#UNDERGROUND UNDERCOVER PATRIOT HOW TO#

She remembers whiplash and a crunching sound as the bones around her left eye shattered.

She instantly goes limp as the other man, scrambling for the knife, catches her again.Īlison doesn’t remember being knocked unconscious, or any pain. As they jostle, one dives past the other, his knee catching Alison, who was spread out on the mat, flush in the side of the head. One pushes the other off the mat then both turn and dive toward the knives. “What's that going to look like?”Ī video of what happened shows two young men grappling on the corner of the mat opposite Alison. “I can't be the one to say, ‘No, I'm not going to do this,’” she says now.

Alison remembers thinking that she, or someone, was going to get hurt as everyone dived toward the knives, and that there should have been headgear. In the exercise, teams of two were placed at the four corners of a large mat, at the center of which were dummy knives the point was for each person to pass their teammates’s guard and reach the knives. It was important to her to not just be a pretty face. She was worried for the other women, and about what the men would make of the female operators.

The training was of questionable utility given the nature of OUR’s undercover operations, which mainly consisted, as far as Alison had seen, of sitting around in bars and strip clubs hinting that you were looking for a wilder scene. That day, they were training in hand-to-hand combat in the CrossFit gym under OUR’s offices outside Salt Lake City. The others, she would later say, were “beautiful, beautiful, sweet, clueless young women.” She was also one of only four women among the operators, and the only one with any relevant background. She had served six years in the Marines had specialized tactical training related to work with a government agency and had volunteered as part of an anti-hijacking team in South Africa. She was a licensed clinical social worker specializing in the treatment of people with extreme childhood trauma, including sex trafficking. VICE News is referring to Alison, 42, by a pseudonym due to her concerns about her safety she stood out among the class of operators, which included some former military, some former law enforcement, and a lot of people from church. Just as important, to her, was that Ballard had nothing to do with it. She had heard that it had operating protocols and arrangements with the government, and it was often held up as OUR’s most functional and effective region.

The draw was clear: OUR leaders responsible for distinct geographical regions would be choosing members for their teams from among the participants.Īlison, who had worked one mission on Ballard’s ops team in the Caribbean, was hoping to be recruited to the Thailand team.

#UNDERGROUND UNDERCOVER PATRIOT HOW TO#

These people had paid their own way for training, which largely involved sitting through slideshows on topics such as how to get information from someone without them knowing you’re doing so. OUR had invited about 60 people who had previously worked for it as operators on what it portrayed to the public as undercover paramilitary missions abroad aimed at rescuing women and children from sexual slavery. It was the third day of a selection being held by Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-sex trafficking group Ballard founded in 2012 after, he has claimed, being told to do so by God. As she lay on the ground, bleeding and vomiting and urinating and having it explained to her that there was no bone supporting her eye anymore, she heard Tim Ballard say, “Well, we can’t call an ambulance.” On a sunny day in late October two years ago, a man twice her size drove his knee into Alison’s face, destroying her orbital bone and knocking her eye out of alignment.

Underground undercover patriot