Philby Greenstreet is a cover name adopted by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter-intelligence (CI) officer W. Alan Howell (born 1934), a protege of legendary spymaster and Cold War architect James Jesus Angleton who turned sharply against his mentor over the conduct of Operation CHAOS during the Richard Nixon administration. The name Philby Greenstreet, however, purportedly became a great deal more than simply a cryptonym, assuming the proportions of urban legend, not unlike that of the mythical character Keyser Söze in the film "The Usual Suspects." In the argot of the intelligence services, such an assumed identity is, in fact, known as a "legend," designed to mislead or otherwise confuse the adversary. In Howell's case, however, the adversary seems to have been mostly the enemy within, as accounts have him fighting a nearly fifty year insurgency against more reactionary elements in the agency.
According to accounts credited to psychedelic guru Timothy Leary and attributed to alleged JFK mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, Howell's metamorphosis into Philby Greenstreet began on an August evening in 1962 when he was invited to Camp David to "drop acid" (take LSD) with the President of the United States. Along for the journey, according again to Leary's second-hand account, were "Captain" Alfred Matthew Hubbard, writer Aldous Huxley (who would die a little more than a year later on the very day of Kennedy's assassination), rat-packer and presidential brother-in-law Peter Lawford, and Mary Meyer herself. Howell had briefly been an attache to CIA Director Allen Dulles, accompanying Dulles to White House briefings of the president, and Kennedy had taken an immediate liking to the young intelligence officer which Howell himself later described as a "psychic kinship." To close the circle of coincidence, Howell's immediate supervisor at the CIA was Frank Wisner, who had also been the superior of Cord Meyer, who had been the husband of Mary Meyer, who was a close friend and confidante of Cicely d'Autremont, who was married to James Jesus Angleton. Meyer herself was murdered in 1964.
Based on records only now being released under a Freedom of Information Act request, the moniker "Philby Greenstreet" mutated and became, throughout the Reagan/Bush years and up to almost the present day, a collective identity and an emblem of discontent within the national security community. From the channels of government, the "legend" leapt to the internet, and from the internet to an alternate reality game known as The Gauntlet, in which Philby Greenstreet appears to have been both character and player. According to sources in the gaming community, the latest and potentially most transformative use of the name is its adoption by Matthew Ross-Hinge III, billionaire scion of a Colorado aerospace dynasty and an avid gamer himself. Ross-Hinge is credited with fostering the evolution of The Gauntlet into a persistent world, and of greatly expanding its presence, on and off the internet, as a chaotic fiction.