CKLN RADIO 88.1 FM RYERSON POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY TORONTO ONTARIO Producer Wayne Morris, International Connection Tape 14a Claudia Mullen Good morning and welcome to another International Connection. Today is Part 2 of an interview I conducted with Claudia Mullen, a survivor of U.S. government mind control at Tulane University in New Orleans. Claudia introduced testimony of mind control experimentation to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in Washington, D.C. in March 1995. This interview is part of an 8 month series on mind control on The International Connection which runs until October of this year. And now, Claudia Mullen: CLAUDIA MULLEN: I described the inside of places that supposedly I had never been to, and yet I could describe the inside -- what rooms I had gone to looked to, things like that. That's how it was verified. WAYNE MORRIS: And did you or other people actually go to re-visit any of the places you were describing? CLAUDIA MULLEN: I went to a few with my therapist. I would never recommend going back to any place where abuse happened by yourself, because you immediately go into a flashback when you go back to some place. We went to some places around New Orleans that I had been to. One was a camp, an arsenal, that's now a police training facility and they allowed us to go in and look around. It was called Camp Nichols in New Orleans, and Dr. Wilson Greene used to stay there when he was in New Orleans. I found out later that it was sort of a place where military people could stay when they came to New Orleans and it also doubled as an arsenal. And I went back to Tulane University and that was pretty scary because that's where a lot of this stuff happened. I showed her the room - I said, "It's room 302" and I described what the hall would look like, what was on the wall, and sure enough a lot of it was the same. Of course there were empty rooms -- they weren't being used. But it was exactly the way I described it. And then some of the people that verified the information actually went to different places and the only place they couldn't get into was Edgewood Arsenal in Fort Detrich, Maryland. WAYNE MORRIS: You remember being experimented on within Edgewood Arsenal? CLAUDIA MULLEN: Yeah. I had been there. I could describe the place but very few people have been inside of it. It did turn out that one of the people that was verifying the information that I sent interviewed different people. A couple of times they interviewed people that I actually remembered from my childhood that remembered me, only they remembered me as "Crystal Stone" which was my name back then. That's what they called me for the experiments - "Crystal Stone". This man interviewed several people and one had actually been inside Edgewood and remembered a portrait of Dr. Greene that had been on the wall, and she said that the description I gave of him was exactly like the picture, that he looked just like the picture. He interviewed another man, a doctor who had come to see me at Tulane, but he had walked out and refused to take part in the experiment because they were using electric shock on me and I was about 14 at the time. He was furious and said "nobody told me you were using children" and he refused to participate. And when he was interviewed by this man, the doctor remembered, "... oh yeah, I remember a little blonde haired girl, skinny -- named Crystal" and so that was verification. But he has asked not to be named. WAYNE MORRIS: Just to reiterate, when you first approached the police about the rape that happened, what did you start remembering at that point before you got in contact with Valerie Wolf? CLAUDIA MULLEN: Actually, as far as any of this stuff, I didn't remember anything. I was mainly having nightmares about the rape. I did try to contact some people from my childhood that I thought had been -- one was a family friend, a doctor -- who I thought had been a family friend -- who had been someone I had always gone to when I had a problem. It turns out he was my monitor, or controller. He was the one who was supposed to keep track of me my whole life and make sure that my memories didn't start coming back, and when they did, he would take me back to Tulane. But I remembered him as a good person -- like an uncle. Then I did call Dr. Robert Heath because I remembered him from my childhood as a doctor I had gone to see. I remembered him as being a kindly old man that had always treated me nice. I didn't even remember what kind of doctor he was -- I just knew the name and I looked it up in the phone book, and I called him, and he said I needed to come in. He remembered me. Actually after the rape, it wasn't until I was in the hospital -- about three months later -- that I started having flashbacks of other people hurting me, other men, not the rapist -- other people. Everybody, from the doctor, the nurses ... was really confused ... because most people who have been treated for a recent trauma ... you have flashbacks of the trauma but you don't have flashbacks of something else ... and it was getting worse instead of better. I was on all this medication, group therapy, being hospitalized on suicide watch, and I wasn't getting any better. I was getting worse. I escaped a couple of times, but they brought me back. The way the memories start coming back -- they deliberately do this. They layer the memories so that you will remember family memories. I remembered my mother abusing me, things that had nothing to do with Tulane or any outside doctors -- I just thought I was abused by my mother and her friends. Then I remembered the camp across the lake and that led to remembering Tulane and that led to remembering all the places I had been to, and it just sort of snowballed. They keep coming, one after another. It's really hard to live while you are getting all these memories back. If I didn't have personalities I probably wouldn't be alive because they came out -- when you are going through these memories you can't just say, "okay I don't want to remember tonight, I want to eat dinner" -- you can't do that. So you go away, and let someone else come out, and they can eat for you, or sleep -- so you are not in a constant flashback. WAYNE MORRIS: How did going to therapy at the time help you cope with dealing with all these memories coming back? CLAUDIA MULLEN: Well, it kept me safe for one thing. Valerie Wolf made sure that -- I had to make a contract with her that I wouldn't hurt myself -- or if I thought about hurting myself I would tell her first. She had to make a contract with each of the personalities that were coming out -- the ones that came out the most. Not everybody came out at once. Obviously -- if I have almost one hundred personalities, not all of them would be coming out at once -- but over the years they come out. Some of them only come out one time and then that's it, they integrate. They come out to give you a memory and then they go inside you and integrate because their job is done. The therapy kept me going from day to day. There were lots of nights I would end up calling her in the middle of the night and she would try to keep control of the flashbacks. That's the worst part, the flashbacks. Because you are actually in the memory and it's happening right then and there. My husband would try to get me out of the flashbacks, and I would think he was the person hurting me. I would fight him. It's more or less a safety thing -- to stay safe. You don't want to be drugged all the time and you don't want to be in the hospital all the time so ... therapy is really important. WAYNE MORRIS: Can you describe the approach that your therapist took with you to help you heal, and to help you remember? CLAUDIA MULLEN: I guess the first part of healing is the remembering part and what she does for that is really just be there -- she doesn't encourage you to remember, you start remembering and you can't help it, and she will just sort of be there and saying, "what else do you remember?" Just sort of someone to give your memory to, someone who believes you, that's a big part of it -- having someone believe you because it is important to you. You remember this awful stuff and once you get past the point of denying it, and you understand it did happen, you need someone else to believe it happened. It is part of the healing process. She was there to help me remember it, to stay safe while I remembered it -- like I said it's actually as if you were going through the whole incident itself. You feel the body pain, whatever happened to you then you feel the same pain. You feel like you are being held down whatever it is that's happening -- you can actually feel -- like, if you are tied down, you can feel the ties on you. You can feel it against your skin. It's a weird sensation. It's almost like you are hallucinating, but you are not. You are just trapped back in this memory. She keeps you from hurting yourself, from running out the door -- which you do. You try to escape because you come in and out of the memory. It is not a constant thing. You are in the process of remembering something awful and somehow you click in -- the here and now will click in -- and you say, "okay I don't want to do this anymore, I want to get the hell out of here" and you start running to the door. She has had to catch me obviously to keep me safe inside of her room. A lot of people can only do this inside of a hospital. I was lucky. I had a therapist who was working outside of the hospital, because it is not a very good environment for doing this -- in the hospital. It is much easier to do it in some place familiar, more like a second home than a hospital environment. Because a lot of the stuff did happen in hospitals -- so that's the last place I want to be. And like I said, verifying the memories. After it's all over with, and you have finished it. You talk about it, you process it and then I would ask her "please try to find out was there a man named James Hamilton from California? Was there ever a doctor by this name?" "Is there such a place as Vacaville, California?" Something like that. So she would call her consultants and all these people that were experts and say, "okay this is the information she gave me." Because she had no idea. She purposely didn't read any of the material that was being published because she didn't want to accidentally contaminate my memories by giving me any information. She said as little as possible during therapy other than encouraging me to talk and basically hanging on to you sometimes. WAYNE MORRIS: Now there has been some material published about describing traumatic memory ... and the different way it's processed inside the brain, as opposed to regular memory. In that it does kind of take you back to that raw experience, including body memories, and that sounds like it was your experience as well ... CLAUDIA MULLEN: Right. Raw experience. That's a good description. WAYNE MORRIS: Did you find that you had to relive all of the memories in order to integrate that identity that had that memory, or were there other ways of dealing with it? CLAUDIA MULLEN: Well I'm told that everyone does their memories different. Everyone heals in a different way. For me in particular, it's important for me to go through the memories. Why I don't know. If I had my choice, I would say, I don't want to do any of the memories. I just want to talk about it, and say, well this happened, on such and such a day, and I was 12 years old -- I would rather talk about it, than experience it. For some reason, I can't put it behind me and go on and deal with it unless I have actually gone through it again. Only this time you do have a sense that it happened a long time ago, that the person's not really there anymore, and that you are safe. That's the only difference. You do have the sensation that you know Valerie is there, that the therapist is there, even though you are caught back in a different time, in a different place -- you still have this sense that this person who is safe and she's not going to let them really hurt you, and that this person is not going to come back and get you -- and that no one else knows about it, it's private. But for me I have to experience the memories. I have to get the full memory from the shadow that experienced it at the time. She gives it to me and then she goes inside or integrates. And that's where most of my shadows have gone. Once they get the memory, they integrate it. WAYNE MORRIS: Just to clarify for our listeners -- when you are saying "she", you are really meaning other identities within yourself ... CLAUDIA MULLEN: Yes. My identities or alters -- I call them shadows -- I mean my alters -- are all little girls. The oldest is 16 years old. The youngest is 1 year old. That's all one hundred of them -- they were all little girls. I don't have any boys, men, animals, robots, anything like that but other people have. Mine are just different ages -- I might have, like, five that are ten years old -- so that's why I have so many. Because there were some years when it was really bad, and things happened a lot, and I missed most of that year at school. It's a miracle that I passed school. I was held back a grade. And we actually went back and checked my school records and that verified information because we found the records of days that I missed from school, and they coincided with memories. I missed almost every Thursday and Friday -- I would go away for the weekend, you now. I don't have any pictures of me at any birthday because I was always sent away for my birthday. I don't have any pictures of me at Christmas, but I have lots of pictures of me at Easter time. I was always home at Easter because Easter is a big Catholic holiday and I was raised Catholic and of course you have to be in church on Easter Sunday or people will ask questions. But for some reason at Christmas, nobody asks questions. But for other people, they don't have to go through the memory. They can just talk about it. For myself I had to go through almost every single one that I have -- there's very few that I am able to process and talk about and not have to experience again. I guess it makes it real for me. WAYNE MORRIS: How long has been your healing process? Are you still in therapy now? CLAUDIA MULLEN: Yes, I am but I am back at work now almost full time, as a nurse. I was out of work four and a half years and I was on disability because I was in therapy so much -- almost every day of the week, except for weekends. I was unable to work. I was just too exhausted. I was on medication. Now I am going to therapy once, maybe twice a week, and it's mainly processing -- talking about the things that happened, talking about how I feel about the people. I have already gotten all the memories back so the worst is over -- actually having to remember every detail. That's done already. That happened during the spring of 1993 until right before Christmas 1996. WAYNE MORRIS: So when you actually gave testimony at the Radiation Hearings, you were only about half way through ... CLAUDIA MULLEN: A little more than half way through the memories. If I gave the testimony now, it would be a lot more accurate, with a lot more detail, a lot more names, places, because there were things I hadn't even remembered then. But it was enough that could be validated, and enough that they were interested ... thank goodness. WAYNE MORRIS: You also have a photographic memory. CLAUDIA MULLEN: I have a shadow who has a photographic memory, so I can use a photographic memory but I don't have access to it at all times. In other words, Claudia doesn't have a photographic memory, but part of me does. I don't have it 100% of the time but I used it a lot when I was growing up because -- unconsciously it was very important to me to remember everything that happened to me, every name, every face. I wanted to remember these people who were hurting me. I didn't know why I wanted to remember. Maybe I thought unconsciously that there would be somebody to tell some day. Somebody that would listen to me. Because they were always telling me not to tell the secrets. That horrible things would happen if you told someone. And I did try to tell twice as I was growing up. I tried to tell two different people and both times I got punished for it. I learned my lesson and I didn't tell anybody. WAYNE MORRIS: Who were these people that you had told? CLAUDIA MULLEN: When I was seven, I told the school nurse. I had been to camp the weekend before, to Mr. Fenner's camp across the lake. I had a really rough time. I was bleeding vaginally. I had bruises, scrapes all over me and my mother would send me to school with these flesh coloured leotards on ... with stockings ... like a little ballet suit, only it was flesh coloured and I would wear my uniform so it hid all the bruises and the scrape on me. She would put like a pad on me, you know, like you use for your period, and she sent me to school. I went to the school nurse because my teacher thought I looked really pale and not feeling well. I told the nurse. She said "How did this happen to you?" She saw I was bleeding and everything, had a temperature, a fever. And I said "my mother did it." She said, "no really, how did this happen?" I said, "my mother did it - she let this man do something to me and I don't want to go home." And so she told me to lay down and take a nap, and she would take care of it. I thought she was going to call the police and have my mother arrested. Instead she called my mother to come and pick me up and that she thought my mother should know what her daughter was saying about her. Of course I missed school after that for three days because she took it out on me. WAYNE MORRIS: Your mother punished you ... CLAUDIA MULLEN: And then when I was fourteen I told somebody and once again, they told my mother -- no actually, they told my monitor, Dr. Brown, the family friend who was best friends with Mr. Fenner and also with Dr. Robert Heath from Tulane and he was friends with a lot of the people from the CIA too. He actually worked with Martin Orne in the 1950's so he was friends with him. I told him what was happening. I said bad things were happening, I don't want to go home, I don't want to go see doctors any more and of course, he punished me then he told my mother. So that was the only two times I told anybody what was going on. I learned my lesson not to tell. But I kept everything filed away in my photographic memory. I remembered whole conversations, could describe what everybody was wearing, what they sounded like, what the place looked like, what it felt like, everything. That's why I have been able to give so much information. It's not just blurs of things that happened to me -- it's details and I am told that that's not very common -- that most people don't remember a lot of detail. They remember the feelings and the pain and sensations, but they don't remember small details, or they try not to. WAYNE MORRIS: I wonder if we could go into some of these details that you do remember, if you could talk about some of the people involved in the experiments ...