♞ Stage 4: Detonation
It’s time to fast-forward to where we left off, right after that war criminal started the process of burning his government-funded house down with kids sitting in my car in his driveway. I’m sorry to ruin any illusion of competence in operations.
I continued to drag through life, one excruciating moment at a time, getting up each morning, somehow. I had told myself that the best way out of the situation was to gain so many postgraduate credentials that no country could turn me away when I finally came crawling over their border.
Images: Author, Early 1990s - 2010s (105)
Image Source: Author’s Personal Collection
A series of events, overt manipulation, and opportunities arose, all pointing me in the direction of England before my master's degree was complete. I knew from a conversation I had listened in on between the recruiter and an optometrist when I was nine years old, and from conversations the recruiter had with me as well, that the recruiter had intended that I spend some time in England to collect her second passport, something she could not do from within the confines of the United States.
The conversation between her and the ophthalmologist was burned into my brain by anxiety because she had talked about how I wouldn’t be able to drive in England due to a lazy eye that she didn’t feel like chauffeuring me to multiple appointments to fix with vision therapy. The ophthalmologist was reminding her that we were running out of time to correct my vision problem. The recruiter had been putting it off until the next year, pretty much annually, since I was four years old.
A weak left eye would be dangerous to drive with when pedestrians are on the left side of the road, so they decided I’d be taking the bus while in England. I have spent so much of my life trying to correct that vision on my own with varying degrees of success since the time I was old enough to see myself in the bathroom mirror (it still requires concentration to keep the eye straight, even to this day and after eight years of treatment as an adult because the muscles are not as malleable and retrainable when we’re older). It has cost me time, effort, money, and an unnecessary level of awkwardness in social situations as I wonder if that’s the moment my concentration on keeping the eye straight will fail, and many a blow to my self-esteem. And mild amblyopia is a condition that is easily treatable in children with a ridiculously high level of success. However, the recruiter wouldn’t benefit from it, so she didn’t bring me to the appointments.
But back to her needing me in England, which she did believe she would benefit from…
I pretended to go along the path she created for me to go to England, falling for each suggestion and manipulation the recruiter presented, weaving them together as if they had all been stretched out perfectly just for me and with no wrinkles in sight. It was difficult. The person in England who had contacted me out of the blue to begin all this admitted, openly in a moment of intoxication, that he was being paid to con me into going there, and who had paid him. He was actually in shock about the offer and for some reason, in that moment, I became his confidant. Maybe because I was the only other person in the room who would have an inkling what he was talking about and he was bursting to tell someone about the entire absurdly invasive interview and hiring process, in detail. I’d never even mentioned the recruiter to him by that time. She was still my dark secret. Back then, he was the one who spilled it all.
I have to admit I took a moment and considered not continuing down the road with him, but it was the path that got me closest to my own goal of finding a way out and then finding a way home. If it hadn’t been him, the recruiter eventually would have forced something or someone worse my way. At least he was easy and far away from America, if nothing else. I’m human. I sought comfort. And I didn’t think there was an actual escape route. I’m still not sure there is. There are reprieves, yes. But escape? Even now, as I write this, I can’t get them to give me the passport they stole 43 years ago. Just because I keep trying doesn’t mean I have hope. I had accepted my situation, and he was the most comfortable forced option in that situation. Much like I had done in the military hostage training years before to escape and thus graduate from their program, I took advantage of the weakest man in the room, the one most likely to mentally break. When he couldn’t even contain that he had been paid, I knew he was the one.
It took some effort to fall for the con, especially with eyes wide open and without that one tiny thread of plausible deniability, of uncertainty, that helps to keep an act alive. My eyes wanted to roll up in my head. My middle fingers wanted to rise. I was already getting very tired of the recruiter still trying to guide my life as I was entering my thirties. But I held back the words that went along with those feelings and allowed the rage alone to drive me forward and past the exhaustion.
Finally, something happened that would give me an excuse to finish propelling forward to England. There was an earthquake and tsunami in Japan. That happened to affect an older designed nuclear power plant that had never gotten a notice about the need for retrofitting their spent fuel pools. Possibly because about twenty years prior, someone I knew had made sure the Nuclear Regulatory Commission never had to notify the plant and fuel pool designers about the known issue.
Image: Fukushima Daiichi explosion (106)
Image Source: National Public Radio
After having spent so much time in labs and assisting with infiltrating the anti-nuclear movement, I knew where to look to find the real-time radiation readings on the West Coast of the U.S., and I knew the difference between normal readings and concerning ones. As I sat in my house a mile up on a mountain range and in that Northern Hemisphere jet stream’s path, I packed my bags and waited. On the television, there was a never-ending stream of reporters telling us the explosion was safe and not actually nuclear-related. They used the wording, “hydrogen blast” over and over again and assured their viewers this was not the same or as concerning as a nuclear explosion or meltdown.
Image Source: ABC News (107)
“The previous explosions at Fukushima Daiichi reactors Nos. 1 and 3 were hydrogen blasts caused by a buildup of steam in the reactor units.”
Text Source: ABC News
A few days after the original blast, Geiger counters along the top of the mountain range started going off, one after the other. I put everyone’s bags in the car and drove down off that mountain. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission - the same one that allowed the spent fuel pool issues to continue unabated in plants with the same design - was still downplaying everything to the public (they still are).
Image Source: Phys.org (108)
“California is closely watching the crisis at a Japanese nuclear plant, but officials downplayed the threat that a radioactive cloud blown across the Pacific could pose for the US West Coast.
While radioactivity could reach the United States from the quake-hit Fukushima plant, the levels would not be high enough to cause major health problems, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
Some experts disagreed, notably pointing to the west-east jet stream, but NRC…said even the Pacific island state of Hawaii faced little risk.
...
(Another source) cited the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster to underline how far radioactivity can travel. ‘The radioactivity spread around the entire Northern Hemisphere,’ from the devastated Ukrainian plant, he said.
Harvey Wasserman, a senior adviser to environmental group Greenpeace added that after Chernobyl ‘fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within 10 days. ‘It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States,’ he continued.
...
The NRC spokesman declined to comment in depth on possible scenarios for how quickly or at what levels radioactivity could reach the US mainland.”
Text Source: Phys.org
Why people pay for the service of being lied to in an emergency, rather than being given honest information and guided on how to prepare themselves and avoid any damage, even if it’s “only minimal damage” and will “only shorten their lifespans by a couple of years,” I will never understand. It goes against the very principles of survival.
With Fukushima to my back, I got on a plane in 2011 and left the West Coast for a let’s-wait-for-the-possible-fallout-to-blow-over vacation. When I entered the plane, I discovered it was inordinately full of mathematicians and physicists. Listening to the conversations in those hours felt like sitting in a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was a beautiful final note to leave the U.S. on. I love the sound of functioning minds and intelligence.
It would be two months before Western media would finally admit the original explosions at the plant had been part of a major nuclear accident and not just a coincidental peripheral explosion at a nuclear power plant for them to downplay the dangers to the public. By then, it wasn’t even front-page news.
Image Source: World Nuclear Association (109)
“(Updated August 2023)
Following a major earthquake, a 15-metre tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident beginning on 11 March 2011. All three cores largely melted in the first three days.
The accident was rated level 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, due to high radioactive releases over days 4 to 6, eventually a total of some 940 PBq (I-131 eq).”
Text Source: World Nuclear Association
It reminded me of the early lecture by physicist Michio Kaku that I had attended with the recruiter. He had said that sustained low-level radiation is the most harmful to us on a cellular level. The sustained runoff from Fukushima looked like it would help us find out if that’s true. I have to note that if you want to punch a population with a biological weapon, it might first help to hit them on the cellular level to make sure they’re already weakened enough for a virus to take hold.
Maybe military and Intelligence would be just as invasive and damaging without the lies and well-planned subterfuge. Maybe if the carte blanche right to deceit were taken away, they’d state their real purposes and still fund and participate in wars all over the globe.
But at least it wouldn’t lead to the utter confusion domestically and internationally, resources and time wasted on responding to mistruths, dangerous “let’s wait and see” pauses, and the countless victims swept under the rug and expected to keep the secrets of their victimizers, even when those victimizers are opportunistic and murderous thugs latched on to the government payload like parasites.
With the United States finally far behind me, one question I’d been biting back the entire time I was there finally surfaced.
Shouldn’t the public of a nation factually know, without averting their gaze due to fear of public ostracization and government eyes staring back at them, that several rather pertinent parts of their military, including Intelligence, are the enemy they are told is culturally and cruelly in opposition to them and their freedoms? The same enemy they were convinced to give their own lives in battle to fight? Isn’t it just a tiny bit sadistic to keep them that in the dark and self-deceiving to that degree? They are paying taxes for it, after all.
Image Source: British Broadcasting Corporation (110)
“Files released by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States have confirmed that World War II Nazi war criminals were employed by Western intelligence agencies.
…former Nazi officers were employed by the CIA, in particular for their knowledge of the Soviet Union.
A US Justice Department spokesman, Eli Rosenbaum, said the files demonstrated that the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war criminals.”
Text Source: British Broadcasting Corporation
I never did tell you how many of the old WWII recruits I met weren’t scientists, did I?
A few months into my stay in England (still a part of the European Union back then), I began the process of procuring citizenship from the European country I qualified to apply for based on ancestry, according to the documents I had been using most of my life by that point. I did it so I could stay in England a bit longer. Once I had landed and the jet lag wore off, every fiber of my being was screaming against even the thought of the idea of returning to America. I didn’t like England, honestly, but I had just escaped the U.S. and there was no way I was ever going to return to there unless in chains. I would have rather survived eating the British cuisine of beans for breakfast. That’s still true to this day, even though after eating their food for long enough, I genuinely thought I was developing stomach cancer….but I digress.
The recruiter thought I was working on applying for her citizenship. She wanted me to procure her exit from America. If I had been applying in any of a variety of offices around the world, the standard requirement would have been that my citizenship had to be piggybacked on hers because we are family on paper - that was why she had always wanted to send me to England, she thought being there would be my motivation to get a second passport for myself, and thus hers as well. Her own documentation was too flimsy to start the process from within the United States where the embassy’s documentation requirements were far more excessive. She had to send me overseas to the country with the laxest embassy so I could do it for her. That embassy, selected by her, happened to be in London.
While going through the stack of family records I had to attain for the application, I started noticing some issues. She married her husband near Washington, D.C. when she was 18 and he was a 21-year-old Yale student, even though none of her stories mentioned a D.C.-adjacent location in that time period. Her mother’s official certified birth certificate looked like the woman had been allowed drunken after-hours access to the records department to modify it, etc.
Fun fact: Her mother decided to change her own birth date. The first records show that she was born on April 19th. The next records show that she had that date amended to April 20th, Hitler’s birthday, with the help of the church via an updated baptismal record. According to the dates on the documents, it looks like she made the change after the start of World War II:
Image Source: State of Connecticut Birth and Baptismal Records (111)
The recruiter’s mother-on-record had a little too much access to that records department and had taken advantage of it for her own personal reasons while there, leaving a trail leading right back to her in the process. She had been part of helping to bring the families of German scientists into the country to reunite with them when the government refused to do it officially. If you have forgotten, then-secretive World War II recruitment brought Nazi scientists into the United States under the threat and duress of having to otherwise go in front of war tribunals stemming from Nuremberg. Because of that, she had made friends in the records department. One of them was the same friend she asked for one last favor when I came onto the scene.
And, no, neither the records office clerk nor the recruiter’s mother did it for free. The stack of cash the clerk had accepted for my forged document was substantial. As for the recruiter’s mother, she already had two homes and two closets full of floor-length mink coats by the time I arrived, despite her being a retired shop-girl who had helped people with their perfume samples. That mink collection was so extensive and well cared for that it spent a large portion of the year in a secure cold storage facility. When I came along, she was given a limited edition vehicle with full white leather interior. Not to digress, but I was expensive. That’s probably part of why I was used so hard. Someone had to get a return on that investment.
Considering that dripping-in-diamonds human trafficker (albeit, mostly of willing international migrants) was who the recruiter called “mom,” I can actually kind of understand why, later in life when I asked the recruiter to babysit my child, her “grandchild,” for a few hours in the evenings while I visited a university dental clinic (all I could afford back then for dental care - they came with a significant discount if you let the students practice doing fillings on your teeth), she told me she would only do it if I paid her $20 an hour (which I did) and then proceeded to complain the entire time that I wasn’t properly compensating her enough.
But, back to England (or forward to England, in this case)...
Because of the discrepancies and the fact that the recruiter’s mother’s birth certificate had the recruiter’s mother’s own handwriting on it where she wrote her preferred first name in sideways (pictured above), I started looking at my own documents again. I decided it was time to check in with the Department of Child Services. After all, when the recruiter was telling me my origin story, she told me that the mother I remembered prior to her was actually a State of Connecticut foster mother. So, I called them to request my foster child file. I made sure to give them both names I had gone by in the U.S. (if you recall, the recruiter used a name change document to bureaucratically legitimize my birth certificate which had no matching hospital birth record to substantiate it).
They were happy to oblige, although they took a while (it may be true that social workers are overworked and overwhelmed). Eventually, they sent my abuse records, which you’ve seen parts of earlier. They also informed me that I had never been in foster care. They had no proof of my existence before the mention of me first came across their desk when I was nine years old and a school reported that my seat in the classroom had been empty for a while.
I thanked them, read through the abuse documents, and picked up the phone again. This time, I was calling the Social Security Administration offices in the United States. I asked them when I was first registered in their system. Again, I made sure to give them both names I had gone by in the U.S. and explained the name change. They informed me that I did not enter their system under either name until midway through 1980. Three years after I was born and at a point at which I had already entered the United States after leaving Argentina.
This was problematic for the recruiter’s story she had constructed about my earliest years. She had claimed I had nearly a million dollars in medical bills from my time in the U.S. hospital directly following my birth (a time and a birth that the hospital had no record of at all, despite their keeping extensive records from that time period). She also claimed the State paid the bill. In the years, 1977-1978, in order for the State to cover the costs of a medical bill, they required that the child have a social security number. According to the Social Security Administration, I didn’t even exist in those years. I definitely didn’t have a number back then.
I said thank you to the Social Security worker for that information, and I hung up the phone. I went across the street. I bought a bottle of wine (I rarely drink and almost never more than a glass). I came back to the rented apartment I was staying in. I sat down on the living room floor. I drank that entire bottle. And I thanked every god of every religion that there was a genuine chance that the recruiter was not my mother.
More importantly, I was grateful that my first mother, the mother I remembered, the mother I had a connection to, the mother I always loved and missed every single day of my life and always will, may have actually been my mother - and not just a foster mother like the recruiter had told me.
A few days later, I picked up the phone again. I called the recruiter, informing her with all sincerity that I could not complete the citizenship application in the remaining time I had on my visa. I told her I was having some trouble with the paperwork (I failed to note that I had also found out that there was a small and previously undisclosed issue with the London-located consulate’s bureaucracy and that I could only apply for my foreign citizenship and passport - and not hers).
What would happen next was almost as easy as that time the two Muslim roommates "conned us into" walking right into their apartment. Except, this time, it wasn't two Muslims about to get entrapped. I was playing against my most formidable enemy, my own personal (and unluckily for me) government-trained exploiter.
I told the woman who had darkened my entire existence that I did not qualify for a traditionally extended visa and would need political asylum in order to stay long enough to complete the task for her. She promised to call a friend of hers in the State Department back in the United States, someone she had once attended Yale University with. She was sure that they could contact someone in the correct office in England to make it happen. That phone call happened in 2011.
On a morning months later, I discussed my case in front of an immigration tribunal in England without legal representation present and on only a few hours of sleep. This was several hours after successfully arguing my master's thesis with a panel of professors over the phone at three in the morning.
As the representative for the Immigration Department spoke about how “Americans don’t have human rights” before listing all the countries and regions with citizens worthy of human rights, a thought flickered through my mind for half a second before I focused on the courtroom again. If Americans do not have human rights according to globally accepted norms and laws, is that why the world has been heavily using the residents of that country as pharmaceutical and weapons research test subjects?
Six months later, I had been granted an impossibility – an approved human rights application for a United States passport holder. Buried deep in the document, it was deemed that if I returned to the United States, they might not let me leave again, if they even allowed me to apply to reenter the US, to begin with.
Image Source: Personal Documents, Courts & Tribunals Service (112)
“But I also have to consider any difficulties the Appellant might have in applying to come back to the United States.”
Text Source: Personal Documents, Courts & Tribunals Service
Sometimes, I wonder if my exploiter’s friend had taken pity on me, knowing what I must have endured all those years under the tactics of the woman that we were all more than just aware of in the political and intel communities, and that she kindly made sure those words were included in the decree. Even if she hadn’t, the document was still enough.
Image Source: Personal Documents, Courts & Tribunals Service (113)
“I am satisfied it would be disproportionate to return her to the United States and accordingly, therefore, that to return her with her children would be a breach of Article 8 of the ECHR, for all Appellants…
The appeal is allowed on human rights grounds.”
Text Source: Personal Documents, Courts & Tribunals Service
That ‘friend in high places’ gave me my first genuine opportunity to experience freedom. After a life of imprisonment and being a hostage, I just needed to learn how to be free.