James Dissette

A View from Luisa’s: A Chat with Vinny Assante

April 2, 2020 by James Dissette Leave a Comment

For twenty years, Luisa’s Cucina Italiana has been one of Chestertown’s bright lights in the Chestertown restaurant scene. Like everyone, however, their business, came to a screeching halt as the nation scrambled to face one of it’s most dangerous health crises.

Co-owners Vinny Asante and Mimmo Fevola, don’t know what the future will bring for Kent County’s small businesses but they continue with their take out services as the county adjust to dire changes and are thankful for the support they continue to be given.

“March 16, 2020 was my toughest day because I had to lay off most of our staff. We’re a family restaurant and my employees are like family,” he says.

Here, Vinnie talks about the closure, his concern with the survival of Chestertown’s economic engine and whether or not we will learn any lessons going forward.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Luisa’s Cucina Italiana, please go here.

At the Academy: Visionary Artists in the 21st Century with Rebecca Hoffberger

March 3, 2020 by James Dissette

A lecture on “visionary artists” by Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, was hosted by the Talbot Spy and Academy Art Museum on February 21.

Hoffberger is the founder and director of AVAM and oversees the revolving exhibitions that explore the universe of self-taught artists, those with a consuming need to create art out of anything at hand—from matchsticks to a 55ft wind-driven whirligig and celestial mosaics made out of broken glass, human torsos formed with piano hammers or floral arrangements made out of old radio vacuum tubes.

Brut art, raw art, naive or “outsider art” is found outside the formalism of trained artists and art galleries. Often, they are constructions made of materials at hand by people who do not think of their work as art or that they are artists. Natural shapes of wood, shards of broken, colored glass, toothpicks, feathers—virtually anything—are fashioned into wildly expressive imaginary compositions. Hoffberger is clear to not misapply the term “outsider art,” pointing out that it was early vocabulary used to describe creations by the mentally ill, those fully excluded from society.

To a packed lecture hall at the Academy Art Museum, Hoffberger described her journey creating a museum to showcase visionary art as a kind of necessary mission born out of her work with psychiatric patients at Sinai Hospital’s People Encouraging People program. It was there she took a keen interest in the imaginative works of the patients and saw their creations as an “evolutionary force of imagination.”

Hoffberger’s search to create a museum of her own led her to the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland during the 1980s where most of the exhibit is comprised of “outsider art.” Visionary art, hence Visionary Art Museum, is more expansive and includes unique works by untrained artists, may they be carpenters, farmers, anyone who is driven to create something personal and sublime.

Hoffberger is a passionate lecturer and draws from a wide-ranging and eclectic knowledge of the art world. She can dovetail a quote by existentialist philosopher Martin Buber and the poet Rumi with a futuristic painting drawn with colored pencils and include a personal story about an artist who quilted scenes about the Holocaust.

The AVAM director guided the audience through her 25-year journey with a slide presentation exploring the wide spectrum of visionary art, how she managed to get the 7 million dollar museum in Baltimore on its feet, and begin searching for the raw masterpieces on exhibit there. More about this can be found in a previous article in the Spy.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information about the American Visionary Art Museum, go here. For more information about the Academy Arts Museum in Easton go here.

At the Visionary Art Museum with Founder Rebecca Hoffberger by Jim Dissette

January 21, 2020 by James Dissette

Recently, the Spy crew trekked to Baltimore in search of a pigeon skeleton. Yes, really. But there was a method to our madness: the skeleton was on loan from Chestertown resident Pat Trams Hollingsworth and placed as an iconic symbol greeting visitors to the new environmental exhibit at The American Visionary Art Museum.

American Visionary Art Museum Founder and Director, Rebecca Hoffberger noticed the skeleton while visiting Hollingsworth’s home in Chestertown and knew instantly that she wanted it to be part of the new 25th annual exhibition she was curating.

“Rebecca saw the bird skeleton —a learning tool I once used to prepare for a dreaded veterinary tech exam—and off she went with it. It was one of those eureka moments, and she has lots of them. I was fascinated with how she was going to include it,” Hollingsworth says.

The Spy team found the bleached and brittle armature accompanied by a porcelain pigeon in a glass case installed along the entry corridor to the amazing American Visionary Art Museum. The placard above it recalled Hamlet’s existential question, “To Be or Not to Be, That is the Question”, an elegant choice given that AVAM’s new exhibit, “The Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! and (Possibly Really Angry!),” challenges visitors to engage in critical questions about our relationship to the environment that sustains life on Earth.

Chestertown’s Trams Hollingsworth’s pigeon skeleton to illustrate the core message of the new environmental exhibit.

But first: if you have never visited the American Visionary Art Museum, it’s unlike any museum you’ve experienced. You won’t find the trained classicists or hear the reverential whisperings of art admirers. Instead, AVAM is dedicated to art that is rowdy, poignant, haunting and joyous, a collection of unschooled masterpieces from the hearts and minds of individuals who worked out their visions with materials at hand. For example, a centerpiece for the permanent collection has a detailed 15 ft. replica of the Lusitania made out of 200,000 toothpicks as two human figures shaped out of hundreds of wood and felt piano hammers convene silently together.

Johanna Burke’s “Another Green World” mixed media of dry plants, seeds, beads and glass was originally designed for a window at Bergdorf Goodman’s New York store and donated to AVAM.

However, the new environmental exhibit is not a bludgeon wielded by political or environmental activists. It is a collection of personal visions by individuals who would not even consider themselves artists, using materials at hand. It is an invitation to explore our environment through alternative perspectives and along the way to muse over the simple scientific facts of the challenges we face if we continue to ignore the ecological emergencies at hand. Even the ramp to the exhibit begs a fundamental question—hundreds of plastic items collected from a single beach in California are suspended from the corridor ceiling. On the wall, a text panel history of plastic. How will we deal with with an ocean choked by discarded plastic and drinking water suffused with hidden threat microplastics now being detected in humans all over the world?

The Spy was lucky to have as their guide Founder, Director and curator of the exhibit, Rebecca Hoffberger whose knowledge about each of the “artists” and their works reveal the depth of her dedication to the exhibit at hand and the overall mission of AVAM. Hoffberger led us through the labyrinth of exhibits describing their origin, the artist, and how she felt it shaped the conversation we must have about our environmental crisis.

But what are we looking at when we see giant green gorillas fashioned from fiberglass, beads, and plants, or a wax rubbing of a crosscut of a tree compared with a human fingerprint, and why does it move us so different from the art spaces of other museums?

Understanding AVAM’s mission is to understand Hoffberger’s original interest in creating a space for art created outside the classical world of classically trained artists. In her mission statement, she wrote, “Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary art Museum refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.”

In the mid-eighties, Hoffberger was employed as the Development Director of People Encouraging People, a program of the Department of Psychiatry at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, and it was there she became impressed with patients’ elaborate imaginations. She wondered how she could showcase these alternative visions, not as an illness but as a strength. Were there galleries or museums showcasing this kind of personal vision? She and her future husband and museum co-founder LeRoy E. Hoffberger decided to visit French artist Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut Museum in Switzerland where the largest collection of anti-cultural Art Brut (raw art) was exhibited, including the intense and intricate work of psychiatric patient Adolf Wolfli. Impressed with the collection and its simple exhibition style, the two returned with ideas for a museum that would widen and redefine the “outsider’ genre to include “intuitive creative invention and grassroots genius.”

Adolf Wolfli’s “General view of the island Neveranger,” 1911. Wolfli, a psychiatric patient for most of his life was championed by French painter Jean Dubuffet and became one of the first artists associated with the Art Brut or “outsider art.”

Intense fundraising efforts were begun. The City of Baltimore helped with acquiring a place, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Bob Dole were early supporters of the effort including getting a Congressional resolution designating the museum as America’s official national museum. The museum design was created by architect Rebecca Swanston and artist and designer Alex Castro who later became Director of Washington College’s SandBox project in Chestertown. AVAM held its grand opening in 1995 and the accolades have poured in ever since. CNN described the museum as “…one of the most fantastic museums anywhere in America…”

“The Secret Life of Earth” exhibit of 88 artists is a perfect manifestation of AVAM’s mission. Johanna Burke’s mixed-media “Another Green World” shares equal billing with every other artist from Brian Pardini’s found driftwood sculptures to Santiago Navila’s video installation “Untitled” and Julia Butterfly Hill’s journal entries from her 738 consecutive days perched in a California redwood tree to defy a lumber company and its threat to clear cut old-growth redwoods. There is no promotion of gender, race or ethnicity, and Hoffberger is adamant about keeping it that way.

The Spy found the delicate pigeon skeleton from Chestertown and it pointed the way to an extraordinary and personal journey guided by visionaries whose directness and self-taught raw talent stunned us into a visceral connection to the primal network of life we threaten with our abuse and denial.

Pioneer in time-lapse cinematography Louis Schwartzberg once said that “beauty and seduction, I believe is nature’s tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.” The American Visionary Art Museum’s “The Secret Life of Earth” exhibit is no less than an illuminated path to the heart of our environmental dilemmas. It’s a braid of science and raw vision without sermonizing and dedicated to the awakening of all who long to curate, protect, and love the world we need to survive.

James Dissette a contributor to the Chestertown Spy and Talbot Spy, a Washington College graduate, and was awarded the school’s Sophie Kerr Prize for Literature in 1971.

“The Secret Life of Earth” special exhibit will be available until September 6, 2020 For hours, ticket prices and more information about The American Visionary Art Museum, see their website here. The Spy and the Academy Art Museum will host a lecture by Rebecca Hoffberger on February 21th starting at 6 pm. For ticket information please go here.

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Cloaks, Daggers and the Eastern Shore (Part 2) by Jim Dissette

October 23, 2019 by James Dissette

Locust Hill Farm near Galena is a mid-18th century 2-story brick farmhouse typical of the Delaware Valley architecture of that era. Remote in the late 1940s, it became the vacation house and part-time residence of one of the most complex US intelligence chiefs this side of James Jesus Angleton.

It was here that Frank Wisner, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counter-Espionage Department spent many holidays and vacations away from the buzz of DC with his family. It was here also that in 1965, after recurring bouts of depression, the “father of covert activities” took his own life.

Frank Wisner, photo from Arlington Cemetery.

The melancholy history of Frank Wisner, like so many in the intelligence services whose lives are necessarily cloaked in secrecy, misinformation, along with myths and spy parables, is not easily constructed. But enough is known to describe a man who was driven tooth and nail to counter Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe at the end of WW2 and during the Cold War of the 1950s when he pled unsuccessfully with the US to recognize the impending formation of Soviet ruled eastern bloc countries.

The scion of a Mississippi industrialist, Wisner became a Wall Street lawyer who ditched the torte laws and equity contracts of Wall Street for the more “colorful” life of the US. Navy—six months before Pearl Harbor. Within months he found his way to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and in 1944 was assigned to Romania to spy on Russian activities in the region. It was in Bucharest that Wisner witnessed key government people in Eastern European countries being replaced by communists and the point he raised the alarm of a coming confrontation with Moscow.

Wisner has been described by some as genteel, brilliant, and imaginative, while others claim he was an anti-communist zealot. Arthur Schlesinger, an OSS sergeant serving in Germany at the time, claimed Wisner, “was already mobilizing for the cold war. I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectation of harmonious relations after the war. But Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”

The Wisner farmhouse, Galena, Kent County deeds.

In 1947—the year he bought the Galena house—Wisner was back in Washington where he hob-knobbed with the political and publishing elite including George Kennan, Joseph Alsop, Clark Clifford, James Angleton, William Averell Harriman, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles, and Phil and Katharine Graham, to name a few. Dubbed “the Georgetown Set,” much US policy was concocted over Sunday night martinis in an intimate Washington long gone to a fractious and very public blizzard of policy arguments via social media. This coterie of blue-blooded, Ivy-educated publishers, lawyers, and spymasters would set the tone of the 1950s perception of the US-Soviet contest, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate era. Greg Herken in his 2014 book The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, quoted Henry Kissinger as saying “The hand that mixes the Georgetown martini is time and again the hand that guides the destiny of the Western world.”

It was during this time that Wisner appealed to the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal to create a special branch of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. He wanted nothing less than to shape the US and European perspectives on Soviet influences in the region.

One of the least documented and long repudiated programs initiated by Wisner’s office and overseen by CIA Director Allen Dulles, was the alleged “Operation Mockingbird,” an alliance between the CIA and major media outlets brought together to “course correct” the news by feeding CIA-vetted opinion to the public, embed agents in news organizations, pay news stringers to place or write stories around CIA messaging, and to recruit others to do the same.

A long piece about Mockingbird by Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein appeared in the 1977 Rolling Stone Magazine where he wrote about the Washington Post columnist Joseph Alsop by saying “Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There were cooperation, accommodation, and overlap.” By some accounts, some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. Much of the relationship between the CIA and its relationship with the media was investigated after the Watergate scandal, most famously in the Church Committee which concluded in 1976 that “Approximately 50 of the [Agency] assets are individual American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are “accredited” by U.S. media organizations … The remaining individuals are non-accredited freelance contributors and media representatives abroad … More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover.”

Wisner’s star rose and fell during the height of the Cold War. After his Romanian assignment which witnessed the US’s disregard for the imminent collapse of King Michael’s government, Wisner took a stronger role in advancing US policy with an active interest in toppling governments perceived as roadblocks to US interests, ideologically or otherwise. Later, in 1956, the failed Hungarian uprising and the US’s denial of support, except for Eisenhower’s “thoughts and prayers” sentiment, would add to Wisner’s growing depressive state and mounting mental anguish. Wisner thought the whole point was to support anti-communist rebellions. Otherwise, why bother?

President Eisenhower consults with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, green-lighting the CIA backed coup of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. John Foster Dulles was CIA Director Allen Dulles’ brother. Both had financial stakes in the United Fruit Company. 40 years of civil wars would follow, including the genocide of the Maya peoples. Photo from Wiki.

The “otherwise” came into play with the CIA toppling of the Iranian and Guatemalan governments, both “framed” as threats to US policy. Wisner was the point man in both coups d’etats ending democratically elected presidents (Mossadegh in Iran (yes, it was about BP oil) in 1953 and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala,) In Guatemala, the multinational United Fruit Company, forced to end its exploitive labor practices appealed to the CIA for help. Easy enough. Both CIA Allen Dulles and his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were on the UFC payroll for 38 years. Casting the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz as Communist, he was replaced by the right-wing Carlos Armas and the beginning of four decades of military dictatorships, countless thousands of lives and the Maya genocide. It wouldn’t be far afield to note that many of the immigrants fleeing Guatemala today are responding to the US installation of Armas 63 years ago.

The failure of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may have been the last straw for Wisner’s emotional investment in his war against communism. Surprised by US, British, and Russian intelligence services alike, the uprising against the communist Hungarian People’s Republic collapsed under the weight of the Soviet army. Wisner felt responsible. He had been encouraging rebellions against Communism throughout eastern Europe through Radio Free Europe and other propaganda networks, leading the people to believe the US would lend a hand. “All these people are getting killed and we weren’t doing anything, we were ignoring it,” he told Clare Boothe Luce, then the Ambassador to Italy.

Suffering gravely from manic depression, the spymaster suffered a breakdown many said was triggered by the ill-fated uprising in Hungary. After treatment, he served several more years in the Agency where he resigned in 1962. Three years later 1965 his illness finally led him back to the familiarity of his brick farmhouse in Galena where he took his own life.

Wisner’s work with the CIA was prodigious, and much of it can be found in public records and even the CIA website (mostly through reviews of books about the Agency, by the Agency). Most records, of course, are under wraps in the Agency archives.

•••

Except for Pete Seviss, who spent most of his adult life on the Eastern Shore, most of the those mentioned above are linked by temporary residence; vacation homes and debriefings.

But one spy stands out as a true child of the Shore: Harriet Tubman.

Araminta Ross, “Harriet Tubman, circa 1885. Photograph by Horatio Seymour Squyer now in National Portrait Gallery.

Despite differing accounts of her life, embellishments and conjecture, disputes over quotes attributed to her, and debates about the interpretive bent of Tubman’s first biographer Sarah Elizabeth Hopkins, enough of her life shines through to bolster her legacy as one the world’s leading political activists who dedicated her life to freeing the oppressed.

Her flight to freedom from Dorchester County to Philadelphia in 1849; her 11-19 dangerous trips (varies by biography) back to Dorchester county to free family members and up to 300 slaves and lead them north via the Underground Railroad; her nursing the sick and wounded in Union camps during the Civil War; she was a protegee of John Brown and Frederick Douglass; and her work as a suffragette later in life finds her working alongside Susan B. Anthony.

But her life as a Union Spy is no less valorous.

Despite a life-long impairment resulting from a head wound received during an altercation between an angry slave-master and a runaway, Tubman developed through hardship and innate intelligence a perfect acumen for espionage. She was canny, had an astounding memory for detail, and could employ disguises and acting to gather intelligence for the Union. Bound together by raw courage, she was a force to be reckoned with.

In 1862, a year into the Civil War, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew asked Tubman to help work with slaves fleeing from plantations to already overburdened Union camps. There, Maj. Gen. David Hunter provided her a written “pass” that ordered Union troops to provide her with transportation whenever needed. According to accounts of her life, she gave her rations away to those in need and started a washing house where she employed escaped slaves, slowly building a network of nine trusted spies—mostly river pilots— to gather information on Confederate troop movement and ordinance. Tubman’s scouts provided intelligence helpful in raids as far-reaching as Jacksonville, Florida.

But Tubman’s most extraordinary moment as a spy occurred along the marshes of South Carolina’s Combahee River where she learned a large group of fugitive slaves was being held. Under the command of Col. James Montgomery, who had just formed the African American 2^nd South Carolina Volunteer Regiment with Tubman’s help—famously depicted in the movie “Glory”— Tubman and her team sailed up the river on a reconnaissance mission and mapped out mine locations while gathering information from slaves, offering them freedom and sometimes cash in return. Later, two gunboats with Tubman, her spies, and Union raiders made its way up the river to free 700 slaves. It was a devastating affront to South Carolina slaveholders. 100 of the freed slaves would join the Union army. By any measure, the raid was a success. But it was also distinctive in more ways than one.

Paul Donnelly wrote in the June 7, 2013, NYT, “…the Combahee raid was planned and executed primarily as a liberation raid, to find and free those who were unable or unwilling to take the enormous risks to reach Union lines on their own. That’s how Tubman conceived of it. That, too, is unique, because for the first and only time in the Civil War, or for that matter any American conflict before this century, a woman (and a civilian at that) played a decisive role in planning and carrying out a military operation.”

In an 1868 letter to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass wrote, “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night.”

•••

There are other stories of intrigue and spymasters related to the Eastern Shore Some are wrapped in accusations like the Alger Hiss case (see article in Chestertown Spy) and many articles have been written about Pioneer Point, the Russian compound that for decades operated in Centreville and was closed by President Obama in 2016. After all, we are just one tinted window Chevy Suburban drive from some of the largest intelligence agencies in the world. (I’m sure someone the NSA is reading this, having a coffee while watching the sunset over the Tred Avon River.)

These profiles are but truncated highlights of “spies” who have intersected with the Eastern Shore and are incomplete at best. By its own definition, clandestine intelligence work leaves behind scare histories. One can only think that the few spies mentioned here are only the ones we know about.

Spies and spy rings are as old as the hills and as old as our republic. During the American Revolution, Agent 711 and his Culper Ring created a sophisticated and large network of military and civilian spies whose information was instrumental in the war’s success, including the unmasking of Benedict Arnold, Agent 711 was George Washington. “Washington did not really outfight the British. He simply out-spied us,” wrote a British intelligence officer after the war.

Cloak, Dagger and the Chesapeake: Spies of the Eastern Shore

October 9, 2019 by James Dissette

An autumn morning. The sun burns up the eastern horizon to dissolve the scarf of fog draped across the Choptank River. The crunch of frost as two men walk along the shore of riprap and river weed, their break-open shotguns cradled across their forearms. They drift from hunting pheasant to talking about the Phillies’ last-place losing season, then speak in lower octaves about Soviet leader Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalinism to a closed session Communist Party Congress three years before.

Ashford Farm, a CIA “safe house” used for debriefing Russian and Eastern bloc defectors. Its cover was blown in 1962 when news reporters picked up on a rumor that Francis Gary Powers was there.

One man is a Russian naval officer recently defected to the West, the other is an ex-major league pitcher and now the Director of the CIA’s Alien Branch, a “safe house” at Ashford Farms, a Tudor-style mansion in Talbot County’s Royal Oak, just west of Easton. It is 1959, the height of the Cold War, and Nicholas Shadrin and Pete Sivess have become friends after the many debriefing sessions that provided the CIA with valuable information about the Russian Navy. They would remain friends for another 15 years.

Peter Sivess

Sivess was born to a Russian-speaking Lithuanian family in New Jersey. A natural athlete, he excelled in high school baseball (1932 All-State) and went on to Dickinson College, where he set the record for strikeouts—243 by the end of his senior year. Scouted and signed by the Philadelphia Phillies, he was placed on the roster right away. They say he had a blazing fastball and was billed as the next “Dizzy Dean.” Unfortunately, his offseason job as a stevedore began to take a toll on his arm, and he was traded around in the majors until he landed in Baltimore with the Orioles where, after changing his pitching technique to sidearm, had one of his better seasons. After a few more trades and an impending war, Sivess left baseball for good, worked for a Grumman Aircraft in 1942, and a year later joined the Navy.

Working for the chief of naval operations, Sivess was assigned to help train the Russian Navy, our allies during the war. He would continue his service by working in Romania and Czechoslovakia, developing a perfect resume for the CIA. He joined them in 1948, one year after the Agency’s inception. Three years later he was in Easton, designing a program to help debrief eastern bloc defectors. Sivess retired to St. Michaels in 1972. According to Jack Morris, in an article for the Society of American Baseball Research, Sivess granted an interview to the Baltimore News-American in 1984. Circumspect about his time in the clandestine service, Sivess preferred to talk baseball, closing with “I always thought I was every bit as good as the players I was facing,” said Sivess. “But I honestly wasn’t enamored with baseball. That’s just the way I am. The game was just a phase of my life.”

Nicholas Shadrin walked a more fateful path. One of the most valuable defectors of the time, Shadrin and his soon to be wife Ewa, a Pole, whose family’s anti-communist leanings would block any future marriage, defected to the West in a daring sea escape to Sweden, then through a network of countries to the US and eventually his debriefing in Easton. His information was “worth its weight in gold,” and for his cooperation, both he and Ewa were rewarded with education opportunities. Shadrin completed his Master’s Degree and Ph.D. in engineering. Ewa, whose training was underwritten by the CIA, became a dentist.

In the mid-60s, Shadrin was contacted by the KGB and was supposedly blessed by the CIA to work in counter-espionage. But soon, his value was depleted, and his jobs for the Agency became more mundane. Until 1975. Contacted again by the KGB, the CIA and FBI wanted to run Shadrin as a double-agent. Various sources point at US intelligence agencies for advocating the perilous arrangement. Shadrin had already been outed during an open Congressional committee meeting, but the CIA-FBI still felt they could exploit the opportunity presented with the KGB contacts. His second meeting with the KGB was the last time he was seen.

Some years later, after his wife sued and pled with the government for information about her missing husband, KGB Major General Oleg D. Kolug told US intelligence that Shadrin had died of a heart attack during the kidnapping. Others say he died from chloroform used during his abduction. A public 1985 CIA document stated that Shadrin had been tried by Russia in-absentia and that the Vienna trip (ostensibly to help cover a highly placed Soviet spy) was, in fact, an elaborate KGB scheme to catch him. The CIA report states that he was executed the same day he was kidnapped. Letters to President Jimmy Carter and to Senator Alan Cranston from (author redacted)—probably Ewa Shadrin’s wife—are posted on the CIA website here.

Pete Sivess lost a good friend, and the Agency lost a man who risked everything for his adopted country.

Many other defectors would be debriefed in the safe house, most famously, Francis Gary Powers, the U2 pilot shot down over Russia in 1959. The prisoner exchange—Powers and US student Frederic Prior for KGB Rudolph Abel—was dramatized in the 2015 historical drama, “Bridge of Spies.”

The house at Royal Oak still stands and has been on and off the market for years.

Part Two begins next week.

Heroes Among Us: CQD Heroes Program Empowers Kids to Make Right Choices

August 27, 2019 by James Dissette

On an early August afternoon, 20 kids of various ages and backgrounds showed up at the Close Quarters Defense tactical training center in Vienna, Maryland to learn how to become “heroes” by making the right decisions when faced with life’s tough choices.

They were met with open arms and high energy by the CQD Foundation Hero Program mentors, who would lead them on a journey of self-discovery.

Children and adolescents have a challenging enough time navigating through their early years, but for some, the rites of passage are fraught with additional, often hazardous obstacles. Easy access to drugs and alcohol, poverty, family dysfunction, bullying, and detrimental peer pressure can obstruct paths to a healthy life.

Nationally, statistics show upwardly trending depression and suicide rates among adolescents, more than doubling between 2007 and 2016 according to the Center for Disease Control. Drug use and availability continue to wreak havoc. On the mid-Eastern Shore alone, Hospital Emergency Rooms have reported over a dozen (survived) drug overdoses in June, underscoring the ongoing substance abuse crisis. One in five students nationwide has reported some type of bullying in school or through social media.

CQD Foundation Hero Program Director Duane Dieter (left) coaches a student during a roleplay session. In this scenario, students are taught to identify and respond to threatening behavior.

Maryland counties have made progress to address many of these issues. In Talbot County, prevention and education organizations like Talbot Mentors, Big Brothers, Big Sisters of the Eastern Shore, Talbot Partnership, Talbot Goes Purple and others have proved that community involvement holds one of the keys to ensuring at-risk kids can succeed and become vibrant, productive members of society.

This is exactly what Duane Dieter, a lifelong resident of Talbot County, envisioned when he launched the CQD Foundation “Hero Program.”

For three decades, Dieter’s Hero Program has served as a dynamic mentorship program designed to encourage the development of positive opportunities, good decision-making, and character for at-risk children.

Recognizing an opportunity to impact the lives of local at-risk children and to promote positive relationships within the community, Dieter began the mentoring program as a result of his personal experience as an officer in the DEA Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in 1988. It was there he witnessed firsthand the tragedies resulting from drug use among at-risk children in underserved communities and the impact it had on their families and the community overall.

“It’s not just people involved with drugs, but the ramifications of how it affects the entire community—the families, inter-relationships, work ethics—and minimizes a person’s motivation to succeed and find their purpose,” Dieter says.

Dieter was quick to notice how dealers were glamorized and emulated by some in the community and realized that law enforcement alone could not impact the deeper strata of the drug culture and its intense peer pressure.

One night, following the arrest of a local drug kingpin, Dieter was tasked with driving the seized car to the police station. He was shocked by the reception he received in the neighborhood—onlookers mistook him for the drug dealer and began yelling praise like he was a rock star.

“I was stunned. I stopped the car and watched as people waved and chanted the dealer’s name.”

Dieter understood the dangerous allure of the drug dealer lifestyle and sought to create a positive alternative.

“There are many professions that are interesting and purposeful that our youth may not be aware of or haven’t had a chance to meet in positive circumstance —police officers, emergency responders and paramedics, helicopter pilots, doctors and nurses, and others,” he says.

The equipment displayed at the Heroes Program is impressive, but it’s the personal stories each volunteer tell that resonate.

From the beginning, Dieter sought career professionals from all fields who were passionate about their work and who were willing to share stories of their journey; the challenges; the failures and successes; the effort and resiliency it took to get there, and what made them happy. Most importantly, he wanted role models who could counter the lure and consequences of the drug dealing lifestyle by offering students a pathway to a life with an energized sense of purpose and commitment to helping others.

“The Hero Program is a way to foster positive interactions between all members of the community and provide an exciting role model for children to emulate. We integrate the kids with ‘everyday heroes,’ persons who, day in and day out, consistently uphold their character and ethics to guide our youth and work positively in their community,” Dieter says.

By interacting with these ‘everyday heroes,’ —first responders, business and civic leaders, teachers, religious leaders, or any individual who can have a positive impact on a youth’s life— kids are provided guidance, mentorship and an exciting alternative to any less-than-exemplary role models they may encounter.

More than 20 years since its founding, the CQD Foundation Hero Program continues to thrive, each year finding, vetting, and training mentors to work one-on-one and in groups to instill kids with the courage and dedication to rise above life’s challenges.

The program is a tiered training process. Mentors are selected and trained by CQD professionals and then integrated into the youth program to serve as a positive role model and work with the children to cultivate self-esteem and character development, as well as the tools to make the best decisions under stress in the critical moment.

“We want to cultivate a genuine relationship between the mentor and student, so the kids can grow into becoming heroes in their own right and overcome the stressful situations and obstacles they may face.”

With the same leadership and character-building components Dieter uses to instruct military special operators and police, students in the Hero Program are provided with hands-on skills to be aware and avoid danger, techniques for mitigating and de-escalating conflict, anti-bullying skills, and the development of life-long moral courage to stand up for what is right. Through realistic training scenarios, they experience this unique validation process, which safely recreates the challenges they may encounter.

Throughout the program session Heroes students work closely with their mentors to develop confidence in their positive attributes.

“They are able to experience the pressures they may face in their daily lives so that they know how it feels and are able to respond appropriately in real-life situations. These stressors prepare them to respond with focused action and the skills to step away from the power of peer pressure to do the wrong thing. This, then, empowers the youth to move past negative incidents, as well as have belief in themselves,” Dieter says.

An adolescent can then draw from the Hero training to emulate his or her mentors, develop self-confidence, a sense of purpose and cultivate what makes them happy, as well as learn to encourage others and stand up for those who need help or support.

At the recent Hero Program event, 20 children completed the afternoon course at the CQD tactical training center in Vienna, Maryland. Groups of students paired with assigned mentors to work their way through the labyrinth of rooms at the center, each room posing a different situation. Confidence was tested in each encounter. In one, a student watched as a girl was trying to be cajoled into visiting a stranger’s house to play video games. The student was prepped to hold his place and call out a warning. In others, an aggressive man threateningly approached a student. All of these were designed so students could experience and overcome the adrenalized stress of the moment.

Each student, with the guidance of their mentors, overcame reticence and fear, asserting themselves with the courage to stand up for themselves and others. They practiced hard in each scenario, and the changes in their sense of self-confidence and demeanor were quick and dramatic.

More than 40 mentors, including role-players and instructors, volunteered to participate in the Hero event. Volunteers from MSP, NRP, DSP, Talbot and Caroline County EMS, as well as a civilian helicopter pilot, showcased their individual jobs and talked with groups outside the facility. CQD training for each mentor was provided by the Foundation.

Rob DePartee, a former Army combat helicopter pilot and current MSP helicopter pilot, talked enthusiastically with each group of students about his job.

“It’s important that kids see there are options out there. I grew up poor and people didn’t think I could do anything. I know how that feels. I don’t want them to take the easy path.” DePartee says.

MSP Sniper Trainer John Arnold also sees the immense value of working with kids early on.

In a previous Heroes Session. Students listen to a DNR helicopter pilot talk about his job patrolling waterways and public lands.

“I’d like to see them learn how worthwhile it is to help each other. This program gives them something to look forward to, to be actively engaged in good projects,” he says.

Graduating from the first class with a certificate, students also left with a workbook to keep note of their progress to become a hero in their own right. In several weeks, they will meet once again with their mentors to evaluate how their news skills played out in their day-to-day lives.

Later, students will return to the CQD facility for their second tier of instruction and additional scenarios set up to challenge their new skills.

“Our aim is to instill confidence, build self-reliance and leadership skills to offer at-risk kids the tools to cultivate their sense of value and to stand up for what is right and what they believe in,” Dieter says.

Dieter’s commitment to the Hero Program and his mission to help “those preyed upon by criminal elements” goes even farther back than his work with the drug task force. As a boy attending church camp one summer, he and another preacher’s kid witnessed a violent sexual assault on a young girl. Through his intervention and alerting the church elders, the assault was stopped, but the desire to help those in need lingered. The event helped to formulate the credo for his Close Quarters Defense (CQD) training system.

Photographs of children from Afghanistan and around the world look out from the walls of the CQD facility, reminding anyone who passes of the Hero Program mission, and the message is clear:

“I found throughout my travels that even in the harshest of environments, people and families are all the same. They simply want to enjoy life and raise their families. We all face negative influences, ridicule, and acts that make it difficult to succeed. Our youth, more than ever, face incredible and difficult challenges. The Hero program helps them to recognize that they are all heroes when they face these struggles, stay positive and do their very best,” Dieter says.

By the end of that day, 20 new heroes went home with a new sense of what they could achieve, even in the face of adversity.

Newly minted Heroes pose with their first phase certificates along with their mentors, roleplayers and other volunteers. Students will continue to work with their mentors and return to the Heroes Program to complete the course.

For further information about the CQD Hero Program, please contact (410) 376-3600 or info@cqd.net.

Lead photograph: The CQD Heroes Program introduces kids to positive role models in their own communities. Here, they make friends with NRP’s search and rescue dog “Beacon,” and NRP Officer Devin Corcoran.

Getting In by Jamie Kirkpatrick

March 19, 2019 by James Dissette

This is not the Musing I had planned to write this week. I’m not even sure it’s the Musing I want to write this week. But it is the Musing I have to write this week. You’ll see why.

For more than twenty years, I was the Director of College Counseling at one of metropolitan Washington’s best independent schools. Since “retiring” (that word always lives within quotes in my mind) from that school a few years ago, I have also worked as an interim college counselor or consultant at four other highly regarded independent schools. My task was always a simple one: to help students and their families navigate the mysterious maze of the college admissions process. In so doing, I’ve seen both elation and disappointment. I’ve watched the pressure of college admissions bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. I’ve been aware of questionable decisions by both families and academic institutions. But until last week, I’ve never seen outright fraud and corruption taint the college admissions process. Am I shocked? No; just bitterly disappointed.

The playing field of the college admissions process has never been completely level. There are a myriad of institutional priorities that come into play when colleges make admissions decisions. There are faculties to pay; buildings to build or to maintain; alumni to please. The ivory tower looms over a highly competitive marketplace and those institutions who do not pay attention to all their various constituencies will ultimately sail over the edge of the world. The football team needs a quarterback. The orchestra needs a bassoonist. Endowments have to grow. A competing institution has a new student union building so we need to break ground for a state-of-the-art science lab. We need more people of color. We need more men. We need more women. You get the picture.

Natural selection will ultimately determine which institutions will thrive and which will fail. College admissions officers are given the Herculean task of identifying those candidates who will best “fit” within their institution’s Board-driven priorities. It’s not easy to build a community year after year, but admissions officers do their best. They look at objective measures of an applicant’s worth—academic performance, rigor of curriculum, and yes, standardized test scores. They also must weigh a variety of subjective measures like leadership potential, commitment to service, legacy, ethnicity, special talents, writing ability, ability to pay, and perhaps most important of all, the ephemeral quality to naturally become a part of, and contribute to, a greater whole.

The doorway to higher education is exceedingly narrow these days and unlikely to get any wider. Some of the most highly competitive colleges and universities now accept fewer than 8% of their highly qualified applicants. Globalization and technology have made the college admissions process more demanding than ever. Students from all over the world apply to American institutions and many of them do not require any financial aid. Paper is a thing of the past: all college applications are submitted electronically now which means (among other things) there are a lot more applicants swimming in the admissions pool. And that’s what drives some people to do unspeakable things.

Parents always want the best for their children, but in the maelstrom of today’s competitive college admissions process, many have lost their way. People of substantial means with imposing reputations now think it’s worth risking it all to get a child into a top-tier school. Pay a specialist to document a specious learning disability allowing for extended time on standardized tests. Find someone to proctor an exam who will look the other way or even correct a test-taker’s answer sheet. Dangle a major gift in front of a prestigious but cash-hungry institution. Bribe a coach. This is a whole new world, one devoid of a moral core or any ethical standards. Sound familiar? Sad!

Colleges and universities must push back. In a recent Op Ed piece in The Baltimore Sun, Washington College President Kurt Landgraf wrote about his institution’s mandate to seek out underserved and underfunded applicants from low-income zip codes for whom a college education will be a life-changing passage. This is right and good but not enough. Colleges also have to drain the swamp, become even more vigilant, and set a clear, transparent, and higher standard in their admissions practices.

I’m not vindictive by nature, but I hope all those people who have become tangled up in this dreadful net go to jail. That admissions process should be a no-brainer.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with homes in Chestertown and Bethesda. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy magazine. “A Place to Stand,” a book of photographs and essays about Landon School, was published by the Chester River Press in 2015. A collection of his essays titled “Musing Right Along” was published in May 2017; a second volume of Musings entitled “I’ll Be Right Back” was released in June 2018. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

Profiles in Recovery: Vincent Douglas

April 6, 2017 by James Dissette

It took Vincent Douglas a near-death experience to reevaluate his life and while that event would rock most of us into a self-assessment mode, for Douglas it required a life or death decision: did he want to die as a heroin addict or work toward a life of recovery.

The Spy caught up with the 28-year-old at the A.F. Whitsitt Center’s Recovery in Motion (RIM) 18 months after making his decision to live and talked with us about his pathway to a new life and his dedication as a peer counselor to carry a message of hope to others suffering from addiction.

Reflecting on his past, Douglas says, “I didn’t sign up for the lifestyle I lived. It happened and now I use that as a tool to help others. When I came here, I had nothing, I was nothing, so I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

As a peer counselor at RIM, his experience as an addict paired with his own recovery program opens the door for communicating with those suffering from the disease of addiction. Speaking a common language is the centerpiece of establishing trust in a peer recovery environment.

Recovery in Motion (RIM) “Offers a wide range of services that provide our community with the tools to increase their well-being. Support includes individual & group counseling, behavioral health education/prevention, peer support and care coordination to assist persons in recovery with behavior and addiction issues.”

This video is approximately 7 minutes in length. More about A.F. Whitsitt Center in Kent County may be found here.

Mid-Shore Health Future: The Risks of Repealing the ACA on the Shore with Jeananne Sciabarra

March 21, 2017 by James Dissette

On Thursday, Jeananne Sciabarra, Executive Director of Consumer Health First spoke in Kent County about the implications of repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare.”

Founded in 2006 as the Maryland Women’s Coalition for Health Care Reform, the organization transitioned into CHF in 2016 with the same mission: to work collaboratively to promote health equity through access to comprehensive, high-quality and affordable health care for all Marylanders.

While the impact of repealing and replacing ACA with the currently proposed American Health Care Act (ACHA) would cause profound changes to healthcare nationwide, Sciabarra focused on what Marylanders, and specifically Congressional District, 1 would lose.

Talking about the rollback of Medicaid expansion, Sciabarra said that “the bottom line is that will push back the matching (between state and federal) to 50-50 which is going to make it extremely expensive for Maryland to continue that provision.” She added that on top of that, a block grant per capita system for each person enrolled in Medicaid would force the state to decide who doesn’t get services.

Also, in regard to hospitals, Sciabarra noted that Maryland has a unique rate-setting system that provides services at the same rate anywhere in the state and that during the expansion of Medicaid, uninsured costs went down $311 million between 2013-2015, and that with set amounts or “global budgets” hospitals were incentivized to participate in wellness programs to help people stay healthy and out of the hospital. A rollback of those kinds of programs would have a “catastrophic” effect on people not covered in the health exchange, especially older people.

The district’s uninsured rate has gone from 8.3% to 4.1% since the ACA was implemented. This 4.2 percentage point drop in the uninsured rate could be reversed if the ACA is entirely or partially repealed.

401,400 individuals in the district who now have health insurance that covers preventative services like cancer screenings and flu shots without any co-pays, coinsurance, or deductibles stand to lose this access if the Republican Congress eliminates ACA provisions requiring health insurers to cover essential preventative services without cost-sharing.

445,400 individuals in the district with employer-sponsored health insurance are at risk of losing important consumer protections like the prohibition on annual and lifetime limits, protection against unfair policy recession, and coverage of pre-existing health conditions if the ACA is entirely or partially repealed.

15,800 individuals in the district who have purchased high-quality marketplace coverage now stand to lose their coverage if the Republican Congress dismantles the Marketplaces.

11,800 individuals in the district who received financial assistance to purchase Marketplace coverage in 2016 are now at risk of coverage becoming unaffordable if the Republican Congress eliminates the premium tax credits.

8400 individuals in the district who are receiving cost-sharing reductions to lower out-of-pocket costs such as deductibles, co-pays, and coinsurance, are now at risk of healthcare becoming unaffordable is the Republican Congress eliminates cost-sharing reductions.

32,900 individuals in the district who are covered by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion now stand to lose coverage if the Republican Congress eliminates the Medicaid expansion.

This video is approximately nine minutes in length. For more information about Consumer Health First please go here. Sources: US Department of Health and Human Services, Urban Institute, Families USA, The Commonwealth Fund, National Women’s Law Center.

Mid-Shore News: Rural Health WorkGroup Focuses on Health Delivery Transformation

January 11, 2017 by James Dissette

Tasked with studying the healthcare needs for the five counties of the Mid-Shore and offering policy templates to the State, Rural Health Care Delivery Group held their third of seven workshops at Washington College on Monday.

The 32-member committee co-chaired by Deborah Mizeur and Dr. Joseph Ciotola, and attended by health care officials, county and state elected officials and business owners, the workshop sought to clarify the goals and possible implementation of an across-the-board transformation of health care delivery of the mid-Eastern Shore as national health care trends change from total dependence on hospitals a sole provider for health needs.

The work group’s focus is “to examine challenges to health care delivery, including limited availability of health care providers and services; special needs of vulnerable populations; transportation barriers, and the economic impact of closing, partly closing or converting health care facilities and also to identify how the benefits of telehealth and the Maryland all-payer model contract might help in restructuring the delivery of rural health care services. Finally, the study is to develop policy options that address the health care needs of residents and improve the health care delivery system in the five counties.”

Rural Health Care Delivery Workgroup. Co-chairs Joseph Ciotola and Deborah Mizeur at center.

Addressing the complexity of designing a transformative rural healthcare model for the mid-shore, Deborah Mizeur said that much of the first two meetings were used to orient all committee members to the healthcare landscape. “We have a wide spectrum of membership, from physicians to businessmen and we all need to be on the same page to move forward. I’m energized and encouraged by the progress we’ve made.”

The session began with an overview of Maryland’s progression plan for an All-Payer Model given by Katie Wunderlich, Gov. Hogan’s deputy legislative officer for health care issues. Using slides, Wunderlich walked the group through key strategies, components, and a timeline to frame further work group discussions on how best to create policy platforms to be submitted to the State next October.

One slide, “Rural Health Nationally” stood out as a profound indicator of the need for a systemic change in rural health care delivery. It showed that in urban settings:

morbidity rates in females decreased by 10% and in rural areas morbidity rates increased by 40% along with a fivefold increase in opioid and heroin overdoses, doubling of suicides and tripling of deaths due to cirrhosis of the liver, linked to alcohol abuse.
At the same time, nationally, “rural hospitals have faced declining margins of 5% annually since 2011, due to shrinking inpatient demand.
Nationally, 68 rural hospitals have closed over the last 5 years, and an additional 670 are vulnerable to closure in 2016, up from 280 in 2015.
Many Americans living in rural communities rely on their hospital as one of their few sources of health care.

With a declining use of hospitals nationwide due to migration from inpatient care to outpatient care—from hospital-centric to population-centric— the focus is on a continuum of care keeping patients healthy through preventive and primary care services, and out of acute care facilities whenever possible. Refined medical procedures have shortened inpatient stays while outpatient procedure have kept patients out of the hospital altogether.

Wunderlich offered key points to sustaining rural health care with an emphasis on building on the success of the current rate-setting Total Patient Revenue (TPR)—the mechanism replacing Fee-For-Service incentives—and creating a geographic value-based model incentive “to address local accountability for population health and Medicare total cost of care.”

“This is basically putting in rewards for providers, for hospitals, for when they are able to improve their methods,” Wunderlich said.

Wunderlich added that a critical component to addressing rural health care is the transformation of primary care to support care management, care coordination, connections to behavioral health, social services and other resources.

In its fourth year of a five-year plan transforming the state’s health care system, 2017 will include continuing infrastructure development and increased support of high need patients with a 2018 focus on primary care home models, incentive harmonization and developing and organizing geographic and regional efforts.

Deputy secretary for public health at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Howard Haft discussed community-based “patient centers” working in tandem with the primary care model as part of the overall transformation needed to meet the needs of the rural population.

“We’re really going to have to transform what we do in primary care, Haft said. “There are insufficient numbers of doctors in the state and certainly a disproportionate number of doctors in rural communities who have to provide more and more care in small intervals. So we must shift from how many people we can see to delivering the best care for every person you can see.”

Patient Centers offer interdisciplinary teams of doctors and specialists who coordinate diagnostics and treatment while taking the stress off overloaded primary physicians. Patient centers would alleviate some of the problems in recruiting new physicians, according to Haft. Many primary physicians are seeing between 35 and 40 patients day. Along with the fact that attracting a physician to a rural area and a lower income model is difficult, Haft sees patient centers as the strengthening of relationships between patient and physician by using coordinated care efforts rather than episodic care visits. This model encourages teamwork between a patient —and his or her willingness to work toward person health goals—physician and other support staff.

The video starts with some of Health Services Cost Review Principal Deputy Director Katie Wunderlich’s overview of the progression plan and is followed by. Dr. Howard Haft, Deputy Secretary for Public Health, DHMH.

The next meeting will be held in March in Annapolis.The Rural Health Care Delivery Plane will be submitted to the State General Assembly in October.

This video is approximately 13 minutes in length To see slides of each of the presentations, go here. Scroll to the January 9 meeting section.

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