“…an old campaigner…”


Baker Street Journal, Spring 2006


Jon Lellenberg


This is an end-of-mission report for The Bruce-Partington Planners within the Military-Industrial Complex, a BSI scion society that was not entirely a figment of my imagination during the years I lived in Washington, D.C. Baker Street Irregularity is a state of mind more than anything else, and much the same must be said of Washington, which at various times resembles a company town, a theme park, a political mirage, or (in the Marion Barry era, not yet over, alas) a small corrupt Third World country. But contrary to what some suspected, The Bruce-Partington Planners did have an existence beyond me, and even whimsical aspects of it took on corporeal dimensions as time went by.


I came to D.C. out of graduate school at the beginning of 1971, and, after a few years in a think-tank, spent some thirty years at the Pentagon by the time I retired in February 2006. I found upon arriving that The Red Circle had been revived the year before, giving me an excellent introduction to organized Sherlockiana. And I found that there’d been a scion society for my profession once before. During World War II, there’d been The Blanched Soldiers of the Pentagon — about whom one of the few things known today is that they didn’t include the Pentagon’s mobilized BSI during 1943-45: Irregulars Colonel John Winterich, Major Robert Keith Leavitt, and Captain Howard Haycraft — members of what were called the Pentagon’s 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Chairborne Divisions —plus Lieutenant Wilbur McKee over at the Navy Department, and Elmer Davis running the Office of War Information.


But there was no forum for strategic sodality in 1971, so after getting the drift of things from Julian Wolff and John Bennett Shaw, The Bruce-Partington Planners was launched. Its patron saint was Fletcher Pratt, who’d been “The Dancing Men” in the BSI. Though best known today for the fantasy novels that he wrote in collaboration with L. Sprague de Camp, he was one of America’s leading military and naval historians from the 1930s on, and his book Secret and Urgent (1939) is a cryptography classic. But as for modern-day Bruce-Partington Planners, there weren’t any others for a while. It worried me, new to the business at age 25, that those who approved (or disapproved) Pentagon security clearances might not understand a deep interest in treating Sherlock Holmes as fact. You might, I feared, have to be in the CIA to get away with something like that. Better, I thought, to compartmentalize the two sides of my life.


These were still Cold War years, after all, with Soviet submarines (not Bruce-Partingtons!) violating neutral Swedish waters, and Moscow trying to deny it by comparing the charges to “a cheap Sherlock Holmes,” and later having to admit that they might not have invaded Afghanistan if they’d known their Sherlock Holmes better. “It was not for nothing,” said a Novosti Press Agency spokesman, “that dear Dr. Watson used to complain to Sherlock Holmes that he had received his leg wound nowhere else but in Herat.” (Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city, is located in the western part of the country, far from Maiwand. If the Soviets didn’t know Sherlock Holmes better than that, they deserved to lose the Cold War.)


So The Bruce-Partington Planners eschewed self-promotion, and responded to eventual inquiries with a bit of tactical deception in the form of the following statement:


THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANNERS


a scion society of the baker street irregulars

within the military-industrial complex


This clandestine scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1971 with two purposes in mind: to study the contributions of Sherlock Holmes and Mycroft Holmes to the universal cause of national security, and to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions to Sherlockiana by members of the military-industrial complex. The scion society’s membership is located principally but not exclusively in the environs of Washington, D.C., scattered through the Departments of State and Defense, the National Security Council, various intelligence agencies, the national nuclear weapons laboratories, and supporting research institutes.


Membership in The Bruce-Partington Planners is limited and restricted. Candidates are examined in the fields of cryptography, identity of foreign agents, and submarine design. Since the examination requires access to classified data, only those already inside the military-industrial complex with the proper security clearances are able to satisfy the requirements for membership. The membership list itself is classified, and The Bruce-Partington Planners is so covert that several members are not aware of its existence.


Bruce-Partington Planners have no constitution, dues, toasts, rituals, officers, awards, events, artifacts, archives, scion society reports for The Baker Street Journal, or other impedimenta and paper trails that might call public attention to itself and its members. Formal meetings are never held. Bruce-Partington Planners occasionally gather for private discussions of canonical and Irregular matters, and these may be deemed Planning Sessions at the discretion of the participants if they take place in Special Compartmented Intelligence Facilities or in the Grill of the Army & Navy Club of Washington, D.C. Discretion and confidentiality are the hallmarks of Bruce-Partington Planners, and requests for information are never entertained. We take our lead from Sherlock Holmes himself: “We also have our diplomatic secrets.”


To date, the scion society’s sole project has been to collect funds for a larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of Mycroft Holmes, which eventually will be placed anonymously next to the statue of Winston Churchill on the grounds of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Financial contributions to this project may be sent to The Bruce-Partington Planners’ point of contact.


I’m sorry that sufficient funds failed to materialize. (If the spirit moves you, it’s not too late to donate. See my new address in the Whodunit section.)


As time passed, The Bruce-Partington Planners did come to include others at the Pentagon, the State Department (most notably Thomas Cynkin, a past winner of the Morley-Montgomery Award, now stationed overseas), and some other agencies. Some had no further interest in organized Sherlockiana; others did, including our most distinguished member, Baker Street Irregular (“Joyce Cummings”) and longtime member of The Sons of the Copper Beeches, Ambassador Ralph Earle; and one or two Planners’ professional circumstances simply wouldn’t permit it, such as the covered CIA agent known to other Planners only as “Phil.” Members outside Washington have included Richard Miller (“The Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa”) at Los Alamos Laboratory, Bill Rabe (“Colonel Warburton’s Madness”), founder of The Old Soldiers of Baker Street, Richard Hughes, the legendary Australian foreign correspondent in Hong Kong (and Cold War double-agent whose MI6 code-name was “Altamont”), and Per Egil Hegge of Oslo Aftenposten, the only other journalist allowed inside our circle, for reasons that must remain classified. In 1987, Sherlock Holmes’s centenary year, our security was breached by an “odd people in funny hats” article about Sherlockians in Smithsonian magazine, but fortunately no Planners’ names, especially mine, were divulged.


In recent years, however, exposure has crept closer. The deplorable New Yorker article in 2004 exploiting Richard Lancelyn Green’s tragic suicide was enough to identify me to a member of my own staff, a Navy commander and SEAL in our special operations bureau — but he learned long ago to take the press with a big grain of salt, since his father happens to be G. Gordon Liddy. (Jim Liddy was vastly amused to learn that a close friend of mine in the BSI is Albert Rosenblatt: his father and Al had once been fellow Assistant District Attorneys in Dutchess County, N.Y., and Al, he knew well, had had more than anyone else to do with his father not becoming the D.A. next, and ending up in Washington instead, and in Watergate, during Nixon’s campaign.)


And when Caleb Carr’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Italian Secretary came out last year with an afterword by me, his following resulted in my hearing from professional colleagues from coast to coast, secret Holmes fans all, who’d never detected any literate streak in me before: from a senior colonel at Special Forces Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to the director of the special ops program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and others in between . . . . Clearly it was time for me to come in out of the cold.


But there were some grand moments along the way. Perhaps what most made life seem to imitate art was a telephone call I received on my cellphone in New York in January ’03, during the BSI weekend, as I was hastening to the Williams Club for the Morley-Montgomery Award reception. It was from a new member of my staff, and until that moment, switching mental gears from Sherlock Holmes back to special operations, I swear it hadn’t occurred to me that I had Colonel Moran for a henchman. S. Moran, no less, though in this case it stood for Sylvia, not Sebastian: one of the first women to graduate from West Point, an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer, and a smart tough professional who also supports half a dozen foster children in Third World countries. Today she is in Iraq, as the military assistant to the U.S. Ambassador there — and that’s no airgun in her holster.



Another former member of my staff, Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Donald Bolduc, is now the commander of 1st Battalion, 3rd U.S. Special Forces Group, and Task Force 31 stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan. In 35 years I have never known a more dedicated soldier, and my excitement grew as the time for Don’s reassignment approached a year ago, for I realized that by July 27th, the anniversary of the Battle of Maiwand, his new headquarters would be barely 25 miles away. I showed him the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet, and a smile spread across his face. “I’m on it, sir!” he said. Three months later, on July 27, 2005, he and a Special Forces A-team of his were present on the battlefield of Maiwand to commemorate the event as shown in the photograph below. (Eat your heart out, Dick Lesh.)



The placard, designed before Don deployed to Afghanistan, reads:


“The Fatal Battle of Maiwand”

125th anniversary, 27 July 2005


Commemorated by

Task Force 31

Kandahar, Afghanistan

LTC Donald Bolduc commanding

CSM David Putnam


in honor of

John H. Watson, M.D., Surgeon,

66th Regiment of Foot (Royal Berkshires)


and on behalf of

The Bruce-Partington Planners within the Military-Industrial Complex

a scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars, Washington, D.C.


Don and his troop visited the battlefield on their way back to Kandahar during a combat reconnaissance patrol, following the same route the Afghans and the British troops took that terrible day in 1880. Holding the placard are Don Bolduc, on the left, and Command Sergeant Major David Putnam. In dark green battledress beside Don is Major Sahky Bariz of the Afghan National Army, representing the victorious side in the historic battle; we Americans and our trusty comrades in Afghanistan have in common the experience of driving British armies from our lands.


For 35 years, it was my great privilege to work closely with the exceptional men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. I will miss them greatly as I take up residence in Chicago, and devote more time to literary matters now. But those matters will be deeply rewarding as well. They will include not only an annotated edition of A. Conan Doyle’s letters to his mother, in collaboration with my fellow Irregulars Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, but, at last, the BSI Archival History of the 1950s. The Game is still afoot.




JON LELLENBERG (“Rodger Prescott of evil memory”) has edited six eight volumes of the BSI Archival History so far [but hasn’t gotten to the 1950s yet!], and is a past winner of both the Two Shilling Award and the Morley-Montgomery Award. 220 East Walton Place, Chicago IL 60611. 1226B Cerro Gordo Road, Santa Fe N.M. 87501.