I may not have had family, and the recruiter was never human enough to me to be a replacement for family, but I did have research scientists and domestic counterintelligence who spent enough time in my vicinity to almost qualify. One, who I mentioned earlier, was George Edwards, a man that newspapers, including the New York Times, regularly published entire articles on that could have easily been summed up as “He’s not a federal agent, we swear!” I’ll show you some of those articles shortly. I grew to know him to the point that he did nearly replace family, at least for a couple of years. He was the only one I had any loyalty to in that mess. Out of respect for his life and career, I waited until he died before writing about his full involvement.
Most of the scientists I only met when they needed an assistant in their office to go through stacks of participant files or other mundane and repetitive work. The counterintelligence agents I would first be introduced to behind closed doors, I would see again at protests, marches, crop harvesting, political campaign offices, grassroots organization meetings, illicit recruitment drives, and coffee shops. Once in a while, there would be a crossover, and they and the scientists could be found in the same place.
Many of them had been recruited by the same mechanism I had been illegally adopted through. They had been offered an escape from prison, threats of death, and criminal or war crimes charges, and they took it. Some had a history of domestic terrorism and activism within the United States, and some had come from foreign countries and predicaments similar to my mother’s. As I mentioned, we even had a few leftover aging Nazi scientists of our own, from the recruitment of that era. However, most of those human relics of World War II began retiring right around the time I reached New Haven.
I understand the need for an infiltrated system. An unpenetrated one may be cohesive enough to be a true danger to other countries. However, the foreign and enemy self-inoculation of military and intelligence via unethical recruitment processes that take advantage of wounds of war comes with psychological aspects and unmet needs among the recruited that, when left unresolved and unacknowledged, endanger us all.
While many of those I met held deep-seated resentment, anger, and sadness, there were some who seemed to have adapted (but then, many people thought the same of me). I fully acknowledge that I have experienced the full range of those emotions, as well as a few fleeting moments of hope, over the course of my life and service.
There is a deep-set pain caused by being enslaved by the enemy and being forced to work in intelligence and weapons research that is aimed at the destruction of your own people. It drills all the way down to a person’s core and then keeps going.
As at-odds as it may seem, I felt most comfortable speaking to the people involved in my abuse and the abuses I witnessed, when it came to how I was really feeling and why. I didn’t have to worry about them not comprehending what I was talking about. I didn’t have to explain what was making me miserable or uncomfortable. They already knew.
I could be closer to my complete self with some of them than I could with anyone else. They were the only people who held my secrets and knew them to be true without refutation. Even as I write this I feel like I’m trying to climb an insurmountable wall to make someone on the outside understand. I didn’t have that issue with them. They were right there on the inside with me. They had seen the damage caused. They were a large part of what caused it.
And I do feel deeply for the ones I have met (and those I haven’t met yet), even many of the ones who have caused me great harm. All people should be free, and they are my people. I feel their pain more deeply than I feel the pain of anyone else, with the exception of the children they harm. I feel their pain because it is mine.
Life is complicated. Without love, I settled for finding comfort in intelligence and reason. Unfortunately, a world that has been taught to self-deceive, in an act of respect for the lies of others, tends to be a little short on reason, even within Intelligence.