Take the blindfold off and walk away from the ledge.
Pushing people over it won’t save you.
They’re tied to you.
(And yes, I know this advice is difficult to follow.
There are days I can see the benefit
of pushing all of Argentina off a cliff, myself.)
Back on the ground in New Haven (and sometimes Hartford, Washington D.C., and other primarily East Coast locations), there was much more going on. Directly in front of my eyes, politicians were leashed and business owners were harassed. In my presence, and often with my assistance, healthy children and cancer patients were manipulated into becoming Department of Defense test subjects for various projects “for their benefit” and almost inevitably resulting in their injury or death.
It always shocked me how easily the parents of children fell for the fraud. All it took was promising their children “opportunity,” the magic word of America that works just as well domestically as it does internationally. I will never shake off the memory of the deceased body of one of those children. She was a beautiful blonde child and a good friend to me for the short time that I knew her. I witnessed her snuffed out by scientists before her time in a room accessed from the halls beneath Yale New Haven Hospital.
I will always mourn her, even though I feel alone in my grief, as if she has been long forgotten by everyone else.
In the period of time in which she died, the recruiter would have me guide children from medical lab to medical lab throughout the day for various clinical research projects and then several blocks away to a local community center to be picked up by their parents from “camp.” These were generally the low-income children whose parents the recruiter had conned into giving her medical guardianship. At the end of one day, I had already collected a Jamaican girl who was roughly my age and we walked down the hall together to find the blonde girl to bring with us to the “camp” parent pickup area. The room door was on our right as we walked down that hall. We entered and there was that girl, on the floor, dead, in front of a small therapeutic pool. Other than her, the room was void of people. They had just left her body there alone. The two of us responded quite like you’d assume girls would, shrieking and jumping around as if we had just seen the biggest spider ever.
Researchers heard our screams and came running. They gave the girl I was with a small cup of drugs to calm her down or help her forget (I’d assume more the latter) and the day went on from there. That evening, they crowded most of the parents into a room in the back of the nearby Jewish Community Center, the building they had used as a camp front for the research. They told the parents it had been a tragic accident that had happened while the children were having swimming lessons in a large pool in that community center, blocks away from the small room where that child had died alone, other than the presence of researchers. The parents accepted the explanation, although many reasonably pulled their children from the camp, and thus the research projects, after that night.
When the deceased girl’s mother entered the room, I tried to say something. I was never great with emotional things; for me they were too raw to summarize in hollow and perfunctory statements such as “I’m sorry for your loss.” I had buried my own feelings so deep to survive through those years that I didn’t know how to adequately express my deep regret, empathy, and pain. As I was trying to find the words, the recruiter swept in between us, guided the woman into a dark room, and drugged her. Within about five minutes, that mother walked out of the dark room, having easily accepted the lie that her daughter’s tragic end was an innocent death, a swimming accident. She actually seemed to be unnaturally at peace with the loss.
While much of that mother’s response was due to the drugs, my heart sank when I saw it. The recruiter had been using strong hypnotics in those years. A suggestion seeded and formed while on the drugs tended to persist in a person long after the drugs faded. In fact, it almost always became a central thought and way of thinking. Those the recruiter drugged were often described as having “changed overnight,” and many never returned to their prior beliefs.
Before that moment, I thought that a child’s death would be enough to wake a parent from their slumber if nothing else was. I was proven wrong.
As for that Jewish Community Center, according to the Ethnic Heritage Center and New Haven Independent, the building had already been sold or was in the transitory hand-off period by that time (the sale was initiated in 1985 and final closing ceremonies were in the early summer of 1986). I did not first meet the Jamaican child, who witnessed the body with me, until the summer of 1986. Meaning, that particular “camp” was either during the end of the transitory period or was falsely running in the name of the established community center, using their prior reputation, even though the people who had established that reputation had handed over the keys, left the sign in place above the door, and had already relocated to another area.
Actually, the history of a Catholic school I went to was much the same – people taking advantage of a reputation established by a prior administration, but I digress…
Image Source: New Haven Independent
“New Haven’s Jewish Community Center was downtown on Chapel Street in those days…It no longer is in that Chapel Street building. (Yale’s art school is.)
In August of 1985, the JCC decided to lease and renovate a fitness facility on South Bradley Road in Woodbridge…The sale of the Chapel Street (New Haven) building was finalized that December…
The Chapel Street era officially ended on Saturday, June 21, 1986, with a commemorative party.”
Text Source: New Haven Independent
Image: Chapel Street Jewish Community Center Building
Image Source: The Ethnic Heritage Center
While I was there, they did have a camp in the building, or at least activities, and we attended once in a while to make the farce seem legit. It was sitting in a gymnasium room in that Jewish Community Center where I once played the parachute game with other children. We would sit in a circle and loft a large and colorful parachute into the air between us. Then, we would run under it, the chaos of our movement hidden under the material as it fell back to the ground. Beneath that parachute, we would seek a way out and find a new place to sit. Once everything was over, every spot to sit was taken, but no child remained in their original place. That is how I see war, especially as a child of it. In the chaos of war, so many of us change positions, that within a few rounds, no one knows what side they are on, what side they started on, or who their enemy is. Have a few generations play that game under a policy of secrecy and deception, and the chaos becomes complete.
At least when the recruiter preyed on adult cancer patients, rather than healthy children, you knew she was probably ending their painful struggle by bringing them to the mercy of death more quickly. Although, her recruitment tactics were still highly unethical (and so was giving patients false hope when the only intention was to use them for the benefit of weapons research for “national security”).
To target some of the cancer patients, she would bring me along for trips on the New Haven to New York Amtrak train and she carried along a small and relatively discreet handheld Geiger counter for radiation monitoring. She’d wander through the train cars until she located someone who had radiation treatment recently enough that they could cause the numbers on the Geiger counter to spike.
Then she would tuck away the Geiger counter and sit next to them as if she were simply a fellow passenger in need of a seat. She would strike up a friendly conversation, which she would quickly steer in the direction of health until they spoke about their cancer treatment. From there, she would exclaim, “Oh, what an amazing coincidence!” The recruiter would go on to tell them that she worked for Yale New Haven Hospital, that she was a cancer researcher there, and that she just happened to know of an excellent research program that had one remaining available space.
As far as I know, every single one of those conned cancer patients died.
And her little, “I’m a cancer researcher” spiel she would tell so many of her marks? Technically, maybe she was early in her career. Those were some of the labs and projects she would end up supervising as time went on. However, the research projects I saw her sign off on covered a somewhat wider variety, and not just nuclear and biological.
When it came to what she told others, her credentials and title seemed to change to match whomever or whatever her mark was. She once told the public and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in official documents intended to be used in court, that she had a background in Environmental Sciences.
Image Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission
“.. holds an AA degree in Environmental Science, was employed as a technician for United Aircraft Research Laboratories… a cost estimator and expeditor for metal fabrication firms, an engineering assistant for the City of New Haven, CT…. She serves as chief executive officer (Coordinator) of CCMN, Inc.”
Text Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission
It would switch over to nuclear engineering or nuclear medicine when speaking with antinuclear organizations or potential research subjects.
Image Source: 2013 Screenshot Facebook
“When I worked at Yale’s School of Medicine, in cancer research within the radiation therapy department.”
Text Source: 2013 Screenshot Facebook
Image Source: Google Profiles 2013 Screenshot
“United Aircraft Research Labs MHD Engineering aide, Yale Medical Library…Yale School of Medicine – Cancer Research…Yale……UCONN, Yale, Goddard, Nursing School… ”
Text Source: Google Profiles 2013 Screenshot
I was growing up in a situation entirely devoid of ethics or honesty, and in which children were not protected, although we were often there to make a dangerous situation appear normal and safe. Illusion is not the same as reality.
We were never safe.
And neither was anyone else.
Shortly after our arrival in New Haven, the recruiter started bringing me along to “Yale movie nights.” They seemed innocent enough, especially if you bring a child along to manufacture an appearance of the safe and innocent. The York Square Cinema was a small theater located on the edge of campus back then. On one weekday per week, the recruiter’s group would rent out the entire theater, barring anyone else from using it, lock the doors, and only permit Yale students who had responded to a flyer to enter. The flyers, posted all over campus, had promised a series of radical movies. The movies highlighted concepts like apartheid, the struggle of grassroots organizations to fight against corporations to stop the poisoning of towns by waste runoff, guerrilla warfare, and other topics of interest to young anti-authoritarian or cognizant students.
We would pile everyone in and start the movie. The theater refreshment stand was closed (although as a child brought along by the representative of the organization renting the space, I would still manage to sneak a bag of Twizzlers before everyone arrived). “Luckily,” the people running the series brought refreshments for everyone and would have a drink dispenser and a bowl of snacks available on a table they set up in the back of the movie theater room we would be occupying for the evening. The beverage in the dispenser was spiked – most likely with whatever expert scopolamine derivative was coming out of the Yale chemistry lab at the time (I’ll get more into that later), i.e., a strong hypnotic.
Then, we would watch the movie. Three or four organizers would watch the Yale students to see what their reactions were throughout the movie. That is how they would decide which ones to target. It was the same routine every time. They’d slide up into the seat next to the ideal ones, start a conversation, and lead them off before the end of the night. I have no idea what happened to the students after that. They were Yalies, so I can reasonably assume they didn’t go entirely missing or end up sold into cancer research. But I do know they left in a highly drugged state, with the type of people who do exploitative, unthical, and blackmail-tinged recruitment. What the recruiter had been doing at the university and in the prisons of Buenos Aires was pretty much the same thing she was doing in New Haven, just with a little more tact since we weren’t in the middle of active state terrorism in 1980s Connecticut.
Did you really think a tiger, or a government, changes its stripes just because it’s in its own neighborhood? That’s where the tiger gets more confident.
It owns the place.
Later, beliefs-based recruitment would come more frequently from the shanty town, where George Edwards was ever-present. That shanty stood, aesthetically very out of place, in the plaza between Yale’s Woolsey Hall and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for about two years.
Image: Shanty on Yale Campus
Image Source: Yale Alumni Magazine
Image Source: New Haven Independent
“He was mostly known as an omnipresence on New Haven streets, in settings formal and informal, with stories to tell and points to make. When activists built a shantytown to push Yale to divest from apartheid South Africa, Edwards was there to help build the structures.”
Text Source: New Haven Independent
Image: Shanty on Yale Campus
Image Source: Yale Alumni Magazine
This type of involvement is standard for the agencies, although it is yet another classifiable form of “embarrassment.”
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency
“The three individuals named by (redacted) did in fact participate in both the training and support during demonstrations…Of extreme sensitivity in the fact that these same individuals were engaged in other highly sensitive activities which could cause the Agency severe embarrassment if they were surfaced today…”
Image Text: Central Intelligence Agency
Next: Demolition Crews