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The Syndicate are the central antagonistic faction of the television series The X-Files and were inspired by the legend of the New World Order.
History[]
The Syndicate was formed at the end of World War II, after the Roswell incident 1947, when German scientists were brought to the United States to work on developing an alien-human hybrid. Alvin Kurtzweil recounted that when he and Bill Mulder were young men in the military, they were recruited for a project that they were told was concerned with biological warfare. Deep Throat claimed that it began after Roswell, when an ultrasecret conference of power brokers in the United States, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, China, France, West Germany, and East Germany, signed a treaty that if an alien spacecraft crashed on Earth and the extraterrestrials survived, the country that held them would be responsible for their immediate extermination.
The group that became the Syndicate existed as early as 1952 as a secret group within the State Department. Their activities included experimenting with xenotransplantation — relocating ex-Nazi scientists to the United States after World War II and covering up the "black oil" discovered in the Piper Maru in 1953.
The members of the secretive group within the Department of State and CIA officially broke off ties with the U.S. government in 1973. However, some of the members continued to claim that they worked within the State Department. On October 13, the Syndicate formally forged their alliance with the alien colonists at El Rico Air Force Base. The Cigarette Smoking Man personally presented a folded American flag to the aliens, symbolizing their surrender to a superior intergalactic force. The Syndicate was also commencing their work on the Project, which would see an immense effort in creating an alien/human hybrid to serve the aliens as a slave race after colonization. To allow the Syndicate to develop the hybrid, they were provided an alien fetus from which to extract DNA and begin research. However, the aliens demanded, in exchange, samples of human DNA. Members of the Syndicate turned over their loved ones to the aliens as human collateral. The Smoking Man handed over his wife, Cassandra Spender, and William Mulder reluctantly surrendered his daughter, Samantha, who was abducted from her bed at a later date.
Prior to March 7, 1992, FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, William Mulder's son, had been trying to access classified government information but someone at a higher level of power had been blocking his attempts to get at it. Mulder stated, shortly thereafter, that the only reason he had been allowed to continue his work was because he had made connections in Congress. A possible reason why his attempts to access the information had been blocked was because the Syndicate were afraid he would leak the information.On March 6, 1992, the Syndicate was responsible for assigning Special Agent Dana Scully to work with Agent Mulder. By March 22, 1992, the Syndicate had use of a vast warehouse in the Pentagon, where artifacts constituting evidence of alien existence were stored. The Cigarette Smoking Man added an implant, recovered by Mulder and Scully on their first case together, to the items kept in this storage facility.
As Mulder and Scully learned, other efforts to erase their findings were apparently made, including the disappearance of paperwork, such as a case file on Billy Miles, that the agents had filed with the District Attorney's office in Raymon County, Oregon.
In 1998, the Syndicate learned of a rebel faction among the aliens that was fighting against their brethren and the colonization of Earth. The first incident of rebel violence on Earth occurred in Kazakhstan, where dozens of impending abductees were found incinerated. Marita Covarrubias investigated the incident and quickly had it covered up. Shortly thereafter, many more abductees were summoned to Skyland Mountain, via metallic tags implanted inside their own bodies. Again, the group was attacked and incinerated by the alien rebels. It was at this time that the rebels were more clearly identified as being faceless, a telltale characteristic that set them apart as the rebel force. In 1999, the rebels made their most daring and destructive move. Outside of Washington, D.C., they attacked a train car, wherein a group of Syndicate doctors, led by Eugene Openshaw, were experimenting on Cassandra Spender – the first successful alien/human hybrid. The rebels incinerated the doctors, but left Spender alive so that the Project would be revealed and subsequently destroyed. Indeed, one of the rebels killed the Second Elder and assumed his position at meetings of the Syndicate. However, the Cigarette Smoking Man realized this and had the group cease meeting together.
Smoking Man contacted his son, Jeffrey Spender, and charged him with killing the rebel posing as the Second Elder with a gimlet weapon. Spender failed to kill him but Alex Krycek was successful in doing so. Spender then realized the scope of the conspiracy being carried out by his father, and he pledged his support to Fox Mulder.
Having their hand forced by the rebels, the Syndicate retrieved Cassandra Spender and prepared to present her to the aliens, so that colonization could begin. However, the rebels appeared instead and incinerated the entire group of gathered high-ranking Syndicate members. Cassandra Spender was presumably killed along with them. Having operated for twenty-six years, the Syndicate was destroyed.
Later in 1999, Scully asked Mulder what more he could possibly hope to do or to find, after having done and uncovered so much, such as exposing the secrets of a conspiracy of men who had been doing human experiments but were all now dead. Mulder's reply was that he still hoped to find his sister.
Mention of the Syndicate featured in a dream reality Mulder experienced soon thereafter, in which an illusory version of the CSM claimed that his group had "made entire cultures disappear.
In reality, the CSM continued working on the Project with a group of men who held a conference to discuss colonization in 1999. The CSM also continued working with his doctors, who were aware of the Syndicate's work to create a human/alien hybrid and attempted to continue this work. CSM met with a group of men, some in military uniforms, who spoke about some sort of disaster and of it.
When the CSM later revealed to Agent Scully that he believed Samantha Mulder was dead, Scully wondered why the CSM had not admitted to this knowledge earlier but he replied that there had been "so much" to protect before, all of which was now gone.
In 2001, Lizzy Gill admitted to Agent Mulder, Assistant Director Walter Skinner and Special Agent John Doggett that, for the past ten years, she and her colleagues had been working to create a human/alien hybrid. According to her, the work had originally been financed by a group of government men but had continued after their death. Gill's colleagues, by this time, included Doctors Parenti and Lev as well as Duffy Haskell, but they had each been recently killed by supersoldier Billy Miles.
After the Cigarette Smoking Man's apparent death in 2000, other groups worked on the Project, often with the assistance of supersoldiers.
In 2016, former Syndicate members Erika Price and Mr. Y planned to take down the Cigarette Smoking Man and stop his scheme to depopulate the human race, although this was so they could carry out an unknown agenda of their own.
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