A former scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who left following a dispute over funding, and his wife — who also worked at the facility — face federal charges in a sting operation built on the scientist's alleged offer to help build Venezuela a nuclear bomb.
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"He got into a big fight with the Department of Energy after speaking out over its failure to fund a project that he highly supported," Johnson says. "The government wound up investigating him and yanked his security clearance in 1987. He ultimately left and filed a lawsuit.
"Sources tell me he kept on being disgruntled all these years," she says.
Although he had his security clearance pulled more than 20 years ago, Mascheroni was still believed to have posed a danger, Johnson says.
"Sources are telling me that everything he needed to know he kept in his head," she says. "He was able to reconstruct most of what he wanted to know and tell the Venezuelan government allegedly by just thinking back to his experience in the business."
Nice! there's the beginning of a solid espionage scenario, right there. You could take that and run with it. I was already intrigued myself. So I kept listening, and heard about this:
In July 2008, Mascheroni allegedly delivered a coded, 132-page document detailing the operation to a post office box prearranged as a "dead drop."
Yeah, that's par for the spy-course, too -- but in my mind, the words "132-page document" turned into "meticulously-copied excerpts from the Necronomicon".
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| "The monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth." |
So! How far away is the NPR story from a Delta Green scenario in which the scientist is a disgruntled scholar who has been driven mad with resentment and is willing to sell out to a foreign power to destroy his former bosses?
Well, it's 1.1 miles from my house to my daughter's school. So...not very.