Ciao Roma

The pessimists who have finished reading this blog might think:

1. He’s a monster and a coward
2. His realization and honesty are “too little, too late.”
3. The Agency will hunt him down and kill him for exposing them
4. F**k the Agency, Henrietta will kill him in his sleep when her drugs wear off.
5. Read between the lines--he definitely nailed her.

But I’m counting on the optimists among you who will realize:
1. I am a victim, too.
2. It’s never too late to right a wrong OR to question authority.
3. Henrietta and I are black ops professionals and can hide indefinitely.
4. The Agency may have brainwashed her but Henrietta’s humanity and compassion remain. She’ll recover and she’ll forgive me.
5. You know I could never take advantage of her. The undercurrent of sexuality and exploitation in my story is there to challenge our complicity with the human trafficking industry and the child soldier phenomenon.

Events of late are persuading me to go more deeply under cover so this will be my last post for a while. I’m uneasy because the landlady at our Pension suddenly started asking questions. Why isn’t Henrietta in school? Where is her mother? I see a violin case so why don’t I ever hear her practice?

And, did you read the comment left by Caterina/Franca? I’m a little spooked by getting comments on my posts from a former enemy agent/terrorist bomber. Henrietta and I were right there, at the Messina Bridge and barely escaped when Franca’s explosives detonated. She claims she’s had an epiphany and she hopes “we’re in a safe place.” Yeah, right.

I need a place to land. Does anyone have a suggestion about where we should hide out for a while? I hear that the southwestern United States, New Zealand, and Thailand are all places where people can disappear and just live quiet, anonymous lives.

Please email me (josefratello74@gmail.com), write on my wall on Facebook (Jose Fratello) or use the comment function here to post your ideas about a place with low population density, mild climate, and light law enforcement. Thanks.

Even when we do find a place to hide, I have no illusions about our future. A “normal” life for Henrietta and me will always be impossible but I’m trying to stay optimistic. After all, who among us has a normal life?

Boiled Frog Syndrome

Have you heard about the phenomenon referred to as the boiled frog syndrome? Put a frog in a pot of water and increase the temperature of the water gradually and the frog just sits there. But suddenly, at 100 degrees C, something happens: the water boils and the frog dies. There is some debate about whether the story is literally true or not but it serves as a useful metaphor, similar to the one about the ostrich with his head in the sand, about the folly of ignoring warning signs.

The metaphor is often as a cautionary tale warning against the danger of letting small, seemingly harmless wrongs go by allowing them to build into a powerful, irreversible force--like global warming. I’d like to borrow the analogy and apply it to my behavior during my time at the agency when I dismissed my growing alarm and dodged my own conscience. Unlike the frog, however, I jumped before I reached the boiling point because of this final event that brought my situation into focus.

Last Spring, the civil war in Sri Lanka finally ended after 26 long years. The leader of the Tamil Tigers was killed and the fighting stopped. Remember one of my first posts when I told you about the UNICEF worker I met on the plane. Remember? She was on her way to Sri Lanka as a UN observer and she had given me the book she was reading. I never found the time or the balls to read it, so I just put it in my locker. The news story jogged my memory and I finally got the nerve to read the book, Children at War.



The day I finished the book became my last day at the Agency because I saw clearly that my organization was on the shameful list of international criminals who use children to fight.

Outsourced Responsibility--Milgram #18

Someone commented about on an earlier post and brought up Hannah Arendt and I want to respond. The outsourcing of responsibility you speak of corresponds closely to Milgram’s experiment #18 that I posted about earlier. The experiment was significant because 37 out of 40 participants administered the full range of shocks up to 450 volts, the highest obedience rate Milgram found in his whole series. In this variation, the actual subject did not pull the shock lever; instead he only conveyed information to the peer who pulled the lever. According to Milgram, the subject shifts responsibility to another person and does not blame himself for what happens. This resembles real-life incidents in which people see themselves as merely cogs in a wheel, just "doing their job," allowing them to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Check out this video clip of one of Milgram's experiments.

Claes, Raballo and Milgram

Rabello/Claes fratello was an unusual partnership.
Rabello was a much older agent who agreed to work with us for a short time. He was assigned to Claes and treated her as if she were his granddaughter. Between training sessions he took her fishing, taught her to work in his garden and gave her the key to his apartment so she could borrow books for her enjoyment. Partly because of his short time with us and partly because of his unexpected attachment to Claes, he decided to become a whistle blower and sought to expose the program. He made an appointment with a journalist but on the way to speak to a journalist but on the way to their interview, Raballo was killed in a freak accident.

Claes was then left without a partner and protector. Our Director said she was worthless without a handler and because their bond had been so strong, efforts to pair her with another were futile. The next step for her was termination but someone further up the chain of command decided the cyborg engineers could use her as a test subject. And this is where I found myself thinking of Milgram's Experiment #18.

The doctors and engineers set up stress tests to monitor the strength of her implants increasing the pressure ounce by ounce until her limbs gave out often tearing her flesh and snapping her bones as they looked for her breaking point. The lab assistants who turned the knob seemed very detached as they ripped her flesh hurting they were only doing what they were told.




So who is responsible for torturing Claes? Let’s go up the chain of command and see. The lab assistant turns the dial and applies the pressure because Dr. Giallani tells her to. He got orders from Dr. Bianchi who got his orders from Lorenzo, Chief of Special Ops. Lorenzo got his orders from Monica Petris, Minister of Defense for Italy, and I can only presume she got her orders from the Prime Minister. So it seems that if you work for the government you’re never responsible for your actions and can claim that you are only following orders,,,unless, of course, you are the prime Minister. Do you see how easy it is to deny responsibility?

Elsa, Lauro and Milgram

Of all the fratello, Lauro and Elsa’s partnership was the most tragic. Their bodies were found in a forest preserve, both professionally executed with bullets to the head, so naturally the Agency thought Padania had put contracts out on all the fratello. Henrietta and I were spirited out of the city for our own safety while the investigation took place. As Section one began a private inquiry the officers wondered aloud why this young girl and older man would be together in such a secluded place.

The tragedy of Lauro and Elsa reminds me of another condition Milgram noted as necessary for suspending morality. His condition stated, “The guards (or teachers) develop a distorted sense of the victims (or learners) as not comparable to themselves. Dehumanizing them as animals would be an extreme example.” Lauro was the textbook example of this condition and treated Elsa with contempt. Although several handlers referred to the girls as cyborgs or tools when they talked among themselves, Lauro referred to Elsa as a cyborg to her face. He was cold and indifferent to her on and off the clock, never complimented her for a job well done and punished her severely if she made a mistake. Because he insisted on giving her the highest doses of conditioning, she was totally devoted to him to the point of being obsessively in love with him so his indifference seemed even crueler. Elsa reacted to this treatment by crawling into an emotional shell, isolating herself from everyone except Lauro, and exhibiting nervousness and distraction on the job. I tried to talk to him about it but he dismissed my concern and criticized my kindness toward Henrietta implying that I was a cyborg lover. His dehumanization of Elsa allowed him to justify his abusive behavior, which may have included the rumors we heard of their “playing house.” No one spoke of a sexual relationship directly, but Elsa showed psychological symptoms of abuse.

When both were murdered, the investigation centered on known Padania hit men but we found no viable suspects. A break in the case came when it was discovered that the bullet in Lauro’s brain came from Elsa’s gun. At the time we could not imagine a scenario where one of our girls, who was highly trained and conditioned to protect her handler, could have allowed her own firearm to be taken away and used to harm her handler.

Another detail was perplexing to the investigators. Elsa’s own fatal wound was a bullet, shot at close range piercing her eye, a secret Achilles heel for this generation of cyborgs. In fact the eye is the only place that isn’t armored so it is THE vulnerable place on the cyborg body. So either the shot was unusually lucky or it was an inside job.

I was a suspect because everyone knew that Lauro and I had strong philosophical differences. But I was quickly ruled out when investigators visited Henrieta and I at our seaside hideout. It was actually Henrietta who solved the case with a dramatic demonstration of the potent emotional bonds forged by chemical conditioning. She told the investigator, very softly--very sincerely, that if I had ever treated her the way Lauro treated Elsa she would have been so heartbroken that she would have killed herself. She grabbed a gun, placed it next to her eye, and fired. We rushed to stop her but she deliberately missed to illustrate her point and it showed us the solution to the crime. Elsa’s despair brought her to a place where the only solution was to kill Lauro, and then turn the gun on herself, committing suicide and ending her pain.

At first this incident caused the doctors and neurologists to rethink dosages and to caution the handlers about using too much conditioning. For a while the staff called the girls by name and stopped making off-color remarks about what they would do if they had a squad of cyborg girls at their disposal. But as the memory of the incident retreated in time it also retreated from our memories and soon we all went back to business as usual.

You Can't Shame the Shameless

I want to go back briefly and finish talking about child soldiers because I finally got back to reading that book I saw on the plane my first day on the job. Remember P.W. Singer’s book, Children at War? I finished that and then dug into more of his writing on the subject.
(Incidentally, all of Singer’s articles are all available on his page at the Brookings Institution Website.)
Anyway…after reading his book and this article, I am convinced that the Agency belongs on the shameful list of international criminals who use children in battle and our motives and behavior are strikingly similar.

One similarity is that the paramilitary groups mentioned in the book like Rwandan war lords, the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, and the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka to name a few, recruit abandoned and orphaned children who have no adult protection. The Tamil Tigers, whose 26 year long civil struggle recently came to a halt, had a bonanza of new recruits just after the tsunami decimated the coast of Sri Lanka, There were many homeless orphaned children who were welcomed into the children's army to fight and die for a cause they did not understand.

We all select our victims the same way hyenas do--we look for the sick, the helpless and the young. The Agency has spotters in many hospitals across Italy and when a young girl is admitted who has no family or no money, we swoop in and offer "to help."

Henrietta, for example, was a victim of home invasion where the robbers weren't content to just take property. They spent a few days torturing and killing the entire family. Henrietta was left for dead with extensive physical and mental trauma from her ordeal.

Angie, another of our cyborgs, was the victim of a near-fatal car accident. The most tragic detail of her story was that her parents were driving the car that hit her and astonishingly, it was no accident. Her father's business was about to fail and to raise some fast cash, he deliberately set out to kill her in order to collect on her life insurance policy.

Triella, our oldest cyborg was "rescued" from a gang of child traffickers in Amsterdam. Hillshire, her handler was part of the police team that broke up the gang and brought them to justice.

Rico was born paralyzed and had been bed-ridden her entire life. Her parents' resources and patience with caring for her were exhausted so they signed her over as a ward of the state. At that point the Agency stepped in to help.

I see now that even as adults, Jean's and my own recruitment happened partly because we were vulnerable after our parents, sister and Jean's fiancee were killed by a terrorist car bomb. We, too, were orphans.

Another similarity is that we choose children because, as Dr Bianchi says, the young mind is plastic and easy to manipulate and they learn fast. We take advantage of the natural child/parent bond and the younger ones develop fierce loyalties to their handlers. Dependent children can be easily conditioned to obey and if they are stubborn, because they are small they can be forced. One Rwandan handler bragged that he could train a child to use a light weight Kalashnikov in 30 minutes. His army of children needed no basic training, no expensive uniforms, and no big food bills. He just needed a strong supply of orphans as cannon fodder and the conflict could go on indefinitely.

There are 300,000 child soldiers in the world today in more than 70 military organizations in 19 countries. Everyone condemns the fact but the practice continues and grows. It seems that no matter how many laws are passed or how many international agencies draft resolutions against such practices, nothing shames us into stopping. Groups who recruit children to kill know very well that they are violating international law and moral codes that have existed for thousands of years and that knowledge is the heart of the problem. They have never been ignorant about whether or not it was ethical or confused about what exactly was allowed under international law. They continue to break the law and stay “off the record” as much as possible.

The biggest challenge of all in ending child soldiering lies in the types of conflicts that employ the young. Children tend to be recruited in long-running civil wars, the kind that simmer for years or even decades, just like our conflict with Padania. Unfortunately, these wars constitute the main form of armed conflict today. Until they stop, the recruitment of children never will.

Those who use child soldiers, and here I include my Agency, and myself are, by definition, willing to ignore and transgress longstanding ethical norms. Those who recruit children, send them into battle, and force them to commit murder are simply unlikely to be persuaded by moral appeals or any kind of rational discourse. As Singer says, “One cannot shame the shameless.”

Last week the 26 year long civil war ended in Sri Lanka, when the leader of the Tamil Tigers was killed. I hope the war will be over for the child soldiers in Sri Lanka the same way I decided the war was over for Henrietta.

The Slippery Slope

(This video will give you a look our first meeting)


I remember that the hospital room was dimly lit and the diminutive patient looked even smaller and more helpless amid the tangle of tubes and wires that were holding her together. Her body, salvaged from devastating injuries, was in the process of being “retro fitted” with bionic parts that would make her an indestructible fighting machine. Her mind had been wiped of memories and she was being psychologically and pharmacologically programmed to be an obedient, guilt free assassin. They asked me to stand by so I’d be the first thing she'd see when she awakened to her new identity. I felt like I should have greeted her with flowers or cuddly plush teddy bear but they told me that her life would be easier if she got used to her new status immediately-- so I placed a SIG P239, a semi-automatic pistol, on the coverlet.


Jean warned me that the first meeting would be hard to take and he was right. Henrietta was the same age as our sister was when she died in a terrorist bomb attack and she did look a lot like our little Enrika. But after the initial shock, I was surprised and kind of horrified at the ease with which I did everything they asked of me beginning with my offering her the gun. My instincts were shouting to comfort and protect this little girl but Dr. Belisario, Dr. Bianchi and my brother, Jean all convinced me to follow their orders. The two Doctors wore white coats and I wondered if I was being manipulated like the subjects in the Milgram Experiments that took place in 1961. You’ll see the similarities if you read about it. Penn State owns the original historic footage and offers it for sale and you can see a short segment here. I'm also giving you a link to an interesting reenactment here.


The experiment used authority figures in white lab coats to urge test subjects given the role of “teacher” to give other test subjects given the role “learner” increasingly strong electric shocks when they answered questions incorrectly. Milgram wanted to know if regular individuals would obey orders rather than follow their own set of values. Milgram’s experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and he summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

That first day I met Henrietta, I pushed away my own instincts of protection and care and began my descent into obeying orders that were incompatible with my own values and in fact with fundamental morality. Throughout our time together, I would ask her to do things that a 10 year old should not even hear about and I would stand by and watch other handlers mistreat their young charges without trying to stop them. I let myself be convinced by the doctors and their white coats that what I was doing was necessary and in fact was the kindest way of dealing with this child.



When she finally did awaken and I looked into her eyes, I saw the trust and love (provided by the psychotropic drugs they euphemistically call conditioning) and I felt the bond they promised. I imprinted her with her new name, Henrietta, and her signature weapon, the SIG P239--then she drifted back to sleep. My role as her handler and teacher would begin as soon as her body healed. Like Milgram's experiment, I would become the “teacher” who would train the “student” by following orders and inflicting the Agency’s brand of manipulation on these budding cyborg assassins. Over the next few months, Henrietta and I would train hard, bond emotionally, and I would teach her to kill the Padania terrorists and anyone else the Agency deemed to be enemies of our country.

I prided myself in the fact that I did not let them give her too much "conditioning" and I tried to treat her like a normal little girl by taking her out for ice cream. Doing these little favors let me convinced myself that I was better than the other handlers but the low dosage presented a new set of dilemmas that I'll talk about next time. Aside from my lame attempts to treat her humanely, I was no better than the subjects in the experiment, I ignored her vulnerability and emotional pain and continued to use her in the name of Agency for the good of the nation.