The Campus

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This article is currently under construction. It may contain little or inaccurate information.

The Campus is an "off the books" intelligence organization and private military company established by President Jack Ryan, Sr and run by former U.S. Senator Gerry Hendley. Publicly, the organization is known as Hendley Associates, a financial trading institution.

Background

The Campus was established by President Jack Ryan, Sr., Attorney General Patrick Martin, and U.S. senator Gerald Hendley in 2001. The organization was founded in order to combat terrorism on an extremely covert level and, unlike Rainbow or other intelligence organizations, is not hampered by international laws and policies.

Backed with one hundred blank presidential pardons, The Campus operates outside of any federal jurisdiction as it is not a formal member of the United States intelligence community. The Campus' objective is to take decisive action intelligence information. The Campus gathers information on the nature and severity of the threat, and take whatever action is necessary, depending on the specific threat. When other organizations can not get the job done, for one reason or another, The Campus takes actions necessary when the conventional methods are not feasible.

The Campus operates under the cover of Hendley Associates, a financial trading institution. Hendley Associates is a trader in stocks, bonds, and international currencies, though, it does little in the way of public business and is not known to have any clients. Hendley Associates does some of its business anonymously through foreign banks, all of which like having large cash accounts, and none of which are overly fastidious about where the money comes from, so long as it is not overtly dirty. It is just another way of keeping outside the system. By intercepting communications between the CIA and NSA, the Campus is able to take advantage of SIGINT they gather and cross-deck to the CIA. This givesThe Campus currency-trading troops the best sort of insider information, which enables the organization to make a ton of long-term money without anybody really noticing. It does that by not attracting investors.

That activity funds the counterterrorist work of The Campus. It means The Campus is not on the federal budget at all. People pretend it doesn't exist. The Campus takes that one step further: It really doesn't exist. There is not a single written document in the possession of any government employee that has a single word about it. No foreign intelligence agency has any way of finding them, as nobody can trace any money to them. The Campus also works outside the federal budget process so they don't have to worry about politicians snooping around leaking information. Since The Campus has deniable authorization with no ties to the U.S. government at all, its personnel have good cover legends, but no diplomatic protection of any kind. Their covers are international businessmen, bankers and other investment professions for Hendley Associates. Personnel get paychecks that are direct-deposited into whatever bank account they set up.

Location

As Hendley Associates, the Campus was situated between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in West Odenton, Maryland. This enabled the organization to intercept and decipher communications between the two agencies without the cumbersome organizational bureaucracy or political red tape. The organization operated out of a mid-rise office building of government-undistinguished architecture. It is nine stories high with a capacious front lawn. The building itself is unusual only in one thing: except for a few old tobacco barns that barely exceed twenty-five feet in height, it is the only building higher than two stories that sits on a direct line of sight from the National Security Agency located at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency at Langley, Virginia. In fact, it is the only building taller than a private residence on the sight line from the NSA to the CIA. Some other entrepreneurs had wished to build on that sight line, but zoning approval had never been granted, for many reasons, all of them false. Three other office buildings were planned for the area, and all were denied construction permits.

Behind the building is a small antenna farm. A half-dozen six-meter parabolic dishes sit inside a twelve-foot-high, razor-wire-crowned cyclone fence enclosure and point at various commercial communications satellites. The entire complex comprises fifteen and a third acres in Maryland's Howard County. After the breach of The Campus by Chinese Special Forces operatives in 2009, the organization relocated to Alexandria, Virginia.

Intelligence Gathering

Recent evolution in the world of international terrorism had caused the CIA and NSA to work even more closely than they had in the past, and since they are an inconvenient hour's drive apart-they do most of their communication via secure microwave links, from the top of NSA's headquarters building to the top of CIA's. That this sight line transits the roof of Hendley Associates has gone unnoticed. And it ought not to matter anyway, since the microwave link is encrypted. It has to be, since microwaves leak off their line of transmission due to all manner of technical reasons. Most of the information is of no interest, but nearly all of it is stored on high-density media and cross-referenced on a Sun Microsystems mainframe computer that has enough power to administer the entire United States, if need be. This enables Hendley's staff to look in on the information the intelligence services are generating, along with the top-level analysis being done by experts in a multitude of areas and then cross-decked to others for comment and further analysis.

Personnel

Active

Former