Re: 3/6/00 - [CGYC] Families, old loyalties abandoned
Families, old loyalties abandoned
Devotion: As Scott Caruthers tightened his circle of followers, the details of his 'mission' grew clearer. So did the price to be paid.
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By Dan Fesperman and Ann LoLordo
Sun Staff
Second of two articles
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Also see From Sunday
Lives caught in orbit of devotion, deception
Charisma: A knack for attracting lovers, investors, admirers has helped Scott Caruthers enrich himself in ventures that led others to personal or financial ruin.
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For Scott A. Caruthers, the cast was assembled. The wealth he had always wanted was in place. And by 1997, all that was left to gain from those around him was a loyalty of such intensity it would wrench apart friendships, lifestyles, marriages and religious beliefs.
Such devotion would also mean abandoning homes and neighborhoods, and Caruthers led the way. He and companion Dashielle Lashra moved from the lowlands of Anne Arundel County to a two-story colonial amid the hills of Carroll County, in an isolated subdivision near Westminster.
According to documents and interviews, the move to higher ground was part of a long-term plan to survive cataclysmic "Earth changes" predicted by Caruthers. In that context, even his new address seemed like a portent: Scott Drive.
Not everyone in Caruthers' inner circle had stayed the course, and not all of his ventures had been a success.
Longtime girlfriend Randi Baverman moved to North Carolina, where she is married and a vice president for Bank of America. She refused requests for an interview.
Commercially, Caruthers' invention of a no-grip dumbbell failed, and the company that collected $2.7 million from investors to market it, Strongput, went broke. But a deal negotiated by a business partner helped Caruthers emerge from the wreckage with a directorship in a new company, Carnegie International Corp., and stock worth millions.
The new household on Scott Drive included Irmina Dzambo, who'd left her husband, family and past identity in 1985 to become Dashielle Lashra; and Steve Rainess, a T-shirt maker from Glen Burnie who had severed ties to his parents and become Caruthers' bodyguard. Soon joining them was Debra Hackerman, a fitness trainer who'd helped write Strongput's exercise manual. She had divorced her husband, Tim, and moved in with their 8-year-old daughter. Later she changed her name to Dulsa Naedek.
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Lewis Dardick, on Scott A. Caruthers and Dashielle Lashra (right), shown with Dulsa Naedek at a party last summer for the opening of his cyberart exhibit. Both women left their husbands to devote themselves to Caruthers. (Photo courtesy Paul Joslin)
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David Pearl, Caruthers' longtime lawyer and business partner, moved with wife Susan and their two teen-age children to another house nearby. Pearl's former law partner, Richard Gershberg, also involved in Caruthers' business ventures, later moved to the area with wife Elaine and their two teen-agers.
A new couple entered Caruthers' orbit when Lewis Dardick, 37, left his job in the Baltimore City auditor's office in 1997 to join Gershberg and Associates in Owings Mills. He and his wife, Amy, 34, had known the Gershbergs for years.
Dardick soon noticed Caruthers and Lashra around the office and thought they seemed odd. "Then one day I see those two kind of glide by my window outside, and I said, 'I don't know what it is about those people, it's like they're from another planet.' And [Gershberg] said, 'You've been skirting around this for months. I've been waiting for you to ask the question you finally have, and there's a protocol to follow.' "
"What the hell are you talking about?" Dardick asked.
"This is serious," Gershberg answered. "Pearl is involved. A lot of people are involved. And you know that I'm not a stupid man and I don't accept things easily and I ask a lot of questions. I have to make a phone call, and I'll get back to you."
Over the next few weeks, Dardick said, Gershberg implied Caruthers and Lashra had connections in the intelligence community and were bearers of a vital message. A meeting was arranged at a Fourth of July party at the home of a business associate in Bel Air.
"We were standing around chatting like you would at a party, kids running around," Dardick said. Caruthers "must have talked to me for an hour straight without a breath. He told me that I had some higher degree of intellect and that I understood the truth, that there were Earth changes taking place in the near future, basically to the point that the Earth's crust was going to shift. ... And the ultimate result would be that life as we know it on this planet would be changed, in chaos, and that they were preparing for this."
Caruthers told him he knew all this because of inside information from the intelligence community. He said compounds would be built to protect those with proper "training," but "only people with certain attributes would be qualified to be trained into a program of higher awareness," Dardick recalled. "The weird thing was that three black helicopters came over the house during the meeting, and he looked up kind of matter-of-factly and said, 'Oh, they're checking on us.' It kind of made me think, like, 'My God.' I think on the way home I said to Amy, 'You'll never believe what I just found out.' She started laughing when I told her."
After that, Dardick said, "I started asking Gershberg and Pearl all kinds of questions, and they told me they were both in training for about the last 10 years. ... They told me they had visited Caruthers in the hospital after he was wounded [on a CIA mission]. They were preaching things like, 'We're about truth and goodness and love.' "
In the conversations that followed, an acronym emerged: BDX, or Beta Dominion Xenophilia. In the group's context, the Latin words meant roughly "Next World Alien Lovers."
"BDX is the 39th level of intelligence organizations above the president," Dardick said Caruthers explained. "Scott claimed that the alien that controlled him was the commander of 'The League,' Scott was the commander on Earth and Dashielle was the queen."
Lashra flies the colors of the organization openly: "BDX ONE" is on the tag of her Lexus.
Dardick soon found himself in a predicament common to people recruited by cults, facing seemingly unbelievable assertions made by trusted friends. In fact, nearly everyone in the group had known each other for years. Debra Hackerman was Richard Gershberg's sister, and she, the Pearls, the Gershbergs and the Dardicks had all gone to Milford Mill High School and were active in their synagogues. They shared vacations and holidays, weekend sailboat rentals and birthday celebrations.
So, when Pearl and Gershberg insisted that Caruthers had CIA connections, Dardick believed it, even if he couldn't quite swallow the alien business. And when they told him not to share any more of the information with his wife, warning of a life-threatening pitfall called "cross training," he was inclined to listen.
In a few weeks, Amy Dardick also got to hear the message. She wasn't laughing anymore.
She was upset, her husband recalled. Then she began going to Scott Drive, joining conversations with Caruthers and her trusted friends Susan Pearl, Elaine Gershberg and Debra Hackerman. One of them would cook an elaborate dinner tailored to Caruthers' tastes and bring it to the house, and then they would chat, often until dawn.
In the meantime, Lewis Dardick said, "They told everybody to keep a journal. Pearl and Gershberg said they were. ... Pearl told me I should keep a 'high points' journal of significant things and send it over [by fax] to Dashielle."
Physically, he said, "training" suited him at first. Like the others, he was losing weight by exercising and eating health foods recommended by Caruthers. Less agreeable was when his wife brought home cats. Caruthers thought every home needed them, and Dardick was allergic.
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Beyond the world of Scott Drive, longtime friends and relatives began to wonder what was going on. People mentioned the weight loss. They saw the Gershbergs and the Pearls less and less. A bar mitzvah for the Gershbergs' son in spring 1997 was one of the last events where many outsiders were invited, and some were puzzled by two of the evening's honored guests, Caruthers and Lashra.
The next year, when it was time for the Gershbergs to bat mitzvah their daughter, they instead held a "celestial event" at a Comfort Inn in Westminster. The few outsiders invited said it was eerie, like something out of an episode of "The X Files," which was playing on videotape during the party.
Susan Pearl quit her job as a speech and language teacher. Richard Gershberg stopped coaching youth soccer, something he had done for years. When friends questioned Amy Dardick's recurring evening trips to Westminster, she cited "national security" considerations. She later quit her job as a vascular technologist.
In August 1998, the Dardicks moved to Westminster with their three young children. Lewis Dardick maintained an edge of skepticism, sometimes catching Caruthers lying or altering predictions, he said. Others in the group had few such doubts, based on purported journal entries from the summer of 1998 that were later found in Caruthers' garbage by a private detective. But the writings do hint at discord in the ranks, particularly regarding Richard Gershberg, who was described as being a "potential RAD," a term for a BDX enemy.
In June 1998, Hackerman wrote of the problems that her brother had caused the group on a trip to the Bahamas and suggested frightening consequences if he continued:
"Throughout the assignment, Rick did not follow Command Protocol, instead continued to follow his ego in how he conducted himself. Essentially, he has failed, period, and will never again be allowed to go on anymore trips. It was he who repeatedly sent up flares for the RADS, from telling people in his office that he was taking 'his wife' on a trip to a specific location, to delaying the plane on the departure just because he wanted to buy a piece of pizza. The point being, he did not display any level of integrity or honesty, only selflessness [sic] and personal wants, all of which constantly placed Command in the line of fire. If it were a IC [intelligence community] assignment, the second he left the beach on the rented Jet Ski, a BDX Operative would have followed him, waited for the correct moment and shot him in the head, leaving the body in the middle of the ocean."
A month later, Elaine Gershberg wrote of being upset by one of Caruthers' new teachings, concerning what might happen to her son after the "Earth changes."
"Scott mentioned that most males would not make it, not be able to survive. ... All I remember is automatically thinking about [my son] and the fact that he fits into this category. Scott instantly picked up on my dismay, and knew that I was getting very upset and emotional with the thought of [my son's] potential death. ... I have been very good at handling a lot of the concepts, precepts, teachings and all that will be occurring in the not too distant future, but the thought of my son not making it, just because he is a male and will become a Man, really got to me. I have finally adjusted to the idea of Rick [not] following his path and possibly not surviving, but I have never put [my son] into that realm."
She went on to describe how Caruthers comforted her: "The sun came up and no one really slept. Scott and Deb ended up leaving the room and Sue and myself went to sleep. Scott returned several hours later and climbed in between Sue and myself. I expected him to just go to sleep, but Sue started massaging him and asked if he wanted to sleep and he said not right now." The description grew more graphic, concluding, "Eventually Scott left and went to rest with the Queen."
The widening gulf between husbands and wives, and its impact on children, alarmed Lewis Dardick most. "One day," he recalled, "Pearl says to me, 'You don't have a wife anymore. You're not married. Forget it.' " But by then he felt trapped: "I had concerns for my safety." He also worried about coming home one day to an empty house, finding that his wife and children had left for either Scott Drive or for a new compound.
His marriage got a fleeting reprieve in late June 1998 when the couple took a weekend trip to Jamaica for their 15th anniversary. Caruthers disapproved, but the Dardicks had made reservations well before "training" had begun. Greeting them soon after their return was a Caruthers memo titled "Decision." Sent to everyone in the group, it was an admonishment of "self indulgence," signed with what Lewis Dardick said is Caruthers' "alien name," Aryeon Lanicet DeRaye.
"I am going to give you a Protocol by which you can determine the right thing to do without any possibility of cross training," it began, concluding: "We may appear to you as altruistic messengers holding up a beacon to dissolve the darkness that engulfs you; but make no mistake. You are not yet fit to lead -- and if you fail to follow, you will die by your own Decision."
Lewis Dardick was taken aback. His wife resumed her regular trips to Caruthers' home.
As leader of the group, Caruthers was apparently exempt from any restrictions against "self indulgence" in marriage. In September 1998, Lashra became his fifth wife in a private ceremony at Scott Drive.
That Christmas, Richard Gershberg wrote a poem for the couple. Titled "Mission of the Fledgling," it was both a tribute and a pledge of devotion, as witnessed in these two stanzas:
I wrote this?
No it just came through you
And a hand and a pen connected to you
did it.
This is just to let you know
I have been
Listening.
Caruthers continued to seek new recruits. One was a friend of Elaine Gershberg's who was visiting from out of state in the fall of 1998. The friend, who agreed to be interviewed only if her name wasn't used, affirmed that Caruthers explained the "Earth changes" and advised her to go into "training" by moving to the area with her children.
What about her husband? "They really didn't want him," she said. "They were living, as Elaine once put it -- 'a nonconventional lifestyle.' ... I just believe it's a form of mind control." That December, Elaine Gershberg wrote in anguish of her friend's rejection: "She is living every day Knowing what the Truth is and not doing anything about it."
Caruthers also recruited on the Internet. Printouts of e-mail transmissions depict a lengthy correspondence with a registered nurse from Memphis, Tenn., in which he told her he was an agent for BDX. They eventually met at a hotel near Baltimore-Washington International Airport on a weekend in July 1997. Later she broke off the relationship. She did not answer a request for an interview.
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There was never much worry about financing the activities on Scott Drive. Documents show how Caruthers and Pearl began structuring accounts to pay for the group's most grandiose plans.
One concern, Lewis Dardick said, was where to build a compound to ride out the "Earth changes." Faxes to the house included at least five real estate listings for 100-plus acres on hilly sites, some of them in the Catoctin Mountains. In summer 1998, Caruthers and Lashra signed a contract on 190 acres near their home, but the deal fell through.
Their base of wealth was stock in Carnegie International, which Caruthers had helped found. He was still a director then. Pearl was secretary and Gershberg was corporate counsel. Seeking tax havens, the group set out to establish foundations, trusts and international corporations with the help of bankers and attorneys in the Bahamas, Belize and Panama. A memo from Pearl to Caruthers on Sept. 21, 1998, stressing the need to "find a jurisdiction that could hide ownership," updated him on progress in Panama.
"As for the purpose of the foundation," Pearl wrote, "we need to consider how to word the document. The standard language is family protection, but I would rather incorporate a more esoteric purpose in line with the Truth. Essentially what is the purpose of the Foundation? Building of Compounds? (We can't say that.) Fund a new religion? (Better, but control must be absolute.)" Pearl said he doesn't recall the memo.
Banker David L. E. Fawkes, managing director of Ansbacher (Bahamas) Ltd., became uneasy with the way Pearl and Gershberg were operating. On Feb. 1, 1999, he wrote to admonish them for ignoring "the legal and discretionary parameters of the Trust structure." He also fretted about possible "insider trading regarding the Carnegie International shares."
Pearl also tried to secure a diplomatic posting for Caruthers from tiny Sao Tome and Principe, an island nation off the west coast of Africa where Strongput and Carnegie sought to do business. It was something Pearl had been working on since October 1995, when he wrote in a letter to Strongput shareholders that the country would soon appoint Caruthers, Lashra and business associate E. David Gable as consuls to the United States.
The deal never happened, Pearl said in a later interview. But that didn't stop him from claiming diplomatic immunity for Caruthers in a dispute in Baltimore County Circuit Court over child-support payments to Caruthers' former wife Paula Crothers. Pearl argued Jan. 5, 1998, that the court had no jurisdiction because his client was "a Diplomat from the Government of Sao Tome and Principe."
Carnegie executives indicate that they never had much concern about what Caruthers and Pearl were up to until late 1998, when Gable, who was Carnegie's chairman, said he asked Caruthers to resign from the board after hearing disturbing stories about life on Scott Drive.
The company soon severed ties to Pearl and Gershberg, and also got rid of a subsidiary called DAR Products, a company that Caruthers had created in 1987 to hold the patents for his no-grip Strongput inventions. But other deals engineered by Carnegie and its subsidiaries kept Caruthers, Pearl and Lashra linked to Carnegie officers and directors in two companies, TimeCast Corp. and Aegis Technologies. Carnegie attorneys say those ties are also being cut.
Carnegie officials are sensitive about discussing Caruthers; for the past 10 months the company has had serious troubles of its own. The Securities and Exchange Commission halted the trading of Carnegie stock April 29, 1999, one day after its listing on the American Stock Exchange. The SEC launched an inquiry into company financial reports, and the AMEX later moved to drop Carnegie altogether.
Company officials hope to resume trading by summer, but with more than $362 million in stocks frozen, irate investors have filed suits accusing some officers of issuing false statements about company revenues. None of the allegations mentions Caruthers, but investors have passed along information about him to the SEC.
Meanwhile, Caruthers has continued to pursue business deals harking back to Strongput. Faxes in 1998 referred to meetings with Black and Decker Corp. officials about producing nongrip power tools.
Disgruntled Strongput investors have neither forgiven nor forgotten that they lost their money by betting on Caruthers. In December 1998 they obtained a consent order from the Maryland attorney general's office barring Caruthers, Pearl and Gershberg from selling further securities. The three each paid $5,000 in fines but admitted no wrongdoing.
The investors weren't satisfied. After a life of relative obscurity, Caruthers was about to be examined as never before.
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In the fall of 1998, Dashielle Lashra did something she hadn't done in 13 years. She contacted her family. Her father, who she said sexually abused her, had died years earlier. She told her mother that she had been out of touch for so long because of her secret work for the government. She then invited her mother, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces to a reunion dinner the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
Three members of the Dzambo family described the event. None wanted to be identified, but an invoice from the M&B Limousine Service confirmed several details. Caruthers paid $605 for two limousines to haul 16 people to and from Rudys' 2900 restaurant in Finksburg on Nov. 29.
When Lashra's relatives gathered in Glen Burnie to await the limousines, some feared for their safety, spooked by the talk of secret work. They arrived at Rudys' to find their hosts in a private dining room. Lashra's mother hugged her, then Caruthers decreed: No more hugs, please.
Dinner was elegant, with Caruthers picking up the tab. A hired photographer snapped pictures while the family sat at a square table with place cards and listened to stories of dangerous missions. The couple said they'd worked for U.S. presidents and that Caruthers had flown a stealth fighter. He had been shot in the head, and Lashra had saved his life.
When anyone asked Lashra a question, Caruthers almost always answered first. Neither mentioned working on a science fiction novel, which Caruthers would later claim was the focus of his group's activities on Scott Drive. At the evening's end, Caruthers permitted a few hugs, after all. Then the long black limousines drove everyone home.
By then, relatives of others in Caruthers' group were trying to get to the bottom of what was happening on Scott Drive. In August 1998, Martin Tulkoff, scion of the Tulkoff Horseradish empire, sought help from an organization in Pikesville known as Jews for Judaism, which specializes in retrieving Jews from cults. Tulkoff and his wife were particularly concerned for their niece, Elaine Gershberg, and her children.
The Tulkoffs also hired a private detective, and in early 1999 he found the fax machine cartridge containing the imprints of seven months of journal entries and other correspondence. The Tulkoffs later joined forces with Tim Hackerman and relatives of the Dardicks, and on May 17, they met with the growing organization of former Strongput investors.
The minutes of the meeting show the strategy they agreed on: "Place the leadership (Caruthers, Gable, Pearl, Gershberg and others) under such scrutiny that it may produce the desired effect to 'rescue' the children under Scott's cult-like influence. 'That lives are at stake' is the top agenda."
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Having acquired wealth and a loyal following, Caruthers set out in the summer of 1998 to become a cyberartist. On July 30, he incorporated Lightspear Corp. and Quantum Financial Corp. to pay his way, and he began calling on business connections to get his work noticed. He wanted attention, but he would eventually attract more than he'd bargained for.
In January 1999, Rick Latham and Peter Jovanovich of Creative Color Graphics came to Westminster from the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia to look at Caruthers' work -- portraits of spaceships and gray-faced aliens. Debra Hackerman, who had changed her name to Dulsa Naedek, recorded the day in a journal entry. She described Caruthers showing his work and introducing five of their seven cats to his visitors. He also told them of the coming "Earth changes" and of his ability to see into the future through "remote viewing."
Latham confirmed in an interview that the journal entry was an accurate account of the meeting, contradicting an assertion Caruthers would later make that such entries were works of fiction or forgeries concocted by his enemies.
Latham found a forum for Caruthers' debut at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. Director Dilys Winegrad said the gallery normally arranges its own exhibits, but last summer "agreed to host -- a word I don't often use -- to host the exhibition. ... People have asked me if he was a self-promoting artist, and that had just sort of flipped through my mind. ... We fitted it in basically because it was over the Fourth of July, when we would have been closed."
The exhibit opened June 18 with a lavish party at the university's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Caruthers paid for ice sculptures and elaborate place settings for 307 guests. An orchestra played as they dined on lobster and filet mignon.
The guest list included syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, a longtime acquaintance who wrote a laudatory introduction to the exhibit; Bahamian bankers; a Portuguese man who'd tried to arrange the consular post for Caruthers; a Black and Decker representative; and Carnegie CEO Lowell Farkas. Anderson, who heads NASA's Young Astronaut program, arranged for former astronaut Gordon Cooper and a cosmonaut from Ukraine to attend.
The gala was splashy enough to attract a proclamation from Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, who declared the next 30 days CyberArt Month. Unveiled along with the artwork was a book called "Truth Notes," a vanity publication of the images accompanied with poems by Caruthers.
Cyberart: Caruthers, who some say has told them he’s an alien, creates "cosmic visions" on the computer. This one, from the vanity publication "Truth Notes" that accompanied his exhibit, is called "Homecoming."
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One, titled "Beta Dominion Xenophilia," spoke of "secret keepers, strangers to the average citizen. A silent coterie, equipped to recognize prevarication and falsehoods, sworn by sacred oath to defend liberty at all cost ... even from the ignorance of their charges."
But a shadow of worry was cast across the festivities in Philadelphia.
Three days earlier, on June 15, the Tulkoffs, Tim Hackerman and the Dardicks' relatives had taken action, armed with the findings of the private detective.
Tim Hackerman picked up his daughter for his weekly visit and immediately filed for emergency custody in Carroll County Circuit Court. Lewis Dardick, seizing his chance to sever ties with the group, also filed for emergency custody of his three children. The judge granted it in both cases. A Maryland State Police investigator began looking into the matter.
Ten days later -- with the question of long-term custody before the court and embarrassing details of Caruthers' life spilling into the public record -- Caruthers hired a limousine to ferry Anderson from his Bethesda home to a luncheon at Cockey's Tavern in Westminster, where the columnist signed an affidavit ridiculing the idea that Caruthers led a cult. Anderson said in a later interview that's the first time he remembers Caruthers discussing a possible science fiction novel.
Caruthers also invited a state senator, the head of the Carroll County Economic Development Council and a reporter for the Carroll County Times to the luncheon, where he began spelling out his version of life on Scott Drive for public consumption.
The Times reported the next day that Caruthers was a local cyberartist who was working with Anderson to develop a TV series called "Futureman" that would be based in Westminster. Later, Anderson said he'd always thought that "Futureman" was an idea for a sci-fi video game that would incorporate images from Caruthers' cyberart.
By fall, it was clear that the halt in trading of Carnegie stock was pressuring Caruthers financially. The caterer of the lavish party in Philadelphia suddenly stopped receiving payments after getting checks for nearly $300,000. Still owed was $246,641.49 to the caterer, a photographer and a publicist. In November, the creditors filed a Chapter 7 action in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Baltimore against Caruthers' Lightspear Corp.
None of the court filings, or even the removal of the four children from their mothers, seemed to draw the group out of its insular existence.
Neither of the estranged mothers has visited her children for nearly six months, said Mark Powers, director of Jews for Judaism. And when reporters visited the home on Scott Drive in December to interview Caruthers, the social order described by others appeared firmly in place.
Dulsa Naedek went upstairs to her bedroom, refusing to answer questions and deferring to Caruthers. Lashra sat through most of the interview but let Caruthers speak for her.
Pearl and Gershberg, who gave a previous interview at Gershberg's law office, interrupted only to offer legal advice or to challenge a statement made by a reporter. Later attempts to interview Elaine Gershberg, Susan Pearl and Amy Dardick were rebuffed.
Caruthers answered questions for three hours. When asked why so many people said he'd told them that he was a CIA agent, a test pilot, an astronaut, a war hero or a space alien who'd come to save the world, Caruthers scoffed, saying, "When I was a little less sophisticated and a whole lot younger, I would share my views about what I was writing with people to get their reaction and their opinion."
Now that some of those people have lost money or their families, he said, they've chosen him as a scapegoat and have twisted the facts against him.
Eight weeks after the interview, saying Caruthers had decided on a policy of "full disclosure," Pearl gave The Sun 518 pages of documents. Most of it was material from Strongput. But in a 16-page cover letter, Pearl drew attention to a copy of a fax that Caruthers sent the CIA on Jan. 31, 1996.
The fax, addressed to "Grace," mentions Caruthers' ties to the government of Sao Tome and Principe, then apparently offers his services, saying that as the head of Strongput, "I understand the fundamental function of commercial cover relevant to Agency interests and wish to discuss it with the appropriate Directorate."
Pearl was coy about the fax, insisting that he was unable to confirm or deny whether Caruthers ever worked for the agency. He suggested that Caruthers' past had merely been "window dressing" for some other, more secretive life and that the identity of "Grace" might unravel the mystery -- although he advised using the information carefully lest it place Caruthers "in harm's way."
But "Grace" is hardly a mystery. The fax number on the letter is that of the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, one listed prominently on the agency's Web site. As for "Grace," CIA spokeswoman Kathy Adams said, "That's a name we give out. That's a clue to us, because we use 'Grace' when the call comes from somebody who sounds like they're a little off."
For security reasons, CIA policy is to neither confirm nor deny someone's employment. But the agency makes exceptions when someone may be claiming affiliation for personal gain.
"We will deviate from our normal policy in this case," spokesman Tom Crispell said. "We have no records of Mr. Caruthers being employed at any time."
It's the sort of rebuff that might crush the credibility of many leaders. But among Caruthers' followers, only his words seem to carry much weight. That is especially the case when he speaks of a theme he has stressed for 15 years, whether in writing customers, addressing investors or e-mailing friends. The subject is "The Truth."
"It's corny, I know," Caruthers said, leveling his steady gaze at a questioner, "but candor is important. The truth always works, and I don't want to deal with anything else."
Originally published on Mar 6 2000
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