FBI agent Theresa Foley to sue agency after contracting disease from rats

Forced to live with rodents in Guantanamo she caught horrific disease

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Theresa Foley

Photo by Nancy Lane, Boston Herald

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A Special Agent is suing the FBI after contracting a debilitating disease after being forced to share sleeping space with a colony of rats in Guantanamo Bay.

“I’m sure they thought I’d just die and go away,” Theresa Foley told the Boston Herald. “And I’ll admit, there were a few times I felt like I wanted to do just that. But when I think that it was my own government who’s left me in this position, that’s brought such misery not just to me, but to my parents and my brother . . . well, I can’t give up. Or shut up. Or just go away.”

The disease has left the 45-year-old Foley unable to walk on her own, and she suffers in pain from two spinal fusions, six other major surgeries and the effective loss of her right leg.

Foley, from Roslindale, Mass., became an FBI agent 11 years ago. In 2003, she was sent to work in Guantanamo Bay with a group of agents assigned to debrief detainees from the war on terror.

Foley, who was raised in a law-enforcement household, liked the work but became disillusioned at the behavior of her colleagues, who seemed more interested in soaking up the Cuban sun and rum than talking to terror suspects.

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She was forced to live for 10 months in a squalid bungalow that hosted a colony of large rats and contracted a hideous bacterial disease called leptospirosis. Her doctors traced the infection that bored into her central nervous system back to the rats.

Foley continued to work even as her legs began to swell. After a supervisor insisted she kneel in order to pass a routine firearms qualification, the muscle in her right leg ripped apart.

Terry Foley has been relegated to worker’s compensation for almost the last seven years.

“I had a supervisor from the Bureau come up from Washington to visit me at my parents’ home. ‘I want to put a face to the name,’ he said to me. He left and we never heard from him again.

“Well, I haven’t gone away.” Terry Foley said. “I’m still here and they’re going to know it.”

The FBI declined to comment.

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