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“There but for the Grace of God, Go I”
VOICES FROM THE PITS OF HELL
By Rayelan Allan
“Vicarious” is such a wonderful word. It describes the act of learning or experiencing through the imagined participation of another’s experience. Imagine how easy it would be to learn life’s difficult lessons, if all we had to do was live life “vicariously” We could avoid all the pitfalls that cause pain and suffering..
While I am not sure if vicarious learning works for subjects like physics and mathematics, it does work for other kinds of learning. How many of you know a younger brother, who has vowed he will never do drugs, because he has seen what they did to his older brother? How many little girls, who saw their older sisters get pregnant and end up on welfare, chose other paths for their own lives? These are examples of vicarious learning.
People learn from good examples, and bad examples. For a vicarious lesson to be really effective, the teacher needs to be someone you can empathize with. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a relative or a friend. You can learn vicariously from the lives that have been lived by people you read about or see in documentaries. The person doesn’t even need to be real. Good fiction, with a good message, can teach people vicarious lessons about bravery, honesty, loyalty, and service to others.
Stories of personal suffering can also teach vicarious lessons. When I made the decision to share every aspect of the life I lived as Gunther Russbacher’s wife, I did so because I hoped that other people could vicariously learn all the lessons I had learned, and thereby escape the horror, tragedy, misery, and agony that I went through.
At the time I married Gunther, I was teaching several different processes for self healing and self improvement. With a background in psychology, a thesis in bio-feedback, and years of workshops in stress reduction, meditation, and self improvement classes; I had developed a process that was quickly learned and produced noticeable results in a short time.
When I married Gunther, my life changed overnight. The first thing I realized was, after all the years of “clearing” and other exercises, I had not conquered my own dragons. I was not the pure, pious and centered person I thought I had become. I still had fear. I still had grief, anger, hate, sorrow, despair, and a thousand different kinds of mental anguish I had never felt before.
But I still had students who had been with me a very long time. They walked a dedicated path of inner growth and devotion to a higher creative power. At that time, I put out a short monthly newsletter called, “The Light Age Journal”. It was my own personal journal of traveling into “The Light Age” – “Light Age” in this sense had many levels of meaning. The bronze, and iron ages were named after the tools; therefore, I felt the age of computers, lasers, and fiber optics should be called, “The Light Age.” I also saw that we were at a time in history that humanity has the opportunity to transform on all levels, and step into a world of light, not darkness.
Two days after I married Gunther, my calm and serene life changed. I went from a world of truth and light through the Looking Glass, into a world of shadows and lies. My new husband, a man I ‘thought’ I had known since the mid seventies, was arrested in front of my entire family. The FBI agents told me he was a conman on a crime spree marrying and defrauding wealthy widows. His arrest made the front page of our local paper. The humiliation was unbearable and extremely humbling.
I was the local girl who left our little town and became a buyer for Nordstroms, and a divisional manager for I. Magnin’s. I was the one who married a nuclear physicist who was the Dean of Science and Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School which is located on the beautiful and wealthy Monterey Peninsula. I traveled to Washington D.C. to do interviews with people like Treasury Secretary, Angela “Bay” Buchanan. I had just been asked to move to Washington D.C. and become the Administrative Assistant for the powerful Senator who was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I was too smart to marry a conman. But the front page of our small town paper said that is exactly what I had done.
The only other time I made the front page of our local newspaper was when I started a company that taught women how to enter the business world. The headlines that once read “local girl makes good”, suddenly became, “Local girl falls for conman”. Shame and humiliation were not emotions I had experienced a lot before then. After I married Gunther, I became intimately acquainted with these two emotions.
After the FBI left with Gunther in handcuffs, I went to bed for two days and begged God to let me die. Somewhere in the black pit of despair, a light went off. I began to remember “little things” that made me question the story the FBI had told me.
The Learjet we took to Reno to get married, had stinger missiles on the wings and a nose cannon. I remembered the pilot and co-pilot talking with Gunther about their trips to Mexico, Central America, Oklahoma. I remembered the pilot telling the FBI agent that he had just met Gunther the day he flew us to Reno. I remembered that Gunther told the pilot that he would re-pay the cost of the flight. They even joked about all the government officials that have gotten in trouble for misusing government jets. Then I remembered the FBI telling me that the Learjet was NOT a government jet, it was a private jet.
How many private jets have stinger missiles on their wingtips? It was obvious that the FBI was lying, the pilot was lying, and Gunther wasn’t saying anything. Once it sunk in that I had been lied to, the shame and humiliation were transformed into righteous rage and I vowed that I would find out the truth about who I had married.
Before I married Gunther, I had been helping researchers and writers investigate various scandals involving the CIA. Because of this, I had contacts within the intelligence community. Once I realized the FBI was lying, I got out of bed and started making phone calls. Within days of requesting information about who I had married, I received calls from three men who identified themselves to me as the Station Chiefs from Frankfurt, Tel Aviv and St. Louis. Each man told me they had known Gunther for over thirty years and he was a Naval officer attached to the CIA. They confirmed that Gunther WAS the man I thought he was. He was the Naval officer I had met, many years earlier, at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Because I had been lied to, and the world around me had suddenly turned upside down, I didn’t really trust anonymous voices over the telephone. To further verify who Gunther was, I flew to Washington D.C. and asked the Senator for whom I had almost gone to work, to tell me the truth. The Senator grabbed my hand, and led me into a dark foyer that separated his office from the outside door to the main hall of the Capitol Basement. With both doors closed, in almost complete darkness, the Senator said, “Raye, you have married a very good man. Just hang on for a few months and this will all be over.” I tried to ask more questions, but he had already opened the outside door and walked me down the hall to the ramp at the back of the Capitol Building. I later found out that the dark foyer was the only place in his office that he was sure was not bugged. Even though the Senator did not tell me much, he told me enough to put an end to my shame and humiliation.
Now that I knew Gunther was not the professional conman the FBI told me he was, I figured I was finished with shame and humiliation. But this was before I experienced the masterful manipulators of the American prison system. Each time I visited Gunther in jail or in prison I was subjected to prison guards who had perfected the art of making prisoners families feel like the dregs of society.
Sometimes, after traveling for days to visit Gunther, I was turned away because I had arrived too late. Sometimes I was told that I could not see Gunther because I had not been cleared. Sometimes guards, who towered a foot above me, got up in my face and screamed as loud as they could.
At one prison, visitors had to be searched. I had to remove my underwire bra and pass it out to a guard who examined it. When I still did not pass the metal detector test, I was led back to the room where the guard examined everything I was wearing. This meant I was stripped down to my underpants in front of a female guard. No matter how much I took off, the metal detector kept going off. I could tell that the guards suspected I was smuggling in contraband. Just before I was about to be taken away for a body cavity search, the guard asked me to take off my shoes. Without the shoes on, the metal detector didn’t go off. The range of emotions I went through started with irritation, advanced to anger, transformed into embarrassment, heightened into fear and settled over me like a black cloud of dread.
At other prisons, I was turned away and not allowed to visit because I was wearing open toed shoes, sleeveless blouses, pants they said were too tight, boots or some other dress infraction. One time, after driving from California, where I live, to Missouri where he was in prison, I was turned away because I did not have a slip under my denim skirt. At that prison, women visitors are required to pull up their skirts and show their slips to the guards before they are allowed in the visiting room.
When you have a loved one in prison, the visits and the phone calls deplete your checking account instantly. All calls from prisons and jails have to be collect and they cost a dollar a minute. If a wife is on welfare or working at a low wage job, she usually has her phone disconnected after the first month. Then there is no contact except through letters and visits. Many times the prisoner is held in another state and the family is too poor to visit more than once a year, if at all. All of this happened to me. When Gunther was in Prison in Missouri, I could only afford to visit him about three times a year. We had to conduct out marriage via the telephone and letters.
For the first year and a half of our marriage, Gunther and I kept our mouths shut and did not go public with what had happened to us. We tried to handle our problem through the legal system. All of this changed in an instant when an attempt was made to kill Gunther. In a recorded telephone call to Rodney Stich, Gunther told him the truth about why people in the Bush Administration wanted him dead.
Gunther was married to the best friend of the woman whose book, “October Surprise” charged President Bush with treason. In a half hour telephone call, Gunther revealed to Rodney that he was the pilot who had flown George Bush back from the Paris meeting which concluded the October Surprise deal. Gunther told Rodney that if he was killed, Rodney should give me the tape so I would understand why he had been killed.
Instead of remaining silent, Rodney played the tape for Harry Martin, the publisher of the Napa Sentinel. Harry published the story on the front page of his Thursday newspaper. On Monday, the article was front page in the nationally distributed Spotlight newspaper. Before I had even heard the truth from Gunther or Rodney, I received a telephone call from a radio talk show host asking me what it felt like to be married to the October Surprise Pilot. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Shortly after the attempt on Gunther’s life, the publication of the articles, and my first appearance on world wide short wave radio, two important things happened. William Webster, the Director of the CIA resigned suddenly, and the Senate and the House both convened long over due Task Forces to investigate the October Surprise.
The October Surprise is the Grandaddy of all the scandals of the Reagan and Bush years. All the other scandals can be traced back to the deal the Reagan Campaign made with Iran to delay the release of the 52 hostages from the Beirut Embassy. Because President Carter could not free the hostages, he looked weak and ineffective, therefore, Ronald Reagan won the election. The moment I told my story on the radio, Gunther and I became overnight celebrities in the world of government whistleblowers.
The positive thing about being infamous as the wife of the October Surprise Pilot was I no longer felt shame and humiliation. These two emotions were replaced by fear and an overwhelming sense of helplessness. After the first radio show where I had to be in the studio, there was an attempt to run me off a freeway overpass. Gunther’s Team members were following me that night. I saw them smash into the van that had just tried to run me off the overpass. I saw the van explode in flames. I later learned Gunther’s team had fired a shoulder held rocket launcher into the van. Many months later Gunther told me his boss had ordered the “Team” to “immediately terminate” any assassin who tried to kill me.
The more Gunther and I went public, the harder life became. Gunther was poisoned, beaten, denied his heart medication which caused him to suffer numerous heart attacks. He was placed on work assignments that were torture for someone in his condition. Everyday a new crisis arose that had to be handled immediately. The worst crises always happened over long weekends, like the three day Memorial Day holiday when all the courts were closed and there was no one I could appeal to.
I was married to Gunther for 9 years. During that time, he was free about 9 months. The rest of the time he was in county jails in three states; federal prisons in more states that I can remember; and finally in an ancient prison in Austria. I have been the wife of a prisoner. I have been bankrupted. I have had times when there was no food in the house. I have stood in lines at food banks. I learned to buy my clothes at Goodwill instead of Nordstroms.
I waited in line at prisons with people that I wouldn’t have crossed the street to help, years before. I met the wives, the mothers, the grandmothers and children of men that we refer to as the “dregs of society”. And I learned that they were just like me. Most were middle class. Some were teachers, chiropractors, doctors. Others were on welfare or holding down menial jobs. Others were farmers struggling to save the family farm while still trying to help their son or husband who was in prison.
Most of the prisoners I met were incarcerated for drug use. All prisoners, no matter where they are incarcerated or what they are in for, live lives of stress, medical neglect, beatings, rapes, poor health, bad food, depression, loneliness, and alienation from family and friends. Imprisoned fathers mourn over the problems their children encounter and grieve when their wives leave them for another man.
An American prisoner’s life is not that much different from prisoners in third world countries. Torture, deprivation, inedible food, little or no medical or dental care are the same here as well as in the third world. In the United States, torture can’t be blatant. Prisoners can’t be strapped down and tortured with electric prods. Instead, they are isolated in freezing solitary confinement cells, or cells that are so hot the prisoner can barely breathe. They are beaten by guards or other inmates. Sometimes they are even murdered.
One of the things I learned from my life, in and out of prisons, is that we never know when we or someone we love could become a prisoner. Dr. Hulda Clark, a 76 year old microbiologist who is challenging the American Medical establishment knows what it like to be a prisoner. Ed McCabe, the author of a book on oxygen therapy spent years in a federal prison. Congressman George Hansen, the author of a book on the IRS called “To Harass our People” spent four long and torturous years in the AmeriKan Gulag. Rodney Stich, author of “Defrauding America” and three other books exposing the connected pattern of government corruption, also knows what it is like to be a prisoner in America.
The names of government whistleblowers who became government dissidents and then government prisoners is too long to cover completely. Chip Tatum, Ron Rewald, Trenton Parker, Bob Hunt, Oswald LeWinter, Al Martin and Les Coleman are prisoners I know personally.
None of the people named above ever thought they would end up as prisoners. None of their wives, children and families ever thought they would have a husband, son or father who was a prisoner. In our country, in this day and age, any of us can be free today and in jail tomorrow.
I wrote this article, because I wanted you to “vicariously” learn what it was like to be married to a prisoner. I wanted you to feel what I went through every day, not knowing if Gunther was dead or alive, was being beaten, was in solitary confinement -- freezing in the winter and suffocating in the summer. I wanted you to understand that no matter how rich you are, the lawyers and phone calls quickly deplete your funds and you are reduced to poverty.
Most families are destroyed when a loved one goes to prison. If they had been middle class upstanding citizens, they are embarrassed to admit they have a family member in prison. They usually drop out of their church or clubs. Sometimes they even move away from their hometowns and go where no one knows them. They lose their support system. Most develop severe depression which gets manifested in different ways. Children are affected the most. Many become antisocial and sometimes end up in prison. Some turn their pain on their father and hate him. Others turn their pain on themselves and commit suicide.
The American system of corrections is broken. Prisoners and their families cannot fix it because they have been broken by a broken system. I took you on this vicarious journey because I wanted you to become a prisoner’s wife, father or son, for just a few moments. I wanted you to know how it feels to have your loved one locked up in place where neither of you knows if he will live to see the next morning.
Some of these prisoners are innocent. Others have committed crimes that should never have been labeled crimes, such as smoking marijuana, innocently driving a car that had drugs in it, stealing food, exposing government corruption, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or being the fall guy. Prisoners cannot help themselves because they must focus their attention on staying alive. Most family members are in too much pain to try to fix a broken system. The only hope the broken prison system has of being fixed is you.
Before you or a loved one becomes a guest in the AmeriKan Gulag, don’t you think you should try to fix it? You should ask Congressman George Hansen how it felt to spend days chained and shackled on a transport bus, with your feet and legs swelling and the shackles cutting into your skin. Ask him was it was like to pull his own teeth. Ask him about his health problems that were caused by medical neglect.
I did not write this to teach anyone how to fix the broken system. I wrote this because one of you will be touched by it and YOU are the one who will figure out how to fix this broken system. You are the one who can change the system so that no man or woman will ever have to know the agony of a prison system that destroy souls, create monsters, perpetuates lives of crime, and offers no hope of reform or rehabilitation.
If this vicarious journey showed you things you did not know, and if you want to know more, please read the following story by a police officer who is a prisoner in one of the worst prisons in this country – and possibly in the entire world. Amnesty International has charged the United States with being one of the worst violators of human rights.
Here are some links to help you gain the background you need to help fix this broken system.
Rayelan Allan – May 28, 2000 ###
