Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy

by David Gatewood (ed)

  “Things Can Only Get Better.”

  That was the song I was playing over and over on my way north.

  Things can only get better. I absolutely believed it, and I couldn’t wait to find out.

  * * *

  Exactly one week after graduation I was sitting in my first college class. American History to 1857. Summer school. Going to class during the break was something I’d chosen because I was anxious to get my new life started and I had nothing else to do that summer. I had no friends, and the anticipation of waiting for the fall semester would’ve been too much.

  My classes were boring, but at least there was air-conditioning, and because I was enrolled I got “free” use of the rec center.

  Through the university’s job placement office I got a part-time job working in the warehouse of a carpet distributor, driving a forklift and loading long rolls of carpet on trucks for delivery. I was also playing basketball every minute when I wasn’t working or in class. My plan was to try to walk on and get a spot on the university’s basketball team, but that plan was mired in a milky white plaster of pipe dreams and harsh reality. The probability of me being picked up, without a scholarship, at an NCAA Division I university was very close to zero. I didn’t know anyone in the university program… and I had handicaps.

  I was white, only six-foot-three, and I’d only been playing basketball seriously for two years. Still, I was pretty good, and could hold my own in pickup games at the university rec center—even when college stars from that school and other big universities were playing.

  But being good wasn’t good enough to make that kind of team. So I sought out other options.

  The athletic director at my old high school had just been hired as the head basketball coach at a junior college nearby, and he’d guaranteed me a tryout for his team. So options were there. And my plan was in place. I would attend summer classes at the university and try to get some notice from the coaches there, and at the same time I was assured of at least a tryout at the junior college in the fall if nothing panned out with the bigger school. The junior college often fed players to the bigger university after a year or two of learning and maturity. Lord knows I needed those things. I was still a beginner. But I was a beginner with promise… I hoped.

  So that was my life. I worked, played basketball, dreamed, and went to classes. Not always in that order.

  Anyway, that was my plan for the summer of ’85.

  * * *

  The first weekend after summer classes started, there was an orientation pool party for incoming freshmen. It was held at the rec center pool, and it would be my first opportunity to really meet some new people.

  I wasn’t very good at that. Meeting people. In fact, I was notoriously bad at it. I was not outgoing, and being around large groups of people frustrated me.

  Not that I was a loner or anything like that.

  Girls seemed to like me, at least in high school they did, so I felt confident that if I’d just show up some of them might talk to me, and that was a nice thought. But overall I wasn’t very social. I’m still the kind of guy who likes the idea of parties more than actually being there. I’m that way now, but I was even worse back then.

  So during the run-up to the party that weekend, I was a complete emotional wreck. I bought some new clothes and worried about how I’d look. I had no plans to swim, so I didn’t bring a suit, and I didn’t figure there’d be booze to loosen me up. Still, I wanted to look comfortable and approachable at the party.

  I overthought everything. I panicked a few times.

  Like I said, I was a wreck.

  * * *

  The party was well under way when I arrived, and at the beginning, all my fears seemed to be in the process of being realized.

  No booze.

  That was the biggest fear, and I was right about that one. And I didn’t know anyone there; I recognized not one person from any of my classes. Second fear realized. And most of the people there already knew people, or were gathered in groups, or were playing water polo in the pool. So I got some lemonade and went and stood by a wall and watched. Expecting to suffer through the night in misery.

  But that’s not what happened.

  An hour after I arrived, I saw a girl handing out name tags—those stick-on kind that say “My Name Is” and then you write your name under them with a marker. She was working her way around the party, ignoring everyone in the pool, but chatting and laughing with small groups of friends who sipped lemonade and ate cookies.

  She was beautiful. Stunning, actually. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Hispanic, but very American in her dress and carriage.

  Then she got to me.

  “Hey there, lonely stranger,” she said.

  She smiled, and I melted.

  “Hey.”

  “What’s your name? Or should I put ‘Lone Wolf’ on this tag?”

  “It’s Matthew, but Lone Wolf sounds cool,” I said.

  “I’ll put Matthew, okay? Lone Wolf will be my private name for you.”

  I blushed. My head dropped. And then I looked up and tried to smile. I shrugged.

  “Okay.”

  “Geez,” she said as she wrote on the tag, “you really are shy.”

  “Not really. Just awkward I guess. Uncomfortable. I don’t know anyone here.”

  She stepped forward and pressed the tag to my chest.

  “You know me.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Well,” she said, thrusting out her hand, “I’m Lillian.”

  I shook her hand and tried to smile. “Hello, Lillian, I’m Matt.”

  “But I can call you Lone Wolf?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lillian took a step to walk away, and then she stopped and turned back toward me.

  “Listen, Wolfie… I… Maybe you think you look awkward and no one wants to talk to you, but that’s not it. It’s not it at all.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Because it seems like that’s it.” I smiled, trying to make her see that I wasn’t feeling self-pity. That somehow this conversation was just part of the joke.

  “You think you’re the wallflower, and everyone thinks you look awkward or out of place.”

  “Right.”

  “But in reality, the girls here think you’re mysterious, and the boys think you’re up to something… which is also mysterious.”

  “Lone Wolf, right?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  I looked into her eyes and figured that this was probably my only chance to make a friend here, so why not take a shot?

  “Maybe I’m just here to talk to you?” I said.

  It was a weak shot, but that’s what came out.

  Lillian smiled and turned to leave again. She looked over her shoulder and smiled again.

  “Mission accomplished, Lone Wolf. Mission accomplished.”

  * * *

  I tried not to make it look too obvious, but I hardly took my eyes off her over the next hour. She made her way around the party, handing out name tags and chatting with guests.

  When she was finished, she talked for a few minutes with an older man. Mid-thirties. Glasses. I figured he was the organizer of this event. Maybe he was a new professor, or maybe he worked in admissions. Then she took her leftover name tags and her marker and dropped them off at a table still stacked high with orientation materials and class schedules.

  Then she turned and walked straight toward me.

  And believe me, I watched her walk.

  Guys tried to stop her, to hit on her, but she just smiled and waved and kept walking. When she’d look up and catch me staring, I’d try to look like I was reading a fall class schedule, but I didn’t do a good job of it.

  And then she was there. Standing in front of me.

  “You wanna talk?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Or if you’re busy, I suppose I could just go home. It’s getting late anyway.”

  “Let’s talk.”

  We
sat on a cinderblock wall facing out over a grassy decline that led down to a parking area lighted here and there by high vapor lights. We talked, and most of the time she swung her feet and looked down at them, or she glanced up into a moonless black sky scattered liberally with stars. She asked me about my life and if I had a girlfriend. She asked me about basketball, and politics, and religion too. She deflected most of my questions about her, though. Most, but not all.

  Here’s what I learned about Lillian that night…

  She was single, but engaged. She didn’t seem (to me) to be excited or even happy about that fact. But I was a hopeful suitor by that point. Maybe my interpretation was skewed.

  She was from Nicaragua originally, but had received most of her schooling in El Paso. She had only the barest trace of an accent.

  She was entering into her senior year come fall, and would be graduating with a biology degree in a little less than a year.

  She told me her family was forced from Nicaragua in ’79 when the Sandinistas took over, and that she was still entertaining thoughts of becoming a doctor and returning to her homeland someday.

  It was getting late. By this time I was smitten with Lillian, and I saw the opportunity to get to know her better slipping through my fingers. So I went for it.

  “I get the feeling,” I said, “that you aren’t completely committed to marrying… whoever he is that you claim to be marrying. And maybe I’m wrong about that, but I feel like you and I have connected a little bit and that it would be wrong of me not to tell you that.”

  She paused for a good while, looking at her feet as she kicked the cinderblocks with her heels.

  “I like you,” she said. She jumped down from the wall and stood on the grass at the top of the hill. “Maybe… maybe in another life.” Then she started walking away.

  I was stunned.

  “Lillian!” I shouted after her. Not really loud, but enough that she heard me and stopped. She turned her head. Not all the way, but I could see her face in profile, with the garish blue-white light of the parking lot silhouetting her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Give me your phone number?”

  “In another life, Matthew. Good to meet you.”

  And then she walked away.

  I didn’t know it then, and I still find it hard to believe now, but that was my first glimpse of the Octopus. Not the whole thing. Just one tentacle, or one tip passing silently through the silt. But a chance meeting with a beautiful girl would be an event that would change my life forever.

  Chapter Two

  A strange event happened in the fall of 1975. In an event known as “the First Halloween Massacre,” the entire Executive Branch of the United States government was turned upside down. They called it a “shakeup.” It started when two men, Donald Rumsfeld (then the White House Chief of Staff for President Ford) and Dick Cheney (Assistant to President Ford) talked their boss into scrambling and reordering the power structures of his office.

  Why the shakeup?

  Less than two months earlier, there’d been two attempts on President Ford’s life. Two assassination attempts in less than three weeks. Only seventeen days apart, two women had been allowed to pierce the cordon around the president—close enough to fire pistols at him. The second attempt, a month before the First Halloween Massacre, failed only because the gunwoman missed.

  She was really close, so how could she have missed?

  Investigators found that the sights on her gun had been adjusted just enough that the bullet missed Ford by inches.

  After the second attempt on his life, Ford was convinced that even after the assassination of Kennedy and the resulting heightened security, the president is never safe if someone wants him dead bad enough.

  From this distance, and maybe with a jaundiced eye, it seems to me that no one really wanted Ford dead. If they’d wanted him dead, he’d have been dead. It seems that they only wanted to change his mind about something.

  Immediately after the dual attempts on his life, Ford was open to suggestions that he reorganize his administration.

  With the approval of their boss, Rumsfeld and Cheney initiated a dark plan that would lead to the accomplishment of several major tactical goals for the powers that had once been openly known as “The Octopus.” What followed was called the First Halloween Massacre:

  George H. W. Bush was named Director of the CIA.

  The entire administration was reorganized—an act that would guarantee (as subsequent events ultimately proved) that Ford would not be re-elected in 1976.

  Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense.

  Cheney became the new White House Chief of Staff.

  This series of events, seen during their own time, looked like just another shakeup in the machinery of government. But with hindsight, a bigger picture takes shape. The first massacre ensured that future events would allow the Octopus to (at the right time) privatize the intelligence infrastructure under the authority of the secret powers—and under the direct control of George H. W. Bush.

  * * *

  The Octopus has been around a very long time. Not the cephalopod. Those have been around awhile too. I’m talking about the shadow intelligence infrastructure called, by some, “The Octopus.”

  That term—the Octopus—goes back to the Rockefellers and Standard Oil. Rockefeller used every machination and device, criminal and legitimate, to gain control of every level and step of oil production and distribution, from getting the black gold out of the ground, to its final purchase by the end user. During that critical time in the establishment of the industrial economy, this gave Rockefeller unparalleled power over every facet of life for a country shifting from what had been a primarily agrarian economy into an industrial one.

  Later, when Standard Oil was broken up into pieces by the government for monopolistic activities, the Octopus morphed and changed (as octopi do), diversifying and extending its arms into and through eight major economic groups. You know the names. Morgan, Rockefeller, DuPont, Kuhn Loeb, Mellon, et cetera. Using the mechanisms created by Standard Oil, these groups solidified their control over the production of steel and oil, over utilities, manufacturing, transportation, communications, industrial farming and banking.

  Eventually, power brokers realized that they didn’t need to directly own the means of production in order to control the world. They learned, in the years leading up to and throughout World War I, that by controlling the intelligence infrastructure in the major developed countries, the arms of the Octopus could be made to reach everywhere.

  * * *

  The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was unofficially formed in the lead-up to World War II and became the official arm of U.S. intelligence in the summer of 1942. The OSS became the central agency of American intelligence and, almost immediately, began exercising control over the flow of money, goods (including drugs), and information all over the world. From the beginning, the OSS was privately controlled by the bankers (the original Octopus); most specifically, that control was exercised by a man named Prescott Bush, the father of George H. W. Bush (the nation’s forty-first president) and the grandfather of George W. Bush (the nation’s forty-third president) and Jeb Bush (the former governor of Florida).

  After the war, the OSS became the Central Intelligence Agency, and now we get to see how the term “the Octopus” applies today.

  What does all of this have to do with a lonely basketball wannabe in the hinterlands of West Texas?

  Nothing. And a lot.

  * * *

  After the First Halloween Massacre, wherein Bush Sr. took control of the Central Intelligence Agency, the plan was put in place for the Octopus to disguise itself once and for all. (You’ll note that the powers behind the Octopus tend to do their dirtiest deeds in October. I don’t know why. It’s just something I noticed, and maybe you have, too. A book could be written on “October surprises,” but that story is for another day.)

  Four years after the First Halloween Massacre
, the second trigger was pulled. Again on Halloween, this time in 1979, Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence under Jimmy Carter (who’d been promised only one term as president), terminated over eight hundred field agents of the CIA. Those field agents, whose last true boss had been George H. W. Bush, were then immediately hired by shell companies all over the world as “intelligence advisors.”

  The shadow CIA was in place. The Octopus had gone underground, and from that point on, the “front CIA” (the official agency known by those three letters, based in Langley, Virginia) would have official deniability no matter what happened in the world. But the shadow CIA (the Octopus) could act anywhere and at any time, with no accountability to legislatures, politicians, or presidents. The Octopus was still controlled by the major power brokers—the bankers and industrialists who controlled the economies of the world—but now they were free to roam a world that, for them, held no borders. They could overthrow governments, assassinate leaders, foment revolutions, install puppet leaders… and they could finance it all without begging at the feet of an elected Congress.

  And there was always one surefire way to raise the money needed to manipulate the world.

  The shadow CIA, the Octopus, could—and would—secretly control the flow of drugs. From the Golden Triangle, to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, to the coca crops of Central and South America, wherever there are drug cartels and wherever there is drug money, you will find the Octopus. Another hint for you amateur historians or newshounds (check it out, you’ll find it to be true): wherever the intelligence hotspot is in the world at any particular time in history, that is where the drugs are being grown and manufactured.

  * * *

  I said that you probably would never see an octopus in the wild unless you went hunting for it. This isn’t altogether true. It’s true for most people, but for some few, the Octopus is found accidentally. Stumbled upon by adventurers or just tripped over by the unlucky.