Twice every year, the FBI assembles the National Mission Force for Marble Challenge, a complex inter-agency test of the ability of the blackest parts of the federal government to find and “render safe” a ticking nuclear bomb. It is the domestic counterpart exercise to Vital Archer I wrote about yesterday that takes place in Canada, and a drill that has become more and more sophisticated over the years, folding in not just conventional and unconventional military assets but also scientists from the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Marble Challenge, according to a March 2015 DOE report to Congress, seeks to “approximate the complexity of conducting operations on a nuclear/radiological device in the United States.” The device though is almost a piece of cake compared to the complexity of the laws and the Constitution, of the role of the states and the governors, and the competing interests in the bureaucracy. No wonder then, when the planners started to seriously contemplate the possibility of having to do this for real, the colliding force of ‘can do’ and can’t forced them to go even further underground. It is a world of extraordinary federal authorities that no one will publicly discuss.

On January 10, 2007, President Bush signed Annex II to the March 2006 Top Secret National Security Presidential Directive 46 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 15 setting out “National Counter-terrorism Strategy.” The follow on Annex, called “Consolidation and Updating of Outdated Presidential Counter-terrorism Documents” was necessary 10 months later because then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the powerful special operators within the black world did not want to give something up that they had been in charge of for years: namely the lead to conduct “render safe activities” inside the United States. Regardless of how you label it, the military just didn’t have the legal authority to operate so broadly inside the United States under the Constitution, even under the President’s implied authorities (unless there was a direct threat to the sovereignty of the United States): There was something called martial law but it could not be lawfully implemented under the circumstances of a terrorist attack. Well, not unilaterally by the military.

Annex II unambiguously transferred authority to conduct render safe activities from the Department of Defense to the FBI, a cataclysmic but little noticed change. The FBI is in charge inside the United States and in that, the law is preserved. But in that, other ominous fall out has occurred: the broadening of participation to include a gaggle of federal actors and the stripping of the Joint Special Operations Command of its former exclusive role has forced the creation of a deeper black hole, one that layers what is black underneath with what is even blacker, what is extraordinary.

One of the many problems with bringing everyone into the big tent of secret operations is seen in one of the actual briefings prepared for the Marble Challenge 10 exercise, which posited a nuclear explosion in Indianapolis and a mass migration of “radiated” people to California, which then set up a cordon and screening site on the highway at Barstow on the Nevada border.

It’s just not funny, the slide from the PowerPoint briefing, but it does punctuate the point that despite the challenge to find and render safe a nuclear terrorist device, which demands highly elite and trained forces on 24/7 call, federal enterprises left to their own devices transform into gigantic circus trains.

Under U.S. law, the Attorney General has the lead authority to investigate federal crimes, which includes the use or attempted use of a WMD; the FBI is designated lead federal agency for investigating WMD crimes. But something much worse than a second wave of al Qaeda hijackers with a nuke was brewing in that 2006-2007 time frame. A new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was learning to walk, the military’s Special Operations Command and Northern Command were heaped upon with new responsibilities, and the new Director of National Intelligence and his National Counterterrorism Center was encroaching on both military and FBI turf. The National Response Framework, initially prepared by the DHS and the National Implementation Plan for the Global War on Terror, drafted by the NCTC, purported to outline how federal agencies should all work together to implement a broader strategy to detect, prevent, and deter WMD events.

Annex II meanwhile got down to the brass tacks of actual stopping; none of that namby-pamby deterrence stuff. It required that FBI to be capable of responding to two simultaneous events (one in the nation’s capital and the other a planned “warned” deployment) while requiring the military to support those efforts as well as efforts of each of the regional commands, which in the case of Canada and Mexico meant NORTHCOM and for the rest of the western hemisphere meant the Miami-based Southern Command, which was then assigned a new render safe mission and its own equivalent of a Vital Archer exercise program called Fused Response.

There was no threat of a nuclear terrorist attack in Latin America, but that didn’t stop SOUTHCOM from smartly following orders, a move, according to one military officer, that put the command “on parity” with the other stars of the counter-terror war.

In 2011, SOUTHCOM held its first Fused Response exercise in the Dominican Republic, followed in 2012 with a nuclear terrorism exercise in Guyana and the a third in 2014 in Belize. The end of this week, Fused Response 15 will be held in Honduras. None of the press materials makes any mentions of WMD.

So what the FBI and the Joint Special Operations Command would really do in the United States when faced with a real live terrorist nuclear weapon is still a mystery, and under what authorities they would actually operate is also unknown. NORTHCOM recently initiated an exercise called Vital Challenge to support Marble Challenge inside the United States, but what role they would play outside of the National Mission Force is unclear.

So there is a pretense of crossing all of the T’s and dotting all of the I’s, and “handling” a global problem by making sure that no country is left unturned. And I’m sure there are fantastic Hollywood-like capabilities lurking behind the Beverly Hillbillies and a bunch of milling about Guyanese soldiers. But on this edifice is built the distrust that fuels Jade Helm.

(Tomorrow, Part 3: The People Are Not So Crazy — the Truth behind Jade Helm)

(Photos: AP of FBI; Los Angeles County Department of Public Health; DOD)

You can contact me at william.arkin@gawker.com, and follow us at @gawkerphasezero. If you are into the theater of being underground, you can anonymously deliver tips through the Gawker Media SecureDrop. I’m open to your input and your questions, tough questions.