Early Retirement In Exile
By now, I knew that I was being monitored, and it was clear where the harassment was coming from. I began to weigh my options. One was to move back into the van, which was still parked in my driveway, and go back out on the road, hiding out in the forest where I couldn't be easily observed. Another was to flee into classic exile. Well, I had given some thought from time to time, of taking an early retirement and moving to Panama or Costa Rica, so I decided to take a trip to see if retirement in exile in either was actually feasible. I had run the numbers, and the finances looked doable, if just barely. I knew that as the post-9/11 Bush administration continued to grow more repressive with time, my continued ability to exercise my freedom of speech, if not live at liberty, surely was beginning to look like it depended on my getting out of the United States - exile kept coming up as the more secure long-term option. I have a good Costa Rican friend who, sympathetic to my plight, offered to host me at his mountain retreat during an exploratory visit, so I took him up on his offer, and scheduled the trip.
During the middle two weeks of April, 2003, I was in Costa Rica, enjoying my friend's warm hospitality (thanks, Diego!), and visiting most of the major parts of the country and meeting some of his friends. Costa Rica proved to be everything I had hoped for and more - far more livable than Nigeria, and with less poverty and more access to the amenities of life, yet with a pleasantly low cost of living. Utilities and infrastructure are more modern and reliable than I had expected or was used to from Nigeria. And the government and people were friendly and accomodating. So I decided it was a go - this was a place I could easily see myself living in.
I returned to the States, and immediately put my house up for sale. I began preparing for the move, and finally, on the ninth of August, 2003, came the big day. The house sold, the goods packed and shipped, I got on a plane. As I write this, I realize that as the connecting flight from Houston to San Jose cleared the Texas coast, I didn't even look back for my last view of the United States. I no longer loved the land of my birth; it had rejected me. So I looked forward to my new life down south in the tropics, where I had always dreamed I would one day live. The next day, I began my new life in Central America.
You Can Run, But You Can't Hide
My first residence was for two months on a quinta (small farm) in the little village of Los Angeles Sur, near San Ramon. I continued to suffer harassment, even in Costa Rica; my laptop was infected with a Magic Lantern installation while staying there (I now know by who and how that happened), and I also noticed that I was not receiving much of any mail through my Miami forwarding address. Anything related to taxes was never delivered at all, and a small dribble of other mail arrived at the forwarder's office, often months late. Most of it was never received. The only tax form I ever received that year was hand addressed and sent directly to my Costa Rican post office box. No other tax forms ever arrived. Yet the other users of that forwarder told me that they had never had a problem. All their mail had arrived just fine. And on two occasions, while traveling in San Jose, the capital, I was followed, and on one occasion, my car had been very cleverly sabotaged (though I caught the problem before it caused serious damage).
The owner of the farm where I was staying was developing a new series of lots nearby and offered to sell me one at a significant discount, as I would be the first buyer in the new development. I liked it a lot, and it was perfect for my ham radio. While waiting to get my financial affairs in order and preparing to build, I moved into a rental house on a hilltop next to the development, where I could easily supervise the construction of my new home. As I settled in, I was in for quite a surprise. The weather at the end of the rainy season, at this relatively low elevation, proved to be very cold and constantly windy, drizzly and foggy, to the point that it was downright miserable in the morning, especially in mid-winter. One of my ham radio friends, a Tico, even told me that the area had a reputation across Costa Rica as "La Penitencia," the place where God sends sinners to do penance. Then there were the houseflies. Whenever it wasn't cold, windy and nasty, the flies came out in swarms, buzzing around the house and being a constant nuisance. I concluded that the constant housefly problem was due to the presence of a chicken farm on the other side of the hill, in spite of the prevailing wind blowing the other way. I almost never smelled it, but the wind didn't stop the flies, which were everywhere. In addition to all that, the developer's partner built a house on a lot directly below the hilltop lot I was interested in, and his roof ended up obstructing a major part of my otherwise million-dollar front-window view. So, given my concerns about the weather and the fact that the lot I wanted was ruined for its view, I decided not to buy the lot, and look elsewhere. Good thing I did. The nearby chicken farm that had been the source of the flies has, in the years since, been more than doubled in size. The flies must be truly awful by now.
One of my ham radio friends, who lived in the little town of Arenal on the north shore of the lake by that name, suggested that I might wish to come up and have a look around. Of course, the fact that he was also selling real estate on the side, meant that he knew the area and that I could probably find a property to my liking, though he certainly had an interest in making sure it was sold to me. Along with another ham friend, also from Phoenix, and who was also looking, I went up to Arenal to look around for a couple of days. I was delighted to find a beautiful property which was quite affordable, and was perfect for my needs, other than the fact that it was not a particularly good location for ham radio. But the property was about two acres, mostly already landscaped, and with a large fish pond. The lot was almost exactly the same size as the lot I had been looking at in Los Angeles Sur, and the lot, including the house, was going for little more than the cost of the lot alone in Los Angeles Sur. It also had all services already installed, and a truly beautiful flower garden with lots of mature landscaping - I didn't have to wait for any of that. I decided to buy the house and move in - it was the best deal I had seen in the country so far, and was an almost perfect match for my needs and desires.
The result is that I lived in Nuevo Arenal, happily retired and spending my time gardening in a gardener's paradise and web publishing when the weather is bad. Yes, it rains a lot there, but that's mostly at night and seldom past ten in the morning. The weather is only occasionally nasty and cold and when it is, it is seldom so for very long; most of the time it is cloudy, but warm and pleasant. The locals have accepted me as one of their own, and the place was very agreeable to me in many ways. Overall, I was pleased with my choice, even though it was quite far from most services. No houseflies at all, little fog, no constant drizzly, foggy wind, and lots of gringo as well as Tico friends. And it is an exquisitely beautiful place. The drive from the Arenal volcano to the town of Arenal has to be one of the most beautiful drives in all of Costa Rica - the highway tunneling through the rainforest in many places, interrupted by gorgeous views of the lake and the volcano. At last, I had found a little bit of paradise. And so far, with only occasional harassment from the Boys Up North. I couldn't have been happier.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
For two years, I lived in Nuevo Arenal without major incident. Sure, incidences of minor surveillance occurred, mostly to let me know I was still being watched, including a hardware bug planted in my laptop. But nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing that led me to believe I might be the object of serious attention by Foggy Bottom.
That all changed on the night of Good Friday, April 14, 2006. While enroute to Nicaragua, and staying overnight in Liberia, I suffered a heart attack under some rather suspicious circumstances, and it left me wondering if I had narrowly survived an assassination attempt.
No, I don't have a smoking gun. The boys from Foggy Bottom are good enough that they rarely leave any laying around - but the circumstantial evidence is damning as you will see.
I was on a journey. I had gotten as far as Liberia, in Guanacaste Province, about 70 km. from the Nicaragua border. My intended destination was Granada, Nicaragua, to conduct some business there and visit with friends. But it was not to be.
I arrived in Liberia on the afternoon of Thursday, the 13th, and took a room at my usual hotel. Being a holiday weekend, the biggest holiday weekend of the year, the hotel could not give me the room I asked for, but put me in room 11 instead. When I checked the air conditioner, I discovered it was inoperative, so asked for a change of room and was given room 14, the second door down (no room 13).
The next morning, I was eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant when I noticed that once again, as has happened so often at this hotel, I was being surveilled. I am used to that - the CIA likes to let me know from time to time that I am an object of surveillance, usually by either watching me or occasionally even interviewing me with The List Of Questions. It happens about every second or third trip to Nicaragua, a run I make frequently. They generally make no real effort to hide it, and I think they do it mostly to intimidate me.
But this time was different. The surveillance was a lot more discreet. And after I had eaten about two thirds of my meal, the main person watching me who had spent this entire time nursing a single cup of coffee, got up and left, just as soon as I had polished off the last of my gallo pinto.
Later in the day, I was reading a book on the patio in front of the row of rooms, and noticed that the man who had been watching me at breakfast was packing his things out of his room - room 12, the room between the one I was originally in and the room I had been placed in (14) after refusing room 11. What really had me suspicious was what he was packing out of the room. Besides lots of suitcases, there were handfuls of red "Biohazard" garbage bags, each with something rather heavy, irregular shapes and heavy and lumpy in it, each bag with contents a rather different shape. He made three trips out to the car carrying handfuls of these bags each time, straining a bit under the weight. What was in them? I don't know. I suspect that maybe I don't want to know, and if what I have since heard about this man is true, it was truly sinister indeed. And as soon as this fellow was moved out of the room, someone else, equally gringo, equally non-touristy, moved into it, sans maid cleaning.
The morning's surveillance and the same rather odd person checking out of the room next door, combined with someone else moving in without the room being cleaned in between, had me suspicious that perhaps I ought to check and see if the common wall between my room and this possible CIA Central had been compromised. So I began a very careful and thorough check of the wall, looking for any tiny holes that might indicate a surveillance operation directed against my room. And sure enough, I found one.
It was quickly plugged with some toothpaste mixed with some crumbled tile grout that I ground up with my foot. And within about ten minutes, I noticed some faint pounding on the wall. They were putting another hole through the wall! This had me really baffled. Why were they so intent on watching me watch television and reading a book in my room? Why did they not want me to notice them at breakfast? Made no sense. It wasn't like I was entertaining Osama bin Laden in my hotel room or anything like that. What was the big deal? Hey, if they really wanted to know what I was watching on TV, they'd have been welcome to drop by and watch TV with me - I don't have anything to hide. I have had lots of knowing conversations with the spooks since I have been living here, and sometimes they can be quite entertaining. Well, later on in that evening, I found out a possible reason why they were so intent on watching me watch TV.
That evening, around seven, I began to notice chest pains. No sharp, biting pains, just an increasingly intense dull ache all over my chest, front and rear, centered in the middle of my chest. It did not let up, but slowly, over the course of a half-hour, got worse and worse, until I was breaking out in a cold sweat. I could feel myself getting weaker, breaking out into a cold sweat, and so I decided to use the last of my strength to make it to the front desk for some help.
I told the front desk clerk to call an ambulance, which she did immediately. When the paramedics arrived, in about five minutes, they looked me over rather quickly and determined that I was likely having a heart attack, and they bundled me into the back of their ambulance, and it was off to the Social Security hospital for tests to see what was going on.
When I arrived, I found a hospital in bedlam - being Easter weekend, literally half of the country's population was in Guanacaste province at Costa Rica's famous beaches, in this hospital's territory. That meant that facilities were hugely overstretched, patients were being treated on guernies in the hall, and the staff was struggling to cope (even after being augmented by drafting the private clinic staffs). But they were coping remarkably well - patient needs were being attended to promptly, and the quality of care seemed to be quite adequate and generally unaffected by the situation. The operations at the emergency room were in a quiet moment when I arrived, so I was immediately wheeled into an exam room. I was strapped up to an EKG machine to measure my heart's electrical activity, and it appeared to be relatively normal. A blood sample was taken and sent to the lab to see if any coronary cell death was occurring (turned out it was). My blood pressure was a bit lower than normal, and the pulse rate a bit slow, too. But otherwise things appeared to be not terribly out of whack. So the decision was made to put me into the observation ward and keep an eye on me overnight. I was given some pain medications and put to bed, hooked up to a coronary observation monitor, pleth monitor and automatic blood pressure measuring device. Before long, I was asleep, although my sleep was interrupted rather frequently by a loud air compressor located just outside the open jalousie window. When it ran, the noise was so great I could not hear the nurses talking to each other. I am astounded that such a piece of equipment was installed so close to patient sleeping facilities, with no sound deadening at all that I could perceive.
In the morning, the doctor came by and indicated that there was some cell death occuring, but it did not appear to be serious, so they were going to take another test and see if the cell death had ceased. If so, they would release me, even though I was still having minor chest pains, but nothing all that serious. At 11 AM, they came and took the blood sample. I had noticed a slight increase in the level of pain. About 1 PM, they informed me that the rate of cell death had increased, not decreased, so they were going to keep me in the hospital for a few more days and keep a close eye on me.
By nightfall, the pain had increased to the point where I was finding it difficult to sleep. I asked for some pain medication, and the nurse on duty gave me a nitroglycerine tablet. It took the edge off the pain, but wasn't adequate for sleep, and as soon as it was dissolved, the pain was back. I kept asking for more, and the nurse got suspicious that something was going on, so he summoned the cardiologist who hooked me up to an EKG strip recorder. Sure enough, my EKG had changed. So the decision was made to administer some strong anti-coagulants to halt the process. At this point, as the doctor was running the strip, my pleth began to drop alarmingly fast, and I was fading in and out of consciousness. It was explained to me later that my heart was beating normally, but the pressure was dropping because my blood was beginning to congeal right there in my veins. Rather than wait for me to sign the consent forms for this very dangerous drug, it was administered immediately as I began to lose consciousness for the final time. The doctor and I both knew that it was the anti-coagulant immediately or I was toast for sure. Had the cardiologist not been there at that moment, and the anti-coagulant been right at hand, I would have been 86.
After about an hour, I woke up, feeling remarkably better. The pain in my chest was almost entirely gone, and I felt remarkably awake and clear-headed. The doctor was still there, and explained what had transpired. I had never lost pulse, but it had gotten very weak - dropped into the 30's briefly, and by blood pressure had gotten as low as 59/39. If I had not been on oxygen at the time, I would have bought the farm.
By morning, all my vitals were normal, though my EKG was noticeably altered (and still is). But I felt in rare form - bright, alert, and ready to go, and the fact that I had very nearly died the night before almost seemed like a remote experience. My asthma was noticeably worse (probably from all the chemicals in the air, I suspect), but otherwise I felt fine. Of course, I had given up all hope of getting out of the hospital anytime soon.
By the time I was processed out five days after the second attack, the staff was quite well aware of my situation as a political dissident, and made sure that I had the documents I needed to deal with immigration, as my visa would be long since expired before I was fit to travel out of the country. They were solicitous to the point of falling all over themselves to help me out in that regard, making sure the right documents were generated and got to me. I thank them all - they're heroes to me.
I got a good grilling by the cardiologist, who was trying to pin down what would have precipitated the heart attack. Had I eaten any strange foods? No. Do I have any allergies? Other than a handful of nasal allergies and penicillin, no. And later cardiologists, five in all, who looked at my records kept coming back to the same thing. Allergies. Do I have any allergies? They were downright persistent in grilling me about that - every single cardiologist that came on the floor asked that same question, even when they asked no other cardiac patients.
Some time back, I remember coming across an item during my research for my blog, that the CIA has developed a new assassination tool for inducing heart attacks. The new compound, which they bragged had already been used quite successfully twice in Latin America, was a compound that very closely mimics an allergic reaction, causing a delayed clotting cascade and therefore inducing a heart attack, and is very difficult to detect, even in sophisticated forensic testing, disappearing from the blood almost immediately after death. I didn't use the item in my blog because I didn't consider it sufficiently significant at that time. Now I sure do, and I regret having not blogged it, as considerable efforts at Google have not turned it up again. It is like that item has disappeared off the face of the earth.
So was it an attempt on my life? For a while, I wasn't sure, and tended to doubt it. Until a chance phone call with a friend of mine filled in the blanks.
It was not long after I had returned to Arenal that I was discussing this event on the phone with a friend of mine, a member of the political underground here. He asked me to describe "biohazard Bob" - the guy who had surveilled me at breakfast and who had moved out of the hotel room next door to me, carrying bag after bag of "biohazard" material. Well, I proceeded to describe him, and hadn't got much out, when my friend interrupted me, and continued with the description. He gave me the rest of the description, in some detail, and when I confirmed them, he said to me, "Do you know who this guy was? He is "A---", the most notorious CIA contract assassin in Costa Rica" and explained that he has been responsible for at least 15 assassinations that the underground knows about. He then asked if this man's son had been with him, and explained that his son works with him on many of his hits. He proceeded to describe this man's son - and sure enough, he had been there too, although he did not appear to have been involved in my survellance. It was then that I began to realize that this had indeed been a CIA hit attempt - and was likely to be repeated. Since then, I have found out about others who have had problems - Alex Jones, a radio talk-show host in the United States was grabbed recently at the Canadian border and was released only when a CBC film crew showed up and started asking inconvenient questions. In thinking it over, I have concluded that the "heart attack" method was chosen to avoid the arousal of suspicion - hey, an overweight, fifty-plus guy dies of a heart attack, no one questions it. No police investigation. No family or friends trying to prove inconvenient facts. All looks very natural. And even if it were questioned, a murder would be almost impossible to prove.
So all in all, it was back to life as normal in Arenal, but all this has left me just paranoid enough that continued casting an occasional glance over my shoulder. And my suspicions were well founded - I soon discovered a bug in the laptop computer I had been using, but the computer was stolen in a burglary before I could remove it and photograph it for evidence.
