Nuts
Susan just called and in the course of the call re-described her relationship with Richard Fuisz, once perhaps of the CIA, and Paul of the DIA. She talked about meeting twice a week with Paul, and at least weekly with Richard for nine years.
Then I got an overseas call from the Scotish journalist who I told you, puts them together. Well, he puts them together but not like that. His last conversation with Richard Fuisz was several years ago and it was Richard asking him, if he had any pull with Susan, to get her to quit calling him.
In the light of this, I have to re-examine what I've been thinking. Susan is certainly not an evil person, but I had considered her problems to be more exagerations than fabrications. Now, it seems I have to accept that much that has stirred me up about her case is questionable.
Then I got an overseas call from the Scotish journalist who I told you, puts them together. Well, he puts them together but not like that. His last conversation with Richard Fuisz was several years ago and it was Richard asking him, if he had any pull with Susan, to get her to quit calling him.
In the light of this, I have to re-examine what I've been thinking. Susan is certainly not an evil person, but I had considered her problems to be more exagerations than fabrications. Now, it seems I have to accept that much that has stirred me up about her case is questionable.
posted by JB | 9:33 AM
1 Comments:
He may not have liked her, but he knew her well enough to hold forth at length about her in "Susan Lindauer's Mission to Baghdad", a New York Times Magazine piece by David Samuels:
"Susan, to me, is one of those people who drift into your life," Fuisz said, after offering me a seat on his couch. "She would drift into the office fairly often, or call. Usually those weren't just social calls. Those were calls about what she was doing, or trying to do," Fuisz explained. "In the early years, her activism generally took an approach which was Arabist, but Arabist from the standpoint of trying to lift sanctions, so that children would do better, and trying to get medicines into countries -- principally I'm talking about Iraq and Libya."
After Sept. 11, 2001, Lindauer was no longer a welcome visitor to his office. "Susan, in her discussions, went from benign, in my opinion, to malignant," he said. "These discussions changed and now involved a very strong seditious bent."
Fuisz did not comment on the specifics of the conversations that Lindauer claimed to have had with Middle Eastern diplomats or whether he passed on the specifics of those conversations to anyone else. But he, like others who have known Lindauer over the years, had clearly thought long and hard about the perplexing geometry of her mind.
"I'd put it this way," Fuisz explained, cupping his palms like a collector presenting a rare species for inspection. "She's daft enough that we could be sitting here, like we are now, and she might see a parrot fly in the window, flap its wings and land right here on the table," he said. "But she's also smart enough not to necessarily say anything about it."
I have no idea what he means by that. Continuing:
When I asked whether, in his opinion, Lindauer could have been recruited by an intelligence service, he paused for a long time before he responded. "I would say that's a hard question to answer. If you're looking at it from the standpoint of an intelligent intelligence agency, absolutely not. She'd be the worst person you could ever recruit. If you're looking at it from the standpoint of my knowledge of Mideast intelligence services, are they dumb enough to recruit her, the answer is yes."
So not a glowing recommendation, but she's not fabricating meeting him frequently.
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