Operation Iron Wolf

### Purpose

Create an army of superhuman soldiers to augment the Soviet military (failed)Sabotage the United States of America and her allies (failed)

Kill anyone who may be a whistleblower against the Soviets (failed)

### Participants

Lev Bratchenko (Deceased)Dietrich Sterner (Deceased)

Vladimira Petrova/The Expressionless/Asset X (Incarcerated)

Tatiana Makarova (Defected)

Oleg Malenkov (Defected)

### Status

Terminated

**Operation Iron Wolf**, also known as the **Iron Wolf Program**, was a collaborative effort between the Soviet Union and East Germany to create super-soldier-assassins that was launched during the Cold War. It was shut down after the Cold War ended, only to be abruptly resurrected in the form of the international terrorist group Cicada.

Meanwhile, the CIA reverse engineered Operation Iron Wolf, believing that the Soviet Union's ability to brainwash its own people into becoming super-soldier-assassins was worthy of imitating, with many believing that taking the battle directly to the enemy would give the United States an edge. Henceforth, it was reverse engineered and perfected by the CIA, under the new moniker *Operation Numbers*.

## History

### Conception

The idea behind Operation Iron Wolf, contrary to popular belief, actually goes back to the Second World War; in 1938, the Nazi Third Reich searched for a new weapon, a step against the Allied Powers. During the Holocaust, the Nazis came up with the solution: forcibly brainwash political prisoners into becoming super-soldier-assassins and use them as weapons to sabotage the Allied efforts. The project, known as Operation Serpent (*Schlange*), involved the experimentation of captured prisoners using a combination of mind control, drugs, and physical abuse meant to break a prisoner and turn him or her into a human Wonder Weapon (*Wunder Waffe*). At the end of the war, the Soviets got their hands on the documents and intelligence regarding Operation *Schlange* and decided to reverse engineer it for its own purposes. The procedures the Soviets implemented were largely similar to that of Operation Schlange, except the Schlange serum was modified so that it wouldn't give agents telepathy, something the Russians believed was "superstitious" and "unnecessary" in the war against the West. Instead, the telepathic ability was replaced with an anger inhibitor, which suppressed feelings of anger within subjects sot that they wouldn't lash out and jeopardize themselves or their allies, in addition to attracting unwanted attention to themselves and compromising their mission.

### The need for a new weapon

The Iron Wolf program was the brainchild of Soviet KGB director Lev Bratchenko and ex-Nazi scientist Dietrich Sterner. Bratchenko desired to create a soldier that would be perfectly obedient to his master, one that would augment the regular Soviet Red Army. Sterner created the solution: a regimen involving physical abuse, psychedelic drug dosages that would wipe out all memories of the agent's former life. This would allow for the Iron Wolf scientists to replace it with a cover story fitting for the mission, incapable of revealing secrets as they would literally not remember any, and go into the field believing their cover stories were entirely real. When needed, the trigger words would cause some of their old memories to resurface, allowing them to be "activated" and therefore follow orders obediently. In addition, the Soviet agents were physically enhanced; they had two of their chromosomes altered, which granted the people better recovery from physical injuries, increased physical performance, pain suppression, enhanced intelligence, heightened reflexes, and various other superhuman benefits.
The Iron Wolf project official began sometime in 1952.

### First Subjects

In the first few years of existence, Iron Wolf scientists used prisoners of war as their first guinea pigs. As time went on, however, the Soviets had a more ingenious plan; in 1954, a team of Soviet KGB agents broke into the British Museum in London and stole the Codex of the Omega, a so-called "magic spell book" that could resurrect the dead. Discovering that the book's power to resurrect dead people were real, the KGB used grave-diggers to dig up the graves of deceased Soviet and German soldiers and bring their remains to the USSR so the Russians could resurrect these dead people and turn them into supersoldiers.

The first voluntary subjects were Tatiana Makarova, a KGB operative, and her then-boyfriend Oleg, who were recruited later that same year. They were the first to receive the mind control treatment. At first, the Soviets believed the mind-control wouldn't have any side-effects. Tatiana and Oleg became feared assassins, killing anyone that was seen by the Soviets as a potential whistleblower or a threat to the Soviet Union's sovereignty.

### The Numbers Program & Firefly

Although the use of songs to trigger assets were effective, it was only temporary and left Bratchenko dissatisfied. Henceforth, at the proposal of Bratchenko himself, this system was eventually replaced by the "Numbers Program"; subjects would be implanted with number sequences; these were a coded set of numbers that would translate to orders, meant to be used as a covert means for Soviet handlers to communicate with their agents. Bratchenko found a second test subject to use his new idea on: an American woman arrested along with her family in the USSR named Agnes Peterson.

Agnes, the daughter of an American missionary, was arrested on charges of "crimes against the state" and was initially sentenced to the gulags, but was later handed over to Iron Wolf personnel in 1961, where she was experimented on as part of Operation Iron Wolf in a secret facility in Siberia. When Agnes resisted the brainwashing technique, the Soviets resorted to using more extreme methods to condition her mind; this included completely erasing her memory and replacing them with false ones so that they would strip her of her identity. They succeeded and eventually Agnes was renamed "Firefly". The Soviets intended to use Agnes as a weapon against the United States of America, but this plan ultimately failed; one year later, in 1962, she was able to escape the program, thanks to a Soviet defector named Yuri Belov. Belov, a former Soviet soldier who was suspected of having been "tainted" by the Capitalist world after World War II and branded a traitor, saved her life by exploiting a hidden flaw that neither Bratchenko nor Sterner could have foreseen: he sabotaged Bratchenko's brainwashing and reversed the programming, reprogramming her to aid his own escape from Iron Wolf. After a brutal rampage throughout the Iron Wolf facility in Russia, Agnes was able to escape back to the United States, while Yuri went into hiding somewhere in the United Kingdom, where he became an informant for the British MI6.
Fortunately, Bratchenko and Sterner never found out what Yuri had done, at least for the time being. instead attributing the sabotage to a series of "flaws that needed to be worked out." In the meantime, Agnes escaped to the United States and told the American public of what had happened to her while in captivity. Word of this reached the ears of the CIA, which sought out Agnes to recruit her into the agency, despite not having any military training. By this point, Iron Wolf had become public knowledge to the Americans, much to Bratchenko's dismay. However, the Russian government refused to shut the program down.

### Rogue agent

*Main article*: 1972 Cedar Sinai Hospital Massacre

In 1970, Gromov recruited another asset, codenamed Asset X, into the program. This operative was deployed to the United States under the alias *Sheila Monroe* to obtain intelligence on US military general General Owen Garfield, a high-ranking general and close friend of then-US President Richard Nixon, whom she was then tasked with assassinating, as the Soviets had reasons to believe that he was connected to an espionage program against the Soviets that would lead to the compromising of Iron Wolf. At first, the mission went smoothly; Asset X was able to spend a year undetected in the United States, gathering key intel regarding General Garfield. However, things went horribly wrong on the evening of June 9, 1972, when her handlers finally gave her the go-ahead to assassinate Garfield. Asset X was tailing Garfield to an unknown location where it was hoped she would be able to terminate the subject undetected. The mission went horribly wrong when a random punk, who was angry at the Soviet sleeper agent for cutting him off (while she was tailing Garfield), assaulted her in a drunken rage by attempting to run her off the road, resulting in a wreck that left Asset X heavily injured and suffering from memory loss. Despite her injuries, her genetic enhancements allowed her to shrug off the injuries and escape to the nearby Cedar Sinai Hospital, where she eventually collapsed.

With the hospital staff clueless as to what to do with her, the decision was made to restrain and sedate her until the authorities arrived to identify the woman. This decision led to Asset X snapping and brutally killing and cannibalizing one staff member and several policemen before fleeing the hospital and disappearing. The Soviets, having lost contact with their asset, feared that she had been compromised. However, after discovering security footage of the hospital massacre that was relayed to the higher-ups via a fellow sleeper agent, the USSR came to the conclusion that she had abandoned the mission and had gone rogue. To prevent the possibility that Asset X would become a whistleblower against the Soviet Union, Gromov gave the order to find and capture Asset X before she could leak the information; if Asset X could not be recovered, she was to be killed.

Meanwhile, the police launched an extensive manhunt for Asset X, which lasted until 1972, after Asset X turned herself in to the US authorities after rescuing two American teenagers from a roaming gang of serial rapists. When questioned by the police, Asset X began ranting and raving about how she had been "brainwashed" by the Russians, a claim the police passed off as "lunacy". Thus, it was believed that Asset X was unfit to stand trial and sent to a psychiatric hospital. One year later, in 1973, Asset X finally revealed everything; how she had voluntarily signed up for a Soviet supersoldier program (not realizing what it really was) and was brainwashed into becoming a killing machine. Eventually Asset X's defense lawyer offered her a deal: she could face a more lenient prison sentence if she agreed to become a police informant and catch other criminals, or face life in prison. She chose the latter option after the government promised to take care of her family, which had fled to the United States sometime prior to Asset X's recruitment into the program.

### MI6's War on Iron Wolf

In 1973, the British intelligence agency MI6 fought its own war against Iron Wolf by sending in assets to covertly sabotage the project. That year, MI6 operative Alfred Lewis was sent to East Germany to investigate allegations of ex-Nazi scientists collaborating with the Soviets to create supersoldiers, and assassinate ex-Nazi scientist turned Soviet scientist Amsel Freud. He was able to obtain the intelligence confirming MI6's suspicions, but his cover was eventually blown and he was captured. While in captivity, Lewis was subjected to Iron Wolf's brutal brainwashing protocol; his captors tortured him and subjected him to doses of hallucinogenic drug cocktails and erased his memory multiple times over the course of six months to become an Iron Wolf asset. However, the brainwashing eventually wore off when he was being ministered by Henrich Freud, his original target. Once his memories returned to him, Lewis remembered his original mandate and killed Freud, then escaped the facility, fighting his way through multiple guards.

Coincidentally, Agnes Peterson, now a CIA agent, came across Lewis. Lewis, mistaking her for a Soviet agent, initially fought Peterson, but stopped after she identified herself as an American asset. Lewis told Agnes what had happened to him, and Agnes eerily confirmed that she was also captured and subjected to the same treatment. Realizing that they were both victims of the program, Lewis asked Peterson for help escaping the Soviets while at the same time charging her with informing MI6 what had occurred. While Lewis made his escape, Agnes created a diversion by luring his pursuers into an abandoned apartment, which she rigged with explosives to kill the KGB search party looking for Lewis.

Eventually, he passed out due to injuries sustained during his escape. He was eventually found by Agnes, who brought him to a hospital in West Berlin and alerted MI6 regarding his whereabouts.

### Coming under fire

Later that same year, Tatiana Makarova and her husband Oleg also turned whistleblower and defected from the Soviet Union, after learning of Gromov's future plans for the project, which they feared would cause World War III. After defecting to the United States, they offered intelligence on Iron Wolf but the US government was skeptical, believing this to be another infiltration tactic, until Tatiana and Oleg revealed solid evidence of Operation Iron Wolf's existence and that they had reason to believe it was connected to the 1972 Hospital Massacre. Their request was eventually granted and Tatiana and Oleg told the United States government everything about the project, which led to the two of them becoming US informants.

### Soviet War in Afghanistan

Despite these concerns, the Soviet Union continued to use Iron Wolf assets, particularly during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. One such asset, the Soviet agent known as "Brutus", proved to be an unstoppable force on the battlefield, killing multitudes of Afghan Mujahideen fighters. At one point, he even came close to killing future Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama bin Laden but ended up sparing him for unknown reasons. Despite Iron Wolf's best efforts, the Soviets were eventually defeated in Afghanistan.

### Termination

As the Soviet Union neared collapse in 1990, Gromov abruptly terminated the program, fearing its exposure by allies of America and ordered everybody associated with it killed before fleeing the Soviet Union and living in exile in Turkey, resulting in millions of Soviets defecting and some fleeing the nation. Some fled to the UK and other Western countries with the truth behind Operation Iron Wolf, and testified alongside defectors Tatiana and Oleg about the organization. In addition, a majority of the scientists involved with the program, wanting to preserve it, chose to disobey orders and instead of killing their agents, they preserved the assets by freezing them in cryogenic chambers located inside their safehouses in the mountains of Afghanistan until further notice. Following his escape from the dying Soviet Union, Gromov himself was the subject of a massive manhunt by the international community. However, upon being confronted by the authorities while hiding out in Turkey, Gromov committed suicide, believing it was better "to die with honor than to live on in disgrace."

### Abrupt revival

After the fall of the USSR, the American CIA reverse engineered Operation Iron Wolf, believing that the Soviet Union's ability to brainwash its own people into becoming super-soldier-assassins was worthy of imitating, with many believing that taking the battle directly to the enemy would give the United States an edge. Henceforth, it was reverse engineered and perfected by the CIA, under the new moniker Operation Numbers. Considered to be an enhancement of Operation Iron Wolf, the program eventually proved to be ten times more brutal than Iron Wolf. This program too, was eventually exposed to the public, causing a massive political scandal.

## The assets

### Training

In its early years, Bratchenko, Sterner and many other Soviet scientists subjected their subjects to physical abuse in order to force their agents' cooperation. Once the drugs broke down an asset's memories, the agents would be trained in languages, martial arts, marksmanship, and other forms of tradecraft. Following this, the agents were given cover stories and released into the world to develop them enough for the stories to become entirely real. Essentially, they became sleeper agents. The agents were also given a modified version of the Schlange serum, which was similar to the original used by Nazi Germany except it also gave the agents an anger inhibitor so that they wouldn't lash out and jeopardize themselves or their allies, in addition to attracting unwanted attention to themselves.

### Number Sequences

Iron Wolf operatives had a variety of triggers that would "activate" them. At first they experimented with songs that would trigger the Iron Wolf programming. However, Bratchenko thought those were ineffective and instead proposed the "Numbers Program"; using a sequence of coded numbers that translated into orders, assets could be activated simply by hearing a coded sequence of numbers that translated to a certain order given by a handler. Though Bratchenko's proposal was an effective substitute, it had a flaw that not even Bratchenko could foresee: the programming could be sabotaged by anyone with enough knowledge of the number sequences to reverse the programming, as Yuri Belov demonstrated when he sabotaged the numbers programming done on Agnes Peterson, an American prisoner.

## Known staff members

### USSR

* Anatoly Gromov (Deceased)
* Leonid Bratchenko (Deceased)
* Dietrich Sterner (Deceased)
* Henrich Freud (Deceased)
* Zina Volkova (Deceased, resurrected with Codex of the Omega).
* Vladimira Petrova/The Expressionless/Asset X (Rogue)
* Tatiana Makarova (Defected)
* Oleg Malenkov (Defected)
* Ludmila Kalinina
* Pavel Volsky
* Song Sun-Kang (Deceased)
* Nikolai Petrenko
* Vladimir Voronov
* "Brutus"

### Test subjects

* Agnes Peterson/Firefly (Rogue)
* Vladimira Petrova/Sheila Monroe/The Expressionless/Asset X (Rogue)
* Alfred Lewis