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No. 25, January 20, 2004

[German translation]

Hoover Dam

click for originHoover Dam on the Nevada border, so clocks go back an hour: my little speaking tour has reached the Pacific Time zone.


IN LAS VEGAS AT FIVE PM LOCAL time, after a six-hour drive, I thought it would take four. I like this city. Most United States cities are unintentionally vulgar, this one's vulgarity is deliberate, and it works.

Discussions by phone with Don about the alternate location. I get calls from three mysterious new "friends," whom I have at first to suspect of being moles.

They invite me to supper however, and since they all turn out to be either steroid-stuffed, or have tattoos and shaven heads, and one even has Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as a ring tone on his phone, I'm satisfied on balance that they do not include a mole, anyway.

I contact Mat, organizing in Seattle: "You are leaving it very late to notify me of the location. I must send out letters today at the latest, for Canada!"

Don phones, he will now speak with the new location -- which we have already announced. At 11:20 am he phones again - the restaurant is already booked for tonight. So that's out.

He becomes loquacious, and I have to curtail him. I report to Benté: "Looks like we've lost Las Vegas, the restaurant is having a wedding reception tonight (know what they are?). No alternative. Five hundred mile drive for nothing."

Don says: "I am waiting for a call back from Arizona Charlie's." But at 12:31 PM he says Arizona Charlie's has not got enough waiters. So I book a meeting room myself in the restaurant at my own hotel.

I go over at four PM to the Hard Rock for an interview with a journalist, Jeff German (I had misheard his name as "Gammon," which upon analysis seemed to put him in the clear).

Nice enough guy, turns out to be a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun but very obsessed with the Holocaust. He winces when I say I find the subject boring; I have never written a book or article on it, I say, and I tend to flip to a different channel whenever it comes on the TV -- and I suspect that he along with 95 percent of the US viewing population reacts the same way. This is before I figure out that he is in fact himself Jewish.

At five PM Don is in my hotel's reception area. The front desk has already received calls protesting about the evening's meeting and threatening violence. The clerk seems unworried, and is telling the callers that the management has gone home for the day and there is nobody they can speak to.

A full house of guests arrives. Three police cars stand at each end of the alley (we did not invite them). Journalist Jeff German shows up and takes copious notes.

Then Brian F comes, ever the businessman, and to my silent fury, while I am talking, he props up on a table a 1939 wreath from the German Consul in Paraguay for the funeral of the Graf Spee victims, which he wants to sell. The journalist will inevitably proclaim that "Nazi flags" bedeck the room I spoke in.

 

NEXT MORNING I LOOK into the source of the leak. After excluding donors to the fighting-fund and people known to me for years, three suspects emerge. Let's see what shakes out of this. I will zap all three off my list.

During the day one responds and I clear him. He was the gentleman who arrived late, he says.

I now mail out invitations to my Canadian friends in British Columbia (exactly one hundred letters), and set out at eleven AM for Los Angeles.

After a meatloaf lunch at "Peggy Sue's 1950s Diner" at Yerba, in the Mojave desert, I arrive at the appointed restaurant in Sherman Oaks at four.

The manageress of this smart restaurant greets me with the words, "Oh no, you phoned in two days ago to cancel your function," and she shows me the register. Our entry is crossed out in red, CANCELLED.

I frostily explain that we have not cancelled it. The traditional enemy has; I do not advise her of that. The registration has been made in T's name, so how they have identified it I don't know.

One rather odd event is a blank phone call at around four PM. I phone back, and a voice identifies the caller as "Tony Roma's Restaurant in Sacramento."

That is Saturday's scheduled location. The voice denies having called me, despite my pointing out I have just pressed the call-back button. Why would Tony Roma's be calling? Only one possible explanation.

Fortunately the private room here at Sherman Oaks is still available, and we go ahead.

We soon fill the available table space, and more seats have to be brought in. The usual problem with the check at the end: it comes to me to pay, including taxes and tips, which people always forget. That leaves me several hundred dollars out of pocket each time.

 

THE NEXT THREE DAYS ARE ALL major California functions: south of Los Angeles, in San Francisco, and in Sacramento. With long distances in between. And I have no help. Then a day's pause while I just drive north to Portland, Oregon.

So far, the weather has been gnädig.

Coffee with Harry, who provides a roof for the night. The Las Vegas Sun has published a good, fair story, so my trust in "Gammon" is vindicated. I reproach Don P however: "You see the problem caused when 'people' (i.e., you) phone the previous location to protest at their cancellation; it goes down badly, and does no good."

Harry's two Hispanic housemaids assume that my shoes and blazer, found tossed aside in the sitting room, are his and have removed them to his bedroom closet. It takes some time for us to find them.

I notice a camera on the coffee table that is identical to mine, and comment on it. Harry says it's probably his son's. I am ten miles down the San Diego Freeway before I realize that the camera is mine, removed along with everything else from the blazer pocket by the maids before they hung it up.

I arrive at Mimi's at one PM, and have lunch with Mark W, looking slightly thinner -- a haircut enforced by his new lady enhances the effect -- and we talk for an hour over lunch.

When the waitress, a withered old retainer by whom however Mark seems disproportionately taken, interrupts to inquire if everything is alright, I say: "It was, until you interrupted our conversation. Please go away. And don't interrupt again."

Mark is shocked. I don't understand these American customs, even after all these years.

A call from Sacramento confirms that Tony Roma's has cancelled under pressure. Their pretext is that the roof has caved in under storm damage. My friend there puts in a call under a different name to ascertain if they have a meeting room available for "Sunday." Oh yes, they say.

To the traditional enemy it is a game, and they do not realize that every time they attack people's freedom to speak, and to listen to others speaking, they are turning more ordinary folks against themselves.

After locating this evening's large function room south of Los Angeles, with somewhat greater difficulty than the US Army is having in finding Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Saddam Hussein, I spend an hour carrying the half-ton of boxes inside.

It's like Feeding the Five Thousand. The boxes never seem to empty. The first people arrive at five PM. Aaargh. I shoo them away and tell them to come back at six, official doors-opening time.

Mark speaks for an hour, pre-empting much of what I am going to say myself; heigh ho. I then speak for an hour, and nobody dies. He makes wind-up gestures towards the end (he later denies he did) and I do so; so the audience misses out on the peroration, which was not very good anyway.

"What did you think of your talk?" he asks rather mysteriously. "Was it one of your best?"

The audience of rather under one hundred is pleased anyway, and many bring in collections of my books to sign, which is nice -- some going right back to THE MARE'S NEST (1964).

Persuading the remaining people with difficulty not to "assist" I load the boxes, grab a coffee at a Denny's, and set out north toward midnight, thereby turning the second great corner of the tour. After driving about 150 miles I check into a lone motel in the desert, about fifty yards from Interstate 5, south of Bakersfield, at 2:20 AM. The car's meter is now reading 7,300 miles since Chicago.

Another lo-o-oo-ng day.

 

DECEMBER 11, 2003: THE hotel must have been quite high up in the mountains, to judge by the room- and the regular gasoline-prices, $1.95 a gallon!

An hour dealing with paperwork. A total of 506 people have now registered on our website to be informed of my talks; five hundred points of light, the Internet is a formidable weapon.

As I set out at ten AM to continue this modest odyssey, a blizzard begins, with ice building up rapidly and reducing visibility. As the road then drops 3,000 feet into the valley, the air-temperature rises to about 55� F, and stays there all day. I click on the cruise control and hold it at eighty for the entire trip.

The Interstate drives straight as an arrow for hundreds of miles north-westwards past endless golden-white prairies and then through the great citrus estates -- the baby oranges, mandarins, and lemons are already burgeoning on stubby bushes.

At one point a pungent odour filters into the car, and we come upon its source, a vast herd of cattle, at least half a million of them, shoulder to shoulder on ordure-blackened, damp fields, standing morosely around and waiting for something. The stench is indescribable.

Windmills on Interstate 80

Coming up over the mountains into Oakland, I see an extraordinary sight: the naked hilltops are covered with literally hundreds of giant modernistic windmills; some are motionless, others winding majestically in the breeze. I grab pictures.

The city of San Francisco is lost in mists as I come in over the Bay Bridge; far off to the right, about thirty miles away, only one pillar of the Golden Gate bridge is visible.

These highways are all becoming very familiar to me now, and I must find others to explore. Around four PM I pull up by our meeting place in downtown Front Street.

The new manager, a Polish-Italian-American, is ingratiating. We can use the big-screen TV in the rear meeting room; this is a plus, as the video of Leni Riefenstahl's long-lost 1933 oeuvre Victory of Faith is certainly enhanced at that scale.

More and more people pack in to hear my talk after dinner. Again extra tables and chairs have to be brought in.

The final check is $945, the total collected from the diners only around eight hundred. Heigh-ho. I fetch the car from the parking garage fifty yards away and become hopelessly lost as I emerge from a different exit than the one I came in by.

It takes twenty minutes to find the restaurant again. Locals whom I ask about Front Street all give me wildly diverging directions.

 

FINALLY I DRIVE OVER TO Sacramento, and it is one-thirty AM before I get there. "Very tired," I write to London. "I am here for two days, thank Goodness."

The Seattle organizer Mat writes:

Please let your supporters know that this event is under different management than the last fiasco. With our ultra-solid back-up location, this event is a guaranteed "go."

He has fixed it at the well-known Pyramid Brewery, with a local museum as the alternate. He reports: "The museum's event coordinator was totally dismissive and unconcerned with my warnings that our event may draw controversy."

 

TWO BLANK CALLS COME IN from a Toronto area code, on the other side of the continent. And there is one "missed call" while I am out, from 973 854 6117. A call-back gets the automatic response, "You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service."

It is either the good guys, or the bad guys, probing.

The Idaho newspapers are now making a fuss about my coming. The usual suspects are behind it (years from now, perhaps, they will wail: "Why us?")

After finding a Sacramento post office to mail out belated invitation letters to Seattle and Idaho, I drive over to the new location around four PM.

D is already there, setting up tables and getting in food. But this library location is twelve miles away from Tony Roma's, the original cancelled restaurant, it is pouring with rain, and I know that few people will come in the circumstances.

It is far better to rent a meeting room downtown, which I'll pay for, than a remote one like this.

 

THE EVENING IS AN UNEXPECTED low point, which becomes even lower as I stop to fill the car afterwards in readiness for tomorrow's onward drive to the north. The car door slams, with the key inside. I stand for over an hour in freezing rain until a Hertz tow-truck comes.

Tomorrow and Sunday I drive 863 miles to Portland, then two hundred more to Seattle on Monday. This to Benté: "Today I get to drive through the giant redwoods! Hooray."

I arrive at Grant's Pass at five PM, getting ticketed by a traffic cop north of Medford for doing eighty-five; I can't complain.

 Oregon Redwoods

AT ONE-TWENTY PM A MEGAN phones to inquire about Seattle. I have no "Megans" on my list; she confesses that she is of the Pyramid Brewery in Seattle, venue for Monday's function, and that somebody has just phoned to inquire if there is a function there on Monday.

It is obvious that all is not well, and I phone Mat to say so. It turns out that a lunatic right-wing Internet forum has yesterday announced the precise location, ostensibly to "help" us.

Ten minutes later, Mat phones me back: the Pyramid has cancelled -- local Jewish bodies are threatening to boycott them with all their bar-mitzvahs, weddings, and other functions.

Mat is bullish, as the alternative location will stand firm. Only now do I learn its name, the Nordic Heritage Museum.

Mat insists that it is a venerable local institution, chronicling the history of seafarers in the Pacific North-West's history.

I say that is immaterial -- to the media it will sound like a place that David Duke himself has established, just one step short of an Aryan Heritage Museum.

Find a Marriott, I say, I will pay the charge for a meeting room. Grudgingly he concedes the point, and phones two hours later that he has booked one next to the famous Space Needle. I ask him to lay on coffee too (I will pay); if people have driven down from Canada, that is the least we can do.

I SEND THIS MESSAGE TO THE lady organising in Portland for tomorrow:

We have lost every primary location since my Las Vegas function last week. . . Can you ascertain very tactfully if everything is still okay for Sunday (tomorrow) night?

She does not reply. Somebody chides me: "An airport hotel might have been better than the city centre. Portland has a Jewish mayor and The Oregonian, the major paper, is owned by a Jewish family in New York City. . . I'm not surprised at the harassment -- just at the extent of it."

I set out north from Grant's Pass at eleven AM, a hard drive in snow and rain. The Portland hotel is elegant, but again it is hard to reach. I report to Benté later: "Drove through blinding snow and a wet blizzard . . . small audience, nice luxury hotel. Off up to Seattle tomorrow, then turn the final corner back to the east and Chicago."

 

FROM PORTLAND I SEND THIS message to the British official Trustee, against whom I have started court proceedings:

I am currently eight time zones west of London. I received a few days ago a copy of the Registrar's order, and I am surprised and perplexed that it makes reference to a meeting between us scheduled for December 16, when I am in Idaho, as the Registrar was aware that I return to the UK at the beginning of February.

I have set out with all proper particularity the categories of the possessions whose return I am demanding, in my Application to the Court.

You have made no attempt to respond with proposed categories of your own.

Exceeding the powers vested in you, you and your agents acted as though the court had never handed down the ruling in Haig vs. Aitken.

A phone call comes from the restaurant in Colorado, to agree Saturday's lunch menu. A long drive lies ahead before then!

Mark W. sends me a page from a website called Stormfront about my little tour. They intend to post a recording of my LA talk on the Internet. I am furious:

They have blown locations in advance [I respond], and cost me a lot of trouble. I have nothing in common with these people, and want out of whatever they are doing.

 

I ARRIVE AT SEATTLE AT THREE PM. The function has been booked as the "North-Western Scandinavian Architecture Appreciation Society," so there may be no problem. My room looks out directly onto the "Space Needle," Seattle's rather obvious trademark.

The first friends begin to arrive from Canada already at four-thirty PM, including one elderly and incoherent Canadian-German. Staff at The Pyramid, the old location, are telling arrivals there that we have cancelled the function; not helpful.

Gradually the room here -- prepared optimistically with forty chairs -- fills and twice as many chairs have to be brought in.

An incorrigible Polish-American asks if he can take photos; I limit him to three, as he has a profi camera and I know these types -- if I don't say No firmly, he will be stepping all round me on the podium throughout my talk, flashing and snapping away and destroying the audience concentration.

Alas, he sits in the front row, and shortly gets up and saunters out; when he returns I suggest he might like to sit in one place, preferably at the rear -- which triggers an extraordinary tirade from him, he has just gone out to pee, humans have to pee don't they, you too, Mr Irving, etc., until the audience howls at him to sit down. -- The travails of a travelling speaker.

 

UP AT SEVEN. "I'll report later today," I write lamely to Bente in London. "Long day yesterday, and I've a 350 mile drive through the mountains to the next location in Idaho. There seem to be just as many boxes however."

I stop at noon-thirty near some mountain lake to phone her. Jessica answers. It was her birthday a few days ago and I ask her how it feels to be ten. "What do you mean?" "I mean, for example, now you can boss nine-year-olds around. . ."

"Daddy," she exclaims, "I am just about to watch an important programme. I'll get Mummy."

I can hear the start-up music for Buffy in the background.

 

AFTER DRIVING ALL DAY I arrive at four at the Mark IV hotel in Moscow, Idaho. The insolent manager informs me he's cancelled our booking as "he hasn't enough kitchen staff."

When I ask to speak with his lawyer, he phones for the police to remove me from the hotel for "disruptive behaviour."

Two scrawny young females with notepads are hanging around outside, local journalists. Will I go ahead elsewhere?

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

The town lives up to its name. Three of Moscow's ten police patrol cars pursue me down Main Street -- at a stately ten miles per hour -- and serve a Trespass Notice on me at the hotel's request.

The cops are very friendly, say they have a duty to uphold law and order if there is a protest demo against me: "We're only carrying out our orders, sir."

I say: "Saddam's officers are probably saying the same thing." "Nice comeback, that," says one, admiringly.

blizzard on I-5I check in at the University Inn and download messages. I have sent a picture of yesterday's blizzard on the Interstate to London. An unusually solicitous Benté writes: "Try to drive carefully! Take care." I reply: "You suddenly realised I am the breadwinner, right?"

She responds: "You've got it!" -- a dreadful Americanism.

The snow since Portland has made driving very worrisome.

 

OUR MOSCOW ORGANISER, Alfred H, has seamlessly relocated the function to a local hotel, which I have paid for in advance some weeks ago as an alternate.

I warn him that the traditional enemy is bent on rioting. But it seems they cannot locate this new address (nor however can most of my audience).

Getting tired of all this, I deliver a sharply abridged version of my talk. The handful present includes a university professor (no friend, I am later told), a local newspaperman whom I have allowed in despite my aversion to them, and a plain-clothes police officer with a radiotelephone. It reminds me of Germany, where officers also had to watch on my lectures.

 

TODAY I AM JUST DRIVING south through Idaho. I slip heavily on ice crossing to the reception desk, thumping my back badly, and limp all day.

We have obtained the letter written by hatemonger Jamie McCarthy to the Pyramid Brewery in Seattle to get them to cancel our function.

This pest has lost them a lost of business while doing us no real harm. I advise him: "Your letter, because it induces them to violate a lawful contractual agreement, commits a tort, an offence. Get legal advice before you do it again."

 

SalzmanIN DENVER THERE IS A GANG plotting violence to disrupt my penultimate engagement there. Their ringleader [SEE SPECIAL ITEM] is Sara Salzman, (right), a local Holocaust specialist; she has bragged to the press that she intends to make my visit to Denver as "nasty" as possible.

Forewarned is forearmed. Thanks to expert friends -- and to Bill Gates' shortcomings in providing proper email security for PC's -- we immediately hack a handy "keyhole" into the directives Mrs Salzman issues.

In future she should go Mac, or pay for better firewalls. I expect my keyhole to enable me to identify her moles and lead her entire greasy gang somewhat astray when Saturday comes.

"In cases like these," I advise my Denver organiser, "we find the address of a local gay bar and pack off the suspected enemy moles to wait all day there."

As stage one, I post on my website the full report appearing in this morning's Moscow Daily News. To mislead the Salzman gang I temporarily add a fake sentence at the end, reading "Irving speaks at a hotel near Denver airport on Saturday."

I also change the identity of my car in the Daily News item.

 

AFTER A MORNING OF paperwork I set out from Idaho, and drive steadily south all day.

Not much wider than a country lane, Highway 95 goes initially over high plateaux and treeless prairies covered with snow. There is rarely more than one other car in sight. Before Lewiston, the road plunges unexpectedly several thousand feet to cross a river and valley, and there are spectacular views of the town as the road swoops down the mountainside in hairpin bends.

After two hours I pause at White Bird for coffee with Alfred H, last night's Moscow organiser, and his family. We share a quiet chuckle at the discomfiture awaiting the traditional enemy in Denver. Then straight down to Boise, the state capital, and on to Mountain Home, where I try two motels.

At the first, a sleepy Asian is manning the desk. I turn on my heel, explaining politely, "I no longer stay at Asian-run hotels in this country."

This is not a racist remark; it is merely the sad experience of such hotels' filth and lack of maintenance. In part thanks to special financing provisions, the Asians are taking over the motel industry in the United States; and with some (few) exceptions, they are destroying it with speed.

The man runs out after me declaring, "I'm not an Asian"- but in a strong Pakistani accent.

It is not for nothing that a new hotel sign is burgeoning: AMERICAN OWNED AND RUN, it says.

At the next motel, it is clearly an Asian running it, and the reception area stinks of week-old curry. "Jeez!" I exclaim, and back out. I check into a Sleep Inn at the next exit.

 

AN AWFUL NIGHT. SOMEBODY is playing his television until three or four AM. Weird dreams about car auctions. I am feeling very tired now. Perspiring heavily this morning, although it is below freezing outside.

Southern Idado

I set out for Salt Lake at 8:45 AM. A beautiful drive across the rest of the southern Idaho desert. Prairie after prairie -- I set the cruise control at eighty for hours at a time, and encounter virtually no traffic.

Two people phone around 11 AM for details of this evening's location in Salt Lake; one, "Dave," meets my criteria, and I unhesitatingly give him the details.

The other, "Justin", who has an ignorant-sounding voice, withholds his surname and says vaguely only that his interest in "the trial" had drawn his attention to the function; I tell him to call me again at five and I will decide whether to give him the location. I arrive at Salt Lake unexpectedly early, around two PM.

With difficulty I find the restaurant, Tucci's, an upscale Italian joint, far too open, in a trendy shopping-mall eight miles south of Salt Lake City. I know at once that the evening may run into trouble with the traditional enemy. A poorly cooked lunch arrives; it is indigestible, and I leave most of it.

"Justin" phones again, and I tell him I have decided not to identify the location. (He has failed to meet several criteria.) After he pleads convincingly, I relent and tell him, in strict confidence, where to come, adding that I trust him to tell nobody else -- an error as it turns out.

A few friends finally navigate their way to this difficult site. Travis M, the organizer, admits he has not seen it before. I point at once to the drawbacks: poor food, picture windows on three sides of the "private room," a difficult location, etc.

Two men outside start handing out an offensive Nizkor leaflet to incoming customers. One is no doubt the lying "Justin". Half an hour after I begin my talk, the manageress interrupts and says nobody told her we were going to hand out leaflets.

I reply that these two louts are nothing to do with us, and security is called to remove them.

The enemy doesn't like that at all: Fifteen minutes later, the manager is receiving furious phone calls, demanding that our meeting be halted. Professor Ernst R., a noted neurologist of the University of Utah, goes to negotiate, but it is clear that we are going nowhere further.

At 11 PM I set out for Denver, five or six hundred miles to the south-east over the Rocky Mountains. I have to be there by around ten AM on Saturday. I drive all Friday across Wyoming in telephone-silence, as Sprint phones do not work anywhere in Wyoming (or in Colorado either, as it turns out).

The road is almost dead straight for hundreds of miles -- I twice cross the Continental Divide at 7,000 feet. I raise the cruise control setting to eighty-five, and rarely have to tap the brakes to slow down.

Wyoming highway

It is like driving across a totally unpopulated moonscape. Stunning geological features abound: table-mountains on every horizon, with sheer rock faces showing millions of years of different strata; giant rock formations thrust up out of other strata like thumbs through a pie-crust; there is not a tree in sight, and only a few shrubs dot the bare landscape, which is covered by a wispy, yellowish, grass-like fuzz.

From an isolated highway restaurant in this desert I call London. Jessica is sitting in front of her computer as always. "Slouching," she happily confirms.

I arrive in Denver at nine PM, and blunder around for forty-five minutes looking for a hotel in Aurora, a suburb of the city.

I at once check the "keyhole." Sara Salzman has still not located tomorrow's location -- which is right here in Aurora. From Salt Lake, she has received an email confirming that "Justin" was indeed the enemy's mole there. He seems to have illegally taped his two phone conversations with me.

Mrs Salzman and her unsavoury cronies have fallen for the disinformation I planted in the Moscow Daily News item.

She has now advised all her gang members that I am to speak at a hotel "near Denver airport" on Saturday, and they expect to learn the precise location shortly "from their mole." They will, they will!

It is not hard to identify him: he is calling himself "Michael Wilde," and he alone receives this from me toward midnight:

Dear all -

Humble apologies for this late notification, but I was travelling through Wyoming from Salt Lake all day and Sprint never told me when I signed up with them that they had no coverage whatsoever in Wyoming. By the time I reached Colorado this evening it was too late to call.

So here is tomorrow Saturday's location by email: please keep it under your hat. Tell no-one. We have booked a room at the Denver International Airport Marriott (the actual address, if you're coming by taxi, is 16455 East 40th Circle).

We have asked the hotel to deny any function taking place. The booking is under a less than obvious name, as you will see when you arrive.

I suggest you come between twelve and one, when I shall arrive; we'll have a meal and then I will talk.

Looking forward to seeing y'all there.

I think that strikes the right note, while plugging obvious loop-holes in advance.

 

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2003: At ten AM a glimpse through the "keyhole" reveals Sara Salzman instructing her gang to head out to the airport Marriott at one PM. Tee-hee. Our actual location is miles away in southern Denver, and we're meeting at mid-day.

While she and her herd of thugs stampede out to the beautiful new International Airport and charge frantically around inside the Marriott, we have an excellent lunch and a fine afternoon. Not a sign of the enemy. I leave around five or six PM for the east, as it is already dark.

 

THE TOUR IS NEARLY OVER. I drive for many hours across the darkened plains and prairies of this beautiful country. I feel close to God, and close too to Josephine. The sky is jet black and moonless, but dotted with myriads of stars.

At one stage, about a hundred miles dead ahead to the east, there is a sudden vertical streak through the sky, falling as fast as a streak of lightning, ending with a brilliant, vivid, lime-green mid-air flash about the diameter of the Moon: it must have been a meteorite hitting the atmosphere and burning up.

I check into a Kansas motel and write this message to Benté:

Very brief report. Denver meeting went well, finished five PM, set out at once eastwards, drove four hundred miles, and I am now somewhere in the middle of the Kansas prairies, and about to go to sleep, 1:15 AM local time.

Tomorrow about eight hundred miles to drive to Illinois.

The snow and ice are melting. I send pictures of yesterday's highway to Benté: "Now you see why I like driving in this country. This was Wyoming. Like nowhere else on Earth."

Before leaving, I also report Sara Salzman's latest effusions to Benté, with a message headed: "Who's a clever boy, then!"

Their shouts of "We've got him!," and "Let's get the British bastard!" must seem premature to Salzman's gang this morning.

I now also thank the local Denver organizer and reveal to him my "keyhole" and the last messages it has disclosed - "Just to round off our relish," I add, "Makes me feel a tad guilty (not)."

It is nine PM before I reach Decatur, in Illinois.

My own message box contains a pathetic last bleat from the Salzman gang's mole -

Mr. Irving, why did you lie to me?

You gave an address for the Denver location of your speech and I waited there for two hours, and you never showed up.

Do you think this is funny? Maybe the Jews are right about you. - Mike Wilde.

I reply at 10:24 PM : "You believe they might be wrong?", and go to bed.

 

Our dossier on the origins of anti-Semitism
 
Index to this Action ReportHelp to fund David Irving's Real History Campaign
"Let's get the British bastard!" " How emails from a badly leaking laptop scuppered the violent plans of the traditional enemies of Free Speech in Colorado
Letter from Jamie McCarthy in 1999 and reply
 

DAVID IRVING says: "Thanks -- See you in Cincinnati, Labor Day 2004!"

© Focal Point 2004 F DISmall write to David Irving