There will always be people waiting
to be commanded to work against their own best interests.
And there will always be someone who has worked
their way into a position of authority,
or of influencing authority,
with their goals set on war, exploitation,
and seeking to command others through fear.
Not all among us are of a healthy mind.
These truths are as inevitable
as the birth of a child in the middle of their wars.
The recruiter, her cohort, and the department she was most directly associated with were lacking in morals and ethics. They were made immune from domestic, and in many cases international, laws due to their position and the perceived significance of their work within the Department of Defense.
They also had quite a few internal and inter-departmental issues. The New Haven Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office, the local office many of the adults in my small circle worked through, has been ranked as the most corrupt FBI office in the country, internally and by the FBI’s own agents. The group I was surrounded by was one of the primary reasons. However, even they felt the damage from it. Things are not neat and tidy in that mess. Everyone gets hurt.
Image Source: NECN
“Special Agent Kurt Siuzdak’s lawsuit, filed in 2014, exposed allegations of internal strife and dysfunction within the FBI’s main Connecticut office in New Haven. It also disclosed a 2013 visit to the New Haven office by then-Director James Comey, who apologized to employees for ‘the failure of the FBI’s executive management to correct the leadership failures’ in Connecticut…
He said FBI New Haven officials authorized unnecessary surveillance of him, gave him bogus bad performance reviews, and threatened to fire him on false allegations of attendance policy violations.“
Text Source: NECN
When people working in foreign intelligence come home to roost, they often have to change agencies and offices in order to work domestically, and there are bureaucratic routes that simplify the process. The New Haven FBI office, with its proximity to Yale, a prime Intelligence recruiting ground, is a top choice in the area for anyone within the agencies clawing for real power (it offers the opportunity of unrestricted access to heirs of the rich and powerful in their earliest adult years, when they are prime for recruitment and being influenced, having blackmail material made to use at a later date, or for directly influencing and accessing their parents).
Image Source: Yale Daily News
“A number of Yale graduates have worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor. They dominated the CIA’s leadership throughout the Cold War period and continue to join the agency in large numbers, said Diplomat-in-Residence Charles Hill, who teaches Studies in Grand Strategy with professors John Gaddis and Paul Kennedy.
CIA recruiters visit other college campuses, but they seem to have a predilection for Yalies — it could have something to do with ‘nostalgia for the Old Blue mentality,’ Hill said, or it could be that Yalies are simply more attractive candidates than their Ivy League counterparts.”
Text Source: Yale Daily News
That office became an interesting meeting point of corruption, CIA transfers, and a few crossovers with the DoD researchers who worked in the area, protected by the FBI and CIA-extended military intelligence umbrella.
And, yes, that mixture does happen. Doctor Charles Morgan, who will come up in this book later in conjunction with his publicized (and cited) New Haven-located FBI research, has for disclosure, reasons of public misdirection, or ego, chosen to allow MedScape to also note his CIA employment.
The recruiter isn’t the only one who drunk drives all over interdepartmental and ethical lines. Many of them, especially in the Yale and New Haven circles, do. Never underestimate those who are paid to ignore the rules, even the rules of secrecy they told you they follow. They may only pepper in the truth within manipulative methods to guide you in the direction they want you to go, but that doesn’t mean they are entirely averse to the truth. They simply tend to wield it a bit loosely. A little truth tends to make the rest of the deception that much easier to swallow.
Image Source: Medscape
“Charles Morgan, MD, a psychiatrist who worked for the CIA for 7 years…
Morgan, who teaches intelligence analysis at the University of New Haven, Connecticut.”
Text Source: Medscape
As I mentioned before, I spent a significant amount of time around one of the agents, George Edwards. He appeared to be primarily domestic, other than a short stint in England and possible involvement in active theaters of war early in his military career. He was a classically Yale Drama School-trained actor (even Yale openly admits to this) and is mentioned in countless articles that include COINTELPRO (the FBI’s counterintelligence program) and the Black Panther Party, who rightfully decided he was a federal agent.
Image Source: New Haven Independent
“…(George Edwards) was an engineer for the U.S Air Force from 1955 through 1961, when he was unceremoniously removed for his role in antimilitarism protests…
Yale School of Drama brought Edwards to New Haven, where he became a stalwart performer in the local Black Arts Movement.”
Text Source: New Haven Independent
George has been mentioned in news articles as having attacked a police officer with a chain, walking in the heavily populated downtown New Haven area with a rifle, and being arrested and imprisoned because of a Black Panther murder case. He then subsequently held front jobs working for the telephone company, the New Haven Health Department, and Yale University despite what was an extensive, published, and public record of erratic and criminal behavior by that point. It’s the type of behavior that usually does not get a person past the standard job application approval process.
Image Source: New York Times
“Mr. Edwards was given two suspended sentences after pleading guilty to two counts of aggravated assault. One dealt with the beating of Mr. Rackley and the second involved an earlier event in which Mr. Edwards used a length of chain to assault a police officer.”
Text Source: New York Times
Image: Black Panther Manifesto. George Edwards, Top Right.
Image Source: IberLibro
He was propped up over the years as a radical and a Black Panther by Yale, the authorities, and media outlets such as the New York Times, Yale Daily News, the New Haven Register, and the New Haven Independent. They also consistently made him out to be a victim of the FBI. The Black Panther Party did not agree. They were some of the original victims of his being a federal agent.
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency
“Although targeted overseas these agents are often exposed to and directed against American radical, leftist, and communist targets to gain a practical knowledge of the leftwing, radical, communist world. There is a possibility that an asset might become suspect and be accused of being an employee of the Agency or Bureau; or it might happen some asset would, for some reason, become disenchanted with his role and expose his Agency relationship and his activities, with resultant embarrassment. To minimize potential problems, therefore, each case is cleared with the FBI…”
Image Text: Central Intelligence Agency
The Black Panthers were so steadfast in their belief that they had held George at gunpoint, tortured him, and then refused to call him a Black Panther for thirty-seven years until Yale intervened and forced one of the prior members to apologize.
Image Source: New Haven Independent
“That ruse became fact in 1969 when a New York Panther named Alex Rackley was brought to New Haven for a show trial in the basement of an apartment at the old Ethan Gardens Coop on Orchard Street. The apartment served as New Haven Panther headquarters. The Panthers accused Rackley of being a government informant involved in disrupting the New York Section; it would later turn out that government informants indeed infiltrated that chapter (as well as New Haven’s), but Rackley wasn’t among them.
The Panthers tied Rackley to a chair and beat him and poured pots of boiling water over his body until he could come up with a story about serving as an informant. Edwards refused to participate in the torture. So they tied up Edwards too. With a .45 pointed at his head, he was ordered to ’confess.’”
Text Source: New Haven Independent
Image Source: New Haven Independent
“Another score to settle was with fellow Panther Warren Kimbro. One night in 2006 Kimbro spoke at the Yale Bookstore..
Edwards listened to Kimbro speak…
Then Edwards stood up. And the bookstore became his stage.
‘After 37 years, five months tomorrow,’ he told Kimbro, ’I want a public apology for having been tied up in that basement at gunpoint, under orders of [out-of-town Panther] George Sams, a .45 to my head.’”
Text Source: New Haven Independent
I would note that despite the Black Panther Party not acknowledging him as a member for thirty-seven years, he spent all of those years posing as one for the media, and he eventually went on to influence the New Black Panther Party directly. He would use the costume of a Black Panther radical within his undercover work infiltrating, organizing, and guiding grassroots organizations and movements for the FBI for roughly half a century.
As far as the general in-the-open infiltrating activities of the cohort I was stuck with, it’s often been more horrifying to watch than what I saw behind closed doors. I’ve felt helpless to prevent it. Even when I’ve stepped away from the perpetrators and whispered to their victims, those victims more often than not still chose to trust those preying on them because they promised false incentives and presented with a sense of authority. My voice was never quite loud enough to break through those illusions. I also had no polished gifts to promise them in exchange for their dealing with reality. I still don’t.
Relevant to George’s case while I was there, was his connection to the wiretapping (a persistent issue referenced in the FBI whistleblower article at the beginning of this chapter) that went on within and by the New Haven FBI office for decades. George, despite his publicized long history of problems with the law, held a job at the local telephone company. From what I remember, he would go to it when needed, to wiretap people’s apartments. It was not a full-time job, although it was listed as one. There were months at a time that he did not go, and yet they had no issue with him showing up when he needed to do something for the FBI.
Image Source: New Haven Independent
“He had day jobs working as a technician for Southern New England Telephone,”
…
“In 1983, New Haven agreed to pay 1,238 citizens a total of $1.75 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its massive illegal wiretapping operation. Victims were each awarded between $1,000 and $6,000 depending on how often they were illegally surveilled. Edwards, of course, got the full $6,000.”
Text Source: New Haven Independent
This was a man who openly complained about being wiretapped “as a radical” and actually received one of the largest payouts for having been the target of wiretapping (a payment which was blatant fraud, considering his employment with the telephone company as well as with the FBI). He was the one tapping the lines with a telephone company hat on. Even the media has admitted that he always worked for the phone company on an as-needed basis, except for a short break allowing the company to save face when he was publicly implicated in crimes.
They were paying a person who directly perpetrated the crime – and they were paying him from the victims’ fund.
While I was growing up in his presence, I never knew about the Black Panther Party’s problem with the man. He had me and everyone else around him absolutely convinced that he was a Black Panther. Each day, he would wear the full overdone outfit: pins representing the Black Panther Party in text or imagery, printed t-shirts that did the same, dashikis, berets, and other overtly Black Panther regalia. In retrospect, he was so incredibly obviously a Yale Drama-trained actor. No actual member of the Black Panther Party would have dressed like that on a daily basis. In fact, it’s doubtful that any went to that full amount and all at once, ever.
However, it never occurred to me that it was unusual, possibly because his partner, the recruiter, was at the same level of absurdly theatrical when it came to her anti-nuclear outfits – with multiple pins, printed antinuclear t-shirts, and even including full-body suit protective gear with a full gasmask on occasion. Frequently enough, she would openly carry an unnecessarily gargantuan Geiger counter. The Geiger counter she carried for show was a massive box-type Geiger counter. The one she actually used for herself (I’ll get into that later) was smaller and much easier to conceal. The terrifying thing is that, when she was infiltrating grassroots antinuclear organizations, they took her seriously and let her join their boards.
I know I’ve been lecturing everyone up until this moment about the seriousness of not allowing deceit to ruin a nation or the world, but I have to pause for a moment because when remembering these details, I’m breaking out into laughter. Any people capable of the level of delusion and lack of basic reasoning required to accept that overdramatic acting as genuine probably deserved exactly what they got.
Okay, I’ll now go back to attempting to plead with humanity to care for itself…
Yale further propped George up with their theater department:
Image Source: Yale Daily News
“Edwards…was one of the first members of New Haven’s chapter of the Black Panther Party. After coming to Connecticut to attend the Yale School of Drama,”
Text Source: Yale Daily News
An interesting little side note on that theater department:
I was once brought along to the David Geffen School of Drama theater on Yale campus by the recruiter. She had me sit two rows from the front in the empty theater. Then she told me, “You’re supposed to be drugged, so act like it.” It was a concerning statement, especially in the moment. A minute later, a very small group of other people came in. They began practicing what I would come to refer to as street acting. They were rehearsing to be believable in their roles when interacting with the public “spontaneously” outside of the theater. I sat in my seat, slightly terrified because I did not actually know what I looked like or behaved like when fully drugged, so I wasn’t sure how to fake it. On top of that, I had to convincingly fake it in front of what were clearly professional actors and spies. I stayed so incredibly still that I probably looked like a deer in the headlights.
Later, after they left, the recruiter gave me a little tour of the building, the lighting, and backstage. She explained that lighting was the most important aspect of stage work. An actor could move or speak in any manner, but it was the lighting they were cast in that made the audience perceive them in a certain way. It was the lighting that made the audience love or hate them. She said all the power is in the hands of the lighting crew. Knowing her, I was certain she was speaking about the use of media manipulation on the political and global stage.
Years later, when watching televised presidential debates and noticing how one candidate was cast in a diffused white angelic glow while the other candidate was under an unnaturally orange light, I nearly choked on my dinner because I was laughing so hard when thinking of it in that context. And it was in that context. A short block away from the theater, when taking a footpath, stood a society building on Yale’s campus that I would always refer to as the Political Actors’ Guild because that’s what they are in the context of the modern-day, and I abhor subterfuge. It was conveniently located on High Street, a short distance from the theater department, the law school, and Dwight Hall. That well-positioned Political Actors’ Guild has produced more U.S. presidents in our lifetime than any other.
A quick aside on Dwight Hall, in case you’ve looked into it and seen that they primarily focus on social issues, such as and including workers’ rights. While they may be good causes on the surface, they are causes that should be approached from a bottom-up perspective and not a top-down one. Allowing the seeds of these movements to be formed and informed by the rich, political powers, and industry that they will be negotiating with is not wise. Because those powerful will make sure their own interests are first met and that they are layered into any doctrine. Why wouldn’t they? The guidelines and rhetoric are being written in Ivy League university classrooms and those are the territory of the rich. The reality is that each and every group is out for themselves first, and that includes socioeconomic groups. When it comes to workers’ rights and related, you do not want the greedy at the top to have first say – you want the greedy at the bottom – those who want an extra meal, and who want dessert with it – to have that major influence over how they approach retaining and gaining enough to eat and succeed in life.
These things, in order to be healthy and successful, must come from the workers themselves, without pre-influence from those who seek to take advantage of them. And the industry does, indeed still seek to take advantage of the workers. I assisted in Ivy League research (not Yale, for once) only recently (2017) that saw the worker as nothing more than something to use at peak performance with overtime until they crashed and became disposable. They thought the worker was an easily replaceable tool from the limitless resource of humanity. There was one worker in our research pool who was actually connecting to us, and continuing to do his work, from the hospital waiting room. Even that was not enough of a wake-up call for those in charge of the research to understand that they were going too far. When I pointed out that workers were falling out of the project due to burnout and that this one was dealing with medical issues, the head of the research only seemed relieved that he still logged in – on the hospital wifi. They considered his dedication to the work to be a success while failing to note that in doing so he was shortening his life and his ability to work for them in the long run, if not within the week.
Never let the foxes build the henhouse. That henhouse is so unstable at this point that no one is safe within it – neither hen nor fox.
Regarding the dangers of allowing the Ivy League to dictate workers’ rights, the same can be said about letting politicians represent the people. They do not have the same interests at heart.
So, back to the political actors the Ivy League is prone to produce:
What I would learn over the years in my interactions with that theater department goes well beyond a few recruiters conning a few Yalies on a street corner between classes. Yale (and other Ivy League) trained actors and drama department academics do a significant portion of the mass-scale public manipulation we see every time we turn on a television. They’re the professional political actors with the resumes to get those jobs.
After such a long history of the takeover of the national and international political stage with a primary strategy of public diversion and manipulation for the benefit of whatever program needed to be kept quiet and whatever exploiters and war criminals needed the most money funneled that week, the public can no longer make informed decisions. They’ve never been informed. They haven’t been given any rational or uncorrupted information with which to make informed decisions. While a portion of the public on both sides of the political aisle genuinely tries to do what is right from their perspectives, they cannot because someone switched out their practical solutions with ones that look similar on the surface but are in reality tainted weapons and exploited half-thoughts. In other words, they’ve all been subverted. I’ve met quite a few of the people who did it.
This public audience manipulation is done with basic mechanisms. I will explain one in the simplest terms possible because I do not want to upset anyone on either side of the aisle. It’s not my intention, although it’s inevitable. Things have been maneuvered in such a way that every move in politics has now been painted as a struggle for life for which each side needs to savagely fight. If only they knew that life was already being stolen from them and that there are no political debates or voting boxes that can fix the damage. Those have become a part of the damage.
A mechanism:
We have a pan. That pan is our shared world. A political actor hands a first group (a political party or a nation) an egg. A second political actor hands a second group the oil necessary to fry the egg. They then individually tell both groups that what their group is holding is necessary to cook. This isn’t a complete lie. What they are holding is necessary to cook, and they know it, and thus each side fully adopts and accepts the words regarding what they are holding – an egg or the oil. Then the actors tell each group that the other group wants to destroy what they are holding because the other side is a madman in direct opposition to that ingredient. Then, the actors on the stage walk away, satisfied, and the public goes at each other’s throats forever, while slowly starving from an inadequate diet on both sides.
Actually, while I’m still on the subject of theater, let me touch upon the patrons of those arts…
Going back a few years, one occasion from before we moved to New Haven stands out simply because it shows the psychology of some of the people the recruiter did dealings with. These were the ones with the money, people who had the actual tangible resources, mineral rights, federal politics sewn up, etc., in that country. They would be the patrons of the political actors’ arts.
The recruiter was there to finalize a contract with them for her bosses, and one boss in particular. The thing about “the company” is that, while you may be a scientist (or any other position), you first work for the company and do the company work. If you can still get your actual scientific work completed, good for you but it’s not the top priority. That’s just how things operate and get done. Apparently, that even applies to the supervisors. So, she was finalizing a political acting contract instead of authorizing disease vector payments and procuring research subjects that day.
The meeting area was a large dining hall on a sublevel of a mall, in the footprint of that mall, and taking up the same area of space as the food court did on the ground level. When planning the mall, they had included the construction of an entire sublevel just for themselves away from the public. Bringing a child through the mall to access the internal elevator provided a level of cover that came with absolutely no suspicion. And that’s how I got dragged along for those negotiations.
I’m honestly not sure I’m ready to mention the negotiations or attempt to maneuver around those carefully placed eggshells. They involve politics, which is always a dicey subject, especially if the politicians are not quite as aligned with the needs of the people and parties they claim to be assisting. It’s a bit like the bird that hides its eggs in another’s nest. You can scream all day that the unrelated baby is stealing all the food from the other nestlings, but at the end of the day, that imposter is the nest owner’s baby, as far as she knows…and she’ll kill you if you say anything else. I’ve become quite tired of having that murderous reaction pointed directly at me. It’s not easy being the messenger.
Instead, let’s start with a tour of the sub-basement layout. I wasn’t the only kid down there. The wealthy families that had joined together to share that private space away from public eyes had provided areas for their children to play in. They converted a movie theater space into a traditional theater with a stage. They made a large shopping area into an arcade with areas to run around and play games. And then there was the museum. It was a large space, big enough to play sports. Along the walls, they had set up a museum of nuclear war. As the children played and ran around the space, we would see the lit-up large depictions of various nuclear explosions projected onto the walls with text below them and triggered audio telling us what country they had happened in, how terrible it had been, and that this was how the world had entered nuclear winter. The people who commissioned that sub-basement, as a giant bunker, had prewritten history for their children and they expected that history to include a nuclear World War III.
So, back in the dining area, I would walk back and forth along the velvet rope that separated the areas between the wealthy and the absurdly wealthy, as the recruiter sat and spoke to a man behind that rope. I acted distracted and retarded, a small person who couldn’t absorb information and was of no threat to secrecy. It wasn’t difficult to do back then. I had a lazy eye when I was small. I may have an IQ that’s off-the-charts high, but people are superficial and tend to take in surface appearances and simply accept them, and I doubt I looked too bright with one eye wandering in the direction of my nose.
(I would work on exercising it in the mirror for hours when I was young. I don’t have any pictures from before the age of eight, but you can see that it still went a little in at that age, even after my initial efforts. Also, excuse the dyed black hair the recruiter insisted on – well, “darkest brown” according to the bottle. It never did suit me. Nothing about that predicament suited me.)
Image: Author, Age 8
Image Source: Author’s Personal Collection
So there I was, pretending to be easy to amuse and ridiculously interested in every fiber of the velvet of the rope, with the smell of rich cigar smoke entering my nostrils as they spoke.
The group the man was representing and was a part of was a core group of people who owned America. They were the ones who owned the majority of the country’s resources and had been taking turns playing the role of U.S. president. Yes, it’s been sewn up for quite some time and since long before we were born. However, I’d note that they cared about some level of stability back then because the nation being wealthy kept them wealthy. Those negotiations were going to change that detail to a significant degree. I listened in horror because I already knew who and what he was negotiating with.
The group wanted a vacation from playing the presidential face of the nation. Being in the public eye is honestly exhausting for most people. We’re not all sociopathic stage actors by nature – that actually takes certain born traits many of us quite simply lack. They had been in negotiations to have political actors fill the roles since the year George H.W. Bush was the head of the CIA (1976-1977) and he’d had a say in what the contract would include. It was an agreement to use the Yale Political Actor’s Guild that he had been in since his days attending the university, still had membership in and influence over, and would profit from financially. And, yes, that guild goes by another name. I just refuse to give them any more power by saying it.
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency
“George H.W. Bush – the 11th Director of Central Intelligence”
Text Source: Central Intelligence Agency
That Political Actors’ Guild, I would later spend a limited amount of time around them behind closed doors. Beneath the polish and media hype, they’re nothing but thieves. Large-scale nation-stealing thieves with inside jokes about being pirates that aren’t even jokes – they have the very real and tangible souvenirs to support those claims. In their need for a vacation, the money and power of the United States handed the keys for the federal-level political theater, and thus the nation’s stability, to a bunch of thieves, many of whom I knew to be long-term heroin addicts. That would commence the draining of America, and a political stage that would go from measured voices and reasoning with a consistently pressured slow drain of resources to being completely replaced by a succession of quick drains and a cascading carnival-madness feeling until the debt ceiling would reach WWII levels once again, and without the need for a declared war.
Maybe when they signed that contract in the bunker they had already built to protect themselves, the truly wealthy of the U.S. knew they were ensuring our destruction by handing the nation over to the addicts among us.
But that’s enough about actors and theater, for now…
As I grew up, trapped within those circles, I would lean against the back wall in many a room. I stood stunned into silence as I witnessed astounding levels of mismanagement, swindling, drug abuse (mostly heroin back then), sabotage, extortion, safety failures, and illicit dealings going on within military research, governance, and intelligence activities.
To a distant public, it was all hidden under a blanket of secrecy and a promise of military-grade professionalism by first-world nations. Up close and in person, the behaviors of the authorities in charge of the projects looked more like those of inmates in a corrupt prison, rather than the falsely promised polish of members of a professional tax-funded organization with rules and regulations.
To them, it was a rush of control and access to drugs, resources, and weapons, all with no consequences, no genuine oversight, and no voice of reason to stand in their way. Many of them had entered the profession at the height of the sixties liberation culture, having been deeply influenced by it (many having influenced it themselves) while in university. They were still high on the adrenaline rush and drugs, and now had full permission from multiple governments to break every promise and every law, including any modicum of truth, the sanctity of human life, and group survival. It was all being paid for by the public and the war-enabled black market, and was backed by one of the largest militaries on the planet. It still is.
And what’s an arms race if you don’t have the method to win the race to the end?
To me, a child too close to the reality to be deceived by the promises of nation-saving and professional behavior that were made to the public, a child who was desperately trying to find something real to cling to that wouldn’t be destroyed or smoked up, it was nauseating. I never felt safe. I never felt that any of us were safe.
And yet, despite all of that, government and their handlers wouldn’t be the biggest barrier to my freedom or the public’s safety.
It was the citizens, kept in the dark and guided to blindly saw at the tree of their own ancestors and children. They would be the ones most effectively blocking the way. They still are.
Next: AIDS Research