The Obama Identity

by Edward Klein

  He led me over to the wall and pointed to a photograph of him with Leon Panetta, the current director of the CIA.

  “Higgy, the first time I met Panetta, he told the media afterward that he had looked into my eyes and saw my soul and came away convinced that he could trust me. You don’t know how my FSB colleagues razzed me about that comment! One of them told me, ‘If you had a soul, Yurik, you’d never have made it in the FSB!’ “

  Suddenly, a door opened and Charnofsky, Maligin’s assistant, entered the dojo. He was wearing a white judo outfit, and he bowed toward Maligin.

  “A demonstration in honor of Comrade Higgy,” Maligin said.

  He walked to the middle of the floor and faced Charnofsky.

  “Begin!” he ordered.

  Charnofsky advanced and aimed a tentative kick at Maligin’s head. Maligin disabled him with a powerful kick to the solar plexus. Then he delivered a quick elbow into Charnofsky’s neck and flipped him over his left hip. He left Charnofsky writhing in pain on the floor. The sparring had taken less than ten seconds.

  “Higgy,” Maligin said, “let’s have some green tea. We can discuss the Obama matter.”

  We repaired to the tranquility of a glassed-in solarium. There was a warm, inviting blaze in the fireplace. A young maid poured us each a cup of tea. Maligin opened a small transparent bag overflowing with pills and swallowed a handful.

  “I’m on a vitamin and anti-oxidant program. It slows the aging process.” He gave me a leering wink. “But the thing that really keeps me young is my mistress. You’ve met her. The Countess Gladys of Thurn und Taxis.”

  “Yurik,” I said, trying to hide my surprise, “I’m glad to hear that Countess Gladys is in good health and is being well looked after. But permit me to change the subject. I believe that you have obtained sensitive information on our new president, Barack Obama. I’m puzzled that you haven’t chosen to use any of this information. What are you waiting for?”

  Maligin put down his teacup and walked over to the fireplace. He grabbed two fresh logs and threw them on the fire.

  “Higgy, I am a student of American presidential history,” he said. “Many of your leaders were admirable men. I most admired LBJ, because when he ran for president in 1964, he promised not to send American boys to fight in Vietnam. Then, soon after he was elected, he went to Vietnam and visited the battlefield and he decided that the little yellow bastards had to be exterminated. And when he returned to the White House, he told his staff to send an additional 500,000 American soldiers over there. He said, and I quote him, ‘We’re going to nail the coonskin to wall!’ “

  “What does that have to do with Obama?” I asked, puzzled.

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  He reached into the pockets of his warm-up jacket and removed a small ball-peen hammer, a forged-steel nail, and a glass beaker. Somehow, I knew with absolute certainty that this was the beaker that had been missing when Sydney Michael Green and I broke into the Wisma Tower in downtown Jakarta.

  Maligin opened the beaker and pulled out an object that looked like a small, paper-thin piece of dried skin. I could smell the formaldehyde in which the human tissue had been preserved. He walked over to the fireplace and prepared to nail the human tissue to the stone chimney. One powerful whack and it was attached.

  Maligin turned to me with a menacing smile.

  “I’m nailing Obama’s foreskin to the wall.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Once back in America, I couldn’t shake the image in my mind’s eye of Maligin nailing that foreskin to the wall. It haunted me even during my regular Tuesday tennis lesson.

  “Dammit, Higgy, your racquet preparation’s slow!”

  Samantha Bass, my dark-haired, tough-as-leather, part-Ojibwa Indian tennis coach, was chewing my ass out.

  “Sorry, Sam,” I said. “I guess I’m not concentrating. My mind’s elsewhere.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Sam said. “You’ve got to bear down and keep your eye on the ball. You’re a natural athlete, Higgy, and a strong club player. You can do better.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re late getting set up,” Sam said. “The second you start moving to the ball, you must get your racquet back in position. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try again.”

  It was a brutally hot July afternoon, just fifteen minutes into my tennis lesson, and my Lacoste shirt was already drenched in sweat. Sam was showing no mercy; she was running me ragged on the White House tennis court, pinpointing shots at the baseline, first at my forehand and then my backhand, forcing me to race back and forth across the steamy Har-Tru surface.

  Sam’s next service came whistling over the net, but this time I caught it in the center of my racquet and returned it with a buggy whip forehand.

  “Much better!” Sam said. “Now that ball you hit had some pace!”

  Sam fired another ball over the net, this one to my left, and I brought my Wilson K Factor K-6 racquet back low behind my left knee. I hit the ball on the rise—THWACK!—for a perfect cross-court backhand that Sam couldn’t return.

  “Great job, Higgy!” Sam said. “You just needed to concentrate, that’s all.”

  “Not too bad!” said Russ Slanover, who was standing on the sideline, drinking Cokes and watching the lesson.

  As usual, Russ was wearing an outfit that was totally inappropriate for the season of the year. Despite the ninety-plus-degree heat wave that had gripped Washington for the past few days, he was wearing a Scottish tweed sports jacket over a Fair Isle sweater, a pair of flannel slacks, and Eddie Bauer Gor-Tex boots.

  “Remember what the Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi said,” Russ shouted.

  “What’d he say?” I shouted back.

  “He said to get in the Flow!” Russ said. “When you’re in the Flow, you’re experiencing spontaneous joy, even rapture.”

  I was never happier than when I was playing on the White House Tennis Court. I’d been playing here since the 1980s, when I was frequently called on as a fourth for doubles. I often played with the then-Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and tennis celebrities like Pam Shriver and Chris Evert. Ever since then I’ve had court privileges, which allowed me to reserve my Tuesday afternoon spot on the schedule.

  The Obama Administration had no use for tennis; the new president preferred basketball. So the Obamas had basketball lines painted on the court, and two portable basketball hoops placed at each end of the court. Sam and I had to string up the tennis net each time we had a lesson.

  Using the court had an additional advantage: it gave me an innocent cover for being on the White House grounds, where I could pick up the latest scuttlebutt from the permanent White House staff of stewards, porters, waiters and maids. They were privy to much more than anyone knew.

  “Okay, Higgy,” Sam said. “Time for some short volleys.”

  I moved up and stood a racquet’s length from the net and tried to soften the rockets Sam fired at me. The key was relaxing the grip and allowing a little give when the ball hit the strings.

  “Boss, I need to talk to you,” Russ Slanover shouted. “I just got a call from the Communications Office.”

  “Sam,” I told my coach, “I need a five-minute break.”

  She began picking up tennis balls, while Russ and I walked over to a pair of white wicker chairs and sat down.

  “There’s going to be a health care press conference tomorrow night,” Russ said. “Rambo just called it.”

  “Rambo” was Rahm Emanuel, who as President Obama’s chief of staff had become the most feared person in the White House.

  “Rambo’s been dropping F-bombs all over the place, saying time’s running out to pass the ObamaCare health bill,” Russ said. “So they’ve requested live TV coverage for a prime-time press conference in the East Room. All the networks are going to air it. And it’s solely on health care. Obama wants the bill passed before the August Congressional recess.”


  I wiped my face with a White House embossed towel.

  Russ continued, “Word’s come down from on high that there are to be no questions on anything but health care tomorrow night. But we hear that Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times is eager to ask the President a question about something other than health care.”

  “What does she want to ask?”

  “She wants to ask the President about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.”

  Recently, Henry Louis Gates, the well-known black Harvard professor, had been arrested by a white cop for breaking into his own house, and then being obstreperous with the Cambridge cops.

  Russ Slanover then added, “According to the President’s Secret Service detail, POTUS has been rehearsing how to answer this question in front of his Oval Office mirrors—even though Rambo and his press secretary are keeping Lynn Sweet off the ‘To-Be-Called-Upon-List’ at the press conference.”

  “Doesn’t the president listen to his senior advisers?” I asked.

  Russ finished of his can of Coke and opened another one.

  “The word is he listens to no one,” Russ said. “He says he’s smarter than his advisers. His favorite line to them is, ‘If you’re so smart, how come I’m President and you’re not?’”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Russ,” I said.

  I picked up my racquet and prepared to resume my lesson with Sam. But my mind was already working on a way to protect Barack Obama from himself. The physical activity set me to thinking about other physical activities. A strong forehand made me think of a strong arm, which led to strong-arm tactics…and bingo! I had the perfect solution.

  “Come on, Higs! Concentrate!”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The next evening, as the White House media assembled for the president’s press conference in the East Room, I positioned myself in a seat behind the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet and placed two sumo wrestlers in front of her. I had wrangled press credentials for these 450-pound behemoths under the pretext that they represented Sumo Illustrated, Japan’s largest circulation weekly sports magazine. I was confident that they would obscure Lynn Sweet, making her invisible to the president.

  For most of the press conference, the president stuck to his “To-Be-Called-Upon-List.” But then, near the end, he looked around the room and called out: “Lynn Sweet! Where are you?”

  “I’m here, Mr. President,” came Lynn Sweet’s sweet voice.

  Lynn tried to get up to ask her question. But I had taken a further precaution. I had spread a liberal dose of SuperGlue on her chair. She was literally stuck in her place.

  Barack Obama wouldn’t be deterred; he was determined to talk about the Cambridge cops, no matter what. He was so smart. He kept searching the room for Lynn Sweet. Finally, he saw her hand poking up from behind the hefty shoulders of the sumo wrestlers.

  “Mr. President!…Mr. President!…” she called out.

  Attracted by her mellifluous voice, one of the sumo wrestlers turned around and noticed her predicament. With no effort at all, he reached out one enormous hand, and began to pick up Lynn’s chair with her in it.

  I leaped forward and grabbed the back of the chair. There ensued a mighty tussle between the sumo wrestler and me. Naturally, I lost. As the behemoth raised Lynn Sweet aloft in her chair, she looked like a bride at an Orthodox Jewish wedding. And like the groom, I was dragged along with her. I found myself dangling from one leg, several feet above the heads of the White House Press Corps. I attempted a cheerful, just-doing-my-job smile.

  The President was stunned, to say the least, to see Lynn Sweet floating above the crowd or reporters, with me hanging on for dear life beneath her.

  “John,” he called to me, “you’ll have to wait your turn to ask a question.”

  I finally let go of the chair and landed on Chip Reid, the chief White House correspondent of CBS News. When I got to my feet, I saw the look of shocked dismay on the face of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as Lynn briefly recounted the massive news coverage of Professor Henry Louis Gates’s arrest, and then asked her question.

  “Mr. President, what does this case say to you and to the country about the state of race relations in the United States?”

  “Skip Gates is a friend,” the President began his well-rehearsed answer. “…Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

  Just as Rahm Emmanuel had feared, Barack Obama had made a huge mistake by wading into the highly charged racial atmosphere surrounding the arrest of his friend Henry Louis Gates. His ill-advised comments overshadowed everything he had said during the press conference about his cherished health-care bill. The president’s support from independent voters dropped ten percent in the overnight polls.

  I called Russ Slanover. “I should have done more to stop the president from calling on Lynn Sweet,” I mourned. “Some John the Baptist I turned out to be.”

  “Don’t worry,” Russ said, “the White House has a plan to stanch the bleeding. They’re going to have some sort of a feelgood reconciliation meeting between Professor Gates and the cop who arrested him in Cambridge.”

  “What kind of a meeting?” I asked.

  “They’re calling it a beer summit.”

  I was determined to be a better Baptist this time. I would throw myself on my sword and wade into the river up to my chin if that was what it took to protect President Obama. I schemed with White House security, and by the date of the Beer Summit, we were ready.

  It took place on the patio near the White House Rose Garden and was attended by four men—President Obama, Vice President Biden, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Police Sergeant James Crowley. The White House press pool was roped off about fifty feet from the summiteers—far enough away to prevent reporters from hearing what they said.

  But I had positioned a CIA-trained lip-reader, with a pair of binoculars and a wireless microphone, next to a Secret Service SWAT team sharpshooter on the White House roof. The lip-reader broadcast the conversation wirelessly as it took place.

  The following is an edited transcript of that conversation:

  (The President introduces Vice President Biden to Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley.)

  Biden: (looking at Professor Gates) So, Lieutenant, do you wear your uniform when you teach at Harvard?

  The President: (sighing loudly) Joe, that’s Professor Gates. And he’s a civilian.

  Biden: (chuckling) Oh…. Okay… Do I call you Professor or Lieutenant?

  The President: Joe, there is no Lieutenant. This gentleman over here is Sergeant Crowley. And that man next to you is Professor Henry Louis Gates.

  Biden: (turning to the Sergeant) So, Skip, how did a Cambridge cop like you become a personal friend of the President?

  The President: Joe, Crowley’s not my friend. Not that he couldn’t be my friend if he wanted to be. But it’s Dr. Gates, who’s known as Skip, who’s my friend.

  Biden: That’s confusing. No wonder the wrong man got arrested.

  The President: The wrong man wasn’t arrested. I mean—

  Biden: (interrupting the President) I couldn’t agree more. The number-one problem facing America is a three-letter word: Race. R-A-C-E.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Shortly after the Beer Summit, I received a surprise in the mail. It was a letter from Taitsie, my estranged wife, inviting me to visit her and our son in Newport, Rhode Island, where they were vacationing during the month of August.

  The invitation had come out of the blue and it made me nervous. The last time Taitsie had seen me, I was in the E
.R. recovering from my botched suicide attempt. I had no idea what Taitsie thought of me now. Did she pity me? Did she think I was a coward for trying to end my life? Had she lost all respect for me? Or was this the opening I had been praying for—a chance to win her back?

  These thoughts crowded my mind as I climbed into my 1964 Bentley Continental “Chinese Eye” Fixed Head Coupe and set off north on the New Jersey Turnpike. After a few hours, I stopped for gas at the Vince Lombardi Rest Area. I noticed a plaque dedicated to the legendary Green Bay Packers coach. Under his bronze likeness was his most famous quote:

  WINNING ISN’T EVERYTHING. IT IS THE ONLY THING.

  What exactly was winning?

  In my case, I had won a major victory over my alcoholism. I’d learned a lot about myself, too, not the least of which was why I had been hell to live with until I got sober. I still had obstacles to overcome and battles to win, both professionally with Obama, and personally with Taitsie. And as I climbed back into my old Bentley to resume my journey, I was determined to be victorious on both fronts.

  Of course, some things I couldn’t control. For instance, I didn’t know how I was going to be greeted by Taitsie’s father, former Ambassador Robert “Ducky” Millard, who blamed the CIA and The Deuce for cutting short his career as America’s envoy to the Court of St. James’s. And then I had to consider the Desert Girls. Would they be hanging out in Newport when I arrived?

  At three o’clock that afternoon, I drove into the dusty parking lot across from Bailey’s Beach, the exclusive Newport club located at the intersection of Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive. I grabbed a bag with my bathing trunks and a towel, entered the club, and signed the register as a guest of the Millard family.

  When I emerged from the men’s dressing room, I was met by a scene of giggling children playing by the pool while their mothers flung back martinis.

  “Dad!” Vier shouted when he saw me.

  He rushed over and gave me a hug.