John Arledge
| TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN | |
|---|---|
| John Arledge | |
| RANK: | Major |
| SERVICE: | CIA Directorate of Plans, later SPS |
| NATION: | United States |
| ON RECORD: | 1959–1983 |
| STATUS: | Missing, Operation LAST LIGHT |
| CLEARANCE: | Class-A |
| TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-GREEN DOVE//NOFORN | |
Major John Arledge assumed command of the Mount Qasioun site in May 1959 under Directive 10-5, and led the Antarctic breach two months later.
He survived the central chamber with total loss of vision through retinal cauterisation, where every other American present died of cerebral haemorrhage.
The 1960 assessment of him reads: Arledge failed because he looked into the glass and saw Hell.
The descents
Blindness made him the most valuable man the programme had.
Ark Chasm attacks through vision. Non-Euclidean geometry to induce vertigo, inverted iconography to invert the observer's foundational symbols, black glass which shows a man the worst thing he is carrying. A mirror does nothing to a man with no eyes.
From 1960 to 1983 Arledge went back down, repeatedly, under three successive programme designations, for twenty-three years. He learned the interior by touch and by count of paces, walked the corridor of calcified remains without a light because a light was of no use to him, and came back up and dictated what he had heard.
He is the only person who entered that place more than twice and remained employable.
The reports
The early dictations are auditory and tactile: surface texture, air movement, echo delay, the temperature gradient in the side tunnels.
From the mid-1970s the reports begin to contain colour.
He describes the ochre of the inverted trees. He describes the manner in which the burning haloes are inlaid rather than painted. He describes the quality of light coming off a surface which returns no light, and names its colour, and the colour he names does not exist.
Three medical reviews concluded confabulation consistent with long-term sensory deprivation. All three noted, in the margins rather than in the findings, that the descriptions matched a photographic survey he had never been able to see.
End of service
Arledge is one of the four personnel listed missing after Operation LAST LIGHT, none of whom were inside the gallery at detonation.
He was sixty-one years old, medically retired for two years, and not on the manifest. He entered the complex on foot by a service route he had memorised in 1961. Nobody saw him go, because nobody was watching a corridor a blind man had been using for twenty-three years.