The Trajectory of Chaos
One of the premises of TRAJECTORY is that the CIA creates organizations within itself for special purposes. This is a common trope in espionage tales - because it is true. Doing research for TRAJECTORY, way back in 1979, I learned about Operation CHAOS: Americans spying on Americans. Launched by Richard Helms, the goal of the operation was to ascertain foreign influences active in the United States. But because of the fall-out from Watergate, CHAOS was shut down in 1973. Of course, in TRAJECTORY, CHAOS didn't really shut down. It simply transmuted into the Department of Foreign Influence Studies (DFIS). It is not a far reach, even for non-conspiracy-theorists, to imagine that the official position and the actual position of intelligence organizations are quite divergent. It requires only a very small lacuna to imagine that even something as repulsive as CHAOS was reformulated and allowed to continue. You can find a pretty descent overview of CHAOS on Wikipedia. And, of cour