He told both my wife and I a long involved tale about how his family had made a small fortune selling the family bakery business. His mother and father had given each child a chunk and then moved to Monaco.

Eringer patiently e-mailed me again and again after that first visit. My agent felt it was not time to sell my novels, so she was attempting to have a biography done of me, as I was loathe to do my autobiography, though I had begun work on it. Eringer proposed all kinds of book schemes for me; schemes in which I was not interested. Nor did I find any of the people my agent sent to me, re: the biography, to be of interest.

Thus when Eringer suggested he would like to look at my fourth novel, Cantor Dust, which was near and dear to my hear, I informed my agent and sent it to him. Eringer was very enthusiastic about it. He said he would prefer to do my autobiography, but would work on getting my novel published as an opener to getting my autobiography.

I said he was welcome to try. Thus began a continuous stream of many hundreds of e-mails between this alleged intelligence operative and myself, broken only by his journeys to England, wherein he told me he saw a number of publishers without success and one new house that agreed to publish Cantor Dust when they were actually in business, and his family vacations. We were still at it the day I was extradited to the United States: July 20,2001.

After over a year of trying to publish the book, so he said, in a conventional way, he decided, after much discussion, to publish it himself. He gave it to a trusted associate, Frank Martin, to read. Frank gave it a glowing review and agreed to copy edit Cantor Dust if I agreed to do more work on the dialogue. We did this work over a four-month period, as Eringer e-mailed me nightly about his choice of wine, and went back and forth to England.

He finally agreed to publish Cantor Dust himself, using the limited edition as a means of selling it to a major publisher. After much delay, this was done in November of 2000.

Annika and I spent a month correcting proof. Eringer arrived in our area in January of 2001 to pick up the corrected copy and to make a deal. Our favorite chateau was not open, so we went to a local hotel and took rooms for the night so that my wife, Annika, could drink wine.

Eringer presented what appeared to be well thought out plans for marketing the book, but balked at giving me any advance money; money which we had discussed and agreed upon from the beginning. It was not a large sum, more a token of good faith. Annika and I were not happy about his backing off on the advance and made our feelings quite clear: no money, no book. This obviously disturbed Eringer. Over a superb French dinner, he talked about my precarious situation in France and proposed a way to both handle that and publish the book.

He said that he had connections with Polish Solidarity and would provide us both with a place to live and money to live with if we would go underground. In fact, he said that he would publish the book only if I agreed to go underground.

Annika had enough of living underground, the French situation was, at that time, alive and I didn’t trust Eringer. So I laughed and told him to keep me informed.

The next morning at breakfast, he gave me two code words for talking about going to Poland and asked me to give him the corrected copy. He promised to give me a financial offer in a short time. I reluctantly gave him the copy-edited manuscript, but both Annika and I felt that our hopes of publishing Cantor Dust had been sharply reduced.

On February 15th, I received a fax from Robert Eringer that said he would publish Cantor Dust only if I went underground. I was astonished at such behavior. I wrote back about it in no uncertain terms. After a flurry of faxes and e-mails, he offered m e $10,000 up front and $10,000 that would be handed to me when I met him at a “to be determined” place on my way to Poland to which he would take me. When he refused to publish Cantor Dust without my going underground, I felt as if I were being blackmailed.

So I sent him an e-mail that said that if he didn’t produce uncorrected page proofs, I was going to the media with the entire story.

My phone range almost immediately. The voice on the phone was that of a very upset Robert Eringer. He begged me to calm down. I said I would calm down as soon as he agreed to produce some uncorrected page proofs of Cantor Dust. He did. He also agreed to try to find a publisher. Proof copies arrived shortly afterwards, but I felt as if the entire process was over, in spite of Eringer’s insistence that he would look for a publisher.

The events around my extradition intervened, though Robert Eringer kept calling and e-mailing on a daily basis. My wife had some contact with both Robert Eringer and Frank Martin for about a month, and then all was silence as the salon.com article obviously frightened them. It is an article that I would have seen in the normal course of events, but I was in jail.

One night I was talking to a friend on the jailhouse phone and mentioned Eringer’s name. It rang a bell. She was sitting on her computer and entered it into a search engine. The Salon.com article appeared on the screen and she gasped. She immediately printed it out and sent it to me. I read it and got the chills.

One of Robert Eringer’s closest associates is Claire E. George, Past DDO (Deputy Director of Operations) for the CIA, in charge of covert operations for the entire planet.

Sources who have researched the situation indicate that Claire E. George and Robert Eringer have worked together on a number of operations, still work together and have a pile of money at their disposal.

Now why would people like that mount a complex operation against “a bum who xeroxes things?”

It is a question that honest folks ought to ask as they think about my situation.


Related Links:

The Greatest Vendetta on Earth, by Jeff Stein
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/08/30/circus/

News on Ira Einhorn:
http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/ienews.html


Robert Eringer
by Ira Einhorn
July 5, 2002