Gang of Four

The Gang of Four was an American political cabal comprised of the NSA, CIA, FBI, and DEA, formed at some unspecified time in the mid-20th century. During its existence, the Gang of Four amassed boundless political and military influence, operating in an extrajudicial manner and with no congressional oversight.

It is largely responsible for the the Collapse of the United States, causing a crescendo of political, social and economic instability due to its dubious involvement in both American and foreign affairs.

Origins (1950s-1990s)
The Gang of Four traces its origins to the years following the end of World War 2. Although agencies such as the FBI have existed since the beginning of the century, the federal government began creating new ones such as the NSA in the early days of the Cold War to combat the increasingly hostile Soviet Union. At some point in time, these agencies began consolidating their power and operating as a shadow government, eventually eclipsing Washington's authority and coordinating outside of legal bounds.

Since the 1950's, the organization had on file a major percentage of every telegraph, telephone, and radiophone call made in Moscow until 1992. Even the encrypted calls were recorded, though some were not decoded for as long as twenty years. In the United States, they had records of every wire transfer and telegram from every on-line office in the country; detailed information on all manner of transactions, from stock exchanges down to the most insignificant savings account, was kept. The NSA was by far the most powerful of the Gang of Four agencies, working in or out of the United States with no legal restrictions whatsoever.

In the 1960's the NSA hired over 22,000 people a year as "analysts" - most of these individuals were either "attached" to the Department of Defense or untraceable, concealing themselves within the byzantine amount of paperwork generated by a bureaucratic process. Given the clandestine nature of the military intelligence field, the Gang of Four would continue to grow unchecked in both size and scope, acquiring nigh-limitless influence in Congress, the Pentagon, and various military circles.

The "Quiet War" (1990-1994)
With the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union in 1989 marking an end to the decades-long Cold War, a rift began to develop between the United States and Europe, which had formed a multi-national coalition known as the European Economic Community. The EEC's growing economic and political capability was poised to overtake that of its American allies, and started exhibiting distaste towards America's "overreaching" foreign policy, further straining diplomatic relations. In 1992, against US wishes, the EEC provided humanitarian and financial aid towards the failing Soviet states. In another show of defiance, the EEC establishes cordial relationships with the USSR, who accepts the new Eurodollar over US currency, with European nations subsequently withdrawing from NATO as American military aid against a belligerent Soviet Union was now viewed as obsolete.

Faced with an ever-growing Europe threatening American hegemony and concerns towards European developments in space exploration, the Gang of Four would engage in espionage and stock market manipulation in an attempt to undermine the EEC's rapidly expanding influence and secure US interests. This included directly hacking into both European and Asian stock markets, artificially altering the value of stocks, bonds and currency, and sabotaging military and diplomatic talks between the USSR and the EEC.

First Central American War
At the same time, the Gang of Four, attempting to curb the American crack cocaine epidemic (which is implied to have been much more violent and prolific than in our timeline), was embroiled in a proxy war with the nations of Central and South America, deciding to obliterate the drug supply chain at its source. To this end, the Gang released an artificial virus which destroyed vast swaths of coca and opium crops and authorized the funding of paramilitary troops to weaken South American drug lords, devastating local economies which were heavily dependent on the income and infrastructure generated by the drug trade.

Consequently, these nations became increasingly destabilized, leading to violent internal conflict and cartel-sponsored insurgencies, with the fighting slowly spilling over into neighboring countries and leading to a full-scale invasion in a conflict that would come to be known as the First Central American War. Although the US attempted to provide military support to assist South American governments in quelling the violence, the war would drag on for several years, partly due to European aid and materiel being provided to drug cartels, and drawing the ire of the drug lords, who would go on to detonate a small-yield nuclear weapon in the heart of New York City in 1993.

Crash of '94
While the conflict continued, the EEC became aware of US interference in global stock markets and diplomatic affairs and retaliated by simply leaking the information to global news outlets. With the alleged security of the exchange compromised, the markets quickly collapsed leading to the Crash of '94, further exacerbated by embargoes imposed on American trade by nearly every developed nation. Federal bonds were being sold at such an alacritous pace that the federal government had to print money to be able to buy them, rapidly devaluing the American dollar and causing massive inflation. Widespread unemployment and civil unrest soon followed, leading to prolific violence and extreme poverty.

The Collapse (1994-2004)
As the US economy spiraled out of control, Congress suspected an outside force responsible for the meddling in European affairs and the resulting chaos. This suspicion was further compounded by the assassination of both President James Richard Allen and Vice President Harold Harrison Hunt on August 17th, 1996. This led to an emergency session being convened, where Secretary of Defense Jonathan Seward assumed the mantle of President, since the Speaker of the House was undergoing a surgical procedure and the Pro Tempore of the Senate was unwilling to take the Presidency. Seward quickly declared martial law and suspended the Constitution, citing efforts to control the unrest. Gang of Four-sponsored coalitions in the Senate began to form but were quickly stricken out by the newly-formed administration, and attempts were made by the diplomatic corps to lift trade embargoes, but these would not succeed until 1998.

The Military Intelligence Cooperative
After the declaration of Martial Law in 1996, several theoretical mathematicians in the military intelligence community began to note a number of aberrant activities and incongruities in the way that the various government agencies were operating in tandem. A glaring discrepancy was the large number of "black ops" being carried out with no government oversight whatsoever. For example, in April of that year, a woman named Alexia Valenze was assassinated for unknown reasons by operatives of the NSA and CIA. The woman was a simple showgirl working for a Las Vegas editorial and allegedly had little to no political affiliations, yet her death was carried out with the care and detail of a high-level political assassination, with costs totaling several thousands of dollars. In the end, the order for her death was traced to an empty office in the State Department. To this day, the motive for her death, and the man or woman who gave the order, remains a mystery.

Suspecting the presence of a cabal in the intelligence community, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff formed the MIC, or Military Intelligence Cooperative, to deal with the vast amount of duplication in the nine intelligence agencies of the United States Military and uncover possible interference in governmental affairs. The MIC was run by long standing Military Intelligence operatives, and despite the cries of the NSA and CIA, the MIC remained its own department, with a high degree of separation maintained between itself and other agencies to prevent outside manipulation of its findings.

Taking this as a discovery of their true motives, the Gang of Four took several putative steps to sabotage the MIC. At first the MIC thought it was under attack from just the NSA. Since the NSA was also attached to the Department of Defense, it was believed that a natural rivalry would exist. But soon tensions arose from the CIA, FBI, & DEA. This worried MIC leaders, who began to realize the extent of these agencies' capabilities.

The "Mideast Meltdown"
By 1997, the NSA withheld massive amounts of satellite information obtained from American military and Israeli sources during the "Mideast Meltdown", a limited nuclear exchange between Iran and Iraq. it was obvious that something was amiss - the NSA had over three hundred operatives in the Middle East, yet suddenly none could be accounted for. The agency, possessing intelligence that a nuclear skirmish between the two countries was imminent, had every single operative extracted in secrecy, obfuscating satellite images from the MIC to avoid rousing suspicion. By the time the information was received, the old Russian missile carriers were already in position and it was too late.

The US lost critical assets in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Pleading that they'd needed to pull out their agents undetected, the NSA claimed that any action by the military would have set off the exchange before any operatives got out. The nuclear exchange razed most of the Arabian peninsula, devastating the world's oil supply and crippling the United States, which was still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. It was too much. Later that year, the MIC, under the direction of President Seward, opened personnel files in the Department of Defense and began inquiries.

Shortly after, the MIC discovered alarming evidence that pointed to the NSA, CIA, FBI and DEA having conspired as an independent force for an extended period of time, and immediately recommended the dissolution of the latter two, which was carried out by the government. With the advent of the Wasting Plague, Seward was assassinated while touring the country by an "irate Nomad", who in reality was an operative in the NSA's employ. General William Newell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, soon took his place, but became involved in a Second Central American War instigated by CIA-backed paramilitary troops. Tasked with containing rioting and looting, and enmired in yet another conflict in the jungles of South America, the military was spread too thin to effectively root out the remaining CIA and NSA, the latter of which would continue to subvert the US government well into 2004.

The End of the Gang (2004-2008)
The CIA, one of the core components of the Gang of Four, included the Special Operations Command (SOC), a subgroup of the US Armed Forces that handled special forces and other covert activities. The acting President Newell, a former Green Beret, used his connections to contact the SOC, promising full immunity in return for testimony on the inner dealing of the agencies. The federal government discovered from these testimonies that the inner circle of the NSA was behind the Gang of Four and responsible for the assassination of circa 13 high-level officials, including the late President Seward. Following this discovery, the CIA was restructured, reformed and reincorporated into the new government.

The NSA was then purged with military force in March of 2004, and a return to civil governance was planned, the administration having mistakenly believed that the conspiracy had been rooted out. However, World News Service star Tesla Johanneson was killed by NSA operatives in Cairo, showing that the agency was still operational and capable to some degree, and another four years of covert fighting in theatres around the world would be necessary to put an end to the Gang of Four.

The last remnants of the NSA were found to be in hiding in Washington D.C., and were crushed with an overwhelming military response, ending the long legacy of the Gang of Four. The members comprising the inner circle of the NSA, however, were never found, and were speculated to have fled to various corporations to escape capture. The first free elections after the lifting of martial law were held on November 7, 2008, but the damage from the years of in-fighting and unrest left the United States of America in shambles, several states having seceded and the total death toll numbering in the hundreds of millions.