Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [42]
Terry continues: “Then, after you were out of office, all of a sudden our bedroom phone line quit working when they removed the hotline. I had two different guys come over from the local phone company to try and repair it. They said, ‘We have no idea who’s been working on the lines. We can’t figure out what they did, or why, and we can’t repair this.’ The weird clicks on the phone continued to happen, even after we moved to our new house. But only at times when you’d stuck your neck out and sounded off on something to the media. When you were away at Harvard—nothing.”
We sit in silence for a little while. Finally I say, “Well, I guess they can’t track us anymore down here, can they?”
The first inkling that certain people inside the government were out to keep an eye on me came within the first couple months of my taking office. Sometime early in 1999, a meeting was set up for me in the basement of the Capitol. The Minnesota Legislature was not in session at the time, so there were plenty of empty rooms down there in the bowels of the building.
I was a newly elected governor who, as far as I understood it, was supposed to be giving orders, not taking them. Yet it seemed I wasn’t being given any choice about whether to attend this meeting. I was more or less being ordered to go down there. No one actually said that. No, I was told, this was a training exercise for the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and they wanted to know if I would be willing to participate.
I thought to myself, doesn’t the CIA’s mission statement say that they are only supposed to be operational outside of the United States? At the same time, being a former serviceman and a patriotic citizen, when your government wants to question you, you almost feel obligated to do it. It was maybe the case, too, that it hadn’t truly set in that I was the governor. You don’t yet fully realize the power you have—or think you have. So, while I felt this pressure to cooperate, and the whole premise seemed outrageous, it also piqued my curiosity. Okay, I guess I’ll go down there and find out what this is all about.
There were twenty-three CIA agents waiting in a conference room for me. I counted.
What stunned me when I first walked in was—these people looked like “the neighborhood.” I mean, some appeared to be in their early twenties, right out of college, alongside what looked like sixty-five-year-old grandmothers. Men and women. It was very diverse. As I looked around at them, I thought, there’s the lady down the block you see sweeping her front step in the morning, and wave to—“Mrs. Jones, how are you today?” Just an average middle-class neighborhood. Except they were all with the CIA.
They sat in chairs in a big half-moon circle, and I was placed in the center. They had notebooks on their laps, waiting there intently. I believe it really was some type of learning class, or why would there be so many of them together? If the CIA simply wanted to interrogate me, they’d have sent over a couple of well-seasoned agents and gotten the job done. Well, all twenty-three didn’t ask me questions; probably only eight or ten of them did. Actually, the meeting didn’t last all that long. Because I don’t think they considered me overly cooperative.
I opened the conversation by saying: “I have some questions for you, before you question me. First of all, what are you doing here? Supposedly, this is the FBI’s jurisdiction. According to your original charter from when the CIA was created in 1947, you’re not supposed to be working directly within the United States of America.” (I knew some background on the CIA from all my reading on the Kennedy assassination.)
Well, I got the hem-haw. So, I then said, “Okay, before I answer anything, I want to go around the room, and I want you to tell me your name and what you do.” I couldn’t get both those answers out of more than three or four. With the rest, either they’d tell you a name but not what they do, or they would briefly describe what they do without identifying themselves, or they’d do neither. I thought that was kind