
Update [April, 2020] The CIA completely declassified this document in January 2020. How this happened is explained in my book, published in April 2020: The Crash of Flight 3804: A Lost Spy, A Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-crash-of-flight-3804 Scroll down for reviews and praise. More on my book under “My Writings.” It has since been republished as a paperback with a new afterword and new title: Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil. (2022) Related to the book is my other website, Follow the Pipelines. It publishes work of pipeline-trackers like myself and has been focusing largetly on the war in Ukraine. You can guess why: The Biden Administration’s successful pressure on Germany to hold off on the certificaion of Nord Stream II pipeline immediately after the Russian invastion. Efforts to derail that pipeline occurred years earlier and the most recent example is the underwater sabotage of the N2 pipeline.
My writing career began in the 1970s, when I was a journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon for Middle East Sketch Magazine and The Beirut Daily Star. The Sketch was a sort of Time or Newsweek English language feature magazine covering the entire Middle East. I was fortunate to be the “roving correspondent,” which had me going to such exotic places as Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, and Oman. In those days, very few Western journalists had ever been to the UAE, Dubai and Oman. (They are on the southeastern side of the Arabian Peninsula). They were just emerging out of the desert. A fascinating experience to see them “modernize” due to sudden oil wealth. I wrote special issues on each of those countries. Now look at these countries!!
I do not have copies of these issues…they were lost along with all of my other belongings in the Lebanese civil war, which raged from 1975-1990. I left Beirut and took up residence in NYC, where I met my future husband, author and investigative journalist Gerard “Jerry” Colby. His opus, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain had just been published by Prentice Hall. The book was subsequently suppressed and we sued Du Pont and Prentice Hall. We won against Prentice-Hall in the lower court. Du Pont got off scott free. We appealed and eventually took it to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Despite that unwelcome outcome, the whole experience got me interested in the law and becoming a lawyer. The book, meanwhile, was resurrected and updated twice: in 1984, and in 2015 when it was reprinted as an ebook, where it is now available through openroadmedia and amazon. com. See https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/Du-Pont-Dynasty/9781453220887
My next writing adventure took me to the Amazon Basin with Jerry. We set off to investigate the genocide of Amazonian Indians, where some 100,000 Indians had been killed during the 1960s and 1970s. We wanted to understand why American evangelical missionaries had turned a blind eye to the massacres of tribes, some of whom were their “wards.” We also sought to verify rumors in Latin America that the CIA was funding the missionaries. It took us 18 years to get all the answers and to create Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995). This book was recently updated and published as an ebook by Open Road Media (2017) Here is a link: https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/thy-will-be-done/9781504048392. Better yet, go to Amazon.com and see all the five star reviews!
In 2008, I agreed to run for Vermont Attorney General on the progressive party ticket. As it turned out, my primary issue became prosecuting President George W. Bush for sending troops to Iraq based on lies. Assisting me was legendary prosecutor and true crime writer (e.g. Helter Skelter, about the Manson family killings) Vincent Bugliosi, author of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Bugliosi (who died two years ago, alas) supported my campaign, appeared at my debut press conference and traveled with me around the state. It was such a great experience that I decided to write a book about it: The People v Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Meets Along the Way. (Chelsea Green, 2010). If you want to know how to prosecute a president for crimes committed while in office, this is a handy guidebook – plus it’s full of colorful anecdotes about leaders in Vermont and nationally of the impeachment movement, Sen. Leahy’s Truth Commission, the [9/11] Jersey Girls and much more.
I have written articles for the Middle East, New Africa, Nation, The Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Huffington Post, Alternet, the Times Argus/Rutland Herald and Vermont Woman. I have posted links to some of them at “My Writings”