The sampling of experiences and highlighted points in history in this book are just grazing the surface of what I witnessed and was forced to be involved in. To write it all would require thousands of pages. I saw more exploitative coercion and callous death in the United States than I ever witnessed anywhere else, possibly because there is more there, or possibly because I was trapped with the offices that do the most harm. Both answers being correct is also a valid possibility.
Because I was still unskilled back then and always available for use, there were occasions on which they quite literally left me to clean it up.
As an example, there was an incident during my freshman or sophomore year of high school, so roughly between 1991 and 1993. The recruiter and her group had brought Middle Eastern men with demolition crew experience into the United States on fake Moroccan passports with marriage green cards, after paying several local women in New Haven and New York City to marry the men to get them into the country. One of the women was the recruiter’s sister, a music teacher I had met in my first days in the U.S. in her tiny Bronx apartment. Another was a cousin with a part-time journalism job who had been living in an apartment in her parents’ multifamily home. They were both in their 30s or early 40s at the time. They would both go from having small apartments (rented and rent-free from parents, respectively) to being owners of nice homes on large lots in preferred neighborhoods. It is highly likely that they received funds for the home purchases from their participation in the scheme.
It was clear that the recruiter selected family members because they were close enough to her to tightly control, and controlling them was necessary. The fake marriages would be rocky, obviously, because the men had to live with the women enough to pass Immigration scrutiny. We spent a lot of time in the women’s apartments in those years, talking them through things and coming up with solutions. It was sad, in a way, because the cousin had fallen for the fantasy and was actually upset that her fake marriage wasn’t working out. There were a lot of emotions involved in keeping up the farce.
However, there were worse conflicts between some of the men, and one of them ended up murdered, apparently at the hands of another of the men imported for the planned criminal yet government-funded demolition project. The office at my high school received a call from the recruiter about an “emergency” with instructions directing me to an address near her cousin’s house. I took the city bus and arrived in time to see them working on dragging the body away.
The recruiter’s cousin was still standing there, visibly shaking and in shock. She nervously talked to me while I ate my sandwich from school in the open kitchen and watched them haul the dead man away. She asked me how I could eat in that situation. I just looked at her. I didn’t have a way to respond. How do you tell someone, whose biggest issues are what to wear and who to fall in love with, that when you’re always surrounded by chaos, you don’t let the chaos dictate your health, your hunger, or your well-being? Or at least you try not to.
Eventually, everyone left and I was handed the keys. Alone in the silence of that small apartment, I cleaned up the blood and tidied up everything else. The entire time, I wondered if I was dropping hair somewhere, if I’d left a fingerprint, and if I had left any trace of myself at all. Honestly, I knew I had. I was never a professional crime scene cleaner. I was thrown into so many insane situations that required a professional, and I just had to try my best. This was no different. For decades I stayed silent, partly because I wondered if I would get blamed for a crime because those were my fingerprints on the cleanup. Looking back at it, I no longer feel the same, not about that murder. I was fourteen or fifteen, a little too young to be masterminding events with men who shouldn’t have even been in the country and who were about to be implicated in something that was much bigger than a young teenage girl with a $5 allowance to buy a sandwich.
I was standing among giants in the intel community, and all I could do was act as if I was okay with it, as if I were somehow magically unaware of what was going on. On more days than I can count, I came within inches of death because of it. On several occasions, it went beyond that line, and I needed to be revived.
And sometimes, I was there for more than the cleanup.
One summer evening, I was standing across the street from the Daily Cafe near Yale, bored and smoking a cigarette by myself. It was something I had done at least a hundred times before. Someone a few years older than me, whom I had met a couple of times before socially, pulled up alongside the curb and started talking to me. He asked if I wanted to drive with him to the nearby parking lot while he parked his car. I got in the car since the parking lot was only a block away. It may have been a little dumb of me. Especially when you consider that we didn’t go to the parking lot.
He kept driving another block or two down Elm Street until we got to a part where the street lights had been broken out. In the darkest section, he stopped the car in the middle of the street. Another car pulled up right alongside us and did the same. He told me to get into the other car, so I piled into it. It was crowded with several people, including a woman I had met once before with George, only a few blocks from the FBI building.
When I met her the first time, George had pulled up in his car with her already sitting in the passenger seat (entirely unexpected, he’d never given me a ride from classes), to pick me up on Audubon Street, right as I was walking out from where I was taking jewelry-making and acting courses through the Creative Arts Workshop and a basement dance and theater studio in the building across the street. His picking me up wasn’t so obviously as clandestine of a situation as I would end up in with her next, but he still seemed nervous and hurried. And, like I said, it was entirely out of character for him. While in the car together, she seemed overly interested in me and asked to see my jewelry while we drove. I showed her a pair of metal earrings that I had made that day. She asked if she could buy them from me.
The next time I saw her, this time in the darkness of the crowded car on Elm Street, one of the first things I would notice about her was the glinting metal of one of those earrings dangling from an ear. I don’t normally fixate on women, notice what they’re wearing, or even talk to them most of the time. After listening to so many females screaming in the prison when I was little, and then being exploited by a woman since the moment I left that prison, it has been rare that I can stand their voices, trust them, or find much in common with them other than the occasional need to learn something from them about clothing sizes and makeup.
But there she was, and something about her stuck in my mind. Sometimes I wonder if I saw something familiar in her. Maybe she was an aunt or a cousin of mine. I spent a lot of life searching for my mother in every face I came across, and in parts of my own reflection, so it wasn’t unusual that I would consider it when looking at her. The only difference was it felt like I might have finally found something.
That’s when the driver took a left off Elm Street and headed into an area with off-campus Yale housing.
We parked and then snuck behind one of the residential buildings and down into its mostly unfurnished basement. It was summer and the majority of students had gone home. The building was vacant except for us. There in the semi-darkness stood the old man the people in the car had wanted me to meet. He spoke for ages and told me about my family, about aunts and uncles I had never heard the names of before, about how they were doing and what they were up to. He spoke for what must have been at least an hour. I had no idea what he was talking about. I acted polite and listened because he was an old man, but I was sure he was senile and had me confused with someone else. In retrospect, and considering the situation, that first judgment of mine may have been incorrect.
Later that evening I would go upstairs to one of the several apartments in the building. Most of the people from the car were there, plus a few others. One of them had gotten ahold of my journal after a friend of a friend stole it. The man holding my journal was a conspiracy theory writer in the making at the time (he would become published later) and he was absolutely convinced that I was a “high-level Illuminati mind-controlled slave.” Things got a little weird from there, I’m not going to lie. He told me that I needed to get in the apartment’s tub to read the journal because “water breaks the mind control.” I humored him and got in the tub, with my clothes on because I wasn’t quite willing to humor him enough to strip naked and read to an apartment full of people while sitting in a tub. I can’t remember what part of the journal he was the most interested in. Maybe I need to get in a tub with a notebook and think about it…(that last sentence was a joke).
Not to spoil the fun, but I wasn’t mind-controlled in quite the way he probably thought. I was primarily silenced by fear, still following the advice of my mother to be a good victim, and also heavily drugged and pliable on that particular day because I had run into the recruiter downtown. I’ll get more into the details of that last part later.
I met with him and parts of that group a few more times over the following weeks in a different apartment on Park Street. He had a manuscript for one of his books that he insisted that I read, in order. It was a dull, long, and dry genealogy of at least twenty-three influential families. I wanted to skip ahead to get to the chapter on the Bush family, but he insisted I start at chapter one. Did I mention that I’m not good with names and that it’s useless to make me read a book that is almost entirely names? I absorbed less than 1% of that reading. It turned out that I would not have the opportunity to make it to the chapter on the Bush family. That chapter also never made it into the published edition.
The next time I went to visit at that Park Street building, the recruiter was already there, waiting for me in front of it. Seeing her resulted in a sudden kick of anxiety. She led me inside, telling me that everything I was about to witness was my fault (No, I don’t believe her. It’s more likely this was continuing cleanup from Operation Condor, since the majority of the people in that room were from South America). Inside the lobby, most of the members of the group were lined up against the walls furthest from the door. There were men who appeared to be SWAT (all dressed in black with rifles that were drawn and pointing at the backs of the heads of three people on their knees in the center of the room). During all of this, the recruiter continued to berate me and insist that their deaths were on my hands. That I was responsible. As the first shot was fired, I turned my head to avoid seeing the result. I still don’t know how many people died. I left the building and never looked back.
I spent the next week attempting to locate the survivors. I didn’t know what I would do when I found them, but I had to try something. Finding them was the first step. I went to the New Haven Police Station, several New Haven Police substations, and the Yale Police Station. No one knew where they were, until the last one. The officer at the desk there told me that the group had been taken by the FBI. When I asked what prison they were brought to, he couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. There was a record of them leaving a New Haven jail in FBI custody, but no record of where they had been brought to.
Years later, that would-be author showed back up, alive, in another part of the country. His books were published but there was something different about them. Instead of the dry academic and thorough writing about more than twenty families, he had brought the number down to thirteen families and the pages were full of ranting religious rhetoric. I think they tortured him until they broke him and he reverted to religious belief to a manic level, in his mind’s bid for self-preservation and escape. His father was a minister, so it makes sense that’s the safety his thoughts would go to during torture. My mind focuses on the pain and turns it inside out into something else, but I’m another story entirely.
The point is, they broke that man. Is basic information really so dangerous that we need to destroy people to protect them from it? Seriously. How many people need to be protected from what is already common knowledge – that rich people with resources exist, that they have families just like the rest of us, and that some of them influence the industries and countries they own and live in? And the concept that some, or even a large percent, of the population might be manipulated and duped – is that really a state secret? Is it worth destroying lives over?
I found an online live chat he was in years later and quietly listened in, afraid to say anything that might spook him. He spoke about an execution and still sounded shaken up by it. There’s little doubt in my mind about what execution he was referring to.
Next: Subversion