Friday, May 16, 2008
How Ringling Bros. minions tormented a freelance writer for eight years.
Aug 31, 2001 | In August, I left a message for Jan Pottker at her home in Potomac, Md. She called back the next day to politely say she'd think it over, but doubted she would want to talk.
"Burned once, you know, it's not my fault," she said. "Burned twice, it is my fault."
It's not difficult to understand why Pottker declined to be interviewed. For eight years, she had been subjected to a bizarre ordeal. A gregarious, prematurely graying man in his late 30s posing as a helpful book packager and promoter had led her on a wild goose chase. While reporting on her every movement, and even thoughts, he steered her toward other projects, feeding her disinformation and generally doing everything in his power to prevent her from publishing anything about Ringling Bros.
The life of a freelance writer can inspire paranoia even at the best of times. Story assignments inexplicably fall through, editors change their minds. But the surreal campaign of dirty tricks endlessly played on Jan Pottker by Ringling Bros. chief Ken Feld and his minions would be enough to persuade even the most stoic freelancer that their career path was being plotted by Franz Kafka.
The excruciating details of Pottker's travails are annotated in almost 10,000 pages of pretrial complaints, motions, affidavits and depositions filed in the bowels of Superior Court for the District of Columbia. The evidence gathered so far evokes other unfortunate milestones in the annals of corporate espionage, going back to General Motors' infamous campaign against the young activist Ralph Nader 40 years ago through the mysterious death of Karen Silkwood on an dark Oklahoma highway in 1974.
Pottker's personal tormentor was an obscure, innocuous-looking, 36-year-old freelance writer and sometime publisher with uncommonly close ties to high-ranking former officials of the CIA. His name was Robert Eringer.
"I met Robert Eringer in the late 1980s," Clair George said in a deposition on file in Superior Court. "He called me when I still worked for the government, introduced himself as a book agent/publisher and asked me if I would be willing to do a biography." (George presumably meant "autobiography.")
A woman who knew him then recalled, "He was very charming. Almost charismatic, I'd say." Her understanding was that Eringer "worked for the CIA, definitely," although she says she couldn't prove it.
At the time, Clair George's 35-year career with the CIA was coming to an end. The chief of covert operations was under investigation for lying to a congressional committee probing the White House's secret, arms-for-hostages, Iran-contra caper. Eventually he would be convicted of perjury, and although President Bush gave him a Christmas Eve pardon in 1992, George was left deeply in debt from attorneys' fees alone, according to a CIA officer who once worked for him.
George and Eringer met at the Georgetown Inn in 1988 and became fast friends, according to both men's depositions. It's not clear why the older man took to Eringer, about 25 years younger. Perhaps the patrician-looking ex-spymaster admired Eringer's friendly interview with legendary CIA dirty trickster Miles Copeland, published in a 1985 issue of Rolling Stone. "Nobody knows more about changing governments, by force or otherwise, than me," Copeland crowed. Copeland also said he admired Richard Helms, another legendary CIA man who'd held George's job 20 years earlier before leaping to the top rung, for famously declaring he'd wear a misdemeanor perjury conviction for lying to Congress "like a badge of honor."
Of all the strange figures that pop up in this murky tale, Robert Eringer may be the most mystifying. Eringer grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of a noted illustrator for Walt Disney who has now retired to Monaco. Despite attending four colleges without getting a degree, he became a fairly prolific author. In addition to a few magazine articles, mostly on espionage-related subjects, he published several nonfiction books, including "The Global Manipulators" (Pentacle, Bristol, England, 1980), an investigation of the so-called Bilderberg Group, a publicity-shy confederacy of top Western industrialists and officials; "Strike for Freedom: Lech Walesa and Polish Solidarity" (Dodd, Mead, 1982); and "The Conspiracy Peddlers" (1981), which one reviewer called an investigation of "researchers beavering away on ... activities of the super-rich and the intelligence community." That, of course, fit Jan Pottker to a T.
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