Project Christmas
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Project Christmas is a fictional black ops project from the television show Alias. Developed by the Central Intelligence Agency and headed by Jack Bristow in the 1970s, the project was designed to identify and train children as sleeper agents to become future spies. The KGB assigned Irina Derevko to marry Jack in order to steal the plans of Project Christmas.
It was stated in the Alias season 2 episode The Indicator that "the best spies have certain traits: proficiency with numbers, three dimensional thinking, creative problem solving. These abilities are all in evidence as early as five years old." Project Christmas was based upon this; an operation to train children to be American spies.
Sydney Bristow stumbles across the project in season 2 while on a mission to Budapest to retrieve information on 16 "next-generation weapons" being developed by a loose alliance of criminal syndicates known as "The Triad."
The "weapons" turn out to be sixteen six year-old children seen assembling handguns while blindfolded. Upon returning to Los Angeles, Sydney learns from an "Agent Kerr" that the children were identified through a series of questions embedded in standardized tests administered to every six year-old child in the European Union. 28 children were identified that year and the 16 who Sydney saw were recruited through their parents under the false pretense of participating in a month-long achievement seminar.
After the month ended, the children's memories were altered so that they had no recollection of the training. Kerr advises Sydney that there were rumors that the KGB had been developing a similar program in the early 1980s but that they had never been confirmed. Shortly thereafter that man who was training the 16 children is identified as Valerie Kholokov, former head of the KGB's Psych Ops division. The CIA placed all the children under surveillance to intercede should the Triad ever contact them in the future.
On a mission to Buenos Aires to recover Kholokov, Sydney encounters a block puzzle ("the indicator") and instinctively solved it. She felt like she remembered it rather than solved it. Back in Los Angeles, Sydney has Agent Kerr hypnotically regress her back to the time she first saw the puzzle. She sees herself as a little girl at home, first solving the puzzle and then handling a handgun. Jack is with her. Sydney realized that Jack subjected her to Project Christmas, programming her to be a spy.
Michael Vaughn independently hires Will Tippin to research Project Christmas after an asset in Moscow sent Vaughn a copy of a test questionnaire administered to Soviet children in the 1980s. Vaughn noted the similarity to I.Q. tests administered to American children in the same timeframe and thought that the Soviets might have used the information stolen by Irina to identify and recruit American children. Will discovers that the questions were incorporated into tests that were administered in 1982 to some five million children. Vaughn passed Will's research to his superiors, who passed it along to the FBI. Will further identified a number of children who had gotten perfect scores on the tests and who had then attended a summer camp together, and realized that these children had been subjects. One of the children he identified was Allison Doren, who would later be subjected to Project Helix and transformed into a double of Will's girlfriend Francie Calfo.
During the two years between seasons 2 and 3, Sydney was undercover with The Covenant. That organization attempted to brainwash her into becoming an assassin, but her Project Christmas conditioning made her impervious.
In the season 3 finale, Sydney discovers papers discussing a "project" headed up by Jack that began April 17, 1975, Sydney's birthday. Initially it seemed these papers would contain further revelations about Project Christmas and Jack and Sydney's roles in it, but by the start of season 4 it was revealed that the papers referred to the CIA's authorizing Jack to assassinate Irina.
In the series finale, a flash-forward shows Sydney and Vaughn's daughter Isabelle assembling the indicator puzzle, suggesting that she shares her mother's potential. After completing it, Isabelle knocks over the puzzle and runs off, suggesting that Isabelle will have the freedom to choose her own path free from the interference and programming that shaped her mother's life.
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