KGC...........Knights of the Golden Circle................KGC...........like KGB.........spy vs spy..................nothing but CIA and KGB.....................they were going around telling everyone that I am the CIA's whatever................w/o my permission.........highly illegal...........to use someone's name like that.............but in the USA it doesn't matter...........................




On April 15, 1865, five days after the end of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth and Michael O'Laughlen enter a tavern in Washington DC and approach Thomas Gates to decode a message in Booth's diary. Thomas recognizes the message as using the Playfair cipher and begins to translate it. While he does so, Booth leaves for Ford's Theatre and assassinates President Abraham Lincoln. Thomas solves the puzzle and realizes the men are members of the Knights of the Golden Circle and are Confederate sympathizers. A fight breaks out, and Thomas rips several pages from the diary and throws them in the fireplace. Thomas is shot, and the gunman retrieves only a page fragment.
More than 140 years later, Thomas's great-great grandson Ben Gates delivers a lecture on the story at a Civilian Heroes conference. Black market antiquities dealer, Mitch Wilkinson, shows one of the 18 missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary, with Thomas Gates' name written on it, convincing everyone that Thomas was not only a conspirator, but also the grand architect of the Lincoln assassination. Ben sets out to prove the innocence of Thomas.