Following up on the “On Astroturfing and Paid Shills” post below:
One of the scariest articles I ever read was an expose published by Salon in 2001 called The Greatest Vendetta on Earth, by Jeff Stein. Part I is here. Part II is here. It describes how the Feld Entertainment company hired former CIA operatives to engage in dirty tricks campaigns against its “enemies,” including an eight year campaign of terror against a solitary and not particularly well-resourced freelance writer. Here are the first paragraphs of this long, detailed, compelling and frightening article:
On a gloomy Veterans Day in 1998, Janice Pottker answered an unexpected knock on the door of her home in Potomac, Md., a woodsy, upscale suburb of Washington. Standing there was a man she’d never seen before, a private detective who introduced himself as Tim Tieff. He told Pottker, a freelance writer married to a senior government official, that he had a discreet message from Charles F. Smith, a former top executive with Feld Entertainment, owner of the Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circuses, Disney Shows on Ice, and other subsidiaries that make it the largest live entertainment company in the world.
Smith wanted to see her, he said.
It had to have been startling news for Pottker, who had written a controversial, 11,000-word piece on the circus and its colorful owners, Washington’s Feld family, for a local business magazine in 1990. Her piece had recounted the Feld family’s Horatio Alger-like story, but it had also exposed some unpleasant secrets about the famously tight-lipped Felds — such as a bitter feud that had broken out between the two chief heirs, and the bisexuality of the family’s patriarch, Irvin Feld. The circus had refused to talk to her ever since.
Ever since, Pottker had been trying, and failing, to get a book off the ground about the circus. But nothing had ever seemed to jell. Promising magazine assignments about the circus’s questionable treatment of its performing children and the care of its animals had been derailed. Congressional and Labor Department interest in the subjects, which she’d spurred, evaporated. Now, out of the blue, a former top Feld official had sent a message saying he would like to meet with her. Would she agree?
In a New York minute. For years, Smith had been the right-hand man of Ken Feld, who had inherited the circus when his entrepreneurial father died in 1984. But Smith had been fired 18 months earlier. Now he was apparently ready to spill the beans.
The next day, Pottker sped off to meet Smith in nearby Chevy Chase. But if she had expectations that the former executive wanted to talk about child acrobats and performing elephants, she was in for an intensely personal shock. Smith was there to talk about what Feld Entertainment had done to her.
Over lunch, Smith recounted a campaign of surveillance and dirty tricks Feld had unleashed on her in the wake of her 1990 magazine piece in the now-defunct Regardie’s magazine. Feld, he said, had hired people to manipulate her whole life over the past eight years. Feld had spent a lot of money on it, he said. He may have even tried to destroy her marriage. In fact, Pottker would eventually learn of a massive dirty tricks operation, involving former CIA officials and operatives, that would target Ringling enemies such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other groups, not just Pottker.
For proof, he told her to go to federal court in Alexandria, Va., and look at a suit he had filed against Ken Feld. In that suit, she would find an affidavit from a man named Clair George with attachments. Those, he told her, are all about you.
And then Smith left.
The next day, Jan Pottker and her husband went to the Colonial-style courthouse in Alexandria and asked for Smith vs. Feld, civil action case number 98-357-A. They opened the files and found the affidavit Smith had described.
“My name is Clair E. George,” it began. “I was the deputy director for operations (DDO) of the Central Intelligence Agency from July 1984 through December 1987 during which time I was responsible for the CIA’s covert operations worldwide.” In 1990, when Pottker’s article was published, George declared, he was “a paid consultant to Feld Entertainment and its affiliates on international issues.”
Pottker may not have known it — she declined to be interviewed for this story — but Clair George had been the CIA’s third-highest ranking official until he was convicted of lying to a congressional committee in 1987. President Bush, the current president’s father, himself a former CIA chief, had pardoned Clair George on Christmas Eve 1992.
Feld, George’s affidavit continued, was “concerned” about Pottker’s article, and so he set out to find out what else she was up to. “Subsequently,” he wrote in the sworn statement, “I obtained an outline for a proposed unauthorized biography of Mr. Feld and his family by Pottker.”
That, according to George’s affidavit, is how it all began. Over the next eight years, “I undertook a series of efforts to find out what Pottker was doing and reported on the results of my work to Mr. Feld. I was paid for this work by Feld Entertainment or its affiliates. I prepared my reports in writing and presented them to Mr. Feld in personal meetings.”
Spying on her, though, was the least of what George admitted. “I was assigned to make arrangements with a publishing house to publish a book by Pottker on another subject to divert her from her proposed book on Mr. Feld,” George revealed. That was “an unauthorized biography of the Mars family, ‘Crisis in Candyland, the Mars Story.'”
Pottker had, in fact, written “Crisis in Candyland,” which was published in 1995 by the tiny and little-known National Press Books. It soon disappeared from the shelves.
“This,” George continued, “had the result of diverting Pottker for a period from further efforts to publish materials that were of concern to Mr. Feld.” At the same time, George said, he’d made arrangements to pay other writers for an “authorized … favorable book concerning Mr. Feld,” to be published should Pottker succeed, despite George’s efforts, to get her own book on the circus published. It turned out to be unnecessary.
The final paragraph of George’s affidavit was a stunner, too. It suggested Feld had set up a special unit, much like the Watergate “plumbers,” to destroy anyone who threatened the image of the circus as wholesome fun for the whole family, not to mention a conscientious custodian of animals and circus children. It was headed by one Richard Froemming, one of Feld’s executive vice presidents, George swore. His main target was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and similar groups that had annoyed Feld with charges that the Ringling Bros.’ elephants were badly cared for.
“As part of my work for Feld Entertainment,” George wrote, “I was also asked to review reports from Richard Froemming and his organizations based on their surveillance of, and efforts to counter, the activities of various animal rights groups. I have discussed these reports in meetings in which Mr. Feld was present.”
The former CIA spy master concluded by stating, “I swear under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.”
You really need to read this if you haven’t, because the “adult entertainment industry” has a lot to gain from derailing and/or capturing feminism, and a lot of resources to work with.
–Ann Bartow
