Bureau 13 was a villainous organization featured in the Babylon Five episode Spider in the Web. A dirty tricks squad, it was part of the larger Psi-Corps organization. Bureau 13 performed black ops operations. The organization was headquartered in the ruins of San Diego, California, which had been destroyed just over 100 years earlier in a nuclear blast set off by terrorists, and led by an individual named Control.
One of their black ops projects was Project Lazarus, which took people very close to death and basically turned them into cybernetic zombies. They would install implants into these individuals and then subject them to deep telepathic scans which fixated the subjects on their dying moments, which would allow the implants to take over. Thus, these people became operatives that would do the bureau's dirty work.
Learning that mega-corporation FutureCorp executive Taro Isogi was heading to Mars to meet with Amanda Carter, who was meeting with him to discuss ways to bring about peaceful independence for Mars. The bureau had Lazarus agent Abel Horn smuggled on to the station as part of a false flag operation to kill Isogi and frame the extremist group Free Mars for the assassination. Horn was able to carry out the first part of the operation and murder Isogi, yelling "Free Mars" while he did so. However, Talia Winters was at the scene and picked up on his memory of being killed. Horn's telepathic contact with Talia disrupted his programming, and he was unable to bring himself to murder Winters even after being ordered to do so by Control. Carter met with Talia to see if there was anything she could do for Horn to help break him free of his programming, who was in her quarters. Meanwhile, Captain John Sheridan and Michael Garibaldi discovered they could track Lazarus agents by scanning for an unusual benign radiation given off by such agents. After tracking him to Carter's quarters Sheridan tried to convince Horn to surrender so they could help him and find out who had altered him. Horn forced Sheridan to shoot him in self defense and was in turn shot by Sheridan. Right after he died, explosives within Horn's body exploded, eliminating any evidence the B5 staff could use to track down the people who had done this.
Sheridan convinced Carter to continue working with FutureCorp to bring about Martian independence. The telepath Thirteen, who had reprogrammed Horn, was contacted by Control and informed that the operation was only partially successful. She ordered Control to confirm the bureau had not been compromised.
Garibaldi asked Sheridan how he knew about Lazarus. Sheridan confessed that one of his hobbies was to collect information on covert operations, conspiracies, and black ops. Ordering Garibaldi not to repeat what he said, Sheridan told Garibaldi this was how he learned about Lazarus and Bureau 13. Sheridan felt that the bureau was part of a larger conspiracy active within Earth's government, and people who gave him information on the bureau would often wind up taken out a short time later.
Eventually, Bureau 13 was shut down, and its operations were subsumed into other parts of Psi-Corps.
Trivia[]
- Bureau 13 was supposed to play a larger role in the Babylon Five story line. However, after the episode was produced JMS and episode writer Larry DiTillio learned there was a heroic Bureau 13 that was part of the Bureau 13 RPG series. As a result, he decided to no longer use the Bureau 13 name, and folded the remaining parts of the bureau's story into the larger Psi-Corps story line.
- JMS later stated that the Control personality in this episode was the sleeper personality that had been buried inside Talia Winters and exposed later in the second season, and that the sleeper program was originally a Bureau 13 program before the bureau was folded into Psi-Corps.