Operation HOLY SHROUD
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Operation Holy Shroud was a series of Inner Sphere wide covert attacks by agents of ComStar's ROM division against the Great Houses' attempt to preserve or rediscover technology lost during the First and Second Succession Wars.
Contents
History
As the Second Succession War began to draw to a close, the fighting had devastated many specialized technologies. While it became increasingly hard to produce advanced items such as JumpShips and advanced computers as the factories that produced them were destroyed, thanks to cannibalizing of existing equipment the Great Houses were able to maintain their current war machines and slowly rediscover how to build them. [1]
However the newly invested Primus Raymond Karpov felt that even this was too much of a threat to ComStar. To this end in 2838 he presented Organizational Edict 3056 to the First Circuit which called for an expansion of the Order's intelligence division ROM as well as increasing it's scope from internal security to actively targeting and eliminating technical experts among the Inner Sphere houses. [1]
After removing those who challenged this new step, including Karpov's long time friend and head of ROM Michelle Dupreas, and replacing them with staunch supporters, the newly agreeable ROM quickly drew up a list of over a hundred key researchers and scientist and began planning their covert assassination. [1]
While ostensibly to prevent scientists of the Federated Suns from making advances in the field of interplanetary communication that could possibly threaten the Order's monopoly control of Hyperpulse Generators, Operation Holy Shroud as the plan was called soon expanded to target laboratories and scientists working on a wide range of military and civilian technology. Further, under the egresses of Holy Shroud ROM agents attempted ferret out caches left behind by the departed SLDF and stripping out any technology before others could find them, and infiltrating the Great Houses to sabotage their efforts to recover technology from caches that ComStar could not prevent being discovered.[1]
By the time Holy Shroud drew to a close in 2843, ROM had systematically eliminated over 300 of best scientific minds in the Inner Sphere. As each House suspected that the seemingly accidental deaths and destruction effecting their efforts to recover and maintain advanced technology could only be intentional covert attacks, the skill of ROM's agents in covering their tracks and ComStar's professed neutrality ensured that each blamed the other instead of the Order.[1]
Aftermath
For ComStar the operation was highly successful, with many technologies taken for granted less than two generations before having all but disappeared outside of the halls of the Order. However while it accelerated the decline of many technological fields, it also helped contribute to the need for the war-weary Successor States to abandon the Second Succession War to rebuild and attempt to recover what technology they could, forcing Karpov to take much more drastic measures, fanning their conflicts to help trigger the Third Succession War. [1]
The success of the first led later Primus Yin Takami to order Operation Holy Shroud II in 2979, however by this time the majority of the Great Houses had taken much more extensive efforts to successfully protect their scientific resources and the second Holy Shroud was but a pale shadow of the first.
References
Field Manual: ComStar - pp 12