About ten this morning, I met with an FBI agent bound for Sudan. He’s headed over there with some other FBI agents and FBI technicians to support a contingent of Department of State Security Agents investigating the untimely demise of a fellow named John Granville, an American and an employee of the US Government, who was shot last week in Khartoum. Whoever did it also whacked his driver, Abdel Rahman Abbas.
“I suppose you know, Mr. Collins,” the FBI man told me, his voice dripping with implication and significance, “that the Bureau is well aware of your… association with Sudanese nationals here in Washington.”
“The Sudanese hire me to do policy analysis occasionally, just like a score of other foreign embassies, such as the British, the Russians and the Japanese do,” I replied coolly. “Since I perform no actions upon their behalf, I do not qualify as an agent of any foreign power as defined under 18 USC Subchapter 371, 18 USC Subchapter 951, 28 CFR Subsection 73.01, 50 USC 36 Subchapter 1801, Executive Order 12333, 3 CFR Section 200, or 50 USC Subchapter 401.”
“Sounds like you’ve done your homework,” the FBI man commented dryly as he took a seat on the couch in my office.
“One had better, if they want to do business in this town with people like the British and the Sudanese,” I shot back. “So if you’re here to arrest me, get on it with it. Otherwise, please tell me how I can assist your employer, the Government of the United States this fine Monday morning.”
The FBI man leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees, glaring at me, his eyes blazing malevolence. “I’m sure not here because I approve of people like you, Collins.”
“Meaning what? You don’t like Italian Americans?”
“You know damn well that’s not what I mean, Collins.”
“Okay, don’t keep an idiot in suspense, then,” I chided him, “Please, Mr. J. Edgar Flatfoot – out with it, if you will.”
“Absolutely. Let me tell you something, Collins. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri and spent ten years in the Marines. I’m a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian conservative and I’m proud of it. I don’t approve of people who think they are intellectuals. I don’t approve of people who have what they think is some kind of sophisticated world view. I don’t approve of people who believe in cultural relativism, or any kind of relativism, for that matter. I don’t care for people who won’t accept that Jesus is Lord and that God created the world in seven days. I don’t approve of people who drink champagne when there’s no special occasion going on. I don’t approve of people who live in Washington, DC but subscribe to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and then make nasty, snide little jokes about the Washington Times. I don’t approve of people who think the Europeans know what they’re doing, and I don’t approve of people think that foreigners can be trusted.”
“No doubt,” I surmised, “you seldom lie awake at night thinking.”
“I certainly don’t,” he growled, settling back into the couch with obvious satisfaction.
“Thank you so much for making your points so clearly,” I continued, “but I still don’t know why, if you despise me, and people like me, so much, you are here to visit me this morning.”
“Because it’s my duty,” he admitted, grudgingly. “Nobody at Quantico or Foggy Bottom has the answers we need.”
“I see. Okay, let’s get on with it then, sir. Start asking the questions.”
“You don’t understand, Collins, it’s not that simple. It’s…”
“Oh, but I do indeed understand!”
He froze at my interruption. Here, it was readily apparent, sat a man by no means used to interruption.
“Yeah?” He muttered the word, distracted, reaching for the handcuffs at the back of his belt. His reflexes had taken control – he was preparing to put them on me and teach some respect for Yankee Doodle.
For what? Well, this is a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation we’re talking about here, folks. They apprehend first and ask questions later, usually while wearing latex gloves. But after a couple of seconds, he stopped, gazed around, and, thus reminded of his surroundings and the prevailing situation, relaxed back into the couch, glaring at me in frustration.
“Okay,” he sighed, “tell me what it is you understand.”
“While making the arrangements for your task force – collecting equipment, assembling the team, getting the visas and so forth, you have convened and held a number of meetings. These meetings all began with extensive background briefings prepared by expensive contractors and presented by your best junior staff. These meetings were well documented and well organized. Detailed minutes were taken, followed by voluminous exchanges of e-mails prior to subsequent meetings. Then, Friday afternoon, shortly before three, some poor fool had the guts to point out that, despite elaborate plans to deploy the task force to Khartoum, once it got there nobody had the vaguest idea of where to begin the investigation, how it should be conducted, or who the real suspects were; and, furthermore, nobody in the United States Government had told anybody in the task force whom in Sudan, if anyone, might know these things. You promptly threw that person off the task force. If that person was a contractor, you called their employer and demanded they be fired. If they were a federal government employee, you wrote a nasty letter to their file and reassigned them to meaningless busy work. Then, on Saturday, the remainder of you held a meeting to do something about it, and after about four hours, somebody suggested you come see me.”
My guest leapt up from the couch, reached over my desk and seized me by my collar, slamming me up against the wall.
“That’s good, Collins! Really, really, good! Too good! You know the penalty for spying on United States Government employees?”
“Of course,” I assured him, “ten years in a federal pen and up to a quarter million in fines. What of it?”
“You expect me to believe,” he insisted, pounding my head against the fine blonde oak paneling, “that you could know all that without bugging our conference rooms?”
“Yeah,” I smugly smiled, “I do.”
“What,” he demanded, now quite well beyond irate, “you think I’m [expletive] stupid or something?”
“I think you’re about as smart as the average federal employee, sir,” I responded, as respectfully as the circumstances allowed. “What I described is what I have come to expect after experiencing similar things for a considerable number of years.”
The realization hit that corn-fed cracker like a Fourth of July twister right up his storm cellar. His grip relaxed, his face fell, his body slumped. He released me and sheepishly resumed his place on the couch, his head hung low in his hands.
“You mean,” he sobbed from between his fingers, “that practically everybody who works for the US federal government is a pathetic, clueless, no-talent ignoramus running around with their head up their [expletive]?”
“Yes, exactly; and in addition to that,” I elaborated as I resumed my seat, “they abuse their powers as servants of the public, invariably using them to hire only those contractors who can supply the most abject, sychophantic, obsequious whores to service their fumbling, nincompoop project teams.”
A rush of sudden and very intense fear passed over my visitor like a cold wind. I could see the blood drain from his face as he sat bolt upright, shivering. “Oh, [expletive]! I’m going to [expletive] Sudan with a bunch of people exactly like that! I’m [expletive] toast!”
“Not necessarily,” I comforted, at least to the extent that I could, morally speaking, without actually deceiving the poor man. “I’m certain that most, if not all, of the task force will return to the US mainland alive.”
“Oh, Christ,” he lamented. “Alright, Collins, I apologize for roughing you up just there now – I’ve been under a lot of stress the last few days…”
“Of course,” I mollified, to the extent that I could without bursting out in laughter. “Not to worry. You should see how they rough house down at the Sudanese embassy. Seriously, no problem. Now, what is it you need?”
“Ah… uh… okay, look, don’t tell anybody else about this, all right?”
“Sure. My lips are sealed. Ask anyone – Tom Collins don’t talk.”
“Okay – this is it: can you tell us who to contact in Khartoum so we can get started on a legitimate criminal investigation of John Granville’s murder?”
“Nope.”
“What?”
“John Granville wasn’t murdered,” I explained.
“He’s [expletive] dead, isn’t he? You saying it was an accident?”
“I’m saying he was assassinated.”
“Murdered, assassinated, what’s the [expletive] difference?”
“Ordinary Americans abroad, even civil servants, when somebody kills them, that’s murder.”
“Right. So?”
“So John Granville was no ordinary American abroad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He worked for the United States Agency for International Development.”
My visitor shook his head in frank bewilderment. “Yeah, right, he worked for USAID. It’s a part of the US State Department. They work on foreign aid projects, worldwide. I got all that in the briefings we had this week. What the [expletive] are you getting at, Collins?”
“Sir, those briefings were all pure horse hockey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ever hear of Air America?”
My visitor shook his head, uncertainly. “No.”
“How about the Military Assistance Institute? MAI? Ever heard of that?”
“No.”
“Okay. How about the Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand Project, around about 1964?”
“That’s ancient history as far as I’m concerned,” he proclaimed in a wavering voice wracked with uncertainty and doubt.
“Well, I have. Look, FBI Bill, here’s what’s happening: USAID is a CIA front organization constructed within the State Department. It always has been, since at least the Hill Tribes project, okay, and most probably always. So, that means that John Granville, if that’s actually his real name, may draw his pay check from the State Department through USAID, but in reality, he works for the CIA. And the killing of a CIA operative is not correctly described as murder, sir. It’s properly described as an assassination.”
My visitor began panting like a Labrador retriever nailing a downed grouse; his words came very slowly. “I’m… being sent… to Sudan… to investigate… the assassination… of… an undercover… CIA operative… as… if it… was an… ordinary… murder?”
“You and a bunch of other unfortunate, suffering bastards,” I cheerily affirmed. “What do you suppose you all did to earn this particular assignment from Hell?”
At this, my guest keeled over, unconscious, clutching his chest. The first thing I did was lean into the outer office and tell my private secretary to dial 911 and then come do some CPR, at which she is highly certified. A quick dip into my briefcase produced an aspirin, which I slipped between his cheek and gum, deep in the back of his mouth near his left second molar. After a couple of minutes of her vigorous chest massage, with me performing a solid accompaniment on hand respirator, he began to come around. So my private secretary, who’s also a registered nurse, by the way, put a tablet of nitroglycerin under his tongue. By dint of these efforts, and those of the DC paramedics who arrived about an hour later, and, of course, those of the dedicated medical professionals at George Washington University Hospital, where he eventually ended up, my visitor survived, and, who knows? Perhaps he will be in shape to accompany the others to Khartoum for the investigation after all. I just can’t wait to read their final report – assuming, of course, that it’s not classified.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana, and what do you know, here it is, once again time for the Quarterly Mailbag:
A surprising number of folks wrote in asking for information about Winslow’s gay Country and Western leather shop in the U Street Corridor. As far as I know, Winslow hasn’t put up a Web site yet, probably because he’d like to keep things on a low profile until Senator You Know Who takes his trademark wide stance atop a suitable piece of livestock and rides on back to Idaho (I assume he will be avoiding airports). Rather than regale everybody with location information and a synopsis of the sales catalog, let’s just say that if you come to Washington DC, U Street is right between T Street and V Street and the U Street Corridor is in the Northwest Quadrant. You can’t miss the place, really, it’s the only gay Country and Western leather store on U Street NW – at the moment, anyway. Who can say what will happen if, by some Act of Divine Providence, Mike Huckabee gets elected President? As for Winslow’s merchandise, I’ve visited the place and let’s just say that, first of all, I guarantee you have never seen selections of chaps and boots like the ones Winslow has anywhere east of the Mississippi. That noted, the fact is you can get anything you want at Winslow’s – including Winslow, if you’re a male and so inclined. Winslow says don’t worry, his partner isn’t the jealous type and in fact enjoys threesomes, provided there aren’t any women involved, of course. So Winslow says bring your bods and your fantasies, guys, both erotic and sartorial (yes, Winslow does actually say “sartorial” now – a bit too often, truth be told, but he’s like that when trying to learn new words). As far as the fashion goes, if he doesn’t have it in stock, he can order it or make it for you custom.
The tinfoil hat crowd had a field day with my post on SPORK. Just for the record, I’m not in the Masons, the Illuminati or the Rosicrucians. Nobody is secretly funding me to sow the seeds of discord among the paranormal investigations community, and aliens from outer space are most definitely not in control of my brain. And yes, my cat can talk. That’s certainly no secret, nor anything paranormal, either.
My Inbox was also stuffed with missives plumping for early primaries – Geez Louise, people, aren’t the dates we ended up with crazy enough? But cheer up – there’s always next time. Maybe we can have the 2012 Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in 2011. Come to think of it, maybe we should, because last time I checked, the world is supposed to end in 2012.
E-mails from guys who want to date my old college flame Veronica (who, as regular readers of this Web log know, moved to DC from LA after her Malibu mansion burned down in October) also flooded in, many with extensive photographic and video attachments. A few morons even attached bitmaps to their e-mails, eating up megabyte upon megabyte of my storage. Look, you bozos (and you know who you are!), nobody with the sense God gave a keyhole limpet attaches bitmap files to e-mails! Use an appropriate tool to obtain a JPEG, GIF or TIFF rendering, please! As for Veronica, it was my pleasure to forward all those e-mails to her and then delete them from my own mailbox. One thing I’ve learned from this experience is that the sheer number of ugly guys who think they’re wealthy enough to date somebody like Veronica anyway is unbelievably astronomical.
One thing I’ll say for my readers, though, they certainly seem to have a sense of humor. After my post about how he lost his cushy federal government job at FEMA and couldn’t get into another cushy federal government job at the National Intelligence Directorate because of a snarky practical joke Mike Chertoff put him up to, I received over eighty e-mails suggesting new career opportunities for Pat Philbin. So, if you’re reading this, Pat, rest assured people are thinking of you – they’re not thinking very nice things, but they are thinking of you nonetheless. Folks wrote in to jocularly suggest that Pat find work licking out toilet bowls in public lavatories, cleaning street gutters by dragging his hinder down them like a dog with worms, draining cesspools with a leaky five-gallon bucket and feeding alligators underwater. There were some other suggestions I won’t repeat in detail, except to note that I got eleven suggestions involving a pickle barrel on a street corner and eight others that would require Pat to don some sort of costume or another before performing this or that imaginatively degrading act. It’s good to see that the citizens of our great republic know federal employees for what they are. So remember, folks, if you see federal employment on somebody’s resume, throw that sucker right in the trash and don’t have anything more to do with the loser who wrote it, either!
Looks like I managed to make equal numbers of Kurds, Armenians and Turks madder than scalded roosters with my post about the Turks’ problems with Kurds and Armenians. As far as the death threats went on this one, though, I’d have to give the Turks first place – and a very solid one at that. While almost all the Kurds and Armenians threatened either to shoot me, blow me up with a car bomb or burn down my house while I’m home, the Turks went out of their way to concoct new and exciting ways to kill me. Their efforts included such gems as poisonous animals delivered by various means, seductive women with pinking shears, booby traps set up in my own back yard, and elaborate body doubles framing me for capital crimes. Bravo, Turkey! If there was ever a country with a perfectly appropriate name, it’s you.
Strangely enough, there are apparently some people who think Pervez Musharraf is a nice guy. I heard from them shortly after my post about the Paki generals who are shaking in their boots, scared witless at the prospect of succeeding Musharraf as leader of the Pakistani military. Oh my goodness no, these emphatic e-mails admonished me, President Musharraf is the savior of his country and a greatly beloved leader. I must have gotten a thousand e-mails like that, which would be pretty impressive if they hadn’t all come from the same IP address.
My post about Aqua Dots and the damage they can do evoked a deluge of e-mails from consumers wanting to share Chinese product horror stories and Chinese denouncing me as unfair, biased, racist and xenophobic, as well as several requests for information on how to make 1,4-butane diol and about half a dozen outraged letters complaining “How dare you butcher Shakespeare just for the sake of teasing your sister?” I suggest the consumers buy American from now on. Everybody else who wrote in on that post – I suggest you eat fifty Aqua Dots, washed down with a quart of water. While you’re waiting for them to kick in, switch on a table lamp, place it on the floor, remove the lamp shade and unscrew the light bulb. When the Aqua Dots start to take effect, you have three minutes before you keel over. So as soon as you feel the buzz coming on, count to one hundred and then urinate in the light bulb socket. Complaining Chinese will achieve instant karma, stupid kids who want to get wasted will get higher than they ever thought possible, and literary prudes will forget about Shakespeare altogether.
I received plenty of e-mails that came down on both sides of the McCain – Romney brouhaha in New Hampshire back in November. I’ve been called worse, however. There was also one e-mail from the company that employed the woman who called me, asking me to print out and sign an attached statement affirming that she had failed to perform the duties for which she was hired because she made a mistake dialing the New Hampshire Area Code and got my home in Virginia instead. I forgot to do that, of course.
Many readers wrote in to comment on what happened to Hitchenson this Thanksgiving. These generally fell into three camps. The first said that Hitchenson only got what he (and everybody else in the Civil Service) richly deserves, the second requested pictures of what Hitchenson looks like now, and the third provided their own deep-fried turducken recipes. As a dedicated foodie, I’ve sampled deep-fried turkey and I must admit, I’ve never had any other form of turkey so juicy and flavorful, particularly the white meat, which was, as they say, to die for. Or get horribly burned for, if you don’t know what you’re doing. I donno, it just might not be worth it – after all there’s goose, which you can make in the oven, all nice and safe, and for my money goose is way better than any kind of turkey, stuffed with a duck, chicken, Cajun sausage and corn bread dressing or not.
I was expecting furious e-mails from the fans of various celebrities I mentioned in my post on political endorsements, but it turns out I was in for a bit of a surprise. Practically nobody wrote in to complain or threaten me, not even the Oprah fans! Well, that’s practically nobody except the Barbara Streisand fans, actually. Many of them did indeed write in to complain, and few also cursed me, too, with things like “You should take too much castor oil and die [expletive] your guts out;” “Leeches should drink your blood dry;” “May you laugh with lizards;” “May you want everything and have no money to buy it;” “May you hang yourself with a rope dipped in sugar to give you a sweet death, and soon;” “A hundred houses you should have, each with a hundred beds, and delirious fever should drive you from bed to bed forever;” and, “May your stomach rumble so loud, people think it’s a Purim noisemaker!” Those were pretty good, but the ones that mixed the traditional with the topical really stood out, like the one that said “May all your teeth fall out and your dentist make you a set of faulty dentures – and may they be ridiculously overpriced and may you get the bill for them the day after they cancel your dental coverage!” Another said “May you keel over with such a stroke, you can’t talk or move, only listen; and may you lie in your bed forever like that while the low-rent Caribbean shvartza nurse that your shyster health insurance company won’t pay any better for plays that jungle rap music on a huge boom box, day and night until you go completely meshuggena!” Those were remarkable, but my favorite was “May Obama get elected and after that you should fall off your high horse and end up like that Christopher Reeve shagitz, and have only the doctors left in the United States after Obama gets his God-damn socialized medicine laws passed to take care of you!” Whew. Better watch it with those Streisand fans – get them mad and, well, people have been found dead suffocated face down in bowls white fish salad, bubbeleh. Enough said.
Either all my readers in Sudan are real good sports, or, more likely, nobody reads this Web log in Sudan because the government won’t let them. Either way, nobody from Sudan had anything to say about my post regarding the school teacher there who was arrested for naming a Teddy bear “Mohammed.” Plenty of folks just about everywhere else besides Burma, Yemen and Cuba did have plenty to say, though. This included a large number of kids from Moslem cultures who own Teddy bears. Their e-mails ran along the lines of “Say it ain’t so, Joe, say it ain’t so!” They didn’t want to believe that Teddy bears are named after any American, much less an American president and, Allah forbid, please, not that evil nasty Theodore Roosevelt man. I don’t know, I could change my mind about it; maybe Teddy bears should come with a warning label. The rest of the mail on that post was pretty predictable. Moslems told me that I am going to pay for sympathizing with somebody like Gillian Gibbons and that she deserved to be stoned to death or beheaded. Everybody else, of course, was totally outraged at those savages in Sudan, etc. But thanks to the three people from Liverpool England who wrote in to contest what I said about Ms. Gibbon’s home town. These were all apparently sweet little old ladies who tend flower beds out back of their row houses and take tea at five every afternoon. From them, I learned that Liverpool is a lovely, pleasant sea side metropolis with a fascinating local culture and a complex and colorful history, massive unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and a plethora of murderous street gangs with some of the cutest names you have ever heard. Very well, ladies, I stand corrected.
Several people wrote in to say that they witnessed the CIA sedan run over Taris Balsov outside that bar I mentioned in the post about the missing torture tapes. I hereby advise them to forget they saw anything. I almost had, until their e-mails reminded me.
And I’m obviously not going to be invited to the Inauguration if a Republican wins the Presidency. The number of e-mails I got complaining about my post on the Republican debates makes me think that perhaps they doth protest too much. Good Lord! Apparently, I’ve been a covert Democratic operative all this time and didn’t know it. I guess my description of Hillary’s cavernous snatch in my post about Taris Balsov’s copies of the missing CIA tapes fooled everybody.
After my post about Veronica’s date with the guy who just landed a juicy job at AIPAC, I got another slew of e-mails from guys who swore they could surpass Shmuel Lipschitz in the looks, personality, social skills and wallet departments. Again, I forwarded those to Veronica and promptly erased them from my mailbox, and again, guys, please, no bitmap attachments! One fellow wanted to know, since Veronica’s staying at my house in Great Falls, Virginia, how could I keep from jumping in the sack with her. Okay, sport, the answer’s simple – if I did, two things would happen. First, Veronica would immediately assume she owns everything I do and proceed to help herself to it. Second, upon learning of it, no doubt from Veronica, Cerise would probably embed the Calphalon skillet she gave me for Christmas in my forehead. Other than that, sure, I suppose I’d go ahead and be flat-out PG redneck stupid, just like the guy who wrote me that e-mail no doubt would himself.
There were plenty of messages about the post that related how Cerise and I saw a mortgage broker and a hedge fund manager duke it out down by the Yacht Basin. Mostly, they were subprime mortgage horror stories, many containing veiled pleas for help, which I shall assiduously ignore, thank you. There were also dueling e-mails from each fellow’s attorney, requesting my street address (so they can subpoena me for the law suit, no doubt). I’m ignoring those, too.
And last, but certainly not least, there have been over thirty e-mails concerning the post about my meeting with the Egyptian Special Cultural Attache, all claiming that the idea of Egypt asserting intellectual property rights to the pyramids and such is just too bloody absurd to be real. To the contrary, my little fishes, like NASA astronauts driving cross country wearing diapers and bent on crimes of passion, or a President of the United States who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear,” some things are so absurd, they can’t possibly be made up.