Crimes and Mercies Read Online Free PDF Page B

e-mail on the Internet, TV signals – anything. While this is fairly common knowledge now, it certainly was news to me then. So far asI can judge, it still is against the law.
    In my case, the line of communication is easy to see. The computers downloaded my Doucet call to tape, flagged it and passed it to probably Bert Cowdrey of the United States Army Center for Military History in Washington, who has written several articles defending the US Army and trying to discredit my research.
    Cowdrey, if it was him, then informed the various American, Canadian, French, German and British writers, State Department employees, academics, print and TV journalists and army officers who were busy rebutting my charges.
    This is only one of many bizarre incidents. My mail has been opened, the contents removed and the empty envelopes delivered to me . After Other Losses was published in the US, a professor named Martin Brech who had given me an interview about his experiences as a guard in an American prison camp in Germany, received death threats by mail and by phone, his car was trashed in his driveway and his rural mailbox destroyed. At Heathrow, my laptop was taken from me by an official of British Airways as I was loading for a flight to Moscow. When I pointed out that I had been promised by BA in Toronto that I could take the computer in the cabin and that in fact I had just arrived from Toronto with the computer in my hand, the official quickly said, ‘If you want to get on this flight, check the bag.’ I checked it.
    When I arrived in Moscow, my Russian researcher Alexei Kirichenko told me that he had been warned by a former KGB officer that a CIA man in Washington had just phoned him to say, ‘Tell Kirichenko not to work with Bacque, as he is a very dangerous man.’ Reassured that he had not been intimidated by the CIA, I began work with Kirichenko.
    I invited him to stay at my house in Toronto to collaborate on a project. He arrived with no typewriter and no notes and nothing done. When I saw the childish scribbling he had done for a draft of a section in our projected book, I said, ‘Alexei, this is no good at all. You told me you had written five books.’ He admitted then he had written none. One day just before his departure, I was out of the house, leaving him there. When Ireturned to my study, I could smell his strong body odour in the room. This was odd, as it was clear to both of us that there was no book to work on. The next day, after he left, I received a call from a Toronto lawyer warning me that Alexei had evidence that I was planning to steal his work from him.
    The next time I used my copying machine, I discovered it was out of paper, though it had been loaded when Alexei was there. Clearly, he had been using a lot of copy paper while I was out. The lawyer then phoned Saturday Night magazine to warn them that because Bacque was planning to steal Kirichenko's work, if they published anything Bacque had stolen, they would be sued. They also threatened my book publishers, Stoddart/General. A few weeks later, the new editor of Saturday Night , Ken Whyte, refused to publish an excerpt from my new book ( Crimes and Mercies ), even though it proved by my research in the KGB archives in Moscow that my earlier work on German POWs for Saturday Night had been absolutely correct. He did this despite the fact that John Fraser, his predecessor, had paid my way to Moscow and back to do that research, thereby acquiring exclusive rights to the work. Whyte then published an attack on me by – of all people – Sir John Keegan, and then refused to print a mild letter from me rebutting Keegan’s incorrect criticism even though he had invited me to respond.
    Work commissioned from me by the Globe and Mail , the Times Literary Supplement and the Ottawa Citizen has been refused. My letters to the editor have been refused by such papers as Le Monde , the New York Times , the Toronto Star , the Globe and Mail , and Saturday Night