RED-BAITED IN BUENOS AIRES

Even if we'd known about the upset to do with the Jennings in 1987, our focus was elsewhere anyway. We were 5,000 miles away. Argentina itself was moving away from the Alfonsin reforms. Pro-Peronist, Carlos Menem, took advantage of the worsening economy and hyper-inflation to destabilize the Alfonsin government, ending up with demonstrations in the streets, which Menem spun as riots.

By 1989 Menem became the new president, and the World Council of Churches was now on a watch-list. By 1994, Alice and I and the two girls returned to the States, which is my way of saying that our focus in that period had not been on Falls Church, Alexandria, Reed Street Church, or even what Dale Woods was obsessing about and eventually started to send to us.

Even Agent Beeman's call never really alerted us.

Particularly in 1992, the WCC in Argentina became heavily red-baited. My name came into it during a sermon in one of the largest Buenos Aires Protestant Evangelical Churches. The preacher there, a known supporter of Menem, claimed that I, myself, had been selected for my position by the KGB. Give me a break! I thought it part of the government's red-baiting. He said he could prove it, although he never did. I once tried calling him, but he would not return the message. My retort to him would have been this: communism didn't exist in Russia, not in 1992. The Berlin Wall had fallen. It wasn't even terribly creative to red-bait in this now, post-USSR climate.

What would the old Soviet Union's KGB want with me anyway? It made no sense.

Yet, eight years previous, my friend Dale Woods pieced together that the Youth Desk of the Geneva WCC office had inquired about me with Wesleyan Seminary. The next thing I knew I was being flown down to Argentina to interview for a position I was now finished with.

It was still not clear how all that had transpired. So, I looked for how that Geneva 'Youth Desk' had 'discovered' me. During my 1992 deep dive in the WCC office hiring archives, I discovered letters from that Youth Desk - under the signatures of Russian Orthodox postulants, volunteers at the WCC in Geneva. Russian interns assigned to work there. Heck, even I suspected that it had been true that the old Soviet Union were not shy about meddling in Latin America, but never thought it possible that that would include me. Even my venerated Father Rutilio Grande had said in his Ecuadoran days, that he cared not the ideology of the Russians, but that, 'My enemy's enemy is my friend'.

Had I just uncovered proof of that Buenos Aires Evangelical preacher's claims about me? Back in 1984, had the KGB somehow engineered a hiring within the WCC in South America? It made sense, but (like always) it made no sense.

So let's get into it. The narrative now shifts to me, Alice and the girls back in Washington D.C. What I was to find out was both at the same time a flight of fancy as well as eminently plausible.

Typical Jennings stuff. Both and. Either or. Neither nor. All of the above. None of the above. All at the same time. And if that were true, it became clear what kind of monstrous stuff circulated for Paige in the home in which she grew.

DALE MORE OBSESSED THAN ME

Don't let me lose track of one of the main questions for me - namely, where is Paige?

It was now the middle of 1994. Alice and I had saved enough for me to be without work for about a year, as long as we watched our pennies and stayed with her parents in their guest house on their property. I was either going to immediately get another pastorate, or get my Ph.D. like Dale.

Frankly, after Argentina, I needed to decompress. Our girls were 10 and 7 and the in-laws lived within easy walking distance of a good elementary school. So we set up there, rent free. Built-in babysitters. Alice got a parttime receptionist job at a church - she was the new Jackie at some other congregation. Me, I walked the kids to and from school, and spent the rest of my time writing, organizing a Ph.D. proposal. I bought a computer and came up to speed with e-mail and browsers and the Internet.

Man oh man, did I wish I'd had that 15 years previous!

But I'm not to lose track. The Jennings. Where is Paige?

Start with Henry. We know about him. Adding strangeness on to strangeness, Agent Beeman, they had said, had de facto adopted the, then, 17 year old boy back in early 1988. Hearing that, all Alice would say was: "See!"

Why would Henry need adopting? Well, fasten your seatbelt. Dale had documented most of it.

I think Alice and I had pieced it together five years ago while still down south, but here it was easier to confirm with the time to write, and by writing actually think it through with the words in front of you.

THE SKINNY

Philip and Elizabeth Jennings had not been engaged in non-violent, industrial espionage. Nor had they left with the kids in 1984. They had been deep cover, full blown Soviet agents residing as a normal family in the USA. For about 25 years part of what the press had called in 1988, 'the illegals' program.

Yes you read that right. More important, I am positive I've typed that right. What I had stumbled upon with Paige Jennings's revelations back in 1983 had been far, far, far, far worse that Russian nationals residing in D.C. to collect what amounted to industrial intelligence. Such low-grade 'spying', if you could call it that, was said also to warn Latin Americans, like Father Rivas, of impending US-inspired action by local forces in the long dirty war.

I mean, even that had been on the edge. Me, I felt conned. Sort of. I'd been presented with exactly the story I would need to justify keeping quiet about them, as well as the struggles poor Paige had endured.

Were they monsters? Consider this. Their kids were props, part of their cover. At the very least, that's what Henry had been. Elizabeth herself had come into my office uninvited, seeking counsel as to how to deal with them. Had that been to pacify me, with a false presentation of vulnerability? Then there was that night Philip had shown up out of the church's shadows ready to beat me up because of my interference with his family.

I've not talked with Henry, he'd be in his mid-20s by now. Seeking out Henry would entail running into Agent Beeman, so I'm told. I had my doubts about him. When Alice and I kibitz about it, we're still not sure what Beeman being close to that family meant. Higher authorities must trust Beeman, because he'd never been arrested and he was a father-substitute to Henry.

And. Where is Paige?

No one seems to know. She, too, disappeared in late 1987. Did she accompany her parents? Dale Woods' obsession with the Jennings never solved that one. (Coincidentally, that had been the same month as Beeman's call to me down in Buenos Aires.) Dale had newspaper clippings upon newspaper clippings, and had spent countless hours in his spare time tracking down anyone connected to the Jennings. From Reed Street Church and from the now closed travel agency. To Paige's network of friends at university.

According to what Dale had assembled, The Jennings, both of them, were implicated in dozens of killings over the years. Murders. Dale's information claimed that the Jennings' world had come apart after some sort of failed operation in Chicago, of all places. The hair stood on the back of my neck when Dale said that even the Russian Orthodox in America had been implicated. (Youth desk in Geneva!) Dale had talked with former employees of the Dupont Circle Travel Agency, some of whom claimed to know of illegal activity being plotted from the Jennings' office in the back. The employees who claimed that would neither be more specific, nor allow their names to be used.

It got to the point where the FBI had visited the Dean's office at Wesleyan Seminary, and then the Dean had requested that Dale stop this private research. He'd only done it a few times, but Dale had made the mistake of occasionally using Wesleyan resources to compile his information. It had never impacted his work on faculty at Wesleyan, but the seminary did not countenance being seen to be interfering with the FBI.

So it was that what I saw from Dale's work had a sudden stop to it. It was incomplete.

Meaning, that there was frustratingly little information about Paige. She had moved on from Reed Street Church soon after our departure for Argentina (1984), but Zach had kept periodic contact with her as she pursued her university career. One or two of the other girls from Zach's young adults' group had been partiers with Paige at university. Those two girls were the best source of what may have happened with Paige in December 1987, when her parents fled back to Russia.

And all they could say was that one day she was there, the next day she was not.

It is time to leave all of that behind, and start writing of the present day. Nineteen ninety-six.

THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT

These mountain roads were as daunting as amazing. British Columbia had managed to put a four lane highway over-top the Coast Mountains from their Okanagan Valley in the interior of the Province, down to the coast and Vancouver.

Me, I was in a rental coming from an interview at a progressive-Christian residential education centre in that gorgeous, interior valley. On that magnificent lake! That would be a grand setting to raise our girls.

It's 1996, and time to catch up on what had happened since returning from South America. It's also time to remember the focus of this particular narrative, as I do not wish to duplicate what I have written at length elsewhere.

First, though, the Ph.D. My parents' inheritance came through. The family dynamics of my parents' death are best not recounted here. I'll get too diverted from the intended narrative.

Suffice it to say that flying into Vancouver two weeks previous, I had violated the first rule of computing. The eleventh commandment, "Thou Shalt Back Up." Which I thought I had; in my briefcase I carried that little portable harddrive unit, an Iomega zip-drive with removable media. I'd had one night up at the university before heading to the interior - meeting some people to do with an interview at the university church congregation, then it was supposed to be the drive in the rental and the interview at the Christian residential education centre.

But I'd had to delay my trip upcountry because both the laptop failed, and the Iomega started its "click of death" destroying my sole thesis back-up. There was no other copy.

That was the first night in the university residence room. Long story short, the university had a sophisticated computer store attached to their bookstore, and they promised me 24-hour recovery of the laptop's harddrive's contents, and if unrecoverable, they'd simply reload the O.S. and programs and I could load my back-up copy of the thesis from the… ok, you get the idea.

"The click of death," meant that the read/write head would slam down on the portable media, destroying it. As it had done with mine. So, I had to leave the whole thing at the university store before heading upcountry, for a 50-50 chance of recovery of the last two years of my work. I was a day late for my interview. What a zoo. On the phone back to Alice, I cried at the schmozzle, seeing my post-grad career, and these jobs in Canada, go down the drain.