The Voice of the White House

                Washington , D.C. , June 21, 2008 : “The Beltway is always awash in rumor, speculation, lies and perversions. Plans to do this or that are sent around, none of which will ever be executed but indicate the mind-sets of the writers. We have Mr. Yoo, the lawyer for Justice who delighted in finding ways to legally torture people. He is now a professor at Berkeley and they deserve him, believe me.

The latest piece of psychotic garbage comes from the Cheney people who have been sending out trial queries to various agencies. There are no real secrets here but everyone thinks there are. And now what is the latest? Why nothing but a strong suggestion that the United States use their long-stored but certainly extant biological weaponry against the countries of Southeast Asia , to include: China , Indonesia , Vietnam , and others. Bombs, you ask? No, destruction of vital SEA food supplies by the introduction of deadly plant diseases.

The idea is to start this nastiness remote from our shores and to use agents that would not thrive in the colder United States so they cannot spread here. That they would certainly spread to Burma , India and other countries has never been considered. The Aussies had this project on their plate some years ago and the project has become a father in that piece of CIA-type nastiness.

Mass SEA starvation would benefit the United States , the proponents suggest, by cutting down the huge populations almost overnight and would also remove any direct threat to the United States for many years to come. If later there is a resurgence of population in China , it won’t be on their watch.

And, of course, destroying their crops and eventually causing the spread of famine and inevitable death, would have the added advantage of preserving the physical assets of the collapsed countries, assets like the great untapped Viethamese oil fields and the factories of China .

Rice is the primary target and we already have developed diseases that would not only wipe out a current rice crop but could so contaminate the growing areas that rice could not be a crop for several generations.

Will this happen? Probably not but the thinking, and the means exist and that is bad enough. When they talk about demolishing nuclear weapons (which is a huge joke) why not add biological weapons to the list?

That will never happen, either.”

Conversations with the Crow: Part 9

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation  in this series, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain,  in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations. It is even more pleasurable to note that a number of people inside the Beltway and in McLean , Virginia , have been screaming with rage! Here is a partial listing of documents from Crowley ’s personal files, now being scanned for publication:

DOCUMENT CATALOG

Catalog Number                   Description of Contents                                         __________________________________________________________________________________

1000 BH                 Extensive file (1,205 pages) of reports on Operation PHOENIX. Final paper dated January, 1971, first document dated  October, 1967. Covers the setting up of Regional Interrogation Centers, staffing, torture techniques including electric shock, beatings, chemical injections. CIA agents involved and includes a listing of U.S. military units to include Military Police, CIC and Special Forces groups involved. After-action reports from various military units to include 9^th Infantry, showing the deliberate killing of all unarmed civilians located in areas suspected of harboring or supplying Viet Cong units. *

1002 BH                 Medium file (223 pages)  concerning the fomenting of civil disobedience in Chile as the result of the Allende election in 1970. Included are pay vouchers for CIA bribery efforts with Chilean labor organization and student activist groups, U.S. military units involved in the final revolt, letter from  T. Karamessines, CIA Operations Director to Chile CIA Station Chief Paul Wimert, passing along a specific order from Nixon via Kissinger to kill Allende when the coup was successful. Communications to Pinochet with Nixon instructions to root out by force any remaining left wing leaders.

1003 BH                 Medium file (187 pages) of reports of CIA assets containing photographs of Soviet missile sites, airfields and other strategic sites taken from commercial aircraft. Detailed descriptions of targets attached to each picture or pictures.

1004 BH                 Large file (1560 pages) of CIA reports on Canadian radio intelligence intercepts from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa (1958) and a list of suspected and identified Soviet agents or sympathizers in Canada , to include members of the Canadian Parliament and military.

1005 BH              Medium file (219 pages) of members of the German Bundeswehr in the employ of the CIA. The report covers the Innere Führung group plus members of the signals intelligence service. Another report, attached, covers CIA assets in German Foreign Office positions, in Germany and in diplomatic missions abroad.

1006:BH                 Long file (1,287 pages) of events leading up to the killing of Josef Stalin in 1953 to include reports on contacts with L.P. Beria who planned to kill Stalin, believing himself to be the target for removal. Names of cut outs, CIA personnel in Finland and Denmark are noted as are original communications from Beria and agreements as to his standing down in the DDR and a list of MVD/KGB files on American informants from 1933 to present. A report on a blood-thinning agent to be made available to Beria to put into Stalin’s food plus twenty two reports from Soviet doctors on Stalin’s health, high blood pressure etc. A report on areas of cooperation between Beria’s people and CIA controllers in the event of a successful coup. *

1007 BH                 Short list (125 pages) of CIA contacts with members of the American media to include press and television and book publishers. Names of contacts with bios are included as are a list of payments made and specific leaked material supplied. Also appended is a shorter list of foreign publications. Under date of August, 1989 with updates to 1992. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Bradlee of the same paper, Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson and others are included.

1008 BH                 A file of eighteen reports (total of 899 pages) documenting illegal activities on the part of members of the U.S. Congress. First report dated July 29, 1950 and final one September 15, 1992. Of especial note is a long file on Senator McCarthy dealing with homosexuality and alcoholism. Also an attached note concerning the Truman Administration’s use of McCarthy to remove targeted Communists. These reports contain copies of FBI surveillance reports, to include photographs and reference to tape recordings, dealing with sexual events with male and female prostitutes, drug use, bribery, and other matters.

1009 BH                 A long multiple file (1,564 pages) dealing with the CIA part (Kermit Roosevelt) in overthrowing the populist Persian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Report from Dulles (John Foster) concerning a replacement, by force if necessary and to include a full copy of AJAX operation. Letters from AIOC on million dollar bribe paid directly to J.Angleton, head of SOG. Support of Shah requires exclusive contracts with specified western oil companies. Reports dated from May 1951 through August, 1953.

1010 BH                 Medium file (419 pages) of telephone intercepts made by order of J.J. Angleton of the telephone conversations between RFK and one G.N. Bolshakov. Phone calls between 1962-1963 inclusive. Also copies of intercepted and inspected mail from RFK containing classified U.S. documents and sent to a cut-out identified as one used by Bolshakov, a Russian press (TASS) employee. Report on Bolshakov’s GRU connections.

1011 BH                 Large file (988 pages) on 1961 Korean revolt of Kwangju revolt led by General Park Chung-hee and General Kin-Jong-pil. Reports on contacts maintained by CIA station in Japan to include payments made to both men, plans for the coup, lists of “undesirables” to be liquidated  Additional material on CIA connections with KCIA personnel and an agreement with them  to assassinate South Korean chief of state, Park, in 1979.

1012 BH                 Small file (12 pages) of homosexual activities between FBI Director Hoover and his aide, Tolson. Surveillance pictures taken in San Francisco hotel and report by CIA agents involved. Report analyzed in 1962.

1013 BH                 Long file (1,699 pages) on General Edward Lansdale. First report a study signed by DCI Dulles in  September of 1954 concerning a growing situation in former French Indo-China. There are reports by and about Lansdale starting with his attachment to the OPC in 1949-50 where he and Frank Wisner coordinated policy in neutralizing Communist influence in the Philippines .. Landsale was then sent to Saigon under diplomatic cover and many copies of his period reports are copied here. Very interesting background material including strong connections with the Catholic Church concerning Catholic Vietnamese and exchanges of intelligence information between the two entities.

1014 BH                 Short file (78 pages) concerning  a Dr. Frank Olson. Olson was at the U.S. Army chemical warfare base at Ft. Detrick in Maryland and was involved with a Dr. Gottleib. Gottleib was working on a plan to introduce psychotic-inducing drugs into the water supply of the Soviet Embassy. Apparently he tested the drugs on CIA personnel first. Reports of psychotic behavior by Olson and more police and official reports on his defenstration by Gottleib’s associates. A cover-up was instituted and a number of in-house CIA memoranda attest to this. Also a discussion by Gottleib on various poisons and drugs he was experimenting with and another report of people who had died as a result of Gottleib’s various experiments and CIA efforts to neutralize any public knowledge of these. *

1015 BH                 Medium file (457 pages) on CIA connections with the Columbian-based Medellín drug ring. Eight CIA internal reports, three DoS reports, one FBI report on CIA operative Milan Rodríguez and his connections with this drug ring. Receipts for CIA payments to Rodríguez of over $3 million in CIA funds, showing the routings of the money, cut-outs and payments. CIA reports on sabotaging  DEA investigations. A three-part study of the Nicaraguan Contras, also a CIA-organized and paid for organization.

1016 BH                 A small file (159 pages) containing lists of known Nazi intelligence and scientific people recruited in Germany from 1946 onwards, initially by the U.S. Army and later by the CIA. A detailed list of the original names and positions of the persons involved plus their relocation information. Has three U.S. Army and one FBI report on the subject.

1017 BH                 A small list (54 pages) of American business entities with “significant” connections to the CIA. Each business is listed along with relevant information on its owners/operators, previous and on going contacts with the CIA’s Robert Crowley, also a list of national advertising agencies with similar information. Much information about suppressed news stories and planted stories

                On October 8th, 2000 , Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley 's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley 's CIA files.

                Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley , died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda , Md.

                After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley 's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

                The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento 's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

                When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

                A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

                The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley 's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

                Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago , Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

                One of Crowley ’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany . Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

                Crowley ’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile , which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas   that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley ’s story but only after Crowley ’s death. Douglas , for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley ’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley ’s death and Trento ’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley ’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley ’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas . No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

                All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley ’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley ’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

                In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

                While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

                These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date:  Monday, April 29, 1996

Commenced:  9:17 AM CST

Concluded: 10:11 AM CST

GD: Good morning, Robert. Interesting news on the wire.

RTC: Good morning. What news is that, Gregory?

GD: I see that Colby appears to have had a boating accident.

RTC: So I understand.

GD: I believe you mentioned this earlier.

RTC: I very possibly may have, Gregory. We live in dangerous times indeed.

GD: Apparently he went out for a midnight excursion on the Potomac and did not come back.

RTC: A terrible loss. They haven’t found him yet have they?

GD: Not yet. Depends on the temperature of the water. When gasses build up in the body, it will rise like Jesus to the surface. We used to call them floaters when I was doing pathology and believe me, they stank badly. That is unless the bottom feeders got to him first. I can foresee a closed casket and lots of air freshener, Robert.

RTC: Graphic side to a great national tragedy. When we shot Paisley in the back of the head and chucked him off his sail boat, we put weights on him so he wouldn’t come up. When divers did find him, he was rotten to the core. Had to cut off his hands to try to get fingerprints.

GD: What was his transgression?

RTC: We let it get out he was suspected of dealing with the Soviets but actually, it had to do with the Kennedy business. Now that the box has arrived here, we will discuss this historical event much further. By the way, Gregory, when I turn it on, all the birds vanish from the area like magic. I can only imagine what must be going on inside. At least it works with the birds and one other thing I noticed. Some local was walking his dog on their side of the street and the dog began to yelp and howl when he came in range. Do you think the Swiss are more sensitive than dogs? I was halfway expecting to hear screaming from over there. Well, I followed your advice and only left it on for about twenty minutes for the first time and a little longer for the second.

GD: I’m glad you’re happy, Robert.

RTC: Well, another DCI gone.

GD: And lamented?

RTC: Certainly not by me, Gregory. Nor, I should think, by many others over there. A nasty man who had a mouth problem.

GD: I hope for the sake of all of us they find him but without a bullet in the back of his head. If the body never comes up, there will be endless books and articles about his vanishing. Some drooling pinhead will swear they saw him playing golf in Madrid . When Kitchner went down with the Hampshire, years later there were claims he was alive and well in Patagonia , running a penguin farm.

RTC: Yes, there’s a lot of that. The Kennedy business has the myth makers working overtime. Have you read any of the fantasy books? Men with umbrellas? People hidden in the sewers? Hoover shooting at him from some bank building? The Hunt brothers potting away from a black helicopter? Well, we’re responsible for a lot of that. Feed silly rumors to the babblers in the nut fringe and they stir up so much mud, you can’t see the truth.

GD: Maybe it’s on the bottom with Colby.

RTC: Remind me to avoid crab cakes for a few months.

GD: Mueller was telling me about Dulles.

RTC: Which one? Allan or John?

GD: Both, actually.

RTC: What did he say about Allan?

GD: Mueller knew him before he became DCI, when?

RTC: In ’53.

GD: Yes.

RTC: Kennedy forced him out in ’61. Kennedy did not trust us and threatened to break up the CIA. Not a wise move.

GD: No, it wasn’t. And Kennedy is dead and the agency lives on.

RTC: Yes, it does. What did Mueller tell you about Allan?

GD: Oh, that he met Dulles in Switzerland during the war. Dulles had no idea who Mueller was. Heini told me Dulles was a sucker for the plant and he loaded him up with all kinds of fake information about what was going on in Germany and Dulles ate the whole horse, saddle and all.

RTC: Allan was never too bright. His brother was a dyed-in-the wool Nazi, just like another one of our DCI’s father. Prescott Bush. But Allan was not a particularly deep or thoughtful man all in all. His son got shot in the head in Korea and came back an idiot so Allan was very bad to him.

GD: Beat him up?

RTC: Worse. He ignored him. Allan was not a kind or thoughtful man. But his wife really did a number on him at the end. Allan was dying in ’69 and they had a Christmas party at his place. Wife was downstairs with the guests, having a wonderful time. Not a word about Allan except that he was not feeling well. Finally, one of the boys decided to go up and wish Allan a Merry Christmas. Guess what he found?

GD: Tell me.

RTC: Allan lying in a urine and shit soaked bed, completely out of it and mumbling to himself. She had left him up there for quite a while. Ugly. She really must have hated him. The boys picked him up, wrapped him in a clean blanket and took him to the hospital where he died about a month later. She didn’t care at all and was very upset that they used one of her good blankets.

GD: You mentioned Prescott Bush. I have an original medal presentation paper giving a high Nazi decoration to him. Signed by Hitler in 1938. I’m surprised this never got out. I also have a picture of IBM’s Watson with a higher decoration, sitting in opera box with Hitler. The IBM people have been trying to buy that from me for ten years.

RTC: You asking too much for it?

GD: No. I thought it might look good in a book. Was George a good DCI?

RTC: George was a sly effeminate creature as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. When he was VP, they attended a state dinner in the White House and he brought his older boy with him. That one was a chronic boozer and during an intermission, he went out and pissed in one of the downstairs halls. I understand Nancy Reagan 86’ed him out of the White House. His brother is a con-man, unconvicted of ripping banks off because Daddy put on the pressure. And his wife is like something out of a Norse legend. A real dominatrix-type. You never know what goes on behind the curtains, Gregory, but I do. It’s enough to shake anyone’s belief in the honesty of our leaders, who hasn’t worked inside the Beltway long enough. Bush was only DCI for a year and I never had any use for him. Smiled a lot and as vicious and back-stabbing as anyone I ever knew. But then so many of them are.

GD: Did you know a William King Harvey?

RTC: Oh, indeed I did. What do you know about Bill?

GD: Mueller knew him and was boffing his wife. Mueller said he was an ex-FBI man whom Hoover fired for being a chronic drunk.

RTC: That’s true. Hoover was a prim and proper one.

GD: And Harvey used to carry a gun around and point it at people.

RTC: Harvey was fat and apparently hung like a stud cricket so the gun made up for what nature had forgotten.

GD: What is it that they said about the flat-chested woman? What nature has forgotten she can remedy with cotton?

RTC: I’ve heard that somewhere before.

GD: Nothing is original. Well, if and when Colby floats, will you go to his funeral?

RTC: That would be a little hypocritical, wouldn’t it Gregory?

GD: Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, Robert.

RTC: You’re a very wise person, Gregory. No wonder Bill and Tom are so upset with you.

GD: And don’t forget Wolfe.

RTC: I don’t like to go to the archives for fear he’ll slink up to me with more hate stories about you.

GD: He’s supposed to be such an expert on the Third Reich but he fakes it mostly. His great triumph was to discover an old record with an alleged speech of Himmler’s in which Reichsheini is talking about killing off all the Jews. Bob made such a fuss over his discovery. I got him to send me a tape of it because it’s in the archives and I got a hold a friend of mine who collects German newsreels. He had a 1939 ufa newsreel with a part of a speech by Himmler so he made a tape of that and I got another friend of mine to compare the speech patterns. Not the same. Either Bob’s precious record that he used to play for Jewish groups or the original newsreel was a stone fake.

RTC: I don’t think it takes a Harvard graduate to see which was which. Do you think he made it? And planted it?

GD: Not personally. His wife is German but Bob is not fluent enough to pull that one off. Probably got it from some co-religionist, planted it, discovered it and exploited it. Or, of course, they faked the Himmler speech on the newsreel. So much of these things are invented and of course the public believes it.

RTC: Tell me, Gregory, what does Wolfe think about our hiring the head of the Gestapo?

GD: Oh and many others. What? Well, he’s a torn person. He’d love to expose this but he can’t because he sucks up to officialdom and can’t have it both ways. I love to tell him about Krichbaum and others and when I do, I suppose he would like to kill me. Kill the messenger, not the message is the hallmark of the very small of mind.

RTC: True enough. And Bill and Tom are highly annoyed that we talk. I think they’re afraid of what I might say to you. Wouldn’t you agree?

GD: Yes. Another convocation of the small of mind.

RTC: But large of ego. When he was younger, we used to call Tom the Arrow Shirt Boy. Ring a bell?
GD: The clean-cut drawings?

RTC: Yes. Really handsome men and beautiful women tend to be very shallow in their social relationships. That’s because they don’t have to make any effort to attract attention. Uglier people have to rely on personality.

GD: Yes, that’s true. My first wife was really beautiful but stupid as a post and very greedy. It’s amazing how we can delude ourselves, isn’t it? She wanted me to give a lot of money to her brother to buy a gas station. He fell off his motorcycle and did damage to his head. I don’t think he could run a bicycle pump, let alone a gas station. I refused and she retaliated by moving her bloated mother in with us. Mom brought four nasty cats with her. I like animals but these loved to shit on the carpets and one loved to take dumps on the kitchen counters. Talking about this did no good so one day while Mom and her hatchling were out trying to spend my money, I took the dear pussies, stuffed them into a potato sack and tossed them into the apartment house pool. When the bubbles stopped, I dove in, fished them out and laid them in a nice, wet, row at the edge of the garden. Threw the bag away. Mom and the Other came home and she started looking for the dear felines. When I told her I had put them outside to do their nasty business, Mom waddled outside, shrieking for her lovelies. Then she really started to wail when she saw the line-up by the pool. When I was at work the next day, they both moved out and took all the furniture with them. This was not a good idea because I had rented the place furnished. I had to pay for the furniture, of course.

RTC: Did she leave the cats behind?

GD: No, they were gone. I think they had a state funeral for them. Burial at Arlington .

RTC: I take it you got a divorce?

GD: Actually, no, I did not. A friend of mine saw the Other passing out drinks in Vegas but when I called personnel at her casino, they said she’d left the place about a month before. She did surface about twenty five years later. Someone sent me a package of old books from LA and wrapped them in the local paper. By God, there was the Other playing golf out at Palm Springs . The long and short of it was, Robert, that she had married a wealthy real estate developer and had two kids by him.

RTC: No divorce?

GD: No, she was too stupid to think of that. I took this to a lawyer I knew but he was not interested until he found out that her husband, who had serious IRS problems, had put all his assets in Other’s name. Then he got very interested because, as he pointed out to me, in California , property acquired by either party in a marriage is considered community property. He was suddenly very eager to take the case on a contingency fee basis because half of what she had was mine and we were still legally married. Here we’re talking about bigamy as well. Much uproar, threats by massive legal firms in LA and in the end, they settled before we made a public filing. I lived on the rewards of my patience and misjudgment for years. And then we were divorced, very privately. Love is a wonderful thing, Robert. Do you know the difference between Herpes and love?

RTC: I can’t say that I do.

GD: Herpes is forever, Robert.

RTC: Now that’s not kind, Gregory.

GD: A very shrewd observation. If I had been a kind person, I would not have sent you those wonderful poems.

RTC: That was not meant unkindly. Let’s say a joke.

GD: Well, we can talk about Kennedy one of these days, can’t we?

RTC: As I said. I can get in touch with you later this week if you want.

GD: Let me call you. I’m sure you’ll be watching and waiting for Colby to emerge from the depths.

(Concluded at 10:11 AM CST )

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control

June 22, 2008

by Alan Fram and Eileen Putman

AP

WASHINGTON - Is everything spinning out of control?

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq , Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year’s presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order - and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, “Yes, we can.”

Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2003.

An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on the national mood.

“It is pretty scary,” said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester , Minn. “People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven’t been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.”

Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone.

Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire.

Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet’s weather that man seems powerless to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge?

It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from visitors.

Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs - turning corn into fuel - is sapping fields of plenty once devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S. , rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the staple.

Residents of the nation’s capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through. In California , leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought.

Want to get away from it all? The weak U.S. dollar makes travel abroad forbiddingly expensive.

To add insult to injury, some airlines now charge to check luggage.

Want to escape on the couch? A writers’ strike halted favorite TV shows for half a season. The newspaper on the table may soon be a relic of the Internet age. Just as video stores are falling by the wayside as people get their movies online or in the mail.

But there’s always sports, right?

The moorings seem to be coming loose here, too.

Baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens stand accused of enhancing their