At the age of eleven, she boarded a ship and made her way to the United States and to a small hamlet in Vermont. She had an uncle who lived there, who helped her perfect her broken English. She was the top of her class in high school and was awarded a full-ride scholarship to MIT where she studied chemistry with a minor in psychology. She graduated in 1970 — what would be the tail end of the Vietnam War — and with her eastern European background and her off-the-charts intellect, she had many suitors, one of which was the United States Central Intelligence Agency. In 1971, she began her CIA training in Langley, Virginia.

After she completed training, she was recruited into what the CIA refers to as its Extraordinary Rendition Program, a fancy name for capturing and interrogating enemy combatants and using enhanced interrogation, aka torture, to retrieve human intelligence.

The years 1973 to 1981 are redacted — huge blocks of blackened text — but I can put the pieces together from what I learned at the hands of the ex-Director of the CIA as well as my mother.

My mother became part of a clandestine operation to develop the best and most effective strategies of enhanced interrogation, an off-the-books black op she referred to as the Sleep Control Program.

At the same time, the CIA was setting up black sites — secret underground torture chambers — both domestically and abroad, which gave my mother and her team ample opportunity to test their new techniques.

Then, according to my father, he met my mother at a coffee shop in November of 1976.

He knew her as Sally Petracova.

A year later, she became Sally Bins.

I was born on December 12, 1978.

According to my father, I was born with my condition, but according to both LeHigh and my mother, I was one of her first experiments, so it’s anybody’s guess what actually occurred.

The next date that isn’t redacted in the file is April 15th, 1981, when she traveled to Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan War was raging during this time period, and my mother stayed for six weeks. My mother was often away for long stretches, but six weeks was a long time to be away from your three-year-old, and I vaguely recall this period when she was away. (Of course, I thought my mother worked for a company called Global Geologist Unlimited identifying oil reserves in different parts of the world. I had no idea she was waterboarding secrets out of enemy combatants.)

The next four years are redacted, then in January of 1985, she traveled to Honduras where she stayed for three years.

This fit with my personal timeline, as the last time I saw her was on my sixth birthday, December of 1984.

From 1988 to 2001 is redacted.

Then in November of 2001, two months after the Twin Towers fell, my mother was sent to the Middle East, no doubt to put her skills to use in the attempt to destroy Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.