Black Chamber

In Girl in the Glass, when Director Bowen’s team intercepts the top-secret, classified document, he learns the military’s plans for transporting Declan back to the United States. He also discovers that the U.S. Army’s Black Chamber, responsible for fabricating Declan’s death and getting him sent to Dante’s Inferno for “advanced interrogation”, is once again involved. Professor Riordan has returned after being missing since 1939, and the Black Chamber would like to find out where Declan’s been for the last two years.

In reality, the Black Chamber was the United States' first peacetime cryptoanalytic organization, established in 1919 to intercept and decrypt the communications of other nations, primarily diplomatic traffic. The Black Chamber illegally accessed cable traffic from foreign embassies, and in 1929 was shut down over ethical concerns. The U.S. Secretary of State famously stated, “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.”

In various iterations, the U.S. government has continued intercepting and decrypting communications, these programs eventually morphing into the NSA (National Security Agency). While the NSA might abide by the law, in The Girl in the Glass, the Black Chamber lives on, still carrying on its beyond-top-secret, unethical behaviors.