Ana Montes: The Most Important Spy You’ve Never Heard Of
How a U.S. intelligence analyst ended up spying for Cuba for 17 years—all while surrounded by family members who also worked for the FBI:
“Montes must have seemed a godsend. She was a leftist with a soft spot for bullied nations. She was bilingual and had dazzled her DOJ supervisors with her ambition and smarts. But most important, she had top-secret security clearance and was on the inside. ‘I hadn’t thought about actually doing anything until I was propositioned,’ Montes would later admit to investigators. The Cubans, she revealed, ‘tried to appeal to my conviction that what I was doing was right.'”
Her Husband Had Taken Their Young Daughter To Iran. She Was Determined To Get The Child Back.
A case of international parental kidnapping, and a mother’s fight to get her daughter back:
“To make the plan work, Homaune had to take on a new persona in conversations with her ex-husband. She tried to be calm, helpful and understanding, and mailed him just enough cash, medicine and clothes to keep him interested in a more lucrative rendezvous. She stopped haranguing and screaming, even when her husband threatened to send her daughter home in a ‘box’ or to sell her on the black market, statements he would later admit he made.
“After the most intense calls, Homaune sobbed or threw up. But she refused to stop calling Iran; a key part of the plan involved being in constant contact, wearing him down, taking his demands seriously and convincing him that they were still friends, no matter what.”
A Nightmare in Real Life: Va. Teen’s Kidnapping Tale in the Philippines
A mother and son from Virginia are kidnapped by terrorists while visiting the Philippines. The story of their escape:
“Every 15 minutes, all night long, the men would shine a bright light inside, checking on the captives.
“Because the militants wouldn’t use names — they called Kevin ‘the boy’ and Gerfa ‘the woman’ or ‘the infidel’ — and never revealed their own, the captives began assigning names to them. Gerfa chose names of parasites that make people sick. ‘The first one I called Enterobius vermicularis,’ — pinworm.’ Another, Falciparum, or malaria. Another was Entamoebas, which cause things like dysentery.
“But her cousin had trouble pronouncing the Latin, so they switched to simpler names. One man had a beard, so Kevin called him Hagrid. Others became Skunk, Tom and Jerry, Pancake and Band-Aid.”
Since 1979, Brian Murtagh Has Fought to Keep Convicted Murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in Prison
Another look at the “Fatal Vision” murder case, through the eyes of its prosecutor:
“When Errol Morris’s ‘A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald’ came out in September, Brian Murtagh sat in the study of the Oakton home he shares with Margaret, his wife of 43 years, and read it cover to cover, all 500-plus pages. He found it credulous, manipulative, a Swiss cheese of strategic omissions. To assert this, he typed out a rebuttal — a legal brief, double-spaced, 14 pages long, with Roman numerals and alphanumerically labeled paragraphs. It is not light reading. Morris, Murtagh writes, ‘doesn’t explain how 60 pieces of the pajama top, including the ripped-off pocket bearing a contact stain in Colette’s blood, could be found in the master bedroom, as well as 30 seam threads. … ‘ Murtagh didn’t file this odd document anywhere. He didn’t release it to the media. It was mostly for himself.
“Murtagh sounds exactly like a lawyer but carries himself exactly like a butler. You want to call him Jeeves. He’s punctilious, a bit formal, often greeting people with a courtly little bow. He views this whole case with an air of bemused exasperation, puzzled by its refusal to die. He knows his ‘brief’ would mostly confuse people. Only two people on Earth, he says, are really in a position to understand it — to understand what a flimsy, paltry, bankrupt case for innocence Errol Morris makes.”
Afghan Women Caught Between Modernity, Tradition
A teen girl who’s being forced into marriage attempts suicide:
“Just before she leapt from her roof into the streets of Kabul, Farima thought of the wedding that would never happen and the man she would never marry. Her fiance would be pleased to see her die, she later recalled thinking. It would offer relief to them both.
“Farima, 17, had resisted her engagement to Zabiullah since it was ordained by her grandfather when she was 9. In post-Taliban Kabul, where she walked to school and dreamed of becoming a doctor, she still clawed against a fate dictated by ritual.
“After 11 years of Western intervention in Afghanistan, a woman’s right to study and work had long since been codified by the U.S.-backed government. Modernity had crept into Afghanistan’s capital, Farima thought, but not far enough to save her from a forced marriage to a man she despised.”
My Son is Schizophrenic. The ‘Reforms’ That I Worked for Have Worsened His Life
A former state legislator considers how the laws he helped pass ultimately harmed his mentally ill son:
“If you were to encounter my son, Tim, a tall, gaunt man in ragged clothes, on a San Francisco street, you might step away from him. His clothes, his dark unshaven face and his wild curly hair stamp him as the stereotype of the chronically mentally ill street person.
“People are afraid of what they see when they glance at Tim. Policymakers pass ordinances to keep people who look like him at arm’s length. But when you look just a little more closely, what you find is a young man with a sly smile, quick wit and an inquisitive mind who — when he’s healthy — bears a striking resemblance to the youthful Muhammad Ali.
“Tim is homeless. But when he was a toddler, my colleagues in the Connecticut state legislature couldn’t get enough of cuddling him. Yet it’s the policies of my generation of policymakers that put that formerly adorable toddler — now a troubled 6-foot-5 adult — on the street. And unless something changes, the policies of today’s generation of policymakers will keep him there.”
Life of a Salesman: Selling Success, When the American Dream is Downsized
A pool salesman struggles to cope with a weak economy, which has forced him to rethink the meaning of the American Dream:
“‘You can’t be too safe or too smart about money with the economy now,’ Tyler said. ‘I want to save up and make the smart investments.’
“‘You’ll make them,’ Frank said, nodding.
“‘I want to have that absolute stability,’ Tyler said.
“‘You’ll have it.’
“They stayed out on the deck until the sun disappeared behind the townhouses. Frank went to bed just before midnight and awoke at 4. He always had been a sound sleeper, but lately he had been putting himself to bed with Tylenol PM and stirring awake to questions in the middle of the night. When had stability become the goal in America? What kind of dream was that? And in the economy of 2012, was it even attainable?”
Transgender at Five
An examination of one family’s experience with a child who has gender dysphoria:
“As a teacher, Stephen knew how cruel kids could be. He imagined his child walking into the social battlefield that is school, insisting she was a boy when under her clothing, she wasn’t.
What about bathrooms? P.E.? The prom? How would all that go?
Despite his resistance, Stephen promised his wife that he would pay closer attention to Kathryn’s behavior and really listen for her ‘I am a boy’ anthem.
It didn’t take long.
‘We were in the car; I was driving,’ Stephen told me.
Kathryn was in the back and grabbed a book off the seat.
‘Daddy, I’m going to read you a story, okay?’ Kathryn said, opening a random book and pretending to read. ‘It’s about a little boy who was born. But he was born like a girl.’
Stephen nearly slammed the brakes, then listened as the story unfolded about how unhappy the little boy was.
‘Okay. I’m listening, Jean,’ he said after he got home.”
Mitt Romney’s Prep School Classmates Recall Pranks, But Also Troubling Incidents
The candidate’s former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day:
“A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
“‘It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,’ said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was ‘terrified,’ he said. ‘What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.'”
Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death
The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency:
“It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters she wrote home, dating from her arrival in Saigon to the week before her death.
“The letters offer a glimpse into the life of a young woman supposedly working for the State Department as she launched her career and looked for love amid Vietnam’s escalating violence.
“‘Reading these letters,’ said Warren, 65, a retired airline mechanic, who hadn’t looked at them since he was a kid, ‘it’s like I got to know her all over again.’
“August 6 1964: Dear Mother, Dad & Warren , I think I’m going to really enjoy working for the State Dept. Security-wise we do have to be careful — but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese Police all over the city.“