WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES

Ok, I'll write it here, for any interested reader to read.

Just before we left for Buenos Aires, who should visit me in my office? Philip and Elizabeth. I'd bet my life that that had been the most normal, straightforward, transparent meeting we ever had. Unlike the last times, they sought my unvarnished advice. No shadowy, hidden agenda. Just as I was leaving town.

The topic? Sit down for this one. They wanted my counsel about their kids, genuinely wanted it. They were thinking of pulling up stakes and returning to Moscow. Ok, ok, that, too, was disarming and a little Kafkaesque. There was no evasion, they just out and out asked me - what did I think would happen if the four of them simply left for Russia, including Paige and Henry. They confirmed that Henry knew nothing of his parents' 'work'.

It took me a week to tell Alice about this meeting. Then again, we were just about to fly south as it was. They seemed to accept my advice, that it would be hard for both Paige and especially Henry to adjust. Just the language barrier alone was daunting. But in all my years of ministry, I'd never had a session with parents like that.

I left them with the reality, "that in a few years it won't be your decision, it will be theirs." Between that meeting and the call from Agent Beeman in 1987, I simply assumed the Jennings went ahead with their plan to return to the Soviet Union coincident with our move to South America.

I mean, the info I had early on when in Argentina was that Paige had left the church. I assumed that meant she was in the USSR. I should stress that I thought they went back to the USSR in 1984, the same year we went to Argentina. My oh my, was I mistaken. Dale Woods filled me in on our return to the USA. That was then.

But, gentle reader, let me transition back to the elephant on these pages.

I now strongly suspect that The Jennings had something to do with my surprise appointment as Executive Director of the Buenos Aires office of the WCC. There. I wrote it. Didn't even backspace over it, as a way of avoiding putting wild speculation into a keyboard.

I thought not one whit again about the Jennings until the last two years in Buenos Aires, which for me was 1993-'94. Ok, ok, like I wrote there had been that phone call from the FBI in 1987. But that one was out of the blue, and Agent Beeman had not explicitly said that Philip and Elizabeth were still (then) in the USA. So - the way that our Argentinian sojourn happened was this:

DALE WOODS, ORACLE AT DELPHI

My buddy Dale Woods announced in June 1984 that he was resigning as assistant pastor to Reed Street Church. He and I had worked so well together, he'd been on hand to cover for me pastorally when I was off doing my ministry overseas. Heck, he'd even gerrymandered things in 1979 so as to get me the job to begin with!

He'd been the first to suggest that The Jennings were not what they seemed, which I was to learn he'd been right about. In spades. I'd just never included him in on the expanding and bizarre drama which unfolded. We had differing pastoral confidences with differing folk.

Yet soon after Dale had resigned, but not yet left Reed Street Church, we went for our usual beginning of the week coffee to centre ourselves on what the week presented. I told him I was going to miss him, and it was going to be hard to find a half-time pastor to match the skills and commitment he had brought. He had a keen intellect and a passion for peace. He was also my friend.

And Dale then proved himself to be my Oracle at Delphi. "The Dean at Wesleyan called me into his office the other day asking about you. He'd got a call from the WCC in Geneva."

What!? Talk about the first of a linked-series of out of the blue stuff. What had that been all about? "Well, it was from the Youth Desk of the WCC there. Apparently, you're a known quantity to them. They wanted to know - get this - would you be good for a WCC administrative position in - wait for it - Buenos Aires? As in Argentina!"

Dale then told me that the Dean, not knowing me other than through my association with Dale, was asked to give a reference. Dale said, "So I told him you'd be perfect, and he passed that on. I told him about the Peace Group network here in the States. I told him about your East Africa work. I didn't tell him that you can't read gas gauges to save your life. Literally."

A week later, I was flying to Buenos Aires to be interviewed. Executive Director of the World Council of Churches office in Argentina. It was surreal. Supervising a program staff of 20, as well as 10 support staff. And it had all happened so fast. By September of 1984, Alice, Claire Louise and I had moved into our apartment in central Buenos Aires, in the Floresta neighbourhood.

Without getting into it too much, that Fall of 1984 (or 'Spring' in the Southern Hemisphere) it had been clear that I was out of my league as Executive Director. It began with my Spanish which was poor. There had been many other qualified candidates in the city and elsewhere in South America who were competent for the job, and none of them were a gringo from America. That was my introduction to the competing interests within the WCC there. And I was at the crunch point, taking a position I probably had no right to have.

Suffice it to say that I worked hard on my Spanish (ridding myself of Ecuadorisms), and I worked doubly so, cultivating the cooperation of those otherwise qualified locals who had been passed over. Managing the disparate interest groups which comprised the World Council was a challenge. But I was good at that part of it. Being an outsider I could do and say things many there could not.

Once again, the narrative you're reading is not about that. But suffice it to say that during a downtime in the winter of 1992 ('summer' in North America), once the writing was on the wall that our time south of the Equator was coming to a close, I exercised my access to otherwise confidential employment files. I mean, I was the Executive Director! I tried to piece together how I'd come into the view of the WCC in Geneva, and why their 'Youth Desk' had had a disproportionate sway in a key hiring there in South America. Tellingly, it was not until my interview that they'd known anything about my East African famine & rights work.

Dale Woods was, in 1992, an untenured faculty member at Wesleyan, and I wrote him asking to tell me everything he knew, and hadn't told me. About my hiring. Two weeks later his return letter arrived. He told me not to sweat it, he had heard I was doing good work in Buenos Aires, and that people had appreciated the way I'd 'lowered the temperature' of all those now years-old issues locals may have had about me. Maybe it was because I'd been an outsider, that I could bring together all the local WCC interest groups. He pointed to the importance of me preaching as a guest speaker in local churches by April of 1985 with a very good command of Rioplatense Spanish. While they were not a member of the WCC, I'd even once done the homily at the Catholic Cathedral. Dale told me to put all that stuff behind me.

DALE'S OBSESSION

In 1992, it was the first that I'd heard that Dale himself had got occupied with the events I'd missed in late 1987, when the Jennings' family, a family at Reed Street Church, had been outed as spies. They'd not left in 1984. They'd fled over three years later, in late 1987. Full-on Russian spies, not the ones they told me they'd been.

So - back to the main narrative. I'd almost forgotten: in December 1987 I'd got a call at my Buenos Aires office from no less than that FBI neighbour-guy back in Washington. Special Agent Stan Beeman. The Reagan-conservative neighbour of the Jennings who'd mooched meals from them, leaving me and Alice to wonder - what the heck was going on? A false-family of embedded, non-violent industrial espionage Russians, posing as a typical American family - but living next door to the FBI!

My oh my.

BEEMAN'S CALL

I'd maintained the habit of logging all the calls I took as Executive Director down there at the WCC. Even though Beeman's call was not WCC business, I'd logged it. We talked for 12 minutes. Give or take. I'd noted "Jennings" in the margin. I wrote even more crowdedly, "Was I aware of anything to do with the Jennings's which might be of interest to the FBI?"

I know my memory of that call is not perfect. Alice and I, much later, both recalled it, before leaving Argentina as well as after when the full impact of December 1987 presented itself to us back here in the U.S.

Alice remembered my accounting of Beeman's call completely differently, although she had not been on the call. In those 12 minutes, Agent Beeman grilled me about the Jennings. I thought that this might be straightforward, but I also thought at the time that I was, once again, being led where I knew not what. Typical for any conversation about the Jennings, every time someone wanted to 'unpack' what it was about them, it was both clear and murky at the same time.

So my memory is that I answered Agent Beeman about as obliquely as I could, that I don't talk about pastoral confidences. I apologized to him and told him I couldn't help. At the twelfth minute, we hung up. Alice said I told her something different that evening. She said it had made her wonder if Agent Beeman was checking to see if his connection to the Jennings, as 'their handler,' as she put it, had leaked out.

One thing Alice and I agreed upon, two really. First was that there we were, five thousand miles south of D.C., and we were *still* being presented with conundrums about The Jennings. And the second, poor Paige.