics of MAJIC’s extensive mandate suggested that the need for the special unit had passed.

  By 1996, MAJIC would be forced to deploy to Liberia and Sierra Leone without official authorization, to combat resurgent cults of Azathoth, Hastur, and Nyarlathotep that had risen to limited power on the margins of the diamond-rich countries’ civil wars. Declaring themselves priests of the true “traditional” indigenous religions, the cult leaders and false priests had urged warlords and desperate political leaders to perform human and child sacrifices to the “old gods” in exchange for invincibility in battle. Lacking official sanction and unable to oppose these cults openly, MAJIC instead used private military contracting as cover for their activities. They assassinated several key cult leaders, and intimidated several others into providing intelligence on regional cult activities and abandoning their bloodthirsty practices.

  A grave complex from the megalithic El Infiernito site in Colombia, dated to ca. 900 BC. As a subterranean chamber, this site was likely dedicated to the Muisca god of floods, Chibchacum, imprisoned underground by the hero Bochica. Chibchacum may be the local representation of Cthulhu, who has a surprisingly strong cult presence in the Andes region. MAJIC private military contractors carried out an unknown mission at El Infiernito in 2006. (PD)