Oops….Sorry About that Austin, Texas: An Otherwise Excellent Example of Great Journalism was Also a Tad Off

The Korean Central News Agency Friday sent out one of the thousands of meticulously staged propaganda photographs they do each year, this one with a caption which included the description of an “urgent operation meeting on the Korean People’s Army Strategic Rocket Force’s performance of duty for firepower strike at the Supreme Command in Pyongyang.”

The picture showed Kim Jong Un sitting at a table with military commanders standing behind him. In the upper left, on the wall, was world map obscured in the background with some barely visible Korean language characters and several arrows pointing to different parts of an unmarked global map.

NKNews reporter James Pearson, with the eagle-eyed attention for out of the box details and curiosity which makes for a great reporter, didn’t focus on the staged people in the photo but on the aspects not designed by the propagandists who produced it to draw attention. One was the map in the top left hand portion of the photo. He translated the writing on the map which turned out to read “U.S. Mainland Strike Plan”.

NKNews.org annotated photo titled “U.S. Mainland Strike Plan.” Original photo by KCNA. Translations and analysis by James Pearson NKNews.org

While this photo was released on the English language service of KCNA, whose target audience is enemy foreigners, it originally had appeared in the main North Korean Worker’s party organ, Rodong Sinbun, which targets North Korean citizens, and which often includes entirely different messages that the ruling party wants to send to its own population. What propaganda that appears in the North Korean language domestic press is very different than the propaganda meant for foreign consumption. Niether the map nor caption was either translated or highlighted in the KCNA English language broadcast photo.
Pearson said: “Shortly after breakfast, I called my NK NEWS colleague in D.C. to tell him I’d spotted a KCNA picture that showed Kim Jong Un and his generals studying a not-so-subtle map with the title ‘US MAINLAND ATTACK PLAN’ crudely printed on it. It could’ve been satire but, knowing how most (if not all) NK propaganda is very much intended for an internal audience, it made sense given reports on the ground in North Korea that the state was trying to create a ‘war-like’ atmosphere domestically.”

Pearson, who is in Seoul, also noted three blurry arrows pointing to spots on an unmarked outline of a world map. He, in coordination with NKNews journalists in Washington, superimposed a Google map of the U.S. on the KCNA unmarked map and located where exactly the arrows were pointing to. One pointed at Hawaii; one at San Diego, California; one at Washington, D.C.; and one at Austin, Texas.

Original March 29 KCNA official photo where Kim Jong-un signed off on the order at a midnight meeting of top generals to put its rocket units on standby to attack U.S. military bases and “judged the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists in view of the prevailing situation”, the official KCNA news agency said. Note map has no markings or translations

Austin Texas? The home of Willie Nelson, hipsters, the South by Southwest music and cultural festival, and great barbecue?

Yep, that Austin.

At least that’s what the NKNews team decided late Thursday night –or rather the wee hours of Friday morning D.C. time–spurred by the work and in conjunction with the crack sleuth reporter James Pearson, who spotted and broke the excellent story, who is in Seoul.

Friday, NKNews.org published a map with the translated words in English “U.S. Mainland Strike force Plan” under the Korean text  and superimposed the map of the U.S. from Google maps and annotated the various arrows and Korean text and U.S. targets which showed exactly which U.S. cities and facilities the North Korean’s were zooming in on.

Given the map wasn’t translated for English distribution it was likely intended only for North Korean consumption when it was published in the Party organ earlier. But the excellent efforts and keen observations of NKNews, with reporting abilities, linguistic knowledge, and depth of historical knowledge of the wacky folks who run Pyongyang and their propaganda nuances, made what would probably have been an un-remarked upon news item into the major and significant news story it deserved to be.

Although like happens in the real world, there is a back story.

According Pearson “Turning to Google Maps, I overlayed a screenshot of the US and the Pacific over the bleached-out map in the propaganda photo, trying to make sense of the ‘trajectory lines’ on the North Korean version (the lines are straight, that’s a clue for a start). Not really knowing my US geography beyond patchy corners of the East Coast, we estimated that D.C., San Diego and Hawaii were probably targets, real or imagined, since they’re all home to military bases. The line that ended in Texas, we decided, was more confusing. “Where is that?” I asked my colleague. “Not sure – Austin maybe? Not sure”, he said. “OK, Austin it is, it’s probably Austin then”.

I was out until the wee hours last night with NKNews.org colleagues and we discussed how the blow by blow story evolved. In the process of trying to identify which cities the arrows targeted, in back and forth conversations between Washington and Seoul, it appeared, rather oddly, that one arrow was pointed at Austin Texas.

Superimposed U.S. map on NK propaganda photo with blank map outline with arrows

Hawaii was pretty easy to determine. As was San Diego. And Washington fit perfectly (and logically) with the Pyongyang military arrows.

But then there was a bit of an odd target.

“That looks like Austin, Texas to me,”said one NKNews.org correspondent.

“Yeah but why would Pyongyang have a beef with Austin, Texas?” asked another.

“Who knows? Why does Pyongyang do anything they do? Just say Austin because that is where the arrow is pointing at,” concluded another.

So Austin it was, the photo was published, and the details noted above and photo were published in a story that made global headlines.

The story that did go out, after considerable editorial discussion, referred to the North Korean military arrow targeting remote South Texas as “probably Austin.”

The NKNews.org story that went out read: “In a photo published in the Korea Worker’s Party (KWP) paper the Rodong, plans for a strike on the U.S. mainland are clearly –and therefore probably deliberately– visible. The newspaper is widely distributed in cities, and often displayed in public places for easy viewing [...] A composite overlay [of the map] appears to show San Diego, Washington D.C., Hawaii and possibly Austin as being primary targets in a North Korean attack plan”. (http://www.nknews.org/2013/03/breaking-north-korean-photo-reveals-u-s-mainland-strike-plan/)”

As America woke up (and our article got picked up by the early editions in Europe and America) the headlines in Texas were: NORTH KOREA WANTS TO ATTACK AUSTIN (http://www.click2houston.com/news/Article-claims-North-Korea-wants-to-attack-Austin/-/1735978/19522828/-/4x4d4lz/-/index.html), WHY AUSTIN IS ON NORTH KOREA’S HIT LIST (http://www.kvue.com/news/Why-Austin-is-on-North-Koreas-hit-list-200605711.html) and, to the credit of people in Austin, the whole thing started an amusing Twitter trend, ‘#WHYAUSTIN’ (http://www.ora.tv/newsbreaker/north-korea-targets-austin-tx-twitter-ask-0_6777gdnp).

Now Texan’s, in general, don’t have a sense of humor generally about people with guns even from the next town messing with them, little less foreigners, and even less the last communist country on earth, North Korea. Hell, a lot of Texans want the entire State to secede from the U.S. and be their own sovereign country.

But Austin, Texas, is a hipster town, the home of Willie Nelson and has a sense of humor.

When the news broke, social media lit up with North Korean plans to nuke Austin Texas. A twitter hashtag went viral: #whyaustin.

The Austin City Government tweeted “Not to worry Austin…we’re prepared” and linked to a cartoon from YouTube  Austin Texas @austintexasgov Not to worry, Austin…we’re prepared: http://ow.ly/jzZ66  #whyaustin –which was the 1951 ‘duck and cover’ instructional video on how to behave during a nuclear attack.

One headline from a story picked up from the NKNews.org story

Slate ran a story titled “Kim Jong-Un’s Latest Unbelievable Threat: Bombing Austin, Texas”

The Drudge report bold headlined: UN-HINGED: KIM TO BOMB D.C., LA—AND AUSTIN?

The Digitaltexan.net headlined “Austin Texas targeted for destruction by North Korean missiles”

“Is Austin ready to handle a nuclear missile attack?

Austin is one of four cities that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his generals have slated for destruction by long range nuclear missiles.

Austin is seen targeted on a chart labeled “US Mainland Strike Plan” in pictures released Friday by the state-run Rodong newspaper. The pictures of Kim and his top generals is supposed to be from and emergency meeting.

The state of Hawaii, Washington DC, and Los Angeles are also going to be taken down along with Austin.

Why would Kim target Austin? What did we do?

Perhaps Kim is jealous that he couldn’t get a comped badge for SXSW. Or maybe he has heard that Austin always makes the top of someone’s top 10 list, and he wants to take the city down a notch.

Austin’s best defense would be to pay Dennis Rodman to move into the W Hotel . Kim and Rodman are buddies. That might spare us from a nuclear holocaust.

The images are more than likely just your standard commie-prop, a staged meeting to show the North Korean people that Kim Jong-un is doing something other than playing video games and watching porn.”

Twitter commentator

Texas commentators had a couple choice comments:

“Why would North Korea attack a city filled with NK allies & sympathizers?,” said one who obviously views the city of Austin, Texas as a bastion for pinko sympathizers.

“I doubt they can hit anything they aim at. It’ll probably strike Waco instead,” said another referring to the notorious botched U.S. federal government raid on the nutty Christian cult in a compound in Waco in the 1990’s.

Then a couple of people noticed that the arrow, despite being identified as Austin by our otherwise crack NKNews.org editorial team in the wee hours of the morning (“Yeah…what the fuck, go with Austin” was the last editorial directive given prior to publication), was likely slightly off and the intended target was actually the nearby U.S. military base of Fort Hood. north of the city.

But Austinites were seriously scratching their heads all day today.

“Austin Texas Residents Respond To Kim Jong-Un’s Bizarre Nuke Threat,” was one headline.

“A map in Kim Jong-Un‘s North Korean war room shows a map of the US mainland with targets for missile strikes like Hawaii, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and, um, Austin. Yeah, Austin. Seriously.

If you’re a crazy mad dictator, attacks on places of military importance like Hawaii make sense. An attack on an important center of commerce like Los Angeles makes sense. Disrupting order in the nation’s capital makes even more sense but bombing the home of the South by Southwest conference?

Austin residents are baffled by the news that their city is on the kill list of the reclusive North Korean communist. One resident told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Kim must want to “wreck a couple of music festivals.”

Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell has said that the local authorities are watching the situation closely but “they do not believe the threats are credible at this time.”

One knucklehead academic decided to offer the balanced view with the following said with a straight face to a local Texas newspaper.

“A foreign affairs expert at the University of Texas downplayed the concerns about an attack on Austin saying that though the choice of Austin is surprising the threat isn’t from North Korea isn’t very real. “They have no serious threatening capability to the United States’ mainland,” said Jeremi Suri, Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas. The choice of Austin isn’t totally surprising though because of its place as a major cultural hub and the presence of a company with deep South Korean ties, Samsung, says Suri.

“Austin has a lot of international cache. It’s seen as a center of music, as a center of exciting technology, and they want to show they can threaten that. They want to show that they can do something to get attention,” said Suri.”

Others took the threat with more of a reasonable response to the gravity it deserved.

“They’re cornering the global BBQ market by taking out the competition,” offered up as opinion one Texan.

“I for one will miss their delicious Tex-Mex,” said another lamenting the impending loss to regular access of local cuisine.

The Twittersphere went viral with hashtag #whyaustin?

“If it ever came down to a real war, I think North Korea would give Austin some trouble but would ultimately crumble with Willie and the troops marching into Pyongyang singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” North Korea, however, could potentially–with some hard work–defeat some of the tiny townships in that area, like Luling, where Kim Jong-Un could finally win the town’s annual “Thump Queen” contest,” was the conclusion of another crack Texan policy analyst.

“I dunno, some of those cats can spit seeds further than Pyongyang can shoot its rockets. I however, volunteer to protect Luling’s favorite daughter, stone cold fox, Tamron Hall,” said another.

“Maybe he’s trying to take out Rick ‘Oops’ Perry?” asked one, referring to the much joked about Texas governor whose presidential aspirations crashed and burned when he was found not to be very bright.

“Kim Jong Un knows that Perry is unstable. He may just ooopps our entire nuclear arsenal on North Korea if he were president,” agreed another.

“North Korea plans to bomb Willie Nelson” headlined the Washington Times.

The London Daily Mail, in a baldly plagiarized and typically sensationalist take on any news regardless of its merit and truth, of course chimed in too.

“So why does North Korea want to bomb Austin? Twitter users mock Kim Jong Un’s ‘U.S. mainland strike plan’ that targets the hipster capital of the Lone Star state” was the Mail headline.

Why does Kim Jong Un seem to have a problem with Austin, Texas?

That is the question that Twitter users and foreign affairs analysts alike have been asking themselves ever since the release of North Korea’s ‘U.S. mainland strike plan’ Friday.

The secretive regime made public photographs of Kim Jong Un inside his military command center signing the order to put rockets on standby to attack the U.S. mainland.

Commentators seem to agree that Kim Jong Un was upset he wasn’t invited to the annual music and multimedia festival South by Southwest.”

“You know who is angry about missing Prince during SXSW? Kim Jong Un. No Purple Rain = Reign Of Terror,‘ Tweeted Sweet John.

In the wee hours of this morning, as the NKNews.org team assessed our professional performance, we were rightfully quite proud of the yeoman sleuthing work of Seoul based correspondent James Pearson.

But we did agree to promptly update our contact list to include expert cartographers and military mapping analysts and spookery.

So on behalf on NKNews.org, I want to apologize for upsetting Austin Texas.

While we are a top notch news outfit for all interested in North Korea, we are not trained cartographers and we were a tad off on that Austin bit.

The target was probably really, upon a bit of sleep and a closer analysis, probably Fort Hood (a U.S. military facility, not coincidentally, a major facility for U.S. cyberwarfare operations) just a bit north of y’all.

Sorry about that.

North Korea’s Global Hall of Mirrors: Shadowy front companies crucial to banned Pyongyang arms exports

Investigation reveals complex web of false shell corporations spanning the world enabling DPRK arms exports

By Nate Thayer
NK News
May 30, 2013

(See entire story at NK News http://www.nknews.org/2013/05/the-front-companies-facilitating-north-korean-arms-exports/ )
Four years after an aircraft was seized in Bangkok with a cargo of illicit weapons being sent from North Korea to Iran, the UN and other governments have concluded an investigation revealing new details of a sophisticated worldwide criminal network to circumvent UN sanctions designed to halt the proliferation of nuclear, missile, and other technologies to some of the world’s most volatile conflicts.

Dozens of shell companies involving at least 16 countries were created in the weeks before the aircraft was seized – paper industries designed to disguise the shadowy players behind the 2009 arms shipment that almost evaded international law enforcement.

On the night of December 11, 2009, the U.S. Ambassador to Thailand called the Prime Minister with an important request: U.S. intelligence had information a cargo plane had departed Pyongyang smuggling 35 tons of clandestine arms and was scheduled to land in Bangkok to refuel. The U.S. wanted the Thai army to seize the aircraft and its cargo, banned under international laws mandated by United Nations sanctions.

But when the aircraft was seized at 4.00pm the next day, the international intricate web of shell companies simply vanished into thin air.

In reality, they never existed except on paper.

The companies were all mail drops hurriedly established in obscure offices spanning the globe. They were all creations of other legal companies that exploited loopholes in national laws from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Ukraine to London – established to hide the true identities of the owners.

The officers listed on company registration papers were “nominee” directors with no power or knowledge over company operations. They received their instructions from the real owners whose true identities, nationalities, and locations they did not know.

Like an optical illusion, the complex global network was a hall of mirrors and the real identities of the powers behind the operation vanished immediately when the cargo was seized.

The only people that proved quickly identifiable were the airplane crew:–one Belarusian and four Ukrainians–who had no idea who they were working for, what cargo they were transporting, who their cache of goods was being delivered to, or even to where it was destined.

But the illicit weapons cache did yield a gold mine of documents that paint a vivid portrait of the complex global network used to evade international and national laws.

Leaked UN reports two weeks ago said their four year investigation into the Bangkok seizure had been concluded, and named three individuals who were part of the intricate web of deceit.

AN INTRICATE WEB

The 52-page confidential report by the Panel of Experts on sanctions against the DPRK named two Ukrainian citizens, Yuri Lunov and Igor Karev-Popov, and one citizen of Kazakhstan, Aleksandr Viktorovich Zykov, for their involvement in the North Korea arms cache seized in Bangkok.

Kazakh Aleksandr Viktorovich Zykov was an international arms trafficker whose company, then registered in the United Arab Emirates, owned the Russian made cargo plane until just months prior to it being used to transport the North Korean arms shipment.

Ukrainian Yuriy Lunov owned the Georgian company, Air West, who held the operating license to the aircraft, and hired the crew to fly the cargo plane.

Ukrainian Igor Karev-Popov was the mysterious figure who was “a UK based European” who controlled the New Zealand registered shell company, SP Trading, which from the shadows leased the aircraft from Air West from SP Trading’s shell mail-drop office in Kiev, Ukraine.

Upon leasing the plane, SP Trading signed an agreement with a just created Hong Kong registered front company, Union Top Management (UTM), which chartered the aircraft.

Four days later the aircraft departed Azerbaijan for a circuitous trip around the globe to Pyongyang.

From shell offices that included Kiev, Ukraine, Auckland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and a mysterious company registered in London, SP Trading and UTM choreographed the operation. The cargo, which included 35 surface-to-air missiles that could theoretically shoot down a passenger plane, originated in Pyongyang and were destined for Hezbollah via distributers in Iran and Syria.

The real beneficial owners of the New Zealand shell company, SP Trading, ltd., and the Hong registered UTM were in real control of getting the weapons from North Korea to Tehran, where they would subsequently have gone to the Palestinian guerrilla army, Hezbollah, via Syria.

The four year UN investigation by the Panel of Experts, in cooperation with a number of law enforcement, aviation, and financial investigators and intelligence agencies, notably New Zealand, uncovered a jigsaw puzzle that has revealed remarkable details of how international criminal syndicated transport illicit commodities under the radar of international and national laws.

A PORTRAIT EMERGES

While North Korea can mask operations within its own borders, there are many national and international laws to abide by in order to operate globally – particularly in shipping, international flight operations, financial systems and company registration. This is compounded within the national borders of countries that are more sensitive to operating within the parameters of international laws and regulations.

Aircraft ownership, operator licenses, safety requirements, cargo manifests, international flight plans, etc, all required documentation – documentation that was found aboard the seized aircraft in 2009, and provided a paper trail that sparked 4 years of international investigation.

“New Zealand authorities investigated the beneficiaries of SP Trading and passed information to the (UN) Sanctions committee,” a New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson told NK News, confirming their ongoing investigation into who was behind the New Zealand-registered companies linked to the seized plane.

“New Zealand legislation will shortly be passed that will close the loophole for non-resident directors,” the New Zealand government added.

IGOR KAREV-POPOV

The “non-resident director” and beneficiary of SP Trading was Igor Karev-Popov, – the same Igor Karev-Popov identified as sanctioned by the UN Panel of Experts this May, and said to be the most important power behind the network revealed so far.

But while Karev-Popov had never previously been publicly identified by name, the New Zealand government has been aware of his identity since at least 2010.

He is is the mysterious unnamed “UK based client” who was the person behind the creation of the two key paper companies, SP Trading and UTM, who controlled decisions to lease the aircraft, create the flight plan, pay those involved, and, most importantly, approve the cargo manifest that, ultimately contained the 35 tons of proscribed armaments.

The real and beneficial owners of SP Trading and UTM were in control of getting the weapons from North Korea to Iran.

Those involved in the actual transport of the proscribed cargo and who set up the web of front companies, knew very little, if anything, about the scheme they played various compartmentalized roles in. It is routine, in fact, for flight crews to have no knowledge of the specifics of the cargo they are hauling, arms trafficking investigators say…….(See entire story at NK News http://www.nknews.org/2013/05/the-front-companies-facilitating-north-korean-arms-exports/ )

Pro-DPRK Americans Revealed

American homegrown terrorist groups are the chosen favorites of Pyongyang

White Power leader Joshua Sutter in his guise of Hind Priest

WASHINGTON D.C. – In September 2003, John Paul Cupp, the 22 year old son of a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Indiana received a message from the government of North Korea.

“Upon the authorization of the Central Committee” it read, Pyongyang “extends militant greetings to you who extend warm support and solidarity to the Songun policy of our respected Marshal Kim Jong Il, treasure sword of our nation.”

The “formation of the Songun Politics Study Group USA has been reported to our Central Committee and, through it, to the Workers Party of Korea….Now your organization has been introduced to the entire Korean nation in the south and the north We are very pleased to have a revolutionary organization and comrades like you in the land of the United States, the bulwark of imperialism and determined to further the relationship with you in depth,”

Rodong Sinmun, the official voice of the ruling Korean Worker’s Party (KWP), reported the news on September 11, the two year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

The message from Pyongyang promised to send further information “by DHL” to the address of “Comrade John Paul Cupp.” What North Korea didn’t mention was at the time was John Paul Cupp had no address because he was homeless and living in a tent under a highway in Portland, Oregon.

“My father is a loser. He lives in Lynn Haven, Florida,” wrote Cupp on an online family genealogy thread in October 1999. “I moved to Portland to join the communist party and get my poetry published. I am 19 years old.”

By the time Cupp vowed his loyalty to Pyongyang and was made Chairman of the newly created Songun Politics Study Group USA, his evolving political ideology embraced white supremacy, pro Islamic Jihadists, virulent anti-Semitism, and launching domestic terrorism to achieve the armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

John Paul Cupp (c) in trench coat when he was homeless living in Portland Oregon in the early 2000’s when he became the chief U.S representative of the Pyongyang sanctioned group of U.S. supporters of North Korea. North Korean media heralded Cupp as a “prominent U.S. public figure.”

In recent years, the North Korean government has joined in alliance and found common cause with American citizens from the violent armed fringes of both the political far right and left who are members of registered U.S. domestic terrorist organizations, have been convicted for violent racial attacks, claimed to have  sent Anthrax chemical warfare agents to the President of the United States, been sentenced to mental institutions for threatening to assassinate sitting U.S. presidents, and been imprisoned for plotting terrorist attacks on U.S soil.

“Comrade Kim Il Sung and Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il are the two greatest human beings in the entire history of theworld”

Several have made official visits to North Korea as the invited guests of the Pyongyang government.

The American political activists of the pro North Korean political organizations created by Pyongyang in the U.S.  include leaders of armed white power groups accused of trying to spark violent race wars, ; Americans fighting for the creation of a U.S. state populated exclusively  by white people; supporters of the extermination of the Jewish race; who applaud the 9/11 and Oklahoma City terrorist attacks; and others who hold as their ideological mentors the religious suicide cult leader Jim Jones, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden, and the assassins of three U.S. presidents and civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

John Paul Cupp with SKS rifle in 2009 with confederate flag in the background. Photo taken in 2009 while he was advocating white supremacy and head of the official U.S. Songun Politics Study Group

But according to North Korean official propaganda, these American citizens and the Pyongyang government they view as their ideological mentors agree on one thing: The Kim family dynastic leadership are the greatest political thinkers of our times.

“My personal opinion,” John Paul Cupp said in a 2007 interview, “is that great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung and Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il are the two greatest human beings in the entire history of the world. For us, it would be impossible to even wake up in the morning should we lose the ability to cherish them.”

Within months of creating the pro-Pyongyang group, Cupp was regularly featured in North Korean propaganda as a ”prominent U.S. public figure,” who was the leader of a broad U.S. movement with deep loyalty to the Kim family’s global political vision.

John Paul Cupp at the top of the Juche Tower, Pyongyang, North Korea, on an official trip by invitation of the North Korean government as head of the U.S. Songun Politics Study Group in 2006

FROM WHITE SUPREMACIST TO ISLAMIC CONVERT

While serving as the Chairman of the Songun Politics Study Group USA, recognized by Pyongyang as their primary U.S. support group, and several other political front groups created in North Korea but portrayed as homegrown U.S. mass political movements, Cupp’s political platform included anti-Semitic laced rhetoric (“hey anyone, actually killing Jews is to be supported in so far as they are killing  Jews”) to racism (“I fully invite every member of an Islamic or Third World country that US imperialism wants to bomb to join us in a cross burning and Jena-rope-the-goat/President event to show how much we love scabs and tools of the Jews and imperialist finance capital”) to support for “Aryan hero Lee Harvey Oswald” and the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

In a post on a white supremacy website titled “A Call for White Resistance” Cupp wrote “One of the things that was brought to my attention while I was visiting North Korea is that during the course of the anti-Japanese struggle the masses began scattered and wanting, then non-violently resisting, and then resisting with ‘terrorism’ and what we call ‘lone wolf actions’ today,” he wrote.

“When looking at our White European-American nation, one finds a people who have not lost their desire to fight the enemy oppressor and who are willing to take matters into their own hands.”

Cupp cited a list of American “Lone Wolves” to be emulated which included the far-right White Supremacist who committed the most deadly domestic terrorist act in U.S. history when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, a White Supremacist group who stockpiled weapons and explosives then went on a murderous campaign of assassination against blacks, and the assassins of Presidents Kennedy, Lincoln and McKinley as well as Martin Luther King.

But that didn’t stop the North Korean government from appointing him the head of the officially sanctioned political organization of U.S. citizens supporting the government of North Korea. Nor did it inhibit Pyongyang prominently depicting the then 22 year old American in state media dozens of time in the following years as a “prominent U.S. Public Figure” and inviting him on official government sponsored visits to the DPRK.

A photograph of John Paul Cupp, Chairman of the U.S Songun Politics Study Group taken at the demilitarized zone on the border with South Korea from the North Korean side. Photo is with a North Korean military officer in the neutral zone during a 2007 trip Cupp made to North Korea as an official guest of Pyongyang

For many North Koreans, the only source of information on developments outside the DPRK is the strictly controlled government media and many therefore believe that the world masses are ardent supporters of Kim Il Sung’s Juche political ideology.

On April 15, 2004 (Kim Il Sung’s birthday), Cupp sent a poem to Pyongyang expressing his fealty to Kim Il Sung and Juche which was promptly republished by North Korean media.

“Marshal Kim Jong Il is the most outstanding revolutionary leader of our era. His Songun army-centered stance, against the fascist scum goons of the White House, cannot be called anything short of genius, extreme bravery, defiant, principled, and even scholarly,” Cupp wrote. “Marshal Kim Jong Il has clearly shown that the gun is the revolution. He clarified that the gun is the faithful and uncompromising companion of the revolutionary. This gun-based approach is correct in every single way.”

In October 2004, the KCNA heralded Cupp as praising the wife of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung and mother of then leader Kim Jong Il which spoke of “a revolutionary comrade-in-arms most loyal to President Kim Il Sung and gave birth to leader Kim Jong Il.”

Another KCNA dispatch the following month published an article by Cupp titled “What a great man Comrade Kim Jong Il is” which read “Then there are questions as to why do intellectuals respect and revere General Kim Jong Il so deeply,”

“He [Cupp] explained in the article that Kim Jong Il is the most prominent leader in the present era just as President Kim Il Sung was. Though the socialist movement suffered setbacks in different countries, the brilliant and august name of Kim Jong Il serves as a symbol of the militant and invincible defender of the world, he stressed,” wrote KCNA.

Cupp remained head of the U.S. Songun Study Group for the next seven years during which he travelled to Pyongyang as an official guest of the North Korean government. Simultaneously, he forged alliances with other American White Power extremist groups who shared his fidelity to Pyongyang, created other political front groups espousing armed revolution to create a racially pure state, and joined with apocalyptic fringe religious sects espousing suicide bombers as a tactic for achieving religious and political goals.

In an article Cupp wrote while serving as head of the U.S. Songun Study Group , he said “Imagine a racial communist super-State comprising all of Europe and Russia and stretching across the reclaimed Siberian Land Bridge Project into White North America and includes Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina in its project. Bloodline shall supersede geographical boundaries [this will be] the total victory of White Power over the conspiracy for our genocide, more than just racialism, but true socialism, and the rebirth of the neighborhood and family again.”

“The best models existing today are those of North Korea and the Iraqi Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party”

“Long live the White race!,” the article concluded, “Long live the communist revolution! Let us vow to die in the trenches of combat before ever even considering the thought of surrendering our European-American Nation!”

In December 2009, Cupp penned a piece in which he wrote “White Power, when correctly defined, ultimately wants both separation from and death to America. Indeed, ‘White Power, Death to America!’ … the best models existing today, and worthy of careful study, admiration, and solidarity by our people are those of North Korea and the Iraqi Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.”

In February 2010, Cupp created another organization called “Aryan Athiests.” The next month, he formally converted to Islam and changed his name to Wahid Yayah Cupp.

By 2011, his erratic behavior and a myriad of infighting among other American contenders for the official endorsement of Pyongyang caused Cupp to be eased out as top leader of the U.S. Songun Politics Study Group.

The road travelled by pro-North Korean American citizens since 2003 has been similarly strewn with controversy, intrigue, and buffoonery. During the last decade, other politically-active Americans were also going through important transitions on their way to joining John Paul Cupp as staunch supporters of Pyongyang and their brand of government.

Joshua Sutter , former Aryan Nations white supremacist leader and leader of the Rural People’s Party in his guise of Hindu priest, Shree Shree Kalki-Kalaratri at the Hindu New Bihar Mandir temple located on Sutter’s rural South Carolina property. (Photo: newbiharmandir.org)

JOSHUA CALEB SUTTER: PREACHER’S SON, NEO-NAZI, FEDERAL PRISONER

Joshua Caleb Sutter has one of the more colorful resumes in fringe American politics. Also the son of a fundamentalist Christian preacher, David Sutter, a well-known South Carolina white supremacist leader, Joshua Sutter was primed for the world of extremist politics from a young age.

He began dabbling in white racist politics as a teenager and rose rapidly through the ranks to become a national leader of the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist neo-Nazi group which advocated the armed overthrow of the U.S. government in order to impose a whites-only racially pure state in its place.

Sutter lived at the headquarters compound of the Aryan Nations in Pennsylvania until his arrest by undercover federal agents in February 2003 for purchasing illegal automatic pistols with their serial numbers scraped off, and possession of silencers in a foiled plot to launch bomb attacks in a domestic U.S. terror campaign.

At the time, Sutter was also a preacher for the Church of the Sons of Yaweh, a white supremacist “Christian Identity” church with links to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

“Roses are red, violets are blue – for every dead Arab, another dead jew!”

After the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombings in New York, Sutter assumed the title of the Aryan Nations “Minister for Islamic Liaison”, tasked with building alliances with international Islamic jihadist groups.  Sutter caught the attention of federal authorities in 2002 after he released a “message of solidarity and support” to Saddam Hussein after Sept. 11 predicting that “the evil regime of the United States … shall be utterly wiped off the face of the earth.”

Among other aliases, Sutter used the name Wulfran Hall, High Counsel of Aryan Nations, while living at the rural Pennsylvania Aryan Nations headquarters owned by Sutter’s mentor, Aryan Nation’s head August Kreis.

On the Aryan Nations website, after leading a large White Supremacist, anti-Semitic rally in Washington D.C., Sutter wrote: “Skinheads, Aryan Nations and Identity, National Alliance, Creators all marching side by side with one enemy in mind – the jew,” citing as a “poignant example” the slogan of the demonstration: “Roses are red, violets are blue – for every dead Arab, another dead jew!” Calling whites “the true chosen race”, Sutter wrote ‘Yes, oh yes… and it shall be much worse this time. Jew – all of your planning, scheming and attempts and preparedness shall not save you from that fateful day, for no man knows the hour….But a little bird told a friend of a friend of a friend who told me that it “shan’t be too far off”…”

Joshua Caleb Stutter, former leader of the Rural People’s Party, selling racist knick knacks (L) and posing in front of a Nazi flag (R)

Sutter was arrested in February 2003 for purchasing gun silencers and an automatic pistol with its serial numbers scratched off from an undercover federal agent. The arrest was part of a sting operation which foiled attempts by Sutter’s White Supremacist extremist comrade to use explosives and weapons to blow up abortion clinics and kill political opponents.

Sentenced to two years, Sutter was released from a Georgia federal prison on Nov. 9, 2004 and moved back to his hometown in rural Lexington County, South Carolina.

THE RURAL PEOPLE’S PARTY AND THE JIM JONES JUCHE CARAVAN

That is when Sutter began a twisted web of sharp u-turns in his ideas, veering off to remote side roads of political ideology, and formed a new underground political organization–the Rural People’s Party (RPP)–which embraced both Kim Il Sung’s Juche ideology and that of Jim Jones as its twin political mentors.

In documents compiled by the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University (which has an extensive archive of the Jim Jones People’s Temple organization), a member of the Rural People’s Party submitted a biography of the history of the party. Documents and other evidence obtained by NK News show that  the author of the RPP biography was Joshua Sutter and the article was sent from Joshua Sutter’s property in South Carolina.

“The Rural People’s Party (RPP) was officially ratified into existence in 2004 when our founder was released from federal prison after serving a sentence on weapons charges,” the document says, revealing details which mirror the biography of Joshua Sutter.“Other comrades on the outside had already scouted out and purchased a rural location for the founding of a commune,” said the RPP document.

A plaque presented by the Rural People’s Party and Songun Politics Study Group to Kim Jong Il onKim Il Sung’s birthday

According to Lexington County title records, on Aug 19 2003, David and Laura Sutter, Joshua’s parents, purchased 3.61 acres of land and a mobile home on 480 Sherwood Drive for $75,000 –the same location of the headquarters of the Rural People’s Party, according to multiple documents obtained by NK News during this investigation.

A photograph on the official RPP website shows a single wide mobile home with a North Korean flag flying on a flagpole in a wooded area and is captioned: “ Central People’s Commune of the Rural People’s Party: Militant Juche Songun and Jim Jones thought Communism North America.”

But Sutter didn’t abandon his far right, extremist white supremacist politics when he was released from the penitentiary at the end of 2004.

The singe wide mobile home in Lexington County, South Carolina that served as the headquarters of the RPP. A North Korean flag flies in the foreground, and large cloth portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, obtained from the North Korean government, decorate the entrance.

Upon release from prison, Sutter began working at the Southern Patriot Shop, a White Supremacist retail outlet managed by Sutter’s father, Pentecostal preacher David Sutter. The shop sells racist paraphernalia and is owned by the League of the South, an established hate group.

While it was on the date of his release from federal prison that Sutter founded the Rural People’s Party—it was also in the following months that, Sutter using alias’s including Wulfran Hall, actively resumed his leadership role in the white supremacist terror organization Aryan Nations.”We can become more than simple domesticated pawns in the games of jewish commerce. We spit upon the false sanctity of the ‘flag’ – of whatever country,” wrote Sutter in February 2005 on the Aryan Nations website. “We spit upon the erroneous sanctity of the cross – and all the meaningless relics of organized religion which is but another way to enslave us and control us, to keep us from realizing the potential that we possess as a race.”

http://archive.org/help/audio.php?identifier=Forbidden_Knowledge_Joshua_Caleb_Sutter&ht=30&wd=500&url=http%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fembed%2FForbidden_Knowledge_Joshua_Caleb_Sutter%26autoplay%3D1

Audio recording of “Forbidden Knowledge” by Joshua Stutter, during which he outlines his extremist political beliefs. Source: Archive.org

Sutter also provided an approved list of books which he positively reviewed. They included “A Practical Guide to The Strategy and Tactics of Revolution” which demonstrates four ways to “undermine/overthrow/disrupt/de-stabilize the present anti-Aryan System, and thus create or provoke a revolutionary situation”.

The book lists four methods for revolution: “(1) assassination of individuals; (2) terror bombing (including targets where civilian casualties are probable); (3) sabotage of the infrastructure of the System – such things as roads, communications, television transmitters, airports, railways, power stations, food supplies, businesses, shops, financial institutions and so on; (4) terror campaigns directed at our enemies – indiscriminate or otherwise.”

Mobile trailer home which serves as headquarters for the RPP, the pro North Korean political group started by white supremacist Joshua Sutter

Also, Sutter provided helpful tips and instructions on killing perceived enemies. “The best types of soft target in this respect are: (1) enemies of Aryan freedom” and “politicians who have spoken-out against Aryan groups or who have done things harmful to our race and our freedom (such as supporting some new anti-Aryan law or encouraging race-mixing). On the practical level, the organization must collect intelligence on suitable targets, acquire suitable weapons and prepare statements for after the action. Individual covert cells can then be supplied with a list of targets, and armed with suitable weapons.” Instruction for terrorist attacks and sparking a race war are also detailed by Sutter.

By April 2005, the Aryan Nations leader and Sutter’s mentor, August Kreis, moved the group’s national headquarters to a doublewide trailer in Lexington County to be near Sutter. On April 9 2005 Aryan Nations leader Kreiss bought a .732 acre piece of land, with a mobile home, at 160 Maplewood drive, Lexington SC for $18,000.

But the following month, Louisiana based Aryan Nations leader and preacher of the White Supremacist hate church Sons Of Yaweh Morris Gulett wrote from the Louisiana West Monroe Correction Center on May 12, 2005 accusing Joshua Sutter of being an undercover government informer. “Brother Charles Thornton from Alabama and myself are in federal custody here in Louisiana charged with Conspiracy to Commit Armed Bank Robbery. We were set up by one of the church’s oldest members, Joshua Caleb Sutter.”

“Let me say that this entire debacle was an FBI set up from the very beginning. There would be no alleged crimes, were it not for an FBI informant/agent provocateur, one Joshua Caleb Sutter, a now former member of the Church of the Sons of YHVH/Legion of Saints.”

Interior of mobile home used by the RPP as the headquarters of the Songun Policy Study Group (USA)

Within days, Kriess removed a photo of Sutter posing in a black turban and face mask, and articles he wrote from the Aryan Nations Web site, and Sutter went underground. The following years, Joshua Sutter focused on supporting the government and Juche ideology of North Korea using a variety of aliases

KEVIN WALSH AND ZIAD SHAKER AL-JISHI: THE WHITE NATIONALIST AND THE PALESTINIAN AMERICAN

It was also in 2004 that Kevin Walsh, an articulate virulent white nationalist and anti-Semite both began an alliance with Cupp and was arrested himself for threatening to assassinate by gun then U.S. president George W. Bush.

“Police in Phoenix cautiously approached Walsh, a registered handgun owner. Guns drawn, Walsh responded by drawing his own”

“John Paul Cupp and I were political collaborators discontinuously from 2004 to 2010” said Walsh in a series of email interviews.  In 2004 “I was arrested and was incarcerated until 2006.”

Police in Phoenix cautiously approached Walsh, a registered handgun owner. Guns drawn, Walsh responded by drawing his own. The standoff ended without violence, but an Arizona judge declared that Walsh must have been insane and committed him involuntarily to a mental institution for 180 days.

He was released two years later, whereupon he resumed his political alliance with John Paul Cupp, based on their shared support of the North Korean vision for how to politically organize a government.

Walsh joined another organization which was run by Cupp—the North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism (NACAZI). Together, the two created the European-American Socialist People’s Front (EASPF).

Photo of hammer and sickle flag inside the RPP headquarters in rural Lexington County South Carolina

A synthesis of White Nationalism and Marxism-Leninism “EASPF is essentially a national communist or racial communist organization,” wrote Cupp on a Yahoo! Group message. “I have been to North Korea and am deeply in love with them.”

Cupp wrote that the North Korean Juche ideology supported “biological and cultural distinctiveness” and were “not nihilistic towards the realities of bloodline in the creation of national identities of people the way Western leftists are.”

Kevin Walsh was more direct in his assessment of the two outfits. “NACAZAI and EASPF were only websites. We didn’t have any kind of mass following or street organization. We would write essays and solicit support, but no support came,” Walsh told NK News in an email interview.

“Jewish power and American imperialism are the source of great misery for the Arab people and the rest of the world, and they must be smashed”

All of Walsh’s emails end with a quote from an April 2006 Rodong Sinmun article: “The south Korean pro-American traitorous forces advocating the theory of ‘multiracial society’ are riffraff who have not an iota of national soul, to say nothing of the elementary understanding of the view on the nation and social and historic development.”

NACAZI was run by Cupp and a Palestinian American by the name of Ziad Shaker al-Jishi, who also held the title of deputy chairman of the U.S. Songun Politics Study Group. Ziad has made numerous trips to Pyongyang on the invitation of the North Korean government over the last decade.

“Jewish power and American imperialism are the source of great misery for the Arab people and the rest of the world, and they must be smashed. We have made great progress in the last decades for the revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle both in the DPRK and Iraq. We at NACAZAI from our geographic position have tried to contribute to this just and worthy effort to rid the world of Jewish power and American imperialism,” said Ziad, in an interview published on the now defunct NACAZI website.

In an October 2006 letter to Kim Jong Il, Ziad said “For the last several years, I have been active in supporting the DPRK, because of my firm convictions in support of socialism and against imperialism and Zionism. The Korean revolution, through my numerous conversations and recent August visit, has demonstrated to me that it is not only genuine in its efforts, but further-more, the most advanced outpost for anti-imperialism in the world today.”

The letter concluded: “While you long for Korean unity, I long for Arab unity. Like the Korean people under your care, my Arab people long for unification and independence. The lessons you have propagated against flunkeyism, by calling for preserving the Juche and national character of the revolution and synthesizing the people’s cultural and historical identity simultaneously with the anti-imperialist class struggle under the banner of ‘nationalist in form and socialist in content’, is nothing short of genuineness creatively putting its pulse on the needs and desires of the great masses of periphery.”In recent years, North Korean state media has heralded Ziad’s visits to Pyongyang and his messages of support to the Kim family dynasty numerous times.

The hammer and sickle fly over rural South Carolina white racist group’s headquarters

ZIAD, CUPP, SUTTER AND THE JUCHE CARAVAN

In December 2007, Ziad and Cupp travelled to meet Joshua Caleb Sutter at his rural mobile home in the woods of South Carolina, and formed a political alliance.

“A successful Songun Conference was held outside of Lexington, South Carolina at the Rural Peoples Party’s Central Commune […] Participants included the US Songun Group, the RPP, and the North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism,” wrote Cupp in a December 2007 message to political supporters.

While the cast of characters and organizations in the U.S. supporting Pyongyang increased, so did the tension between the extremist leaders with varying political agendas fighting for control over the small  U.S. Juche organization officially sanctioned by Pyongyang.

The U.S. Songun Politics Study Group’s official North Korean government contact was through a known front group for North Korean intelligence agencies, the Committee for Cultural and Foreign Relations, charged with garnering foreign support for the government, and their offices and contacts are located in Pyongyang. For the U.S. political activists and groups, a man using the name Zo Il Min was their primary North Korean contact.

“Cupp told me that Zo Il Min is from southern Korea but had moved to the DPRK and that he has a cable connection to an e-mail address in Japan to do Songun work internationally,” said Walsh in a series of email interviews with NK News from his Arizona home over recent months. “I don’t know if that is true and whether the Juche study group really is sanctioned by the DPRK government. Given the sort of people they’ve been tolerating in positions of leadership recently, I certainly hope not.”

“The first time the RPP and John Paul Cupp crossed paths was in July 2007, when the RPP released a message of support for Pol Pot”

During the late 2007 meeting in the South Carolina woods with former Aryan Nations leader Joshua Caleb Sutter, the leader of the  Rural People’s Party, both Cupp and Ziad quickly found common political ground with the White Supremacist-turned Pyongyang disciple.

“In 2008 Cupp and Ziad had become involved with the Rural People’s Party and had actually travelled to South Carolina to meet their leader, known as David Woods. Cupp would later say that Woods was a pseudonym for Josh Sutter and that Sutter had been arrested for some offense and had become a government agent” said Walsh. “Cupp and Ziad had initially thought Woods/Sutter and the RPP were sincere,” Walsh told NK News.

illian Hoy—or “comrade Morrison” of the pro North Korean Rural people’s party holding a Korean trade magazine sent to them by the Pyongyang government in 2008. The photo is from inside the mobile home in rural South Carolina that served as headquarters for the RPP.

The first time the RPP and John Paul Cupp crossed paths was in July 2007, when the RPP released a message of support for Pol Pot, the former leader of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge movement, on a pro-Khmer Rouge website. 1.8 million people died during Pol Pot’s 3 years and 8 months in power in the 1970s.

Sutter sent a message. “We stand in firm solidarity with the Group for the Study of the Theories of Pol Pot and as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization have held steadfast in defense, study, assimilation into party line and, by our work in establishing the Central People’s Commune, advancing toward practical implementation of Pol Potism. Please find as follows some links to photographs taken at the CPC, a place which all who uphold the glorious line of the CPK are most graciously welcome.”

The message contained photographs of the Khmer Rouge flag flying over a vinyl-sided mobile home in a rural setting – the Central People’s Commune of the Rural People’s Party. In photographs published elsewhere, the same trailer and property later show pictures of the North Korean flag and large portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on the exterior of the small building.

John Paul Cupp wrote back a month later “On the Occasion of CPK Foundation Day” to the RPP: “It takes a lot of courage and guts to defend Democratic Kampuchea and Comrade Pol Pot in the U.S. I congratulate the RPP on this statement.”

After the December 2007 meeting in South Carolina between Joshua Sutter, the RPP, John Paul Cupp and Ziad, the group of extremist leaders decided to join forces. Joshua Caleb Sutter, Jillian Hoy (an RPP committee member), James Porrazzo (another White Supremacist leader), and others affiliated with the RPP were all present.

Literature and propaganda material also sent by the North Korean government to the Rural People’s Party (RPP)

On February 9, 2008, a joint statement was released in celebration of Kim Jong Il’s birthday, announcing “The Songun Politics Study Group (USA)… are pleased to announce the formation of the US Preparatory Committee for the Celebration of February 16th and Red Sun’s Day.”

“The Committee will be chaired by John Paul Cupp and Ziad Shaker al-Jishi, Chairman of the North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism (NACAZAI) will be the Vice Chairman,” the statement said. Included in the release was an RPP Statement, a letter to Kim Jong Il from John Paul Cupp and a similar letter from Ziad Shaker al-Jishi, Chairman of the North American Committee Against Zionism and Imperialism (NACAZAI).”

“Weapons-grade anthrax isn’t something some redneck can make on the weekend in his tool shed”

The meeting between the unlikely grouping of white power extremists, Palestinian Americans and a formerly homeless person produced several new elements in the nexus between Pyongyang and their American citizen comrades.

“Cupp did tell me that Woods/Sutter had been talking about having been involved with sending anthrax to the White House,” Walsh told NK News.

“Ziad had said something similar. I said, ‘I seriously doubt that he had anything to do with that.  He doesn’t have the technical know-how to make weapons-grade anthrax. I have two university degrees, and I don’t have that technical knowledge. Weapons-grade anthrax isn’t something some redneck can make on the weekend in his tool shed. It takes a great deal of medical and biological expertise and expensive laboratory equipment. It’s not a do-it-yourself project for revolutionaries.’”

Picture of Pol Pot on the wall inside mobile home on secluded South Carolina property of the Rural People’s Party (RPP) headquarters

Walsh said if Sutter and Ziad were correctly recalling the conversations, “then it would seem that Woods/Sutter is some kind of government provocateur trying to entrap people by inciting them to use harmless powder that he claims is weapons-grade anthrax.”

Walsh added that North Korea had no control over the white nationalist group, European American Socialist People’s Front (EASPF), which he and Cupp ran, “because I had veto power over everything there, and I originated a lot of the ideas, and no one in Korea told me to do anything.  I suspect the Rural People’s Party is run by the FBI, so if the DPRK is having anything to do with them, it’s probably not a good idea for them.”

In the South Carolina backwoods on April 15, 2008, Kim Il Sung’s Birthday, the RPP changed its official constitution to formally pledge loyalty to Pyongyang and their Juche ideology, giving equal status to both Kim Il Sung and Jim Jones. , officially adopting Juche as its “guiding ideology” and announcing a new “officially authorized” website which posted North Korean official propaganda “provided to the RPP by the Pyongyang Mission of the Anti-Imperialist National Democratic Front of South Korea (AINDF).”

The RPP also posted a picture of RPP Central Committee member Jillian Hoy holding an inscribed plaque sent to “KPA Supreme Commander Kim Jong Il on the occasion of the birth of his father Kim Il Sung” which was captioned: “RPP Central Committee member holds plaque for KIM JONG IL presented on behalf of RPP and the Songun Politics Study Group (USA).”

The RPP copied the official policy of the North Korean Ministry of Propaganda and Agitation  by using a different, bolder and larger font and type style for the North Korean leader’s name.

THE PLOT THICKENS, THE GROUP UNRAVELS

But like any good melodrama script, the new alliance also produced a subtext of love, betrayal, and treachery.

And so began what would be a rapidly unraveling political alliance of U.S. North Korea supporters as  the U.S. Songun Study Group and the RPP ushered in a tumultuous period worthy of a bizarre soap opera script.

“The rivalry was to get tenser, including an exchange of death threats and an alleged assassination attempt.”

During early 2008, John Paul Cupp fell in love and became engaged to Jillian Hoy, but that relationship would implode within months amongst accusations of it having been a politically motivated “honey trap” whereby Hoy was accused of attempting to poison Cupp in an alleged RPP bid to take over control of the officially recognized U.S. Songun Study Group.

By the summer of 2008, the RPP, having established their own direct connection to Pyongyang, cut all ties with Cupp. The rivalry was to get tenser, including an exchange of death threats and an alleged assassination attempt.

“Cupp was involved in a sexual relationship with one of the female members and had told me on the telephone that they were to be married. In July 2008, Cupp became severely ill with chronic appendicitis and some kind of lung infection and had to be hospitalized,” Walsh recalled in an email to NK News.

“He wanted to talk to his ‘fiancée,’ and I e-mailed the RPP on his behalf but got no response.  When he was released from hospital, she still didn’t respond.  It was then that Cupp came to the conclusion that it was all some kind of set-up.”

Pol Pot, Jim Jones, Kim Il Sung and white racial supremacists share a common vision

Jillian Hoy—who used the name “Comrade Morrison” in her role with the RPP—was in fact Joshua Sutter’s girlfriend—and soon to be wife.

The RPP “contact[ed] the then Songun Politics Study Group USA in 2007 and had very cordial relations with them,” wrote Jason Adams-Tonis in December 2011, the head of the Songun Politics Study Group by that time. Jillian Hoy “became the fiancée of the then chairman John Paul Cupp” but in June 2008 the RPP “cut off all ties, unprovoked, with us. Cupp believes his illness was caused by being poisoned by Jillian” and Adams-Tonis charged the “whole RPP action was designed as a government attempt to seize control over the Study Group.”

Jason Adams-Tonis added “with Cupp dead, Woods [Joshua Sutter] would have become the study group leader and thus have an inside connection to the DPRK leadership.”

“[Sutter] later boasted to me that Jillian was in fact his own girlfriend and that he had indeed poisoned Cupp,” wrote Adams-Tonis, quoting Sutter as saying Cupp was “insane” and the Study Group “deserved” a better leader.

“In personal conversations I had with the RPP leader, who utilized the pseudonym Woods, Woods told me that he had been a member of Aryan Nations before his ‘conversion’ to communism and that he feared retribution by Aryan Nations for his defection,” according an online post by Adams-Tonis in December 2011.

He wrote that Sutter, in “statements to me and also to other comrades”, tried to recruit them as loyalists to seize control “in his unsuccessful 2007-8 attempt to take over the group.”

Cupp had a lengthy hospitalization in July of 2008, but emerged seemingly even more radical in his political beliefs.

“The content of [Cupp's] political manifestos were extreme enough to draw the pointed but gentle rebuke of Pyongyang directly.”

In August of 2008, Cupp wrote numerous public screeds extolling the mass killing of all Jews, support for suicide bombers, Saddam Hussein, Sirhan Sirhan (the assassin of Robert Kennedy), and various calls for  a new government to replace the U.S. authorities with  a nation populated by an Aryan race.

Shrine with automatic weapons of alter of Hindu apocalyptic sect in South Carolina property shared by North Korea U.S. disciples

CUPP DRAWS PYONGYANG’S DISSAPPROVAL

Cupp posted many of these screeds on the official North Korean U.S. Songun Politics Study Group which was disseminating propaganda sent by and on the instruction of Pyongyang.

The content of his political manifestos were extreme enough to draw the pointed but gentle rebuke of Pyongyang directly.

In an email from North Korea to Cupp on September 15, 2008, Pyongyang wrote instructing Cupp  to pull non DPRK provided political propaganda from the U.S. Songun Study Group’s website and refrain from posting DPRK material on Cupp’s incendiary white supremacist anti-Semitic web pages.

“Dear comrade CUPP,” the North Korean message began “We would like to make a comradely suggestion to you on the matter of publishing the great Juche and Songun-related photos and articles, great leaders’ works, etc, on the internet. Could you please publish those materials exclusively on the US Songun website and the US Solidarity webpage and not post non-DPRK materials on this, and not post those Juche-Songun and DPRK photos and articles on your?”

“That’s only for the sake of the dignity and prestige of our great leaders and the DPRK. We hope you who sincerely and ardently follow and revere the great leaders could understand what we mean and soon rearrange the materials on the internet, please. We’re waiting for your reply in this connection and the good news of your better health. With our sincere and comradely regards, Zo Il Min, Representative of the Pyongyang Mission of the AINDF, September 15, Juche 97 (2008), Pyongyang, DPRK.”

On September 15, Juche 97 (2008) John Paul Cupp replied to Pyongyang requesting him to tone down his virulent extremist politics.

“I will most certainly, as always, comply with the dictate given to me, and all these articles will be removed and I will comply with the request by this by Sunday… I do believe in…fulfilling the tasks assigned to me. I never ever even remotely wanted to disparage the DPRK in any way, shape, or form… what brought about this concern? Did someone complain? Am I in trouble?  I wish to tell you that I have never stopped in my reverence to the DPRK leadership.”

“The DPRK has known we support Saddam, hollowcause revisionism, reject ‘Israel’ and detest Jews for several years now and sided with us privately on most of that”

But Cupp reacted to  the rebuke with alarm to his U.S. comrades . A September 16, 2008 email from Cupp to a half dozen members of the U.S. Songun Study Group with the subject “HUGE EMERGENCY NEWS” said: “I need you to promise me you aren’t going to contact the DPRK […] Someone is fucking with us, and whining up the ass to the DPRK, and crying to them about three things: A. My open support for European-American nationalism (which they probably went and told Zo Il Min I was a KKK lynching or something), our position against the Jews (but they’ve known that for like 6 years!) and our support for armed struggle to bring down the American regime”

“I mean I told them I laughed my ass off at Sept 11 and they chuckled,” Cupp said.

Cupp concluded “We are the most open and honest about not bowing to the Jews and hating America and supporting all international and national violence or other means to stop them….this is a major security issue attempting to wreck our ties to the DPRK (and the DPRK has known we support Saddam, hollowcause revisionism, reject ‘Israel’ and detest Jews for several years now and sided with us privately on most of that).”

North American skinhead Juche supporter, white power activist and Satanic cult devotee

His erstwhile comrade, Kevin Walsh, told Cupp that he would have told Pyongyang differently.

“Quite frankly if Zo Il Minh had come to me with such a request, I’d have told him to fuck off. No one is going to stop my expressing support for the DPRK, not even the DPRK leadership itself.  NACAZAI is an independent anti-imperialist organization, not an agent of any foreign government, no matter how progressive.  The Korean Revolution is worthy of defense, even if the leadership no longer think so.”

“You don’t get to vote in DPRK elections,” Walsh wrote to Cupp, “So you don’t have any obligation to go along with DPRK decisions. You are not an agent of a foreign government, and for the sake of your legal status, it is for the best that things stay that way.”

Cupp did not take North Korea’s advice.

Immediately after the rebuke to Cupp from the North Korean government, Cupp posted a virulent message on the Aryan Nations website in support of a White Supremacist U.S. terrorist, David Lane, who had been sentenced to death  and executed after his arrest for a spree of racial and terrorist violence in 2001. Cupp wrote Lane “rests with our martyrs and ancestors for all of eternity” and said it was “time for raising the White Power battle cry….David Lane is a symbol of our struggle for liberation by any means necessary.“Lane recognized that America is the enemy of White people and the world.  He taught us to love the White woman with all our hearts, and to defend her in with the same fanaticism of Timothy McVeigh… and Palestinian human bombs….On the day when a great army of Aryan guerrillas answers the call, we will honor him through victory and martyrdom. White Power, build the People’s War!

FROM JUCHE CARAVAN TO HINDU TEMPLE: A NEW GOD IN LEXINGTON COUNTY

On November 18, 2008 Joshua Sutter and Jillian Hoy (aka Comrade Morrison and Cupp’s erstwhile ex-fiancé) married at a South Carolina Apostolic Pentecostal church “on the anniversary of the People’s Temple martyrdom” to the tune of the song “Hold On, Brother” from the People’s Temple album “He’s Able”, and “Marching to Zion” used for the movie Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, according to Lexington County, South Carolina probate Court records.

Jillian Hoy, wife of white power leader, pro North Korea advocate, and Jim Jones supporter Joshua Caleb Sutter. Here Hoy, who bills herself a Hindu priestess Jayalalita Devi Dasi, is pictured at the rural South Carolina property where the Hindu temple New Bihar Mandir is located which worships the deity Kali, the “Goddess of Destruction” is located

By 2009, both the RPP and the U.S. Songun Politics Study Group vied for control over the officially-sanctioned U.S. support group for North Korea. In doing so, both groups veered farther into extremist white supremacist and apocalyptic religious politics.

“In 2009, leaders of the clandestine U.S. White Power movement created another religious organization—a Hindu sect worshipping an apocalyptic Hindu Deity, Kali”

“The RPP continues to work within religious circles in line with the example given to us by Jim Jones and Peoples Temple,” said the RPP in a November 2009 biography written for the University of California at San Diego Center for Religious Studies,

Also in  2009, Joshua Sutter, Jillian Hoy, and other leaders of the clandestine U.S. White Power movement created another religious organization—a Hindu sect worshipping an apocalyptic Hindu Deity, Kali.

Taking on the aliases of a Hindu priest and priestess, Sutter and Hoy established the New Bihar Mandir Temple at the same rural South Carolinian location  as  the Rural People’s Party  headquarters and where the U.S. Songun Study Group represented by Cupp and the Palestinian American activist Ziad secretly travelled months earlier to formalize their political alliance.

Sutter adopted an additional new identity of a Hindu Hare Krishna priest calling himself Shree Shree Kalki-Kalika Mandir. Sutter’s bride, Jillian Hoy, took on the name Jayalalita devi dasi, and billed herself as a Hindu priestess.

Jason Sutter, a former pro-North Korean support group ringleader, now a self-proclaimed hindu priest, in an illustration created by NK News for this article

While ostensibly clandestine in its formation using aliases and other tactics to obfuscate who was in fact behind the new Hindu temple, the New Bihar Mandir Hindu Temple used the same mailing address and phone numbers used for the RPP. Public recruitment notices in local newspapers and in new age circles listed the physical address as that of the Sutter owned property and Joshua Sutter was given as the contact person to call for directions to worship services.

New Bihar Mandir’s Myspace page, created in 2009, says “A new god has come to rural Lexington County, South Carolina: Their Lordships Shree Shree Kalki-Kalika.” Adding “Lord Kalki will appear as the “Killer Avatar” to cleanse the earth as the pivotal factor in a worldwide annihilation, from which, like a phoenix arising from the ashes, will come a new Golden Age (or ‘Satya-yuga.’)”

The New Bihar Mandir proclaimed “Lord Kalki is our commander, ultimate master and final authority life after life.” According to ancient Hindu scriptures, history is divided into four epochs: now is the ‘Kali Yug’, the Age of Kali, an epoch of darkness and disintegration…New Bihar Mandir, a worldwide movement of devotees and temples, is beginning to bring this prophecy into fruition.”

‘Shree Shree Kalki-Kalika Mandir’ and ‘Jayalalita devi dasi’ both list their marriage dates on My Space as November 18, 2008, the same date listed on Sutter and Hoy’s marriage license in Lexington County probate court records. In keeping with their affinity for violent apocalyptic religious sects with a political agenda, The New Bihar Mandir Temple heavily promotes Velupillai Pirabhakaran, the head of the Sri Lankan LTTE ‘Tamil Tigers’ armed guerrilla group, who was a devoted follower of the same Kali sect of Hindu and responsible for creating suicide squads of teenage girls dispatched to explode deadly terrorist bombings and assassinate political leaders, including the May 21, 1991 killing of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, home to India’s Tamils.

“New Bihar Mandir of Lexington, South Carolina has as its foremost mission providing the facilities for persons in our area hitherto unfamiliar with ancient Vedic wisdom to engage in this bhakti-yoga (devotional yoga) and commune personally with Lord Kalki and Goddess Kali,” reads the New Bihar Mandir MySpace profile.

Photo of weapons and other offering to the Hindu Goddess kali at Joshua Sutters rural South Carolina property. Titled “Their Lordships Shree Shree Kalki-Kalaratri , New Bihar Mandir, United States”, the photo is taken from the official New Bihar mandir temple website and posted in 2009

The New Bihar Mandir Temple Face book page, used the slogans “Where Worlds Collide” and “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds “and invites the public to “Contact us to learn how to get involved in NBM.”

The previous year Sutter had professed loyalty to the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism. “In retrospect I can see just how much my life has been enriched by your work,” Sutter wrote in a letter to the head of a North Carolina-based Hare Krishna temple.

“[My wife] is now having some of the happiest times I have seen her have since our marriage because of the enriching potency of Krishna consciousness,”

“[We] covertly inserted ourselves into various religious organizations in the rural Lexington County area”

By 2010, in addition to proclaiming loyalty to Pyongyang and their Juche ideology Sutter and the RPP simultaneously asserted their devotion to white racist Christian Identity churches; the Jim Jones religious cult; a Hindu apocalyptic sect worshipping “the Goddess of Destruction”; a mostly black South Carolina fundamentalist Pentecostal church, and the more mainstream Hare Krishna Hindu sect – all within a matter of several years.

A biography of the RPP published by the University of San Diego in 2010, and written by Sutter, explains the reasoning behind the discordant affiliations.

The many shades of Jillian Hoy: (L) Jillian Hoy in a photo taken during a pilgrimage to visit the former church headquarters of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Los Angeles, (C) Hoy holds an RPP plaque devoted to Kim Jong Il and poses for a photo (R) Hoy in her guise as a Hindu preistess

During 2008, the Rural People’s Party “covertly inserted ourselves into various religious organizations in the rural Lexington County area,” wrote Sutter for the archives of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple. “Many communists might look upon our activity…as suspect, due to what – in our opinion – is a naive belief… that all political activity must by default primarily be “above-ground.” These same people seem to forget that Joseph Stalin began his political activity at Tiflis Theological Seminary as a seminarian, and that Kim Il Sung organized many pre-revolutionary anti-imperialist activities while an accomplished organist at his parents’ Presbyterian church in Korea….at the peak of the RPP’s involvement in local Pentecostal and Apostolic circles, two members of our organization were married in a ceremony at a local Apostolic church on November 18th, the anniversary of the Peoples Temple martyrdom.”

THE NEW BIHARD MANDIR WHITE SUPREMACY CONNECTION

The members of the  New Bihar Mandir temple include a veritable who’s who  of North American white power activists. They include a ‘Minister Black’ identified as ‘Works at New Bihar Mandir’ and a former white power activist; James Porrazzo the former leader of the American Front, once the largest white power neo Nazi group in the U.S.; ‘Emily Putney, Porrazzo’s girlfriend in Massachusetts and convicted of an anti-Semitic assault and hate crime on an elderly Jewish man in 2010; ‘Jayalalita Devi Dasi of Lexington, South Carolina’ who is Jillian Hoy of the Rural People’s Party and Joshua Sutter’s wife; ‘Rex Morgan’ a white power activist with a history of involvement in Satanic cults; and Chris Hayes a long time white supremacist activist with the American Front.

“The Aryan is white and noble in contradistinction to the black and ignoble.”

The group all using numerous aliases.  are affiliated with white supremacist groups, Satanic cults, and underground political groups who call for the violent armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

On James Porrazzo’s web site “OPENREVOLT” he posted an article “NOTES ON THE BHAGAVAD-GITA” on August 22, 2011 which begins: “We assume, quite justifiably, I think, that the Bhagavad-Gita sets forth Aryan philosophy. The Aryan is white and noble in contradistinction to the black and ignoble. This book then, if Aryan, must give us a noble system of philosophy and ethics.”

The article concludes with: “This post is dedicated to his Divine Grace A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabupada, my anonymous Krishna Conscious Spiritual Advisor (you know who you are) and my brothers and sisters at New Bihar Mandir.”

Jillian Hoy at hare Krishna ceremony at hare Krishna temple retreat in North Carolina in 2009

On July 4, 2012, on the white separatist web site run by Porrazzo “American Front”, there is a graphic labeled as the artwork of New Bihar Mandir dedicated to the military unit of suicide bombers of the Sri Lankan LTTE, listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU and others.

ENTER JASON ADAMS-TONIS AND THE ‘FBI INFORMANT’

In late 2009, John Paul Cupp and Kevin Walsh got into a confrontation with Joshua Sutter and James Porrazzo of the Rural People’s Party over a young recruit by the name of Jason Adams-Tonis.

A New York University college student from New Jersey, Tonis had contacted the RPP earlier in 2009 interested in working with U.S. supporters of North Korea. Tonis was unaware about the ongoing clash between the U.S. Songun Politics Study Group, and was taken aback by the RPP private denunciation of the Songun Study Group, and contacted them.

“Someone has told me that your leader, Woods, was formerly a member of a white gang. He and few others did something, got caught by the cops, and Woods snitched to avoid going to jail.”

Tonis then contacted Cupp at the U.S. Songun Study Group who denounced the RPP to Tonis as possible government informants.  On August 25th, Cupp wrote to Walsh, saying that Tonis told him he had “contacted the RPP some time back and they claimed to be the real representatives of the AINDF in the US! I made clear to him that they only time the AINDF ever contacted them was at my suggestion to which I take enormous self criticism.”

Tonis wrote to the RPP head Joshua Sutter afterwards on October 31. “Someone has told me that your leader, Woods, was formerly a member of a white gang. He and few others did something, got caught by the cops, and Woods snitched to avoid going to jail.”

“This person believes that Woods founded the RPP as an FBI/CIA or other government attempt to infiltrate the American Songun movement and the DPRK. Care to comment on the allegations?” Tonis wrote. “I wish you would be more open with me, a Communist party is supposed to be a family but how can we ever become a family when you don’t even tell me your names?”

“All you do is keep secret, said Tonis, “Secrecy is important for some kinds of political work, but how can you even build a party if we don’t even know each other’s names?”

The message was not well received.

Sutter replied back, saying “Consider all friendships between us as ended. This email is being forwarded to the Special Dictatorship Group intelligence apparatus of the party as facsimile copy. Please return any and all materials the party has sent you to the party post office box. Should you choose not to reciprocate in the requested manner, we will take other measures”

On November 3, Tonis emailed Cupp in panic. With the subject line I think the RPP is coming after me, Tonis wrote “ooh my god…I just got an email from the RPP, they’re making some sort of threat against me, what should I do?”

John Paul Cupp responded Tonis regarding the conflict in an email, saying “Okay so it looks like we are going to wind up getting stuck with an ugly fight with the RPP, maybe even literally.”

“Woods went nuts and is basically threatening to kill Jason in not so many words….I think he is afraid the RPP is going to send some ZOG agent to kill him and his family,” wrote Cupp.

“We cannot promise they aren’t crazy enough to try killing him”

Hidu sect shrine with offerings to the “Goddess of Destruction” in South Carolina

Cupp decided to “avoid confrontations that needlessly waste literally years of our time or get people killed and locked up” and opted to warn Joshua Sutter that he would publicly identify him by his real name and his white supremacist past unless he backed off.

Cupp wrote that he told Tonis “we cannot promise they aren’t crazy enough to try killing him” and that “I have already told him about my lung stories and true or not he is sure I was poisoned so he will listen.”

“We [could] avoid these people and not waste years fighting with them,” Cupp concluded, “but if we do, we fight them ruthlessly. I also genuinely think one of two things, either a) Jason is some sort of agent or tool or b) his life is in serious danger. Woods is crazy enough that if he feels all is lost, to just drive up to such said address and kill him. He really is that nuts. He’d do that to me, also.”

“I am concerned that lots of well meaning sort of national communistic types, both White and Black are going to contact the RPP in the next few years looking for options ‘outside the box’ and could wind up dead or seriously harmed,” Cupp said. “At some point we need to eliminate the RPP, likely for now we see if it can implode. If it doesn’t we make clear who they are out in the open and destroy them, but first get inside their allies so these people know who they are dealing with.”

Cupp’s 2010 conversion to Islam did not ring true with Kevin Walsh, who broke all ties with Cupp and resigned from both Nacazai and the EASP. “In March 2010, Cupp made a public and obviously false conversion to Islam on Face book three weeks after posting on a Face book group that he had himself founded called “Aryan Atheists,” Walsh said.

Cupp was eased out of the leadership of the Pyongyang-recognized U.S. Songun Politics Study Group, and was replaced by Jason Adams-Tonis by February 2011.

In a statement posted in December 2011, the Study Group said: “In February 2011, John Paul Cupp’s mentally ill state and devolution reached a point whereby he totally abandoned Juche and communism. Jason-Adam Tonis was left to take over leadership of the group and try to rebuild it.”

Jason-Adam Tonis “decided to lead it in a strictly orthodox Juche-Songun framework, away from racism and all those who supported racist ideas. Jason-Adam Tonis since 2009 had always opposed John Paul Cupp’s white nationalist line but his attempts to lead Cupp back to the orthodox Juche camp always ended in failure due to Cupp’s increasing mental illness.”

“Mr. Tonis was at that same time campaigning for ‘Prime Minister’ of a Japanese based political organization called the Manchukuo Temporary Government.”

TONIS: A TEMPORARY PRIME MINISTER OF A TEMPORARY GOVERNMENT

The transition, however, was far from smooth and Jason-Adam Tonis’s promotion in February 2011 hardly brought a semblance of harmony to the U.S.-North Korea political movement.

In fact. Mr. Tonis was at that same time campaigning for “Prime Minister” of a Japanese based political organization called the Manchukuo Temporary Government. The Official Website of the Manchukuo Temporary Government states on May 28, 2011 “Mr. Jason Adam Tonis was elected as the new Prime Minister.”

The state of Manchukuo existed as a puppet state of Imperial Japan between September 1932 and the 1945 Russian invasion, and was the site of some of the worst atrocities committed by the Japanese military and is a symbol of Japanese imperialism and aggression to many Asians.

“The sovereign rights and ruling right was handed to the Temporary Administrator Mr. Jason Adam Tonis,” announced the Manchukuo Temporary Government in April 2011.

Their manifesto includes the statement: “We put emphasize in watching the Korean peninsula’s relation. If the two Korea are at war with each other [sic]. We will no doubly declare war on North Korea to fight the totalitarian Kim regime and liberate the North people [sic].”

Emily Putney, Porrazzo’s girlfriend convicted of violent assault on elderly Jewish man, North Korea supporter and new resistance leader

JAMES PORRAZZO: THE PRO-NORTH KOREAN WHITE SUPREMACIST

An increasingly prominent figure among U.S. citizens supporting North Korea in recent years is James Porrazzo.

Porrazzo became a key figure in pro Pyongyang activist circles in America when he was released from prison in 2007 or 2008 after a stint for selling illegal growth hormones used by athletes to increase strength.

He was also former head of the largest white supremacist group in the United States, the American Front.

Founded in 1987, the American Front was affiliated with racist groups such as the White Aryan Resistance, and gained publicity for breaking U.S. chat show host Geraldo Rivera’s nose live on his television show. Starting out as a White Supremacist skinhead group targeting blacks and Jews, it soon went through numerous internal power struggles and ideological programs.

“In 1998, Porrazzo was arrested for assault against an anti-racist activist in Springfield, Missouri, given a one-year suspended sentence and ordered to give up racist politics”

American Front members committed numerous violent racial hate crimes in the 1990s. In 1991, police offers searching a Beaverton, Oregon residence found a “hit list” of Portland police officers. In 1993, in California and Washington states a series of bombings targeting blacks, gays and Jews were attributed to the American Front. The U.S. Attorney in Washington State said the American Front were part of a larger conspiracy to incite a race war.

Their motto was to “Secure National Freedom and Social Justice for White people in North America.”

In 1996 James Porrazzo took control of the group, and moved to Arkansas where he professed an ideology known as “Third Positionism” – an amalgam of far right racial politics and leftist communist economic policies which had its roots with the European fascist right.

In 1998, Porrazzo was arrested for assault against an anti-racist activist in Springfield, Missouri, given a one-year suspended sentence and ordered to give up racist politics.

“By the early 2000s,” the anti-racist Anti-Defamation League wrote, “Porrazzo had largely run the group into the ground and it was Porrazzo’s approach to Islamists which seems to have been the final cause of his undoing.” The group promoted not only Hamas and Hezbollah, but even Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, that kind of promotion “inspired some heavy state harassment and severely limited our ability to safely expand or organize,” Porrazzo said.

Porrazzo advocated “socialist revolution in a racialist context,” explaining “We propose a workable, realistic alternative, and that is Separatism! White autonomy, Black autonomy, Brown autonomy and death to the current twisted system…. The only other obvious route would be an eventual winner take all race war: I don’t think anyone with any sense would want that… ”

After the September 11 terrorist attack, Porrazzo disappeared from public activism. The American Front was taken over by another virulent white racist, David Lynch, who was murdered by an assassin on March 2, 2011.

A man, possibly Porrazzo, at the RPP headquarters, now a temple.

Like many of U.S. citizens supporting North Korea, Porrazzo goes to great lengths to hide his real identity and obfuscate his real political agenda by using a myriad of pseudonyms and front groups. In doing so, he and his confederates continued to try to lure potential supporters to their true political beliefs.

A careful dissection of their complex web of front religious cults, White Supremacist groups, and neo Nazi front organizations all lead back to the same core group of people and extremist political objectives.

“In 2008, Porrazzo, a long time member of the U.S. based Hare Krishna Hindu sect, joined forces with Joshua Sutter in the RPP.”

In a March 2013 interview with Polish National Socialist organization XPortal, Porrazzo explained “The American Front  took “what we could from left-wing sources” but a “very influential” ideology was what was called “ ‘occult fascists’, this on top of the foundation of our having been America’s first national ‘Skinhead’ organization” and “very importantly from Gaddafi‘s Green Book.”

“One of the areas we studied heavily was the Islamic resistance movements towards the Globalists. This study would backfire on American Front when Sept 11th occurred” which resulted in “heavy state harassment and severely limited our ability to safely expand or organize. By 2002 we voted to put American Front into a ‘tactical hibernation’ until we felt the situation was better suited for us to act openly.”

In 2008, Porrazzo, a long time member of the U.S. based Hare Krishna Hindu sect, joined forces with Joshua Sutter in the RPP. He was also was a leader in the 2009 formation of the New Bihar Mandir temple.

U.S. Juche Leader John Paul Cupp after converting to Islam and now called Walid Cupp

American Front White Power member Kent McLellen

In a series of August 2011 email communications between a group of radical anti-racists, one American Front member, Kent McLellan, broke with Porrazzo and detailed his political activities.

I’m done with American Front,” wrote McLellen. “James Porrazzo, former leader of American Front…is a convicted GHB peddler, as well as actual contributor to Libya, (in fact in 2003 Libya tried to give him $3 million but was denied by the US government) […] He also [believes] in Hindu/Satanism/Allah.”

Kent McLellen, at the time was an avowed white supremacist who had spent time in prison for racial hate crimes.

TYLER MOSES AND THE UNITED JUCHE FRONT OF NORTH AMERICA

On November 17, 2011 the United Juche Front of North America was created by someone using the name Tyler Moses.

Tyler Moses was an alias used by Joshua Sutter in 2002 while serving as the “Pennsylvania state coordinator” for the white racist terror group Aryan Nation shortly prior to his arrest for buying illegal weaponry from an undercover federal law enforcement agent in a plot to launch a bombing campaign in the U.S.

“The sole mission of The United Juche Front of North America is to disseminate information related to the practical application of Songun and Juche based ideologies on the American continent,” the organization’s manifesto read.

“We recognize as Americans that support of the DPRK is seen as a hostile act and are acting in accordance [with] the engagement of operating behind enemy lines.”

James Porrazzo former head of white power American Front turned DPRK supporter. Head of racial separatist communist organization New Resistance

Just as David Woods was the alias used by Sutter as head of the Rural People’s Party, Tyler Moses was the alias he used to coordinate a White Power march on Washington D.C.

Jillian Hoy, who also claims to be a disciple of the mainstream Hare Krishna Hindu sect, holds up Hare Krishna literature at a rural South Carolina library in 2009

In his time as leader of Aryan nations Sutter also used his real name and other aliases, including the name Wulfran Hall. In his incarnation as a Hindu priest for the New Bihar Mandir temple he assumed the name Shree Shree Kalika-Kalki. In other covert communications with outsiders, he used the name Stephen Browne.

But numerous South Carolina, online, and other records show that all these identities are, in fact, Joshua Sutter. They share birthdates, marriage dates, telephone numbers, and addresses.

THE BID FOR PYONGYANG RECOGNITION

In December 2011, in an apparent attempt to seize control over the organization and become the only official organization supporting North Korea in the U.S., Joshua Sutter and James Porrazzo, used the RPP, New Resistance and another pro-Pyongyang group created using pseudonyms to attack the Pyongyang-recognized leadership of the North American Juche-Songun Ideas Study Group.

“The Juche movement in North America has been hampered in its development because of the study group’s former chairman John Paul Cupp’s deviationism from Kim Il Sungist Thought”

“A few weeks ago, a man using the name Tyler Moses formed a group calling itself the Juche Front this man was also an Aryan Nations figure and he claimed also to be a Hare Krishna and member of New Bihar Mandir, as part of our group’s routine background check for applying member candidates, we discovered the identity of New Bihar Mandir’s leader Shree Shree Kalika-Kalki Mandir was actually Sutter,” wrote the North American Juche Songun Study Group in December 2011.

The statement continued: “Over the past several years, the Juche movement in North America has been hampered in its development because of the study group’s former chairman John Paul Cupp’s deviationism from Kim Il Sungist Thought and his flirtations with anti-communist philosophies such as white nationalism.”

Cupp’s deviations “led him to bring many dangerous and suspect people into the group; two of these individuals were Joshua Caleb Sutter and James Porrazzo,” the statement said, referring to the former leader of the Aryan Nations and the former head of the American Front.

the fault for these matters rests solely upon John Paul Cupp and his adoption of a pro-white nationalist line; had he not done so James Porrazzo and Joshua Sutter would never once have ever been considered for a moment to be validly qualified to be members of this study group, from now on we will pursue a more vigilant anti-racist, anti-white nationalist policy.

The statement concluded “The North American Juche-Songun Ideas Study Group repeats and reaffirms our warning to all comrades and friends of the DPRK and Juche to avoid James Porrazzo and his New Resistance group.”

Porrazzo and Sutter lashed back, creating another front group, the Swords of Songun and went public with attacks on Tonis the same month.

Swords of Songun was a newly created pro-North Korean web page that posted propaganda it had obtained from the North Korean government describing itself as the journal of “Juche Truth, a North American National Revolutionary think-tank focusing on the study of Juche and Songun.”

But its sole posting was a vitriolic screed against Tonis titled “A warning to all Revolutionary friends of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Juche Thought: This silver spoon fed NYC metro-sexual exposed.” contending “Tonis’s true beliefs as the Manchukuo group is obsessively pro-Japan and anti-China, anti-communist (Tonis professes to be pro-Stalin and Mao to some he is spying on), anti-”racist” (Tonis also advocates racial separatism to others he spies on) and most disturbingly militantly anti-DPRK.”

Swords of Songun spewed venom at Tonis saying “He tongues the toes of the Japanese along with his Manchu reactionary cohorts as if they were his 55 year old tranny possible police contact / boy-girlfriend’s – then he attacks the Japanese attempting to curry favor and trust with the DPRK!” and threatened Tonis with death.

Jaon Adams Tonis, head of U.S. Juche Group after Cupp converted to islam

“Tonis went too far when he tried to infiltrate the New Resistance. In addition to whatever harm he has caused to the DPRK through his weekly contacts with DPRK representatives… turbulence was ignited between Juche Front and NR”

“After the Revolution he will answer for his crimes.”

New Resistance is a clandestine front organization controlled by James Porrazzo, and other veteran hard-core members of extreme right wing white supremacists that had their origins in the Aryan Nations and American Front of the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

The Swords of Songun website, aside from posting long sections of official North Korean propaganda detailing Juche ideology and praising the Kim dynasty, attacked the U.S. Songun Study Group and its leadership.”Jason-Adam Tonis…has repeatedly tried to drive a wedge between New Resistance and other revolutionaries  in North America and the Eurasian Movement led by Comrade Alexander Dugin. This will not continue. New Resistance urges all revolutionary organizations to break communication with Tonis and his fake Juche honey trap’s pig work.”

After the Revolution,” the article warned, “he will answer for his crimes.”

But the dissension within the U.S. group, not to mention the extreme racist and white supremacist public views of its top leaders, did not stop the North Korean government from heralding the U.S. figures in their official media.

On December 19, 2011 Kim Jong Il died.

One week later, the official North Korean state media said in an article headlined “Organizations of Foreign Countries Mourn Demise of Kim Jong Il” said that “Different organizations of the world sent letters… on Dec. 19 and 20, expressing profound condolences over the demise of leader Kim Jong Il.”

“They included,” the article said, “the North American Group for Study of the Juche, Songun Idea in the U.S. and the North American Committee against Zionism and Imperialism.”

EPILOUGE

The 2011 split amongst U.S. Juche supporters did not usher in a new harmony.

The U.S. Juche Study Group became wary of infiltrators. “Advocates of a global melting pot  may not find this the group for them. While parallels can be drawn between the Great Leaders’ ideas and those of third positionists, they are notoriously filled with police officers, would-be-terrorists and a whole host of other shady folks and we ask that if you’re a member of any of these types of groups, stay away from us.”

The most prominent advocate of third positionism, James Porrazzo, explained his political strategy in March 2013.

“We took from left-wing sources” and the “very influential ideology of ‘occult fascists’,” calling American Front “America’s first national ‘Skinhead’ organization.”

“We studied heavily the Islamic resistance movements” which “backfired on American Front when Sept 11th occurred” with “heavy state harassment severely limiting our ability to expand. By 2002 we voted to put American Front into ‘tactical hibernation’.”

In 2009, Porrazzo sabotaged rival “bandit groupings, disrupted it and reestablished American Front as a National Revolutionary movement.”

North Korea is a model of a racially pure state for many white power skinheads

In March 2011, American Front leader David Lynch was assassinated and Porrazzo attempted to seize power. Law enforcement infiltrated the group and uncovered a muder plot against to Porrazzo by rivals “conspiring with (white power group) Combat 18.”

Porrazzo recruited American Front members to his New Resistance group promoting North Korea, racial separatism, and the overthrow of the U.S. government.

In May 2012, 14 American Front members were arrested plotting “race war” and charged with stockpiling weapons, paramilitary training using automatic weapons, and murders of political enemies.

Porrazzo’s rival’s sidelined, he disbanded the group and its website, directing to links  to New Resistance. FBI documents show Porrazzo  threatening challengers to  his leadership.

“We “cleared the slate” continuing our revolutionary efforts under a new banner…and New Resistance was born. Anyone claiming to be American Front is a renegade,” Porrazzo said in March 2013.

On March 16, 2013, the far right Russian Defense League named Porrazzo its “Ambassador” to the U.S.

May of 2012 also saw  renewed  infighting within the U.S. Songun Politics Study Group.

Despite Jason-Adam Tonis’s claim of  moving away from racist politics after taking over from the Muslim convert John Paul Cupp, private emails obtained by NK News show Tonis denigrating rival U.S. DPRK sympathizers as “all Jews or else fags.”

“Have you ever heard of a group called the American Front ? Sutter/Woods is now working with them,” Tonis wrote white supremacist Kevin Walsh. “I’ve made received “death threats…because I believe bloodline is the main determinant of nationality as Kim Jong Il postulated” adding “comrade Woods aka Joshua Sutter came back under a new alias and tried to steal control of the group by accusing me of being a CIA agent.”

Walsh replied “The WWP are a bunch of Jews” and “I can’t believe any thinking person would take “Woods” seriously. My advice is to cut off all relations with anyone who wants to work with Woods.  Those who want to work with him are either government agents or too fucking stupid to be of any use to you.”

However Walsh soon discovered Tonis’ claims of renouncing white supremacy. Walsh–a committed racial separatist and anti Semite–objected.

“I maintain that white nationalism is the correct interpretation of Juche for the European-American community and is in no way incompatible with communism.  The  Korean people in the north keep their blood pure, and so should the European-American people,” Walsh wrote. “Tonis didn’t have a problem with this in 2009. Whatever the ultimate cause of Cupp breaking with Tonis, it was not white nationalism. I support solidarity with the Korean people against imperialism, but I don’t knowingly work with liars, hypocrites,  fraudsters, and traitors. If the Korean people want to work with such people, more the fool they.”

Tonis replied to Walsh with a violent threat. “The Juche party is based on absolute unity around the Leader. As leader of the US study group I demand you submit to me and follow my orders. If not then, the next time I’m in Arizona, I’ll gladly crack your skull open.”

“I must make self-criticism for wasting too much time and been too patient with hypocrites and cowards. I am making an implied criticism of the Koreans for having such flakes as Cupp represent them in North America, but in their defense, they probably didn’t have a whole lot of volunteers come forward and couldn’t be terribly choosy. In any case, I wish the Korean people well, but I will sever all relations with this particular group.”

John Paul Cupp did not reply to messages seeking comment. Using the name Walid Cupp, he said. “I support the Korean [stance] against American Imperialism, but I have been a practicing Muslim for a few years now and no longer am directly involved.”

Jason-Adam Tonis responded to NK News interview requests for an saying “I’ve not been in good health lately and have been unable to reach a computer. Of course I would love and am always ready to talk about the DPRK and Americans such as myself who are supporters of it.” He did not  respond to further questions in a subsequent emails. Neither Joshua Sutter or James Porrazzo responded to messages left for them….

A mysterious North Korean train explosion, dead Syrian missile scientists, fake Canadian passports, a poisoned Hamas terrorist, and the Israeli assassin: One curious tale in the bloody global spy war behind the Middle East conflict

An Israeli agent on a stolen Canadian passport spotted in Pyongyang raises eyebrows after Syrian weapons scientists are killed in a mysterious North Korean train explosion.

At the time, he was fleeing New Zealand charged with trying to steal the identity of a cerebral palsy victim. He later resurfaced with a fake beard on a French passport in Dubai in a hotel where a Hamas leader is assassinated.

Governments in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America all want to talk with the American born Zev Barkin.

Canada has been looking for him for a decade…or were they?

See full story and related stories on North Korean-Syrian clandestine activities at NKNews.org

Explosion aftermath in Ryongchon, North Korea that killed a dozen Syrian missile scientists. Israeli Mossad agent Zev Barkan, inset, who was reportedly in Pyongyang at the time

BY NATE THAYER

JUNE 20, 2013

 NKNews.org

See full story and related stories on North Korean-Syrian clandestine activities at NKNews.org

Zev William Barkan was last seen in late April in Pyongyang, North Korea, after travelling there from Beijing using a Canadian passport issued under the name Kevin William Hunter, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail and other media reports. The Canadian passport of Kevin William Hunter was said to have been reported stolen in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou on April 11, 2004—11 days before the massive blast, measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale, at Ryongchon.

“Israel Mossad agent in North Korea?” read the headline in the August 4 Jerusalem Post. “New Zealand passport scam takes Canadian twist.”€

The Canadian Press reported that “Federal officials are investigating whether a suspected Israeli spy is travelling in Asia on a stolen Canadian passport.”€

It said “agencies are checking allegations that Zev William Barkan – embroiled in a New Zealand espionage caper – is using a Canadian passport issued under the name Kevin William Hunter.”€

“That part of the story’s being checked,” said Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Reynald Doiron. “All of that being put together, we should have a clearer picture.”€

He told Canadian CTV television that “We are checking the information. We know some of the answers but not all of them and we are determined to get to the bottom of this.”

Governments on five continents have been seeking answers on the clandestine shenanigans of American born Mossad agent Zev Barkan for more than a decade.

TINKER, SAILOR, TOLD’YA HE’S A SPY

Barkan was at the time wanted by police in New Zealand in an espionage scandal that had erupted in the weeks before the North Korean train explosion.

The rare public spy scandal captured New Zealand headlines on April 17, 2004 when two Israeli Mossad agents were charged with attempting to illegally obtain New Zealand passports for the use of the Mossad operative Zev Barkan. When two other Mossad operatives were arrested, Barkan, who was in New Zealand between March 3 and 20th, vanished.

As part of the elaborate forged passport ring, Barkan attempted to assume the identity of a severely disabled New Zealand man with cerebral palsy.  He obtained the man’s birth certificate and applied for a passport under the New Zealander’s name and submitting Barkan’s real photograph, but his American accent raised the suspicions of a New Zealand official which sparked authorities to investigate.

The two Israeli Mossad spies who were arrested and jailed in New Zealand for attempted to obtain a fraudulent passport for Barkan in 2004 appear in an Auckland court. Barkan vanished

New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told New Zealand radio that Barkan was a former Israel Defense Force diver and Israeli agent assigned to Israeli embassies in Vienna and Brussels between 1993 and 2001.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark has said there was “no doubt whatsoever” that the men were spies.

Secret cables from the American embassy in New Zealand confirmed that U.S. officials knew the arrested men were Mossad agents. “We have very strong grounds for believing these are Israeli intelligence agents,” the cable, released in 2009 by WikiLeaks, said. “While Prime Minister Helen Clark would not confirm which service employed the men, she noted that if one were to lay espionage charges then one would have to be prepared to offer the kind of evidence in court which our intelligence agencies do not like coming forward to display.”€

Zev William Barkan

One New Zealand news organization reported that  “Barkan is being investigated by Macau and Chinese Immigration for his movements in April/May. The investigation includes his alleged use of the U.S. passport in the name of Zev Barkan and a second Canadian passport in the name of Kevin Hunter – which was stolen in Guangzhou China on April 11th.”€

 From New Zealand To Pyongyang

The court arraignments on April 16 revealed the arrest of the two Israeli’s on charges of attempting to obtain a New Zealand passport, but Zev William Barkan had “fled the country and authorities concede they would not know where to find him.”

But soon reports emerged which placed Barkan, now travelling on a stolen Canadian passport, in Pyongyang in late April, according to the Australian Sydney Morning Herald and other media.

And in the ensuing weeks, months, and years, the unlikely saga only became more curious .

New Zealand, Canadian, Israeli and Australian media reported that Mossad agent Zev William Barkan was reported seen in Pyongyang working as a security adviser for the North Korean government€ where he was negotiating a contract to build a security wall along the border with China with Israeli-manufactured motion detectors and night vision equipment.

Unconfirmed accounts cited an “Asian-based NGO closely linked to New Zealand intelligence networks” at a conference in Japan on North Korean refugees saying Barkan and other Israeli agents had entered North Korea under the guise of security consultants in April.

New Zealand news site scoop.com quoted “a senior NGO chief executive with Global-Protect All Children” as saying “Barkan is there negotiating details of an extensive contract for design and technical equipment to support a security wall project, including- but by no means limited to -Israeli produced motion sensors and night vision equipment.”

“Barkan flew from Beijing to Pyongyang at the end of April. He was allegedly travelling on a Canadian passport issued in the name of Kevin Hunter, which had been reported stolen at the Canadian Consulate in the Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in mid-April.”€

The account said Israeli experts were conducting a “feasibility study on a security fence along the 1500 KM North Korea China border.”

New Zealand believed Barkan “was trying to secure a ‘clean’ passport for use in a sensitive Israeli undercover operation in the region, less risky than a forged passport, “ according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Barkan was reported to have stolen the Canadian passport of Kevin William Hunter in Guangzhao, China and traveled to North Korea in April 2004

ISRAELI-CANADIANS

Canada was already sensitive to Israel’s spy services carrying out black espionage operations under the cover of fraudulent Canadian passports. The Canadian investigation of Barkan followed another investigation Canada carried out only the previous week to determine why one of the two Israeli’s convicted in the passport scandal had used a Canadian passport, rather than an Israeli one, to enter New Zealand in 1999.

During his 2004 visit to New Zealand, he entered the country using his Israeli passport. Canadian authorities concluded that the arrested Mossad agent was a “legitimate citizen,” a dual Canadian-Israeli national, and that the Canadian passport he held was “genuine.”

But seven years earlier, in 1997, Israel-Canadian relations were severely strained after two Mossad agents carrying Canadian passports were caught trying to kill Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Jordan. Mashal was injected in the ear with a poisonous toxin. Jordan immediately seized two Mossad agents posing as Canadian tourists and surrounded another six who had fled to the Israeli embassy.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal survived a Mossad assassination attempt when two agents posing as Canadian tourists squirted poison in his ear on an Amman Jordan street in 1997

Under the threat of execution and an embarrassing public spectacle after being caught red handed, an Israeli doctor was dispatched by airplane to Amman with an antidote for the poison which was administered to the murder target Khaled Mashal, who survived. The deal forced Israel to release from prison Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

After that diplomatic embarrassment, Israel promised Canada in 1997 that it would cease using Canadian passports.

After the Canadian Foreign Ministry announced they were investigating reports that Barkan was travelling on a Canadian passport in North Korea, New Zealand’s foreign minister, Phil Goff, said: “I have read with interest the Canadians are following up allegations he may have traveled at some point on a stolen Canadian passport. When he came to New Zealand my understanding was he was travelling on a U.S. passport. Clearly there would be co-operation between police forces in different countries to try to get to the bottom of these things.”€

A 72 meter crater at explosion site in North Korea that registered 3.6 on the Richter scale in April 2004. Remnants of a mobile phone wrapped in duct tape were found nearby by investigators

“The passports that Mossad agents tried to obtain illegally might have been reserved for an assassination operation in a third country, which would have caused irreparable damage to New Zealand,” Foreign Minister Phil Goff was also quoted speculating to the Israeli newspaper Haâaretz.

In July 2004, a New Zealand media outlet reported a detailed, but unconfirmed account of how the fugitive Mossad agent, Barkan had fled New Zealand to North Korea. In an article headlined “NGOs Claim Wanted Israeli Agent Barkan In North Korea”, the report said “Zev Barkan, the suspected Israeli Mossad agent on the run from New Zealand Police, has been sighted in North Korea, according to an Asian-based NGO closely linked to New Zealand intelligence networks.”€

The train car in North Korea where 12 Syrian missile scientists were killed in bomb blast transporting weapons destined for Syria

The account went on to allege, “Zev William Barkan turned up in Pyongyang as an Israeli security adviser in April, within weeks of fleeing from New Zealand prior to a suspected Israeli spy ring being sprung for attempting to illegally acquire a New Zealand passport.”€

The reports of the pilfered Canadian passport in Guangzhou, the Chinese city near the North Korean border, was only 11 days before the blast at the Ryongchon train station.

On April 22, 2004, a massive explosion tore through the train station in Ryongchon, North Korea, nine hours after North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il passed through returning from a trip to China. Wide speculation that the blast was a botched assassination attempt has lingered for years.

BOOMTOWN

A number of sources say that North Korean investigators had concluded the explosion was an attempt on the leader’s life, but more logical evidence points to sabotage directed at the cargo of sophisticated missile components destined for Israel’s enemies in Syria.

The explosion destroyed 40 percent of the town and had the fingerprints of an Israeli intelligence operation. Within days, North Korean secret police from the Ministry of People’s Security, found that a rigged cell phone triggered the blast.

The epicenter of the explosion was in railroad cars where a dozen Syrian missile technicians working for the Syrian Center for Scientific Research were accompanying missile and other components toward to port of Nampo to be shipped to Damascus. All the Syrian scientists were killed. The SSRC is the secret government agency in charge of Syria’s nuclear, missile and chemical weapons development program.

Scenes of the devastation April 2004, Ryongchon North Korea

On May 24, 2004, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo reported that a North Korean official visiting China said the North Korean National Security Agency had “concluded that rebellious forces had plotted the explosions.”€ The paper quoted North Korean sources saying security agencies had determined that a cell phone had been used to detonate the explosion and reported to the North Korean leader that “the use of cell phones should be banned for the sake of the leader’s safety.”

Indeed, five days earlier, on May 19th, North Korea abruptly halted the entire nationwide mobile phone service and confiscated all the 10,000 cell phones in the country. Mobile phone service was not resumed for another five years.

Reports emerged in the following days that North Korean investigators had found a damaged cell phone wrapped in duct tape near the site of the blast. Speculation among intelligence agencies and North Korean investigators was that Kim Jong-il, whose personal train had passed through the station nine hours earlier returning form a visit to China, was the target. Still widely unknown were the deaths of the Syrian weapons scientists and the destruction of their illicit cargo in the blast.

Israeli citizens Eli Cara (left) and Uriel Zoshe Kelman were sentenced to six months’ jail for attempting to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports. Photo New Zealand Herald

In July, the two Israeli Mossad men in jail in Auckland were convicted in a New Zealand court of the Israeli intelligence passport acquiring scam and sentenced to six months imprisonment by the Auckland High Court. They were ordered to pay NZ $100,000 to a cerebral palsy charity.

New Zealand High Court Judge Justice Judith Potter said: “It’s difficult to see why anyone would want a false New Zealand passport unless it was intended to be used in a way ancillary to some other offending (law).” She said: “That offending is likely to be serious or perhaps very serious.”

The New Zealand judge may have been prescient.

In 2005, the year after the New Zealand passport scandal and the train explosion in North Korea, Barkan was back in the news, accused of trafficking in passports stolen from foreign tourists in Southeast Asia and was said to operate a security business in Thailand. “He goes to Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand and deals with gangs who rob tourists of their valuables and passports,” an aid worker told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Barkan is mostly interested in passports and there have been a number of Australian passports.”

After disappearing from New Zealand, unsubstantiated media reports in Australia and New Zealand placed  Barkan in Cambodia, accused of running a studio making snuff and porn movies in a town on the Mekong River North of the capital, Phnom Penh, where foreign students and tourists were lured by promises of movie stardom.

Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in a Dubai luxury hotel room in January 2010 by Mossad operatives using Australian, British, Irish, French and Dutch passports

In January 2010, Zev Barkan was again fingered by authorities–this time the government of Dubai—when a team of 32 Mossad agents carried out the assassination of a senior Hamas leader in a Dubai hotel room. Zev Barkan, using a forged French Passport under the name Eric Rissaneux, was caught on video wearing a fake beard, dressed in sports clothes and carrying a tennis racket, following the Hamas leader up the elevator and down the hallway to his room. Barkan then rented a room across the hall.

Dubai police chief publicly named the man using a French passport under the name Eric Rissaneux and other Mossad agents from the Kidon unit of the spy agency, responsible for assassinations and other special operations, as the culprits. There photographs were published and Interpol issued warrants for their arrest for murder.

Israeli American Zev Barkan in disguise on his forged French passport using the name Eric Rassineux

At the time, Zev Barkan still had an outstanding arrest warrant in New Zealand for the passport scandal six years earlier.

The Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in a Dubai luxury hotel room in January 2010 by Mossad operatives using Australian, British, Irish, French and Dutch passports, many of them apparently surreptitiously copied from unsuspecting travelling tourists who now had warrants for their arrests for murder.

The killers were all caught on hotel and other video cameras, some dressed in wigs, observed frequently changing clothes, some carrying tennis rackets as they stalked the guerrilla leader from the lobby to the elevators to the hallway outside his room. Hotel surveillance camera’s observed the agents using forged electronic room keys to enter the Hamas leader’s room shortly before he returned. He was found suffocated the next day, a paralyzing drug had been injected into his thigh.

Hamas leader exiting hotel elevator in Dubai. Behind him is Mossad assassin Eric Rassineux

But the Israeli team was long gone, all 32 having departed Dubai airport for different cities in Europe within an hour of the assassination the previous evening.

In August 2010, Dubai police chief Lieutenant-General Dahi Khalfan Tamimut announced that an unnamed “non-European country” had told Dubai in July they had arrested a Mossad suspect in June for the January assassination, but  Lt-Gen Tamimut complained the Country had since refused to cooperate or provide details.

But then in October, Lt-Gen Tamimut, unhappy with the delay, named Canada as the “non-European country.”

“A senior Canadian security official here told me in July that they have made an arrest of one of the suspects,” Lt-Gen Tamimut told The Globe and Mail.

Zev William Barkan in the photo he gave New Zealand authorities to obtain fraudulent passport in 2004

The photo used by Barkan for his fraudulent French passport used on 2010 mission to assassinate Hamas leader in Dubai

Superimposed photo of Eric Rassineux from Dubai police over photo of Barkan from New Zealand authorities. His facial features are identical

“We want clarity on this issue. We want the Canadian authorities to tell us exactly what the details are — the thing that is discomfiting is the lack of transparency on this,” he told Reuters. “The person informed me then that this information was not to be released in the media and was only for the police. Since then we have not heard any more information and I don’t understand the secrecy.”

Shortly thereafter, the Al Ittihad Arabic daily reported the suspect was one of the two people shown on the hotel’s surveillance cameras wearing tennis outfits and carrying rackets as they followed the Hamas leader to his room up the elevator in the Bustan Rotana Hotel.

Later that month in October that year Israeli TV reported that the Mossad agent under arrest in Canada was the assassin using the alias Eric Rassineux.

The Israeli Mossad agent Zev Barkin, who fled New Zealand for attempting to obtain a fraudulent passport and was then reported to be in Pyongyang when the mysterious explosion killed Syrian scientists attempting to return home with a cargo of sophisticated weaponry,  has since been identified as the man who used the alias Eric Rassineux to murder the Hamas leader in Dubai.

Message tweeted by Israeli embassy in London the day Israeli ambassador was summoned to explain why 6 U.K. citizens had their passports used in the Dubai assassination. Barkan was dressed in a sports outfit carrying a tennis racket during the mission

But Canada soon refuted the allegations they had anyone in custody related to the Dubai murder, calling the assertion “baseless.”

Lt.-Gen. Tamimut also told The Globe that one of the suspects had entered the UAE on a fake Canadian passport.

“We have nothing to say at this point,” said Sergeant Greg Cox, a spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“Tamimut said we gave this info to the Dubai police, and we didn’t,” Canadian embassy officials in Dubai told the Globe and Mail.

During the height of the dispute between Canada and Dubai in October, the UAE refused Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay’s airplane, which was returning from a visit to Afghanistan, permission to fly over Dubai airspace, forcing him to take a circuitous route over Europe.

Interpol mugshots of Mossad assassins in Dubai wanted for murder. Barkan is on the far left, third from top

ZEV, ZE’EV, LEV

“Former Israeli diplomat to New Zealand Zev William Barkan leads a life akin to that of novelist Frederick Forsyth’s Jackal, emerging from the shadows only to be named by authorities in connection with various crimes before again disappearing,” wrote New Zealand’s Fairfax Media in July 2011.

Zev Barkan was born Zev Bruckenstein in 1967 in Washington D.C, where his family owned a “doors and windows business” and his father was director of religious studies at a synagogue. He holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship after his family moved to Israel in the 1970’s.

Barkan entered New Zealand on a U.S. passport and had an American accent, according to New Zealand officials.

Other aliases he has used include Zev William Barkan, Ze’ev William Barkan, and Lev Bruckenstein. He told acquaintances in New Zealand that he was American and his name was Jay.

Dubai officials believe he was travelling on a fraudulent French passport using the name Eric Rassineux and Canadian officials were investigating him using the stolen passport of Canadian Kevin William Hunter.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that “The passports that Mossad agents tried to obtain illegally might have been reserved for an assassination operation in a third country, which would have caused irreparable damage to New Zealand.”€

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said “the New Zealand government views the act carried out by the Israeli intelligence agents as not only utterly unacceptable but also a breach of New Zealand sovereignty and international law. The Israeli agents attempted to demean the integrity of the New Zealand passport system and could have created considerable difficulties for New Zealanders presenting their passports overseas in future.”

She added: “The Israel government was asked for an explanation and an apology three months ago. Neither has been received.”€

When reporters for the New Zealand Herald tracked down Ze’ev Barkan’s family in October 2004, they were not well received. In the village of Shoham, 15 miles from Tel Aviv, Ze’ev Barkan wife, Irit, answered the reporter’s phone  call but claimed she did not know a Ze’ev.

His father, Yossef Barkan was more direct. “Stop calling here, you hear me. I’ve nothing to do with this business. Goodbye.”

See full story and related stories on North Korean-Syrian clandestine activities at NKNews.org

My contribution to boost local tourism. From the Washington Post Style section……

ESCAPES: The Living Fields; Cambodia’s Most Famous War Reporter Retreats to Dorchester County, Md. 

“If I were writing about this area,” the war correspondent says with one arm draped over the steering wheel of his pickup, “that would be my lead right there.”

The war correspondent is squinting down the sunny main street of Cambridge, Md.–a rank of blank storefronts and shabby 1960s siding. Specifically, he’s pointing at a digital clock that glows feebly on the side of a two-story corner law office. “That clock has been six hours slow since I got here. It’s the perfect emblem for this place.”

This place is Dorchester County, Md., a working Chesapeake borough less than two hours from Washington where it sometimes seems the digital age has progressed no further than a half-bright digital clock overlooking a sleepy downtown.

The war reporter–who has a hard time looking at any scene without mentally crafting a paragraph about it–is Nate Thayer, a hard-eyed, trouble-hunting journalist who has infiltrated some of the bloodiest jungle strongholds in Southeast Asia. To the surprise of his family, colleagues and readers, the 40- year-old Thayer recently retreated to placid Dorchester after more than 15 years of chasing danger around the world. Last spring, he bought a capacious old farmhouse and 70 acres on Church Creek, less than a mile as the heron flies from Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. He’s quietly writing a book and tending the fields with his longtime sweetheart, Carol Bean, and Scoop, a scrappy mutt they rescued from the slums of Bangkok. After a long adrenaline ride through hot spots and hellholes, Thayer says he came to Dorchester for a little peace. Reluctantly.

“I was the world’s most unmotivated buyer,” he laughs, walking across the street to his frequent breakfast spot at the counter of Doris Mae’s Restaurant. “I looked at waterfront property all over the world, Thailand, France. When I finally came over here, everyone said, ‘Don’t even look in Dorchester, there’s nothing there,’ which immediately intrigued me. The overwhelming sentiment here is not to change things. That’s why I like it.”

A white-haired woman at the griddle looks up as Thayer enters. He’s an imposing figure in any setting, but particularly in a small- town egg joint with Navy recruitment posters on the wall. He’s tall, lithe and swimmer-strong (from daily laps at the Cambridge YMCA). With a shaved head, a natural scowl and an ever-present pinch of black snuff under his front lip, Thayer looks downright piratical. It’s a broke-nose mien that serves him well in the dyspeptic bars where he does much of his reporting, but one that belies his blue- blood lineage (his father was an ambassador to Singapore) and his own intellectual bent as a rapacious reader who recently did a turn as a think-tank scholar with Johns Hopkins University.

The waitress greets Thayer in a motherly way and asks if he wants his eggs poached, an item not on the menu. He says yes, asks her the news and looks around at the orderly calmness that pervades this community. “Having lived so long in the absence of rules,” he says, “I’ve come to appreciate a properly organized society.”

Thayer began his career as a flouter of rules, a hard-drinking 28- year-old with a taste for conflict and serious weapons. As a Bangkok- based freelance reporter, he quickly gained a reputation for going where others couldn’t–or wouldn’t–go. He learned the local dialects, lived and walked in the jungle with the bad guys and endured the sundry malignancies of modern Indochina: multiple bouts of cerebral malaria, kidnappings, a land mine explosion that shattered his leg and ruined his hearing. But the stories kept coming. In 1992, along the old Ho Chi Minh trail, Thayer discovered a forgotten band of mountain rebels who had to be convinced the Vietnam War was over and their American sponsors long gone. He has exposed heroin kingpins, corrupt politicians and murderous generals. “I want to go to my grave making people with guns, power and money nervous,” he says with a frank grin. “I love it.”

But more than any other, Thayer has been in pursuit of one villain for the whole of his career: Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge dictator who oversaw the greatest mass murder since Hitler. To work his way into Khmer Rouge territory, Thayer allowed himself to be captured numerous times, each occasion making friendly with another local Communist field commander. He tramped, on one trip, through more than 400 miles of jungle with Khmer Rouge units. He shared their mess and was treated in their field hospital after the truck he was riding in tripped a land mine and he woke up with his head in the engine compartment and a companion’s severed leg across his chest.

Finally, in 1998, Thayer’s single-minded pursuit led him to what many consider the scoop of the decade, the first on-the-record interview with Pol Pot since he was driven from Phnom Penh in 1979. When they met in a sweltering jungle hut, the man responsible for killing an estimated 2 million people fixed his gaze on Thayer and said slowly, “I’ve known your name for a long, long time.”

Five months later, Pol Pot–old and broken–was dead.

Somehow, it’s even more jarring to hear Thayer’s matter-of-fact telling of his extraordinary history as he moves through his now decidely ordinary life in Dorchester County. After breakfast, he rumbles down brick-paved High Street, past the boat basin crowded with both yachts and work boats. The big, shady Victorian sea captains’ houses along here are slowly being bought and restored. It’s an antique waterside neighborhood that seems like it could be, maybe, on the verge of better times.

“I think it’s going to take off,” Thayer says, pulling up to a large, well-groomed red house with a noble front porch. It’s Cambridge House, a bed-and-breakfast that Thayer wants to visit. He entertains a steady stream of globe-trotting reporters, photographers and diplomats at his new place, and he considers it a host’s duty to be able to recommend local inns and restaurants. Inside, innkeeper Stuart Schefers cautiously shares Thayer‘s optimism about the county.

“Slowly it’s coming back,” says Schefers. In addition to Cambridge House–already popular with bicyclists, birders and hunters– Schefers is a partner in the Chesapeake Grill, one of a number of ambitious new restaurants in the area. “It’s been neglected, but it is one of the few areas around the bay that hasn’t been ruined by overdevelopment.”

Driving the growing feeling that Dorchester may finally cash in on the tourism that has plumped up St. Michaels Island just across the Choptank River is a Hyatt resort being built hard on the edge of town. The $150 million, 450-acre development is slated to open in Christmas 2001, instantly becoming the biggest employer in the county. After decades of placidly watching tourist dollars zoom through town at 60 mph on their way to Ocean City, Dorchester may be in for a boom of its own.

A few minutes later, Thayer is driving down the wattle of shoreline below Cambridge, an intricate terrain laced with the many creeks and marshes that feed the Chesapeake. There are few buildings, just some modest homes, a sun-baked one-room schoolhouse where young Harriet Tubman once learned her letters and, tucked in a shoreside forest, an ancient Anglican church and cemetery. The corn fields are in stubble now; the sorghum is up and the waterfowl are on the wing. It’s duck-hunting country and through the autumn, Thayer–who has heard some gunfire in his time–listens to the reports echoing across this wet, flat land.

“It’s so dominated by water,” he says, gazing at the low white crab boats working up the creek. Thayer is a slow, deliberate talker, and he drives the same way. Old farmers in tractor caps pass him in pickups even shabbier than his. “It’s steeped in classic rural traditions, agriculture, fishing. That’s what drives life here.”

That will remain, Thayer believes, even if more people discover what he has, in part, because the vast 25,000-acre Blackwater refuge keeps adding more land. But there’s also a doggedness to the local culture that will survive the lure of quick-buck development. (And already, more Volvos lugging bikes and kayaks are to be seen on the local roads, pulling into B&Bs and restaurants that cater to city visitors who come for the Eastern Shore the way it used to be.)

“You find that they are determined to maintain a farmer’s way of life, even though they could make a killing by selling out to developers,” says the war correspondent. As he rolls by, window open, a blazing white egret lifts out of the reeds with heavy, angelic flaps. “They know better than I do what a good place this is.”

ESCAPES KEYS

Getting There: Dorchester County (war-free since 1865) is on the Eastern Shore, about 90 miles from Washington. From the Beltway, take Route 50 east all the way to Cambridge. James Michener set part of “Chesapeake” here, and it’s the birthplace of Harriet Tubman (Home Towne Tours offers tours of Tubman sites, 410-228-0401).

Lodging: Cambridge House (112 High St., 410-221-7700, http://www.cambridgehousebandb.com) is a stout, begabled old captain’s mansion at the town waterfront. Rooms are $120, with a five-course dinner available with weekend packages ($329). Twenty-eight miles south of Cambridge, Wingate Manor (2335 Wingate-Bishop’s Head Rd., 888-397-8717, $80 to $120) is a comfortable, roomy old pile hard on the Honga River. Bikes available gratis, boats for rent.

Eating: Rolston’s Chesapeake Grill (321 High St.) makes it no longer necessary to cross the Choptank for upscale steak and seafood (entrees start at $20, with a less expensive bar and bistro up front). Hysers (824 Locust St.), an honest lunch counter, mixes a serious ice cream soda.

Antiquing: Dorchester remains bargain country, with almost a dozen antiques shops around Cambridge proper, the largest being the Packing House Antique Mall (411 Dorchester Ave., 410-221-8544).

Info: Dorchester County Tourism, 800-522-8687, http://www.tourdorchester.org.

- See more at: http://natethayer.typepad.com/blog/2000/11/escapes-the-living-fields-cambodias-most-famous-war-reporter-retreats-to-dorchester-county-md-1.html#sthash.MEVVLugM.dpuf

Lamont Diaries continued…

To my friend, Buddy

Lamont’s Uncle Buddy has come to stay with us for a couple of weeks. Buddy is one of my oldest, closest friends, ever since he was given a reprieve from death row a decade ago and came to live with me. Buddy has lived with my brother the last couple of years, where he has a backyard and three young whippersnappers who love him.

Buddy has had a good life, and he has made my life much richer by sharing himself with me. He is an older guy, now. Glaucoma clouds his eyes and his hearing is worse than mine. Sometimes he can’t muster the strength in his well used legs to get up. I just had to carry him down the two flights of stairs so we could amble ever so slowly to the dog park. It took us 23 seconds to cross the street. These are my thoughts for my friend, Buddy, now.

To my friend, Buddy

I remember when I first heard of you. It was at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a rural church basement. Someone—a volunteer at a local human society—stood up and said he loved you but you were scheduled to be executed the next day because you did not have a home. 

The man said you were a good dog.

I had just gotten home from Iraq. And I needed someone to love me too. So I said: “Stay the execution, the boy has a home.”

I came to the dog prison and you were hiding at the back corner of your jail cell. They opened the door, and you came out, reluctantly. 

They said you had been a bad boy.

That you would run and run and run and that the hated Dog Police had arrested you umpteen times and they had had enough. And they captured you and put you in a cage. And then, when nobody wanted to give you a home, they sentenced you to death.

You came out of jail and, once out the front door, you broke free and you ran and ran and ran from the jail. We had to chase you down the rural roads of Maryland’s Eastern shore until we captured you again.

And then you came home with me, buddy. That was 10 years ago this summer.

And Scoop, my pal from Bangkok, who we both know had a pea brain but a big heart, and we both know, Buddy, she really considered that she was an entitled Princess and, to be generous, she sometimes was a bit bitchy.

After all, she was born in a fetid sewer on the streets of Bangkok and now had her own waterfront estate in America. She was not very nice to you, Buddy.

But you were then and you are now such a good, tolerant boy. You put up with her snarls and growls—just standing there and letting her have her fit, and you said: “It’s OK, Nate. If you have enough room in your heart for me and Scoop, I have enough room in mine for you and Scoop, too.”

I love you for that, Buddy. You taught me how to be a better man.

My friend, Buddy, enjoying his sunset years

Scoop wouldn’t let you sleep on my bed for 6 years, but you would come smooch me each night and then you would always sleep blocking the door. I knew you were trying to protect me, Buddy. So many nights you would bark at what you suspected was some bad guy, and you were right more than a few times.

Do you remember nearby there was a minimum security juvenile prison and how many times those poor fellows escaped? But the problem was there was only one road out to freedom because we lived on that long peninsula and it was surrounded by water. It was nine miles to the nearest store and so, most of the time they would sneak across our farm fields and try to steal my truck to make their getaway.

And you would have none of that Buddy, would you?

So you barked and barked and ran to the door and back to me until I paid attention and we went outside, together Buddy, with my 30 odd 6 and fired off a few very large, very loud rounds their way. And then they would go away. You were, rightly, very proud of yourself, Buddy.

And you forgave me when, another night you were convinced something was outside and I stumbled out of bed to the front door with the 45 automatic pistol and I tried to put a round in the chamber but I couldn’t lock and load because the ammo wouldn’t chamber  and remained in the clip. So, like the idiot I can be sometimes, I tried to load it by pulling the trigger and shot a hole through the wall and that round came entirely to close to you.

I was embarrassed for the Accidental Discharge and you had the bejesus startled out of you.

But you still loved me even when I was an idiot, Buddy.

Lamont and Buddy, on guard duty

You were such a happy boy. You loved that big farm. You were free. All 70 acres were yours. The waterfront was yours to frolic, which you did every day. And I remember how happy you were, running full speed round and round and round the swimming pool and the deck just to show how happy you were to be free.

You are such a loving boy, Buddy. When Scoop died in my arms, her head resting on my shoulder, in my bed, you smooched her one last time and you saw how devastated I was and you smooched me,  too, and put your paws over me.  And you crawled up into my bed and you never left me in the years since. That was the first night you slept all night in my bed, and you did every night afterwards.

And you smooched me when I was sick. And you curled up by me every night to protect me.

I remember the night when the barn caught fire. You barked and barked and ran up and smooched me and ran back to the front door and back again, until I woke up and saw what the commotion was all about. You were so proud of yourself. As you should have been, even though the barn burned down.

You were the perfect guard dog and you are the perfect friend, Buddy.

I love you Buddy and I know you love me with all our hearts.

Those Hated Dog Police Nazi’s who sentenced you to die because they said you were a bad dog were wrong, Buddy.

Then I got sick again, Buddy, and you were such a loving boy. Every night, curling next to me and kissing and licking me. You waited there till the morning when I woke before you went out for your long stroll and swim and frolicked, just thankful to be blessed to be alive. Every day.

I love you Buddy.

You are an older guy, now, Buddy. Your eyes are clouded from Glaucoma.

You still are such a tolerant fellow, Buddy, such a very loving, very, very good boy.

Now, you let Lamont annoy you and you understand. You let him play his childish puppy games and you even let him eat your food.

And Lamont lies next to you staring up at you, wondering how he can be the man you are.

And you show us by example. I am very happy and proud to tell the world what a beautiful boy you are, Buddy, even if they don’t care or they can’t understand.

Now you come and sleep next me every night and it is now time you let me show you how important you have been in my life.

I love you Buddy.

Thanks for being my friend.

The check is rarely in the mail: The dark side of freelance journalists trying to get paid for their work

By Nate Thayer

August 6, 2013

There is only one thing more frustrating to freelance journalists than being asked by for profit companies to work for free.

That is being forced to spend months fighting, arguing, begging, threatening, cajoling, and renegotiating to, if you are lucky, actually get paid a portion of the compensation you were promised for the work you have already done.

Every freelance journalist, photographer, musician and creative artist on the planet knows exactly this scenario–how unethical, debilitating, frustrating, and sometimes humiliating this, routinely, is part of the everyday cadence of freelancers who make a living practicing their craft.

Here is a portion of the latest example of my being forced to divert my attention today from writing for a living to trying to get paid for that work already performed that has taken up much of my last few weeks.

Most every freelance journalist, and creative artist, will immediately recognize, and is all too familiar with the depressing, common scenario.

For much of May June and July, I was solicited and commissioned by a major Hong Kong based company which promotes Chinese direct investment in the U.S. economy, to write articles, copy edit, and provide other professional consultancy work to help them write a news letter, corporate brochures, and other English language documents.

For freelance news journalists, such work is often drudgery, and slightly demeaning, but necessary to supplement the dwindling opportunities to make a living as a journalist in these profoundly changing times for a free press in free societies.

The Hong Kong company has, to date, despite scores of attempts on my part, not paid a single dollar for these months of work.

Today, I received an email from them, after no response to increasingly strident messages from me since early July, saying they had no intention of paying me–at all–for the professional services they initiated, commissioned me for, and that I provided them.

It is, unfortunately, not an uncommon scenario faced by freelancers everywhere.

from:     XXXXXX<xxx.xxxx@xxxxxx.com>

to:          Nate Thayer <thayernate0007@gmail.com>

cc:          xxxxxx.xxxxxx@xxxxx.xxxx>

date:      Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 10:24 AM

subject: Response to second payment request

10:24 AM (3 hours ago)

Hello Nate,

Per your earlier request about $5980, I have discussed with xxx and here is our response.

You and I have agreed orally to work on the newsletter as a project and you have agreed to provide us with a compensation proposal during our first meeting in Caribou cafe on June 25th. However, you have failed to present us with that proposal. And the project didn’t yield much result because what you wrote was not usable for us. So I am afraid that we can’t pay you what you are asking for.

We appreciate your work and it’s regrettable that it didn’t work out well. I wish you best of luck with your career in the future.

Best,

xxxxxxxx

Communication Director

My Response:

Dear XXXX,

I think you must have sent me a message you intended for someone else, so I wanted to alert you so you could correct your error and direct it to the proper recipient.

This would save XXXXXX the embarrassment of being accused of being guilty of the most transparent, egregious, immoral, unethical and illegal business practices that are readily provable and evidenced by the mountain of documents from yourself and XXXXXX CEO XXXXXX to me soliciting my work, congratulating me on its quality, and repeatedly soliciting more work, which you acknowledged, approved and thanked me for, in writing, throughout June and July 2013.

There is an off chance that you actually didn’t push the wrong send button, and you actually seriously meant to tell me that you don’t intend to pay me for the 62 hours of work (which was an extremely generous and conservative invoice of my time and efforts made on your behalf in June and July, taking into account that you repeatedly missed deadlines, changed your requests, asked me to standby for urgent deadline work requests which then didn’t materialize, and other bumps and starts which I attributed to your lack of experience or knowledge of the production requirements of putting out a quality newsletter).

This is work you solicited and I performed at the request of you and XXXXXX CEO XXXXXXX that you are now in default in paying me the $5890.00 you owe.

If by some unfathomable chance you have taken leave of your sanity, and you actually intended to say that XXXXX, after contacting me and securing my professional services 2 months ago, in which the physical records of  several hundred exchanges of emails, documents, text messages, Skype conversations, phone calls, conference calls between you, I , and XXXXX CEO XXXXX in Hong Kong, and personnel meetings, all of which document with indisputable clarity me having provided those professional services at your request and the request of XXXXX CEO XXXXX to XXXXXX during that period and are in my possession, that XXXXXXXX does not owe me compensation and payment of $5890.00 for providing my services, please clarify to me why the fuck not, promptly.

Two months after I began working for you, in which you have repeatedly delayed living up to your singular end of the deal—to pay me for my fucking work—you are now seriously contending that I didn’t work for you and you didn’t use my services at your request and initiation and are refusing to pay me?

Really?

As a matter of advice, it might be in your much better interest to rethink that strategy in your rather bizarre attempt to renege on having to live up to your promises and obligations to pay for the services you solicited, contracted, and received.

Here are some random samples of scores of quotes from your own messages to me that obviously shows that your suggestion that you did not agree to pay me or use my work you contracted me to perform for XXXXX, is ludicrous.

By my rough count, there were approximately 327 exchanges of emails, text messages, Skype conversations, Dropbox documents, phone calls, conference calls, and personal meetings in June and July between you, I, and XXXXXX CEO XXXXXXX.

From XXXXXX CEO XXXXXXXX to me on June 30:

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 11:45 PM,  XXXXXX  wrote:

Nate

Thanks for your notes, these are my feedback, I have not talked with Min, but wanted to send this to you first, let’s discuss and get this moving.

Thanks

XXXXXXX

President & CEO

XXXXXXXX

From XXXXXXX to me and XXXXX CEO XXXXXXXXX July 1:

Hello Nate,

The newsletter outline is right on track. We have some comments to share with you. Please see the attachment. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Best,

XXXXXXXX

Communication Director

XXXXXXXXX

From me to XXXXXXX Chairman XXXXXX and Communications Director XXXXXX July 1:

XXXXXX:

See my comments highlighted in yellow below.

I thought the comments and suggestions were all spot on, useful, and good.

Cheers,

Nate

From XXXXXX to me July 1:

Hello Nate,

please find the attachment with our comments in red underline. We are riding on a good momentum here, please let us know your plan going forward.

Good luck with moving today!

XXXXXX

Communication Director

XXXXXXXX

From XXXXXX CEO XXXXXX July 1:

date:      Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 12:28 AM

subject: Re: Thanks for your notes

Hi Nate,

thank you, this is exciting to find a passionate, professional writer we can rely on.

July 2 email from XXXXXX to me:

Hello Nate,

We have drafted a Newsletter table of content, which includes the three articles that you are working on and also another 12 articles which we found “fit to print”. All of them need to be worked out this week. Next to you, XXXXX and myself will take up some writing. I just sent an email to our team for TOC comments and inputs. Here I am sharing with you.

Best,

XXXXXX

Communication Director

XXXXXX

XXXXXX Newsletter Table of Content for Your Comments

Dear colleagues,

We are redesigning the XXXXX newsletter. The newsletter will demonstrate our mission in building bridges between US and China, inform the readers about XXXXX developments and create a platform for XXXXX partners, XXXXX communities and XXXXX past events participants to contribute to XXXXX mission. The newsletter will have print and online edition and will contain texts, photos and videos.

Since the last time some of you saw the newsletter index, we have made quite some changes and renamed it as Table of Contents. Please take a look at the latest XXXXXXX Newsletter Table of Contents ( TOC) and share with me your comments.  This TOC is designed primarily for the English newsletter, although we plan to let the Chinese newsletter to keep most of these items if not all.

Each numerical item represent a section and an article. Articles will generally be between 300 – 600 words, with one or multiple photos. We have set up 15 sections, which roughly doubles what we used to publish. Even though XXXXX, Nate ( outsourced writer ) and myself will take up majority of the writing, there are five articles that currently don’t have author. I highlighted them in yellow and if you are interested to produce any of these articles, please send an email to me.

Because we are working on a tight schedule, I’d like to ask you to please provide your comments before July 3rd, 6 pm EST.

Thank you!

From a July 8 email to me from XXXXX on XXXXXX official email:

Hello Nate,

Thank you for submitting the three articles. They are well developed, only need some minor adjustment, which we will mark out tonight. The newsletter is moving quickly. We plan to publish it this Friday. I have a translated article that needs some copy editing. I will send it to you in a separate email in an hour or so. I can see that you have put in a lot of effort, and I hope we can find a time to have coffee and recap after the dusts are settled.”

Or another message from XXXXX to me on July 8:

“Hello again,

I am sending you the short article that need some copy editing. This one can be worked out after you finish with article 2 and 3 revision. It’s a straight forward article, just need to smooth out and make it read like a 1st tier professional English news media article.”

Email to me from XXXXXX from July 11:

Hello Nate,

We are entering the final stages in the newsletter production. Let me give you an update since yesterday.

1. XXXXX approved all the section names and the article 2-4 packaging change.

2. Two more article folders are ready for copy editing. My colleagues sent me stories for article 7 and 8.

So for today, could you first finish the final copy editing for articles 7-15? Some of these are short articles. To purpose is to smooth the language, final round check. Some of the articles are already copy edited by you, such as # 9, 10, 12. Some are functional pieces, such as # 8, 11. For these kind, little changes maybe needed, but I still hope you simply go over them to approve the language for the last round.

For this kind of editing, because no big changes are needed, so there is no need for you to turn on track changes. If you want to show me places that you are unclear about or need me to look at afterwards, please highlight them in yellow.

Can you get this done before 5 pm today? And please send them in one by one as you finish copy editing.

After that, can you add a forth paragraph to dropbox article 2 to summarize what to be expect in the following three articles ?

XXXXXXX

Communication Director

XXXXXXX

There are dozens more, but I think you get the point.

I know you are young, inexperienced, and new to my country, and I know these kinds of unethical business practices are routine in your home country of the People’s Republic of China, so here is a bit of unsolicited advice to avoid unnecessary headaches for you as you start your budding career doing business in the properly organized world: Pay your fucking bills; pay them on time; don’t try and steal other people’s work; and live up to your promises.

One’s reputation as a person and a business of honor and integrity is important in a business environment driven by the rule of law and ethical conduct.

Given XXXXXXX singular mandate, using the company slogan “Building Trust, Creating Jobs”, is to promote Chinese direct investment in the United States by easing concerns among Americans and economic development officials that such investment will not be tainted by China’s well-earned reputation of using dubious business practices to make a fast buck and undermine the interests of those it is conducting business with, the irony of XXXXXX refusing to pay a contracted employee (that would be me) for services XXXXXX solicited, is a more than a tad ripe.

Please let me know if perhaps you have misspoken and let me know sometime in the next three hours.

On a positive note, I do think that your particularly stark attempt to refuse to live up to your legal and ethical responsibilities by trying to wangle out of paying for the services you solicited, contracted, and received, does make for a perfect case study of what thousands of freelance journalists and other producers of creative products face daily and are all too familiar with.

On a more negative note, for you in any case, I assure you, have fucked with the wrong person.

If you are under the delusion that you will not very much regret not having the $5890.00 in my bank account by the end of the business day Wednesday, August 7, you would be mistaken.

With all sincerity,

Nate Thayer

Within two hours of me sending this email, the Chinese company communication director rang me on the phone, attempting to argue they had no legal obligation to pay me anything.

“Let me be clear here. Fuck you! You either have $5890.00 wired and in my my account by the close of business day Wednesday August 7, or you will, I assure you, regret you were ever under the profound miss-impression that retaining my professional services could be had without living up to your end of the pretty simple arrangement—pay me my fucking money! This is not a matter of discussion, little less negotiation.”

She then offered me $1500.00

“Fuck you! You will pay the $5890.00 you owe me and a wire transfer in my bank account with that $5980.00 by the close of business Wednesday, August 7.”

“I will let you know our decision,” she said before I hung up the phone.

3 minutes later, my phone rang. It was the company CEO from Hong Kong. The conversation was civil and polite and clear. He agreed to send the money owed me by wire transfer immediately, today Hong Kong time.

But it took 3 weeks of dozens of increasingly acrimonious messages exchanged, a considerable amount of angst, and an entirely unnecessary and distracting amount of effort to simply get paid what had been agreed long ago was the amount owed me.

I estimate I spend 40% of my time negotiating payment and then trying to get those who commissioned my writing and agreed to compensate me for it to live up to their agreement to do so.

It is hard enough to make a living as a freelance journalist these days, but it is made infinitely more difficult by those who commission one’s work, invariably under the pressure of tight deadlines, and then give no priority to living up to their side of the agreement to fairly compensate you.

I detest it. And I, for one, am fed up with it.

Within hours of receiving my above message, the $5890.00 was transferred by wire to my bank account.

Another unpleasant day distracted from focusing on the only thing I do know what to do—write.

AUGUST 14, 2013

FREE-lancing: The ethics and economics of paying writers with exposure and a byline, an AEJMC Magazine Division panel

Left to right: Kevin Lerner (Marist College), Matt Yglesias (Slate), Mike Madden (Washington City Paper), Kevin Stoker (Texas Tech University), Nate Thayer (Freelance Journalist); (photo by Elizabeth Hendrickson)

Excerpts of transcript of August 9, 2013 panel discussion in Washington D.C. (For full transcript see http://presscriticism.com/2013/08/14/free-lancing-the-ethics-and-economics-of-paying-writers-with-exposure-and-a-byline-an-aejmc-magazine-division-panel/#comment-734)

Kevin Lerner: Hi everybody. The double room makes this look like a sparse turnout, but I’m hoping people will trickle in. My name is Kevin Lerner, from Marist College, and this is a sole-sponsored Magazine Division Professional Freedom & Responsibility panel called “FREE-lancing: the ethics and economics of paying writers—although the online schedule says “exposures,” which makes it sound like photography—and a byline. But I was not responsible for copyediting that. We’ve got a blockbuster panel here, and I’d like to start by introducing our panelists, who are all to my left. So, directly to my left, we have Matt Yglesias, business and economics correspondent for Slate. To his left, Mike Madden, who’s the editor of Washington City Paper, the alternative newsweekly. To his left, we have Kevin Stoker, an associate dean at Texas Tech and part of the Media Ethics Division here. And finally to his left, at the opposite end of the table from me, we have Nate Thayer, who is a freelance journalist.

So very quickly about where this panel came from. Some of you may know this story, and it all started with the man to my far left, Nate Thayer, who inspired this. So in early March of this year, Thayer had written a piece for NKNews.org, which is a North Korean specialist site, and North Korea is one of his specialities in reporting. He has over 25 years of reporting experience. He’s covered Cambodia, North Korea, Iraq. So an experienced freelance journalist, and he had written the piece for NK News. It had come to the attention of an editor at The Atlantic, and she contacted him and NK News and said, we’d like to rerun this piece, could you do a version of this for The Atlantic. And the piece was timely. You may remember when Dennis Rodman had been to North Korea. The article was about the history of “basketball diplomacy” in North Korea. And like any freelance journalist, he said yes, I would be happy to have the opportunity to have my piece on your site. And he asked the three questions that a freelance journalist wants answered: When is it due? How many words? And, How much are you going to pay me? And the answers came back: End of the week. 1200 words. And… We get 13 million viewers a month, but our freelance budget is gone, so I’m sorry, we’re not in a position to pay you.

And Nate put that up on his personal blog, the email exchange between him and the editor. And it took off. It hit MediaBistro and all of the usual media gossip sites and it created a discussion in the industry about what’s right and wrong about paying a writer. Is it ethical to “pay” just by saying you’re going to get 13 million people to see this? Is that OK? Is that something that a freelance writer might want to do? Is it different at the beginning of your career or the end of your career? When do you give your work for nothing?

So that’s the topic of this panel. I’ve asked the four panelists to have a little bit of an opening statement, to put their positions out there. Then I have a few questions. Then we’re going to open it up to you in the audience.

I’d like to actually ask Nate to start, since he started this whole thing, and maybe say a few words about the life of a freelance writer, since the post he put up was just called, very blandly, “A Day in the Life of a Freelance Writer, 2013.” Because it seems like half the time, a freelance writer is negotiating pay, and the rest of the time doing copyediting for corporations and public relations firms. So I’ll start with Nate. Just say a few words. I appreciate it.

Nate Thayer: Thanks, thanks for having me. Yeah, I should probably give a little bit of context to this, because believe me, I was as surprised as anybody else. I’m actually a Luddite; I’m a tech idiot, and I’ve been a journalist for 25 years. I was just saying to Kevin that you know, it was actually under two years ago before I actually even used a computer to research an article. I probably should have beforehand, but I just didn’t. My own personal focus in journalism is longer, investigative journalism, and much of my career has been spent overseas, much of it in countries where I didn’t even have electricity, or even less a telephone. And if you’re in the middle of nowhere, the fact is, the story doesn’t happen until you get back and file it, and it can be a couple weeks later. I have to say that I acknowledge that I really am an idiot and behind the times on some of this stuff. So in the context of that, I do realize fully that the future is in this amazing, wonderful, borderless world of free flow of information. I’m not that much of an idiot. I do have a blog. It automatically puts it on Twitter and on Facebook, and that’s about as complicated as I get.

Anyways, the actual reality was that this conversation I had with The Atlantic was in fact a very civil, normal conversation. I’ve had the same conversation with several hundred people over the last decade, and every freelance journalist has. It’s the norm.

I wasn’t actually pissed off. I was, you know, mildly annoyed enough to take the six-email exchange, cut and paste them, put a headline on it that said “A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist.” I think I put one line at the top, another line at the bottom, and I pressed send on my irrelevant blog, which had less than 100 readers a day, mainly family and colleagues, and which I never promote, and I went to bed. I woke up in the morning and I had 25,000 emails in my inbox, and I had made at that time exactly four tweets in my life. So I looked and I saw that within hours there were 100,000 people who had read this thing. It was a kind of odd day. In fact it kind of fucked up my day, and I really had no idea what really was going on. But I did find it fascinating. And 80,000 of these people came from Twitter, and another 50,000 from Facebook, and it took on a life of its own. But in fact it really had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t exactly a brilliant piece, in fact I didn’t even write it—it was an email cut and paste exchange. But it clearly hit a chord. Clearly, because by the end of the day, I had 500,000 people. I actually did the calculation: it was a 33,973% increase from the traffic the day before. So something had happened. But I really should say that was the full extent with The Atlantic. It wasn’t David and Goliath. I didn’t have some fucking beef with The Atlantic. There was no Nate Thayer jihad against The Atlantic. That was the sum total of my communication with The Atlantic. I hadn’t talked to them since eight years before when the then-editor actually hired me to go on staff for a considerable amount more than 13 million viewers reading my stuff. In fact it was $125,000 a year for six articles and I could write for anyone else. So I think the context of it is that the world has changed, as I think any freelance journalist knows. And I really don’t know how… I still get over 100 readers a day to that article six months later. And I’ve gotten well over 200 personal emails from other writers, including six Pulitzer Prize winners who said The Atlantic has done the same goddamn thing to them, many of them in the same week. So the idea that this was a mistake and it wasn’t their policy? They’re really full of shit. That’s one reason it took off. Because you know, they certainly had a budget to hire a PR firm, which may be part of the problem, so that they could lie about what their policy was, and then really piss off journalists. Because if you really want to piss off journalists, lie to them.

Whatever happened, I still haven’t really wrapped my head around it. But it is interesting, and it certainly resonated with me and really almost with everybody else I know who’s worked as a freelance journalist. This happens all the time. The fact is we are now in this amazingly positive new world of borderless information, but no one’s figured out how to make any fucking money out of it. So, you know, until they come up with a viable business model—which someone will, soon, because there’s a demand for quality journalism, and it costs money. So someone’s got to figure out a way to make that happen, and they’re going to figure it out soon. I just hope they do it before I starve to death and get evicted. Which would be a plus. But it’s all really positive. But I think we’re in this abyss period between the combination of the downturn in the economy, the downturn in the metrics of the print publishing industry, and the rise of digital journalism has made it really really difficult to make a living as a journalist. And not just as a freelance journalist. I mean the fact is, and I’ll finish this off by saying, the one really true reality is that you really can’t believe anything you fucking read anymore. You can’t. You can’t believe it on the Net because they’ve fired all the editors, they’ve fired all the fact checkers, and really, the motivation is to get as many clicks and hits on your web site as you can, regardless, really, if it’s true. And obviously, I’m exaggerating for the point of debate, to a degree, but that’s really the larger reality. So to me it’s a really serious problem. Obviously, it’s a serious problem because it’s making it hard to make a living, which frankly, three or four years ago, it never even crossed my mind. I spent 30 years, I’ve been very lucky, I’ve done well. It never was an issue. I never wanted to get rich, but I could always pay my bills. Now, that’s just not the case. So that’s one thing on a personal level, but on the, other, more important level, is the effect it’s having on the institution of the free press and free society. The quality of journalism that’s coming out now is horrific. It’s unacceptable. And the reason is because it costs money to do it. And some people are under the misimpression that people are going to accept substandard quality journalism in the stead of real reporting, and I’m absolutely convinced that they’re wrong, and that sometime, relatively soon, someone’s going to figure out how to create a model where everyone can make money in order to produce a quality product. So on that positive, I’m also ten days late on my rent.

Lerner: Mike, could you take this from the point of view of an editor? You’ve worked as a freelancer…

Mike Madden: …..Although, I wanted to ask you [to Thayer] you were talking about the traffic you got on that blog post, and I know you prefaced that by saying you were a bit of a Luddite, but were you able to quickly set up a Google AdWords thing and you could have made some money off of the exchanges.

Thayer: I have not made a penny off it. I did not organize advertising. Although, since this whole thing, I have also looked more closely at how you can make money. And there are all kinds of ways out there. One organization I do work for is called NK News. We have the same problem everyone else does: we’re trying to figure out how to bring quality news on North Korea to people who have an unhealthy interest in North Korea. And we haven’t been able to figure it out. We’re losing money on it. But everyone’s trying, and I have not succeeded………

Yglesias: Absolutely, but I think that is in a lot of ways the most promising kind of free content that you get is along those lines. You go to someone who is at The Center for Global Development and you say—I mean a particular problem that we have is that there’s not a huge amount of audience interest in foreign affairs. But there isn’t zero interest. It’s not a toxic subject, but it’s not a killer for us the way the Dear Prudence advice column is. And at the same time, advertisers don’t love Dear Prudence’s weird questions about bestiality, and they also don’t love articles about depressing famines in North Korea. For similar reasons. So if you want to get coverage of these super sad, medium traffic subjects, it’s difficult to turn that into tons of revenue. But we want to do it because we believe in journalism, and we want to do it because there’s some audience there, and when you can find opportunities to get people—it might have been that in the days of yore, they would have been the sources for articles—if you can get them to be the authors of articles, then that’s a real advantage. That’s an advantage to the world. And I think what The Atlantic does, where they’re just kind of propositioning professionals, professional freelance writers who are established in their careers, it doesn’t make a ton of sense. I wonder how much success they have getting anyone to actually agree to that proposition. I think we try not to say things to people that are going to be insulting or ridiculous for them to do. That’s common sense. But I think that the sentiment that I sometimes hear from writers—that people shouldn’t be doing stuff for free—well, who’s talking to you for these articles? It’s people doing things for free.

Madden: Yeah. We don’t get a lot of rewrites for $25 or $50.

Lerner: Is that different than writing for free?

Madden: It’s not that different, no.

Thayer: It is different. It’s fundamentally different, and I think it goes back to what several people were saying. To me, anyways, it’s the fundamental problem of for-profit media companies as a central business strategy eliminating paying the producer of the product which they sell so that they can increase their fucking profit margin. That’s really what it is. I write for free all the time. I’ve written for free for 30 years. I’ve written probably 1000 articles for free. Because, for whatever circumstances, for non-profits, or people where I’m interested in the issue. My blog is for free. I use Facebook copiously as a professional tool. That’s all for free. I don’t have any objection to writing for free. And depending on your circumstances, it’s true for a lot of people.

There’s a couple things that have struck me here. Slate still owes me $3000 for going to Iraq, for which they’ve never paid me, three years ago. Now this is not something new for any journalist anywhere. It happens to everybody. This idea of user-generated content, which I don’t know exactly what that means. There’s probably a more direct way of putting it. But the fact is that that, and the issue of, ok, people do work because they are going to be quoted or contributed to the article, I don’t buy that at all. They’re interested parties. Our job as a journalist is basically, I’ve spent most of my life sitting in a hotel room, waiting for someone to come down and lie to me. And that happens all the time in various degrees for all the information you get. And your job is to sift through it and come through with something that’s as close to what’s accurate and balanced and in the public interest as you can. One of the things that really bothers me about the new business model is that sure, there are people who will write for free. But most of them have institutional support. They have real jobs. They’re academics, they’re scholars, they have people who pay their rent, who pay for the bills to live. So they’re not actually journalists. They’re trying to sell a book. I mean I was a scholar in residence at Johns Hopkins at SAIS down the street here for a year. They gave me a full salary to sit in my office and think.

Madden: But you were still a journalist when you were doing that. You weren’t not actually a journalist just because you had some other way of paying your bills.

Thayer: No, I took a year off from my paid job with the Far Eastern Economic Review because I got kicked out of the country I was working in, and I needed some place to go, and they gave me this scholar in residence thing. And the thing that struck me was that all of these academics, if they could get quoted in the newspaper, that was really big for their resume. Or if they could even publish an article, that was really big. Now it’s standard but it’s being couched as legitimate news. It’s not legitimate news. They are an interested party, often, in the subject matter. And so I object to that being a substitute for legitimate, quality journalism. I read the stuff all the time. I find it interesting; it’s interesting source material. But I know that they’re not the internal standards of a news operation that has the whole sausage-making process that makes sure that when I send something in, it has to go through a very rigorous process to make sure that by the time it gets to print it’s not biased, it’s properly sourced, it’s corroborated, it’s accurate and so on and so forth. And that’s missing in so much, including the brand name former journalism outfits. There’s so much pressure to get everything out there quickly and to get page hits that the idea of quality news has taken a serious back seat, and that makes me very very uncomfortable, and I don’t think it’s a substitute for quality news.

And actually, on our panel here, both Slate and the City Paper, which I’m a big fan particularly of—I’d be a bigger fan of Slate if they’d pay me the money they’ve owed me for ten goddamned years—

Yglesias: That seems fair.

Thayer: But the City Paper is an excellent paper, and the fact that they each pay something means that what we do for a living is worthy, and I believe, I will go to my grave knowing that what we do for a living is not only worthy, it’s vital to a free society and it needs to be defended, and it costs money to produce, and someone’s got to figure out a way to do it. The fact is that people who own these publications—and they have to be private businesses; they can’t be government, otherwise we’d be Pravda, right—they really don’t care whether they’re selling toothpaste or news to free people. If they make more money on toothpaste, they’ll sell toothpaste. So I think the question everyone agrees with here is that someone’s got to come up with a way to first recognize the value of quality news, see that we’re not getting it now, and figure out a way to make money in the process so that we’re able to have it.

……..Thayer: You [Yglesias] mentioned an analogy earlier that people don’t want to read about bestiality, but in fact, I bet you, if the City Paper, which runs a wonderful column which often focuses on bestiality…

Madden: Oh, people love reading about bestiality.

Yglesias: No, I’m saying that advertisers don’t want to be on that page.

Thayer: I’m saying that the page right next to that probably has a higher advertising rate.

Yglesias: No, no…

Madden: It does, but only among a restricted pool of advertisers.

Yglesias: Chrysler doesn’t like bestiality………..

Audience question: Someone mentioned musicians. I’m with a group of harpists, and someone will say, “Oh, play for my wedding, you’ll get tons of exposure.” Well, you can die of exposure, too. But yeah, they feel this just as strongly, always being asked to do stuff for free.

Madden: That’s a particularly nervy pitch. How many people at their wedding are going to be in need of another harpist?

Audience: Exactly. And somebody mentioned before about profits, and it’s really true. These people are making obscene profits. I was at an organization where the top people were making $200,000–$300,000 salaries a year, and we were lucky to be squeezing $50,000 a year, which is not much in D.C. And if you look at a place like HuffPost, Arianna is just raking in the millions. So does anybody have an answer for—Huffington Post is a great example: they’re rich, they’re oozing money. There’s staff in New York, and you know they’re not there for free. But they won’t pay…

Thayer: I have an answer: Don’t fucking write for them. Arianna Huffington’s entire business model is based on not paying the people who produce their product, so that they can make money. She just sold her company for $317 million, based all on people’s writing. When the Atlantic article came out, I was kind of impressed by their hubris, they called me up and asked me to come onto the Huffington Post TV station and talk about this issue. And I said, “I’d be happy to, but you’d be under a profound delusion if you expect me not to bring up the fact that the Huffington Post is the poster child of this whole problem. And make sure that your bosses are aware of that.” And I got a call back about an hour later, disinviting me……

Thayer: But they also have what is a fundamental problem: most of their stuff is people who have an agenda, a political agenda, a financial agenda. And it’s being couched and presented as news. It’s not……

Thayer: Actually, for The Atlantic, and I actually do know this because I have literally gotten several thousand personal communications from people. The Atlantic policy is not to pay people. You know the line they said, “We’re out of a freelance budget, but we have 13 million readers”? I have exactly 412 emails from people who told me the exact same quote, verbatim. So it’s not a matter of them being out. So that’s an Atlantic policy. I think it’s part of their business plan—because it works. And I don’t hold it against them because their job is to increase their profit margin. That’s what they do, and if they can get that product and they think that readers will be satisfied with it.

But I think there’s a Ponzi game going on around this, that people are under the delusion that they’re actually getting the same quality news that they were getting prior to this wonderful, positive transformation that we still haven’t figured out how it’s going to work out. That they’re still getting the same quality news that the brand names produced before we entered this period. That’s just not true. It’s not true with TheAtlantic.com and what you get in print. It’s not true with the WashingtonPost.com and what you get in the Washington Post, and they’re saying that it is, that they’re using the same internal standards. And I think that part of that—to address your question—I used to work for Dow Jones, which owned The Wall Street Journal and the magazine that I worked for, called the Far Eastern Economic Review, and most of their people went over to Reuters, and a similar thing is happening with Bloomberg. And what they’re buying is people with a name. And I was approached by several people several years ago where they wanted to pay me more money than I needed or probably deserved because they thought that I had a name. The bigger thing that that translates into, and that’s really a big shift, which makes me uncomfortable with being trained—and I did not go to journalism school either, I started out with the Associated Press for several years and a number of other publications—and it makes me very uncomfortable to market myself. I’ve now kind of gotten over that, because that’s really where we’re going, where people have to individually market themselves in order to make a living. But what a lot of these companies are doing is that they’re putting the bulk of their money, and offering big salaries—and Reuters did this when they had the big turnover a couple years ago—they hired away all kinds of big name people for ridiculous salaries. And the journeyman workers at Reuters, who actually do very well because they have a very good union, get paid considerably less. So a big part of this money is going into the trend of people promoting themselves or where they think when people read the news, they look at who it is that’s writing the article—as opposed to what it used to be, and I’m more comfortable with, which is that when I pick up The New York Times, I know that there is an internal process, which means that whatever shows up in that paper has a degree of credibility. That’s why I buy that as opposed to, say, The Washington Times, or the National Enquirer. I know what I’m getting when I read it. And now I don’t know. And on the web you do not know what you’re getting at all. And in fact, a lot of what they say you’re getting, you’re really not getting at all. Because there is no vetting. There is no more internal sausage-making process.

I have a friend who is a Washington correspondent for a major news chain, who now pushes the send button when he’s sitting in Congress, covering a hearing. It doesn’t even go through an editor. That’s how much pressure there is to get stuff out quickly and what falls victim to that is the quality of news……….

Thayer: The Atlantic policy is—they’re actually on the record because they put out a press release after my ridiculous little post on my irrelevant little blog, saying that they do pay people and that this was a mistake by a new employee, and so on. That’s just not true. They don’t pay people. But what they do say is that what you read on The Atlantic, you can believe based on the credibility—and The Atlantic’s a wonderful magazine. I have no beef with The Atlantic. It’s a systemic problem. And certainly this poor woman, Olga—and I feel really bad because God knows what grief she got for this—she was just doing her job. But The Atlantic promotes itself as, when you read The Atlantic, you know what you’re getting based on their very high internal quality standards. My point is, in this new digital age, that’s all a lie. You don’t get that. The other transition period that we’re in is that people still believe that when you read The Washington Post online, or The Atlantic online, they’re getting the same thing that they got beforehand. And that’s just not true.

For the full transcript of the discussion with thoughtful, good arguments and points of view by Slate’s business and economics correspondent Matthew Yglesias; the editor of City Paper, Washington’s alternative weekly newspaper Mike Madden; Kevin Stoker, of Texas Tech University and a scholar of media ethics; Kevin Lerner, professor of journalism at Marist college; and excellent questions from an audience of journalism of scholars and academics, please go to Kevin Lerner’s excellent blog here: http://presscriticism.com/2013/08/14/free-lancing-the-ethics-and-economics-of-paying-writers-with-exposure-and-a-byline-an-aejmc-magazine-division-panel/#comment-734

Has the state of the news biz come to this? Freelance journalists required to sign document forbidding writing anything negative about employers or advertisers before being payed unlivable wage.

Freelance journalist not only asked to work for unlivable wages, but now required to sign away constitutional rights and fundamental ethical journalistic obligations, forbidden to say or write anything negative about their employers or advertisers?

August 21, 2013

An email exchange today between me and a freelance journalist requesting advice, comment, and suggestions after receiving the contract terms for her to write, still on a freelance basis, for a major U.S. news outlet which demanded she sign an agreement which demands she “cannot criticize, ridicule or make any statement” that “which disparages or is derogatory of XXXXXXX, or any of its officers, directors, agents, associates, consultants, contractors, clients, customers, vendors, suppliers or licensees.”

All comments from anyone who has had a similar experience or thoughts on its legality, ethics, precedence or suggestions on how to respond are welcome.

Below is the email exchange in its entirety, with the name of the news organization and journalist redacted at her request.

Dear Nate,

I am one of the folks who attended your panel at the AEJMC. Since you’re attuned to the freelance world, wondered if you’d heard of media outfits making freelancers sign non-disparagement agreements. A former editor who’s now working with XXXXXXX (a major, national politically oriented news site that is ramping up its breaking news section) contacted me to see if I’d write regularly for them on things I am expert on; but when their HQ in XXXXXX (A U.S. city) sent me a contract for work-for-hire, I was amazed that I had to agree I cannot criticize, ridicule or make any statement “which disparages or is derogatory of XXXXXXX, or any of its officers, directors, agents, associates, consultants, contractors, clients, customers, vendors, suppliers or licensees.”

   I informed XXXXXXX’s attorney that this could be several hundred people and that either I need a list of all these folks or they need to change their contract. She told me that this is standard in the freelance world which is nonsense in that I’ve written in the past 18 months for WaPo, the WSJ, CNN.com, the Economist and a bunch of other biggies and I’ve never had to agree to anything like this.

   Before I email her to say she’s quite mistaken, wanted to check with someone who also writes for big markets. I know you do not know me, but would you mind telling me if you’ve ever heard of this?

Sincerely,

XXXXXXX (Freelance Journalist)

 From me:

Hi XXXXX,

I have indeed never heard of such a thing, and I am guessing I would have. But I could be mistaken.

I can have your question answered, I think quite readily, as one of the side effects of the Atlantic kerfuffle is I have acquired a lot of new freelance friends who follow these issues quite regularly, religiously, and passionately.

My guess? It is XXXXXXXX’s corporate–or more precisely–legal side, that wrote this up on their own without precedent or forethought.

I am sure I can get the right answer and an informed one in a couple of hours if you want me to onpass your question to colleagues–other journos and freelancers. I can of course redact your name and, actually, even the reference to XXXXXXXXX, and I am sure I will have informed replies within a couple of hours.

It is of course, outrageous. The very premise of the function of a press is to not be censored from criticism, wherever it might lead to. Particularly not as formal policy of the news organization itself. And even more disturbing the requirement to write only approved propaganda regarding any advertisers or prominent figures associated in, it seems, any way whatsoever who have a financial or other vested interest in the news organization. Not to mention your own first amendment rights as a citizen, etc. etc.

It more than boggles and even more so disturbing, to say the least.

Let me know. And I hope you are well.

Nate

Email reply from the freelance journalist:

Dear Nate,

Would love to get any react you can. I had no idea who else to ask.

What is so crazy about all this is that XXXXXXXX first tells its writers it will only pay $200 per multi-sourced 800-word+ stories. I worked them up to close to $400 but that is still pennies. If they paid like $2.50/word, heck, I might say yes but for less than 50 cents a word? Really?

Yes, pls leave my name out for now. For XXXXXXXXX, feel free to say it’s a politically oriented news site that is ramping up its breaking news section but wants writers for cheap who are OK with signing away their First Amendment rights.

Thanks for your time,

XXXXXXX

Any comments, suggestions, or similar experiences and how best to respond are welcome.

A recent story on NKNews.org on the North Korean Origins of the Syrian Chemical Weapons Program has renewed timeliness given the current crisis over chemical weapons use against civilians in Syria

(full story at NKNews.orghttp://www.nknews.org/2013/06/the-violent-consequences-of-the-north-korea-syria-arms-trade/

Clandestine cooperation between pariah states has left trail of bodies

BY NATE THAYER , JUNE 20, 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The blast at the al-Safir facility in July 2007, killing Syrians, Iranians and at least three North Korean ballistic missile specialists, is just one occasion in which underover operatives have died working on Damascus’s WMD arsenal.

The clandestine weapons collaboration between North Korea and Damascus in recent years has left a trail of bodies from Moscow to the Syrian desert to North Korea in a deadly game of spy versus spy hidden in the shadows of the Middle East.

A mysterious blast nine years ago was one of many incidents in which individuals, including North Koreans, have met violent ends cooperating with Syria in developing weapons of mass destruction.

Photo of crater after explosion, Ryongchon 2004 | Picture credit: David Hill, ECHO

(full story at NKNews.orghttp://www.nknews.org/2013/06/the-violent-consequences-of-the-north-korea-syria-arms-trade/

How Hordes of U.S. Republican Party Apparatchik’s Toppled the Mongolian Communist Descendants of Genghis Khan

Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with the Mongolian Voter” was the single largest printed and most widely distributed document in Mongolian History, and Crucial to Overthrowing History’s Second Longest Ruling Communist Government Without Shedding a Drop of Blood:

The  ”Contract with Mongolia.”

From the archives of contemporary history.

By Nate Thayer

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

The Washington Post

April 6, 1997

On a stool in his portable felt and canvas yurt, Yadamsuren, a 70-year-old nomadic sheepherder, offered a visitor chunks of sheep fat and shots of fermented mare’s milk to ward off the unspeakable cold.

Seventy miles of bleak desert northeast of Ulan Bator and many miles from the nearest neighbor, he spoke glowingly of the work of then U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and the Republican Party. “I read the `Contract With the Voter’ closely. Everybody did,” he said, explaining why he decided to vote for a new government in Mongolian elections last June. “In the contract, they clearly say what society and the people can do for each other.”

American hordes, led by the Republican Party, have invaded the steppes of Mongolia in recent years. Instead of cavalries, they have comprised teams of election strategists and campaign organizers, who mobilized a once ragtag Mongolian opposition to achieve victory in national elections last June 30.

In what was once an impenetrable Soviet satellite, a remarkably young democratic government has taken power, creating Asia’s first successful transition from communism to democracy.

A key element behind the victory, say Mongolia’s new leaders, was a carefully engineered strategy by American Republican political operatives to end 75 years of Communist Party control. And the tool that the Mongolian Democratic Union credits for victory was none other than the “Contract With America,” the platform used in 1994 by revitalized Republicans to sweep into control of the U.S. Congress.

“This form of signing a contract with the people is a new achievement of the Mongolian political system, even of political science,” said Prime Minister M. Enkhsaikhan in a recent interview, smiling in his drab Soviet-built office in the main government square in Ulan Bator.

But today the halls of government in Ulan Bator could be mistaken for a university campus. Of the 50 new Democratic Union coalition legislators who gained power in the elections, 36 are in their twenties or thirties; the prime minister is 41, the parliament speaker is 43, and the minister of defense is 38. “It is an unqualified success of political transformation,” said a Western diplomat here. “But the 50 Democratic Union MP’s and new government have virtually no previous political experience. The phrase `complete chaos’ has been used.”

When the Russians built a capital for their first satellite country, populated by nomadic herdsmen, they named it Ulan Bator, which means “red hero” in Mongolian.

But the winds of political change have swept again across this isolated but strategically important corner of northeast Asia. Mongolia’s new freewheeling democracy has scores of newspapers, dozens of political parties and vigorous debate within the government, achieved without bloodshed or resistance from the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the once-Stalinist Communist Party in uninterrupted power since 1921. Under the pressure of demonstrations in 1990, the government promised political and economic reforms, and the first multi-party parliamentary elections were held in 1992. The disorganized opposition only garnered six seats, leaving the other 70 — and the government — firmly in the hands of the Revolutionary Party.

In the wake of the crushing defeat, the Mongolian opposition began to work together with Republican advisers to transform itself into a unified force with formidable campaigning skills. Such peaceful transformation stands in stark contrast to the turmoil that has beset Russia and many former Soviet satellites after the collapse of communism.

“For decades Mongolia was under the domination of foreign countries,” Prime Minister Enkhsaikhan said in an interview with the Post . “So really Mongolia itself is a new nation.”

The U.S. Republican Party help to the fledgling Mongolian democratic opposition began in late 1991. “It was a personal request from Secretary of State {James} Baker. He called us up when he returned from {an official visit to} Ulan Bator and said, `I think you need to do something there to help the democratization process,` “ said Kirsten Edmondson, the Washington-based International Republican Institute (IRI) program manager for Mongolia. IRI — the Republican wing of the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy — dispatched staff members to Mongolia. They convinced squabbling groups of opposition forces — political parties, students, activists, nongovernmental organizations, intellectuals and businessmen — to form a united coalition.

IRI then trained candidates and supporters from the newly created National Democratic Union in the science of targeting voters with relevant messages, grass-roots party development and membership recruitment.

As the campaign season began in late 1995, Gingrich sent the authors of the “Contract With America” to Ulan Bator. Working with the Democratic Union, they drafted the “Contract With the Mongolian Voter.”

Even the new Mongolian election law was lifted verbatim from the election law manual of Texas, Mongolian and IRI officials said.

The Contract with the Mongolian Voter called for private property rights, a free press and the encouragement of foreign investment.

It became the most widely distributed document in Mongolian history, according to Mongolian officials, with 350,000 copies printed in 1996.

The Americans convinced the opposition candidates of the importance of hitting the campaign trail — a concept previously unheard of here — personally taking their message to the far-flung corners of this country of 2.5 million people just under the size of Alaska.

And it was voters such as Yadamsuren, who like many Mongolians uses only one name, who put the new government in power. A herder like more than half of Mongolia’s population, he owns 50 cows and sheep, which grazed nearby in minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit weather.

While his wife melted snow on a coal stove for drinking water for the livestock, he talked of giving the young opposition forces a chance to change Mongolia: “People understood that this new government wanted to put Mongolia on the same footing with other countries. We decided to give them the power to do it.”

And it was the contract that persuaded him to vote out the Communists, he said. “We knew before the elections there were promises in the contract that could not be fulfilled, like raising the pensions. But in general, in a strategic sense, {the new leaders} are doing important things. We decided to give the younger generation a chance.”

In dozens of interviews with ordinary Mongolians during a one-month trip through the country, all were familiar with the “Contract with the Mongolian Voter” and every Mongolian nomad living in the vast desert country in their portable tent-like traditional dwelling, known as a Ger, in this 15th largest nation on earth that straddles China and the former Soviet Union, knew who Newt Gingrich was.

On June 30, 1996, dressed in their finest traditional clothing, and traveling by horse, camel and on foot, 91 percent of the Mongolian electorate turned out to vote — -the biggest turnout by far in Mongolian history. The result stunned everyone, including the victors. Baker was on hand to witness the victory, having returned as a private citizen to serve as an official election monitor.

Diplomats and Mongolian officials agree that the Communists grossly miscalculated voter sentiment and the opposition’s organization. All 50 of the newly elected legislators were trained by IRI, according to government leaders. IRI and Mongolian officials said the Communist candidates were offered training and assistance in campaign strategy by the Americans, but turned it down.

But diplomats and Mongolian officials are quick to credit the Communists for the smooth transition. “In many ways they are the unsung heroes. They had the army and the power. They could have just refused to turn it over,” said an American diplomat.

In a July letter, two former leaders of the democratic opposition who suddenly found themselves head of parliament and the majority leader praised IRI and “all of our friends in America”: “The victory of democracy in Mongolia demonstrates that the values of life, liberty, freedom of speech and respect for human rights and justice are not just American values, but universal values inherent in all peoples, including the people of Asia,” they said. “We want to thank our American friends who worked so hard to make this possible. The International Republican Institute stood side by side with us.” -

Lunching With Mass Murderers: Top Khmer Rouge leaders explain, in their own words, why they killed 1.8 million people, why it was not their fault, and really for the best.

Excerpts from unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All rights reserved. No republication, quotation from, copying or dissemination in whole or in part without prior written permission from Author)

The Early Education of a Future Cantankerous Journalist: 7th grade English class papers from a 12 year old

By Nate Thayer

October 28, 2013

I recently moved several hundred boxes of books, papers, and various possessions I have acquired through my decidedly nomadic, itinerant life from a storage unit into the basement of my new flat. I have spent many hours in recent days discovering all sorts of treasures which have brought back many long forgotten memories.

Some of the most special forgotten treasures are from my childhood schooldays that my mother had the foresight to know might be meaningful to me someday, and she surreptitiously secreted away and tucked in boxes to keep safe and give me when I was old enough to know they would be meaningful.

I was a difficult child.

I went to 13 schools prior to graduating high school. Let’s just say I did not leave them all by my own choice. “Nate is very smart and finds academics easy and does well in class. He has a bright future if he would only apply himself. He lacks discipline and appears to have some serious problems with authority,” read one report home to my parents on how I was faring, prior to the school insisting it would be in all parties best interest if I did not return to that institution the following academic year.

That was when I was 14. That was the fifth school I had attended in 3 years.

I made it a point, if one is too appoint a very acrobatically creative narrative, to do original research in my youth of the entire spectrum of educational styles and institutions.I went to fundamentalist Christian missionary schools, private day schools, all boys boarding schools, coed private day schools, Christian coed blue-blood boarding schools, alternative open class room schools, and public high schools. That was prior to college.

Most of them were social penitentiaries for the reproduction of the ruling class.

They were a lot of boarding schools. Their purpose was to ensure one did not attempt to poison one’s mind with the misconception that you could think for yourself. By the time, if they were successful from preventing your escape and you were allowed out on parole to the public at large upon graduation, one was 18 or so, and sufficiently safe to be allowed to experience the real world without threat of diverging from the, by then,  quite effective brainwashing.

I went to 13 schools before I was released into the civilian population at 18.

I was required to wear a coat and tie. I was required to attend church daily.

There were a lot of rules. I broke most of them. For lesser infractions, one would be disciplined with “work hours” as penance and assigned a mundane task to perform as punishment, such as janitorial duties etc. At one school, I accrued 578 work hours—an historical school record which, I am guessing, still stands. That was so many punishment “work hours” that there was no hope I would ever be able to complete them prior to graduating, not that the latter chance was either likely or proved true. But I saw this as a plus and a relief, because it really didn’t matter how many more rule breaking infraction hours I accrued as a result. And, hence, how many more rules I broke in the future.

I am finding all sorts of stuff in these boxes of memories.

Yesterday, I found a box with my 7^th grade English class school paper assignments, with the teacher’s comments and my responses to his comments.

It is dated October 28, 1972—41 years ago to the day from today.

I was 12 years old. That is 7^th grade for the American school system. It was in an all boy’s Christian boarding school in Connecticut.

Every second was regimented. One of my jobs was to get up at 0600 each day and ring the tower school church bell to awake the entire student body sleeping in dormitories. We had exact times to file in for breakfast. Our bedrooms were inspected for cleanliness each day. Church. Class. Recreation, meals–every minute was regimented. All lights had to be out at bedtime—which was 9:30 PM. Everyone had to be up by 0600, showered, dressed in coat and tie, bed made and room clean for inspection by 0630.

An adult dormitory monitor who lived on the dormitory would inspect each room at precisely the assigned hour to make sure innumerable infractions were not violated.

I lasted exactly one semester at that penitentiary, at the age of 12, before the school and I parted company. In this case, I told them—which was not the usual scenario—that I was leaving.

A solemn meeting was held in the principal’s office where a school psychologist was brought in. The stern duo of headmaster and psychologist did their most somber, almost grave best to try and persuade me to stay.

I had, at the time, the highest grades of any student in the school. I remember, because they would post every student’s grades next to their names on a public bulletin board for all to see. What a horrible thing to do to a child, in retrospect, if one was not performing at their peak for whatever reason.

I remember the exact words of the psychologist that day sitting in the principal’s office when I, 12 years old and 4 feet 11 inches tall, informed them I was leaving their institution because I determined it was not in my interest to continue that relationship.

“If you leave this school, you will be a failure. You will never be a man. Men don’t give up.”

I didn’t like that man in 1972, and I don’t like that man today in 2013.

I suppose I was a contrarian then, which has its downside, i am well aware.

Here is an English paper assignment dated October 27, 1972—41 years ago to the day from when I found it in a box this morning.

It includes my original paper and the notes and comments of my teacher, as well as my responses to his comments on the quality of my writing, which I returned to him for review.

Nat Thayer

English 7-1

October 27, 1972

Teacher: Sir Andy Rutman

“Last summer while in North Carolina, I had a chance to go rock climbing. Now rock climbing is my favorite sport and I always jump at a chance to do it.

A party of eight of us went to a gorge in the middle of the Carolina wilderness where we knew were some good climbs. We practiced on many little climbs until we knew we were ready.

Early one morning we woke up, had a light breakfast, and hiked for about two miles down a very steep path. After about an hour we came upon a huge rock, 350 feet in the air. I could not believe my eyes! It looked like an endless wall bounding up into the clouds. I had no hope of going to the top of this mountain rock.

We got all our ropes ready and within fifteen minutes we had started to climb the rock. At 4:30 in the afternoon we were on the top of the rock eating lunch. I had climbed the rock! At times I was sure I was right on my first conclusion. But I had climbed it. I had done the impossible. I had done a “five dollar job”.

The teacher “Sir Andy Rutman” graded the paper a 95%. He commented at the bottom, in all capital letters: “VERY GOOD. BUT IN SOME PLACES YOU LEFT OUT WORDS, SO IT DID NOT MAKE SENSE. QUESTIONS?”

“Sir” Andy made several corrections and criticisms which I detail un-redacted below.

In the second paragraph, first sentence regarding the phrase “A party of eight of us went to a gorge….” Sir Andy circled the two words “of us” and wrote in the margin: “Not necessary.”

I wrote in the margin under his comment: “Yes it is and does make sense!!!”

In the last paragraph, fourth sentence, “I was sure I was right on my first conclusion” Sir Andy put a big question marked and circled it, indicating he didn’t know what I meant.

I scrawled in the margin next to his circled question mark: “Just what I said!”

I wrote, in a summary of my response to his grading conclusions and skills in the returned paper to him addressing his criticisms and comments: “Your corrections do not make sense. You just want to find something wrong.”

Forty-one years later to the day, this now 53 year-old sticks by my then 12-year old comments as correct.

I was a difficult, problem child, I suppose.

And, reasonable people argue,  I am a difficult adult man.

But I still loathe to this day my early English teachers who did their best to suck the life out of a young child’s imagination, in the stead of nurturing and encouraging it.

We won’t even begin to speak of my 9^th grade English teacher who failed me for starting my sentences with the word “and”.

I have made a point of starting sentences with the word “and” in hundreds of stories I have published as an adult professional writer in the ensuing years, and I think of him and smile each time. Well, and say a quiet “fuck you”, to be honest.

Lighting the darkness: FULRO’s jungle Christians     

Vietnam Era Renegade Army Discovered

By Nate Thayer

(This story appeared in the Phnom Penh Post and  as the cover story in the Far Eastern Economic Review.  I discovered, in the remote Northeastern Cambodian jungles along the Ho Chi Minh trail along the Vietnamese border, an army literally lost in time. Eventually all 398 FULRO fighters and families were given political asylum in the U.S., after the high pressure intervention of their former U.S. army special forces comrades learned they were still, 17 years after the Americans withdrew, fighting the Vietnam War. They are all now settled in the U.S., mostly in North Carolina.

Friday, 25 September, 1992

By Nate Thayer

MONDULKIRI, Cambodia – Accompanied by a chorus of crickets and the steady drumming of rain on the leaf roofs of their huts, scores of Montagnard fighters and their families gather in the jungle darkness each night to pray and sing.

Having long ago fled ideological restrictions in Vietnam for a religious sanctuary deep in the forest, the soldiers are members of FULRO–the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races-which has fought for a separate homeland in Vietnam for their hill tribe people since 1964.

Lamps fueled by chunks of slow-burning tree resin give light to the few shared tattered bibles and hymnals as Christian songs of worship echo through the otherwise uninhabited forest. Familiar gospel hymns are sung in the tribal dialects of the mountains.

For many at FULRO’s scattered guerrilla bases, the ability to pray freely was a main motivation to flee their villages in Vietnam’s central highlands 17 years ago.

Fulro Catholic Priest at Services in Jungle Church Where They Fled From Religious Persecution in Vietnam

“The communists will not let us pray. They say that Christianity is an American and French religion, so we came to live in the jungle,” said Lt.-Col. Y Hinnie. “In our land under the communists, people pray at home secretly or in the rice fields. They cannot worship together like we do in the jungle. Here we are free.”

Each of the five jungle encampments in the FULRO rear base area have an Evangelical church, while there is a lone Catholic church in the main guerrilla camp. Nearly 40 people share a single bible for the daily Catholic Mass and at weekend services. The church consists of pews of wooden logs lined neatly in a clearing, a towering rough-hewn cross behind the altar.

Similar Evangelical churches, cut into clearings surrounded by 30-meter high hardwood trees, are packed with more than 350 worshipers for the daily two-hour evening service and brief early morning prayers. Each church has its own pastor, and worshipers bring large green leaves as hassocks to kneel on the damp forest floor.

These believers are the legacy of Christian missionaries who lived in the Central Highlands until 1975, when the last of them were expelled by the current government in Vietnam. Many of the missionaries had mastered the local dialects, translating Bibles and hymnals into the region’s Rade, Jarai and Koho languages.

The guerrillas also tune into weekly radio sermons delivered in their native languages by a powerful shortwave radio station in Manila operated by the Christian Missionary Alliance.

A guerrilla congregation reels off the names of “their” missionaries like a litany: “In Pleiku, Mr. Long and Mr. Fleming and in Dalat, Helen Evans, she is from America too. Ken Swain from Darlac, he preaches in our language on the radio every Saturday now.”

FULRO officials say some of the missionaries’ involvement with the Montagnards went beyond simply bringing the scriptures to the area. They said some of them were active in the waning days of U.S. involvement in the early 1970s in running guns to the guerrillas.

Following the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975, FULRO leaders say, the communists set about systematically dismantling Christian churches. Many of the Montagnards’ religious leaders were arrested and killed after the communist victory in 1975, they say.

“They take our pastors, preachers and Christians and put them in jail,” said FULRO’s military Commander-in-Chief Col Y Peng Ayun. “We don’t hate any one man because we are Christians, but we can never trust the communists,” he added.

Two prominent Montagnard pastors from Ban Me Thuot, Y Ham Nic Hrah and Y Lico Nie, died in the early 1980s after many years of harsh conditions in prison, according to the guerrillas. “Here, we worship no matter what,” said Pastor Budar Su Khong, 52, from Dalat. “Jesus said ‘Come to me whoever is tired, and I will bring you rest.’ We are very tired. Please take a message to Christians in other countries to pray for us, and we will pray for them.”

—–0000——
Vietnam War Era Renegade Army Discovered In Mondulkiri

By Nate Thayer

Abandoned for years by their own leaders and former foreign military backers, an anti-Hanoi Montagnard army based in northeast Cambodia has a plea for protection.

The military combatants of FULRO-the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races-have waged a lonely battle for a separate homeland in Vietnam for their hilltribe people since 1964.

The recent discovery of the Montagnard army in Mondulkiri province prompted Phnom Penh’s Interior Ministry to inform U.N. peacekeeping forces that unless the group-formerly given sanctuary by the Khmer Rouge-is disarmed they would attack them.

Under threat from the Phnom Penh regime, expelled by the Khmer Rouge, and a thorn in the side to Vietnam, FULRO is presenting an interesting if not painful dilemma to U.N. officials in Phnom Penh.

UNTAC-mandated to verify the withdrawal of all foreign forces in Cambodia-may be obligated to ensure the return of the group to Vietnamese soil if they insist on continuing to wage war.

But UNHCR-responsible for protecting people with a “well founded fear of persecution”-may have to offer asylum to the fighters if they are in danger of being sent back to Vietnam, where they certainly would face imprisonment.

That, in turn, could open the floodgates to thousands of requests for political asylum from Vietnamese living in Cambodia.

“We have enough problems in Cambodia dealing with the four factions, and now this army we never even heard of turns up,” said one UNTAC military official.

American diplomats in Phnom Penh and U.N. military officials in Cambodia are urging that UNHCR grant the group refugee status to begin the process of third country asylum, and give them temporary protection from military attack.

But FULRO Commander-in-Chief Y Peng Ayun and his forces are reluctant to accept giving up their fight without first getting U.N. protection.

“If we give up our weapons, they will take us back to Vietnam or the Vietnamese will come get us,” Ayun said. “If I go to the U.S., I don’t want to stay a long time there, because I have responsibility to liberate my country.”

When two correspondents visited FULRO’s remote guerrilla headquarters last month, they found an army unaware of the world around them and desperately seeking instructions and resupply from their leadership.

Col. Ayun and his lieutenants gathered around the reporters, hungrily seeking information. “Please, can you help us find our president, Y’Bham Enuol?” Colonel Ayun asked. “We have been waiting for contact and orders from our president since 1975. Do you know where he is?”

Neither Ayun nor his troops, who gathered around to meet the first journalists to find them since they fled to the jungles after the American defeat in Indochina in 1975, knew that their leader was executed 17 years before by the Khmer Rouge.

They fell silent when informed; some wept quietly.

Situated in a string of five villages carved out of dense forest along a raging river, the group of 407 guerrillas and their families have no access to even the smallest luxury items except from fighters returning from Vietnam.

There is no medicine or schools, and many of the soldiers and their families have only the clothes they wear and rifles. Bamboo huts with roofs of leaves provide shelter.

“The food we get from the forest. The forest belongs to FULRO.” said Lt. Col. Y Hinnie. “We don’t have food or medicine, so it is difficult. But with food and medicine the jungle is a very nice place. We are used to it.”

The rivers nearby abound with crocodiles, huge catfish, and fresh water porpoises and the surrounding jungle-thick with mosquitos-is home to elephants and a host of deadly snakes.

The combatants and their families are traditionally rice eating people, but they are unable to farm rice here with the enemy constantly forcing movement.

A staple of corn, with jungle cucumbers, pumpkins, and hot green peppers are all they have. For part of the year they survive on poisonous potatoes that must be carefully processed for five days to extract a deadly toxin.

“We must eat it slowly until our bodies get used to it or it will kill you,” Hinnie said, “But the poison is also the medicine we use to cure snakebites.” Nearby a soldier lay paralyzed from a snakebite he received three months before.

“This tree has the medicine we use for malaria and this one here we can use to treat diarrhea,” Hinnie said, pointing.

The army has no maps or compasses. “But we can guide ourselves by stars and winds of the seasons. We can tell by which side of the tree is wet during different months exactly which direction we are going,” he said.

Hinnie spoke credible English from his days as a young boy with Christian missionaries, as well as Khmer, Vietnamese, and French, and several tribal dialects, and translated for others who spoke in Rade. His skills have given him the title of “the FULRO Military Delegation’s Representative of Foreign Affairs.”

But his knowledge of world events is spotty. “We would like you to take a message to U Thant,” he said, referring to the former U.N. Secretary-General. Asking about the cold war, he said, “I hear that President George Bush now contacts with the Russians.”

He is charged with listening to the shortwave radio each morning, tuning in VOA, BBC, Christian radio, and Radio Vietnam to keep the group abreast of foreign developments.

Hinnie told amazed fighters of the fax machine: “You take a letter and put it in a telephone and it comes out in one minute in America,” he explained.

The Forgotten Army

A number of soldiers appeared to introduce themselves in English as having fought with the Americans.

“You are the first foreigner I have seen since 1975,” said Bhong Rcam, 47, “The Americans usually call me Tiny.”

Like many of the fighters of FULRO, he worked with the U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War. After the U.S. withdrawal he was jailed by Hanoi, before joining FULRO in the jungle in 1976.

During the Vietnam War FULRO was supplied with millions of dollars of U.S. equipment, and before that, used as allies to further the objectives of the French and various Vietnamese regimes.

When the North Vietnamese launched decisive offensives in March 1975, FULRO leaders say that senior U.S. officials in Saigon promised continued support for the Montagnards and pledged to covertly support their fight.

Well equipped with American weapons and promises of more as South Vietnam crumbled in the spring of 1975, FULRO waited for the Americans who never returned, eventually re-grouping in the jungle.

“The Montagnard people and the Americans are like one family,” said Lt. Col. Hinnie. “I am not angry, but very sad that the Americans forgot us. The Americans are like our elder brother, so it is very sad when your brother forgets you.”

FULRO continued to launch attacks on Vietnam for four years after the U.S. withdrawal, fielding a fierce army of 10,000 fighters. But by 1979 they were running low on ammunition and had suffered huge casualties, with more than 8,000 of their fighters killed or captured.

In 1979 FULRO abandoned their bases in Vietnam and moved to the jungles on the Cambodian side of the Vietnamese frontier, switching to underground networks and small guerrilla strikes in their four regions of operations in Vietnam-Quang Duc, Darlac, Pleiku, and Kon Tum.

Previously given sanctuary by the Khmer Rouge in areas under their control, FULRO was expelled from Khmer Rouge zones in January to a remote area of Mondulkiri province. Khmer Rouge officials in Phnom Penh say they had given FULRO sanctuary since 1979, despite having fallen out with their leadership in 1986.

“They had no political vision. Their fighters are very, very brave, but they had no support from any leadership, no food, and they did not understand at all the world around them,” said one senior Khmer Rouge official.

Jungle Christians

Col. Ayun complained bitterly of the treatment of his people by the Hanoi government.

“My people suffer terribly under the Vietnamese communist regime,” he recounted from a thatched hut in the forest. “They came and took our land, and made it theirs. They try to erase our language and force us to speak Vietnamese. They have taken our fertile land and forced us to the bad land.

“They say they have come to build progress for my people, but they have come to kill, arrest, and oppress my people.”

For many at FULRO’s scattered guerrilla bases, the ability to pray freely and practice Christianity was a main motivation to flee Vietnam. Each of the five villages in the FULRO area have an evangelical church, while there is a lone Catholic church in the main guerrilla camp.

“The Communists will not let us pray,” Col. Hinnie said. “They say that Christianity is an American and French religion, so we came to live in the jungle.”

Col. Ayun requested to meet with the American ambassador to seek advice on whether his group would get the aid he said was long promised and to seek proof of the death of their leader.
“We are the troops of President Y Bham Enuol,” he said.

“If he has died, we want proof from the United Nations. The Americans had a whole plan for Indochina. I want to meet face to face with the American ambassador. I have a plan for the future, and they should know clearly our position for the revolutionary struggle. We want to know whether they will help us or not.”

But the chances of U.S. support for Ayun and his forces are dim, and FULRO faces a whole new series of difficulties.

Montagnard leaders now living in the U.S. appealed to Col. Ayun to give up the fight. “Due to unfavorable circumstances, I suggest it is time to stop fighting, to find different ways to reach our ultimate goal,” said Pierre K’briuh in a recent message to the FULRO fighters.

K’briuh is a leader of the former FULRO troops now in the United States and he himself was jailed by Hanoi until the early 1980s.

“President Y-Bham Enuol and his entourage were executed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975,” he wrote.

“Therefore, based on common sense, lay down your weapons and appeal at once to the U.N. for political asylum to join us here. We don’t have any other choice.”

Col. Ayun and his troops say that if they have proof that Y Bham Enuol is indeed dead, they will consider going to the U.S.

“But even if we go to another country, our resistance will continue until we get our own land, until we get back the land that belonged to us before,” Ayun said.

“I don’t want to go to a free nation,” he added. “I want to stay here because this is my battlefield. It is my responsibility. But I have no supplies or help from free countries.”

Buddy left us forever today

Preparing Buddy to go to a better place. He was sedated and sleep alive, but he was near sleeping. The Dr. prepares the drugs that will cause his heart to stop, when he will die.

My old friend, Buddy, left us, forever, this afternoon. Below, I am listening to Buddy’s heart stop beating. He took a last,deep gasp, an inhale of breath. It was the sound of death. I have heard it many times before. I knew Buddy was gone. He lived a good life and died a good death.

He died painlessly. He was surrounded by love when he went to wherever good dogs go.

Buddy, surrounded by love from his family

We said goodbye. Buddy, a few minutes before he went away, forever, today.

The doctor released him from his suffering

Buddy gets the final, loving death drug that stops his heart

My friend, Buddy, a few weeks ago

The doctor came over and eased him from his suffering. Buddy lived a good, fulfilled life.

He is no longer suffering. Buddy had departed a few minutes earlier. But here his body departs his house. His ashes will come back to me and I  will keep them, forever, in a special place, with me always

Written the evening before Buddy was eased out of this world:

Good Bye, Buddy, My Friend. Thank You for Making Me a Better Man

By Nate Thayer

November 2, 2013

Good bye, Buddy, my friend. Thank you for making me a better man.

My enduring, very important, exceptionally wise, unconditionally loving friend, Buddy, has made me a better man in the ten years and five months we have known each other.

Buddy and I had a long talk today.

He told me that he has had a very worthy, very fulfilling life, full of fun and joy and meaning, has had special friends who he knows have loved him very much, and a full breadth of mostly happy and all meaningful and important adventures and experiences.

He told me he loved me. And I told him I loved him, very much, and I wanted him to know that having him in my life has made me a better man.

But, today, he told me that the flame of his inextinguishable candle, which has made his life glow and shine on this earth, has been irreversibly, increasingly flickering in recent months, and he asked me if I would be with him to gently blow it out.

The time has come, he said, for his this life to end, and he asked me to help him go gently, with dignity, into the good, permanent night.

He said that he has been in a lot of pain and it has sabotaged his ability to be joyful.

He cannot muster the strength, after a lifetime of his maximally used muscles, to rise after he needs to lay down and rest, which is now most of the time.

He cannot walk without a great deal of pain.

He cannot see the things and people who have brought him delight and pleasure and make his life worthy.

He cannot hear the sounds and voices of pleasure and love that have surrounded him, without pause, for more than a decade now.

He cannot eat much and he is weak.

And he told me that it frightens him to feel the steady march of the erosion of his mind.

He asked me to help him to go gently, surrounded by love, from this world to a different, unknown place. Even if that place is no place at all, he said he has had a good life full of meaning and joy.

I told him, as he has known has always been true, I would do anything for him, as best I knew how, that will help make him more satisfied, more content, that would give him more pleasure, that would make his heart warmer than one of the already warmest hearts of any of God’s creatures.

He kissed my face and I kissed his forehead, for a very long time. I promised him I would do my best so he would feel better, soon.

Tomorrow, Sunday November 3, a doctor will come to Buddy’s house and I will be holding him tightly in my loving arms as she eases him into a permanent, good, better, final, irrevocable night, and in my elusive dreams and hopes and fantasies, a sunnier bright new dawn where his heart would only smile and be smiled upon.

I want my friend, Buddy, to know this:

Buddy, you have been one of my oldest, closest friends, ever since you were given a reprieve from death row a decade ago and came to live with me.

Buddy has lived with my brother the last couple of years, where he has a backyard and three young whippersnappers who love him.

Buddy you have had a good life, and you have made this world a better place because you have lived. And you have made my life much richer by sharing yourself with me.

You are an older guy, now, Buddy. Glaucoma clouds your eyes and your hearing is worse than mine. You cannot now muster the strength in your well used legs to get up.

I have had to carry you down two flights of stairs so we could amble ever so slowly to the dog park.

The other day, it took us 23 seconds to cross the street. We had to stop and retreat several times because we wouldn’t have made it to the other side before the light turned green.

But you have been, still, very happy, despite your increasing challenges.

These things happen to all of us, Buddy.

I have been so pained to have watched them happening to you now, increasingly diminishing the joy you have had from, and respect you have accorded, simply being alive.

These are some of my thoughts for you, my friend, Buddy, now.

My tears of sadness are clouding my ability, as I write these words, to say goodbye.

But they are exceeded by my memories of the joy and meaning you having been part of my life and this world has brought me:

To my friend, Buddy:

I remember when I first heard of you.

It was at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a rural church basement.

Someone—a volunteer at a local human society—stood up and said he loved you but you were scheduled to be executed the next day because you did not have a home.

The man said you were a good dog and you just needed someone to love you.
That was in May 2003. I had just gotten home from Iraq. And I needed someone to love me too, Buddy.

So I told the man “Stay the execution, the boy has a home.” We hadn’t actually even met yet, Buddy.

I came to the dog prison and you were hiding at the back corner of your jail cell. They opened the door, and you came out reluctantly but with dignity, but looking humiliated and defeated.

They said you had been a bad boy. They were very wrong, Buddy.

They said that you would run and run and run, and that you demanded to live a free life and that the hated Dog Police had arrested you umpteen times and they had had enough.

So they captured you and put you in a cage.

And then, when nobody wanted to give you a home, they sentenced you to death.

You came out of jail and, once out the front door, you broke free from me, because you didn’t know me then Buddy. I would have done the same thing, if I had been you, then.

You ran and ran and ran from the jail. We had to chase you down the rural roads of Maryland’s Eastern shore until we captured you again.

And then you came home with me, Buddy. That was 10 years ago last summer.

And Scoop, my pal from Bangkok, who we both know had a pea brain but a big heart, and we both know, Buddy, really considered that she was an entitled Princess, was also part of your new family. To be honest and generous, she sometimes was a bitch. She was not very nice to you, Buddy.

But, after all, she was born in a fetid sewer on the streets of Bangkok and now had her own waterfront estate in America. She had had a hard life, too, Buddy, and you understood that.

But you were then, as you are now such a good, tolerant boy. You put up with her snarls and growls—just standing there and letting her have her fit.

And you told me: “It’s OK, Nate. If you have enough room in your heart for me and Scoop, I have enough room in mine for you and Scoop, too.”

You taught me to think of others before myself and that anger and ego and revenge and grudges rarely make anyone happy or improve any situation.

I love you for that, Buddy. You taught me how to be a better man.

Scoop wouldn’t let you sleep on my bed for 6 years, but you would come smooch me each night and then you would sleep blocking the bedroom door. I knew you were trying to protect me, Buddy.

So many nights you would bark at what you suspected was some bad guy, and you were right more than a few times.

Do you remember nearby there was a minimum security juvenile prison and how many times those poor fellows escaped? But the problem was there was only one road out to freedom because we lived on that long peninsula that was surrounded by water. It was nine miles to the nearest store and so, many times, the escaped prisoners would sneak across our farm fields and try to steal my truck to make their getaway.

And you would have none of that, Buddy, would you?

So you barked and barked and ran to the door and back to me until I paid attention and we went outside, together Buddy, with my 30 odd 6 and fired off a few very large, very loud rounds their way. And then they would go away. You were, rightly, very proud of yourself, Buddy.

You sympathized with them, but there were certain red lines for you in life that just could not be crossed. I learned which of those red lines were important to you, Buddy, and made some of them part of my own. Thank you for that, you made me a better man, Buddy.

And you forgave me when, another night, you were convinced something or somebody was outside who shouldn’t be and you barked and smooched me over and over, insisting I pay attention and go see what the ruckus was all about. I stumbled out of bed to the front door with the 45 automatic pistol we kept by our bedside, with no bullet in the chamber but the ammunition clip inserted partially in the weapon.

In truth, I may have been half drunk, Buddy. At the front door, before going outside to investigate, I tried to put a round in the chamber but I couldn’t lock and load because the bullet wouldn’t chamber and remained in the clip.

So, like the idiot I can be sometimes, I tried to load it by pulling the trigger and BOOM, I shot a hole through the wall in the front hallway and that round whizzed right by your head.

I was embarrassed for the accidental discharge and you had the bejesus startled out of you, Buddy.

But you still loved me even when I was an idiot, Buddy. I learned this quality from you, too, Buddy: Unconditional love. You made me a better man.

You were such a happy boy. You loved that big farm. You were free. All 70 acres were yours. The waterfront was yours to frolic, which you did every day. And I remember how happy you were, running full speed round and round and round the swimming pool and the deck. You were celebrating and reveling in just how happy you were to be free.

I learned that being free is very important, from you, Buddy. Thank You for making me a better man.

You are such a loving boy, Buddy.

When Scoop died in my arms, her head resting on my shoulder, in my bed, you smooched her one last time. Even though she never smooched you, once, in six years.

You saw how devastated I was and you smooched me, too, and you put your paws over my heart and your head on my neck. And you crawled up into my bed and you never left me in the years since.

You taught me the importance of tolerance and empathy, Buddy. You made me a better man.

That was the first night you slept all night in my bed, and you did every night afterwards. You were understanding, forgiving, and loyal, Buddy. I learned that from you, too, Buddy. Thank you for making me a better man.

And you smooched me and took care of me, Buddy, when I was sick for a very long time. You would curl up by me every night to protect me, Buddy and you would flow towards more loving when I would ebb towards sicker. I know it wasn’t much fun for you then, Buddy, but you always thought empathy towards others was more important than your own pleasure, in times when others needed you, Buddy.

I learned from you the importance of this, too, Buddy. You made me a better man.

I remember the night when the barn caught fire. You barked and barked and ran up and smooched me and ran back to the front door and back again to my bed, until I woke up and saw what the commotion was all about. You were so proud of yourself. As you should have been, even though the barn burned down.

You believed that you can not try and certainly fail, or you can try and you may succeed or fail. For you, Buddy, it is more important to try and fail than not try at all. I learned that from you, Buddy. You made me a better man.

You were the perfect guard dog, and your unqualified loyalty to those you love and those who loved you never wavered. You are the perfect friend, Buddy.

I love you Buddy and I know you love me. We love each other with all our hearts.

I want you to know that those hated Dog Police Nazi’s who sentenced you to die ten years ago because they said you were a bad dog were wrong, Buddy. You are a very good dog. The world is a better place because you lived.

Then I got sick again, Buddy, and you were such a loving boy. Every night, curling next to me and kissing and licking me. You would wait there, by my side with me, till the morning when I woke, making sure I was OK, before you went out for your long stroll and swim and frolicked, just thankful to be blessed to be alive, to celebrate your freedom. Every day.

You knew what freedom was because you had experienced it denied to you, Buddy. I learned how important it is to remember that, Buddy, from you. Thank you for making me a better man.

I love you Buddy.

You are an older guy, now, Buddy. Your eyes are clouded from Glaucoma.

You still are such a tolerant fellow, Buddy, such a very loving, very, very good boy.

Now, you let Lamont annoy you and you understand. You let him play his childish puppy games and you even let him eat your food.

And, now, Lamont lies next to you staring up at you, wondering how he can be the man you are.

You have shown others a code to live by, by your example, Buddy.

I am very happy and proud to tell the world what a beautiful boy you are, Buddy. It doesn’t matter to me if they can’t understand.

I learned that when you are saying the right thing, believing the right thing, behaving the right way, it doesn’t matter how different people may interpret it. I learned that from you, Buddy. You made me a better man.

These are just some of the many ways you have made me a better person than I was before you blessed me with sharing your life with me, Buddy.

Now, you are still as wise but you are more fragile, Buddy. Now, when you come and sleep next to me it is the time for me to show you how important you have been in my life.

I love you Buddy. Thanks for being my friend. I will miss you very much Buddy.

But I will celebrate your life and how lucky I have been to have you share your wisdom and character with me, because you deserve to be remembered with a smile and warm feeling in my heart.

Because, while you are a better man than I, Buddy, you have made me a better man than I was before I was lucky to have you share your very important, special self with me.

Goodbye, my friend.

I love you now and I will love you forever, Buddy.

I will be holding you very closely, tightly in my arms full of love, as you go gently away from me and from all those who have been lucky to have crossed your path, tomorrow, forever.

But, I want you to have no doubt of this: you will remain alive forever.

You represent the better part of who I am today.

Love & Sex in the U.S. Foreign Service -Lust, Loneliness, Bombs & Bureaucrats & other writings by retired diplomat and best selling author James Bruno

By Nate Thayer

November 7, 2013

You can access the writings and book of James Bruno at http://jameslbruno.blogspot.com/

This morning, James Bruno, an old friend and now a best-selling author, who for 23 years served his country with distinction, skill and principle as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. Department of State, sent me a message.

Jim Bruno, served, amongst many places around the world, in Cambodia as deputy chief of the U.S. embassy, where he saved my sorry ass more than once intervening with the Cambodian government when the embassy received intelligence that I had been ordered assassinated or expelled or otherwise officially the target of government harassment for some spot on, dead accurate, but decidedly not serving the authorities public relations objectives, article or another I wrote and published.

I recall him personally demanding an urgent meeting with current Prime Minister Hun Sen after one of his top military officers decided I was overly pesky and ordered me killed.

Bruno made it clear to the Prime Minister, in no uncertain terms, that this would be very much against the rules and the full weight of the U.S. government would be employed to express the gravity of the dim view they took of tin pot dictatorships killing any American citizen, and particularly U.S journalists carrying out the essential functions of a free press, something the U.S. government valued and promotes as a key tenet of its foreign policy as vital to healthy societies.

Mr. Bruno, met officially with the Cambodian leader, in his official capacity as the representative of the President of the United States of America in Cambodia, and skillfully and politely, but equally forcefully and without qualification, explained to the Cambodian Prime Minister, a free press was a central tenet of American political ideology and a top priority of U.S. government policy.

Not to mention there is no higher priority for any U.S. embassy in the world than to protect the safety and interests of its citizens residing or visiting that country.

Essentially diplomat Bruno told the Prime Minister, if you fuck with Nate Thayer, or any American journalist carrying out their legitimate job of bringing information of import for a well informed citizenry and the common good to free people, you are fucking with the government of the United States of America and the essential principles for which it stands.

Or more concisely, if you fuck with Nate Thayer carrying out his job as an American representative of the free press in Cambodia, you are fucking with Jim Bruno. It was not a wise thing to violate principles of which Bruno determined important.

Jim Bruno used the power of words and civil dialogue to address issues of international discord between nations. When I think of the adage “War is the failure of diplomacy,” I think of, and wish there were more Mr. Bruno’s, and a number of his specific colleagues, representing several U.S. agencies, who have performed with great skill and distinction, and not infrequently, heroically, but almost always behind the scenes and seldom recognized.

The U.S. ambassador to Cambodia at the time, on the other hand, in my opinion and that of much of the staff of diplomats and U.S officials working for other agencies attached to embassy Phnom Penh, was, a knucklehead.

The Ambassador had also concluded that I had demonstrated the potential to become a long term pain in the ass for him.

I recall chit chatting with the U.S. Ambassador, immediately after one assassination plot against me, hatched by a provincial governor and regional army commander that the embassy got wind of and quelled by quietly intervening, using formidable verbal diplomatic skills, and smacked some sense into the highest levels of the Cambodian government.

The American Ambassador and I were discussing the incident at a cocktail party—held to celebrate British National  Day by the embassy of the United Kingdom, if I recall—and the Ambassador was clearly annoyed.

Not at the Cambodian government for ordering the assassination of an American citizen–that would be me–for performing credibly my job as a free man, a citizen of a free society excersizing the U.S. constitutionally protected right of free speech and a free press.

But rather the Ambassador was annoyed at me for forcing him to engage in the unpleasantry of having to confront the leaders of a rapacious, murderous, corrupt, thuggish, incompetent government inclined to murder those who engaged in the dissemination of accurate information that revealed them to the citizenry as exactly the aforementioned.

He was trying to build a good relationship with the tattered, second string remnants of one of the most egregious governments to seize control of a state in modern history who had now devolved to a group of Consiglieres in charge of a mafia state.

“Nate, why don’t you just leave the country and go somewhere else to work. Don’t you think that would be for the best for everyone,” the U.S. ambassador said, with more than a hint of a muted sneer.

I replied: “Well, Mr. Ambassador, for the same reason you wouldn’t close down the U.S. embassy because some ten cent thug in power of an irrelevant backwater of a country didn’t like the principles that the U.S. government stands for, promotes, and defends and threatened to kill you unless you ceased supporting those tenets of freedom which is your job, as my employee, as a U.S. citizen.”

It was a brief conversation.

I don’t think I ever thanked Jim Bruno personally for intervening on my behalf. In fact, I am quite sure I was not supposed to have known he did, little less have been privy to the details.

So I am and will thank him now.

Thanks, Jim.

Bruno is now a best-selling novelist. His books and blog site, largely based on his experience as a career U.S. Foreign Service Officer, are gripping must reads, full of behind the scenes details, including the un-redacted successes, failures, buffoonery, drudgery, intrigue, heroics, and personal foibles of the men and women who represent the U.S. government abroad, and my government’s proud and vital record defending important principles and it’s, often, equally clueless tactics and misguided implementation and policies that have crashed and burned, not infrequently, but rarely without good intentions or motivated by malice.

James Bruno sent me a message today: “I blogged about Son Sen a couple of years ago. Thought you might find it interesting. http://jameslbruno.blogspot.com/2011/04/people-ive-known-who-died-violent.html.”

“Son Sen was the Heinrich Himmler of Cambodia.  He was head of the communist Khmer Rouge regime’s own Gestapo, the Santebal, and oversaw that short-lived regime’s death factory, Tuol Sleng Prison.  I sat across Son Sen at UN-sponsored peace negotiations for a year-and-a-half.  He was the most chilling human being I’ve ever encountered.

It is estimated that 17,000-20,000 were brutally tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng….Son Sen played a direct role in designing its torture chambers and overall operations. … Son Sen had the face of a merciless killer, stone cold and utterly devoid of humanity.  His few attempts to smile came off as evil sneers.  His eyes appeared dead.  His body language was reptilian.  I once included in one of my regular cables to Washington reporting on these meetings a paragraph on how Son Sen spent the entire time methodically picking apart a caviar hors d’ouevre with a toothpick, carefully separating each part and then crushing them into a blotchy mess.  I thought that small act spoke a lot about this man. On June 10, 1997, Son Sen and thirteen members of this family, including women and children, were shot to death on orders from Pol Pot….”

I replied: “Great piece, Jim. Son Sen was a very cold man. His brother, not without irony, was not only the KR ambassador to North Korea throughout the 1970, 80′s, and 90′s, well after the Khmer Rouge did what they did, and still a loyal senior Khmer Rouge official but serving the governments run by King Sihanouk, Ranarridh and later Hun Sen, while you served in Phnom Penh as deputy chief of the U.S. embassy. In the late 1990′s, Son Sen’s brother then defected to live in Phnom Penh to Hun Sen’s politcal party, where he now lives freely and holds the title of “senior adviser” to Prime Minister Hun Sen. His daughter married a relative of Hun Sen. When I asked Pol Pot if and why he ordered the killing of Son Sen, he freely and in detail admitted he did, and justified it. “For the babies, I am sorry about that. It was a mistake in implementation.” Pol Pot then paused and said “His niece married a relative of the one eyed puppet lackey, the contemptible Hun Sen.” Pol Pot looked me straight in the eye, holding my gaze in silence for a long time, seemingly perplexed why I didn’t understand this  logic and its corollary–the necessity to order his long time comrade murdered.

Pol Pot then became animated, visibly angry at me, and he wagged his finger in my face and said: “Don’t you see! The connection had been established! I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

I wrote James Bruno back saying “Jim:  I am posting a  story on my blog about you and your career and writing. I would like to send it to you to have you see whether my remembrances are correct and the extensive excerpt from some of your blog posts are ok with you.”

He replied: “Nate, I’d be honored — Note: I alluded to you recently that I also had been a prisoner, albeit briefly, of the KR. When I was chief of our consulate in Udorn in 1985, I was on one of my regular border runs in Sisaket collecting info from contacts on the latest on the war in Cambodia. We took a turn on a jungle trail. Like you, I had a reputation for pushing my luck. I told the driver to continue. Well, lo and behold, we run smack into a KR supply convoy coming down the trail right toward us. KR soldiers ordered us out of the car, asked who we were. I told him I was a U.S. diplomat and that they needed to get a Thai 838 (A Thai military intelligence unit that coordinated interaction with Cambodian guerrilla’s and their covert military supplies along the two nations borders) officer there pronto. The KR were actually polite, signaling with their AK’s for us to go to a small bunker where we were kept under armed guard. After an hour, I requested permission to take a piss. A young guard signaled for me to pee in a very specific area. OK. No problem. So, as I’m pissing, the guard pointed to an area just a couple of feet away covered in landmines. He wanted to make sure I didn’t go and do my business in the minefield. Nice guy. I engaged him is a conversation in Thai for insights on life in the KR. An 838 officer and two aides showed up not long thereafter and extricated us. I rewarded them with bottles of Johnny Walker. Word of this incident quickly got back to embassy Bangkok, which called me in for a dressing down. The State Dept. followed suit. It wasn’t the first time. I had that reputation. A few years earlier, an identical episode happened with the Lao commie militia seizing me at gunpoint and holding me prisoner for the better part of a day. The State Dept. chewed me out and ordered the Charge to deliver a protest. It was unreal. I accompanied the Charge to translate our protest as well as the Lao counterprotest against me. I ended up getting in an argument in Lao with the MFA officials. That’s the closest I ever came to being PNG’d. A few weeks after the KR incident, I was back snooping along the border for info on Ta Mok. Walking along a trail interviewing recent refugees, PAVN 110′s opened fire from the mountain range. I ran to take cover and landed real hard on my sacroliliac. Paralysis started taking hold not long thereafter. I medevacced myself to Bangkok where I underwent immediate surgery to remove a crushed lower disk and two vertebrae laminae. State Dept’s Medical Unit grounded me for five years in DC before clearing me to serve as DCM in Phnom Penh, though I did do TDY’s in Peshawar, following the Afghan war against the Soviets. After Cambodia, I served inside Cuba and at GTMO. More minefield fun.”

I replied: “Jim: Great stuff, Jim. None of which surprised me. You know how people talk behind ones back often? But it is not always cowardly, negative gossip. I remember in your case, while to a man, I found virtually no affection from within embassy PP for (the then Ambassador), I found equal respect and affection as universal from among your colleagues–all of them from xxx, to xxx, to xxxx to xxxxx and so forth, for you. As well as from me. It remains unclear to me how you get much of your stuff (in his four best selling novels and blog posts) in print past the USG censors who, i presume, require you to have ur writings vetted. Your blog is excellent. I would like to insert the anecdotes in this email from you into the story. With your permission. let me now. Let me know if I have misrepresented your work or anything else inaccurate in my posting. The anecdote I mentioned regarding you intervening when the Cambodian government ordered me assassinated came from very good sources among your colleagues at the time. I hope you are, and remain, well.”

James Bruno replied: “Geez, Nate. You oughta write fiction! Wow. I feel honored and humbled. And your recollections revived events I had pushed way back into the deepest synapses. Thanks for bringing them back. I don’t know if any of us saved your life. Being devout, you might just conclude it was your Lord and Savior who pulled your ass out of all those fixes. Yes, do feel free to draw from my last email. It’s open material. As for USG censorship of my writing — they almost always make me take stuff out, but they’re nice about it. I’ve established a healthy working relationship with my censors, including those at the CIA and NSA. They’ve even asked for autographed copies of my books. My upcoming nonfiction book (essays drawn from my blog posts) was pretty seriously redacted. I’m publishing it with blacked out text included, so some pages look like a zebra.”

James Bruno was a Foreign Service officer for twenty-three years, having worked previously in military intelligence and journalism.  He remains a member of the Diplomatic Readiness Reserve, subject to worldwide duty on short notice.

He is now a bestselling author.

He began his career as a journalist, having acquired an MA degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. He also has an MA from the U.S. Naval War College. His diplomatic postings have included, amongst other countries, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Cambodia. He has worked in a Secret Service presidential protection detail overseas, and has spent much of his career being a liaison with colleagues from the Pentagon, CIA and other foreign affairs agencies.  His spy thrillers include PERMANENT INTERESTS and CHASM, have been bestsellers, including #1 in Political Fiction and #1 in Spy Stories.  His book TRIBE, a political thriller centers on Afghanistan.  His latest book is HAVANA QUEEN, an espionage thriller set in Cuba.

His blog posts are particularly vivid, raw in their authenticity and detail, entertaining and full of details based on firsthand experience.

The one he sent me today is titled: “People I’ve Known Who Died Violent Deaths, and Deserved It: Part I”

Another blog entry is titled: Life after the Foreign Service.

Below are excerpts from it and several others.  

“Our clueless ambassador in a war-torn country where guerrillas were targeting and killing foreigners ordered the embassy staff to travel into the lawless interior to monitor people’s attitudes toward UN-sponsored free elections (Why I Write), an irresponsible order the staff refused to obey.  My wife experienced a complicated and life-threatening pregnancy after MED — the State Department’s medical unit — refused to authorize business class travel to the destination where she would give birth (Love, Romance and Sex in the U.S. Foreign Service – Part III: Making Babies).  My boss in a communist country violated security rules in his emails, resulting in the host government’s harassment of one of our best sources.  The promotion and assignments processes were becoming an even more uneven playing field.  . . .Time to leave the Foreign Service.  There is nothing like a Foreign Service career:  getting paid to travel the world and live in foreign countries representing one’s country; dealing with Big Picture issues; working with some of the smartest people on the planet; a variety in work content virtually unmatched in any other career.  Twenty-three years in the U.S. Foreign Service gave me no end of challenges and adventures and opportunity to apply my brainpower toward history-making events and to meet presidents, kings and high-caliber intellectuals.  I had the time of my life.  But too many shortcomings in the system compelled me to make the decision to leave my government career early and to find reward in greener pastures.

As one advances in the ranks, one hears the refrain, “Is there life after the Foreign Service?” — accompanied by much wringing of the hands.  Contemplating the end of one’s diplomatic career is akin to those 15th century folk who saw monsters and oblivion at the edge of world’s end.  It’s understandable.  After decades of working in a profession, what else does one know?  And how do you apply airy-fairy statecraft skills to making money on the outside?  Many turn to academia, think tanks, independent consulting, NGOs and international organizations.  Logical fits.

Sorry.  Not for this free spirit.  Determined, against the counsel of family and friends, never to hold down another job again, never again to don suit and tie for work, never again to answer to a boss, never again to commute to an office, I made the wild and crazy decision to return to my roots: work on the family farm. Oops! Nope! The family farm was sold years ago. I mean my later roots: being a writer and making a living off of it.  I turned down a lovely offer from a college president to be a “diplomat-in-residence,” teaching a couple of courses and assisting in setting up a nascent international relations program. Then I declined a nice offer from a London-based political consulting company to take on assignments from them. The reason?  I was too preoccupied with selling my spy-mob thriller, Permanent Interests and my war criminal thriller, CHASM. And my literary agent was expecting much more of me after the 2011 release of my Afghanistan thriller, Tribe.  Teaching college and political consulting, simply put, would interfere in the marketing of my twisted fantasies.

Rather than doing the “right thing,” this ex-FSO decided to follow his dream:  fiction writing.  I sit in my armchair at home or in my favorite cafe dreaming up and writing down plots involving Machiavellian politicians, lustful doyennes, mad generals, ruthless spies, flawed heroes and world-threatening events — drawing from my rich mother lode of Foreign Service experiences (see Inspired Insomniac: Voices in the Night).

And it’s worked! ….winding up my fourth novel, a spy tale set in Cuba. I’m actually making a living doing this.  Of course, it ain’t easy when you lack full first amendment rights (Why I’m Censored).

The lesson?  “Do the right thing” doesn’t necessarily apply.  You’ve done that for years as a buttoned-down, team-playing, don’t-rock-the-boat bureaucrat.  Try something new.  Listen to your heart and follow your dreams.  I did.”

Another blog excerpt gives a flavor of how he  weaves real life behind the scenes experience into his writing:

My Forrest Gump Moment
“On November 12, 1986, I was in the West Wing of the White House on official business. After a long meeting, I made a pit stop at the downstairs men’s room. While standing doing my business, the door swung open and in streamed several men. At the urinal on my left was Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger. On my right was Secretary of State George Shultz. At the toilet stood CIA Director Bill Casey. They obviously had just come out of a lengthy meeting of their own. All were stonily silent. None acknowledged any of the others. They studiously avoided eye contact at the sink, the towel dispenser and as they sought to exit the room. I sensed a definite chill between them and couldn’t wait myself to get out of there. In the outside foyer, a suck-up White House flunkie greeted Shultz in a fawning voice. The Secretary stopped in his tracks and, red-faced, glowered at the man, then stormed off.

Next day headlines broke open the Iran-Contra scandal. The Washington Post reported on a stormy meeting between Pres. Reagan and his national security officials. For me it was truly a Forrest Gump moment.”

An excerpt from another of Bruno’s blogs:

Ambassadors-at-Large for Incompetence . . .
“In 1992, as the Khmer Rouge were targeting foreigners for assassination in the countryside, our ambassador in Cambodia ordered his staff to travel into the lawless interior to ascertain people’s attitudes about upcoming UN-sponsored elections for that country. The staff refused such an irresponsible order, confronting the ambassador with passive resistance bordering on insubordination. The State Dept. countermanded the order.

When working on U.S. policy on Cambodia in the UN in the early ’80s, my State Dept. boss asked me: “Are the Khmer Rouge the good guys or the bad guys?” As most of the world knows, the Khmer Rouge killed at least a million Cambodian citizens in the 1970s, a genocide second only to the Holocaust.

Having just arrived as a young diplomat at an isolated Asian post, my bosses, the Chargé d’Affaires and his deputy, had me accompany them to the home of a wealthy Sino-Thai businessman for luxurious repasts which included delicacies such as shark fin soup, fish maw and barbecued bear paw. This man, however, led a surreptitious life. His entertainment facilities were hidden behind an office bathroom and he dodged all questions about his business and personal life. Suspicious, I sent his name to several U.S. agencies for a database check. The Drug Enforcement Agency promptly replied that our charming dinner host was on their Most Wanted List; he had earlier dropped out of sight, one step ahead of the law. The U.S. Chargé d’Affaires and his staff had been hobnobbing unawares with a notorious narcotrafficker. Who was dumber: the crook, for entertaining American officials? Or, the clueless officials themselves?”

. . . and Embassies for Sale!
In the late 1980s, our ambassador to Italy was an Italian-American lumber baron from Minnesota. Having donated generously to his party, the man got the job, though he possessed no diplomatic or related experience. An otherwise gregarious sort, he was at sea in Rome. He used one of the most sensitive communications channels, normally reserved for matters of high policy, to update the Secretary of State on his project to remodel Villa Taverna, the U.S. ambassador’s residence, including one lengthy cable on his selection of curtains. He was also fond of telling demeaning Italian jokes before crowds of host country officials and journalists, an act that endeared neither him nor the United States to the Italian public.

Fact Stranger Than Fiction
If you had any illusions that your government is manned with competent, bright, judicious officials who have your best interests at heart, you’re wrong. Twenty-five years in the federal government showed me otherwise. Regularly, I faced situations which made me say, “Fiction can’t rival this.” Our debacle in Iraq, the Mark Foley affair, the Valerie Plame case and the Abramoff scandal only reconfirm my sentiment.

So, I cut short my diplomatic career to have more fun writing stories which encompass the chicanery and fecklessness of government. If you thought Washington was out of control, then don’t read my books. They’ll only confirm your worst fears about how things are done in our nation’s capital.

Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Singapore, a former South Dakota state legislator, walked off with the ambassadorial china upon completion of his unremarkable assignment. Upon being asked to return the expensive, eagle-embossed dinnerware, our ambassador refused, stating it was his just reward for having been an ambassador.

Faux pas by non-career ambassadors include cocaine smuggling using diplomatic pouches, drunken imbroglios at embassy functions, embarrassing adulterous affairs, and simple ineptitude. We used to sell military flag officer ranks to political hacks until the end of the Civil War, when the extent of the slaughter revealed the tragic consequences of such practices. U.S. ambassadorships and other senior diplomatic positions, however, remain on the auction block for the highest bidders. Fully a third of ambassadorships, in fact, go to non-career people.

Another blog post is titled:

How to Get Ahead in the U.S. Foreign Service: Walk, Don’t Run

Ambition is the last refuge of failure. ~ Oscar Wilde

(Note:  The following is a personal essay.  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.)

We Still Need Kremlinologists
After twenty-three years working for the Department of State, I left with little more understanding on how to get ahead in that opaque and byzantine system than I had upon entering.  Yet, using my past Kremlinologist skills as well as drawing from a long career of trying to decipher other closed regimes such as North Korea, Cuba and Chicago, I’ve come away with some pointers for those just entering the Department as well as those still inside the belly of the beast.  Following are some broad type categorizations for success in the U.S. Foreign Service:

·  The Operator:  Ratko Mladic, the Serbian war criminal now in custody, was an Operator.  He embraced three keys for being a highly successful executive:  (a) effective networking; (b) sucking up to his superiors; and (c) amorality and ruthlessness.  So is it in the Foreign Service.  The effective Operator spreads his tentacles out the minute he completes his oath to protect and defend the Constitution.  Think of the kiss-ass schmoozer we all knew in school.  The brown-nose apple polisher who was at his teachers’ feet and his classmates’ throats.  Like Mladic, such people are able to advance quickly, even if it’s over a mountain of their victims’ skulls.  Definition of success per the Operator:  To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women and children!

·  The Female Emasculator:  Why is it that four decades on in the feminist movement, many women feel they must out-testosterone their male competition?  Everyone is familiar with this ilk:  the “barracuda” who devours her young if it will lead to advancement.  The alpha-female who, if she sacrifices any time at all to romance, weds an emasculated Caspar Milquetoast –another pelt on the barn door.  Most, however, don’t marry.  After all, matrimony and children only get in the way on the ladder-climb to victory.  These women are the first to launch class action lawsuits claiming “discrimination” as a vehicle to win court-ordered promotions or plum assignments.  Give them a wide berth; otherwise, find a fine surgeon to extricate the daggers and high-heel marks from your back and to reaffix your testicles.

• Boobs Struck by Lightning:  Think of the dumb-ass who can’t organize his breakfast, constantly loses his keys, comes to work with one brown shoe and one black.  Yet karmic lightning strikes and next thing you know he’s in the fast lane, screwing up one assignment after another, yet continually rewarded as others pick up the pieces.  A variation on this species is the “Being There” type, patterned after the eponymous Peter Sellers movie.  The protagonist, named Chance, is a simpleton who, because he dresses like an aristocrat and says little, is fawned over and rewarded by pompous social climbers who are blind to his vacuosness.  Form trumps substance.
• The Anointed One:  Similar to Boobs Struck by Lightning minus the dumbassedness.  This is the individual who is visited by Jesus while in A-100 junior officer training and thereafter put on the super fast track despite never having an original idea, being devoid of personality and showing all the risk-taking of a Swiss accountant.  The Old Boys just like him/her and coddle the haloed Anointed One through unremarkable ambassadorships and snoozer sinecures up to the Undersecretary level.
• The Wagon-Hitcher:  A bevy of these often capable FSO’s rode on the coattails of Henry Kissinger to the pinnacles of the foreign policy establishment.  Finding oneself attached to such a shooting star is as often as not a factor of dumb luck, being at the right place at the right time with the right senior official on the way to megastar status.  These Wagon-Hitchers become luminaries in their own right and enjoy highly successful careers.  There but for the grace of God go I. . . 
• Get Along to Go Along:  Those with severe CDD (Charisma Deficit Disorder), a face in the crowd and a harmless, nonthreatening disposition who do their time in the bowels of the bureaucracy accomplishing little more but staying in place and offending no one often are rewarded in their 50s with an ambassadorship to a malarial backwater capital shunned by the parvenu political appointees (see The American Diplomatic Spoils System: Embassies for Sale).  It’s the State Department’s version of the gold watch.
• Lateral (No Exam Required) Entry:  This means of advancement, which exempts its beneficiaries from such inconveniences as the Foreign Service exam, is reserved for cronies and affirmative action entrants.
• Legacy:  Just as the Ivy League traditionally reserves admission spaces for the offspring of distinguished alumni (remember Pres. W?), the Foreign Service takes special care to coddle and promote the careers of the children of distinguished Foreign Service officers.  If you are a Foreign Service brat, your odds at finding yourself on the fast track are greater than the peons, particularly if dad was an ambassador.

Caution and Incompetence
In my first Department posting, as I rushed down one of the long gray corridors with a draft cable in hand to seek an urgent clearance at another office, a stooped, pasty-faced FSO admonished me, “Walk, don’t run!”  I think the last person to scold me thus was Miss Nall, my sixth grade teacher.  But over the years I found it to be emblematic of the careful, cautious, compromising Foreign Service culture; of waiting one’s turn, not rocking the boat, staying in lock-step, all keys to that ambassadorial posting to Lower Slobovia.

After my first overseas tour, I went to pay an obligatory call on my “Career Development Officer.”  As I sat silently, this man thumbed through my file, brows scrunched, grave demeanor.  As he read on, he began to shake his head.  Then he looked up at me and said, “Let’s face it, Jim.  You’re going to have to hit the ground running in your next assignment.”  I was stunned.  I had gotten nothing but sterling evaluations.  I said, “What do you mean?”  The CDO shrugged and frowned.  “Well, you didn’t do so well in your first tour, did you?”  I stood up and requested to have a look at my file.  He reluctantly handed it to me.  While the folder had my name on it, the contents belonged to another officer.  My personnel papers had been misfiled.  Steaming, I demanded that the CDO straighten it out and call me as soon as he did.  It was an early lesson in the fallibilities of the personnel system.

From another blog post by James Bruno:

Love, Romance & Sex in the U.S. Foreign Service – Part I: Of Lust & Loneliness

“Never play cards with a man named ‘Doc.’  Never eat at a place called ‘Mom’s.’  And never sleep with someone who has troubles worse than your own.”

Diplomats have a justifiable reputation for being impeccably proper, bloodless figures whose passions get stirred by a good concerto, a stimulating dinner party, a good book.  But diplomats are human too.  After all, they do procreate just like real people; though, perhaps they have fewer progeny.

The U.S. State Department has a well deserved reputation for being manned by people who are morally irreproachable, temperamentally self-controlled and emotionally repressed. ..  Conformity is the creed.  Norman Rockwell on steroids.  Like nonconforming meerkats, the wild in behavior, the over-the-top eccentrics, the loners, the terminably weak, the wildcatters, the truly innovative and those who are too New York menschlich are either driven off the reservation or insidiously sidelined until their career comes to a premature end.

But sex is a fact of life.  And, like it or not, Foreign Service folk can’t escape it.  The peccadilloes keep State’s security cadre very busy indeed.  First, let’s categorize the broad rubrics of sexual behavior in the American  Foreign Service:

• Midlife Adolescence:  the married middle-aged male who suddenly finds himself in a sexual playground like Bangkok or Manila and loses it.
• The Poor Soul:  the man or woman whom love has passed by and plunges into a marriage with a Third Worlder who recognizes a free ticket out of misery when s/he sees it. 
• The Political Appointee Who Mistakes ‘Diplomatic Immunity’ for Diplomatic Impunity:  When to mischief we bend our will, how soon we find the instruments of ill.
• The Gays:  (a) those open about their sexuality (tending to be younger), and (b) those firmly in the closet (tending to be older).
• Sleeping With the Enemy:  violators of the “non-frat” policy who have affairs with the nationals of hostile powers.
• The Nut Cases:  exhibitionists, predators, the morally unhinged.

Middle-aged Adolescents:  While in diplomatic training after just entering the Foreign Service, a middle-aged woman offered me a ride home from the Foreign Service Institute in her van with three young children.  She had just returned from Bangkok where her husband was posted.  “Oh, Bangkok.  That must be very interesting,” I said, making conversation.  She harrumphed.  “I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” she said.  She went on to relate how, after a few months at post, her husband took up with an assortment of Thai bar girls and abruptly ended their marriage.  She came home with their kids to pick up the pieces of her life and deal with lawyers and State Department bureaucrats on the red tape surrounding divorce.  Even one of our married career ambassadors carried on with local honies. The Thai have a strong sense of joie de vivre about such things, but most Americans don’t want Hugh Hefner representing their country overseas.

And there was the notorious case of a colleague who was sent packing from another Asian post because he had decided to divorce his generic American wife for a young Chinese woman with whom he had fathered babies. But the wife hung on and both women lived with him at the same time. This harem chief confided that what ticked him off was that the ambassador who made him depart was himself living with a local mistress.

It’s a sad yet all too familiar tale.  Middle-aged men tossed into overseas sexual playgrounds where any Western gentleman is a catch by dint of his income and passport.  I lost count early on as to how many male colleagues I knew who dumped June Cleaver for Suzie Wong….In my experience, most are smarter and sharper than the Caspar Milquetoasts they marry. …

A place like Thailand is great for self-deluded studs, but a hellhole for foreign women.  Frustrated in love, many of the latter hit on the available bachelors within the embassy community.  Being the target of such approaches over the years by both married and single Western ladies, I speak from personal experience.

The Poor Soul:  How often one encounters the frumpy plain Jane with her new hubby — an Ethiopian rock star half her age, the Paul Giamatti look-alike wed to buxom 22-year old Miss Ukraine.  I recall the 40-something Foreign Service secretary who married a tattooed Fijian Hell’s Angels Harley aficionado.  A match made in heaven.  The face-in-the-crowd mid-life consul, trained as a classical pianist, biggest suck-up in the Service, who fell deeply in love with a smashing young college-educated Korean girl.  Like teen love birds, they were.  Until she got her American passport.  The first thing Miss Korean Beauty did upon landing at LAX was to file divorce papers.  Another common scenario.  You see, foreign spouses are entitled to almost instant U.S. citizenship upon marrying an American diplomat.  Too many have discovered this Get Out of Teeming Developing World Free card.  The ones with a trace of moral conscience might wait a year or two before ditching Mr. or Ms. Meal Ticket.  Others, like the Korean babe, have it all scammed out and ditch their new mate as soon as the ink is dry on their shiny new eagle-embossed passport.

Political Appointees:  Someone needs to collect 200-years of lore and write a book about the idiots who are allowed to buy United States ambassadorships.  No banana republic rivals our diplomatic spoils system, a topic to which I plan to devote a special entry soon.  But here are just two examples of political appointee ambassadors who were caught in sexual misconduct:

Former U.S. Ambassador to Norway Mark Evans Austad, an outspoken former Mormon missionary who hurled verbal attacks against a variety of Norwegian liberal institutions as well as the press was taken by police at a house where he was bellowing loudly and banging on a woman’s door at 3 a.m.  Austad claimed that, after hosting a cocktail party, he headed to a friend’s house “to plan a salmon fishing trip,” and the taxi had taken him to the wrong address. The police returned Austad to his residence.

Joseph Zappala, a wealthy Florida developer and fundraiser for President George H.W. Bush, was appointed ambassador to Spain despite his inability to speak Spanish.  Zappala’s tour in Madrid was marred when he took up with another woman, ending his 30-year marriage. “This guy’s roaming eye for the Spanish ladies became very embarrassing for us in the career Foreign Service,” said someone who served in Madrid with Zappala.

Gays:  A senior protocol official was nabbed in a raid on a Washington gay brothel years ago. He faced a dual dilemma at that time: the shame and security implications of being outed as gay when it was not condoned, and the legal issues of being arrested as a john in a pay-for-sex situation.

Prior to the 1990s, homosexuality was grounds for exclusion from the Foreign Service.  Enforcement, however, was spotty at best.  Everybody had friends and colleagues known to be gay.  It was no big deal.  But the gays themselves were forced to remain in the closet.  When the ban was lifted, gays organized themselves into their own Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies.  While younger FS members are open about their gayness, many of the older ones remain closeted, whether out of habit or whatever.  The bottom line is the Foreign Service is a much friendlier institution for gays than in previous years, particularly since Secretary Clinton initiated some reforms to accommodate partners.

Sleeping With the Enemy:  the national security agencies have what is called a “Criteria Countries List” comprising those nations whose intelligence services target our personnel (see “On Spies, Counterspies, Would-be Spies and Just Plain Losers – Part I”).  A “non-frat” policy applies.  Think:  Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, etc.  It is verboten to have romantic relationships with the citizens of such countries.  Nonetheless. . .

There was the junior FSO who fell in love with an East German woman while posted  in another communist country.  The young female FSO who had a torrid romance with a Cuban man while serving in Havana.  The embassy communicator who up and married another country’s army officer while serving at a communist post.  Diplomatic Security pulled their clearances, yanked them from their postings and placed them in dead-end nonprofessional jobs back in D.C.  At least two were assigned to the Department’s mail room.  They got the message and quit.  BTW, the guy with the East German lady and the woman who married the foreign officer enjoyed happy marriages outside of the Foreign Service.

Nut Cases:  There was the USAID official who had a penchant for displaying his private parts to females who entered his office (yes, he was dismissed).  And the admin staff sleazebag in one of our large embassies who coerced his local national female employees into sex acts with him in his office (got off scot-free; an all-too familiar crime in our embassies).  The married, sixtyish political appointee Under Secretary of State who preyed sexually upon his female secretary (who filed a grievance action leading to his quiet dismissal).  And there is at least one confirmed case of incest.

The U.S. Foreign Service consists of America’s best in terms of brains, abilities and relevant knowledge.  But its members are all too human just like the rest of us.  No, Foreign Service personnel are not a bunch of kinky perverts lusting after the people with whom they work and associate.  But funny things do happen in life.  And the system is pretty good about policing itself.  Messy adulterous affairs overseas often end up with the involved parties being sent back home, with a cloud over their careers.  Our diplomats are held to high standards which are taken seriously.

Love, Romance and Sex in the U.S. Foreign Service – Part II: Bombs & Bureaucrats

The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? ~ Pablo Casals

Six Tips on Courtship in a War Zone
(Cosmo Mag — are you paying attention?)

• When your love interest calls via military radio phone from a jungle redoubt asking for advice on what to do as mortar rounds slam into her encampment, counsel her as follows:  “Hit the ground!”
• When dating via helicopter over enemy terrain, become a Believer and pray to God often — even if you aren’t a Believer, it’s best to hedge your bets when your life is on the line.
• 24/7 armed guards who accompany you wherever you go can put a crimp on your dating as well as the rest of your social life.  Stay at home until the danger passes.
• Kevlar trumps Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana:  don’t fret about making a fashion statement in a place where olive drab dominates the runways. There’s something to be said about bullet-stopping Kevlar even if it does suppress the fine lines of your figure. 
• When the local fare moves on your plate, or all those around you are retching their guts out, a dinner date centered on Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) is an acceptable fallback.
• When traveling over jungle cover in which wild-eyed, drug-crazed freedom fighters love to take pot shots at low-flying aircraft just for the hell of it, do anything possible to protect your private parts, as these may come in handy as your romance progresses to the next stage.  Helmets, flak jackets and medical kits are just some of the items you can use for this purpose.

Is This a Date, or Apocalypse Now?
A fetching young Dutch UN peacekeeper caught my eye when I was serving at our new embassy in war-torn Cambodia in the early ’90s.  There was something about the blue beret, the gouda-infused enthusiasm to bring Freedom and Democracy to the benighted Cambodians, her sacrificing her wooden shoes for jungle boots, her patriotic profile in a black one-piece swimsuit at the only pool in the country.

We hit it off.  Then she was posted to the country’s far northeast, an area so remote that no roads led to it, a backwater in which we stumbled upon anti-communist Vietnamese guerrillas who didn’t know Hanoi had won in ’75, a region dominated by exotic minority peoples speaking languages unknown to linguists, an ecological wonderland with animal species thought to be extinct.  The only way to get there was by chopper.  The UN contracted transportation out to a Russian company operating rickety Soviet-era helicopters piloted by Red Army veterans, many of whom made their bones in Afghanistan.  It wasn’t unusual for Khmer Rouge guerrillas to shoot at these choppers; bullet holes occasionally were found in the fuselages after landing.

When in D.C. on a date, one needs only to hop into one’s shiny new Miata, pick up one’s date and zip over to Marcel’s for filet of Dorade and foie gras mousse, to be followed by drinks at Veritas and maybe a late showing of Woody Allen’s latest.  When dating in Stung Treng, however, one must lower one’s standards a notch or two.  With alcohol-sodden, joyriding Russians at the stick, I flew too many times than I care to remember between Phnom Penh and Stung Treng.  I got a break when our own POW/MIA search team flew Blackhawks to that region to excavate the remains of our Vietnam War missing-in-action.  Otherwise, we kept in touch via Australian military radiophone.  Indeed, she did call me one afternoon asking what to do as mortar rounds fell into her encampment (I could hear the explosions over the receiver).  And I shouted, “Hit the ground!”

Mother State
Something like sixty percent of Foreign Service personnel take on foreign-born spouses.  This, of course, is to be expected when most enter the Service at a fairly young age and spend much of their working lives overseas.  But love and statecraft often don’t follow in parallel paths and bumps are encountered along the way.  Mother State becomes a mutant Junior Prom chaperone when it comes to one’s love life and family affairs.  You thought you shed parental oversight of your personal affairs once you hit your late teens.  But once you take the oath and sign your soul away for that security clearance, be prepared to have your most intimate affairs become the business of Mother State.

Once my relationship with the Dutch peacekeeper became a steady one, the embassy’s Regional Security Officer informed me that she needed to be “cleared,” i.e., investigated and deemed not a security threat to the United States.  “Fill out this Form SF-86 and all these other forms,” he told her.  She looked at me and asked, “Is this for real?”  I said, “Yes, dear.  It’s only a formality.”  “I’ve never dated anyone before whose employer required that I be investigated,” she replied, not pleased.  The 21-page SF-86 asks such questions as:

“Have you ever knowingly engaged in activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government by force?”
“Have you ever knowingly engaged in any acts of terrorism?”

The RSO then interviewed her at length.  Sheepishly and with unsteady nerves, she confessed to having demonstrated against short-range nuclear missiles in Europe when she was at the University of Leiden.  The RSO gave her a pass for this crazy youthful act of anarchistic nihilism.  He generously informed us that we could continue to see each other pending a background investigation of her life in the Netherlands.

Now, security investigations have a way of throwing a damper on romance.  In the eyes of the foreign ladies, you go from being an eligible bachelor to radioactive waste.  Fortunately, I was able to assuage and sweet-talk my foreign lady into going along with what for her was a low-level inquisition.  She was “cleared” not long afterward.

Fast forward:  Our Engagement.  According to the regs. 3 FAM 4191, “an employee intending to marry a foreign national must provide notice 90 days prior to the marriage date.”  More red tape to complete.  The regs further warn, “Failure of an employee to provide the required notification/approval of cohabitation with or marriage to a foreign national may result in the initiation of an appropriate investigation, immediate suspension (which may result in a proposal for revocation) of the employee’s security clearance, and/or disciplinary action.”  Pretty heady stuff.  More assuaging and sweet-talking needed.

We put in all the paperwork and made arrangements to wed at a small castle in a fairytale setting in Nijmegen.  The entire Dutch extended clan was invited.  Everything was on track.  All we needed was the actual green light from Mother State.  As time drew down, we continued to wait for that green light.  And waited.  Finally, I got on the phone and called State.  “What gives?” I asked.  “It’s been months now.”  I was told to wait some more.  Still nothing.  My mind started going off in strange directions.  Was she indeed a bomb-throwing anarchist? I wondered.  Maybe a card carrying member of the Gouda Workers of the World?  Nope.  Mother State lost our paperwork.  Advance directly to Go and start anew, I was told.  “But we have a whole castle lined up.  Half of Brabant province has been invited.”  “Sorry.  No wedding without us saying it’s ok,” Mother State replied with heartfelt empathy.  Desperate, I called a buddy who entered the Service with me who worked in that office.  Miraculously, he made things happen.  We got the green light to marry.

If you work for Wal-Mart or GEICO or JetBlue, you may live with or marry whomever you want whenever you want.  But for those who labor in the twilight reaches of national security, Uncle Sam’s cold, boney hand keeps a tight grip.  Like some medieval lord, his blessing must be gotten to enter a steady relationship or to take the hand of a beloved in matrimony.  Amor vincit omnia.

Read more of James Bruno’s excellent and prolific blog, Diplomatic Denizan, at jameslbruno.blogspot.com. You can also buy his books through the same site.

Musicians say Enough is Enough for being asked to work for Free: One mans strongly worded refusal goes viral on social media

A Familiar refrain: “They consistently offer musicians nothing for their work, instead suggesting ‘exposure’ as a form of payment.”

The issue of for profit companies trying to increase their profit margin by refusing to pay creative artists for their work has once again gone viral, creating a debate which has metastasized on social media. Today it is by musicians. The similarities to the debate and discussion sparked in march of this year on the issue of writers and journalists facing the same problem are almost identical. See  http://natethayer.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-freelance-journalist-2013/

Whitey, aka Nathan Joseph White, a musician from London, is the latest creative artist to put his foot down and publicly confront for profit companies asking to use his work, but refusing to pay him for it. The latest request by a major corporation to do just that prompted him to write a strongly worded, resounding no, and then post the message on both his FB page and twitter.

“I want a loud dialogue started in the music press about this shit. I’m sick of these people. I propose a collective blacklist of companies that play this shabby angle, enough. I donate music all the time to indie projects, students and those who need it but cannot pay. But these people… ugh,” Whitey wrote on his Facebook page today

Letter from Musician Outraged One last Time at being Asked to Give His Music for Free to For Profit Company

“This approach is becoming standard, I see an epidemic of these cheap manouevres. The income of musicians has already been decimated by file sharing- and smelling the blood in the water, there is a cynical trend for companies to play upon that struggle for survival. They consistently offer musicians nothing for their work, instead suggesting ‘exposure’ as a form of payment. Well ‘exposure’ only worked when the masses actually bought music, or if it is attached to a prominent cultural event. This kind of exposure… might as well pay me in Monopoly money,” he wrote on his FaceBook page.

In 2004, Whitey released The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Train which was lauded as a critical triumph, recognized on numerous Best Of Year lists worldwide. In 2007, his album Great Shakes was leaked onto the internet, and as a consequence was never officially released, resulting in Whitey losing several mainstream licencing deals. Whitey’s work has been featured on Grand Theft Auto IV and on episodes of The Sopranos, House, One Tree Hill, The O.C, Kyle XY, Entourage, Breaking Bad, and CSI.

In May 2012, Whitey condemned”….ludicrously one-sided offers, arrogant A&Rs and hammering on closed doors”.

In December 2012, Whitey successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his seventh album as well as making physical releases on CD and vinyl available for all his back catalogue.

Yesterday, Whitey rejected a Betty TV request to licence his music for free and reposted the email online to begin ‘a public discussion… about this kind of industry abuse of musicians.’ The post has gone viral.

British musician Whitey has had it with being asked to donate his music for free to big for profit companies. After the latest email from British company Betty TV, Whitey, aka NJ White, responded. Here is his letter, which has now had thousands of retweets on Twitter and thousands more on FB. The beat goes on……..:

“I am sick to death of your hollow schtick, of the inevitable line “unfortunately there’s no budget for music”, as if some fixed Law Of The Universe handed you down a sad but immutable financial verdict preventing you from budgeting to pay for music. Your company set out the budget. so you have chosen to allocate no money for music. I get begging letters like this every week – from a booming, affluent global media industry.

Why is this? Let’s look at who we both are.

I am a professional musician, who lives from his music. It me half a lifetime to learn the skills, years to claw my way up the structure, to the point where a stranger like you will write to me. This music is my hard-earned property. I;ve licensed music to some of the biggest shows, brands, games and TV production companies on Earth; form Breaking Bad to the Sopranos, from Coca Cola to Visa, HBO to Rock star Games.

Ask yourself – would you approach a Creative or a Director with a resume like that – and in one flippant sentence ask them to work for nothing? Of course not. Because your industry has a precedent of paying these people, of valuing their work.

Or would you walk into someone’s home, eat from their bowl, and walk out smiling, saying “So sorry, I’ve no budget for food”? Of course you would not. Because, culturally, we classify that as theft.

Yet the culturally ingrained disdain for the musician that riddles your profession, leads you to fleece the music angle whenever possible. You will without question pay everyone connected to a shoot – from the caterer to the grip to the extra- even the cleaner who mopped your set and scrubbed the toilets after the shoot will get paid. The musician? Give him nothing.

Now lets look at you. A quick glance at your website reveals a variety of well-known, internationally syndicated reality programmes, You are a successful, financially solvent and globally recognised company with a string of hit shows. Working on multiple series in close co-operation with Channel 4, from a West London office, with a string of awards under your belt. You have real money, to pretend otherwise is an insult.

Yet you send me this shabby request – give me your property for free… Just give us what you own, we want it.

The answer is a resounding, and permanent NO.

I will now post this on my sites, forward this to several key online music sources and blogs, encourage people to re-blog this. I want to see a public discussion begin about this kind of industry abuse of musicians… this was one email too far for me. Enough. I’m sick of you.”

Here is the email on Whitey’s Facebook page.

As I did with a request by the Atlantic Magazine in March this year, in an almost blueprint equivalent of his case, Whitey makes clear he does not object to playing music for free. He told DangerousMinds.net today

I don’t want payment for everything. I don’t even care that much about money, I give away my music all the time. You and I live in a society where file sharing is the norm. I’m fine with that.

But i don’t give my music away to large, affluent companies who wish to use it to make themselves more money. Who can afford to pay, but who smell the file sharing buffet and want to grab themselves a free plate. That is a different scenario.

The Night I Lived: Landmines, war and journalism. One close encounter with religion, death, and victory

By Nate Thayer

Excerpt from Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

(Copyright Nate Thayer. No reproduction or dissemination in whole or in part without express written permission of the author)

By Nate Thayer

It was after midnight, before I was to be picked up before dawn by Thai military intelligence to be escorted into Cambodia to accompany guerrillas on a mission to attack and seize a Cambodian district capitol town.

It was monsoon season. As always, I was carefully preparing my equipment. There was an art to fitting everything I might need into a light backpack with lots of pockets and readily accessible under pressure. There were separate Ziploc bags for different speed film, for each Nikon lens, my two Nikon camera bodies, a point and shoot camera (what we then called a “drunk proof” or “idiot camera”), for an extra pair of dry socks and other dry clothes, a small medical kit, notebooks, a flask of whiskey, a poncho, a hammock, extra pens, a carton of cigarettes to give away to grunts on the front line, tape recorder, extra batteries, and more. As always, I never knew how long I would be gone for or what I might encounter.

There was a knock on my door, and the manager of my small guesthouse where I lived in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, a young boy of 17, entered. Ghung, who I had taken under my wing in the previous months, knew I was going to leave in a few hours on what might be a dangerous assignment. Ghung was very concerned.  I invited him into my spartan room and, with a very serious expression on his face, sat down. He opened his hands which clutched two Buddhist amulets.

“I want you to take these with you. Wear them around your neck. If you are respectful to them, they will protect you from danger,” he said. The one on the left, pictured below, is an effigy of a dead baby fetus. He warned me that I should not be afraid if it talked aloud to me. The powerful one, he said, was that image, the Kuman Thong. “This will make sure you don’t die”, he said, if I treated it with a reverence.

Ghung clearly did. “Only wear it around your neck and don’t be afraid. Sometimes it will talk to me.”

Philip Blenkinsop photo

The Kuman Thong effigy is revered in rural Thailand and Cambodia by many Buddhists, but it is Animist, not a traditional Buddhist practice, more “black magic”, or necromancy. Kuman Thong was created centuries ago by surgically removing the unborn fetus from the womb of its mother. The child’s body was roasted accompanied by chants. original Thai Buddhist texts say making a Kuman Thong amulet requires removing the dead baby from the mother’s womb, followed by a ritual of the baby cooked until dry. This process must be finished before dawn.

“Kuman Thong” means “Golden Baby Boy”. They say if you have a good relationship with your Kuman Thong, you will not have very bad things happen to you.

Ghung’s heartfelt gift had not gone through such an involved process, but it represented. to him, the same power. They are widely believed, in rural Thailand and Cambodia, to be very powerful, protecting one from danger, even bullets bouncing off of you.

Ghung was a very sweet and intelligent boy and we had become friends. I thanked him respectfully, because I knew he was very sincere and serious, but I didn’t really believe him. But it was touching.

I wrapped the amulets in my traditional Cambodian scarf and wore them around my neck when I departed for the Cambodian jungle, before dawn broke, riding shotgun in an unmarked Thai military pickup truck.

We arrived at a secret Cambodian guerrilla base in the jungle just over the Thai border and hour later. The guerrillas were gathered, waiting for me, heavily armed and sporting a dozen brand new  CIA supplied Yamaha 250CC dirt motorcycles. They also had a new, powerful, secret weapon that the government was unaware of which had been clandestinely delivered to their enemies in the days before.

We left the guerrilla base before dawn for an arduous trek through monsoon soaked ox cart paths that snaked through the jungle, led by the convoy of  dirt bikes, one of which I was riding shotgun on. Advance teams of troops were ahead and behind us.

The guerrillas had two new weapons; the German made Armbrust 69 mm shoulder fired one time use anti-tank weapon and the Swedish Carl Gustav 84 mm anti-tank weapon. For ten years, the government had tank superiority. For a decade, once the government tanks broached the front line positions, the guerrillas had no effective weapons to stop them. For years, the guerrilla commanders had offered a 50,000 Baht ($2000) reward to any soldier who could destroy a tank prior to that day. Their only weapon was a B-40 rocket propelled grenade launcher, designed to take out concrete bunkers,which required one to get within 20 meters of the tank, from behind, crouch and aim upwards and so it hit the undercarriage of the tank and took out the tracks to halt its advance. More often than not, the guerrilla would be killed attempting to do so, and if he was lucky enough to survive, it was likely he would be wounded by his own shrapnel backwash from firing the RPG from so close.

This time was different.

We entered the first government held town and immediately destroyed three tanks. The German and Swedish weapons, covertly supplied through Singapore, penetrated the tanks armor but the round would not explode until it was inside the tank, vaporizing the 3 or 4 man crew instantly. I took pictures of their incinerated, burnt corpses still sitting in the drivers seat and manning the tank turret gun, the twisted carcass of the feared armoured T-54 Soviet tank smoking and twisted and neutralized.

We captured that town within an hour.

The government troops fled in sheer terror, the psychological impact and confusion of knowing they no longer had tank superiority changed the face of the war that day.

Within two hours we advanced without hesitation and had captured the district capitol of Thmar Puok.

My feet. Photo Blenkinsop

There, we destroyed 4 more tanks defending the perimeter of the sprawling city.

The guerrilla’s had a celebratory lunch in the former Vietnamese military headquarters, the former only school house in the city and the only concrete building. Graffiti spray painted on the inside walls read in Vietnamese Roman script: “Long Live the Communist Party of Vietnam!”

This was 30 kilometers from the Thai border, more than 500 miles from Vietnam.

It was the first district capitol seized by the guerrillas during the long 12-year war. Government troops, terrified young boys who didn’t care a whit about politics and were conscripted like all troops on both sides of the war, surrendered by the hundreds, along with their Russian jeeps and transport trucks and weapons.

We drank lots of whiskey in the mid day sun. The people I was with were very happy. Other people, not so much.

For the civilians, none were happy. They were satisfied, like most Cambodian’s,  if they did not die, their daughter was not raped, their life possessions not looted, and their water buffalo not stolen. Peasant villagers in Cambodia knew that no army or government, regardless of ideology, actually had anything to offer to make their lives better. It was the faction that wreaked the least havoc, who took away the least from their already meager lives, which they would least detest.

It was a big story, I knew. I had very good pictures and an exclusive eyewitness account.

We toured the new liberated zone of dozens of villages with no electricity, schools, running water, or hope. This stretch of real estate, for a very, very long time, only knew war.

Then, after 12 hours, we began the return trip towards the sanctuaries of the rear military bases straddling the Thai Cambodian border, as dusk began to fall, west, towards the Dongruk mountain escarpment far on the horizon marking the border.

The heavy, daily late afternoon monsoon rains had begun.

I was eager to file my story and pictures, which would be, still, many hours away. I still needed to cross out of the jungle, be transported back across the border to Thailand, and down 60 kilometers to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet.

From there, I would call the Associated Press office in Bangkok and dictate my story by landline telephone.

Ghung, the sweet and cocky 17 year old boy, who had given me the Buddhist amulets late the night before, would always, for months now, push the button on a stopwatch and time my calls and charge me by the minute.

The undeveloped photographs, still on 35 mm film, would be given to the long distance bus driver of the commercial bus company which made a half a dozen trips through the day and night from Aranyaprathet to Bangkok. We would give him no money for fear he would then take the film and sell it to local Thai papers. In Bangkok, an AP messenger on motorcycle would be dispatched from the AP office and meet the bus at the bustling Moenchit bus terminal. There, they would exchange cash for film and he would return to the AP office, where the film would be souped and developed. A few pictures would be chosen and put on a roller and sent over telephone lines to Tokyo and New York. From there they would be transmitted to AP customers worldwide. To get story and pictures out from when they were taken to when they were seen and read could often be days.

But this day it didn’t work out, as it really never did, as planned.

We began the motorcycle ride on our CIA dirt bikes through the uninhabited savannah and jungle, headed west towards Thailand. Bombs and gunfire were everywhere. This area had been under government control when dawn emerged earlier that day. It was, in reality, now under control of no one, but the government had fled. The guerrilla’s had never been here before.

Then the motorcycle convoy of a dozen or so got separated. The dirt tracks were a meter deep in mud. We got separated. Then our motorcycle broke down. Dusk was rapidly approaching. One guerrilla stayed with me. We finally abandoned the motorcycle and began walking west towards the silhouette of the Dongruk Mountains still a dozen miles to the west. That was Thailand and that is where I wanted to be.

“Are there any landmines around here,” I asked the young guerrilla grunt.

“No. No landmines,” he replied

“Where are we,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

What it feels like after not dying

“Well, if you don’t know where the fuck we are, how the fuck do you know there are no landmines? I asked, now tired, dehydrated, and hungry.

It had been 12 hours since we left the guerrilla base on motorcycles and seized a couple hundred square kilometers of territory. Many, many were dead. That didn’t much bother me. I had not eaten all day. That didn’t much bother me either. I was dehydrated. That made my mind fuzzy. But, mostly, I wanted to get my story and pictures, which I knew would be a minor scoop in the world news, out, safely.

We entered a thicker jungle and bushwhacked ourselves through by hand.  We did not know where we were. It was now dark. There were no longer front-lines defined. No one knew what territory was now controlled by the enemy or friends. As far as I was concerned, there were no friends and there was no enemy. I only wanted my pictures and story to get out.

Then we heard the sounds of trucks idling ahead in the jungle.

That was a very bad, frightening sign.

The guerrilla’s I was with—troops of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, did not have any trucks.

We halted. We moved slowly through the light forest and peaked through the trees and foliage.

There, idling on an oxcart path, were two Soviet Zil transport trucks with several Cambodians, in government military uniforms, carrying Soviet issue AK-47’s.

My lone guerrilla companion turned to me, after a long period of silence, and said: “I think they have defected to us.”

“What the fuck do you mean ‘You think they have defected?” That is not fucking good enough! They either have defected or we are about to be dead or become prisoners of war.” I was, honestly, ready to surrender if the latter was the case.

He had a look of fear and uncertainty in his eyes. That scared me even more.

“You wait here. I will go check,” he instructed me, failing in his attempt to give the impression he was in control of the situation.

He tried to be quiet as he pushed aside the forest brush and not alarm the armed men in government uniform in government military trucks.

I waited, crouched, decidedly not comfortable in the savannah. My guerrilla guide returned with a smile on his face. The armed men and vehicles had, indeed, defected in the previous hours.

I was ecstatic. It was dark. We were lost. Our motorcycles had broken down and been abandoned. It was rainy and muddy and hot. I was hungry and we had no water. We were in territory under unclear control. Now we had a truck and we would be back in Thailand within an hour.

I emerged from the jungle and was greeted warmly although with the concomitant, quizzical look that is directed towards animals in a zoo.

There were about a dozen troops in the jungle clearing with two trucks. Some were guerrillas and some were freshly defected government troops. We all piled into one truck. The driver was a government soldier hours before. Now he was a guerrilla. Three of us were in the front seat, myself squeezed in the middle, between the driver and an impressive fat guerrilla officer. About a half dozen troops were in the open back carriage of the 2 ½ ton Russian military transport truck.

We were laughing and giddy as we slowly negotiated the mud soaked, deeply rutted ox cart path, headed west, towards Thailand. The dim silhouette of the Dongruk mountain escarpment still visible under the moonlight about ten miles to the west.

I remember being scrunched up tightly between the fat guerrilla commander and the skinny young boy government conscript, now a defector, in the driver’s cabin of the Zil. I was sitting in the middle. I was in a very happy mood. I had great pictures and a great story and I was the only journalist there and I was now in a truck being driven towards a safe place where I could transmit them to the few interested around the world. I remember chatting to the driver, smiling and laughing. He was happy, too, mainly because he was not dead, a fact I am sure he was concerned about at the start of that day.

I loved this life.

We had been driving only a few minutes and then something–in an instant–terrible, something life altering, and for some, life extinguishing happened.

The sound was so profoundly loud that I could not hear it. My eardrums were blown out. The concussion of the explosion was so great my brain shut down. I remember the liquid in my body became so heated I could feel it simmering near boiling. I could hear my blood boiling, gurgling from what seemed like heat. I felt my brain being tossed around like a rag doll bouncing off the insides of the wall of my boned skull.

Our 2 ½ ton truck was thrown in the air several meters and, luckily, hit the side of a tree, and bounced back down, landing upright. Actually, I don’t remember that part. I saw it, afterwards. It looked like a shredded child’s toy Tonka truck.

We had driven over two Chinese anti-tank mines.

Specifically, our left front tire, which was less than 1 ½ meters from where I had been sitting.

This is very Cambodian. One does not need two anti-tank mines to blow up a tank.  One will do. But, for good measure, just in case, the guerrillas had placed one on top of another. The mines were placed by the guerrilla’s themselves. Because they had no vehicles—until that morning.

We had just driven over our own landmines.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious.

I do remember waking up that night, with clarity and vividness, that startles me in my sleep and jolts me awake, regularly, now many hundreds of nights and some days, to the present, years later, in a mixture of unspeakable fear and grief and confusion and sadness.

There was a severed leg lying across my face. I held the leg up and looked at it. It was not connected to a body.

I was in the remnants of the engine compartment of the truck, its tattered carcass spread meters across the muddy jungle ox cart path.

I needed to know whether it was my leg I was holding in my hand. But I was very scared to find out. I reached down and ran my hand over my left leg and it was still attached to me body. I did the same with my right leg. It, also, was still attached to my body.

I had no idea what happened. I looked around me.

A few feet away was the young Cambodian truck driver, moments before with whom I was laughing and smiling and chatting. Life, for both us, would be, from that moment on, very different. His would be much shorter than mine.

He was sitting up, with a look on his face of raw terror and amazement I will never, ever forget. He was holding tightly the stump of his thigh, eyes locked, fixed, wide open, staring at what was no longer there. He did not panic. He didn’t seem in pain. He cried—no he moaned–loudly, but in words profoundly mournful.

He only called for his mother.

“Mother, please help me!” he repeated over and over and over and over.

I extricated myself from the engine and went over to him and held him in my arms. “You will be OK,” I lied. “Everything will be fine.”

For perhaps ten minutes, he called for his mother, staring in utter terror and horrid curiosity, his mind racing over, I suspect, his brief past, perhaps his never realized hopes, and his now very, very brief future, while grasping tightly the shredded stump of his muscle and bone and meat in his hands, the end of what was his leg, now within easy reach of his clutching hands.

And then he died on this irrelevant, muddy jungle dirt ox cart path, in the rain, at night, far from his mother. Probably, no one, other than the half dozen of us there that night who remained alive, to this day, knows how and where he died. He just never came home.  There are millions of Cambodians whose loved ones simply never came home and they don’t know why.

We left him, dead, on the dirt path, in the dark, alone. I am sure, no one amongst us even knew his name.

The man who was sitting to my right, the fat guerrilla commander, before the driver died, was angry.

He had taken shrapnel to his head. It penetrated his skull. There was a gaping hole on the side of his skull, above his ear, leaking increasing amounts of blood and other, whitish, grey coloured liguid, mixed with chunks of solids. It was his brains.

I remember him cursing the truck. He got up and he kicked the side of the truck with a ferocious boot and yelled and blamed the truck. Who else was there to blame?

Then he died, too, falling on the mud path, on his face.

We left his body there as well.

After I had fled in slow motion the dying, legless driver, another man, lying down, prostrate,  who I thought was dead, bolted upright.

He jumped up and yanked his pants down and, terrified, grabbed hold of his cock and balls and inspected them to make sure they were intact.

That made sense to me and I immediately did the same. I later learned this is a common reaction to the freshly wounded in war.

I remember asking him: “What just happened?” I had no idea. I had no idea we had run over a landmine. I did not understand why, in the dark, and mud and rain there were people dying and suffering.

“”We hit a landmine,” he said, with no discernible emotion.

Then, strangely, I became obsessed with locating my film, my cameras, my notebook from the wreckage of the debris of the truck and human carnage littering this irrelevant jungle patch, which, really, was of importance to no one, save those of us who died, or didn’t die, there that night.

I became obsessed and started  sifting through the metal and mud, in the dark and the rain, looking for them.  I need to salvage a purpose, an excuse that I had a reason to be there. Two other surviving troops came over and helped me. We found my Nikons and lenses and film and small,little backpack next to the bodies and under the remains of the truck. They had survived unharmed. I was greatly relieved.

Most everyone that night was killed, but several of us were not. Two were severely wounded. We cut two tree branches and attached hammocks to them, and two guerrillas carried the badly wounded through the night, in the rain and dark, for three hour, for 7 miles, a silent, sad trek, everyone lost in their own thoughts, to the nearest guerrilla base.

There, 7 miles away, they had felt the earth shake from the explosion from the landmine that was planted under the dirt less than 2 meters from me that night.

We began a long silent, sad walk.

I didn’t know that bones were sticking out of my leg until I stepped in a mud hole on that walk and a jolt of pain went from my leg to my brain. I didn’t know that I had shrapnel in my head until I tasted blood dripping into my mouth and wiped my hand over my face and looked, in fear, as it was covered in bright crimson fresh liquid.

I didn’t know I had permanent brain damage. Or that my ear drums were burst, or that my sternum was broken. Or that my liver was dislocated. And other stuff.

I just walked. Because we had no choice.

We arrived, hours later, at the guerrilla base. They knew we were coming. They piled us wounded into the back of a pickup truck and took us to a CIA funded guerrilla operating theatre in the jungle. It had a gas powered generator to provide electricity for an antiseptic operating room. There was an air conditioner in it. But we were put into an open air thatch roofed room. The loud din of a chorus of frogs croaking in celebration of the heavy monsoon rains, along with crickets, was soothing, but was so loud one had to speak louder to be heard.

A dozen or so soldiers,  all on crutches, their freshly bandaged stumps of legs covered in bright red fresh blood, their legs and arms and some one or both of each, gathered and stared at us, the new arrivals to their new world.

I was placed on an elevated military cot. Next to me was the most badly wounded soldier. The kind eyed, French trained doctor spoke softly and touched and poked me, my badly wounded neighbor on the stretcher next to me, and one other severely wounded guerrilla.

Then two soldiers walked in with a chainsaw, headed towards me.

I had bones sticking out of my feet. I jumped up like an Olympiad on methamphetamines and screamed in at least three languages to get the fuck away from me. I was forcibly restrained and reassured that the chainsaw was not destined for me. It was for the man next to me in the stretcher. They were massaging his heart. His leg was attached by a few strands of ragged tendons to his torso. he was not conscious. The medics, who, in truth, only had training in amputating limbs,  cranked it on and cut his leg off with no anesthesia, two feet from me. I stared emotionless at this. I was drained of any reserves of emotion by then.

I watched, in retrospect, with a calmness fueled and mitigated, I guess, by the context of the evil of that night. He died not so long afterwards.

They took me to the operating room. They took pieces of metal out of my legs, my torso, and my head. They sewed it up. They did their best.

Honestly, I felt very little pain, even then. I had just been blown up I then walked 7 miles with bones protruding from my foot, dozens of holes in my body, pieces of metal embedded in my head my torso, my legs, my feet. I had several broken bones. But in the coming days, for weeks, I would not be able to move from the pain.

Despite the unpleasantry of the previous hours, I was fixated, oddly, on one thing–to get my photographs and story to the Associated Press office in Bangkok. I knew then I could relax, my job done.

I repeatedly asked to be taken back the 60 kilometers to the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. I needed—not wanted—I NEEDED—to file my pictures and story. In the darkest hours before dawn, I was driven by Thai military intelligence in an unmarked truck back to my hotel.

I was bandaged. I was confused. My whole body hurt by then.

My good friend, Philip Blenkinsop, the photographer, was staying in another room in the sparse ten room ground floor motel. I knocked on his door. It was before dawn.

He opened the door and stared silently for a few seconds. Philip, who I love dearly, didn’t say “What happened to you? Are you OK?”

He said, and I won’t forget these words: “Don’t move, mate, Great pics. Let me get my kit.”

I felt comforted,  as if I was now home and out of danger and with my people. He took these, and other pics.

A long day just begun Photo Philip Blenkinsop

The young boy, Ghung, the 17 year old Thai hotel manager, came to the room a while later. He had  a serene and loving look on his face. He looked me in the eyes and said ‘I told you they would protect you.”

Ghung knew he had saved my life that day. And I was pleased he believed he did. His black magic dead fetus was still wrapped around my neck.

Both he and I were very thankful and quite satisfied with the day, for different reasons.

Later the commander and chief of the guerrilla army came to my hotel room with a dozen roses. I liked this man. He smiled and chuckled and said: ” I told them not to drive down that path” and he handed me the flowers.

But the memory since has never left me, and never will leave me with any sense of peace or conclusion. I am not sure this story can be adequately conveyed. But that is the best I can do, today, 22 years later.