The Department of Truth #20

Ruby enters the recruitment scene

The issue opens in an American city rendered as a hotel, a street, and a field of flags. Ruby follows or meets a man who has information about her husband. The encounter is flirtatious at first, but the social language is a cover for surveillance and persuasion. He knows she is married to Cole Turner and knows that Cole’s work is connected to the Department. His familiarity signals that Black Hat has studied the couple as a unit rather than treating Ruby as an uninvolved civilian.

The operative says that the people who believe they are well-intentioned institutional types fight for the way things are, no matter the cost. He calls them the white hats and says Black Hat is partly a joke. The language makes the recruitment sound like a moral correction: Black Hat will expose the truth and bring the real story to life. Yet the scene also demonstrates manipulation. The speaker chooses the details most likely to make Ruby doubt Cole, then asks her to use her marriage as a route into his decision-making.

Ruby is offered time to think and a way to get home. The offer is not freedom from influence. It is a promise that Black Hat will continue to watch her while she decides whether to help. The issue treats recruitment as a contest over intimate relationships, not merely a battle between organizations.

The Nazi secret and the postwar divide

The account begins at the end of the Second World War. United States intelligence is said to have learned that the Nazis uncovered a secret about how the world worked, a secret that had been bottled up throughout human history. Two countries then took hold of the secret and began a battle over what people believed the world should look like. In the United States, the officials called themselves the Department of Truth; in the Soviet Union, they called themselves the Ministry of Lies.

This origin story revises the institutional history described in earlier issues. The Department no longer appears only as a response to Truman-era anxiety or Cold War propaganda. It is presented as the inheritor of a much older secret that Nazi researchers allegedly discovered. The image of the secret being bottled up implies containment, but the issue does not identify the original container, the prewar custodians, or the evidence that survived the Nazi program.

The account is powerful because it converts the Cold War into a struggle over the shape of the world. The American and Soviet organizations are not simply defending different political systems. They are trying to decide which ontology the public will inhabit. That claim belongs to the comic’s fictional continuity. The real postwar intelligence rivalry, Nazi occult mythology, and Cold War propaganda history must be documented separately.

Lee’s recruitment and Soviet defection

The account says Lee’s story begins in the 1950s when he was a disaffected young Marine. A superior officer approached him and recruited him to infiltrate the Soviet counterpart. Lee then defected to the Soviet Union and infiltrated the Ministry of Lies before bringing its secrets back to the United States. This version matches his earlier statement that he was recruited when barely nineteen and sent into the rival organization because the Department needed someone inside.

The difference is rhetorical. In issue #18, Lee describes a mission that left him ashamed of what the Department did to keep the country’s story intact. In issue #20, Black Hat’s account turns the same history into the first stage of Lee’s rise. The defection is no longer only an intelligence operation. It becomes the moment when Lee learns that the two institutions are using the same kind of power and begins to imagine that he can control it himself.

The issue does not show the Soviet infiltration directly. It gives the account through narration and accusation. The precise chronology of Lee’s contacts, the identity of his handlers, and the records carried back from the Ministry remain unresolved. Later articles should distinguish the explicit fact of Lee’s recruitment and defection from the motives assigned to him by Black Hat.

The Woman in Red and Babalon

The Ministry is described as being obsessed with a figure that Nazis and Catholics believed to be the true form of the Devil. The account connects her to Aleister Crowley’s use of the name Babalon from the Book of Revelation and describes her as a woman dressed in red with no eyes. Lee allegedly rallied the Department to determine what the demonic woman was and how the Nazis had used her power to nearly take over the world.

This passage is the issue’s clearest expansion of the Woman in Red’s mythology, but it is still delivered as a contested institutional account. The visual description—red clothing and absent eyes—is compatible with the series’ earlier appearances, yet the identity is not proved by the description alone. Babalon, the Devil, a manifestation, and the Woman in Red may overlap in the comic, or the names may be competing interpretations imposed on one figure.

The real-world references are equally layered. Crowley’s writings, Christian apocalyptic imagery, Nazi occult legends, and Catholic history provide cultural material. The comic’s claim that those traditions describe a literal entity with political power is fictional. Historical background must identify the documented sources and later mythmaking without presenting the comic’s synthesis as historical fact.

Kennedy, the Pope, and the alleged assassination

According to the account, John F. Kennedy learned that the Department was attempting to summon the Devil. In coordination with the Pope, he tried to eliminate the organization. Lee allegedly responded by taking matters into his own hands and using contacts built during his Department service to kill the president. The story therefore turns the Kennedy assassination into an internal conflict between a president who wants to shut down the reality program and an operative who wants to control it.

The claim is not presented as a documentary reconstruction of the historical assassination. It is an in-universe explanation designed to give Lee motive, the Department a hidden vulnerability, and the Woman in Red a place at the origin of modern American trauma. The issue’s use of the Pope and Kennedy also emphasizes the temptation to make a complex event the product of a small number of secret actors.

The story leaves several questions open. It does not identify which Pope participated, explain how Kennedy learned the Department’s plans, or show the operational chain between Lee and the shooting. It also does not resolve how this version relates to the competing assassination accounts in issues #16 and #17. The contradictions are part of the evidence problem rather than errors to be silently reconciled.

Summoning the Woman in Red and reaching the Moon

The account says that Lee finally summoned the Devil, identified here as the Woman in Red. He then spent the next decade uncovering the arcane power into which the Department had stumbled, studying under magicians, and summoning monsters into existence. Once he understood the scope of the power, he used it to get Americans to the Moon. This is the issue’s most direct connection between the Woman in Red mythology and the moon-landing material from issues #17 through #19.

The wording “get Americans to the Moon” is intentionally ambiguous. It can mean that Lee used reality manipulation to make the mission possible, that he created the public image of the landing, or that he changed the relationship between the broadcast and the physical event. Black Hat’s account does not provide technical mechanics. It uses the moon as proof of Lee’s reach and as an example of a national story that could become real when enough people accepted it.

The sequence must not be read as a claim about the real Apollo program. Within the comic, the moon landing is part of a fictional struggle over consensus reality. Outside the comic, Apollo 11 is a documented NASA mission with an extensive historical record. The story’s deliberate use of a real conspiracy motif makes the separation especially important.

Nixon and the hidden ruler

The account continues by saying that even Nixon became afraid of Lee’s power. Lee allegedly used that power to remove Nixon from office and become the secret ruler of the United States government from the shadows. The claim turns presidential succession into a manifestation of invisible authorship. Public institutions continue to operate, but the person who controls the underlying story is no longer accountable to them.

The image of Lee as a hidden ruler also explains the Department’s obsession with preserving a national story. If Lee is using the organization’s discoveries to dominate the government, then every intervention can be interpreted as either defense against him or evidence of his control. Black Hat’s version makes the Department look like Lee’s instrument, while the Department’s own testimony may describe it as the only barrier preventing Lee from rewriting the country completely.

Nothing in the issue independently confirms that Lee removed Nixon or became the secret ruler. The claims should be linked to the character’s history and to the later revelations about the Department, but retained as allegations until the canon supplies corroborating evidence.

The Star-Faced Man and Cole’s adult life

The account says Lee became powerful enough to gather acolytes across the country. His chief agent was a high priest who carried an inverted pentagram scar across his face. Cole eventually exposed the program in the late 1980s, but the people involved convinced him it was all a dream. It was not until Cole’s adult life that the old system began to chase him again, using the Star-Faced Man to keep Lee Harvey Oswald’s deep state alive and place him at the heart of the American Dream.

This passage offers a possible explanation for the Star-Faced Man’s design. The figure is not merely a monster generated by public belief. It is described as an instrument made to preserve Lee’s influence and pursue Cole across different stages of his life. The claim connects Cole’s childhood trauma, his later FBI career, and his recruitment into the Department as one long operation.

Cole’s response is immediate disbelief. He says the account cannot be true, but disbelief does not end the conversation because Black Hat has supplied names, institutions, and events that overlap with Cole’s experience. The chapter therefore weaponizes the same evidentiary structure used throughout the series: a false story can contain accurate details, and an accurate detail can be used to support a larger fiction.

The reporters, the Soviet informant, and Ruby’s choice

Black Hat tells Ruby that Cole’s former colleagues at the Washington Post uncovered the story and that Lee had Cole kill them to cover it up. The speaker then identifies a former head of the Soviet division who brought records to Black Hat and helped the organization fight back against Lee. That informant is now dead, and Black Hat expects Ruby to consider the possibility that the same fate awaits her, perhaps by Cole’s hand.

Ruby says the account is insane. Her reaction matters because the story is asking her to reinterpret her marriage as evidence of an intelligence operation. If Cole killed reporters, then his intimacy with Ruby could be surveillance. If Black Hat is lying, then the recruitment scene is an attempt to destroy trust by making every fact about Cole appear sinister. The issue does not allow Ruby to resolve the choice through a single piece of proof.

Black Hat asks Ruby to persuade Cole to turn his back on the Department. The stated goal is to strip Lee of the power he believes he controls and save the country. The request reveals that Black Hat’s strategy depends on personal influence as much as institutional exposure. Ruby is not merely a witness. She is being positioned as the person who can change Cole’s reality from inside his own home.

Continuity significance

Issue #20 is a turning point because it presents a full causal chain linking Nazi occult mythology, the Department, the Ministry of Lies, Lee’s recruitment, the Woman in Red, Kennedy, the Moon, Nixon, the Star-Faced Man, and Cole’s adult life. The chain is not yet a settled chronology. It is a Black Hat account that may contain truth, distortion, or strategic invention.

The issue also establishes the importance of Ruby as a political and epistemic actor. She is asked to choose whether Cole is an operative who has been manipulated, a killer who is hiding his crimes, or a person trapped between institutions that both want to use her. Her decision will affect Cole’s loyalties, but it will also determine which version of the past she is willing to carry forward.

The final movement leaves the central question unanswered: is Lee the hidden author of the American story, or is Black Hat building a story about him in order to replace the Department’s reality with its own? The series has not yet provided enough evidence to choose between those accounts. That unresolved conflict is the issue’s most important canon fact.

Real-world references

The issue invokes the end of the Second World War, Nazi occult narratives, Aleister Crowley and Babalon, the Book of Revelation, John F. Kennedy, the papacy, Richard Nixon, the Apollo program, Satanic Panic, Washington Post journalism, and Cold War intelligence. The supernatural secret, Lee’s hidden rule, the summoning of the Woman in Red, and Cole’s alleged murders are fictional claims within the comic.

Historical background should identify the documented record of Kennedy, Nixon, Apollo 11, Crowley, Catholic history, and Satanic Panic before explaining how the comic adapts those subjects. The issue’s power comes from the tension between a recognizable history and a fictional explanation that tries to absorb it.