When we left off in Edition Four, I was standing in the middle of a South Sudanese night staring into a flickering campfire listening to the most prolific arms dealer in Africa tell me the next President of the United States would be an Islamic plant – put in America by OPEC and radical Islamic leaders over twenty five years ago. He was tasked only to undermine the Western way of life and make sure that when the Arab countries attacked Israel, America would be unable to come to their assistance. Step by step he laid out the entire plan for me: how this man would orchestrate the destruction of our economy; bring riots to our streets; create chaos between the races; shatter our loyalty to Israel; and undermine and dismantle our military.
As if that was not enough, he also began describing how he and his family had smuggled the bio weapons of mass destruction out of Bagdad while France and Russia tied the hands of the United States in the United Nations, giving he and his family time to hide or destroy what they couldn’t smuggle out of the country. He stated this would taint almost anything the conservative leadership could bring to the table. He actually knew more about our two-party process than most college graduate students and how not finding weapons of mass destruction would divide our country and put a cloud over our sitting president. With just a little prompting, he revealed that they had taken the bio weapons and nuclear material they had hoarded for decades to Egypt and Libya and had stashed them in Osama bin Laden’s old training camps under the watchful eye of Muammar Gaddafi.
At this point I couldn’t stand to hear any more of his fantasy swill, and without thinking that this man could kill me and no one would even ask him why, I told him what I thought of him and called him a drunken loud mouth that only talked to hear the sound of his own voice. He responded at the top of his lungs, cursing me with every English profanity he knew – acting like the self-conscious bully he was. He said, “I’ll prove it to you.” Throwing back his head and puffing up his chest he blurted out, “To prove to you I know what Al Qaeda is doing, fourteen days from today Rafic Hariri [the ex-prime minister of Lebanon] will be killed in Beirut on February 14th along with his entourage. When you see this, you will know I’m not just a drunken Arab.” Almost speechless, I realized that I just poked a bad dog with a stick, and I treaded very lightly for the rest of the trip.
Upon arriving in Kenya a couple of days later, I went straight to the American Embassy and met with the head of the regional Security (a polite way of saying he ran the African desk for the CIA). As I sat in his office trying to tell him about this hair raising experience, he just stared back at me through his almost black glasses and said, “These guys are always trying to act like they know more about Al Qaeda than anyone else. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.” For the entire thirty minutes I sat in the taxi trying to reach the safety of my hotel room, I kept running the whole scenario over and over in my mind. Had I dreamed the entire thing? Was I the only person in the world that could see this plot to destroy America; and if everything I had seen and heard in the desert was true, what could I do to prepare my generation for the upcoming events? You can only imagine what I felt when on the 14th of February I woke up and turned my TV to the BBC morning news and was met with bloody bodies and tangled steel of what was left of Rafic Hariri’s entourage. They had driven straight into a trap in front of the International Hotel and a planted bomb was triggered just as the ex-prime minister’s vehicle drove past. I grabbed the phone and called the Embassy but they were too busy talking to the State Department trying to explain to someone, whose pay grade was far above their own, how this could have happened on their watch.
As the day waxed on, it became evident that alcohol had played a part of my conversation with the arms dealer in the desert two weeks earlier. Just before lunch, the arms dealer called and offered me $90,000 just to fly to Yemen and talk to his uncle (who is also a smuggler) about bringing medicine into parts of the Middle East. The alcohol had loosened his tongue, and he had revealed too much classified information to me. Suddenly I knew if I went to Yemen, I would never be seen again. Now for the first time since my arrival in Africa, I caught myself looking over my shoulder and using all the evasive tactics I had been taught. Later that day I called my wife Sharon back in Keller, Texas, and told her if I suddenly disappeared to have the State Department look for me first in Yemen and then in the deserts of South Sudan.
In Edition Six, I will tie more of this into the open vision I experienced on the mountains of Colorado, the Prophetic Words God has given me over the years and to scripture. So please be patient – there is much more to come.
***I have had several friends mention to me that the blog almost reads like a book, but I assure you that this is not fiction. Every word of this is true, down to the smallest detail.