Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  MYSTERY MAN

  Both the spy tunnel and the Bloch investigation were FBI operations, but early on the FBI concluded that the mole was more likely to be a CIA official, so that’s where they focused their efforts.

  For years tips had been coming in from U.S. sources in Russia, describing a spy who had a thing for “exotic dancers,” sometimes liked to be paid in diamonds, and was said to make “dead drops” (leave packages and pick up money) in Nottoway Park in Vienna, Virginia. None of the Russian sources knew the man’s identity—as far as anyone knew at the time, the man had never revealed his real name to his handlers or even told them which intelligence agency he worked for. Apparently he’d never met with his Russian handlers, either. No one even knew what he looked like.

  THE MATRIX

  One of the ways intelligence agencies hunt for spies is to make what is called a “matrix.” They compile a list of all the intelligence secrets that have been betrayed, and then make a list of the people who had access to those secrets. Then, using whatever other clues they have, they try to rule suspects in or out. The FBI mole hunters used just such a matrix to narrow a list of 100 suspects down to seven and then down to just one: a CIA agent named Brian Kelley. They gave him the nickname GRAY DECEIVER.

  Kelley specialized in exposing Soviet “illegals,” spies who do not pose as diplomats and thus have no diplomatic immunity if they are caught. One illegal that Kelley had uncovered was Reino Gikman, the KGB agent who tipped off Felix Bloch. Kelley was a distinguished agent—he’d been awarded five medals for his work at the CIA, including one for the Felix Bloch case. But the FBI was now convinced that he’d been a spy all along. Uncovering Gikman and then warning him about Bloch was the perfect cover—who would ever suspect that a decorated CIA officer would blow his own case?

  Some female cockroaches mate only once and are pregnant for the rest of their lives.

  DIGGING DEEP

  In late 1997 the FBI arranged for Kelley to be given a new assignment: to review the Felix Bloch files to see if any clues had been missed. The real purpose of the assignment was to isolate him and keep him at CIA headquarters, making it easier for FBI mole hunters to keep an eye on him until enough evidence was collected for him to be arrested.

  In the meantime, the FBI placed Kelley on round-the-clock surveillance and secretly searched his home. They also tapped his phone lines, sifted through his garbage, searched his home computer, and planted listening devices all over the house. On one occasion they even tailed him all the way to Niagara Falls, only to lose him near the Canadian border. That suggested that Kelley was “dry cleaning”—taking evasive action to lose anyone who might be following him, so he could slip over the border into Canada, presumably to meet with his Russian handlers.

  ONE TOUGH COOKIE

  It was then that the mole hunters realized just how difficult it was going to be to catch Kelley red-handed. Sure, they knew about the dry cleaning incident at the border, and they also knew that Kelley shopped at a mall where SVR operatives had been seen in the past (the KGB was renamed the SVR after the collapse of the Soviet Union). But after all the bugging, searching, and garbage sifting, the only incriminating piece of physical evidence they were able to find was a single hand-drawn map of nearby Nottoway Park, with various times written at different locations on the map. To the mole hunters it could only be one thing: a map of various dead drops, complete with a schedule of different drop-off times. With the exception of the map, though, Kelley seemed to be an expert at erasing nearly every trace of his double life.

  In fact, to the untrained eye, he didn’t seem like a spy at all.

  Who was the mole? Covertly flip to Part II on page 342.

  Tough guy: A 100-pound cougar can take down an 800-pound elk.

  MOLES AND MICE

  Who says you have to be a spy to talk like one? Here’s a look at some of the expressions real spies use when they’re on the job. (Don’t tell anyone.)

  • Black-bag job: Sneaking into a home or office and searching it, leaving no evidence that you were there.

  • Floater: A waiter, bellhop, or other low-level employee who occasionally freelances for a spy agency when needed.

  • Dog drag: A device which, when a spy drags it behind him, releases a scent to throw bloodhounds off his trail.

  • L pill: A suicide pill. (“L” stands for lethal.)

  • Notional agent: A non-existent secret agent who is identified as the source of secret information in order to protect the real source.

  • Sheep dipping: Obscuring the true identity or origin of individuals and equipment so they can be sent out on secret missions.

  • Dry clean: To make sudden U-turns or other evasive driving maneuvers to spot and hopefully lose enemy agents who are tailing you.

  • Operation slammer: The U.S. program of interviewing convicted spies in prison to learn their motives and prevent spying in the future.

  • Foots: Members of surveillance teams who ride as passengers in pursuit cars and then follow suspects on foot after they leave their cars.

  • Wet affairs: A Russian term for spy operations that involve killing people (“wet” refers to blood).

  • Walk the cat: Retrace the steps of a “blown” secret agent or operation in an attempt to figure out what went wrong.

  • Piano: A spy radio. The person who operates it is the “pianist.”

  • M.I.C.E. The four most common reasons people turn against their own country and spy for a foreign power: 1) Money; 2) Ideology; 3) Compromise (they’ve been compromised by incriminating information); 4) Ego.

  Eat ’em before they spoil: 65% of American candy brands are over 50 years old.

  THE POLITICALLY CORRECT QUIZ #1

  Here are some real-life examples of “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” behavior. How sensitive are you? Guess which answer is the “correct” one. Answers are on page 515.

  1. In 1994 Great Britain’s Gateway supermarket chain changed some of the baked goods sold in its stores out of fear they might offend customers. What kind of baked goods and why?

  a) Hot cross buns. It removed the “Christian” crosses—buns without crosses “better reflect the cultural and religious diversity of modern Britain,” said a spokesperson.

  b) Gingerbread men. It renamed them gingerbread persons “to promote gender parity.”

  c) Bear claws. It dropped the “bear.” Now they’re just “claws.” “The imagery of an amputated bear claw was rather demeaning to bears,” said a spokesperson.

  2. After a 10-year battle, in 2004 commissioners in Jefferson County, Texas, voted to change the name of a street that some community members found offensive. Which street?

  a) Liberal Lane. (Jefferson County is 70 percent Republican).

  b) Sissy Street, named in honor of county founder Jefferson Davis Sissy. “I don’t care if he died at the Alamo,” local resident Shelby Jones told reporters. “I’m tired of living on Sissy Street.”

  c) Jap Road. Ironically, the street was named in honor of Yasvo Mayumi, a Japanese immigrant and farmer who introduced rice farming to the area in the early 1900s.

  3. In 1999 a former employee of Play It Again Sports in Sydney, Nova Scotia, filed a complaint alleging that her employer “created a poisoned environment” by giving her a demeaning nickname. What was the nickname?

  a) Hot Pants. (The woman resented the sexual innuendo.)

  b) Kemosabe. (The woman is a member of an Indian tribe.)

  c) Big Girl. (The woman was sensitive about her weight.)

  Ain’t it grand? Rachmaninoff could cover 12 white keys on the piano with one hand.

  4. In 2004 a student named Yvan Tessier was denied admission to a college course in Canada’s University of New Brunswick. What was the course, and why was he denied admission?

  a) History of the Animal Rights Movement. The class had a “cruelty free” dress code, and Tessier refused to leave his leather shoes outside in the hallway.

&nbs
p; b) History of Sex Discrimination. Tessier is a man, and the class admits only women. “He has no context for understanding the subject. Besides, as a typical male, he probably just wants to gather information to use against women,” said the professor, Sarah Pearsson.

  c) Immersion English. The course requires that only English be spoken in the classroom and Tessier, who is blind, has a guide dog that responds only to French commands.

  5. In the spring of 2004 a Lexington, Kentucky, high school student was barred from going to her own prom because she was wearing a dress the school considered “inappropriate.” What was wrong with the dress?

  a) Instead of sequins, it was decorated with condoms.

  b) It was styled to look like a Confederate flag.

  c) It was an old-fashioned hoop skirt with a petticoat. (Too traditional). “Why even have a feminist movement if women are going to dress like we never won the right to vote?” one school official told reporters.

  6. In 2005 Oklahoma State Senator Frank Shurden proposed lifting the ban on cockfighting in his state by making the following reform to the blood sport:

  a) Put tiny boxing gloves on the roosters.

  b) Use radio-controlled robot roosters instead of real roosters.

  c) Have them wear “uniforms” of protective padding similar to those worn by professional football players.

  * * *

  “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

  —Ernestine Ulmer

  The good news: You’re 96% likely to die a natural death. The bad news: you’re still gonna die.

  ROYAL PURPLE

  Today clothing comes in a wide variety of colors and shades, but that wasn’t always the case. Read on to find out how people first made purple clothes.

  THE LAND OF THE PURPLE

  According to an ancient Greek legend, the god Hercules was walking his dog on a beach one day when he suddenly noticed that the dog’s snout had turned brilliantly purple. Upon investigating, Hercules discovered that the dog had been eating some sea snails. He gathered some of the snails himself, crushed them, spread the juice on some cloth—and was amazed by the vibrant color. So he dyed an entire robe with the color and sent it to the king of Canaan, declaring that the brilliant purple should be the color of his royal house. The king agreed.

  Fable or not, purple dye was first used in Canaan (modern-day Lebanon). Around 1800 B.C., people in the port city of Tyre discovered that certain glands of the murex—a small, spiral-shelled mollusk—when extracted, produced a purple substance that could be used to dye cloth. Humans had been making dyes for thousands of years, but no one had never seen a color like this. The Canaanites started making the dye in their colonies all around the Mediterranean Sea, beginning the world’s first chemical dye industry. The color became known as “Tyrian purple” and was so famous that it and the murex “fish” are mentioned in many ancient texts, including the Torah and the Bible. And “Canaan” was later known as Phoenicia—which means “the land of the purple” in Greek.

  PURPLE GOLD

  The dyeing process: Gather several thousand murex, crack them open, use a sharp tool to extract the glands and veins, mix well, and spread the substance on a piece of silk or linen. Place the fabric in the sun, and in a few days it will turn purple. Sounds simple, but it took more than 12,000 murex to make just 1.4 grams of dye—less than a teaspoonful! At its peak, a pound of dyed cloth cost ten to twenty times its weight in gold.

  Only the extremely wealthy could afford such a luxury, which meant royalty—that’s how the color got the name “royal purple.” In fact, another name for being born of royal blood was to be “born in the purple.”

  All sturgeon caught in British waters are legally the property of the Queen.

  Some purple extravagances:

  • Legend says that in the first century B.C., Cleopatra sailed to battle in a ship with a huge purple sail to show off her wealth.

  • In the first century A.D., Roman emperor Nero made it a law that only emperors could wear royal purple. The punishment for violating the law: death. (Some historians believe the law was enacted to protect the shellfish, which were already in danger of extinction due to aggressive harvesting for the dye industry.)

  A NEW PURPLE

  The mollusk-based dye industry changed hands several times as various empires—Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman—took control of the lands around the Mediterranean. Yet purple remained the color of royal houses until the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. Popes and high church officials had also worn royal purple through the ages, but in 1464 Pope Paul II made a less expensive dye, known as “cardinal’s purple,” the new official color of the church. That brought an end to the Mediterranean murex dye industry—which had survived for over 2,500 years.

  The new purple was made from another very ancient process, one that used insects. Small, pea-sized kermes bugs infest a type of oak tree common in southern Europe and the Middle East. The insects were gathered from the trees, killed by exposure to heat (sometimes by the steam of boiling vinegar), dried and crushed into a powder that could be mixed with water, and applied to cloth. Cardinal’s purple, which was actually more scarlet than purple, became the luxury dye of the Middle Ages, just as royal purple before it. Did it last? Yes: Catholic cardinals still wear the color today.

  BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

  In 1856, 17-year-old student William H. Perkin was given an assignment at the Royal College of Chemistry in London: produce a synthetic form of quinine, which is naturally produced in the bark of the cinchona tree in South America (quinine was used by Europeans to fight malaria). One experiment, with by-products of coal tar and aniline, led to a purple sludge. Perkin liked the color so much that he dyed some silk with it, and was so impressed with the result that he quit school and opened a dye factory.

  In ancient Peru, chili peppers were used as money.

  Perkin called his color “mauve” (the French name for the purple mallow flower), but marketed it as “Tyrian purple.” This new dye was affordable enough for the masses, and it quickly became hugely popular in Europe. Just as royal purple had marked the birth of the chemical dye industry 3,000 years earlier, mauve began the synthetic dye industry, which would go on to replace virtually all handmade dyes. The new color even got a nod from royalty: Queen Victoria wore a mauve silk robe to the Royal Exhibition of London in 1862.

  UNCLE JOHN’S FAVORITE PURPLE

  There were other ways of making purple (or nearly purple) dye in ancient times, but they didn’t produce the brilliant color that the murex dye did. One was known as Orchil dye, also known as “poor man’s purple” because it used a cheaper base and was much easier to make. The important ingredient in Orchil dye was lichen—mossy fungi that grow on rocks and tree trunks. Another vital ingredient was uric acid. Where did ancient people get uric acid? From urine. Recipes from the time instructed how much was needed to get the desired color. Here’s one from the Plictho de L’Arte de Tintori, from the 1540s:

  Take one pound of the Orselle of the Levant, very clean; moisten it with a little urine; add to this sal-ammoniac, sal-gemmae, and saltpetre, of each two ounces; pound them well, mix them together, and let them remain so for 12 days, stirring them twice a day; and then to keep the herb constantly moist, add a little urine, and let it remain eight days longer, continuing to stir it; afterwards add a pound and a half of pot-ash well pounded, and a pint and a half of stale urine. Let it remain eight days longer, stirring as usual; after which you add the same quantity of urine, and at the expiration of five or six days, two drachms of arsenic; it will then be fit for use.

  * * *

  “Time’s fun when you’re having flies.”

  —Kermit the Frog

  Don’t blink! A 30-minute cartoon may contain over 18,000 separate drawings.

  UNLIKELY BEST SELLERS

  Recipe for a best seller: author writes great book, a publisher buys it, book is hyped and promoted, and sells a lot of copies. Except that it do
esn’t always happen that way. Take these books, for example.

  THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK

  It was 1968. Nineteen-year-old William Powell was peripherally involved in the “counterculture” movement, smoking marijuana and attending anti-war protests. But he longed to do something really subversive, something to promote violence and chaos as a vehicle for social change. So, using military manuals and other sources that he got from the public library, he began compiling instructions for such activities as how to build pipe bombs, how to pick locks, how to manufacture LSD, and how to counterfeit money. He interlaced the “recipes” with anti-government rantings, put it all in book form, and under the pseudonym “Jolly Roger,” shopped The Anarchist Cookbook to publishers. One (but only one) was interested: Lyle Stuart, who published it, unedited, in 1970.

  By 1976 The Anarchist Cookbook had sold more than 800,000 copies…but Powell had changed. Radically. He’d graduated college, married, embraced religion, and was teaching high school. And although many of the “recipes” were inaccurate and didn’t work, Powell now considered The Anarchist Cookbook the dangerous creation of an irresponsible youth, so he asked Lyle Stuart to take the book out of print. But Stuart refused, citing a loophole in Powell’s original contract: Powell had refused royalties, so the copyright was taken out in the name of the publisher, not the writer, as is the usual practice. In other words, Lyle Stuart owned the book. In 1990 Stuart sold the rights to another publisher, Barricade Books. The book remains in print and has sold more than two million copies to date.

  THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

  In 1990 Robert James Waller, a University of Northern Iowa economics professor, spent 14 days writing a short romantic novel about a lonely housewife who engages in a brief love affair with a photographer who comes to Madison County, Iowa, to photograph covered bridges. Waller printed a few copies and sent them as gifts to a handful of friends and family, one of whom liked it so much that he sent it to a friend of his: a literary agent. A few weeks later, Waller received a surprise phone call from the agent. “Robert,” he said, “where have you been all my life?” Warner Books published it in 1992.