After Irvin Feld died, Pottker described how Ken mysteriously turned on his sister, Karen, a vivacious syndicated Washington society columnist who had only turned to journalism after finding any meaningful role in the company blocked, first by her father, then her brother. In fact, Karen Feld told Pottker, Ken tried to evict her from the Georgetown house their father had provided her, but never given her title to. Ken seized her BMW, another gift from her father. Much of this was known to the small, business community of Washington, which operates in the shadow of the federal government and national media. But Pottker's riveting piece was nevertheless the talk, if not of the town, then at least Duke's, the now long gone Connecticut Avenue steak house where the capital's local money men hung out.

At the headquarters of the circus, however, Ken Feld was in a towering rage. Pottker's "revelation" that his father was gay "outraged him," Pottker would discover in a deposition given by Allen Bloom for Smith's suit against Feld. Bloom had been taken under Irvin Feld's wing as a child in 1947, and would eventually become marketing and publicity director for the circus. In the summer of 1990 he watched the younger Feld twist himself into a red-faced, neck-throbbing, full-throated primal scream against Pottker, "that cunt." Feld, said Bloom, could not get over the article. He read it over and over. He vowed total war.

And he knew just the man to do it: Clair George, the disgraced, suave, former CIA chief of covert operations, whom he had originally hired to work on "international" duties, including the acquisition of a Chinese panda for a circus act. Now Feld had a new mission for the career dirty trickster: Find out what Jan Pottker is up to.

Get dirt on her, he said. Ruin her professionally ... and why not personally, too? Perhaps they could recruit "a bodybuilder type" to seduce her and wreck her marriage, he told his sidekick, vice-president Charles Smith, according to depositions that would later be filed in court. Nothing's out of bounds. Spread rumors. Throw dirt. Report back to me personally on your progress right away, Feld was reported as saying. And for as long as it takes.

In went the clowns.

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The paper trail of crime and punishment in Washington usually begins in the basement of Superior Court for the District of Columbia, where the clerk's office is. When I request civil case number 99-008068, the clerk rolls out a cart piled with 15 bulging volumes, about 7,500 pages in all. I unload each 20 pound volume one by one. They are all labeled the same: Pottker v. Feld, et al. It will take six days to read through them just once, taking notes and making copies. After that I go back again and again, transfixed by the plot that unfolds in the files.

As a whole, the filings, motions, rulings, depositions, affidavits and exhibits evoke "The Spanish Prisoner," David Mamet's 1997 portrait of deception and paranoia. In stomach-turning detail, the documents describe how Ken Feld, Charles Smith, Claire George and a mysterious cabal of still-unknown dirty tricksters with close connections to the CIA were deployed to act as Jan Pottker's personal gremlins, without her ever having a clue about why so many things in her life were going wrong.

All this because Pottker, a pixie-haired, 50-ish wife and mother of two daughters, had written a magazine article that included a passage on Irvin Feld's well-known sexual proclivities and his reportedly negligible job as a father. It might have worked, too, and Pottker would have gone through life just feeling particularly unlucky, as many writers do. But then, the plot started to unravel.

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