One of the methods that covert assailants use to isolate TIs is to make them stink. Unbelievable, but true, keep reading. As most people are familiar with, we humans make a lot of judgments about others based on how they smell – how clean, how healthy, if vegetarian or meat-eater, is it real odour or fake etc. A horrible smelling person is usually seen as one best to keep away from. As a result he/she tends to get isolated and alienated.

Bad breath! What a curse! Over a year ago I moved to Tasmania, from Byron Shire, NSW, Australia. At first I noticed that a particular type of bad breath was far more prevalent here than on mainland Australia. A bit like off milk smell, but worse. I have had it about nine times now, starting in my teens. It lasts for a couple of months. It is a strong, revolting odour easily noticed while passing someone with it in the street, or being served at a counter etc. In 23 years in Byron Shire I noticed two other people with this horrid problem. Here in Tasmania I noticed some most days, old and young, all sorts, kids too, no obvious pattern. That is way more than the occasional TI. It reminded me of a small item in the Brisbane newspaper, The Courier Mail, around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. Unfortunately, I haven’t got the quote, but it was about a method of tagging unfriendly agents in home territory – giving them a ‘bad breath drug’. Not long after noticing the prevalence of that bad breath here in southern Tasmania I found that I had a far worse variant. It was the same off milk type, but stronger and lingered so that the whole room that I was in would smell of it, very embarrassing it was too. It has gone again now and I only occasionally notice that bad breath coming from others too. I have had two other types of bad breath off and on. One is like bad smokers breath and the other is far worse being the odour of shit. Needless to say nearly all those who identify as TIs are single, poor, angry and some raving lunatics.

In my experience there are many other body odours happening that definitely seem out of the ordinary: smelly crotch, smelly feet, smelly underarms, smelly scalp, smelly semen, extra smelly shit and piss, smelly sweat, and extreme smelly and excessive farting. We tend to know what our normal b.o. is and so it is a sign of something changed, or wrong, if we smell really different. Of course there could be normal changes causing any new b.o., but if a person, with stable eating and exercise habits, and no new health problem, gets way more of these occurring off and on for decades it starts to get in the suspicious category, does it not? When a new body odour, is a very weird chemical smell, the level of suspicion goes up. Weaponized chemicals, drugs and biologicals may be in play. Whatever, this is not so far-fetched given today’s advanced understanding of the processes of the body. When a person who claims covert assailants are disrupting all his activities in life gets a voluntary position in a rural project and, when other workers are added to the project, his sweat starts to reek of an unknown and unnatural metallic and foul smelling chemical, then you have to wonder, surely? The only practical thing for this TI to do was to keep away from the other workers. Yet more isolation. On top of that there are odours introduced into a TIs home and clothing. In one of the odour assaults I experienced in Byron Shire I had no indication of a home invasion other than quite specific spots on many clothes smelt putrid and would have been embarrassing to wear out into the world. The same was on sheets and blankets. That was on about half of all wool and cotton materials. A day after writing about that into an online document, but not sharing it anywhere, a new and different very putrid odour turned up on my pillow. All these odours I have never experienced before. They are awful and not at all like normal bad smells, and very difficult to get rid of. You have to experience that sort of covert assault to know that with such an act you can tend to get a feeling of the perpetrator and this one was really hideous, the experience of whom was worse than the smell.

Another example: Back many years, when I was doing work as a disability support worker, I had the task of going to a special event with the client. I had the clothes for this event nice and neat on my bed at work. We went out for a few hours, and when we got back to the closed house, with screens on all windows, those clothes reeked of cat’s piss. I had never seen a cat anywhere in the local neighbourhood and it simply could not have got in if there had been one. Nothing else had that on it. Four times now I have had mysterious cats piss and on only one occasion could a cat have gotten in. I am not sure about normal cat’s piss, but this variety is extremely hard to get out of the affected materials. This sort of thing made the job extremely difficult. I managed to keep it for 17 years though, but only just. I had to resign in the end because of tensions created by my not being able to explain some of my behaviour in countering such covert assaults, and which I was unable to talk about, without being labelled ‘crazy’ that is, and losing the job that way instead.