Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

01:49 A.M._

“Methods which the special services employ are always considered dirty,” the Lawyer noted. “A lot of books, movies and stories in the press are dedicated to this subject, but when you come across them in reality, everything you saw or read before fades away.”

“Tell me, did you have a similar experience?” Kold asked.

“Yes,” the Lawyer admitted. “For example I had to defend one diplomat, also a writer of horror novels, who was accused of working for the MI6. What’s more, the prosecution claimed that to contact the British ‘james bonds’ he used some incredibly complicated equipment which not even every professional IT worker would know how to use. The thing is, he was, how to put it, not all there – or to be more precise, he suffered a serious mental illness. It was so severe that when he was abroad, he would sometimes spend hours wandering across town, unable to find his own house. Once, tired and lost, he went into a park, bought himself a hamburger, sat on the grass and began to eat it. Then a dog came up and grabbed the hamburger from his hands, ate it and run away. So he bought himself a Swiss knife, spent a few days tracking down the dog then caught and dismembered it. How a man like this could work for the Russian MFA (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) – I have no idea. As a result I had to enter into polemics on the pages of mass media with representatives of our counterintelligence who were very proud that they had caught such a scary ‘super agent’. And the English also did well with the story – they could report that they had recruited a ‘prominent Russian diplomat’.

In the end, he was recognised as mentally ill and sent for compulsory treatment. For some reason our counterintelligence weren’t too upset with me. I am even a member of the Public Council of the FSB – that’s the public control on the special services…

But Mr. Kold, if I begin to tell you about it in detail now, we will have to swap our seats – you’ll take the Dictaphone and I will start on my memories.”

“Who knows,” Kold smiled, “Maybe one day it will happen. But you’re right – everybody should do their own job, so I’ll get back to my story…”

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“I was really ill when I came back from Zurich – maybe the Alps’ icy breath did chill something in my body. So I was wrapped up in three blankets, shaking with fever, suffocating from a never ending cough and stuck for a few days in my bachelor flat without food or internet. The thing is, while I was still in Europe I had contacted my seniors and asked for a few days off, as compensation for all that overtime. Nobody objected and that’s why nobody was looking for me now.

I was so tired I didn’t even turn the lights on in the evenings, making my way to the toilet by feeling along the wall. I had no pets, lover, or friends. In short, I didn’t have anybody who could’ve remembered about me.

The illness only strengthened that odd and scary emptiness which had appeared inside me back in Zurich and was getting more and more overwhelming with each hour, with each day.

For the first two days I was convinced I would die and I accepted it with gratitude. Death for me was karmic retribution for the wrong I had done in Zurich helping Steve – that’s why I didn’t call anyone, completely surrendering to the will of providence.

I was lying in bed, looking into the ringing silence and whispering Buddhist mantras I learned back in the Garage:

‘AUM-SHRI-GAIYA-ADI-SHIVA-GAIYA-ADI-KALI-GAIYA-ADI-KALA-BHAIRAVA-NAMAH-FORAM: in order to rid myself of addiction and leave this world pure;

REM-RAO-AUM: in order to destroy anything bad in me;

OM-MAHADEVAIYA-NAMAH: in order for the Great Absolute to accept me as I am.’

Sometimes it seemed to me that the demons were holding me and not letting me pass into the next world. But I read and learned by heart the Tibetan book of the dead Bardo Thodol, and its first stage Chikhai Bardo:

I couldn’t remember anything after that and that’s why I recited this piece over and over again. My lips cracked and became covered with scabs. Black spots floated in front of my eyes. My ears were ringing and I could hear the voices of some people, maybe deceased relatives or friends or maybe my neighbors behind the wall. I would fall asleep as if I was falling into dark water. Each time I thought that I wouldn’t wake up again, but death still didn’t come.

So one evening I sank into the slumber which normally precedes sleep and may precede death, when suddenly a bright light flashed in front of my eyes, like the one which is mentioned in Bardo Thodol.

In my final dying (pre-dying) effort I clenched my fists… and saw the Baseball player. Well, Mr. Jenkins. He was standing in the middle of the room in his mac and cap and looking at me like a character out of some gangster movie.

‘You look awful, Josh,’ he said to me. ‘Why didn’t you call?’

I wheezed something in response.

‘Alright, alright, we can talk later,’ he took his hat off and hung it on the corner of the door. ‘I’ll call for some doctors. They’ll patch you up, give you the necessary pills and you’ll be like new. And then we can talk.’

‘Then’ happened about a week later. I was indeed patched up, although pills alone weren’t enough and I had to have injections of antibiotics. Either way, by the time of my conversation with the Baseball player, I was pretty much healthy, though still quite weak.

‘The psychiatrists have a term – ‘escape into illness’, the Baseball player said, when we ordered coffee in a café overlooking the black mass of the main building of Fort Meade. ‘I get a feeling, Josh, that you had a bit of a nervous breakdown.’

‘It’s nothing to do with nerves,’ I answered irritatedly. ‘The weather in Zurich was just awful – rain, wind and also damned cold. Even Popeye would’ve caught a fever or something of the kind.’

‘You know in Europe it’ll always be like that,’ Mr. Jenkins laughed for some reason. ‘Global warming will bring them global cooling.’

‘I think these are mutually exclusive,’ I said, stirring my coffee.

‘I think you’re not familiar with the principle of work of our HAARP laboratories involved in complex ionospheric studies.’

‘Is that the station in Alaska built during the Cold War?

‘After, Josh, built after the Cold War.’

‘Or are you talking about the super-cannons HARP, created by Gerald Bull for sending satellites into low orbit?’

‘You’re a bright lad!’ the Baseball player blinded me with his smile. ‘I see you don’t waste your time on the internet. But whether it’s HAARP or HARP, what I am saying is: you’re simply tired, my boy. You’ve done your work very well. You helped the guys out even though you didn’t have to. Your superiors value your work a great deal. By this evening, I’ve been told, there’ll be something added to your bank account. Anyway, you should go on holiday. To Hawaii, say. And why not – it’s an amazing place! Palm trees, the ocean, volcanoes, music, stars shining in the night sky as big as my fist… And the girls there – m-m-m… I am not an envious person, as you know, but I really envy you now. Hey, waiter! Bring me a fresh orange – I have nostalgia.’

Do I really have to say that after this recommendation from Mr. Jenkins I was soon off to Honolulu and from there to the base of the sleeping volcano Mauna Kea?

I ended up in a bungalow, rented for two weeks, lying in a recliner with a glass of Blue Hawaii on an open terrace with a mind-blowing view over the snowy dome of the volcano and the dark-blue ocean. And yet, for some reason, I felt exactly the same hopelessness and loneliness as I did during the first week in college.

The octopus was holding me tightly and I could not break free from its tenacious tentacles. To distract myself, I climbed again into the thickets of the internet, reading various cryptologic theories connected to HAARP. The Baseball player never mentions anything without a reason and so I knew something related to this installation, which can influence the ionosphere with high frequency rays, would somehow come into my life in the very near future.

The aerial fields of HAARP, the electro station and the research units are built in a remote area of Alaska near Gakona village. The mesh design antennas, incoherent radiation radar, and laser radars tower like aliens from the fantastic future amid dense taiga and wild mountains. Officially, HAARP is considered a scientific laboratory for studying the ionosphere. Unofficially, it’s acknowledged that the installation has been constructed not just to study the nature of the ionosphere but also for the development of the systems of air and missile defense.

In particular, according to information from inside which I managed to discover, HAARP can be used to interfere with Russian stations tracking ballistic missile launches in the Northern Hemisphere. This is all gossip, but the gossip is in the zone of reason. And beyond this zone people say things about the station which would make our Hollywood scriptwriters cry with envy.

For example, idle reporters and crazy followers of the internet call HAARP the ‘most modern weapon’. A few dozens documents have been published on the net in regards to this subject, in which it’s described in detail how this installation creates devastating typhoons, brings Russian satellites down, stirs the psyche of whole nations into mass riots and civil wars, and even triggers artificial earthquakes which destroy whole cities.

It would’ve been quite funny if it weren’t for the Baseball player. Why did he start talking about HAARP? At the moment, all I could see was a thick information curtain, like a smoke one, around this project. By the way, the Russians have similar installations but people don’t write even a tenth as much as they do about HAARP. So people write that this means that someone for some reason needs this fog. And it seems that after my holiday this headache has every chance of becoming my headache.

To get distracted and give my brain a chance to switch on to something else, I renewed my memory of another project HARP, spelt with a single ‘A’. This story dates to 1961, long before the construction of the aerial fields of the current HAARP in Alaska.

Everything began, as it often does, with the scientists. They constructed an experimental light-gas cannon with a barrel thirty metres long in order to track the behaviour of ballistic objects. But soon the military became interested in the cannon, and HARP received financial support and began to develop rapidly. It was assumed that the cannons will throw out small military satellites to heights of up to two hundred kilometres, the so-called low orbits. It was much cheaper and quicker than taking the devices into space by rocket.

From open sources, it became known that about ten cannons were built and located across the whole of North America – from Arizona to Quebec, and one cannon was located on Barbados, because it had the best conditions for ballistic launches. By the way, the calibre of the Barbados cannon was 406 millimetres and the length of the barrel was forty metres, which was a record.

To achieve a launch speed of 3500 metres per second, the gun barrel was filled with an inert gas, and there were also other technical tricks but all was in vain. The cannons of HARP project could hurl their ballistic satellites only to heights of 180 kilometres, and that wasn’t enough to enter low Earth orbit. The experimental ingots, weighing almost two hundred kilograms, fell into the ocean time after time.

In 1967, the project was closed, but it had a completely unexpected resurrection in the eighties. That’s when Canadian engineer-artillerist Gerald Bull, one of the chief designers of HARP, got an invitation from Saddam Hussein himself.

There was a war between Iraq and Iran, and the Iraqi leaders, who’d failed in their plans for a quick seizure of the oil and gas province of Khuzestan, were in desperate need of a super-weapon to change the course of the war.

Bull’s new project was called Babylon. It was estimated that the 1000 mm, multi-chamber cannon could blast a six-ton projectile a thousand kilometres up, powered by a nine-ton charge. With it, Iraq would’ve been able to bomb Tehran all the way from Bagdad. The super-cannon could also fire special reactive shell-rockets with a mass of up to two tons. Four weapons were supposed to be constructed.

Bull’s first brainchild for Saddam was an experimental 350mm cannon – basically a copy of the cannons from the HARP project. It tested successfully and Iraq embarked on Big Babylon, which was supposed to change everything: the course of war, the balance of power in the region and the place of Iran on the world arena.

But Saddam’s triumph was not meant to be. The special services of a few countries of the West and the foreign intelligence of USSR interfered, slowing down the development of the project. The Iran-Iraq war ended without bringing any noticeable dividends to either side. Parts of the super-cannon, manufactured in Europe, were confiscated on the way to Iraq, and no matter how hard the Iraqi government tried to prove that these were for oil refining, they never made it to Bagdad.

And then in March 1990 Bull was shot near his home in Brussels. The killers were never found but behind it were maybe Mossad, the CIA or the KGB – who knows?

The experimental super-cannon and the rest of the project were completely destroyed by special divisions of UN during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. That was the end of super cannons – although there are rumours the Russian army is armed with the self-propelling 20 metre monsters Oka and Kondensator, which can fire shells, nuclear ones, up to fifty kilometres.

Tired from all this military history, I made myself another glass of Blue Hawaii, although without the extra Curacao, and returned to the recliner.

It occurred to me that the fates of both projects – the old artillery HARP and our highly technological HAARP – are very similar. They both began as objects of purely scientific interest, both went through the stage when the military got seriously interested in them, and both have become (at least nominally) weapons and… The similarities ended there – unless you listen to conspiracy theories, because the HAARP with double A hasn’t killed anyone yet.

Dozing off to the whisper of surf and the rustle of leaves, I suddenly saw myself as some kind of sea creature – a prawn or mollusc-nautilus – swimming in water pierced by shafts of sunlight.

I remember inexplicable delight from the sensation of weightlessness, the chill in the chest from the realization of how many kilometres of water there were beneath me, and a feeling of euphoria – which lasted until the moment when it appeared from the depth.

The octopus.

The disgusting creature noticed me at once and made a lunge. I felt that I cannot move, that I am shackled, my hands and feet are bound.

An octopus doesn’t kill its victim straight away. It goes about its business gradually, as if following a scheme. First it wraps its prey with its tentacles. Then is grips it with its suckers and injects poison with its sharp chitin beak. Only when the fish, crustacean or mollusc finally falls still, does the octopus begin to feed, tearing pieces off its paralyzed prey and swallowing them.

It looks like I am in the second stage. I am entwined by the slippery tentacles of this creature so tightly I can’t break free. Now the bite has come in and the poison is already entering my blood.

Waking up tangled in the blanket with a frantically beating heart and staring wildly, I grabbed the bottle of Curacao and gulped back almost the entire contents. Only then did the horror which took over me during my sleep ease off a little.

Sitting by the foot of Mauna Kea, breathing in humid and warm Hawaiian air, watching the sunset, the appearance of the stars and their falls into the dark endless ocean, I clearly realized – I have only one, last, chance.

The octopus’s poison is a virulent liquid, a complex mixture of alkaloids. On most of inhabitants of the sea – fish, crabs, crayfish, prawns, molluscs – it has the same effect, causing paralysis of the central nervous system and death. For a human this poison is also very dangerous. Dozens of cases are known where fishermen and divers have died after being bitten by an octopus.

But there are creatures – the golden armatus of the south seas, for instance – on which the octopus’s poison has a different effect. It stimulates their physiological processes, forcing their hearts to beat faster and their muscles to contract more powerfully. After an octopus’ bite, an armatus struggles in the tentacles so forcefully that it very often manages to escape and survive.

I found a picture of an armatus on the internet. It’s a not very big fish. It looks a bit like marlin but more yellow and with a flattened head. I don’t look very similar at all – and anyway how could a Homo sapiens and a fish be similar?

Nevertheless, I made the first meaningful moves to free myself from the deadly grip of the octopus while I was in Hawaii – right after the poisonous information bite the octopus had struck me through the agency of the Baseball player.

Even now I don’t know what project linked to HAARP I was supposed to join. Indeed, did such a project exist? But Lao Tzu says:

I was using what was given to me to change my life and my entire situation.

Later I completed an algorithm which I had begun to develop while in Hawaii.

Lao Tzu was my guru.

Orwell was my ideologist.

The octopus’s poison bubbled in my blood.

Hawaiian stars were shining on me from the sky.

I remember a storm roaring. The electricity flickered, wet palm branches whipped against the roof of my bungalow. Gusts of wind hurled rain water against the glass door and a big puddle washed in under it, which oozed slowly towards me.

I was sitting on a mat reading 1984 again trying to find in this book the words to inspire me and give me the courage to act.

I read on and with each line, each paragraph, I was submerging deeper and deeper into Orwell’s text – sinking into a swamp, a sticky quagmire, from which it was impossible to get out.

Images, characters and their actions engulfed me and the plot sucked me into its suffocating embrace. It was a delusion, a druglike effect, when that combination of chemical elements takes control of your mind and body so you are no longer your own master.

Orwell, like a Siberian shaman or Indian mahatma, plunged me into a trance and pumped my consciousness with surreal images, which turned out to be uncannily real.

The lights went out. The old palm tree behind the house fell with a crack. But I did not flinch. I was bending over the faintly glowing screen of the tablet, and repeating after the characters in the book:

The realization that everything written by Orwell is not just a great prophesy, but a truth of life that turned from fiction to reality, pressed on me like a slab of super dense lead. The fact that it was all written about the totalitarian regimes of the last century, rather than my country and my time made me squirm with powerlessness and humiliation.

I had been deceived – and millions, tens and millions of people had been deceived with me. We had been lead into a trap, like fish lead into a net, like herds of sheep and cattle go into a pen where they are cut, castrated, or killed by electrocution to skin them and cut their carcasses for meat.

Anything can be done to us. That was the main thought troubling me. Big Brother has decided everything for us. He is watching and watching our every our move.

And the Baseball player’s words kept spinning in my head: ‘to become a hero you don’t have to join the military and travel to the other side of the world. You can protect your country right here. Remember Joshua – the front line is everywhere.’