Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (18 page)

The recipe soon became a specialty of many local restaurants, but remained unknown outside of southern Texas until a man named Frank Liberto saw the potential of nachos as a concession-stand item. In 1977 he figured out how to process the cheese to keep it soft all the time, and started selling nachos at Arlington Stadium, then home of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He later replaced the tostadas with tortilla chips, and modern-day nachos were born.

CRUNCH TIME

But nachos might have remained a Texas specialty if not for Howard Cosell and
Monday Night Football
. Someone gave Cosell nachos before a game. He loved them…and liked the funny-sounding name. That night (and for weeks after), Cosell and the broadcast team worked references to nachos into the game analysis as often as possible. Cosell loved describing great plays by calling them “nachos,” giving the food national recognition, making the term an acceptable adjective for spectacular events, and forever securing its spot as one of the sport watcher’s favorite finger foods.

Taco
is Spanish for “plug.”

CELEBRITY GOSSIP

Here’s the latest edition of the BRI’s cheesy tabloid section—a bunch of gossip about famous people
.

M
ICHAEL JACKSON

During his 2005 trial, a lot of information came to light about the King of Pop—even his favorite food: “Colonel Sanders’s KFC original fried chicken (breasts) with mashed potatoes, corn, and biscuits with spray butter,” according to police records. For his toddler son, Prince Michael II: “crackers, grapes, juice or milk, and KFC cut up into pieces.” On his plane, Jackson bans broccoli “or any other strong-scented food.”

PARIS HILTON

While dining at a fancy restaurant with Pamela Anderson, Hilton threw a temper tantrum when handed the menu. “I hate reading! Someone tell me what’s on the menu!” Anderson told the story to
GQ
magazine, concluding, “I’m blonde, too. But c’mon.”

WILLIAM SHATNER

Want to know what your favorite star smells like? On the set of the show
Boston Legal
, which Shatner starred in with James Spader, they filmed a “love scene” in which the two “spooned” in bed together. Spader recalled the experience: “You can tell a lot about a person by that first impression, that first smell. Bill had a very sort of, a strangely very attractive sort of pungent sort of gamey, sort of a venison or a lamb sausage scent.” Ironic twist: Shatner is a vegetarian.

OPRAH WINFREY

After undergoing DNA tests, Winfrey proudly declared that she is a Zulu, descended from the race of warriors who once ruled South Africa. How did the modern day Zulus react? They snubbed her. African-Americans, they claim, are descended from
West
Africans. South Africans ended up in Asia and South America. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the seven-million-strong tribe, said, “I hate to tell Oprah this, but she is sorely mistaken.”

There is an underwater statue of Jesus in Key Largo, Florida, called “Christ of the Deep.”

HUGH GRANT

In a book about how people deal with their loved ones getting cancer, Grant recounted his relationship with his mother during her final days. “I got bored and went back to tormenting her,” he said. “My personal favorite being secretly activating her hospital bed so that the head and legs both lifted to put her in an amusing jack-knife position. I blow-dried her hair on the day before she died, which was frankly not the success I had hoped for, and which may—I now concede—have finished her off.”

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

In 1989 President Bush was giving a speech in Poland when it started to rain. He ordered a Secret Service guard—who was holding Bush’s raincoat—to give it to an old woman on the other side of the fence. The press praised the president for his selfless generosity. Sixteen years later, Bush admitted that the raincoat wasn’t his; it belonged to the guard…who was just about to put it on.

HOWIE MANDEL

The wacky comedian was expelled from his Toronto high school. Why? For pretending to be a member of the school board and convincing a construction company to start work on an addition to the school.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA

In 2005 the pop singer was about to record a song written by “Aurora Lynne”…until Aguilera found out that Aurora Lynne was actually a pen name for Britney Spears, who wrote the song. Aguilera refused to record it—keeping a feud going that started early in their careers when the two were Mouseketeers.

TOM JONES

Trying to maintain a hip image, 65-year-old Jones recently returned to wearing his trademark tight leather pants and open shirt on stage. But his son (and manager), Mark Woodward, told him: “Dress your age.” Fearing that fans may have stopped taking the Welsh singer seriously, Woodward banned his father’s new outfit. Also on the “Don’t do that anymore” list: picking up women’s panties that are thrown onto the stage.

With each breath, humans exchange about 17% of the air in their lungs.

SPY HUNT: GRAY DECEIVER, PART I

Everyone loves a spy thriller—especially when it’s real life. Here’s an amazing tale that a BRI operative recently uncovered
.

T
HE MOLE
In February 1994, FBI agents arrested a 30-year veteran of the CIA named Aldrich Ames. The charge: spying for the Soviet Union. In the nine years that Ames was an active spy, he exposed more than 100 sensitive operations and revealed the name of every CIA intelligence source in the Soviet Union. At least 10 of them were executed; many others were sent to prison. Ames was paid more than $2.5 million for his efforts and was promised another $1.9 million, making him the highest-paid double agent in history, not to mention one of the most damaging.

Yet as pleased as the FBI and the CIA were to have caught and convicted Ames (he received a life sentence), disturbing signs soon began to emerge that there might be one, and possibly even more moles hiding elsewhere in various U. S. intelligence agencies. Some secrets known to have been compromised couldn’t be traced back to Ames—he simply didn’t know about them.

So both the CIA and the FBI set up new mole-hunting teams and set to work looking for spies. The FBI gave the investigation the code name
GRAYSUIT
; each time a new suspect was identified they were given a code name with “
GRAY
” as a prefix. The new mole hunt dredged up two more relatively minor spies: an FBI agent named Earl Edwin Pitts and a CIA agent named Harold J. Nicholson. Both men were arrested in 1996 and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

BIG SECRETS

Neither arrest answered the question of who was responsible for giving the two biggest intelligence secrets to the Russians:

• The Tunnel
. Someone told the Soviets about the secret eavesdropping tunnel that the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) had dug beneath the new Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The tunnel program cost more than $100 million but never produced a single piece of useful intelligence, because the Russians were told of its existence in 1994—five years before they moved in.

Food? Clothing? Shelter? About 65% of Americans say TV is a “necessity.”

• The Spy
. As we told you in
Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader
, in 1989 the FBI was hot on the trail of a senior U.S. diplomat named Felix Bloch, who was suspected of spying for the KGB. Someone tipped off his handler, a KGB spy named Reino Gikman. Gikman then tipped off Bloch, blowing the FBI’s investigation before they could collect enough information to indict him. To date Bloch has never been charged with espionage.

MYSTERY MAN

Both the spy tunnel and the Bloch investigation were FBI operations, but early on the FBI concluded that the mole was more likely to be a CIA official, so that’s where they focused their efforts.

For years tips had been coming in from U.S. sources in Russia, describing a spy who had a thing for “exotic dancers,” sometimes liked to be paid in diamonds, and was said to make “dead drops” (leave packages and pick up money) in Nottoway Park in Vienna, Virginia. None of the Russian sources knew the man’s identity—as far as anyone knew at the time, the man had never revealed his real name to his handlers or even told them which intelligence agency he worked for. Apparently he’d never met with his Russian handlers, either. No one even knew what he looked like.

THE MATRIX

One of the ways intelligence agencies hunt for spies is to make what is called a “matrix.” They compile a list of all the intelligence secrets that have been betrayed, and then make a list of the people who had access to those secrets. Then, using whatever other clues they have, they try to rule suspects in or out. The FBI mole hunters used just such a matrix to narrow a list of 100 suspects down to seven and then down to just one: a CIA agent named Brian Kelley. They gave him the nickname G
RAY
DECEIVER.

Kelley specialized in exposing Soviet “illegals,” spies who do not pose as diplomats and thus have no diplomatic immunity if they are caught. One illegal that Kelley had uncovered was Reino Gikman, the KGB agent who tipped off Felix Bloch. Kelley was a distinguished agent—he’d been awarded five medals for his work at the CIA, including one for the Felix Bloch case. But the FBI was now convinced that he’d been a spy all along. Uncovering Gikman and then warning him about Bloch was the perfect cover—who would ever suspect that a decorated CIA officer would blow his own case?

Some female cockroaches mate only once and are pregnant for the rest of their lives.

DIGGING DEEP

In late 1997 the FBI arranged for Kelley to be given a new assignment: to review the Felix Bloch files to see if any clues had been missed. The real purpose of the assignment was to isolate him and keep him at CIA headquarters, making it easier for FBI mole hunters to keep an eye on him until enough evidence was collected for him to be arrested.

In the meantime, the FBI placed Kelley on round-the-clock surveillance and secretly searched his home. They also tapped his phone lines, sifted through his garbage, searched his home computer, and planted listening devices all over the house. On one occasion they even tailed him all the way to Niagara Falls, only to lose him near the Canadian border. That suggested that Kelley was “dry cleaning”—taking evasive action to lose anyone who might be following him, so he could slip over the border into Canada, presumably to meet with his Russian handlers.

ONE TOUGH COOKIE

It was then that the mole hunters realized just how difficult it was going to be to catch Kelley red-handed. Sure, they knew about the dry cleaning incident at the border, and they also knew that Kelley shopped at a mall where SVR operatives had been seen in the past (the KGB was renamed the SVR after the collapse of the Soviet Union). But after all the bugging, searching, and garbage sifting, the only incriminating piece of physical evidence they were able to find was a single hand-drawn map of nearby Nottoway Park, with various times written at different locations on the map. To the mole hunters it could only be one thing: a map of various dead drops, complete with a schedule of different drop-off times. With the exception of the map, though, Kelley seemed to be an expert at erasing nearly every trace of his double life.

In fact, to the untrained eye, he didn’t seem like a spy at all.

Who was the mole? Covertly flip to Part II on
page 342
.

Tough guy: A 100-pound cougar can take down an 800-pound elk.

MOLES AND MICE

Who says you have to be a spy to talk like one? Here’s a look at some of the expressions real spies use when they’re on the job. (Don’t tell anyone.)

•
Black-bag job:
Sneaking into a home or office and searching it, leaving no evidence that you were there.

•
Floater:
A waiter, bellhop, or other low-level employee who occasionally freelances for a spy agency when needed.

•
Dog drag:
A device which, when a spy drags it behind him, releases a scent to throw bloodhounds off his trail.

•
L pill:
A suicide pill. (“L” stands for
lethal
.)

•
Notional agent:
A non-existent secret agent who is identified as the source of secret information in order to protect the real source.

•
Sheep dipping:
Obscuring the true identity or origin of individuals and equipment so they can be sent out on secret missions.

•
Dry clean:
To make sudden U-turns or other evasive driving maneuvers to spot and hopefully lose enemy agents who are tailing you.

•
Operation slammer:
The U.S. program of interviewing convicted spies in prison to learn their motives and prevent spying in the future.

•
Foots:
Members of surveillance teams who ride as passengers in pursuit cars and then follow suspects on foot after they leave their cars.

•
Wet affairs:
A Russian term for spy operations that involve killing people (“wet” refers to blood).

•
Walk the cat:
Retrace the steps of a “blown” secret agent or operation in an attempt to figure out what went wrong.