We’re damaging our individual selves, families, 

societies, countries, and international relations 

by making deceit the expected norm. 

Constant and pervasive deceit tears at 

what makes our interactions human 

and our choices safe and useful to ourselves. 

Sometimes, the recruiter brought me along to make a situation look less suspicious, or in some cases maybe just because there wasn’t a babysitter that day. Ordinary life is still a constant even within an unordinary life. We all have to crawl out of bed in the morning, put on our shoes, and make sure the kids are still alive (possibly not in that order).

As a child, much of the behavior of those who had been working Operation Condor and related operations would be commonplace to me because it was all I had known. However, some of it still left me worried from the start. 

Before I was concerned for the public, I was concerned for the people in my life who were doing things that were obviously dangerous, including to themselves. I was worried for them and for myself. I had already lost one family. I didn’t want to lose them too, even if they were absolutely not qualified to be family, professionals, or even to have a pet without supervision. As I got older and saw more, that feeling of concern would only grow regarding their behaviors and methodologies that were clearly short-sighted and against their own best interests, and eventually the world’s. 

The amount of unchecked secrecy they are permitted and the resulting subterfuge allow opportunistic exploiters and those with grudges to get away with gross amounts of theft, sales of entire countries, abuse of citizens, misuse of funding and resources (including warfare research labs – but we’ll get to that). This includes reckless and harmful behaviors no one would allow if it were happening clearly in plain sight under glaring spotlights, with an honest narrator on blast on the television, and memories of a way to fight still present in the minds of the populace. I’ve seen it all, and soon enough you will too. It eviscerates a country from within, and then the damage and instability build and spread beyond its borders. 

What once may have been an almost reasonable idea of secrecy to provide protection, quickly became a tool for exploitation and unrestrained corruption. By the time I was born, the damage was already ramping up.  

And don’t look at me with those wide trusting and terrified eyes and say, “But there are oversight committees and internal auditors for that.” Honey, the moment I turned twenty-one, I was rotated through a job in internal auditing in name only just so a department could fill out the reports on themselves by themselves. It was already their well-honed and established routine, with a never-ending list of lackeys to use. I never even saw the forms. I was also there for many visits to the private offices of oversight committee members in capitol buildings, the same ones that had overreached their own borders in order to fund the instability in South America. 

There is no oversight. 

But about my first years in the United States…

Once the recruiter’s work status was normalized, albeit domestically instead of internationally as she had hoped, she began bringing me along to the labs. I was left to wander those lab halls alone for hours all too frequently. One time, early into her domestic supervisorial role, the recruiter was deep into a two-hour session of berating a medical researcher in his own office, and I felt uncomfortable enough from the screaming to leave the hall and seek refuge in an office, myself. I went into the darkest-lit office I could find that was unlocked. It had one of those desk toys, a Newton’s cradle. I must have spent hours testing all the ways the balls could swing back and forth, clacking against each other in various patterns. There, I would first meet, and later come to somewhat know, a depressed and homesick former Nazi scientist who had been recruited back at the end of World War II, never to see his homeland again. 

Before I go on with this memory, I need to clarify something for you, the reader. When I speak of a country, a political group, a military, or the like, I’m not taking sides against them, nor am I advocating for or supporting the deaths they cause. We can all benefit from being healthy. A healthy world creates healthy enemies who can rationalize instead of being hell-bent on erratic and suicidal undertakings that jeopardize us all, including them.

They had care packages sent from Germany to the scientist in an attempt to alleviate his sadness. Those were what would lead me back to his office over the years. The flavor of the German chocolate had as much tangible depth as his longing for home. It was incomparably beautiful in contrast to the plastic-tasting Hershey’s chocolate of America. I loved that he shared it with me. It reminded me of the depth and care of my own mother who I had lost in my own homeland, only to be given a caricature of an American life as if it was a real replacement for a mother with a soul. 

His pain, dangerously situated in the middle of a weapons research laboratory, should serve as a reminder of the dangers of wartime recruitment of the enemy in secrecy. Especially if the practice continues simply so that the public can experience the adrenaline rush of the false chase of persecuting and pursuing ancient war crimes while keeping the appearance of themselves being untainted and patriotically wholesome. It rarely leads to healing and eventually leads to the next war. 

The ironic part is that the government keeps these workers and allows them to rise through the ranks and into supervisorial and strategic roles partly because of the false belief that the U.S. is a crown jewel that everyone wants to go to; as if it has nothing to do with their nations being destroyed or them being coerced by force into coming, often (especially in the case of the scientists and Intelligence) under the threat of war crime tribunals and/or death. 

The sad thing is that it was Intelligence that first manufactured that belief to help Americans feel better about their post-war conditions by telling them the conditions they live in are the best in the world, a shining jewel that everyone flocks to without duress. Now, even the government buys its own lies. Do I really need to point out how terrible this is for actual national security, or for long-term global stability? Anyone who has traveled all of America and then other parts of the world knows that America, other than a few select neighborhoods, is not a shining example of prosperity or sanity. 

In addition to the harm the self-congratulating lies do to a nation, there is also the harm they do to the soldiers (and civilians who get caught up in war), regardless of what country or war they come from. Many war criminals were citizens serving their country, soldiers who believed the internal propaganda and thought they were protecting other nations or their own borders. To be abandoned, exiled, and under threat because of that, for life, and often while being employed by enemy militaries (the reality of post-wartime recruitment processes), is a very big problem no one discusses. I would end up spending time in endgame research labs and war strategy think tanks with many of those forced recruits over the years. Their level of depression and resentment for having to carry the world’s sins permanently, combined with government funding and access, isn’t good for any of us. 

It leads to weapons and strategies, used by our own militaries, that will kill us all and not just a perceived enemy of the day. To believe that the military has these workers strictly under control and manufacturing everything to specifications is pure ego and not at all realistic. The recruited scientists and strategists create what they want to create and then they hand it to the military, appeasing egos and reinforcing the national lies by falsely claiming they obediently followed specifications, like good subservient and loyal lapdogs happy to be there. I’ll get to a few examples of their actual work in a bit. 

The population gets to experience a time of peace and normalcy between wars. It is both inhumane and dangerous to not give the same to the soldiers who fought the wars for that public, strategized for the wars, and built the weapons at the expense of their own health and possibly their lives. 

To assume it’s all okay because what the public is experiencing is okay, or due to some inane hero-savior complex based on the belief that there is a country with wealth and culture truly superior above all others (and of course, out of all the luck, it always just happens to be the one they’re standing in), is a major oversight that will lead to the next war having much crueler tactics and weapons. It makes the public appear weak, heartless, and having the whimsical and irrational mind of a small child. This does not put them in a favorable light to those they have captured and now forced into labor for them, especially not when the public has allowed the handing of the keys of the military-industrial complex to those captive enemies. 

What intellectual or scientific mind could rationally respect that level of combined idiocy and callousness from an enemy? And which one wouldn’t use the keys now in their hands?

In addition, self-congratulating self-deceit gives the public and politicians a focus that is not their current issue. Meaning current atrocities are never prevented or ended in real time. They just become a fallacious legal circus after the fact, and prime military and intelligence recruitment hunting grounds. 

We do post-war wrong. This is one of the major factors behind why we have never broken the cycle of war. In shoving everything under the rug and creating a televised spectacle of completion for the public, we don’t include actual healing. We only include pain and anger – driving forces behind vengeance, sustained motivation, and action. And then we take the precise people who hold those feelings and place them into military positions within the governments that forced them there, and then…just to make sure we’ve set ourselves up perfectly for the fall…we give them the protection of secrecy to hide behind while they work. 

I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you are afraid of your government, if you feel powerless in the face of your government’s crimes against its own people, that’s not your government anymore. It’s an infiltrator that has crawled their way up through the ranks and is now wearing the face of your government as its prize. 

And your own government was probably the one that handed the keys to your enemy.

But let’s get back to how I learned all this, firsthand…

When one group of scientists visited in less formal settings, I was still allowed to remain in the room, rather than nestled into the back of the coat closet like I had been when superiors on the administrative and strategy side visited. There was a clear separation between the group from those labs and their superiors. The lab workers were tight-knit and kept their own secrets within their part of the hierarchy. I would be just another secret to add to their list. 

That was when I first sat with the cohort of primarily military-captive scientists for a long series of dinner table discussions that would end up spanning the early years of my childhood in the country. It’s where I first heard them endlessly discuss plans and ideas for potential longer-running projects. When it came to one topic of discussion, the energy and drive behind the excitement in their voices were enough to capture my attention. They strategized about combining walking pneumonia with an incurable disease so that it would slowly sink into the entire population. They wanted an incurable pneumonia that no effective vaccine could be created for, and that people would pass between each other without becoming immediately incapacitated. 

They actually wanted the endgame – something that even they, with their scientific expertise, could not cure once it was released. They discussed the Epstein–Barr virus and a slew of other viruses back then, still undecided on the perfect one. 

They had no loyalties. Their own countries had abandoned them and they were forced to work for the enemy. For them, life was already over. They simply wanted to take everyone else out with them. 

I’ll be honest. There were days when I would come to agree with them, but not due to hate or vengeance. After seeing the never-ending harm done to the children (you’ll see more of what I’m referring to in a bit) by a culture that feeds on its own youth, I saw no way to save those children or myself. How can you save them if their own parents, communities, and nations are their exploiters and the ones selling them to additional exploiters in exchange for a head pat and a little extra cash? There’s nowhere safe for the children to grow. In those dark moments when I lost my humanity and aligned with the scientists, it wasn’t due to hate. It was love. I saw it as a mercy killing. The only way to end the children’s pain.  

If you’re an ordinary citizen, hardcore war-borne nihilism may be difficult to comprehend because you still have something to live for – family, country, the future. The people ripped from war have none of that. It was stolen from them. They are the people you should be concerned about handing your safety to. They are not you. They are the ones who will always stand on the bridge while burning it because they are already on fire. And this entire world is their bridge to the frivolous and unthinking civilization that turns its back and leaves them to toil in the war machine. Your knee-jerk response is to take this lightly or avert from it. Don’t. It’s not an empty threat from those you have safely chained. No one is attempting to scare you in order to gain a ransom from you. You already handed everything to them – the money and the ability to maneuver within your own military, to exploit you without needing your further consent. 

It is the reality of what has already been going on this entire time, tangibly, with funding, and unchecked. 

I sat quietly over my plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes and listened to the scientists talk about creating their theoretical hybrid viruses, something I was raised to refer to as sane and unconcerning dinner conversation. There are reasons I would develop stomach ulcers as a child. The fact that the scientists’ experiences had correctly led them to believe funding was available for such obviously reckless research is as concerning now as it was then.

Next: Maneuverings