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Heroin is "Good for Your Health": Occupation Forces support Afghan Narcotics Trade (May 10, 2007)
"The occupation forces in Afghanistan are supporting the drug trade, which brings between 120 and 194 billion dollars of revenues to organized crime, intelligence agencies and Western financial institutions."

U.S., allies seen as losing drug war (May 7, 2007)
"The United States and its Latin American allies are losing a major battle in the war on drugs, according to indicators that show cocaine prices dipped for most of 2006 and U.S. users were getting more bang for their buck."

101-year-old Zambian man nabbed over cannabis cultivation, trafficking (May 3, 2007)
"DEC spokesperson Rosten Chulu confirmed the arrest of Timothy Chilekwa, a peasant farmer of Namembo village in Southern province who was born in 1906. Chulu said the old man was nabbed for alleged unlawful cultivation of cannabis weighing 1.2 tons. He was also found trafficking two sacks of cannabis weighing 6. 95 kg, Chulu said. The spokesperson said the 101-year-old would appear in court soon."

Was Timothy Leary Right? (May 3, 2007)
"Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time? The answer to both questions is yes."

The Farce of the War on Drugs (May 1, 2007)
"My brother Howard Wooldridge served as a decorated police officer and detective in Lansing, Michigan for 18 years. During that time, he collared killers, drunk drivers, child molesters, rapists, wife beaters and drug dealers. What he learned launched him on a crusade to stop the federal government’s useless 35 year 'War on Drugs.'"

Coca Growers Shake the Andes Once Again (April 27, 2007)
"During the last few days, coca growers, especially in Peru and Colombia, have been in the news again, as their actions have given the media something to talk about."

LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US (April 27, 2007)
"BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work."

No Jail for Willie Nelson on Drug Charge (April 25, 2007)
While the editor of DrugWar.com applauds this decision by the judge, I can't help but wonder how hard the judge would have thrown the book at me for the exact same offense.

The War on Salvia Divinorum Heats Up (April 14, 2007)
"Middlebury, Vermont, this week declared a public health emergency to prevent a local business from selling it. It's already illegal in five states -- Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Delaware -- and a number of towns and cities across the country, and now politicians in at least seven other states have filed bills to make it illegal there. For the DEA, it is a 'drug of concern.'"

Book Offer: Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics (April 14, 2007)
"Normally when we publish a book review in our Drug War Chronicle newsletter, it gets readers but is not among the top stories visited on the site. Recently we saw a big exception to that rule when more than 2,700 of you read our review of the new book Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics: A Critical Analysis of Claims Made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy."

Plant growers served search warrant (April 11, 2007)
"Three WSU students were surprised when a plant they were growing in their closet was mistaken for marijuana."

California in bid to impose 7.25% sales tax on cannabis (April 10, 2007)
"For decades, smoking marijuana has been an illicit affair, a key anti-establishment ritual for America's counter-culture underground. But the legalisation of the drug for medicinal purposes in California has presented its advocates with a dilemma: to remain firmly on the wrong side of the law or accept a demand to pay taxes on its sale."

The Other War: Democratic Candidates are Deafeningly Silent on the Drug War (April 9, 2007)
"There is a major disconnect in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House. While all the top candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed War on Drugs, a war that has morphed into a war on people of color."

Ex-officer likens drug war to Prohibition (April 8, 2007)
"Retired police officer Peter Christ on Tuesday compared the contemporary war on drugs to National Prohibition of the 1920s."

Minnesota drug laws: Are they too harsh? (April 8, 2007)
Momentum gathers for review of sentencing rules

Drug Czar Blasted for Lack of Leadership (April 8, 2007)
"During the course of research for this series, it became apparent that many prominent players in the war on drugs don't have many compliments for the current drug czar, John Walters."

Is the Drug War Nearing an End? (April 8, 2007)
"Little by little by little there is some hope that the "war" on drugs is becoming a political issue - the first step in undoing a set of policies that make little sense no matter how you look at them."

Law Enforcement Group Visits Maine To Advocate For Legalization Of Drugs (April 8, 2007)
"LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, says it has 5,000 members, made up mostly of retired and active law enforcement professionals. The group tours the country speaking to various civic groups about what they call a $60 billion failed war on drugs."

Afghans pin hopes on a new economy (April 8, 2007)
"As a competitive economy awakens in one of the world's poorest countries, the residents of Kabul are jockeying to get ahead in a city flush with cash from US soldiers, foreign aid workers, new investors, parliamentarians, and drug traffickers."

Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala (April 8, 2007)
"If the trip to Guatemala was a fiasco, Colombia was no better, Bush's arrival in Bogotá couldn't have happened at a worse time as every moment ticked off another scandal, some of them leading in the direction ofo President Uribe's office, and nothing that Bush or Uribe president could say concealed the fact that the Colombia phase of the U.S. anti-drug war was more dead than alive, which was even more certain when it came to extraditing Colombian suspected felons to the U.S."

Analysis: U.S. anti-drug war in Afghanistan (April 8, 2007)
"In a bluntly worded letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the lawmakers said inter-agency rivalry and U.S. policy failures in Afghanistan risked allowing it to slide back into chaos."

Law Enforcement: This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories (April 7, 2007)
"A Georgia fire captain gets caught peddling coke, a pair of New Haven narcs lose their jobs, a former Mississippi police chief cops a plea, and a former Ohio cop goes back to prison. Let's get to it...."

Methamphetamine: Feds Make First Cold Medicine Bust Under Combat Meth Act (April 7, 2007)
"An Ontario, New York, man last Friday won the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested under the 2005 Combat Meth Epidemic Act. According to a DEA press release, William Fousse was arrested for purchasing cold tablets containing more than nine grams of pseudoephedrine within a one month period."

Harm Reduction: New Mexico Governor Signs Overdose Death Reduction Measure (April 7, 2007)
"New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) Wednesday signed innovative legislation that would protect friends or family members who seek medical attention for drug overdose victims. The law is the first of its kind in the country."

Pot-Growing Takes Root in the Suburbs (April 1, 2007)
"In Coldwater Creek, a middle-class housing development outside Atlanta, the neighbors mind their own business and respect each other's privacy - ideal conditions, it turns out, for growing marijuana in the suburbs."

Bob Barr Flip-Flops on Pot (March 28, 2007)
"Bob Barr, who as a Georgia congressman authored a successful amendment that blocked D.C. from implementing a medical marijuana initiative, has switched sides and become a lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project."

What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care? (March 28, 2007)
"Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one... But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it... You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people."

Mexican Envoy Highly Critical of U.S. Role in Anti-Drug Effort (March 23, 2007)
"The United States has contributed 'zilch' to Mexico's efforts to combat the nations' joint problem with criminal narcotics gangs, Mexico's new ambassador to Washington said yesterday."

Colorado Has Song in Its Heart, and Not Drugs on Its Mind (March 14, 2007- Free NYTimes registration required)
"The Colorado General Assembly wants to be quite clear on this point: When the singer-songwriter John Denver praised the joys of Colorado and sang about 'friends around the campfire, and everybody’s high,' in 1972, he was not referring to illicit drugs. Definitely not. Don’t even think it. The high in question, lawmakers say, is really about nature and the great outdoors — the tingly feeling you get after a nice hike, perhaps."

U.S. faults friends, foes in drug war (March 5, 2007)
"The United States said top anti-terror allies Afghanistan, Pakistan and Colombia had fallen short in the war on drugs despite enhanced counter-narcotics efforts and it criticized perennial foes Iran, North Korea and Venezuela for not cooperating."

Cuba’s War on Drugs (March 5, 2007)
"A review of the main results of the Cuban efforts against illegal drug trafficking as well as prevention during 2006, shows a marked reduction in the presence of drugs on the island, with 1.7 tons of narcotics seized, the lowest figure of the past 11 years and almost four times less than the amount detected in 2003."

Drug War Corrupting Cops In Hawaii and Elsewhere (March 5, 2007)
"Claiming to be the 'world’s leading drug policy newsletter,' the Drug War Chronicle publishes a regular online feature called, 'This Week’s Corrupt Cops Stories.' The typical Hawaii newspaper reader probably comes across these cops-gone-bad stories pretty rarely. But, when hundreds of reports compiled over the past year from around the nation are read at one sitting, they add up to a hidden cost of America’s ill-fated drug war -- widespread corruption inside local police departments, prisons and jails."

Drug war rips apart Mexico (March 5, 2007)
"More than 250 people were executed last year in Acapulco as the sweltering Pacific resort became the latest battleground between rival cartels battling for supremacy of the multibillion-dollar drug trade."

In Guatemala, officers' killings echo dirty war (March 5, 2007)
"The two sets of brazen killings set off a vicious diplomatic conflict between Guatemala and El Salvador — heightened by news reports suggesting that the congressmen were indeed drug dealers — and ignited a political scandal here. It shed light on how corrupt the National Police has become, and raised questions about links between drug dealers and high-level police officials, as well as whether the government can contain drug trafficking without international help."

Collision Course: Bolivia's "Coca, Si; Cocaine, No" Policy Runs Afoul of the International Drug Control Board and, Probably, the United States (March 1, 2007)
"A confrontation is brewing over Bolivian President Evo Morales' effort to rationalize coca production in his country and expand markets for coca-based products....Now, the Morales government is also pushing for expanded legal markets for coca products and, in a joint venture with the Venezuelan government, is preparing to begin coca product exports to that country."

Ga. Reconsiders No - Knock Warrant Rules (March 1, 2007)
"A group of lawmakers wants to make it harder for police to use ''no-knock'' warrants in the wake of a shootout that left an elderly woman dead after plainclothes officers stormed her home unannounced in a search for drugs."

Here we go again (Feb. 22, 2007)
"We're happy we could help with that, Mr. Vice President, but Colombian cocaine is still readily available in U.S. cities, so we have a difficult time thinking we got a good deal for our $4 billion. In fact, we don't believe Americans are getting their money's worth for any of the cash the government has thrown into the bottomless pit of the drug war. Court dockets are packed and prisons are overcrowded, yet illicit drugs are still readily available to anyone who wants them."

Latin America: Mexico Moves to Decriminalize Drug Possession -- So It Can Concentrate on Drug Traffickers (Feb. 22, 2007)
"Legislators from Mexican President Felipe's Calderon's National Action Party (PAN -- Partido de Accion Nacional) have introduced a bill in the Mexican Senate that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs for 'addicts.'"

DPS officials were told of lax lab security (Feb. 22, 2007)
"Texas Department of Public Safety officials were aware of security breaches in the handling of their drug evidence as recently as 2006 and as far back as at least 2003 — problems such as failure to log evidence out of storage, containers of marijuana left open and the lack of a monitoring system for a high-security drug vault — according to the agency's internal audits."

'Safest city' now has drug war (Feb. 22, 2007)
"From the shopping malls and the fashionable clothes of its residents, this could be any affluent U.S. suburb. Residents pride themselves on their prosperity. But in recent weeks, drug-related violence has shattered the tranquillity."

Mexican president gives soldiers pay hike as drug war intensifies (Feb. 22, 2007)
"Soldiers waging a nationwide offensive against drug traffickers will get a pay hike of nearly 50 percent this year in a bid to insulate them from corruption, Mexican President Felipe Calderon announced Monday."

New Federal Study Shows Methamphetamine Use Decreased Between 2002 and 2005 (Jan. 31, 2007)
"A new analysis of data from The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows that past-year use of methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant, declined between 2002 and 2005 among persons age 12 or older....The study also shows that the number of persons who used methamphetamine for the first time in the 12 months before the survey remained stable between 2002 and 2004 but decreased between 2004 and 2005."

Tell Governor Spitzer to Support Rockefeller Drug Law Reform (Jan. 31, 2007)
"The Rockefeller Drug Laws require extremely harsh prison terms for the possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs. Most of the people incarcerated under these laws are convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses, and many of them have no prior criminal records. Today 14,139 people are locked up for drug offenses in NY State prisons, comprising nearly 38% of the prison population. This costs New Yorkers over half a billion dollars a year. Send a message to Governor Spitzer now, urging him to support real reform."

Mexico eyes Colombian experience in drug battle (Jan. 27, 2007)
"Mexico's top prosecutor on Thursday looked to Colombia's experience in counter-narcotics and conflict for lessons to help his government battle drug cartels whose violence has engulfed parts of the country."

Rio gang kills seven as drug war spreads (Jan. 27, 2007)
"The mutilated bodies of seven youths, some with their heads and legs chopped off, have been found in an abandoned car in a notorious Rio de Janeiro slum. They appeared to be the latest victims of a long-running drug war that has made Rio, which depends heavily on tourism, one of the most violent cities in the world."

Drug Policy Reform Group to Partner with State of New Mexico in Federally-Funded Meth Prevention Education Program (Jan. 27, 2007)
"In a first for drug reform organizations, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) New Mexico office has been designated to create a statewide methamphetamine education and prevention program directed at high school students, thanks to a $500,000 grant obtained by US Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) as part of a Justice Department appropriations bill. The grant is the result of years of close collaboration between DPA and New Mexico state and local officials dating back to the administration of former Gov. Gary Johnson (R), a prominent voice for drug law reform."

Spot in brain may control smoking urge (Jan. 27, 2007)
"Damage to a silver dollar-sized spot deep in the brain seems to wipe out the urge to smoke, a surprising discovery that may shed important new light on addiction. The research was inspired by a stroke survivor who claimed he simply forgot his two-pack-a-day addiction - no cravings, no nicotine patches, not even a conscious desire to quit."

Case highlights medical-pot dilemma (Jan. 23, 2007)
"'If they didn't arrest me with 1,500, it's not likely they're going to come back and arrest me for 50,' said Sarich, whose advocacy group, CannaCare, says it has provided marijuana plants for 1,200 patients all over the state. Some of his new plants, delivered by patients in Longview, Federal Way and Vancouver, Wash., are descendants of the plants he lost."

Alleged cartel members extradited to Texas (Jan. 23, 2007)
"A suspected Mexican drug lord whose cartel allegedly smuggled more than 4 tons of cocaine a month over the U.S. border will stand trial in Texas. Osiel Cardenas-Guillen, the alleged kingpin of the Gulf Cartel, and three other alleged drug lords appeared in a Houston court Monday. Mexican authorities delivered Cardenas-Guillen and 14 other alleged Mexican drug dealers and criminals to Houston late Friday and early Saturday, the Drug Enforcement Administration said."

Burdened U.S. military cuts role in drug war (Jan. 22, 2007)
"Stretched thin from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has sharply reduced its role in the war on drugs, leaving significant gaps in the nation's narcotics interdiction efforts."

S.F. area is No. 1 for regular drug use, study says (Jan. 21, 2007)
"The San Francisco metropolitan area has a higher percentage of people who are regular drug users than any other major metropolitan area in the USA, a study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found."

Executive Order 13420 -- Dismantling the DEA (Jan. 21, 2007)
"This is the order I will sign after delivering my inaugural address," says Steve Kubby, who is again running for office this time seeking the nomination from the Libertarian Party as their Presidential candidate.

Cocaine found on 99.9% of UK banknotes (Jan. 21, 2007)
"Pretty well every banknote in the UK shows traces of cocaine, forensic scientists have claimed. According to a report in the Sunday Telegraph, 99.9 per cent of the two billion notes currently in circulation have come into contact with Bolivian marching powder."

A Legacy of Torture: From Cointelpro to the Patriot Act (Jan. 21, 2007)
"In today's world, the US government's use of torture and complicity in its clients' use of it is part of the headlines on a regular basis. Yet very few US citizens believe that methods like waterboarding, beating, and electrical shocks could be -- and have been -- used on US citizens." But the fact that torture is used profusely in US jails and prisons is unsurprising to those who've been inside the US "justice" system.

Reefer Madness (Jan. 21, 2007)
"I was never an activist until I got busted [noted Tommy Chong]. But it ’s not so much my efforts as the substance itself. Pot lives and dies on its own reputation....Years ago, people would do booze jokes. Then they start dying of cirrhosis of the liver and all these alcohol-related car accidents. Alcohol started out as a fun thing and ended up as this evil thing that kills people. Pot is the opposite...."

In the Costly War on Drugs, Who's To Say What Is Right? (Jan. 21, 2007)
"It seems like you lack a certain enthusiasm for the war on drugs, I said. I do lack enthusiasm for the war on drugs, he said. I asked about legalization. He shrugged. 'Monday, Wednesday and Friday I think they should be legalized. Tuesdays and Thursdays I think they should be illegal. I don't like drugs. I strongly disapprove of them. The costs are great. But it's expensive to incarcerate somebody. The costs are enormous either way. I don't know what's right.'"

Democracy and Plan Colombia (Jan. 21, 2007)
Just what effects are the massive spraying in anti-cocaine and poppy efforts that are one of the main tenents of Plan Colombia, not to mention all the arms and training given to the Colombian military and governments to combat Colombian peasents...errr, I mean, dastardly narco-terrorists? No major advancement of democracy it appears.

Drug mafia, CIA blamed for sacking of Afghan governor (Jan. 21, 2007)
"As The Washington Post has plainly summarized, 'corruption and alliances formed by Washington and the Afghan government with anti-Taliban tribal chieftains, some of whom are believed to be deeply involved in the trade, [have] undercut the [counter-narcotics] effort.'"

PAST NEWS ARCHIVE

The Spy Who Loved Me

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Los Angeles HERALD EXAMINER
Sunday Oct 11, 1981

RANDALL SULLIVAN
'The spy who loved me'
An officer's battle with obsession


She quoted from Chaucer at breakfast but had preferred talk of stakeouts, surveillances and undercover busts over drinks that night.

She bore an exotic name that suited her aquiline features - Theodora Nordica D'Orsay - but called herself Teddy, wore a red sweatshirt with the emblem of the New Orleans Police Department on the shoulder, and was sitting with three patrol cops from the Los Angeles Police Department's Venice division when Mike Ruppert met her at the bar of Brennen's Pub in Marina del Ray during December of 1975

"it's not too often you meet a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, literate and witty siting in a bar with a bunch of police officers," Ruppert said. "She was definitely somebody I wanted to see more of."

Ruppert got Teddy's phone number at breakfast. They went to dinner the next weekend then spent most of the next 15 months together. Even after Teddy disappeared in March of 1977, she would remain in Ruppert's life as the catalyst for his career collapse, his obsession with intrigue and his eventual doubts about his own sanity.

It was never clear, especially at the beginning, precisely what Teddy was doing with her life.

She was vastly more versed in the vernacular of law enforcement than any police groupie Ruppert had ever encountered. And she knew people or seemed to. Teddy dropped the names of not only undercover investigators but of suspected organized crime figures like Dan Horowitz and Hank Friedman. She brought home a story once of a visit to the hotel rooms of an apparent Mafia weapons dealer who kept a cache of machine guns in his closet but insisted to Ruppert that she had gone there with friends, "good guys."

Lacking any visible means of support, Teddy explained that she had saved money.

["His story was incredibly detailed and with many names and dates, all of which appeared quite logical. At not time were the patient's associations loosened or was his story incoherent. His thought processes were lucid. He appeared fully oriented in all spheres. Clearly, he is a bright individual with no major weaknesses." -From the Woodview-Calabassas Psychiatric Hospital "Discharge Recommendation" prepared by Dr. Robert A. Cole, Feb 2, 1978, regarding Los Angeles Police Department Officer Mike Ruppert.

"OK, I tried to go along with the idea that I was crazy, since that's what the department wanted me to do. But my doctor said I was totally sane. And if I was sane, then something really strange was happening. And it went back to Teddy."
-Mike Ruppert, Sept. 26, 1981]

Late night calls to Teddy from men who asked for her even when Ruppert answered a phone registered under his own name and what Ruppert described as "cryptic phone messages" left on the answering machine went unexplained.

Teddy was out two or three nights a week - off drinking with her friend Linda Covington, a Brennen's bartender, Ruppert was told. When he heard from Linda that Teddy had disappeared early in the evening on one of those nights, Ruppert did not make the obvious assumption that she was seeing another man. Instead he imagined clandestine operations and undercover identities.

Not long after Rupert and Teddy moved into the same Culver City apartment in March of 1976, she left for a vacation in Hawaii. When Teddy returned to Los Angeles, Ruppert was not interested in stories of waterfalls and white sand beaches, and certainly not of men with darkly tanned torsos. Ruppert insisted that she tell him the truth. What was the "deal," he demanded to know. He hammered her with questions about the specifics of the "operation." At 3 o'clock in the morning, exhausted, Teddy "confessed" that she had been in Hawaii to participate in an exchange of a huge load of government-issue automatic weapons for several kilos of processed, uncut cocaine.

Teddy fell asleep to the sound of Rupert alternately chortling and demanding "further details."

Ruppert had been warned early on by another policeman that Teddy was "a party girl," but he saw that as "a cover."

The aura of adventure Teddy cloaked herself in appealed to Ruppert's own sense of singularity.

He was "not your average cop," Ruppert said, and he had plenty of evidence to support that claim. Ruppert was far more intelligent than the average LAPD recruit, an honors graduate from UCLA who had verified his intellectual gifts by obtaining membership in MENSA, the organization for people whose IQs are in the top 2 percent of the population. One of the former commanders said he had heard Ruppert had the highest IQ in the LAPD.

A political science major at UCLA, Ruppert was attracted to the "sense of mission" that had been inculcated inside a police department run then by the nations fore-most spokesman for "Don't like cops? Next time you're in trouble, call a hippie" law enforcement chief Ed Davis

He had attended college as "a shorthair surrounded by longhairs" during the early 1970s, Ruppert said, and he was drawn to the sense of camaraderie shared by the officers of a department that was then successfully passing itself off as the finest police force in the world.

Ruppert and his closest friend at UCLA, Craig Fuller, now a highly placed White House aid to President Regan, had frequently discussed -- as they stood on the sidelines of campus demonstrations - how much more effective they could be if they got inside the system and became part of its inner workings before calling for change.

"I entered the police department sincerely believing that someday I would be chief of police in Los Angeles," Ruppert said.

It did not seem such an unlikely forecast at the beginning of his career. Ruppert was valedictorian of his Police Academy class in 1973 and earned solid "outstanding" ratings on his personnel reports over the next four years.

While his commanding officers praised him with four official commendations and 13 citations, some of his fellow patrol officers were a bit rattled by Ruppert. He was obsessed with his career. As a young white man from Orange County thrown onto the streets of a black ghetto wearing a blue uniform, Ruppert was known for his relentless pursuit of "hypes," heroin addicts. Other officers said he never took the uniform off, that he worked in his sleep.

Ruppert's field reports, a former sergeant of his said, were the most elaborate and descriptive in the department., "a pleasure to read each one a complete story."

His new girlfriend, Teddy D'Orsay, not only accommodated Ruppert's obsession with police work and his endless extrapolations, she enhanced them, building on the idea that each small case was spiraled upward into the criminal organizations she had infiltrated.

[Pull Quote: During the course of the next 10 months Ruppert began to document evidence - much of it still on file with the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department and the LAPD - that would support his theory that he was living with a CIA agent. End Pull Quote]

In May of 1976 Ruppert and Teddy went to Las Vegas, where he was enrolled in the US Drug Enforcement Agency training program. In Las Vegas Ruppert asked Teddy to marry him. There were things she had to discuss before she could answer, Teddy said. The couple drove to Ensenada, Mexico, for a short vacation.

In the Bahia bar, Ruppert loudly demanded to know where Teddy got her money. In a stage whisper that was overheard by people at nearby tables, Teddy told him that Rupert had already assumed, that she was "working for the government in an intelligence capacity involving organized crime."

Ruppert pounded on the table, shouted in triumph. Teddy began to shake her head, looking frightened. It was just a joke, she said, Didn't he get it? But Ruppert was still pounding the table, repeating again and again, "I knew it. I knew it."

Teddy shrugged her shoulders and finished her drink. OK, she said, you knew it.

During the course of the next 10 months Ruppert began to document evidence - much of it still on file with the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department and the LAPD - that would support his theory that he was living with a CIA agent.

The intrusions on their home life, the phone calls and Teddy's disappearances increased.

Ruppert bought Teddy a present, a pistol, an off make F1 Garcia 380-caliber automatic.

"She had it field stripped in 10 seconds," he recalled. He took Teddy to a practice range and discovered "she was as good a shot as I was."

She had been trained by the government, Teddy told him, and smiled.

One night during the fall of 1976 according to Ruppert, he was awakened by a phone call from a man who asked for Teddy. He handed the phone to her, lying in bed next to him. When Teddy hung up, she told Ruppert that Carlo Gambino, the Mafia don of dons, had died that night and the West Coast mob was meeting in San Francisco. She would have to fly up there that night, Teddy said.

For once, it occurred to Ruppert: to secret business, national security, undercover assignments, what better cover could a faithless lover have?

The next morning, driving to work, Ruppert heard a radio news announcement of Gambino's death and of the mob meeting in San Francisco.

Teddy insisted later that the trip to San Francisco had nothing to do with Carlo Gambino, whoever that was. She had been planning the trip for a week, she said. It was all a coincidence. She couldn't remember any phone call the night before she left. She advised Ruppert to take deep breaths.

Ruppert's speculations upon his live in love's "business" began to assume international proportions during the last month of 1976.

Teddy had been a childhood friend of Minou Haggstrom's, the American educated niece of Shah Reza Bahlavi of Iran. Teddy and Minou had carried on an occasional correspondence between Culver City and Tehran during the early months of 1956, but at the end of the year the letters from Iran began to arrive more frequently. Teddy talked about the danger Minou was in, how important it was to get her out of Iran soon.

Ruppert decided that the envelopes arriving from Tehran did not contain personal letters but rather encoded messages.

He began to see that it all fit. Even the bullet hole in Teddy's car fit.

He discovered the bullet hole on March 1, 1977, one year to the day since Ruppert and Teddy had taken the apartment in Culver City. Their relationship was deteriorating. Teddy was out more, gone overnight occasionally. Ruppert was complaining more about "the disruptions of our home life."

"I'm blowing your cover, right?" Ruppert said.

Teddy showed him the bullet hole in the driver side door of her 1965 Ford Comet - a perfect car for a secret agent, Ruppert had decided, because it was "sound mechanically on the inside, a heap on the outside, the kind of car you don't notice." Someone had tried to kill her in her Comet, Teddy said, she had to get out of town.

Ruppert now believes Teddy put the bullet hole there herself, with the gun he bought her, but at the time he believed her story.

Two days later Teddy was gone without a goodbye. A month passed without word from her.

One week after Teddy's disappearance, Ruppert's mother, a marginally successful realtor in Fountain Valley, was approached in her office by four men with Italian surnames who asked her to help arrange the purchase of a $45 million parcel of real estate.

Mrs. Ruppert, who made her living selling occasional $70,000 tract houses, calculated that her commission on the deal proposed by the Italian gentlemen would be $750,000. Panicked, she called her son and told him she thought she was becoming involved in something illegal.

Mike Ruppert took the names of the men who had proposed the $45 million deal to two members of LAPDs Organized Crime Intelligence Division, Lee Goforth and Charles Bonneau.

Goforth and Bonneau ran checks and informed Ruppert that one of the four men did have "an association with an important organized crime figure" but that it was not a close association. They scheduled another meeting with Ruppert.

At this gathering, Goforth said he noticed that Ruppert appeared "agitated."

"I asked him if there was something else besides his mother's deal and he said, yes, there was," Goforth recalled. "Then he went into all this weird stuff, this theory about his girlfriend, the double agent, being behind it all.

He and Bonneau attempted to check out the name Teddy D'Orsay with "at least one federal intelligence agency," Goforth said, and "nobody had heard of her, they said." Mike Ruppert's name had been passed along during these inquiries as well.

It was after his initial meeting with Goforth and Bonneau, Ruppert said, that "the harassment started." Hang up phone calls and cars tailing him to and from work. He found his apartment searched, he said, and the only things missing were two photographs of Teddy. He began to drive with his gun on his lap and slept at night with it under his pillow.

Five weeks after Teddy's disappearance, Ruppert received a post card from a small town outside Atlanta, Ga. - "Having a great time, wish you were here, Teddy."

One more month after that, 10 weeks after her disappearance, Teddy called Ruppert from New Orleans, where she was "working on something important," and gave him a phone number and an address in suburban Gretna, near the Belle Chase Naval Air Base.

(Part two continues the story of Ruppert's obsession with Teddy, which leads eventually to his resignation from the LAPD to "save my life.")

Teddy D'Orsay's phone call from New Orleans in May 1977 was Mike Ruppert's first voice contact with her since Teddy disappeared from their Culver City apartment 10 weeks earlier. During that conversation, Ruppert wrote Teddy's new phone number and address in Gretna, La., on a sheet of paper already filled with information regarding his mother's pending $45 million real estate deal. He had that paper in his jacket pocket, Ruppert said, the next evening when he finished his shift at the Police Academy and drove to Brennan's Pub in Marina del Rey where he had met Teddy 17 months earlier.

While Ruppert was drinking in Brennan's, his car door was unlocked by someone who used a metal shim, according to the official police report, and the jacket, the sheet of paper and Ruppert's service revolver all were stolen.

The next day Ruppert was back in the office with LAPD organized crime Investigators Lee Goforth and Charles Bonneau, attempting to convince his increasingly remote fellow officers that Teddy's life was in danger. "They" were going to kill her with Ruppert's own service revolver.

Goforth and Bonneau told Ruppert he looked tired. They advised him to take some time off.

In July 1977 Ruppert took a weeks vacation and drove to New Orleans pulling Teddy's furniture behind him in a U-Haul trailer.

During his six days in New Orleans, Ruppert reported, he was shot at as he and Teddy stood outside a bar. He and Teddy were followed by car and on foot. In Teddy's apartment he discovered more than a half-dozen phone jacks, including one complicated electrical hookup unlike anything he had ever seen before. He called a friend, a naval and communications officer, described the phone and hookup, and was told it sounded like the KY3 model scrambler phone, which required top secret clearance.

Teddy was cold and stony. She would not sleep with him. She told Ruppert that the smartest thing he could do would be to forget that he had ever met her.

Teddy was visited at night by a friend who wore a 44-caliber Magnum pistol in his boot and talked about the work he was doing for Mafia don Carlos Marcello. During the day, Teddy was visited by an Air Force sergeant named Johnny who brought her Manila envelopes from Belle Chase Naval Air Base filled with what he described as "communiqués."

Another friend who was employed by a company specializing in offshore oil rig communications systems said he was helping Teddy see that "some things got moved off the mainland."

Teddy and Johnny gobbled speed and smoked grass that they described in Ruppert's presence as "issued," laughed crazily at Ruppert's ardent, attentive expression.

He left New Orleans at the end of that week, Ruppert said, "borderline suicidal."

Back in Los Angeles, Ruppert notified Goforth and Bonneau that he now wanted to "drop the whole thing."

Shortly after Ruppert's return from New Orleans, his father Ed, an Orange County businessman, received a phone call from Teddy.

"She said she was worried about Mike," Ed Ruppert recalled. Teddy said she was "doing some sort of sensitive work involving organized crime." An organization she referred to alternately as "my people" and "my company" had considered Mike for employment, Ed Ruppert remembered Teddy telling him, but had decided Mike "wasn't ready" for that kind of work.

Because Mike was "worried about bugs," Ed Ruppert relayed the conversation to his son on the banks of the Santa Monica Beach palisades.

[Pull Quote: "I've never seen anyone as committed to something as Mike has been to this … Imagine what he could have accomplished if he had used the energy and the dedication he has devoted to this over the past five years to further a career" -Ed Ruppert, Mike's father. End Pull Quote]

Two days later, as he left a theater in Westwood, Ruppert said, he was chased around the perimeter of the UCLA campus by two men in a white pickup truck.

Ruppert called Bonneau and Goforth. He had imagined the tail, they told him. There had been no scrambler phone in Teddy's apartment. Maybe three weeks vacation wasn't enough.

That week, Ruppert signed in as a voluntary patient at Woodview-Calabassas Psychiatric Hospital.

A battery of tests and hours of interviews during which Ruppert repeated his "incredibly detailed story" to staff psychiatrist, Dr. Robert A Cole, consumed much of the two months that Ruppert was registered as a day patient at the hospital. Cole noted that Ruppert's "ties to reality were adequate with no evidence of bizarre thought, processes, delusions or hallucinations." In Ruppert's official "Discharge Recommendation" Cole referred to his patient as "an exceptional individual with no major weaknesses."

On Sept. 9, 1977 Ruppert saw Teddy again at his father's house, where she had come to pick up the last of her personal possessions.

Ruppert used a hidden recorder to tape most of their conversation. He played this tape later for Cole, who described what he heard as "a solid basis for his (Ruppert's) interpretation of events." On the tape, Cole heard Teddy "admit her involvement in investigative pursuits of an admittedly vague nature."

Ruppert later turned the tape over to LAPD's Bonneau. He never saw it again. During the summer of 1978, as the foment in Iran built toward revolution, Ruppert, now a senior training officer at the Police Academy, began once again to make those long-distance connections that obsessed him.

On Aug. 17, 1978, Ruppert went to Bonneau to say that he believed his ex-girlfriend Teddy was involved in a plot that had something to do with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.

Twelve days later Bonneau called Ruppert and asked for details of Teddy's "associations."

According to Ruppert, the "harassment" began again immediately: hang-up phone calls, tails, break-ins.

On Sept. 7, 1978, Bonneau said he had been unable to contact Teddy. What Bonneau did not mention was the FBI in New Orleans had contacted Teddy. On Sept. 12, Ruppert said, he was followed by a car with a license plate he checked through the Department of Motor Vehicles. It was registered to a post office box registered to the U.S. Government.

On Sept. 30, Ruppert was followed again, he said, by two vans bearing license plates registered to post office boxes.

He ran a check on Teddy's license plate and discovered it was also registered to a post office box.

On Nov. 17, Ruppert formally requested an interview with LAPD's new chief, Daryl Gates. The connection was made through Sgt. Virginia Pickering, who worked in Gates' office. Pickering came to the Police Academy on Nov. 28 to meet with Ruppert and on Nov. 29 told the young officer he would get five minutes with the chief the next day.

Five minutes was not enough time to tell his story, Ruppert insisted. He was lucky to get one minute, Pickering told him. On the morning of Nov. 30, 1978, Ruppert reported that he has been followed to work by two vans, a Volkswagen and a Pontiac Firebird. He failed to show up for his five-minute meeting with Chief Gates. That afternoon, Ruppert submitted his official resignation from the Los Angeles Police Department.

In an interview with the FBI four days later, Ruppert sad he had left the LAPD "to save my life."

o

Three years have passed and Ruppert hasn't let go. His fixation on Teddy and the international intrigue Ruppert believes he was drawn into by her has become both his vocation and his avocation.

Supported by files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, through research into the affairs of Mafia don Carlos Marcello, through information contained in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency report on the exchange of drugs for weapons - classified top secret because of a U.S. government agency's alleged involvement in these transactions - and through a historical study of the United States' involvement in Iran, Ruppert insists he now knows what "this incredibly story I stumbled into" was all about.

It was about suppressing the revolution in Iran,. Ruppert believes Teddy, useful because of her childhood friendship with the shah's niece, Minou Haggstrom, was assigned by the CIA to cultivate relationships with organized crime figures who would assist - in exchange for free access to refined Mideast heroin - in the transport of weapons to Kurdish counterrevolutionary forces in Iran.

"The actual transaction went down in New Orleans," Ruppert assures all who will listen, "under the supervision of Carlos Marcello. Teddy helped coordinate it all."

What is perhaps most incredible about Ruppert's story is that so many people in the best positions to evaluate it consider it "plausible."

Aaron Kohen, former deputy director of the FBI and head of the New Orleans Crime Commission considered the world's foremost legal authority on Carlos Marcello, found Ruppert's theory "entirely plausible." Speaking from a lawn chair beneath a shade tree in the back yard of his home in Lake Ponchartrain, Kohen said he, "would not be at all surprised" to learn of either Marcello's or the CIA's involvement in such enterprise.

Ruppert's attorney, Bill McCord, a former FBI agent, noted that "LAPD probably has had closer connections with the CIA and with SAVAK (the secret police of the shah of Iran) than any police department in the country. If Mike had been on to something, a lot of people would have known about it." What McCord finds less plausible is Ruppert's portrait of Teddy as a CIA agent. "It sounds like Teddy was a bit of a party girl who knew law enforcement people and also knew people on the other side of the law." McCord's friend and former colleague Buck Sadler, an FBI agent assigned to Los Angeles who conducted the official agency interview of Mike Ruppert, also found the theory "plausible," but added that he had "been offered no facts whatsoever to support it."

Other FBI agents, ones stationed in New Orleans, interrogated Teddy during the autumn of 1977. Teddy was almost immediately released, and the FBI has "no available record" of her statement.

Freedom of information Act petitions concerning the matter filled by Ruppert with the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Justice Department were answered with written statements that "nothing pertaining to your request" was found in the files of either agency.

o

On the evening of Oct. 9, I reached Teddy by phone at a bar in Honolulu, and she called back later from her home on the other side of Maui.

All that was incredible abut the story in her mind, Teddy said, was "that Michael Ruppert is still trying to make something out of this after all these years. Doesn't it make you doubt the mental stability of someone who has become so obsessed with things that happened so long ago?"

"Yes, I knew a lot of people," Teddy said, "I'm friendly, I smile and I say hello. And if you're a girl (Teddy is 32) and if you're friendly, you meet people. I didn't always know what those people were involved in, what they did for a living. Some of them may have been into strange things."

The problem with Ruppert, Teddy said, was that "he was always making connections - if I was friendly with two people who he knew or thought were involved in something together, then I was involved too."

Yes, she had told Ruppert that her vacation in Hawaii during the spring of 1977 had been cover for her involvement in a government-Mafia exchange of cocaine for automatic weapons, Teddy said. "He kept me up for hours the night I got back insisting that I tell him the truth, so finally I told him what he wanted to hear so I could go to sleep."

Yes, she had gone to San Francisco at the same time the West Coast Mafia dons were meeting there in the wake of Carlo Gambino's death, Teddy said: It had been a coincidence, but she had "let Michael think what he wanted to think."

Eventually it became convenient to play the role Ruppert had assigned her, Teddy said. Clandestine meetings and undercover assignments were the best excuses available for getting out of the house, for not coming home at night, for taking a weekend out of town.

After she ran away to New Orleans and Ruppert followed her, things got a little out of hand, Teddy said.

She was still a friendly girl and she had met people who were involved in things she did not quite understand. "Some of them may have been into - probably were into - - weird things," she admitted. "But I didn't know about that until later."

Ruppert had come into town and started asking questions of people who did not want to give answers, Teddy said. Some of her friends "had kind of done a number on Michael." Some had implied their involvement in an "operation" of international proportions. Others had threatened him. Some had shown him government documents and weapons.

"Its all kind of messed with his mind, and I'm sorry for that," Teddy said. "I just wanted to get rid of him at that point."

Yes, she had talked of her work as an undercover agent during a taped conversation with Ruppert, Teddy said.

"I saw him slip this tape recorder behind the couch as I came in and I figured if he was going to be this ridiculous, so would I." The one question Teddy would not answer was how she had supported herself without employment during the 15 months she spent with Ruppert: "That's nobody's business but my own."

She was sorry Ruppert had been hurt, Teddy said, but it would never have happened if he had developed a sense of humor.

o

"She's lying, she's lying, she's lying." Ruppert insisted pounding on the leather arm of a couch in the Herald Examiner lobby the next morning. "She's very good, I'll admit, and you wouldn't be the first person she's fooled."

He had been waiting three years to have his story told, Ruppert said. "Don't cut me off now," he pleaded. "This is the closest I've come."

o

Mike Ruppert's plight, his story, appeals to a collective paranoia that has been cultivated in most of us. "They" really are everywhere. And because we concede that much, we also must concede the possibility that Ruppert's private obsession is some aspect of responsibility the rest of us have failed to assume.

Ruppert says he is a victim. We need victims. They put a human face on the corruption and incoherence most of us are unable to confront. The inept innuendoes used by LAPD to rebut Ruppert's story only encourage sympathy for him:

"He came in with a story, I believe, that his mother was a CIA agent," said the department's official press spokesman, Cmdr. William Booth. "And you were aware, I'm sure, that he has spent time in a mental hospital."

Ruppert is a well-educated 30-year old who has been forced to fall back on the financial support of his mother and father. At least two jobs he had been promised after his resignation from the LAPD failed to materialize. Ruppert believes this was the work of "some agency interested in closing all doors to me."

Broke and beat, this UCLA honors graduate who reportedly possessed the highest IQ in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, eventually took a job as a clerk in a 7-Eleven store. Two hours into his first shift, Ruppert was arrested for selling liquor to a minor: "A setup, without question," he says.

o

"I've never seen anyone as committed to something as Mike has been to this," his father Ed said.

"Imagine what he could have accomplished if he had used the energy and the dedication he has devoted to this over the past five years to further a career."

It is Ruppert's "commitment" that has compelled the attention of others who have helped him along the way.

"Whether or not I buy Mike's theory, I consider his personal credibility above reproach," said McCord, a former FBI agent. "I have absolutely no doubt that Mike is telling what he believes to be the truth."

That same phrase "what he believes to be the truth" was used by a retired LAPD Intelligence officer, another FBI agent and psychiatrist Cole to describe Mike Ruppert. Each of these three professionals professed both a measure of admiration and a measure of fear of Ruppert.

Ruppert has stayed on the case. In a world where so much seems possible and so little likely, you begin to wonder if the courageous and the crazy are the same people.

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