The Office of Alliance Territorial Hegemony



The Office of Alliance Territorial Hegemony (or OATH) was an elusive Alliance Black Ops organization founded in 2157 CE by Alliance Admiral Evelyn Gargosh. It was headquartered on Tokugawa Station situated in orbit around the gas giant Jupiter in the Sol system. Founded in the wake of the First Contact War, it was started mainly as a way of aiding Alliance interests in a way that could be done off the record and undetected, immune to any laws or restrictions. This aid mainly came in the form of assassination and murder. The office recruited soldiers in great secrecy, hiring Alliance soldiers that stood out as remarkable in skill, taking them to Tokugawa Station and offering them a chance to work in the OATH. Those who agreed were welcomed into the OATH and marked either MIA or KIA according to their personal preference. Those who did not agree were thrown out an airlock. The OATH also hired informants and undercover operatives in multiple fields ranging from politicians to mercenaries. This wide net gave the OATH significant resources and information in the galaxy. The OATH was disbanded in 2184 CE, after a number of unfortunate incidents.

Early Years
Following the discovery of the mass relays in 2148 CE, the Systems Alliance began pursuing an enthusiastic course of exploration, travelling the galaxy and activating every mass relay they could find. However, the Alliance's interstellar adventures came to an abrupt halt in 2157 CE, when turians caught the Alliance attempting to activate a relay that they had intentionally deactivated centuries earlier. This was in violation of galactic law, and thus the turians opened fire. The result was a three-month long war between the Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy, culminating in the siege of the human colony Shanxi. The Citadel Council intervened, brokering a peace treaty, but there were many in the Alliance Military who resented the forced detente, and these men and women believed that humanity needed some way to protect its interests. Among these men was then-Rear-Admiral Evelyn Gargosh, a holdover from the failed Operation Janissary, who successfully convinced the Alliance to authorize the creation of the Office of Alliance Territorial Hegemony.

After Adm. Gargosh founded the OATH, he immediately proceeded to buy several politicians to his side to aid him in influencing policies. Within a year, over 2.5 billion dollars were being secretly transferred to the OATH from bills supposed to be meant for construction and other public welfare projects. The OATH was at that period mainly leading assassination attempts, killing over eighteen gang and mercenary leaders in twelve months. This lead to the office's insignia being the crosshairs of a rifle, and it was criticized by insiders like Adm. Derek Younis as a "bureau of assassination. However, Gargosh was prone to fits of hubris which had long wreaked havoc on his career. When he married an underage girl, Charlotte Beauclaire, and tried to make her an OATH operative so that her horrified parents wouldn't be able to anull the marriage, one of his colleagues, Adm. Wayne Hopkins, elected to blow the whistle. The Alliance decided it had had enough of his behavior and demoted him to head of recruiting. The OATH was subsequently taken over by Adm. Yong Sudoko. Shortly afterwards, Hopkins died under mysterious circumstances; conspiracy theorists believe that either Gargosh had him killed for revenge, or that Sudoko had him killed to prevent himself from suffering the same fate as his predecessor.

Under Admiral Sudoko
After Gargosh stepped down in 2166 CE, Adm. Sudoko took power and immediately changed the OATH into an organization focused on protection of the Alliance throughout the galaxy by killing political and criminal targets. Sudoko also started to hire a small number of asari and salarians, much to the protest of his staff, who saw the potential for security breaches and exposure to the galactic community. In Sudoko's first month as director, the office's operatives killed the turian mercenary leader Terock Drevillian, the asari diplomat Elandria Ginera, and the Alliance Captain Jack Fellows. The death of Fellows was a significant turning point in the OATH's history, as it was the first Alliance target to ever be killed by the office. Sudoko proclaimed it to be in the Alliance's best interests; Fellows had drawn attention for carrying out a hit-and-run operation on the batarian deep-space war station, The Sky Warrior, weakening it for invasion. Though he'd earned the Star of Terra for the raid and weakened the station for invasion, he'd lost two frigates in the operation, and in the wake of his success, he had been granted four more frigates to continue his strategy. While Sudoko hated the batarians as much as any other Alliance officer, he feared that these operations would cause the batarians to increase the security on their space stations, which would require the OATH to change its strategies for infiltrating those stations.

The office's next major operation was the murder of batarian crimelord Krimus Garfron in 2172 CE, which was carried out by operatives Jonah Richardson and Daniel Chung, as well as multiple other OATH contacts all throughout Omega. A quick, three-day operation, the assassination of Krimus Garfron was considered later to be the high point of the OATH's work and the highlight of Sudoko's career.

The assassination, however, was also the beginning of the end of Sudoko's career; a few months after Garfron's death, the increasingly-paranoid Sudoko sent Richardson to kill the anti-human turian ambassador Thanos Morchavian, who had become positioned to get a spot on the Council at a time when the Council was contemplating giving humanity a seat. Though Morchavian's hatred of humanity was not shared by other members of the Council, he was a highly charismatic and persuasive speaker, and Sudoko feared that he might stop the negotiations between the Council and the Alliance. Richardson killed Morchavian as he was walking to the Citadel Tower, but the assassination was witnessed by over a dozen people. Sudoko panicked and sought to turn Richardson into a scapegoat, but instead Richardson disappeared and emerged three weeks later to kill Sudoko before being himself killed by the salarian Special Tasks Group.

Under Admiral Farrell
Following Sudoko's assassination, an appalled Systems Alliance Parliament ordered a two-year audit of the OATH's activities. Eventually, in 2174 CE, Adm. Jim Farrell was appointed head of the OATH. Previously the head of Alliance Scientific Affairs, the scientific arm of the Alliance, Farrell immediately implemented changes to the way in which the OATH operated, even changing its insignia. Under his command, the office abolished the practice of marking new operatives KIA or MIA, and potential recruits who refused were only forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement instead of being killed outright. While it was clear that the OATH's goal remained aiding and helping the overall security of the Alliance, Farrell had a different view of how that mandate could be carried out than his predecessors; instead of killing high-value targets, he re-focused the organization on acquiring technology to bring humans up to the level of the Council species. Under his command, teams were sent out to develop and steal new weapon designs that could benefit the Alliance. This is not to say that the OATH no longer killed threats, however; the turian pirate Ramus Octicus, killed in an OATH siege of his base on Deroltack, was one of many threats neutralized during Farrell's tenure.

Farrell's tenure was troubled. Inexperienced (and uncomfortable) with running a covert-ops organization, he turned to Adm. Gargosh to manage operations. Many of Gargosh's subsequent decisions were ethically questionable, for instance, his recruitment of Cmdr. Emmanuelle Sharon in 2181 CE. Sharon was facing a military tribunal for misrepresenting herself as an Alliance soldier when she was on suspension and travelling to Zak'kon, a world that had been annexed by the Batarian Hegmony centuries earlier. Though Sharon's intentions were ostensibly good - she had gone in order to rescue an asari heiress - her actions had nearly sparked a war between the Alliance and the Hegemony, and had resulted in another former soldier, James Skinner, being captured and tortured by the batarians. It was a complicated case, and yet Gargosh managed to make the charges against Sharon disappear by recruiting her for the OATH.

Disbandment
"It is an open secret in the Alliance Naval Command that Lyn [Gargosh] loves fucking people in the ass. Obviously, we weren't exempt from that."

- Jim Farrell, on the OATH's demise.

Farrell continued to run the OATH smoothly until 2184 CE, when the Alliance brass learned that Adm. Gargosh was behind the Alliance being pulled into the Zak'kon Affair three years earlier. That disaster, which had nearly sparked a war between the Alliance and the Batarian Hegemony, had long been blamed on Cmdrs. Emmanuelle Sharon and James Skinner; the former supposedly driven mad by depression, and the latter pursuing a paranoid vendetta against the Alliance for abuses that he supposedly suffered years earlier at the hands of a mad Alliance scientist - and this scapegoating had been used by Gargosh to force Sharon to join the OATH. But in 2184, evidence emerged that both had been set up by Gargosh; Sharon had been caught having an affair with Gargosh's estranged wife prior to the Zak'kon fiasco, while Skinner's paranoia had threatened to expose Gargosh's involvement in Operation Powergrid, a top-secret project that attempted to find ways to utilize low-powered biotics like Skinner, and thus the admiral had sought to eliminate both.

Compounding the situation, Gargosh had recently sent Cmdr. Sharon to clean up a mess he'd made months earlier, resulting in her being severely injured, and had drawn the wrath of Sharon's lover, Illium businesswoman Siani T'Nair. T'Nair had long been a thorn in the OATH's side after Gargosh managed to get her company, NairidaCorp, listed as a suspect enterprise, which prevented the company from doing business with the Alliance, and had prevented Sharon and T'Nair from being together. T'Nair was now threatening to sic some of the most powerful lawyers in Illium on the Alliance unless Gargosh was removed from power.

Farrell was blameless in all this, but the scandal caused the Alliance to take another close look at OATH's operations, and Farrell had just ordered the beginning of the Monroe Project, an attempt to create an army of Alliance-controlled geth. Whether the plan was even feasible was questionable, but Farrell had enthusiastically planned nearly every step of the project, from acquiring still-functional geth "subjects" to setting up an isolated base of operations at Jerusalem Station. Still remembering the atrocities committed under Adm. Sudoko, as well as the political sanctions that had resulted from the AI research project on Sidon in 2165 CE, the Alliance Parliament had no desire for yet another controversial AI research project, and so the OATH was disbanded, and almost all remaining operatives were either executed or handed life sentences, while the late Adm. Sudoko was posthumously stripped of all honors. Farrell himself got off lucky, with only a dishonorable discharge, because the Monroe Project was still only in the planning stages, and thus could be written off as a pipe-dream devised by a man who was clearly mentally troubled.

Post-Disbandment Developments
In 2185 CE, the OATH's records were made public and all of its assassinations were revealed. The exposure did major damage to the human relationship with the Council and Citadel when the turians, asari, and volus learned that officials in their government had been killed off by an Alliance group, and though the Alliance tried to write it off by saying that the OATH had gone rogue, relations were still severely damaged, with political implications that will almost certainly harm the Alliance's diplomatic efforts for multiple decades.

Shortly afterwards, Jim Farrell attempted suicide, having grown depressed at his inability to find work, but was saved by the intervention of Emmanuelle Sharon, who convinced him that he should make amends for his involvement in the OATH. He went on to work at the Nilsson Institute for Traumatized Children, where he created the Thera-Vee, a VI interface that helped severely-traumatized children re-learn basic social interaction. When the tests proved successful, he sold the patent and retired to Bekenstein, where he has since become a recluse.