"the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).”

Over the last four years, researching this story, I’ve fallen down rabbit holes that some would define as textbook apophenia.

What if my father, Larry D. Jennings, supplied Edwin Wilson with drilling mud, and created a cover for the shipment of the mud-packed C-4 explosives to Libya from Houston?

This is an outrageous and conspiratorial theory, despite the fact that we lived in Houston at the time Wilson shipped the explosives, my father’s boss had been an information officer at Aberdeen Proving Ground during the Vietnam war and my maternal grandfather, RJ Duran, was a drilling fluids engineer — a “mud man” with Loffland Brothers, in Tulsa, for more than 25 years… his memoir is titled Diary of a Mud Man…

During one of many sessions using “Libya” plus a combination of words browsing the Reagan Presidential Library archive, I discovered Jerry D. Jennings.

Jerry D. Jennings is on NSC distribution lists for classified Libya documents across numerous Reagan Library “WHORM” withdrawal sheets from February of 1982. Jerry was accused of leaking Carter debate materials to the Reagan campaign, known as “Debategate.” He had a background that straddled FBI counterterrorism, CIA connections, and campaign operations across multiple administrations.

My father never mentioned Robert James Woolsey Jr. growing up. The future Director of Central Intelligence (1993-1995), was born September 21, 1941, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, eight days after my father. Both graduated from high school in 1959, Woolsey from Tulsa Central High School, the crosstown rival to my father’s Edison High School.

Bob Daly retired as Director of Human Resources for the Scott Paper Company. This was the same director who “recognized Larry’s potential,” in the late 60’s and moved Jennings from Laguna Beach to Philadelphia.

Daly trained at Marine Base Quantico and Annapolis, home to our military intelligence infrastructure. Bob passed away in 2007 and was by my father’s side all the way to the end of his life.

Darrough Diamond, my father’s boss at Arby’s from 1977 to 1979, was a commissioned Second Lieutenant, Information Officer of the U.S. Army Ordnance Center and School at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

George Plimpton was trained by the Army as a demolitions expert in Louisiana before he was shipped to Italy, where he drove a tank during and after WWII.

Felix Grucci Sr. developed mock atomic bomb tests for the Defense Department for use in military training. The family had been mimicking atomic bombs and booby traps since the 1950s for the Pentagon.

My father was the Grucci’s ad-hoc PR man from 1979 through 1983, an operation with classified government contracts, traveling with them to Monte Carlo, and handling their crisis communications after the 1983 explosion on Long Island. By the time my father knew them, 60% of their annual revenue came from DOD contracts for explosive simulators and training devices.

In 1980, my parents brought me to Washington, D.C., for the Soccer Bowl at RFK Stadium. We stayed at the Washington Hilton. There were events surrounding the game: a private tour of the White House, Stallone promoting the film Victory. The Kissinger photo is from this event. Dr. Kissinger was Chairman of the NASL’s Board of Governors, from 1977.

This is the same hotel where, six months later, John Hinckley Jr. would shoot President Reagan.

On March 31, 1943, the musical Oklahoma! opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway. Lynn Riggs was allowed leave from his Signal Corps post at Wright Field in Ohio, making training films, to see the premiere.

Thirty eight years later, March 31, 1981: Roy Richards, founder of the Southwire Corporation, sent a confidential letter to Vice President Bush requesting an audience with Salah El-Haddad, Qaddafi’s brother-in-law…the letter at the center of this story.

The aforementioned St. James Theatre on Broadway shares its name with the St. James Hotel in Claremore, the hotel where Lynn Riggs’s Aunt Mary (the basis for Aunt Eller) ran the kitchen, and one of the most indelible tales in American pop culture was born.

Operation El Dorado Canyon was the name for the airstrike ordered by President Reagan against Libya in 1986.

The car we were in during the 1988 New Year’s Day accident was a 1983 Cadillac El Dorado.

Richard Rodgers, the composer who adapted Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma! with Oscar Hammerstein II is no relation to my second cousin, Dr. Richard Rodgers, an ER doctor at St. John’s Hospital in Tulsa.

Dr. Rodgers was also the family genealogist who connected with me in 2018. We met in person in 2022. He showed me all of his files and prepared thumb drives full of documents and keepsakes. He passed away in October 2023.

My father ran a vintage cowboy boots store in Santa Fe, from 2004 to 2009, called “Cowboy Legends.” His business card featured a picture of Gene Autry.

Gene Autry stayed at the Midway Rooms in Sapulpa in the 1920’s and early in 1930 while working as a telegrapher for the Frisco Railroad. The Midway Rooms was the boarding house run by my Great Aunt, Doll Woods. During that time, Autry became involved with Lillian Whitwell, a relative of Doll’s, also living at the Midway.

Nine months later, Lillian had a baby girl, Shirley Maxine Whitwell, November 14, 1930. Gene Autry was Shirley’s real father. Lillian told her husband Johnny, serving time for bootlegging, that she was leaving with Gene and the baby.

Johnny threatened to kill everyone from prison.

Lillian stayed in Sapulpa. Autry went to California alone and became a star, and my father put Gene Autry’s face on his business card, as some sort of wink to a private legacy.

Shirley passed away in 1963.

In 2019, Ali Stroker won the Tony for playing Ado Annie in a wheelchair. She lost the use of her legs at age 2 from a car accident.

Willie Woods, my great-grandma and the real-life basis for Ado Annie, lost the ability to walk, and used a wheelchair, due to an injury from a motor-vehicle accident. The wreck happened as she was driving herself home from her sister Lillie Ada’s 60th wedding anniversary party.

Willie died by suicide four years later.

On October 9, 2001, Elaine Collett sued Libya in federal court in Washington for her husband’s death. Her husband, Alec Collett, a British Journalist, was abducted by a terrorist organization funded by Libya.

Her lawyer, John McDermott, worked at the DC office of Hall Estill, a firm headquartered

in…Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In 2002, building evidence for her case, McDermott filed a FOIA request at the Reagan Library. The title of the FOIA is “Alec Collett Murder and Libyan Involvement.”

The documents that define the relationship my dad found himself inside - the Richards letter and the shun directive - were declassified on June 1, 2007.

The name of the woman driving drunk when we were hit on New Year’s Eve was Kathryn Ann Booth.

This past week, assembling my sources, citations and court records, I discovered a Kathryn C. Booth represented by Atlanta attorney Robert G. Fierer. Different middle initial…different woman.

Robert Fierer defended Larry Flynt, Karl Koecher (a Czech intelligence officer who penetrated the CIA), and many other notable clients. He surrendered his Georgia law license in October 1997 after federal guilty pleas to tax evasion and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Of course, I can’t ignore the similarity between Fierer and Ferrier - Frank Ferrier - my friend killed by Kathy Booth.

The irony of apophenia.

Two women raised my family in Claremore, Oklahoma: Mary and her daughter Willie Thompson. Lynn Riggs turned them into Aunt Eller and Ado Annie. Riggs wrote the play Green Grow the Lilacs in 1930, set in Native American Territory before Oklahoma statehood.

Willie’s daughter Delores married Willard Jennings, a lead and zinc miner, in Claremore, February 5, 1939. Their son Larry Dean was born September 13, 1941, in Picher, Oklahoma, a town that no longer exists.

In 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein took Riggs’ play and turned it into Oklahoma! It opened on Broadway March 31st and ran for 2,212 performances.

The following year, Private Willard Jennings was killed in action, somewhere in Italy. Young Jennings left Picher with his mother, and moved to his grandmother Willie’s rooming house in Tulsa.

Riggs used Willie as a muse across several of his plays. Stories from her famous rooming house, where she led games of bridge and entertained a steady stream of Tulsa’s blue collar class, are legion.

After graduating from Northeastern State in Tahlequah, and marriage, Jennings moved with my mother to Laguna Beach, CA. He surfed every beach south of Venice for a few years, while my mom taught 5th and 6th grade.

Jennings used the career services office at UCLA to land a sales job with Scott Paper Co. His territories were Orange and LA counties. Leno LaBianca, a Manson family victim, was one his clients.

His sales impressed executives and Jennings was moved across the country to work at the Scott Paper HQ in Philadelphia in the late 60’s. He was quickly promoted to handling sales for the New Jersey and New York territories, after taking executive classes at Wharton, provided by his employers.

Muammar Qaddafi took over Libya, in a bloodless coup, in 1969.

Libyan sponsorship of militant terrorist groups: the PLO, the IRA, European factions, Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal, ran continuously from 1973.

Qadaffi nationalized the oil industry, and began to institute various philosophies, outlined in his “Green Book” published in 1975.

My father left Scott Paper, moved to Atlanta, and took a job leading marketing for Six Flags Over Georgia. My first home was a trailer at the amusement park.

Jennings was lured away in 1974 to open an office in Tampa Bay, FL for the celebrated Atlanta advertising agency McDonald & Little. He ran the accounts for McDonald’s fast food and the Rowdies, NASL professional soccer team. This advertising, public relations and marketing would become the envy of team owners and other professional sports leagues across the country.

My first car accident happened here, on Roebling Rd., at age 3.

In 1976, former CIA officer Edwin Wilson went to work for Qaddafi after leaving a Naval Intelligence program called Task Force 157. He set up bomb making facilities in Tripoli, Benghazi and Tobruk. His factories made devices out of attaché cases, ashtrays, coat hangers and rocks.

That same year, we moved to Houston so Jennings could open another satellite office for McDonald & Little. We stayed in our River Oaks home until the end of 1977.

In October 1977, twenty tons of C-4 plastic explosives left Houston Intercontinental Airport for Tripoli in barrels labeled as drilling mud. The barrels cleared customs as routine oilfield cargo. (My grandfather, R.J. Duran, was a drilling fluids engineer at Loffland Brothers for twenty-five years. His unpublished memoir is titled “Diary of a Mud Man.”)

In 1978 and 1979, Billy Carter, the younger brother of President Carter, made multiple trips to Tripoli, took a $220,000 loan from the Libyan government, and escorted Libyan officials around the United States. He was eventually forced to register as a Foreign Agent.

Other Atlanta real estate brokers, Georgia state senators, and business figures facilitated Libyan contacts throughout the late Carter years.

In December 1979, a mob burned the American embassy in Tripoli, and on December 29 the United States designated Libya a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The embassy in Tripoli was closed on May 2, 1980.

After a short time in Houston and two years in Pittsburgh, where my sister was born, we moved back to Atlanta in 1979. The move to Atlanta was spawned by the launch of my father and Jim Epstein’s ad agency, Jennings & Epstein.

Jim Libby, my father’s accountant, and Carter “Chip” Tate, his attorney, both had offices in the midtown Colony Square complex…the same complex where the Carter Presidential Transition team had kept their offices.

Jennings & Epstein opened their Atlanta office at 400 Colony Square.

The Rowdies played the Moscow Dynamo indoors at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg (now the Salvador Dali museum) in February 1979. My father arranged for George Plimpton to play goalkeeper for the Rowdies and write about the game.

That July, we drove from our hotel in Manhattan to Plimpton’s Bastille Day party at his home in Wainscott, on Long Island.

A month later, my father traveled with Plimpton to Monte Carlo, where the Grucci’s won the International Fireworks Competition. People Magazine photographed Plimpton and my father examining firework shells, shirtless.

Col. Chuck Scott, one of the 66 hostages taken by Iran in 1979, was released in January 1981. Scott lived outside Atlanta.

Jennings, working with Chiefs General Manager Terry Hanson, arranged for the Colonel’s public reveal from captivity at an Atlanta Chiefs indoor soccer match. The Colonel and his family were brought to the Omni and held backstage in complete secrecy.

Col. Scott walked with the color guard, under a spotlight, to center field, as the National Anthem played. The announcer welcomed Col. Scott home, and the crowd of 25,000 erupted into a sustained 10 minute standing ovation. The event was covered by national news media and became a public relations coup.

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. Vice President George H.W. Bush became acting President as Reagan underwent emergency surgery.

On March 31, 1981, Roy Richards, the founder and President of National-Southwire, wrote to Vice President George H.W. Bush proposing a meeting with Salah El-Haddad, Qaddafi’s brother-in-law, while El-Haddad was in the country between April 12 and 17. The day after Reagan’s assassination attempt.

Richards’ letter explained how Libya had awarded a contract to Southwire, valued at $120 million dollars, for an aluminum smelter to be built in Zwara. The meeting between Bush and Haddad was expressed as an effort to ease tensions between the two countries.

Two weeks later, on April 13, Jennings was invited to a suite at the Peachtree Plaza hotel by his accountant, Jim Libby. Libby introduced Jennings to Chap Chandler, a Ret. Marine Colonel and the Executive Vice President of National-Southwire.

Chandler had been tasked by Libya’s Foreign Minister, Ahmed Shahati, to find a public relations consultant. Shahati and Chandler’s idea was to use public relations to create a tenable channel of commerce between the two countries, and not doubt clear the path for construction to begin on the smelter. The PR contract was being “shopped” in the States by Haddad.

Chandler introduced my father to Haddad, who in turn offered my father a fee of $100,000, an amount corroborated by two separate sources, to create a public relations strategy for Qadaffi. A trip to Libya was planned. Departure was scheduled to happen within a week.

In a 2019 email, my cousin, Dr. Richard Rodgers (no relation to Richard Rodgers, of Oklahoma fame) recounted how, a few days after my dad discovered his passport had expired, an individual from the State Department delivered my dad a new document.

On April 15, Richard Allen, the National Security Adviser, upon knowledge and review of Richards’ letter, instructed the Vice President to “shun all contact” with Haddad and Richards, as noted in a declassified White House memo.

Despite the directive, (which may not have been known), Chandler, Jennings and Libby traveled to Tripoli on April 20, 1981 to meet with Haddad, Shahati, and Qadaffi.

Within a day, Salah, while driving my dad back to his hotel after a night out, hit a “bridge abutment.”

Both men were extracted via private jet, quietly, to West Germany and hospitalized for two months at the Universitates Klinik in Bonn. The German executive who arranged care for both men was never told the cause of the accident, or how the two men knew each other.

There were two stories from this point forward: the accident was caused by Salah falling asleep at the wheel, and the Jennings & Epstein ad agency dissolved because the partners failed to manage the firm while my dad was in the hospital. My mother never questioned either version.

Salah didn’t fall asleep. He was drunk.

Qaddafi banned alcohol in 1969. Being caught with booze meant losing your job, your standing in court, your drivers license, your reputation. Jail and hard labor weren’t out of the question. This explains the quiet medical evacuation and the silence around the accident’s real cause. Salah was an embarrassment and political risk to the leader in the same scope and stature Billy Carter was to his older brother.

Two weeks after the accident, on May 6, 1981, Reagan closed the Libyan embassy in DC and expelled all Libyan diplomats from the United States, citing terrorist ties and Libya’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

After being transported home to Atlanta on June 23, my father was taken to Piedmont hospital, where he recovered until his release that fall, the day before Halloween. .

A few days after arriving home, the Jennings & Epstein partners came to our house, met with my father briefly in the living room, then left. We never saw them again.

Qadaffi graced the cover of Newsweek in July 1981 with the headline, “Kadaffi: the Most Dangerous Man in the World?” Later, that December, a portrait of the dictator with the headline “Libya’s hit Teams.”

On August 19, 1981, Navy F-14s shot down two Libyan Su-22s over the Gulf of Sirte, the first direct combat between the two countries, four months after the crash.

Eleven days later, the New York Times published an article detailing Edwin Wilson’s mud-packed C4 shipment to Libya.

In June of 1982, Ernest Keiser, a former business associate, international commodities trader, and occasional intelligence operative. lured Edwin Wilson out of Libya by offering him safe haven in the Dominican Republic. Wilson was instead put on a plane to New York and arrested by federal agents.

Chip Tate was hired by Jennings to pursue the Libyans for compensation.

Rollin Mallernee, Chip Tate’s law partner, recalled in a November 17, 2025 phone conversation that Chip negotiated a settlement with the Libyans and traveled to Switzerland to collect the $100,000 from an account the Libyans opened in Tate’s name. Mallernee says Chip “gave the money to the family.” Chip Tate’s files were thrown out shortly after his death, according to his wife Martha. Both Martha and her daughter Anne recalled the trip to Switzerland in separate emails I received.

In May 1983 the Grucci’s staged the fireworks display at the Brooklyn Bridge centennial. At the time, it was one of the largest fireworks events ever exhibited. My father was handling PR, ad-hoc, for the family. Despite his injuries, Jennings climbed the cables of the bridge to examine the shells with Plimpton and Jimmy Grucci, who’d become a close friend, before the event.

Six months later, on November 26, 1983, the Grucci’s plant in Bellport exploded. Jimmy Grucci was one of two people killed. Hundreds of homes were damaged. My father was packing his bags for the airport as the reports came on the evening news. The cause of the explosion was never determined.

Sometime in 1984, the exact date is unknown, Salah’s home was raided. Libyan authorities discovered a stash of gold bars, he was detained and never seen again.

A burst of gunfire from inside the Libyan People’s Bureau in London, killed Metropolitan Police Officer Yvonne Fletcher in April, the same year..

A year later, in March, Alec Collett, a British journalist on assignment for the UN, was kidnapped near Beirut by the Abu Nidal Organization, operating under Libyan sponsorship.

Again, Libyan involvement was suspected in the La Belle discotheque bombing on April 5, 1986, in West Berlin, killing 3 and injuring over 230 people.

In response to the La Belle bombing, President Reagan ordered operation El Dorado Canyon on April 15. The airstrike targeted Qadaffi and military installations across Libya.

Ten days later, in retaliation for the airstrike, Alec Collett’s captors released a video of his hanging.

Chap Chandler left Southwire in 1986.

That fall I played football at Lovett in Atlanta. In the Spring I played lacrosse at Avon Old Farms in Avon, CT.

On January 1, 1988, a drunk driver hit the Cadillac El Dorado I was riding in at Peachtree and Piedmont, a busy intersection in the heart of Buckhead, while home for the holidays. My friend and classmate, Frank “Bud” Ferrier, was killed on impact. My three friends and I, all passengers, suffered a variety of injuries.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am flight 103 exploded 38 minutes into flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.

In January 1989, three years after retiring from Southwire, Chap Chandler faxed Christopher Drogoul, the manager of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro’s Atlanta branch, seeking bank credit tied to an export deal.

Three years later, in federal court, Drogoul testified that his assistant, Leigh New, who had grown up next to the Chandlers in Carrollton, Georgia, recognized the name and told him Chandler’s firm, CCI, was a front for the CIA.

Drogoul then approached Wafai Dajani, the Jordanian intermediary in the bank’s Iraq business, seeking info on Chandler. Dajani confirmed to Drogoul that Chandler worked for the CIA and that his principal interest was Libya.

My parents divorced in 1990.

I started Emerson College in the fall of 1991.

Jennings remarried shortly after the divorce and relocated to Connecticut. His third child arrived in 1992.

In 1993, my father charged over $2,000 to my American Express card. He didn’t cover the charges, which led to the account being charged-off, damaging my credit.

Jennings’ second marriage ended after a PEC hold in 1995, and he never saw his third child again.

I was hired by the Arnold ad agency my senior year in college…thus, my career in film and video production began..

I visited my father in Tulsa in March of 1997. I wouldn’t see him again, in person, for eleven years.

Chip Tate died, unexpectedly, in 1999.

Jennings married a third time and eventually moved from Tulsa to Santa Fe, NM sometime in the early 00’s.

Once in New Mexico, he and his third wife opened a western wear and cowboy boot shop called “Cowboy Legends,” on the Plaza, at 227 Don Gaspar Ave., using Gene Autry’s image as the company logo, (an inside reference to a family secret).

Seven years after the American Express card charge-off, Capital One contacted me to inquire when payment would be made on my account… I didn’t have a Capital One account…Jennings had used my social security number to obtain credit cards, mobile phones and other items he could re-sell or use.

Investigation into the thefts led to the discovery that Jennings had stolen several other family members identities. I spent two years submitting affidavits and handwriting exemplars to remove the fraudulent activity off my credit report. I filed charges with the Tulsa Police Department, the Postmaster General of Tulsa and even met with Special Agent Robbins at the Boston FBI office.

No charges were filed…nothing was done.

On October 9, 2001, Elaine Collett sued Libya in federal court in Washington for her husband’s death. Her lawyer, John McDermott, worked at the DC office of Hall Estill, a firm headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In 2002, building evidence for her case, McDermott filed a FOIA request at the Reagan Presidential Library. The title of the FOIA: “Alec Collett Murder and Libyan Involvement.”

On June 1, 2002, I married in Boston, MA at Emmanuel Church followed by a reception at the Harvard Club on Commonwealth Ave., in Back Bay. My son arrived in January of 2005, my daughter in May of 2006.

Chap Chandler passed away in 2006.

The Richards letter and the shun directive were declassified on June 1, 2007. At that time, my father was living in Santa Fe, operating Cowboy Legends.

The United States and Libya signed the Claims Settlement Agreement in Tripoli on August 14, 2008. The Libyan government set aside $1.5 billion for documented American claims. The Collett case was dismissed on December 5, 2008, and settled within the agreement.

That same August, I saw my father for the last time, in-person, at the Time Warner center in New York. I also met his third wife. We remained in contact for the next eight weeks. During those two months, he sent my family cowboy boots, claiming that some were used in the wardrobe departments of the films “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.”

Then, right before Thanksgiving, the old behavior returned, the chaos I’d tried to avoid and thought mistakenly had disappeared, presented itself. I told him over the phone I was done. I never spoke to him again.

After filing for bankruptcy in both 2008 and 2009 in New Mexico, Jennings packed up Cowboy Legends, including consigned goods worth thousands of dollars, and moved with his wife back to Tulsa.

Alec Collett’s remains were found in the Bekaa Valley region of Lebanon, an area about 19 miles east of Beirut, in November 2009. March 25th, the date of Collett’s kidnapping, is observed and commemorated annually by the United Nations as the International Day of Solidarity with Detained and Missing Staff Members.

Jennings was spotted selling the consigned and stolen merchandise at the Expo Flea Market, also known as the Tulsa Fairgrounds, by a boot collector from Santa Fe. Many of the boots that had been placed on consignment were reported stolen by their owners. After numerous reports of the thefts, a Santa Fe Prosecutor presented a Judge with the evidence and a bench warrant was issued for Jennings’ arrest.

In September of 2011, Jennings was arrested selling boots at the Tulsa Fairgrounds Flea Market by the FBI. He was extradited to New Mexico and indicted for embezzling $40,000 worth of merchandise and transporting stolen goods across state lines. He pled guilty, was sentenced to time served, placed on probation, and ordered to make restitution.

I spoke to a woman who owned a store near Cowboy Legends. She helped to define the moniker “Larry the Liar,” which was attributed to Jennings in an Albuquerque Journal article by staff writer Bill Rodgers. She said he told crazy stories about being in a car wreck in Libya, working with spies.

Qaddafi was captured and killed on October 20, 2011, during the Arab spring that spread across the middle east that year. He was found hiding in a sewer pipe in his hometown of Sirte.

Only one family member saw Jennings in the years between his arrest and death. Dale Johnson, Jennings’ half-brother, saw Larry just before the pandemic, at a library in Tulsa. He hadn’t seen his brother in several years, and when he approached, Jennings appeared confused and didn’t recognize Dale. Years of declining health had finally taken their toll.

I made a decision to reach out to my father in early 2022 after no contact for close to fourteen years. The pandemic ignited a sense of curiosity - did he survive with his sarcoidosis? (An ailment diagnosed a year before the accident in Libya…likely instigated from the lead and zinc chat of his youth in Picher).

I first reconnected with Uncle Dale. He brought me through the thirty years of family history and financial chaos that I had stepped away from.

After repeated attempts to contact my father and his wife went unanswered, including a visit to their home in Tulsa in October 2022, I hired a private investigator in January 2023 to determine my father’s whereabouts.

The Richards letter, and other documents related to McDermott’s FOIA, F02-010, were uploaded to the Reagan Library server on February 22, 2023. I discovered these documents six months later, in August of 2023, from a simple keyword search, using the same combination of words: Libya / Salah / Southwire, that I’d searched since “search” became possible.

I was notified of my father’s death three months later on March 8, 2023 while on business in Malibu, CA. Larry Jennings had passed away on August 9, 2022, estranged from his children and other family members, destitute and alone in small home, not far from the Fairgrounds where he’d been arrested.

There was no obituary, notice, funeral or memorial. Larry Dean Jennings had been cremated.

I submitted the obituary I penned to the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board. They wrote back: “Members of the Prepublication Classification Review Board were saddened to hear of Larry Jennings’s passing. Please accept our condolences.”

After my initial response went unanswered, I made second and third attempts to engage Attorney Burt Fealing, the Chief Counsel of Southwire. My first letter was sent in 2022, followed by correspondence in October of 2023, and again in March of 2024. I sent letters with copies of my original FOIA, the March ‘81 Richards’ letter to VP Bush and other relevant documents contained within the White House records file.

After three attempts to engage Burt Fealing over three years, I escalated to Laura Richards, one of Southwire’s largest shareholders, and a contemporary. We have several friends and acquaintances in common. We are the same age…we went to rival Atlanta schools.

I obtained her Southwire email, sent her the same documents I’d mailed to Fealing, with the addition of an English translation of the German newspaper article describing my dad’s return medical flight from Germany and waited for a response.

I sent the email at 10:01am on November 17, 2025, and at 2:17pm, the same day, Ms. Richard’s responded with one word:

“Received.”

I attempted to engage Ms Richard’s two more times, and after the second one-word response “received,” the third came from Charles Peeler of the Troutman Pepper law firm, outside counsel for Southwire.

I was politely asked not to contact Ms. Richards or any other Southwire employees, and told that no records exist related to the event that occurred in Libya.

The estimated date of completion to my original FOIA request, filed in 2019, is sometime in 2028.

Presidential Directive NSC-55, signed by Zbigniew Brzezinski on January 10, 1980, established something remarkably similar. It was called APEX.

The official description was deliberately vague: “a single special access system to protect particularly sensitive intelligence sources and methods.” This was bureaucratic language for what APEX actually was: a centralized compartmentation system that would control who knew what about the most sensitive intelligence operations in the United States government.

APEX wasn’t an operation. It was a filing system. A database. A mechanism for controlling access to, and distribution of, intelligence about sources, methods, and operational details across multiple agencies. It replaced the TALENT-KEYHOLE system that had been in place since 1960, which had protected intelligence from aerial reconnaissance and satellite imagery. APEX was broader, more ambitious, and far more controversial.

The directive stated that APEX would “control the nature, attributable collected information, and operational details of the most sensitive intelligence sources and methods, as determined by the Director of Central Intelligence.” Uniform security standards established by the DCI would govern access to, distribution of, and protection of intelligence sources and methods, subject to any specific statutory requirements applicable to any department or agency.

In other words: the CIA Director would be the gatekeeper. If you wanted access to intelligence about sensitive operations, you went through the DCI. If you wanted to distribute information about those operations, the DCI controlled who received it. The National Security Council would serve as the appeals forum for any disputes during implementation.

The document I obtained from the CIA Reading Room shows that APEX conformed with Executive Order 12065 and would be implemented by the Director of Central Intelligence as the Council’s Executive Agent. The National Security Council, it noted, “will be the forum for any appeals arising during implementation of the APEX program.”

What it didn’t say, but what became immediately clear, was that every other intelligence agency hated it.

On June 29, 1981, less than sixteen months after APEX was established, National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen sent a memo to Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Attorney General William French Smith, CIA Director William Casey, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General David Jones.

The subject line read: “Presidential Directive/NSC-55.”

The message was one sentence: “That portion of PD/NSC-55, dated January 7, 1980, which established the APEX system, is rescinded.”

A separate memo from Allen to Casey, marked TOP SECRET, provided context. APEX, Allen wrote, had been “a very controversial issue among the agencies and departments.” He was directing the CIA to conduct a review of the entire system and provide recommendations for revision.

APEX was dead. The question was why.

The timing is impossible to ignore.

APEX was established in January 1980, during the final year of the Carter administration, under the authority of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s National Security Council. It was designed to centralize intelligence control under the Director of the CIA at a moment when the Carter administration was pursuing détente with enemies, normalization with adversaries, and engagement with regimes that Reagan’s incoming team viewed as existential threats.

By April 1981, when my father traveled to Libya, APEX was still operational. That means his mission, if it had any intelligence dimension, would have been compartmented under a system controlled by Carter-era structures, governed by Carter-era rules, and accessible only to personnel cleared under Carter-era protocols.

Two months later, Reagan’s NSC killed it.

This wasn’t a technical failure. This wasn’t a bureaucratic reform. This was a purge.

Intelligence compartmentation exists for a reason. When an operation is compartmented, access to information about that operation is restricted to a specific list of people who have been read into the compartment. The compartment has a codeword. If you don’t know the codeword, you don’t know the operation exists. If you aren’t on the access list, you can’t see the files. Even people with Top Secret clearance, even people working in the same building, can be completely unaware of operations happening ten feet away.

APEX was designed to be the master compartmentation system. A single, unified structure that would replace the patchwork of agency-specific access controls that had proliferated since World War II. It would standardize how the most sensitive intelligence was protected, distributed, and controlled.

If the Director of Central Intelligence controlled APEX, the DCI controlled which operations got protected and which ones got exposed. The DCI controlled who had access to operational details. The DCI controlled the distribution lists that determined who in the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and Justice Department would be read into which compartments.

And in 1980, the DCI answered to Jimmy Carter.

By the time Reagan took office in January 1981, APEX had been operational for exactly one year. It had been used to compartmentalize Carter-era operations, Carter-era sources, and Carter-era methods. It protected the intelligence relationships that Carter’s people had cultivated. It controlled access to the operations they had authorized.

Reagan’s team didn’t trust it. More importantly, they couldn’t control it without revealing what Carter’s people had been doing.

So they killed it.

The documents don’t explain what replaced APEX. That itself is telling. If APEX was replaced by a superior system, you would expect the cancellation memo to reference the replacement. It doesn’t. Allen’s directive simply rescinds APEX and orders a review.

What likely happened is that APEX compartments were dissolved, reclassified, or transferred into agency-specific systems that the Reagan NSC could control. Operations that had been protected under APEX were either terminated, restructured, or buried so deep that even FOIA requests decades later would hit a wall.

This is what I believe happened to my father’s file.

If the April 1981 Libya mission had an intelligence dimension, if it was connected to Carter-era normalization efforts, if it involved relationships that the Reagan administration wanted to disavow, it would have been compartmented under APEX. When APEX was cancelled in June 1981, the compartment would have been dissolved. The access list would have been destroyed. The operational details would have been reclassified into systems that no longer acknowledged the original mission’s existence.

The file didn’t disappear. It was orphaned.

This is the third dimension of the factional warfare theory.

The first dimension was the policy conflict: Carter-era normalization advocates versus Reagan-era confrontation hawks. The Georgia business network wanted the Southwire deal to succeed. Reagan’s NSC wanted to destroy Qaddafi. My father was caught between them.

The second dimension was operational: provocation versus engagement. Did the Reagan administration allow the Southwire mission to proceed because they wanted an incident? Did the Carter-era facilitators genuinely believe they could pursue business with Libya despite the “shun” directive? Both could be true.

The third dimension was structural: control of information itself.

APEX was the mechanism through which the Carter administration protected its Libya operations from scrutiny. When Reagan cancelled APEX, he wasn’t just reforming a bureaucratic system. He was seizing control of the intelligence distribution network so his people could see what Carter’s people had authorized, and so they could control what became visible to Congress, the press, and the public.

My father’s mission occurred in the gap between these two systems. APEX protected it in April 1981. APEX was cancelled in June 1981. The file was caught in the transition, classified under a system that no longer existed, accessible only through protocols that had been rescinded.

The file isn’t classified because it contains sensitive intelligence. It’s classified because it exposes the factional warfare that nobody wants to admit happened.

The genius of APEX, from a bureaucratic standpoint, was plausible deniability. APEX was a master compartmentation system, therefore, operations could be protected without anyone outside the compartment knowing they existed. If someone asked about an operation, you could truthfully say you had no knowledge of it, because you weren’t on the access list. The compartment itself was classified. You couldn’t reveal the existence of the operation without revealing the existence of the compartment, which would itself be a security violation.

When APEX was cancelled, that protection remained in place, but the access structure disappeared. The compartments still existed, but the master list of who had been read into which compartments was gone. The operations still existed in the files, but there was no longer a centralized system for granting access to those files.

This is how things get lost.

Not destroyed. Not erased. Just... orphaned. Trapped in a bureaucratic void where they’re too classified to release but too old to matter, protected by systems that no longer exist, accessible only through procedures that were rescinded decades ago.

The APEX documents I obtained from the CIA Reading Room were declassified in 2009 and 2012. It took nearly thirty years for the government to acknowledge that APEX had existed. The directives are still partially redacted. The Executive Secretariat routing slip from January 15, 1980 shows distribution to the Director of Security, but the building designation is marked “Hqs” with no further detail. The “remarks” section is blank.

Even in declassification, the system protects itself.

In the Mission: Impossible films, the NOC list is always a trap. The list itself is the objective, but possessing it makes you a target. Everyone wants it. No one can safely hold it. The moment you have it, you become the person who needs to be eliminated.

APEX was the same kind of trap, but for bureaucratic actors instead of spies.

Carter’s NSC created APEX to centralize control, but centralization made them vulnerable when power changed hands. Reagan’s NSC cancelled APEX to seize control, but cancelling it meant they inherited all the compartmented operations they couldn’t acknowledge without revealing what they’d known.

The agencies hated APEX because it threatened their autonomy, but killing APEX meant they lost the centralized access structure that had allowed them to coordinate.

Everyone wanted control. No one could safely exercise it. The moment APEX was established, it created the conditions for its own destruction.

APEX was supposed to be a filing system. A way to organize and protect intelligence.

What it actually became was a mechanism for ensuring that certain operations could never be acknowledged, certain missions could never be explained, and certain men could never be claimed.

I was five. We were in the lobby at the Colony Square hotel, where we lived.

Colony Square is Atlanta’s Watergate.

I was wandering around the lobby, exploring.

The glass elevator was separate from the main bank of elevators, it had its own entrance. There was a velvet rope corralling the entry. I pressed the button, the elevator door opened, I walked inside, the door closed, and the elevator began traveling up. I watched out the window as the car rose above the buildings across 14th street angling west..then the tree tops, the beautiful sea of green tree tops…stretching as far as I could see.

The car stopped between the top floor and the floor below it. I could see everything, the atrium, the full drop of the building beneath me. The doors kept opening and closing. Not all the way, the car was stuck between floors, so the doors would part and I could see the gap where the floor should have been, and then they’d close again.

Open. Close. Open. Close.

I pressed myself against the door jamb, under the control buttons. I thought about crawling through the opening, but it wasn’t large enough. I couldn’t stop the doors. They just kept going. I didn’t know what to do with any of it except not move.

I was beginning to panic, and the red button caught my attention, so I hit it. After a few minutes, something in the panel behind the buttons clicked, a bell rang, and the car began descending, all the way to the first floor, where my parents were waiting along with a small group of hotel staff.

This was the Colony Square complex in Midtown Atlanta, at the corner of Peachtree and 14th. The elevator was part of the Fairmont Colony Square Hotel. We were living there between my father’s business ladder of transfers. Jennings had moved us from Florida to Houston and back to Atlanta. We stayed in both a condominium and the hotel on different stops.

Colony Square had opened in stages. The first office tower in 1969, the hotel and condominiums by 1974. Six years and millions of dollars to build the Southeast’s first mixed-use development: two office towers, three residential buildings, a twenty-seven-story hotel, a retail mall with a skating rink, a Rich’s, a Neiman Marcus. Twelve acres at an intersection that, a decade earlier, had been one of the most dangerous stretches of road in Atlanta. A cop who walked the beat from 10th to 14th in the late sixties said it was worse than combat in Vietnam.

My father’s ad agency, Jennings & Epstein, operated out of building 400 from 1979 to 1981. The Atlanta Archdiocese had the Colony Square Hotel listed as my address.

Jean Hague had her office there, the educational consultant who would help place me at Avon Old Farms and the Colorado Springs School.

Chip Tate and Rollin Mallernee’s law practice was there.

Jim Libby worked there at the Carter Campaign Headquarters.

Earle Palmer Brown’s offices were there in 1988, where I interned the summer of the Democratic National Convention.

Every institutional thread of my early life, home, business, school placements, church records, a presidential campaign, and a barbershop, ran through the same building.

Colony Square was built by a man named Jim Cushman. He’d grown up in Chester, South Carolina, where he ran a small dairy delivery business. At twenty-two he was appointed director of the South Carolina Dairy Commission, the youngest person to ever head a state agency there. He sold the dairy in 1962, moved to Atlanta, and within four years had built Buckhead’s first high-rise and one of the city’s first condominium projects. He was a born salesman, a gregarious Southern gentleman who looked at the intersection of Peachtree and 14th and saw something magical.

No Atlanta bank would back him. He made thirteen trips north before two New England banks gave him ten million for the first tower. The groundbreaking was the Fourth of July, 1968. By 1974 the whole thing was done. Cushman moved his own family into Colony House. They called him the Father of Midtown. Colony Square was his landmark. His children, Elkin and Jimmy, were both ahead of me at Lovett.

There’s a shadow box outside my office door. I walk past it every day. Inside is a photograph of a nine-year-old kid holding a shotgun, flanked by two Winchester AA skeet shells. A brass plaque reads: CHRIS JENNINGS. “DOUBLES.” SEA ISLAND, GA 11-28-81.

Thanksgiving, 1981. We were guests of Jim Cushman at Sea Island.

Whatever we were doing at Sea Island that Thanksgiving, it didn’t feel like a vacation. My father was one month out of the hospital, with a broken body. He could barely walk, was using a cane, and his energy was limited due to the strain on his respiratory system from sarcoidosis, which had been diagnosed in 1980.

I’d been shooting since I was eight, rated a marksman at summer camp every year from eight to twelve. I was a good shot.

After Libya, the ad agency dissolved in the fall of ‘81. Apart from my meetings with Jean Hague, and the occasional haircut, we disconnected from Colony Square. My father moved his office to Piedmont Center, then Pharr Road, his last office at 103 West Paces Ferry. His business name became Jennings & Associates. He tried to revive things with Tom Little, a former colleague from McDonald & Little in the ’70s, briefly becoming president of a short-lived agency called Thomas Spencer Little. He published the 1986 Goodwill Games book. He published other books with Plimpton.

Years later, after my parent’s divorce, my mother moved to Ansley Terrace, right next door, on 15th Street.

The principle behind FOIA is simple and, in the context of American democracy, radical: the default position of government should be openness. Secrecy must be the exception, not the rule. The burden falls on the government to justify withholding information, not on the citizen to justify asking for it.

The man who made FOIA happen was a California congressman named John E. Moss. He arrived in Washington in January 1953 having won his seat by four-tenths of one percentage point, about 700 votes. He was a former appliance salesman, a Navy veteran, a product of the Depression who grew up dirt poor and never expected to serve more than one term.

What radicalized John Moss was McCarthyism. During his campaign, he’d been accused of being a communist sympathizer, a smear that nearly cost him the election. When he got to Congress, he discovered that the Eisenhower administration had been firing government employees for “disloyalty” and then refusing to release their names or the evidence against them. The executive branch was operating behind a veil of secrecy, invoking “executive privilege” to withhold information from the people’s elected representatives.

Moss was furious. He pushed for the creation of a special subcommittee to investigate government secrecy, installed himself as chairman, and launched what would become an eleven-year crusade.

Think about that. Six sessions of Congress. Countless hearings. Twenty-seven federal agencies testified against his bill, every single one of them opposed. The Department of Justice called FOIA unconstitutional. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI opened a file on Moss and began monitoring his activities. “Our relations have not been favorable with Congressman Moss,” a 1960 Bureau memo noted with characteristic understatement.

Presidents of both parties fought him. Eisenhower stonewalled. Kennedy made small concessions but preserved the essential architecture of secrecy. Johnson was the worst. “What is Moss trying to do, screw me?” LBJ complained to Democratic leaders. “I thought he was one of our boys, but the Justice Department tells me his goddamn bill will screw the Johnson Administration.”

In the end, Moss succeeded through a combination of stubbornness, political maneuvering, and the peculiar leverage of an issue that transcended party. A young Republican congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld, yes, that Donald Rumsfeld, decades before he would become a symbol of executive-branch secrecy as Secretary of Defense, co-sponsored the legislation and helped rally Republican support. The House passed FOIA 307 to 0.

Johnson signed it on July 4, 1966. There was no ceremony. No pen presentation. Moss was never invited to the Johnson White House again.

The law established the principle that federal agency records are public property. It created a formal process for requesting documents, and it carved out nine specific exemptions: categories of information the government could legally withhold.

These exemptions are the terrain on which every FOIA battle is fought. They are the weapons the government deploys against you when you come asking questions. If you’re going to use this tool, you need to know them:

Exemption 1: National Security. Properly classified information relating to national defense or foreign policy. The big one. The catchall. The reason you’ll see entire pages blacked out, sometimes entire documents, sometimes the very existence of documents denied.

Exemption 2: Internal Personnel Rules. Records relating solely to an agency’s internal practices. Trivial stuff, mostly: parking regulations, cafeteria menus. But occasionally invoked more creatively.

Exemption 3: Statutory Exemptions. Information that another federal law specifically prohibits from disclosure.

Exemption 4: Trade Secrets. Commercial or financial information that could harm a company’s competitive position.

Exemption 5: Privileged Communications. Inter-agency and intra-agency memos protected by various legal privileges: attorney-client, deliberative process, attorney work product. The government uses this to shield anything that might reveal how decisions were actually made.

Exemption 6: Personal Privacy. Personnel files, medical records, anything whose release would constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy. Often invoked to redact names.

Exemption 7: Law Enforcement. A broad exemption with six sub-parts protecting records compiled for law enforcement purposes…such as… the release could interfere with proceedings, reveal sources, disclose techniques, or endanger individuals.

Exemption 8: Financial Institutions. Records relating to the regulation of banks and financial institutions.

Exemption 9: Geological Information. Data about oil and gas wells.

The first exemption, national security, is the one that matters when you’re trying to find out why your father was in Libya in 1981, what he was doing there, and why the White House was tracking his movements in real time.

The process of filing a FOIA request is simple. You write a letter, describe the records you’re seeking with specificity, in a format that is uniform across government agencies, and mail it to the appropriate agency’s FOIA office.

Then you wait.

The law says agencies must respond within twenty business days. The law says many things. In practice, complex requests routinely take months. Years. Some of my requests are still pending. The NSA has informed me I won’t receive a substantive response until 2028.

When the response finally arrives, it will take one of several forms:

A “full grant,” meaning you get everything you asked for.

A “partial grant,” meaning you get some documents, often with substantial redactions: black bars or white boxes obscuring words, sentences, sometimes entire pages. Each redaction will be tagged with the exemption number justifying it: (b)(1), (b)(3), (b)(6), etc.

A “denial,” meaning the agency has determined that responsive records exist but are entirely exempt from disclosure.

A “no records response,” meaning the agency claims it has searched its systems and found nothing matching your request. This can be legitimate. It can also be a lie.

You have the right to appeal. You can challenge redactions. You can sue. Litigation takes years and costs money. Most requesters don’t have those resources. The agencies know this.

The system is designed for attrition. It’s not that anyone is actively deciding to keep secrets from you, though sometimes they are. It’s that the machine is built to exhaust you. The default is delay. The default is redaction. The default is the path of least resistance for the bureaucrat processing your request, which is always to withhold rather than release.

This is how secrecy perpetuates itself. Not through conspiracy. Through inertia.

To understand why files from 1981 remain sealed in 2026, you have to understand what the government was doing in Libya in those years. And to understand that, you have to know the story of Edwin Paul Wilson.

You’ve probably never heard of him. That’s not an accident.

Edwin Wilson was born in 1928 to a poor farming family in Nampa, Idaho. His father died of cancer when Wilson was twelve. He worked his way through school, became a merchant seaman, earned a psychology degree from the University of Portland, joined the Marines, and fought in the last days of Korea. In 1956, he went to work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

For the next fifteen years, his specialty was setting up front companies, legitimate-looking businesses that could ship supplies for the Agency’s covert operations, launder money, provide cover for officers working abroad. He guarded U-2 spy planes in Turkey. He busted communist unions in Corsica, paying off mobsters to keep leftist dockworkers in line. He shipped “incendiary, crowd dispersion and harassment devices” to Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela during the Agency’s campaigns to destabilize left-wing governments across Latin America.

Wilson was good at his job. He was also getting rich. The front companies he ran generated legitimate profits alongside their covert purposes. There was no oversight. By the time he left the CIA in 1971, he’d accumulated a modest fortune.

But he didn’t really leave.

With the Agency’s knowledge and approval, Wilson transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence, where he went to work for a secret unit called Task Force 157. The unit’s official mandate was gathering intelligence on Soviet naval activity. Its actual order was considerably broader. A Washington Post article would later describe Task Force 157 as “the U.S. military’s only network of undercover agents and spies operating abroad using commercial and business ‘cover’ for their espionage.”

Wilson set up another front company, World Marine, Inc., and continued doing what he’d always done: shipping things to places, moving money around, maintaining relationships with people who operated in the shadows. He delivered a spy ship to Iran. He facilitated arms shipments to southern Africa through an Australian bank called Nugan Hand, which would later collapse amid revelations of its role as a CIA money-laundering operation.

In 1976, the new Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, discovered that Wilson was running questionable side deals through his Navy cover. Wilson was pushed out of Task Force 157. The unit itself was disbanded the following year.

A reasonable person might assume this was the end of Edwin Wilson’s intelligence career.

Wilson claimed, and would continue to claim for the rest of his life, that a high-ranking CIA official named Theodore Shackley asked him to go to Libya. Shackley, known within the Agency as the “Blond Ghost,” had been Wilson’s case officer years earlier. He was now Associate Deputy Director of Operations, the number-three position in the CIA’s clandestine service. According to Wilson, Shackley wanted him to keep an eye on Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist who was living in Libya at the time.

Whether this was true or a convenient cover story, Wilson went to Libya. He ingratiated himself with Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. He sold them military uniforms. He arranged for retired Green Berets, decorated Vietnam vets, to travel to Tripoli and train Libyan military and intelligence officers. He helped deliver weapons to Libyan embassies abroad. One of those weapons, a pistol shipped to the Libyan embassy in Bonn, was used to assassinate a Libyan dissident in 1979.

And then there were the explosives: Twenty tons of C-4 plastic explosive. Military grade. Enough to bring down 40,000 commercial airliners. Equal to the entire U.S. military stockpile at the time. Wilson arranged for it to be manufactured in California, hidden in barrels of oil-drilling mud, and flown to Libya aboard a chartered jet.

Forty thousand pounds. The bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, 270 people killed, required less than a pound of Semtex, a plastic explosive similar to C-4.

When Lawrence Barcella, the federal prosecutor who eventually put Wilson away, heard about the Lockerbie bombing, his first thought was of Edwin Wilson. “In particular,” The Nation reported, “Barcella pondered the 40,000 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive that Wilson, well schooled by the agency in intrigue and arms dealing, sold to Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi in 1977.”

By 1978, federal investigators were circling Wilson. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been building a case. The Washington Post was publishing stories about an ex-CIA officer running guns to Libya. Congressional committees were asking uncomfortable questions.

Wilson fled to Tripoli. He lived there for four years as a fugitive, increasingly paranoid, increasingly isolated. The Libyans were suspicious of him. He feared for his safety.

The prosecutors knew this. In 1982, they sent a con man with CIA connections named Ernest Keiser to convince Wilson that he’d be safe in the Dominican Republic. Wilson took the bait. He flew to the Caribbean and was arrested the moment he stepped off the plane.

What followed was an extraordinary legal spectacle. Four federal trials. Four separate sets of charges. Witnesses dying under suspicious circumstances: one in a boating explosion, another simply found dead. Wilson himself allegedly trying to hire a fellow prisoner to murder the prosecutors, the witnesses, and his ex-wife.

He was convicted of exporting the guns. Fifteen years. He was convicted of shipping the explosives. Seventeen years. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Twenty-five years. Total sentence: fifty-two years in federal prison.

Throughout it all, Wilson maintained the same defense: he was working for the CIA. Everything he did in Libya was known to the Agency, approved by the Agency, done at the behest of the Agency. The explosives, the weapons, the training, all of it was part of an operation to gather intelligence on Qathafi’s regime.

The government’s response was emphatic: Wilson was a liar. A rogue. A traitor. A “death merchant” who had sold out his country for profit.

To prove it, the prosecution produced an affidavit from Charles A. Briggs, the CIA’s Executive Director, the third-highest-ranking official in the entire Agency. Briggs swore, under penalty of perjury, that a comprehensive search of CIA records had revealed no evidence that Wilson performed any services for the Agency after his retirement in 1971.

“With one exception while he was employed by Naval Intelligence in 1972,” the affidavit stated, “Mr. Edwin P. Wilson was not asked or requested, directly or indirectly, to perform or provide any service, directly or indirectly, for the CIA.”

The jury deliberated for one day. They asked the judge to re-read the Briggs affidavit. An hour later, they returned a guilty verdict.

The Briggs affidavit was a lie. Not a mistake. Not an oversight. Not a reasonable interpretation of ambiguous records. A lie.

Three days after the trial, but before sentencing, the government admitted internally that the affidavit was false. A memo circulated within the CIA documented the problem. Discussions were held among dozens of officials and lawyers about whether to correct the testimony.

No correction was made. Not after trial. Not before sentencing. Not on appeal. Not for twenty years.

Edwin Wilson went to federal prison. He spent twelve of those years in solitary confinement, a precaution, the Bureau of Prisons claimed, because of his intelligence background and the threats he’d allegedly made against prosecutors. He filed FOIA request after FOIA request, demanding the records that would prove what he knew to be true: that he had continued working with the CIA, that the Agency had known about his activities, that he had been framed. For years, the government stonewalled. Denied. Redacted. Delayed.

Then, buried in a warehouse of documents, Wilson found it: a Department of Justice memorandum titled “Duty to Disclose.” The memo acknowledged, in writing, that the Briggs affidavit was “inaccurate.”

Wilson sent the document to U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston, who appointed attorney David Adler, himself a former CIA officer with security clearance, to investigate. Adler spent years digging through classified files. What he found was damning.

Not zero contacts between Wilson and the CIA after 1971. Not “one exception.”

Eighty. At least eighty documented contacts. Meetings. Briefings. Intelligence shared. Operations discussed. A CIA memorandum from 1982 reported that “Agency personnel maintained continuing personal/professional relations with Edwin Wilson after his resignation; in some cases these relationships continued until Wilson fled the country.”

The government had known this all along. Two dozen government lawyers had been aware of the deception, including some who went on to become federal judges.

On October 27, 2003, Judge Hughes vacated Wilson’s conviction. His opinion did not mince words:

“In the course of American justice, one would have to work hard to conceive of a more fundamentally unfair process with a consequentially unreliable result than the fabrication of false data by the government, under oath by a government official, presented knowingly by the prosecutor in the courtroom with the express approval of his superiors in Washington.”

“America did not defeat the Axis because it locked up Japanese Americans. America did not defeat the Soviet Union because it tried to lock up its philosophic fellow-travelers here. America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time, informal government agent.”

Edwin Wilson walked out of prison on September 14, 2004, after twenty-two years. He was seventy-six years old.

He sued the prosecutors who had framed him: seven former federal officials, two of whom had become sitting federal judges, plus a past executive director of the CIA. In 2007, another federal judge dismissed the case. All defendants, she ruled, had immunity for their actions.

“There were lies told before, during and after his trial,” Wilson’s lawyer summarized, “and the judge basically said, ‘too bad.’”

Wilson died in 2012. He was eighty-four. His New York Times obituary called him “The Spy Who Lived It Up.”

The prosecutors who knowingly used false evidence became federal judges. The CIA officials who orchestrated the deception retired with pensions and honors. The man they framed spent twenty-two years in solitary confinement.

The files that could have proven Wilson’s innocence were classified. They remained classified while he rotted in prison. They remained classified while he filed FOIA request after FOIA request. They remained classified until a tenacious lawyer with security clearance spent years prying them loose.

And here’s the thing: the files had no legitimate reason to be classified. The Cold War was over. The Libya operations of the late 1970s were ancient history. Kaddafi himself would be overthrown and killed in 2011. There were no sources to protect, no methods to preserve, no national security interests at stake.

The files were classified because classification is the default. Because no one had any incentive to declassify them.

My father was in Libya in 1981. The Reagan White House was tracking his movements in real time. He was involved in something that went catastrophically wrong.

I have been trying to find out what happened for years. I have filed FOIA requests with the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the NSA. I have received form letters and delays and denials. I’ve been granted appeals. The NSA has pushed my case to 2028.

The Wilson affair created a black hole. The government made such a mess of its Libya operations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the rogue agents, the arms deals, the lies under oath, the frame-ups, the cover-ups, that everything touching Libya from that era got swept into the vortex of over-classification.

My father’s file isn’t classified because someone is actively hiding something. It’s classified because the machine has no mechanism for letting it go.

This is the deep state. Not a conspiracy. Not a cabal. A system. A machine that operates through bureaucratic inertia, default over-classification, and institutional self-protection that outlives any individual actor’s memory of why something was classified in the first place.

The effect is indistinguishable from deliberate concealment, even when no one is actively deciding to conceal anything. The file stays closed not because someone is guarding it, but because no one has sufficient incentive to open it, and everyone has sufficient incentive to leave it alone.

John Moss gave us a tool. Edwin Wilson proved that the tool can work, if you have twenty-two years, a tenacious lawyer with security clearance, and the will to keep fighting after everyone else has given up.

In December 1921, the Republican Observer published a small item: “The little son of Peter J. Düren, who was operated on a short time ago for appendicitis, which was followed by pneumonia, while he was at the Reedsburg hospital, recovered from both nicely. Emphysema followed the pneumonia and he was again operated on for that last week and at this time is improving.”

The boy was six years old. Appendicitis, then pneumonia, then emphysema. Pus filling the chest cavity, requiring surgery to drain. Two operations in a Wisconsin winter. In 1921, that was life-threatening for an adult, let alone a child.

His name was Reginald Joseph Düren. He was my grandfather.

On February 11, 1937, RJ boarded a bus in San Antonio and headed for Laredo.

He was twenty-two years old. He had just turned down an Air Force recruiting officer at Randolph Field who had spent hours trying to convince him to become a pilot. The officer had shown him everything: the aircraft, the rec center where pilots played craps with stacks of cash, the promise of adventure and status and a career. My grandfather listened, toured the base, watched the gambling, and walked away.

“I decided,” he wrote decades later, “that I still wanted to remain free and see a little more of the world before I tied myself down to four years in the armed services.”

As the sun set over the Texas plains, long shadows casting over the mesquite, he watched from the bus window and made a silent resolution: he would go at least as far as Monterrey. If he found himself having too much difficulty not knowing Spanish, he could always return.

He crossed into Mexico at Laredo. On the bus he met a woman named Margie Cross and her cousin Brice Rogers, Americans heading to Monterrey. The three of them would spend the next year traveling through Mexico together.

He lived there for over a year, learning the country, learning the people. He hiked to the Mirador above Monterrey. He befriended a “hacendado” named Roberto he met on the trail riding a palomino stallion. They talked, and Roberto invited RJ into his home. He sat and ate with his family while a pig wandered around and under the table.

Among the many expatriates he met in Monterrey, were two Germans. One was a tall, handsome young man in his late twenties by the name of Fritz von Thaden. Fritz worked in a camera shop near the Monterrey Hotel. He’d been in Mexico about a year, spoke Spanish and English fluently, and was an ardent follower of Hitler, and made no apologies for his position.

Through Fritz they met another German named Franz Manheim. Franz was about Margie’s age, in his mid thirties. He represented a coffee company and traveled the length and breadth of Latin America. He was stiff necked, erect in posture, brusk, and had the manner of a Prussian officer. His teeth were bad, and Margie said it was probably because he’d had a bout with some kind of tropical fever. His hair was close-cropped and tinged with grey, his complexion was pale and unhealthy.

My grandfather saw exactly what these men were. He didn’t need briefings or intelligence reports. He was twenty-two years old, watching Nazi Germany position its assets in Mexico.

On March 12, 1938, Hitler’s Anschluss, the political “union” with Austria, took place. Austria, however, had no choice in the matter. Hitler simply plunged across the Austrian border with his Panzer Divisions in the early dawn, and within a few days the Austrian government capitulated.

My grandfather was strolling down Avenida Morelos that day and met Fritz. “Do you think Hitler can hold Austria?” my grandfather asked.

“Oh yes,” Fritz replied, posturing himself up to his full six feet. He pulled his shoulders back, and projected his chin, as though he were passing inspection by Hitler himself. “Austria is now a part of Germany, forever and ever. Deutschland uber Alles!”

There was an aura of fanaticism about him that left my grandfather awe-stricken. He stood there on the street in Monterrey and watched a man’s face transform with ideological ecstasy and it left an indelible mark.

For the next three days and nights, the Deutschland Restaurant, where the German colony in Monterrey gathered to eat and drink beer, was the scene of continuous celebration. One could walk by any hour of the day and hear laughter and shouting and German songs pouring out of the open doors of the restaurant.

My grandfather was angry at the bold arrogance of the Germans, but he realized there was nothing to do about it. An American, with a German last name, in a Mexican town…an expatriate. He made a quiet choice.

Six days later, on March 18, Mexican President Cárdenas announced over the radio that he had taken possession of the American and British oil companies refineries and derricks. Mexican dignitaries made speeches in the parks and plazas before huge throngs of people, and there were endless parades. Rumors spread that the Americans would invade.

Three days after that, on March 21, 1938, Margie Cross threw my grandfather a surprise birthday party. He had just turned twenty-three. The guests at the party held in the Casa de Rodriguez included Fritz and Franz, Brice and Margie, Senora Maria and Roberto, the hacendado he’d met riding the palomino.

Though it was a mixed group, nothing was said about the war in Europe or the takeover of the oil wells. RJ asked that politics not be discussed.

My grandfather didn’t write about when he changed his name. He didn’t record the moment he decided that Düren, the name of a German town a few miles north of Bonn, the name his great-grandfather Wilhelm had carried across the Atlantic in 1856, would become Duran.

I know what he saw before he made that choice. He saw Fritz von Thaden’s face on the day Austria fell. He heard the German songs pouring from the Deutschland Restaurant for three days and nights. He sat at his own birthday party with ardent Nazis who spoke openly about their führer while the oil fields burned and the world teetered toward war.

The recruiters didn’t need to find him. He was already at the party. He was already breaking bread with Fritz and Franz while Hitler’s tanks rolled into Vienna.

Fritz and Franz were building a network of German nationals positioned across Latin America, cultivating relationships, gathering intelligence, preparing for a war that hadn’t started yet. RJ understood that a camera shop was a perfect cover for photographing documents, that a coffee company representative who traveled the continent was a perfect cover for mapping resources and relationships.

He understood, in 1938, what the United States government wouldn’t formally acknowledge until 1942: that Nazi Germany had built an intelligence infrastructure across the Western Hemisphere, and that young men with German names were targets for recruitment.

He changed one letter in his name and disappeared.

There is a photograph in his memoir, noted in his own handwriting: “R. Duran. In the ‘Alameda’, a park in Saltillo, Mexico, April 17, 1938.”

One month after his birthday party with the Nazis. One month after the Anschluss celebration. The caption already reads Duran, not Düren.

By 1939, he was back in the United States. He first settled in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Then the oil fields: Shreveport, Louisiana. Casper, Wyoming. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Barranquilla, Colombia. Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.

He told stories about hiking into the Yukon to gather soil samples. His work tools consisted of a tent, small mess kit, shotgun, rod and reel, and his Rolex Datejust.

He spent more than twenty-five years as a drilling fluids engineer for Loffland Brothers, the Tulsa-based drilling contractor. He wrote his own memoir about it, called Diary of a Mud Man.

He used to send me books by Jack London, but I thought him as the real-life Jack London. A man who had walked into danger with his eyes open, who understood, at twenty-three, that intelligence networks were being built across the Americas, and who had chosen to disappear into the hardest work he could find rather than be recruited by either side.

When we visited Tulsa, we stayed with my mother’s parents at their house on Utica. Always. My grandfather would sit in his chair and talk about Mexico, about the oil fields, about the men he’d known. They had siamese cats. The house smelled like cigarette smoke and coffee and something indefinably Oklahoman. The red dirt and petroleum and the particular mustiness of houses built in the 1950s.

Margie Cross was part of these stories. The woman my grandfather had traveled with through Mexico. Her father was Colonel George Harvison, who spent thirty years in the cavalry under Pershing, chasing Pancho Villa across the border, fighting in the gas-soaked trenches of the Meuse-Argonne. Her mother was quarter-blood Cherokee. After the Army, Colonel Harvison had become vice president of the First State Bank in central Oklahoma.

Margie moved to Chicago and married a newspaper reporter named Charles Cross. She was there, in Chicago, on the morning of February 25, 1929, when her husband got a tip from one of his underworld sources and drove to a garage on North Clark Street. She saw the bodies slumped against the brick wall in a pool of blood. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

He wrote about Brian “Boru” Dunne, the eccentric Irish journalist who had been secretary to a New Mexico senator, who wore a floppy tan Stetson who vanished mysteriously from his hotel and reappeared days later with a wild story about being summoned to help a Mexican aristocrat’s daughter. He told me about the party in Chicago where Dunne had introduced Margie to Mabel Dodge Luhan, the famous patroness of the arts from Taos, and to Arthur Davidson Ficke, the poet.

Eight years after my grandfather sat at his birthday party with Fritz and Franz, in 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act. The legislation created the Central Intelligence Agency, precisely because of what my grandfather had witnessed with his own eyes in Monterrey.

Drew begins talking about Adam, and how he has learned to cope with the tragedy. Celine listens with ears absorbing every sound that comes out of Drew’s mouth. He stops talking, and she inquires about Bhodi, if Drew planned to see him again. Drew doesn’t answer.

Instead he takes a strong pull off his beer, and gives Celine a warm, loving smile, as if to say,“that isn’t necessary.”

He then pulls a MANUSCRIPT out of his leather knapsack, and puts it on the table. “I finished my book it’s called GALISTEO.

We see the skyline of New York City in the early morning hours. Different vignettes of the city early in the day: Men working in the meat market, people opening their stores, as the credits roll across the screen from right to left. The endless stream of taxis through Times Square brings us to the scene of Drew Diamond (main character), and his best friend and co-worker Adam Crane at a diner in the center of the world, eating breakfast. They finish eating the small plate of eggs and bacon, as a steady stream of people flows in and out of the diner’s front entrance. They settle back in the seats after they simultaneously look at their watches. They both light cigarettes and begin a casual conversation about college and highschool. We soon learn that these two have been friends for a long time, at least ten years. They are both now twenty-six, only two years out of college. Drew and Adam attended boarding school in Connecticut together, then they journeyed to Bennington College in Vermont. Life in the big city has changed their lives drastically.

They begin discussing the road trip to Galisteo they had always planned, but never did because of commitments and a trustworthy car. They heard about Galisteo from a friend at the college, David Moret. He told them it was a small city about twenty miles from Sante Fe that possessed a magic and spirit unlike any other town in the world. David had lived all over the world with his military family: Germany, Belgium, the Pacific, Arizona, Nevada, California,

New Mexico, Colorado, D.C., and Iceland. Soon after, Drew and Adam read about the small New Mexican town in a travel magazine that had a special article on Santa Fe. Over two hard eggs and thin coffee they agreed to take the entire month of August off to finally make the road trip.They finished their b-fast, paid the check, and went outside to hail a cab to their office in Chelsea. They work for Slovis & Cabes, a medium size advertising agency with a few national accounts. The cab screeched to the curb, and the two quickly got in. The driver mumbled something, then accelerated into the stream of yellow passing on his left shoulder.

Adam and Drew continued their conversation about Galisteo: The high desert, the stars, the moon, the way the earth would seem alive and vibrant after so many months in the concrete jungle. “If I could worry about something other than rent and my student loans…” Both seem to be in desperate need of a vacation.

The cab swerves, the driver screams, and the whole picture becomes a blinding white.

We see flashing lights in the hot morning sun. Numerous ambulances, rescue vehicles, and police cars are scattered around the intersection. Emergency medical techs are running from their vehicles toward the three masses of twisted yellow metal. Adam and Drew’s cab was hit by another taxi coming from the passenger side, and knocked into another taxi in the middle of the intersection. Rescue workers were busy cutting the roof off the taxi to remove Drew and Adam. They finished, and pulled Adam, unconscious, out of the car. He appears lifeless. Drew, conscious, begins screaming in pain. His white dress shirt is a dark hue of red from the deep cut on his right arm. He is pulled from the car, his legs dangle, twisted, as if they are separated from is body. They are badly broken. A backboard is placed underneath him, and the emergency techs finish pulling him out, place him on a stretcher and quickly roll him to the back of the same ambulance Adam is in. Drew overhears the med techs say that his friend Adam isn’t going to make it. He begins to cry, and passes out.

We then see Drew in the hospital, sitting up in bed, staring out the window. His friend Mary Serafane enters the room with a large bouquet of flowers. Drew is bitter, and unkind to Mary.

She tries to reassure him, but is unsuccessful in her attempts. Both of his legs are in casts, and his left arm is bandaged from the cut that nearly severed his arm from his body. She wishes him a speedy recovery and asks if there is anything she can get for him, or do anything for him at the office. He shakes his head, and she leaves.

Months later, we see Drew at his office. His appearance is disheveled, face pale, life and color absent. He is playing with a pen staring alternately at the pen and the computer monitor to his left. His phone rings, he answers in a corporate monotone, and perks up when he realizes its the boss. She wants to see Drew in her office immediately. Drew gets up from his desk, and we follow him as he walks, with a pronounced limp on his right leg, toward her office. (Drew now has a permanent limp due to the injury to his right femur, crushed in the accident).

In her office, she questions Drew about his mishandling of an important account, saying he had never made such a careless mistake before. She asks how he is feeling, and inquires if his injuries are affecting his work. He replies by shaking his head no. She then tells him that his work is very important, “Toughness is readiness for reality, and you seem lost in your own world,” but that healing injuries, mental and physical, is much more important to her. He is a vital asset to the agency. She asks him to take some time off, heal and return to work when he feels ready. Drew’s eyes fill up with tears, but he does not cry. He walks to his office, angry, and relieved. He puts his suit-jacket on, gathers his things and heads to the elevator. In the elevator a friend offers to give him a ride to his apartment. On the way, Drew tells Kim that he is going away. He is uncertain for how long.

He enters his building, the doorman greets him in a traditional, calm manner, as he gets on the elevator.

In his apartment, he opens the hall closet and removes a suitcase. He walks into his bedroom, grabs an arms full of clothes then walks out and puts them in the suitcase. He then walks back toward his bedroom, but stops, then walks out the front door without the suitcase.

We then see Drew walking out of his building, reaching in his right inside breast pocket for his sunglasses. The sun is blinding his eyes, as he raises his left arm to hail a cab, he uses his right hand to block the sun from his eyes.

Then images flash across his mind of the accident: In rapid succession we see Drew and Adam hail the cab; in the cab; the accident from bird’s perspective; and Drew’s face screaming in pain. He stumbles, puts his hands to his face, and walks down the street, his limp more pronounced, to the subway station. He gets on the train not sure of where it will take him.

We then see Drew at the counter of a car rental agency, he is taking the keys from the woman at the counter, his sunglasses are on, and he is wearing the same clothes he had on when he left his apartment earlier that day.

We see Drew driving on the highway at night, hair greasy, an accumulation of thick stubble

on his face, eyes watery. He is outside of New York, just past the rows of high-rise tenement buildings on the outskirts of the big apple, on his way to Galisteo.

The journey will take at least three days, if he drives all night.

We see Drew walking down the main street of Galisteo, toward the “BAR,” he is wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. There is no color, only black and white. The world he has begun to create for himself mentally is black and white: Right and wrong, pleasure and pain, life and death.

We see Drew inside the bar, back to color, drinking a beer jotting notes down on a piece of paper. He is smoking a cigarette, nursing the beer. He has grown a full beard, and his hair is long. He looks beat up, but the color has returned to his face, he is smiling - passively - at different people in the bar. His eyes return to the paper as we move toward his face, and suddenly return to the road.

Drew is standing at the rear of the rental car, filling up the gas tank. The attendant comes out from the garage and asks Drew if there is anything he can get for him other than gasoline. Drew asks for some directions about a small town south of the station. He is now in Taos, New Mexico - close to his final destination.

The man at the gas station is old, and of Asian decent. He seems out of place in the middle of New Mexico. When Drew inquires about his descent, the man (Bhodi Vasatt), explains that his parents, during the second world war, had to travel east to avoid internment in the camps. They ended up in Taos and became farmers. Bhodi’s dad bought a plot of land, and began to raise cattle.

Bhodi is not the type that would manage a gas station, but the simplicity suits his personality. Drew is fascinated as Bhodi tells him stories about his parents journey; the suffering they went through, the fact that they aren’t even Japanese, but because they are Asian, they were persecuted as such. Bhodi explains his father was from Pakistan, and his mother was Chinese.

Drew talks about his desire to reach the small New Mexican town of Galisteo. Bhodi’s eyes turn up, and he says the name of the town with a fondness, and grace. “As a matter of fact, many folks drive through here on their way to that, town. I can’t figure it out, cause we’re off the interstate.”

Bhodi asks many questions that are not answered, a “socratic” style that enlightens Drew.

He asks him what a disheveled yuppie is doing so far away from the big city in Taos. Drew explains briefly his journey, the loss of his friend and his need for the peace of the small New Mexican town. Drew tells Bhodi the pain he has gone through in putting his friend’s memory to rest. Bhodi then tells Drew that there is truth in pain and suffering. Life is a hard road, there is not much that can be considered sweet on the outside. Bhodi continues telling Drew the four noble truths of buddhism.

Drew has learned the value of life, not just from Bhodi, but from the peace the town of

Galisteo pours into his heart. He is not worried about deadlines: Life moves as slow or as fast as he likes, and that is why he will never return to the big city.

Drew finishes his beer, stands up and walks out of the bar, the MANUSCRIPT clutched in his left hand, and his knapsack slung over his right shoulder. He opens the door to the bar, and the same blinding light that occurred as the accident happened, now shines brightly on Drew’s face. He puts on his sunglasses, his Lee Wranglers faded, his boots scuffed, his white t-shirt gleaming in the sun, and walks down the middle of Main St., Galisteo, into the sunset.

📷 Esha Chiocchio

The same combination of words: Salah - Southwire - Libya, that I’d submitted in the blank spaces across archives, databases, search engines, government websites…forms, FOIA’s and journal entries for years. I searched for information about the accident from the onset of the digital age.

Then, one day in August 2023, five months after receiving the news of my father’s death, the query returned a hit - a link to a Reagan Presidential Library case file:

The information contained at this link was - and remains - the only evidence that a man named Salah El-Haddad (al Had’d) ever existed. When you click on the link, you are directed to a WHORM file. WHORM is an acronym for “White House Office of Records Management.”

Box 121 of Case 080000-206039 contained a total of (5) documents relevant to my father’s event in Tripoli:

Roy Richards’s letter to Vice President Bush, #24797, (March 31, 1981); Senator Mack Mattingly’s transmittal letter, #24796, (April 2, 1981); Richard Allen’s memorandum to the Vice President, #24795, (April 15, 1981); Frank Hodsoll’s memorandum to Allen, #24794, (April 17, 1981); and Allen’s “Qadhafi Brother-in-Law” memorandum instructing that all contact with Salah al Had’d and Roy Richards be shunned, #24793, (April 20, 1981).

All of these documents were declassified on June 1, 2007, under Reagan Library FOIA case number F02-010, as recorded on the withdrawal sheet for file folder CO 089 (LIBYA) 206036.

The withdrawal sheet identifies the requester by surname only: McDermott.

The Reagan Library’s public FOIA log for 2002 identifies case 2002-010 as “Alec L. Collett Murder & Libyan Involvement.”

Alec Collett was a British-born journalist. While on assignment for UNRWA, he was abducted in Beirut on March 25, 1985, by the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims, an Abu Nidal front.

In April 1986, days after the US bombing of Tripoli, his captors released a videotape purporting to show his hanging in retaliation for the bombing.

On October 9, 2001, Collett’s widow, Elaine Collett, filed a lawsuit against Libya in the US District Court for the District of Columbia: Collett v. Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, No. 01-cv-2103.

Collett’s attorney was a man named John Joseph McDermott, then listed at the Washington, D.C. office of Hall, Estill, Hardwick, Gable, Golden & Nelson, a law firm headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Collett’s case was ultimately settled under the terms of the Libyan Claims Resolution Act. In August 2008, the United States and Libya signed a claims settlement agreement. Congress passed the Libyan Claims Resolution Act to enforce it. Libya put $1.5 billion dollars into a fund. Once the fund was established, the Collett’s effectively vacated their suit, with the stipulation of compensation through the Settlement.

Larry D. Jennings never filed a claim.

The 2008 settlement was not a fund for Americans harmed by Libya. It was a mechanism for extinguishing lawsuits from the Pan Am 103 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, the LaBelle disco bombing in West Berlin, and the suitcase bombing of UTA flight 772 over the Sahara Desert. The fund was a way to close the terrorism docket so that oil companies could go back in.

The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission could only hear the categories the State Department referred to it and the categories were built around acts of terror and plaintiffs already in court.

The claims agreement was signed the same month my father and I sat across from each other for the last time at the Time Warner center in New York City.

Within a year, the FBI arrested him in Tulsa, his third wife took hold of his affairs and began pressing two relatives to have him institutionalized.

John McDermott’s FOIA inadvertently triggered the release of Richard’s letter. Without Collett, the letter would have stayed classified until some other request or systematic review happened to hit WHORM box 121, CO 089.

Just eight days after Jennings was born in Picher, Robert James Woolsey Jr., arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The future Director of the CIA was born on September 21, 1941. He later graduated from Tulsa Central High School (just a few miles across town from Edison), attended Stanford, followed by a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. Woolsey rounded out his post-graduate studies at Yale Law.

Who was the National Security Council’s head of internal security in 1981-1982?

Jerry D. Jennings.

Jerry was a CIA adviser to foreign intelligence agencies in the Far East from 1965–68. He was then an FBI special agent in Memphis and New York from 1968–73, a special assistant to the Director of the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence 1972–73, then adviser to the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from 1973 to 1982.

After the NSC, Jerry became the executive director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House Science Council from 1982–86.

He then became acting director and then deputy director of FEMA 1990–92. His last known position prior to his death was as Chairman and CEO of his own firm, the Phoenix Communications and Research Company in McLean, Virginia, from 1993.

Jerry D. Jennings’ name appears on the NSC distribution lists for classified Libya documents, that I’ve discovered, from February 1982. He was accused of leaking Carter debate materials to the Reagan campaign, known as “Debategate.” He had a background that straddled FBI counterterrorism, CIA connections, and campaign operations. His NSC tenure spans Nixon, Ford, Carter, and the first two years of the Reagan Administration.

One of my father’s customers while he worked sales for Scott Paper Co., across Los Angeles county, was Leno LaBianca.

Larry Jennings was the Grucci family’s ad-hoc PR man from 1979 through 1983, traveling with them to Monte Carlo, and handling their crisis communications after the 1983 explosion on Long Island.

Felix Grucci Sr. developed mock atomic bomb tests for the Defense Department for use in military training. The family had been mimicking atomic bombs and booby traps since the 1950s for the Pentagon. By the time my father knew them, 60% of their annual revenue came from DOD contracts for explosive simulators and training devices.

In 1980, my parents and I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the Soccer Bowl at RFK Stadium. We stayed at the Washington Hilton. There were events surrounding the game, a private tour of the White House, and a reception for the premiere of the film Victory. The same hotel where, roughly 6 months later, John Hinckley Jr. would shoot President Reagan.

On March 31, 1943, the musical Oklahoma! opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway. Lynn Riggs was allowed leave from his Signal Corps post at Wright Field in Ohio to see the premiere.

Thirty eight years later, on March 31, 1981, Roy Richards, founder of the Southwire Corporation, sent a confidential letter to Vice President Bush requesting an audience with Salah El-Haddad, Qaddafi’s brother-in-law. The letter sets in motion a chain of events that puts Larry Dean Jennings in Tripoli, in a car with Salah, only a few days later.

The St. James Theatre on Broadway shares its name with the St. James Hotel in Claremore, the hotel where Lynn Riggs’s Aunt Mary ran the kitchen, and one of the most indelible tales in American pop culture was born.

Salah El-Haddad crashed his Peugeot 504 into a bridge abutment. My father was in the passenger seat. I was told, at the time of the accident, and for decades afterward, that the accident happened because Salah fell asleep.

I found out, over 40 years after the accident happened, that Salah was driving drunk.

The United States Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps carried out air strikes, code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon, against Libya on 15 April 1986 in retaliation for the West Berlin discotheque bombing ten days earlier, which U.S. president Ronald Reagan blamed on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

On January 1, 1988, I was a passenger in a fatal drunk driving accident. I sustained injuries to my pelvis and spine. My friend, Frank “Bud” Ferrier, who was driving our car, a Cadillac El Dorado, was killed on impact.

Kathy Booth, the driver of the vehicle, was found not guilty of vehicular manslaughter due to the State’s mishandling of her blood sample evidence, which was lost.

Richard Rodgers, the composer who adapted Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma! with Oscar Hammerstein II, became a legend in the theater community.

Dr. Richard Rodgers was my second cousin and an ER doctor at St. John’s Hospital in Tulsa. He was also the family genealogist who mapped the Thompson women and connected with me in 2018. We met in person in 2022. He showed me all of his files and prepared thumb drives full of documents and keepsakes. He passed away in October 2023.

In his final years, my father ran a vintage cowboy boot and western wear store in Santa Fe called “Cowboy Legends.” His business card featured a picture of Gene Autry.

Gene Autry stayed at the Midway Rooms in Sapulpa in the late 1920s, while working as a telegrapher for the Frisco Railroad. The Midway Rooms was the boarding house run by my Great Aunt, Doll Woods (my great grandma Willie’s older sister).

During that time, Autry became involved with Lillian Whitwell, a relative of Doll’s, also living at the Midway. Nine months later, Lillian had a baby girl, Shirley Maxine Whitwell, born on November 14, 1930.

According to family knowledge, Gene Autry was Shirley’s real father. When Lillian told her husband she was leaving with Gene and the baby, Johnny Whitwell, from prison, threatened to kill everyone. Johnny was in jail for bootlegging. He was released from prison in 1932.

Lillian stayed in Sapulpa…Autry went to California alone and became a star.

You’d been dragged to basements and closets, pressed against cinderblock, listening to the pressure drop. One side of the street scraped off, destroyed with evil precision. The opposing side of the street, untouched. That was the weather I was raised in, And every spring, as tornado season gathered, the networks would broadcast The Wizard of Oz.

From 1959 to 1991, this was appointment television. No streaming, no DVR, no second chance. The whole family gathered. It was a ritual broadcast to every household in America at the same moment.

A movie about a girl who gets sucked into the sky by the very thing we feared most, and survives. A rite of spring. I was five years old, somewhere in Atlanta, when I first saw it. And something happened during a scene most people barely notice.

Dorothy has just escaped death in the poppy field, a sleep she didn’t choose, couldn’t fight, couldn’t escape on her own. Snow falls from nowhere. Glinda intervenes, and as Dorothy wakes, an ethereal chorus begins to sing. Disembodied women’s voices, impossibly soft, telling her she’s out of the woods, out of the dark, out of the night. Coaching her to step into the light. To hold onto her breath, her heart, her hope.

The song is called “Optimistic Voices,” composed by Herbert Stothart. The lyrics were written by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, the same Harburg who wrote “Over the Rainbow.” The melody incorporates a theme from Mendelssohn.

The singers were The Rhythmettes, a vocal group of professional studio singers who worked extensively on MGM musicals during Hollywood’s golden age. Their voices were recorded on a soundstage in Culver City, California, in 1938, and they run barely ninety seconds in the finished film.

Most people forget the song exists. I have never forgotten it. Not once in forty-eight years.

Because if you listen…really listen, it’s haunting. These aren’t triumphant voices celebrating victory. They’re coaching survival. “Hold onto your breath.” As if that’s something that could slip away. As if staying alive requires active, conscious effort.

It’s a lullaby for people who almost don’t make it. Something in me absorbed those voices like a blood transfusion. They settled into my nervous system and waited.

This is what I didn’t understand for decades: the voices weren’t waiting for crisis. They weren’t reserved for the spectacular traumas.

On January 1, at 12:01am, in the middle of Peachtree St., while trapped in the backseat of a Cadillac El Dorado, I heard these voices as they sawed the roof off of the car. They echoed and reverberated in the lowest area of my mind. The lights outside the vehicle, the flashing red, blue, white, yellow…coming back to my senses, I heard the singing…

“You’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night,” repeated, over and over and over…"‘hold onto your breath, hold onto your heart, hold onto your hope…you’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night.”

The voices, over and over, like a mantra, keeping me away from permanence.

A few years later, I’m at a movie theater with my parents. A few minutes into the film, Michael J. Fox skateboards into an empty mall parking lot. It’s wet, as if it just rained. He’s there to meet Doc Brown, who asked him to bring the video camera.

Marty McFly begins taping Doc Brown’s message, as the door to the DeLorean pops open: “I, Dr. Emmet Brown am about to embark on an historic journey…” he stops, and realizes he’s forgotten to pack extra plutonium for his trip, Back to the Future.

Then, off-camera, we hear Doc’s dog Einstein bark. Doc looks over at the dog, then shifts his glance to the dog’s line of sight.

As Doc walks toward the camera, a terrified looks comes over his face, and with a shudder in his voice, he says “Oh my God…they found me, I don’t know how, but they found me. Run for it Marty!!”

Marty, still holding the camera, asks, “who?”

Doc, after reaching into the DeLorean to fetch a pistol, points at the Volkswagen bus coming at them full speed and screams:

“THE LIBYANS!”

From the sunroof of the bus, a man, screaming in Arabic, begins firing an AK-47 at the Doc and Marty, eventually cornering Doc, who is shot in cold blood.

This was supposed to be a comedy.

Libyans. Libya. The place that nearly killed my father. For a few minutes, there in the theater…the voices began, quietly in my mind…“hold onto your breath, hold onto your heart…you’re out of the woods, you’re out the dark, you’re out of the night.” The Rhythmettes and their surreal mental salve.

Marty jumps in the DeLorean, hits 88mph, and once he was in 1955, the voices disappeared.

There was a day at the Colorado Springs School when I tried to do a kickflip and fell wrong. I landed on my hip, the one that was damaged from the accident the year before. Something in me understood, in that moment of impact, that I was broken. Not just the hip. Not just the body.

The voices came, but for the first time, I didn’t want to hear them. I took pills. I wanted to sleep and keep sleeping. I wanted the voices to stop. I wanted to stay in the poppy field this time and let the snow fall on someone else.

I came to, and the voices were there. The same voices. Still singing. Still impossibly soft. Still insisting I was out of the woods when I had tried to walk back into them and lie down.

I was the last in my dorm room of three to wake up. I grabbed my towel, and made my way to the shower down the hall. I passed out in the shower. I was splayed across the bathroom floor. I opened my eyes, and saw that my feet were in the shower stall, my head under the sink. My body was forcing the crisis into the open.

Someone called down to the dorm parent, Rich, who brought me to his apartment to wait for the ambulance. The voices, right there, quietly in my mind “you’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark,” repeating, over and over.

The fluorescent lights of the ER made the questions difficult to dodge. I told them what I had done with the pills, I told them to send me to Cedar Springs.

That’s where I learned what the voices really were. They weren’t a choice. They weren’t comfort I could accept or refuse. It was a custom, hardwired, survival protocol running beneath my own will to end my life. My five-year-old self had installed something that couldn’t be uninstalled.

In Wild at Heart, after Lula has been through hell: her father burned alive, her mother complicit, the whole scorched-earth nightmare of that film, she clicks her heels, and says the words, “there’s no place like home.” Over and over again. Not as parody, as genuine incantation. Lynch knew Dorothy’s heel-click was never about going home, it was about believing you could.

“There’s no place like home,” is Americana, brought to life by Dorothy. A phrase that’s become part of our national language, our collective vernacular.

Dorothy clicks her heels to get home. But before that, she has to survive the poppy field. She has to wake from a death she didn’t choose. And when she does, she doesn’t get triumphant horns. She gets the voices.

The heel-click is the destination. The Optimistic Voices are the survival. The thing that keeps you moving. Lynch gave us the prayer for arrival. I’ve been living with the hymn for endurance.

Pop culture didn’t traumatize me. Pop culture was the oracle that told me the trauma was real before anyone else would.

Years later…I would end up renting a building for my production company at 9314 Venice Blvd., in Culver City, across the park from Culver Studios, where The Wizard of Oz was filmed in 1939. Stage 14 for the tornado. Stage 27 for Munchkinland. Stage 29 for the poppy field where The Rhythmettes sang Dorothy back to life, their voices recorded in that very building. I didn’t choose that location consciously.

When I found out my father had died seven months after it happened, alone, that’s when the voices finally made sense. Not as comfort, not as delusion, but as preparation. As the hymn my five-year-old self had been singing for forty-eight years, preparing me for the moment.

The cardinal lands on the fence, that red flash against whatever season it is. The cardinal doesn’t migrate, doesn’t leave, appears in January snow and August heat and the first pale days of March. The folklore says a cardinal means a loved one is near. I don’t know if I believe that. But I know what I hear when I see it.

The voices, rising from the frequency beneath everything. Soft. Angelic. Infuriatingly gentle. Telling me what they’ve always told me…since I was five years old…

You're out of the woods,
you're out of the dark, you're out of the night,
Step into the sun, step into the light.
Keep straight ahead for the most
glorious place on the face of the earth or the
sky.
Hold onto your breath, hold onto your heart, hold onto your hope,
March up to that gate and bid it open.

If your great-grandmother was born there in 1901, you were probably Cherokee. That’s how it worked.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made the same claim based on the same kind of family story. Warren released DNA test results in October 2018 showing Native American ancestry six to ten generations back. The Cherokee Nation’s response was immediate and unequivocal: “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”

The reason DNA tests are useless for Cherokee citizenship: the Cherokee Nation doesn’t use blood quantum. They require direct documented descent from someone on the Dawes Roll. You need to prove a paper trail, not genetics. That’s why you can be blonde, blue-eyed, and fully enrolled, or have Native American DNA and be ineligible.

The process is specific: you submit an application with original state-certified birth or death certificates connecting you generation by generation back to an enrolled ancestor listed on the Dawes Roll taken between 1899 and 1906. If that chain breaks anywhere, if even one generation isn’t documented, you don’t qualify. DNA is irrelevant to the tribal government’s determination.

The assumption gets reinforced by another misunderstanding: many Cherokee citizens don’t possess what people think of as stereotypical Native American characteristics.

But…enrollment isn’t about appearance or DNA. It’s about documented lineage.

In January 2019, I hired TRACE, a professional genealogy research firm, to obtain Willie Reburta Thompson’s birth and death certificates so I could file for tribal citizenship with the Cherokee Nation. The objective seemed straightforward: get the documentation, prove the Dawes Roll connection, complete the enrollment process.

The research report that I received identified the wrong Willie Thompson, though, I didn’t know this at the time.

In October 2022, I dropped off my application at the Cherokee Nation tribal registration office in Tahlequah. The denial came back in January 2024.

In June 2025, I sought to correct the record. Cherokee Nation identified a Willie Thompson on the Dawes Roll, however, it was not my great-grandmother.

I hired professional genealogist Aimee Rose-Haynes, a specialist in Cherokee genealogy, to figure out the error in family lore.

Her research revealed the problem: there were three different Willie Thompsons born around the same time in Indian Territory.

Aimee traced each one systematically:

Willie Thompson, Freedmen Card #681: Daughter of William Thompson, enrolled as Cherokee Freedmen with siblings Albert, Laura, June, and Nannie. Died July 12, 1903, as a child. Not my Willie.

Willie Thompson, Cherokee by Blood Card #1247: Daughter of William M. Thompson and Mahala D. Wells, founders of Vian, Oklahoma. William served as a district judge. This Willie married Edward Lee Hill in 1917 and died in 1995. A well-documented family with deep Cherokee Nation roots. Also not my Willie.

Willie Reburta Thompson (1901–1974): My great-grandmother. Born to William Edward Thompson (b. 1858, Ohio) and Mary E. Riggs (b. 1861, Fort Smith, Arkansas). Found in the 1900 census with her parents in Township 22, Cherokee Nation. Found in the 1910 census living in Sapulpa with her divorced mother Mary, who worked as a housekeeper for John D. Brice. By 1920, Mary had married Brice.

Aimee’s conclusion: “No enrollment or evidence of Cherokee ancestry was found for Willie Reburta Thompson or her immediate family.”

She traced Willie’s parents back one more generation to be certain. William Edward Thompson: born in Ohio, documented as white in the 1860 and 1870 censuses. Mary E. Riggs: born in Arkansas, parents Joseph Riggs and Sarah Estep both from Virginia, documented as white. No Cherokee connections anywhere in the documented lineage.

Her formal finding: “Willie Reburta Thompson and her ancestors do not qualify for enrollment in the Cherokee Nation through the Dawes Roll.”

The Cherokee story went the opposite direction. Accepted as family truth, disproven by methodical research.

For the Lynn Riggs work, this creates clean separation. My genealogical connection to Riggs runs through Mary E. Riggs, Willie’s mother. The Thompson family’s influence on Lynn Riggs’s work: Mary Thompson Brice as Aunt Eller, Laura Thompson as Laurey, Willie as Ado Annie, exists as theatrical and cultural history regardless of Dawes Roll enrollment or blood quantum.

I’m connected to the story of Oklahoma! through family lines that lived in Indian Territory.

What the research revealed is how identity forms in the gap between documentary fact and family narrative. The Jennings line carries stories I can verify: Captain Richard Swain purchasing Nantucket in 1659, Willard Matthew Jennings killed in action in Italy on October 12, 1944.

Reginald Joseph Düren changing his surname to Duran in 1939 after encountering Nazi operatives in Mexico. Those stories have paper trails.

The Cherokee story had the feel of truth because of geography. Indian Territory, Willie born there in 1901, the family living in Claremore and Sapulpa - being Cherokee would have been the default assumption.

Aimee’s 2025 research didn’t just answer a genealogical question, it showed me how assumptions become facts across generations, and how easy it is to get the wrong Willie Thompson when three women share the same name in the same place at the same time.

Acapulco, Mexico · Adams, MA · Albuquerque, NM · Alice Springs, Australia · Alta, Norway · Amarillo, TX · Amherst, MA · Amsterdam, Netherlands · Anchorage, AK · Ann Arbor, MI · Atlanta, GA · Auburn, MA · Augusta, GA · Austin, TX · Avon, CT · Ayers Rock / Uluru, Australia

B

Baja Peninsula, Mexico · Bantayan Island, Philippines · Barcelona, Spain · Baton Rouge, LA · Beachy Head/Eastbourne, UK · Bellingham, WA · Bend, OR · Bermuda (Hamilton) · Birmingham, AL · Boston, MA · Boulder, CO · Brooks, ME

C

Cairns, Australia · Cambridge, MA · Camden, ME · Cannes, France · Cape Breton, Canada · Cebu City, Philippines · Chicago, IL · Cincinnati, OH · Colorado Springs, CO · Columbus, OH · Copenhagen, Denmark · Corpus Christi, TX

D

Dallas, TX · Dangu, France · Del Mar, CA · Denali, AK · Denver, CO · Detroit, MI · Dixville Notch, NH · Durham, NC

F

Franconia, NH · Frankfurt, Germany

G

Galveston, TX · Gardiner, NY · Gardner, MA · Girona, Spain · Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands · Great Barrington, MA

H

Halifax, Canada · Hamburg, Germany · Helsingør, Denmark · Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam · Hong Kong · Honolulu, HI · Houston, TX

I

Isla Partida, Mexico

J

Juarez, Mexico · Juneau, AK

K

Ketchikan, AK · Kingfield, ME · Kingston, Canada · Kona, HI

L

La Jolla, CA · La Junta, CO · La Paz, Mexico · Lake Placid, NY · Las Vegas, NV · Lebanon, NH · Lenox, MA · Lincoln, NH · London, UK · Long An Province, Vietnam · Los Angeles, CA · Los Olivos, CA

M

Mactan, Cebu, Philippines · Manchester, NH · Marathon, TX · Maratea, Italy · Marblehead, MA · Marfa, TX · Mayer/Arcosanti, AZ · McAllen, TX · Memphis, TN · Mexico City, Mexico · Miami, FL · Milan, Italy · Minneapolis, MN · Montreal, Canada · Mound, MN · Mt. Tremblant, Canada · Mountain View, CA

N

Naples, Italy · Naples, ME · Nashville, TN · Neil’s Harbour, Canada · New Bedford, MA · New Orleans, LA · New York, NY · Newark, DE · Newport, VT · Newport Beach, CA · Newry, ME · Nice, France · North Adams, MA

O

Omaha, NE · Orlando, FL · Oslo, Norway

P

Palm Springs, CA · Paris, France · Philadelphia, PA · Phoenix, AZ · Pittsburgh, PA · Ponte Vedra, FL · Port Douglas, Australia · Portland, ME · Portland, OR · Providence, RI · Puebla, Mexico

R

Reykjavik, Iceland · Roseburg, OR · Rouen, France

S

Sacramento, CA · San Angelo, TX · San Antonio, TX · San Diego, CA · San Francisco, CA · Santa Fe, NM · Santa Fe, Cebu, Philippines · Scottsdale, AZ · Seattle, WA · Sherbrooke, Canada · Silver City, NM · Sisters, OR · Springfield, MA · St. John, Canada · St. John, USVI · St. Louis, MO · St. Paul, MN · Stavanger, Norway · Sussex, UK · Sydney, Australia · Sydney, Canada · Sweetwater, TX

T

Taos, NM · Tijuana, Mexico · Tisbury/Martha’s Vineyard, MA · Tokyo, Japan · Toronto, Canada · Tulsa, OK

V

Van Horn, TX · Vancouver, Canada · Vancouver, WA

W

Wageningen, Netherlands · Wareham, MA · Washington, DC · Whitefield, NH · Wilmington, NC · Wolfsburg, Germany · Worcester, MA

Z

Zurich, Switzerland

We arrived in Sydney, and stayed on the harbor, at the Pier One Park Royal.

Our production was capturing a new campaign for Royal Caribbean cruise lines. I was producing a series of videos filming the various activities guests could do off the ship: climbing Harbour Bridge, surfing at Bondi Beach and the latest at the Opera house.

We flew out to the middle of the country and filmed hiking at Ayer’s Rock in Uluru.

We traveled north to Cairns, then Port Douglas where we ventured out by motorboat and captured underwater footage of the Great Barrier Reef.

After Port Douglas, we traveled back to Sydney and prepared to depart. The trip had been close to three weeks.

The night before we left, before our flight to Los Angeles, then Boston, I went out alone. I cabbed to a club. I was people watching, soaking in the vibes.

I was nursing a beer, maybe on my second. It wasn’t very late, maybe 10 or 10:30p. I stepped into the bathroom, used the urinal, washed my hands, and made my way to the bathroom exit.

When I emerged from the bathroom, two men appeared, one on each side of me. Gently, but firmly, they took my upper arms, and said: “Mr. Jennings, come with us.”

I was startled - but - I didn’t feel any danger... they weren’t moving me in an aggressive manner, it was supportive…like cover.

We made our way to the first floor of the club, walked through the crowd, exited the club, past the rope line, and toward a waiting car, with a man in the driver’s seat, on the right side of the vehicle.

I entered the back seat, the man to my right opened the passenger door, waited for me to be seated and my door shut before he entered the vehicle’s passenger side, crossing the rear of the vehicle. The man on my left had walked around the trunk, and sat next to me. The doors closed and we were off.

I didn’t ask any questions. I was half-terrified, half in shock.

A few minutes later, the car stopped in front of my hotel, The Pier One Park Royal.

The doorman at the hotel opened my door, the man in the front passenger seat turned, looked at me, and said: “have a good night Mr. Jennings.”

The door closed, and they drove off.

I stood in front of the hotel for a minute.

I went to the front desk. “Did someone send me a car? I’m Jennings in Room,” whatever the number was.

The woman at the front desk checked her notes, made a call, then set the phone into the receiver, looked at me and said “no, Mr. Jennings.”

I looked around the lobby, was this a prank from the production company?

The next morning, I asked the producer, “did you send me a car last night?”

“No, why?”

The men were American I could tell - especially after being down under for 18 days. Aussies are very similar in dress and manner to Americans, with subtle cultural differences: Blundstones, cricket and Aussie Rules football merch...small details…

The two men seemed American, and the one man that spoke, was definitely American.

How did they know where I was staying?

I arrived at Memorial Hall, met my client, and was directed toward a Secret Service agent who screened me. I was then handed a badge and directed to my seat, which happened to be next to Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legendary legal affairs correspondent.

From my seat, I could see sitting in the front row: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices’ Gorsuch, Souter, Kagan, Kennedy, Breyer, and Attorney General Merrick Garland. A quorum of Supreme Court justices, gathered to watch a film I made.

I took a photo an hour earlier as I was having lunch, alone at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, in Harvard Square. The attendance of the justices’ was kept secret, for reasons of national security.

The interviews I conducted for the film are a hall of fame of legal power: Loretta Lynch, the former U.S. Attorney General under Obama. Paul Clement, former Solicitor General, who’s argued more Supreme Court cases than almost anyone living. Rodgin Cohen, the most powerful banking lawyer in America. Bert Fields, the legendary Hollywood attorney who represented Mario Puzo, Steven Spielberg, the Beatles, Tom Cruise and Michael Jackson. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Haben Girma, the first deaf-blind graduate of Harvard Law. Judge Margaret Brenneman, the first female graduate. Sheela Murthy, an immigration law pioneer. Michelle Wu, then President of the Boston City Council, now Mayor of Boston. Margaret Montoya, one of the first students of color to attend Harvard Law and Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who died in 2023 at 103. The man who prosecuted the Einsatzgruppen.

There was one interview, however, that was not like the others.

Early planning sessions centered on who we would interview. My client, Keith McCluskey, arranged a trio of meetings with the Dean, Martha Minow. The purpose was to arrive at the list of interviewees above. Our collective lists started with roughly one hundred people. Some individuals, like Benjamin Ferencz and Bryan Stevenson were obvious choices.

A name I had never heard before, Antonio Oposa, survived all of the “voting” rounds, and was slated as a subject to interview as coverage for the environmental side of law. Each interview subject, in addition to being a graduate of Harvard Law, was to represent a particular facet of the law: Wu, Lynch and Clement: the government; Murthy: immigration; Fields: entertainment, and so on.

In 1993, Antonio Oposa had successfully argued before the Philippine Supreme Court that future generations have legal standing to sue for environmental protection. The case, Oposa v. Factoran, established what has become known as the Oposa Doctrine, a legal framework that has since been cited in courts around the world.

Oposa lived in Manila, but kept a non-profit environmental school on Bantayan Island, a tranquil, underrated paradise located off the northwestern coast of Cebu.

A “Warrior Lawyer Profile,” written by a University of British Columbia law student, Veronica Plihal, from March 21, 2021, remarked on the dark side of Oposa’s legal efforts: “Unfortunately, Oposa’s activism has not avoided repercussions from those who benefit from the practices he seeks to end. Oposa has been the target of death threats and assassination attempts. In 2006, his close friend and co-activist, JoJo de la Victoria, was murdered.”

In February 2017, after we’d decided who would be interviewed, we moved into the planning phase to schedule interviews ranging from a local shoot at Boston City Hall to capturing Oposa at his camp on Bantayan Island.

There was one problem. That month, on February 27, 2017, the BBC reported a German tourist had been beheaded by Abu Sayyaf, at a beach, 400 miles from our Bantayan location. Abu Sayyaf, at the time, was one of the smallest and most violent jihadist groups in the southern Philippines.

I contacted one of my oldest friends, T.K. Knowles, owner of BOB industries, a commercial and film production company in Los Angeles who put me in touch with Nicholas Simon, the owner of Indochina Productions, based in Banghkok, with contacts and offices across Asia. Indochina provides production services for large studio films, like Avengers: Endgame and Infinity War, and serial TV like The White Lotus.

Nicholas put me in touch with a Manila based production manager named Mary Jane Pe Aguirre. “Mother Jane,” as she was known, started her career as Oliver Stone’s assistant when he came to the Philippines to shoot Platoon.

We talked about the project, how it was a simple interview, no sets, or much in the way of lighting, but, based on our subject and the risk posed by Abu Sayyaf, that security was paramount.

My next phone call was to a man named Tony Smith, Mother Jane’s go to for set security.

Tony Smith is a former British SAS operator, who works as a security consultant in the film industry, based out of Manila. He’s also an actor, and can be seen in the Ridley Scott film, Body of Lies, torturing a prisoner with a cricket bat.

I described our interview subject, Mr. Oposa, and sent Tony some articles and background for him to research.

We connected a couple days later, and he outlined a plan for the crew, from the moment we would set down in Cebu, until we boarded the plane, en route back to the States.

Despite assurance from Tony that we would be safe, I was traveling into a country that was being run at the time by an aggressive, autocratic leader, President Rodrigo Duterte, to interview a high-value target, with an active reward for his assassination.

For a Harvard Law School documentary.

We left Boston and flew to Los Angeles, where we would switch to a Philippines Airline flight.

We departed from a gate I’d never been to at LAX. We boarded a bus from the Tom Bradley Terminal, were driven to the middle of the airfield, and dropped off at an open air lounge, or “remote gate.” We waited for a few minutes, then boarded the plane, which was a converted Iberian Airways jet from the 1970’s. The interior had never been changed, and the Iberian logo was still visible on certain surfaces.

I received my credentials from the Presidential Communications Operations Office, a visiting journalist pass signed by Jose Ruperto Martin M. Andanar.

Tony explained when we arrived on the island our escape plan. It started with the vehicle. Any transport would be done in his Volkswagen Touareg, which had bullet proof glass, and a nice beefy engine. If we needed to evacuate the island, he had secured a high speed boat, and showed me where it was kept, once we arrived at the hotel. We hired five off-duty, armed, Interpol officers, to shadow and provide close protection for myself, my DP and (2) clients.

As we were making our way to La Playa Estrella resort in Santa Fe, Tony’s wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat, pointed out the giant wooden structures, that looked like miniature arenas, as we drove through each small village.

Across the Philippines, cockfighting, or “sabong”is a longstanding tradition with deep cultural roots. It’s legal. Her father was a top promoter and she asked us if we wanted to attend a fight. Fights were staged at “cockpits,” the rickety wooden structures we’d been passing, typically near the center of town. Coming into and leaving each town, you’d see an advertisement, a portrait, typically a detailed painting or photograph of a chicken, promoting the town’s winner, like a famous wrestler.

We arrived at the resort, a small enclave with 10 rooms arranged in a square next to the beach. I dropped my bags, put on my bathing suit and went for a swim.

When I got out of the water, I noticed my chest hurt as I walked. I went to my bungalow, rinsed off, and laid down on the bed. A half-hour passed, and I was getting a headache. The symptoms were coming on fast.

I walked out of my bungalow, to the middle of the property, where Mother Jane was meeting with the crew, organizing for the shoot. As I walked up, one of the PAs looked at my face, grabbed my arm, and helped me sit down. He began rubbing my temples and shoulders. Mother Jane was calling a local doctor before I could even say I didn’t feel well.

They helped me back to my bungalow, and I waited for a doctor. The island of 150,000 residents was served by a total of six doctors. To have one come to the bungalow, instead of making the hour long drive to the clinic, cost twenty dollars, which I happily paid.

A couple hours later, a man in a t-shirt, sandals, and shorts left an assortment of powders, pills, and tonics, with written instructions of when to take and in which order. I had no idea what any of it was, except some form of antibiotic. The fever stayed under control, but the headache was fierce, like a migraine. Light and movement triggered the heavy, dull pressure.

The next day, I mustered enough energy to observe some of the B-roll Martin Albert, my DP was capturing and conduct the interview with Oposa. Then I crashed.

The day after, I could barely walk. They put me in the Touareg, and made a dash to the Bantayan Ferry. Two hours later, we arrived at Hagnaya Ferry Terminal in San Remigio. I don’t remember the ferry ride back to Cebu island. The drive from the Hagnaya Ferry Terminal to our hotel in Cebu City took several hours. Dirt roads, traffic, the noise, I was in and out of consciousness the whole way. I felt like I was dying.

We arrived at the hotel. They had me wait in the van, checked in, then took me to my room. The hotel doctor came immediately. He threw out the powders, pills and tonics from the island doctor, and left a different litany of powders, pills and tonics.

“Take this first, dissolve this in a small amount of water, drink this. Take this 30 minutes later.”

Martin was worried. Martin and I have worked together in countless U.S. states, and traveled to Denmark, Australia, The Cayman Islands, Alaska, and the Philippines on different jobs. He took over client duties. He kept everything together.

I just wanted to get home, but my fever had to drop or I wouldn’t be able to fly. Luckily, when I woke up the next morning, the fever had dipped, but I was still very ill.

Walking through the immigration hall at LAX was a bit nerve wracking until I was given the all-clear.

My doctor in Marblehead was puzzled. Some sort of bacterial infection that threw my system into a tailspin for seventy-two hours.

9/13/41 to 8/9/22

Larry Dean Jennings traded his spurs for wings August 9, 2022. Born in Picher, Oklahoma on September 13, 1941, Mr. Jennings lived a remarkable and eventful life.

The young Jennings moved with his mother Delores to Tulsa after the news of his father’s death, in the Europe theater, during WW2. They moved to his grandmother Willie Thompson Woods iconic rooming house. Willie's fascinating life inspired the character “Ado Annie” in the beloved musical "Oklahoma,” based on “Green Grow the Lilacs,” by Lynn Riggs, a cousin but more of a father-figure to Larry as a young boy.

Larry attended various schools in Tulsa, including Cascia Hall, graduating from Edison High School in 1959.

He turned down a wrestling scholarship to the University of Oklahoma and enrolled at Northeastern State University.

He embarked on road trips with friends, journeying along the legendary Route 66 to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, where they worked summer jobs in the Pendleton Store between surfing sessions at Trestles and the Wedge.

After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree, he moved to Laguna Beach. While in California, Larry landed a job as a sales associate with Scott Paper Co. His charm and charisma helped him thrive in the business securing clients across Los Angeles and Orange counties, including the renowned Leno LaBianca and his small chain of grocery stores.

His greatest successes in business were the memorable marketing campaigns in the 1970’s for the NASL soccer franchise, the Rowdies, earning accolades from George Steinbrenner himself, claiming the work as the “best in all of sports.”

Tragically, in 1981, Larry suffered near-fatal injuries from a motor vehicle accident in North Africa while on business.

Undeterred by the setback, Larry continued his career and collaborated with renowned figures like George Plimpton, working on projects for the Paris Review and Fireworks by Grucci.

Larry's personal life went through changes, including divorces and remarriages. Eventually, he settled in Santa Fe, where he met his third wife. Together, they operated a vintage western wear and boot store called Cowboy Legends.

Mr. Jennings returned to Tulsa and for the past several years was rarely seen in public due to years of declining health.

Larry is survived by his wife, two ex-wives, three children and three grandchildren.

We see the front of the hotel in an old black and white photo, aged, at a 3/4 angle. A group photo of a dozen people.

EXT. INDIAN TERRITORY, NORTHEASTERN OKLAHOMA (TODAY)

Aerial shots of Claremore and the Verdigris Valley. The Claremore Mound, comes into view.

SCHOLAR: “In October 1817, a well-armed band of Cherokee and Delaware Indians attacked the Clermont Village (Claremore became so due to a typing error at the post office). The Osage warriors were away on a hunting trip. The village was filled with women, children and old men. During the attack, many of the Osage Indians got as far as the river, but drowned in an attempt to escape. The others were killed and some taken as prisoners. Chief Clermont (the Osage leader) was killed and buried on the Mound.”

EXT. PLAINS OUTSIDE CLAREMORE TOWARD VINITA

Montage of the history described to match frame. We see Native Americans (as they were prior to the land run), men and women, horses, Marshalls and cowboys firing guns, outlaws robbing trains, banks, men in masks. The Klan. Outlaws. Intercut with pictures of the Thompson women and Riggs, the people of the area, railroads, mines, conductors, signal men, miners...ranchers...a barber...a post master.

CUT TO:

INT. KITCHEN

We see the tape recorder.

LILLIE ATW: “Uncle Jim built on the back of it for Mama, you know...he built a big dining room, and a kitchen, and another little room; and then an upstairs. Had bedrooms upstairs. She had a big sleeping porch and then another room and two little rooms.”

NARRATOR: This was Mary Thompson’s home after she had divorced William Thompson, left Sapulpa and settled into Claremore, about 1915. A few years later, in 1920, after nuptials with her second husband, a cowboy named John Brice, she bought herself a farm house on the edge of Claremore.

INT. MONTAGE

We see a carriage move from the St. James to the outside of town.

We open on Lynn’s NYC apartment building and move toward the door.

CUT TO:

INT. 1 CHRISTOPHER ST.

We are in the apartment with Lynn, a friend and Ida Rauh.

IDA RAUH: (Dialogue from recording as she’s interviewed by the unknown person).

CUT TO:

INT. KITCHEN

We see the tape recorder rolling.

CUT TO:

EXT. ROUTE 66, LYNN RIGGS BOULEVARD, DOWNTOWN CLAREMORE

Present day Claremore, time-lapse through a full day as the narrator closes the film.

NARRATOR: Riggs continued to write plays, and also worked as a screenwriter, adapting his own plays and other works for the movies. He also served as the president of the Dramatists Guild from 1941 to 1945. Rollie Lynn Riggs died of complications from stomach cancer in New York City in 1954 at the age of 55.

EXT. SHELTER ISLAND, 47 ST. MARY’S RD.

We see the exterior of a farm house, driving by, intercut with the historical society documents.

NARRATOR: Riggs kept his apartment in Greenwich Village but began spending more time at his farm house on Shelter Island, inviting friends out and operating a “salon” of sorts. The royalties he received, starting in 1943, would be his main source of income for the rest of his life and where he once was constantly looking for work, and living from paycheck to paycheck, Riggs finally achieved a level of financial stability in his mid 40’s.

EXT. MUSEUM OF HISTORY, CLAREMORE, OK

We see Lynn’s memorial outside the museum.

NARRATOR: Rollie Lynn Riggs was an American playwright and screenwriter, born on a farm outside of Claremore, OK, April 25, 1899, and died on July 21, 1954, in New York City. Riggs grew up in the area known today as Claremore, Northeastern, Oklahoma. He attended the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a degree in journalism. He worked as a journalist and teacher before turning to playwriting. His first play, "Knights of the White Magnolia," was produced in 1923 and was followed by several more plays, including "The Cream in the Well" and "Big Lake." However, it was his play "Green Grow the Lilacs," first produced in 1931, that brought Riggs national recognition. Set in rural Oklahoma at the turn of the century, the play tells the story of a love triangle between a cowboy named Curly, a farmhand named Jud, and a young woman named Laurey. The play's realistic dialogue, use of folk songs, and themes of love and rivalry would inspire Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to create the musical "Oklahoma!" in 1943. Riggs continued to write plays, including "The Cherokee Night" and" Roadside," and also worked as a screenwriter, adapting his own plays and other works for the movies. He also served as the president of the Dramatists Guild from 1941 to 1945..

CUT TO:

INT. MUSEUM OF HISTORY, CLAREMORE, OK

Inside the Museum we see the displays as we split screen to the credits of the film.