The Plot Against House Cameron

A great man or a great conspiracy?

I don’t like “great man” explanations of historical events – but I think it’s right that BattleTech sources usually appeal to that kind of thinking. After all, they express the views of people living in a neo-Feudal society that daily insists on the rightness of “the great” ruling over the meek. The Inner Sphere probably has some historians who use other frameworks, but they’re minority views consigned to sidebars (at best). Last week, I left off pointing to two of the “greatest men” in the broader narrative and that wasn’t exactly a ruse – though my intention is to get away from the biographical approach and look harder at the processes and context.

What Do We Know?

The fact that Stefan Amaris led the coup against House Cameron in 2766 is so well-known in the BattleTech community that it needs little elaboration, and I think others have done a fairly good job of narrating the Amaris-Kerensky war that ran through to 2779. But there is a big mystery surrounding the coup. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the extraordinary competence of the Hegemony Central Intelligence Bureau (HCIB) and more recently noted that mentions of this extremely important agency of the state faded away as the narrative continued. I find it pretty hard to think that the Star League defunded their intelligence agency – not only is this uncommon for large states in general, it doesn’t fit in with the League’s massive military expenditures. In Historical: Liberation of Terra, Volume One, we’re told about the “Burned Records” which left 31^st century historians with a very uneven view of the Star League era, but this only explains how the story of the HCIB disappeared. To work out what that story was, we have to do some work.

Let’s start with one point that I keep coming back to: there was no scandal about the HCIB’s intelligence failures ahead of the coup, and they were staggering. Overlooking the buildup of forces in the Rim Worlds Republic, starting in the 2750s and continuing at a high pace until the coup in 2766 could perhaps be forgiven. After all, there was a general increase in military spending across the Star League in this period and the Amarises were widely thought to be loyal.

However, the HCIB also failed to detect both the source and scale of the so-called “Secret Army” that was built up in the Deep Periphery and fought the Star League Defense Force (SLDF) in the Freedom War (known to Inner Sphere sources as the Periphery Uprising). We’re told that the Secret Army numbered perhaps fifty divisions. If the people involved were a drop in the Star League bucket, thousands of battlemechs and the rest of the Secret Army’s military equipment was not. Despite being described as fairly inconsistently-equipped, the Secret Army was up to the task of fighting the SLDF for two years and inflicting very serious damage on the Star League’s army. The military supplies to back up that effort had to be procured and shipped long distances to Secret Army bases, and the HCIB failed to assemble the signs into a real warning. Even the disappearance of a SLDF exploration team in late 2763 didn’t raise alarm bells or get placed into the picture until after the fact. The intelligence situation was so bad that the SLDF didn’t really understand the source of the Secret Army until 2767 when the leaders of the Outworlds Alliance and Taurian Concordat transferred information to them. (The Magistracy of Canopus attempted to do the same but was considered too untrustworthy to be taken seriously.)

But even if the people of BattleTech’s imagined future were prepared to wave aside HCIB failures hundreds of light-years away from its well-appointed offices on Terra, what happened in the Hegemony itself just can’t be excused. Between July 2764 and the coup at the end of 2766, troops were redeployed from the Rim Worlds Republic to the Terran Hegmeony. Thirty regiments came along legitimately under the “Humanity Homeworld Defense Agreement” – and more than that number were smuggled in. A sidebar in Liberation of Terra gives the excuse that “Amaris’ transport manifests lied,” which might excuse the shipping clerks and customs officials for their part in the affair. But how could some dishonest paperwork be enough to fool the HCIB for years?

Worse yet, the Bureau failed to warn of the coup as its final preparations took place. In the half-baked coup against Jonathan Cameron, which only involved troop deployments on Terra, the HCIB was alert to the danger. Amaris’ coup involved preparations across one hundred and forty-seven planets, as well as space installations and spacecraft. Despite the scale of the operation, there were no well-placed agents (or even badly-placed ones) to tip off the SLDF in the way that their predecessors had warned the Terran Hegemony of Carlos Marik’s armada.

For now, let’s set aside the question of how they failed – how could this failure go without mention? How could there be no hearings in the aftermath? Many readers will recall the long period of inquiries, both official and unofficial, that followed the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Well, the Amaris Coup was not only bigger but more shocking, even seeing the deployment of nuclear weapons. Maybe we can appeal to “Burned Records” to explain why primary documents of the “Amaris Coup Inquiry” disappeared, but news of such hearings ought to have left a paper trail through the period. Even if the details of a supposed Inquiry were so well-known that they didn’t need to be reported on, there should have been references to it in the last proceedings of the Star League’s High Council and personal documents of people working on Terra after the Amaris-Kerensky War – especially those who would play formative roles in ComStar. It seems like we have to conclude that there was no official inquiry, though this poses new questions. Why was there no paper trail of all the demands for an inquiry – not even an off-hand mention in early ComStar proceedings?

What could have happened to make the people of the 28^th century uninterested in this question?

I think there are three broad options for explanation. It could be argued that this was an irrational decision. People were tired and didn’t want to stir the ghosts of the 2766. There were other things to do, and anyway the First Succession War was breaking. The big problem with this view is that many people in the Human Sphere weren’t caught up in the Amaris-Kerensky war. The conflict zone was mainly in the Periphery and then the Terran Hegemony. People living under one of the other Great Houses (not to mention the leaders of those Houses) were in a position to wonder about what had happened and start asking questions during the peace. Indeed, one of the sidebars in the old Star League sourcebook is attributed to “Investigation into the Death of Simon Cameron” from 2784, so we have some reason to think that historical questions were still being considered even as the Succession Wars began. Still, I’m not saying that the fatigue position is totally implausible - it just seems like the explanation of last resort, the place we’d go if nothing else made sense. On the other hand, I do think it’s somewhat implausible that an inquiry was considered unnecessary because the HCIB had clearly done their job properly and were above suspicion. (It felt like a joke to type and maybe it read like one, too. ) That leaves us with the third option, but it’s… well, it’s crazy. Let’s talk about something else for a bit.

Family Business

This is as close as we’re getting to a Stefan Amaris issue. I still don’t want to spend too much time on him but there are a few misconceptions that need to be addressed. Firstly, he was not a Rim Worlder or Periphery person of any kind. I suspect that if he’d been asked (and was inclined to answer honestly), Amaris would have given some variation on the line that a human being born in a stable isn’t a horse. The Amaris family were proud of their Terran Hegemony citizenship and maintained estates on Terra until their destruction. Stefan himself spent more of his adult life living in those estates than anywhere else, using them as his base of operations for official business in the Star League High Council and unofficial intrigues around the court of the First Lord. The Rim Worlds capital Apollo perhaps had some childhood memories and was certainly an important possession of his dynasty, but it was a provincial backwater. It wasn’t his home.

We also need to talk about the occupation of House Amaris. “What’s your family’s job?” certainly sounds odd to 21^st century ears, but for the neo-Feudal people of the Inner Sphere, it’s perfectly normal. Their society viewed inherited professions as the best way to secure a steady supply of farmhands, mechanics, and so on. We often see this in the fiction with military personnel just carrying on in the family trade, sometimes even using the weapons of their ancestors. Among the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere, the typical trade seems to be warfare – though exceptions on grounds of faith, such as Jocasta Cameron or Thomas Marik in the 31^st century – do exist. However, with House Amaris, our only indication of a family occupation is Terens Amaris, the Hegemony Central Intelligence Bureau operative at the center of a coup in the Rim Worlds Republic. Given that the family was proud of its ties to the Hegemony, we don’t have much reason to think anything changed over the centuries. To put that more directly: before looking at the evidence, we should assume that Stefan Amaris was a member of the HCIB. Furthermore, as social rank and organizational authority went hand-in-hand in the Star League, we should assume that he was highly-placed in that organization.

Other evidence is pretty thin but does trim the possibilities. Liberation of Terra has it that Amaris met Kerensky “in the Periphery” sometime in the first half of 2764 to brief the General on unrest in the Taurian Concordat. According to the sourcebook, Amaris claimed to have obtained the information as a private citizen and Kerensky had it verified by other agencies. The old Star League sourcebook tells a similar story, though it doesn’t have Amaris giving any story for how he gained the information. It’s possible to read these incidents as proof that he wasn’t in the HCIB at all, but that’s a very confident move. For me, they only show that Stefan Amaris wasn’t known to be a member of the HCIB, which is consistent with with Amaris’ meeting with the other Periphery leaders to stoke rebellion. We’re told that they were suspicious of him, but if he was a recognized member of the Star League’s intelligence community mere suspicion would have been totally inappropriate. Finally, there’s a slim possibility that he held some sort of ambiguous title that many people believed was purely ceremonial – but generally speaking, intelligence agencies don’t get that cute.

The Crazy Option

Alright, let’s indulge: what if there was no scandal about Hegemony Central Intelligence Bureau’s intelligence failure because everyone knew they were traitors? This is certainly something that will get some wide-eyed looks from your BattleTech buddies, but it might not be wrong. In the first place, we get a throwaway line in Liberation of Terra that the HCIB’s parent organization, the Bureau of Star League Affairs, “proved particularly supportive of [Stefan Amaris]” after the coup. Past that, the theory has a surface plausibility given that other parts of the Star League bureaucracy were part of Fredasa’s ham-fisted plot against Jonathan Cameron. Finally, if the HCIB was in on the coup that would explain the Amaris faction’s success in keeping all those extensive and long-developing plots secret – the “ever-vigilant eyes” saw what they themselves were doing, but chose not to say anything.

Lastly, I should grant that this interpretation appeals to me because it does away with the single evil genius theory. If the HCIB was plotting against House Cameron, there’s no longer any need for Stefan to single-handedly out-plot his foes at every point up to the coup - only to be far less effective after seizing power. Rather than being the great man of history, he would be the preferred candidate of the intelligence community. These people found it very easy to deceive other Star League institutions on matters of intelligence because they were the ones writing the reports, but once the coup was launched their advantage of surprise melted away. Of course, we don’t need to overcompensate and conclude that the HCIB was some kind of “hive mind” where every field agent and analyst thought the same way. It might well be that there was some kind of war in the shadows, and those who felt their loyalty to the person of the First Lord outweighed appeals to “the good of the Star League” were the losers in that exchange.