The Dream Catcher

By Dale Kiser

The Dream Catcher is a story about two people, Anna Doli and Jim Owens. Both are highly regarded CIA intelligence operatives. Both are part Native American, Anna being part Navajo and Jim part Cherokee. As they go about their work, both seek to delve deeper into their heritages as well as Native American culture. Each explores past feelings and tries to relate them to their present-day selves. They travel together, and they catch former spies as part of their intelligence work. They begin their lives together amid considerable conflict. This writing is classified as fiction but is based to a large extent on actual happenings in the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504952323

Dale Kiser

The author grew up in both western North Carolina and northwest Washington State. He has spent several years writing about various aspects of the intelligence world, mainly the CIA. Much of his writings, although classified as fiction, are based upon actual events and happenings. Following his employment with the government, he spent several years in public education, serving as a teacher, guidance counselor, and principal. He attended several colleges and universities and taught at some. After retiring, he was able to devote time to one of his passions, flower growing. He has also spent much time hiking the mountain trails in Alaska, Washington State, and North Carolina, photographing all the interesting things he saw along the trails.

Book preview

Contents

Thoughts

Preface

Introduction

Prologue

Prologue

Chapter 1      Anna Marie Doli

Chapter 2      Jim Owens

Chapter 3      Mollie Sands Owens

Chapter 4      Mick Wilson

Chapter 5      Anthony Bassaglia

Chapter 6      The Saga Continues

Chapter 7      King Charlemagne

Chapter 8      Three months later

Chapter 9      Anna and Jim

Chapter 10      One Year Later

Chapter 11      Mischa Wolf

Chapter 12      Trip to Berlin

Chapter 13      Anna kidnapped

Chapter 14      Warsaw

Chapter 15      The Escape from Warsaw

Chapter 16      Prague

Chapter 17      North Carolina

Chapter 18      The Beach

Chapter 19      Arizona—The Reservation

Chapter 20      Washington State

Chapter 21      Marriage

Epilogue

Other books by the author:

Where the Mountain Laurel Grows

TOP SECRET: Eleven Years of Blood, Sweat, and Tears

Surcease: The End and the Beginning

The dream catcher has been a part of Native American culture for generations. The dream catcher legend is full of rich symbolism. Almost every part has symbolism. Native Americans believe that the night air is filled with dreams, both good and bad. The traditional dream catcher was intended to protect the sleeping individual from negative dream, while letting positive dreams come through. When hung over or near a bed, swinging freely in the air, it catches the dreams as they flow by. The positive dreams slip through the hole in the center of the dream catcher and glide down the feathers to the sleeping person below. The negative dreams would be caught up in the web and expire when the first rays of sunlight hit them.

I believe Anna Doli has some sort of belief in the dream catchers since her family had mentioned them to her at one point in her young life.

Thoughts

First of all I’ll say that this is a simple account of how the characters in this book go about their daily jobs and how they work through problems that are presented to them, step by step most of the time. This is the story primarily of two people who ended up loving each other. It is the story of their thought process that take place during their daily lives. It is the story of how they react toward each other and to the circumstances they find themselves in. And it is a story of many of their travels together as they worked and went about developing their love for each other.

It’s not intended to be a sensational account about how spies catch other spies, or how they go about outwitting the enemy. What I’ve tried to do in this writing is to get inside the heads of the individuals I’m writing about as much as I could. Because Anna Doli and Jim Owens are part Native American, I’ve tried to weave a bit of Native American culture into the story of several intelligence officers going about their work. Once more I’ll say to a reader, that intelligence work is often boring and not very interesting. It can be long and time consuming and tedious at times when one is working through intricate details of some sort of problem or setup. This will be evident in this writing. But I wanted to get it as real as I possibly could to the actually happenings. Of course, I’ve embellished a little now and then when I felt the necessity.

Needless to say, this writing lacks any of the sensationalism that the great spy writers are able to put in their books to make them more interesting. And of course make them saleable. But in actuality it’s just not normally done that way and I wanted to stick close to how it actually is done at times. But of course if you were to get inside the CIA, or other intelligence organizations, you would find things far more different than laid out here. That is because I’m writing about what I’m simply calling Special Operations a super-secret part of the CIA, and the illegals spy game which is far different from the normal everyday operations of any intelligence agency. The people who work in this Special Operations are not bound by the rules and regulations of the everyday operative who works out of the headquarters or out of embassies around the world. Nor do they have the protection of their government as do other intelligence operatives should they happen to get caught.

I want a reader to get to know something about the characters and how they think. What about their lives that has influenced their thinking. I want the reader to know what they like and what they dislike and what they feel about things around them. To me, knowing a character I’m reading about is important. I want to know how the person is going to react in certain situations. I want the reader to know all the pertinent facts about each individual and how their likes and dislikes affect them. And in some cases, how these affect the daily work lives of individuals.

This is the story mainly of Anna Doli and Jim Owens over a fairly short period of time that they knew each other, worked together, and loved each other.

Life may present one with some

bad things, along with some good things as well. Hopefully the good things will over shadow, or at least balance out the bad things.

Deception is a vast part of the world we live in. In the world of intelligence that is particularly so, be it right or wrong. Would it suffice it to say that the end justifies the means. Perhaps not, but maybe time will answer that for us.

Some people live much of their lives without having to experience the heartbreak of losses of loved ones who were very close to them. Then there are those who do have to bear the pain of the loss of someone who was very dear to them. Some even have to bear multiple losses throughout their lives. Some might say that’s life. But I say where is the justice in all this? Why should some suffer greatly and others not at all? I don’t have the answer to that question, I only know it is so. Perhaps it will be clear to us in the next life.

Anna spoke often of the Rules of Saint Benedict. She felt the fourth rung of humility was pertinent. It requires that a person hold fast to patience with a silent mind, especially when facing difficulties, contradictions and even any injustice.

It seems Anna based much of her life on this premise.

Preface

What is the real purpose of this writing I’ve asked myself time and again? While no one clear cut answer jumps out at me that would answer this question completely and satisfactorily, I must say that there is a compulsion within me to write about the things I know of, or have been involved with, in some way in my life. Or in some cases, just things I dream of. There is some kind of a need within me to get things out and on paper, while knowing that I have not the talent of a great writer, not even the talent of an average writer. Perhaps I might even use the word mediocre, or less, to describe my writing abilities. But never the less, the need to write is within me and I must let the words come out as they may.

Perhaps the reality for many writers is that they write about what they have done or know about, while others write about what they would have liked to have done as if it were their own reality and that they indeed had accomplished their reality. Could they be pretending to be someone they are not just because they can in their writings?

As I look back over my life I realize I didn’t have the normal kind of life that most people have. Mine was filled with much moving, very little stability at times, and certainly with the lack of established roots in any one place for any length of time. My roots were never allowed to grow and mature and sink into the ground in any one place for very long. In some ways that might have been an advantage for me, but in others it definitely was a disadvantage. Just having a place that really was home seems to me like a good thing.

Introduction

This writing is classified as fiction. However much of it is fact. I’ve taken the liberty of interweaving several characters that I am familiar with into one character at times. And I’ve incorporated many things and sometimes taken the liberty to interweave these to suit the story. However, the Dream Catcher is a person I had so much in common with and whom I cared so much for over the period of time we worked together. She influenced me perhaps more than any other person I’ve known. As in the case of most authors, I’ve taken some basic circumstances and have woven them around to suit the story. I won’t go any further in explanation.

Prologue

Ana Doli

Her thoughts and Dilemmas

Setting the Stage

Strange thing, time. It weighs most heavily on those who have the least of it. Nothing is lighter than being young with the world on your shoulders; it gives one the feeling of possibilities so seductive, while one knows there must be something more important one could be doing with one’s time. Is this not true of most of us much of the time?

A philosopher might say that the strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong. So true, she thought. But her people were not smart nor strong. Thus, those stronger and smarter than they had continually taken from them.

She remembered suddenly the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of her future identity. And the other single year that brought forth so much joy to her life.

Her mind often wanders as if seeking something far beyond her reach. She thought, if I could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if my mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if I was really good at mathematics, I could write a formula of all the future. She knew that this would be herself described in a nutshell, if only she could do it.

You do what many dream of all their lives. Dream? Strive to do, and agonize to do, and fail in doing sometimes—this is how she viewed her contribution to her Navajo heritage. This was how she felt she had done. And how she felt about her very short life with Jim Owens. When she looked down at him from heaven, she knew that his views were sometimes the same as hers. But they were the opposite of hers in some things. He thought their relationship, as short as it was, was something of great beauty. While she thought the same thing, she knew their thoughts about the shortness of it were not identical in most respects.

She knew he was so grieved by the shortness of it, and his great loss, that he failed to understand the complete beauty of it all, and all that he had gained from it. He failed to see and understand the fullness of it and how it had contributed to making him a stronger and more complete person. And he failed to understand his grief and how that added to his character as a man. What could have been did not happen, therefore there was a great loss in his heart. But because she was in heaven, she did not suffer like he did because of his still being on earth. And because she was in heaven and saw and understood all that there was to understand about their relationship and how it affected her life, she was complete with it, while on earth he was not.

And, because she was in heaven she did not suffer, because there was no suffering in heaven. And because he was still on earth, he suffered greatly at times. Because there is suffering on earth and always will be.

These things she knew to be part of her dreams. Their time on earth together had been short, but she had felt a grateful fullness from what she gained from it. For a short period of time she had felt a completeness that had exceeded her fondest human dreams. She was content, she loved, and she was loved. What more could a person want out of life on earth?

Now all I can hear from earth is the silence. The silence that has invaded his hearing. He is sad because of his loss, she knew.

She thought many thoughts about him and his circumstances as she looked down at him from her high perch above the earth. She thought, we are creatures of peculiar habit. When a mountain appears along the path of our journey, we often try to avoid that mountain by going around it. First we will go to the left of the mountain and then to the right; we try to find the easy way to navigate our way back to an easier path for our life on the other side of the mountain. But the mountain is there to be climbed and crossed. It is while on this pilgrimage, as we climb higher and higher, that we are forced to shed the many useless aspects of our lives we have carried so long. This lightens our load and leads us to find that once our load is lighter we come to know something more of ourselves in this our perilous climb. These lessons of life make stronger mountain climbers of us and make our journeys of life much more meaningful. My grandmother told me these things and once told me that I would become a dream catcher. Perhaps it was true.

Prologue

Jim Owens

Thoughts and Dilemmas

Setting the Stage

These are some of the thoughts and dilemmas of Jim Owens that he always had to deal with.

After many years of searching the canyons of my mind, searching for some good memory to jump out at me that would take me back home to the place where I might want to be if I would but let myself delve into those memories, I thought I’d finally found it. Maybe I couldn’t say it, but should say I’d found a few of them which might qualify for what I was looking.

I’ve struggled with one aspect of my life in particular that has taken me down a bit now and then. It wasn’t that I felt myself better than the people who lived there in the place of my birth. That was entirely not true. They were the best people of my life in many respects. Many of them were stuck there just like I was most of the time. But I was one of the fortunate ones in that I did get out now and then to another place across the country. It was just that in my youth, the old home place did not provide anything for me to grasp and hold on to that seemed to be of any value to me at the time. Now, here I am many years later finding some memories and also finding my sincere desire to share a part of my life with other people. A part of my life that no living person on this earth knew about.

Once again, I’ll say that it wasn’t that I felt better than my family and friends who lived there. Maybe I should say some were stuck there. Perhaps part of the problem was that they didn’t have the same thoughts, desires, and yearnings for the kind of things that I did. A big part of it all was that I had opportunities that others didn’t have. I have told some people over the years that I knew I was going to get away from where it was that I was from as soon as I was able to do so. Did that make any sense? I’m convinced that if I hadn’t gotten to go to the Pacific Northwest when I did, I might have been all right with where I was. But once I’d been there, I was never going to be happy in the hills of western North Carolina. At least not until I was much older and perhaps wiser.

I don’t recall dreaming about any special place I wanted to be, nor any special circumstances I wanted to be in. I just wanted to be someplace else, where I could pursue my life the way I wanted to. And I wanted to be in a place that offered lots of opportunities, not where I was with little or no opportunity that I could see. I felt I couldn’t do that at the old home place. Of course there were several small things that played a part in all those things. No one large thing, but a compilation of many small things.

Now as I look back over those times from the vantage point of many years and many experiences, I wonder what it really was all about. Could all the thoughts I had when growing up be simply a figment of an over grown and zealous imagination that has finally come to fruition these many years later? Somehow I don’t look at it that way, but I must admit that somewhere in a small place in my mind there is the thought that it might be that way. Should I pursue that thought a bit further to see where it leads me? Maybe I’m afraid to because of what it might reveal about me and my character.

Then sometimes now I actually feel it wasn’t some sort of conscious feeling that made me lean the way I did and made me want to be somewhere else during my life. And sometimes I question what it was that could have made me feel the way I did about the place of my birth and some years of my childhood. I’ve said that I thought it was because I got out and saw a better place for me to be. I don’t seem to be able to come up with any solid answers about that question. Whatever the total of it was, it was strong and relentless within me. Looking back now from the perspective of time, I once again ask myself should I have done it the way I did or should I have sought some other type of solution to the problems as I saw them at that time? I don’t have the answer to that.

Sometimes, when I awoke within the safety of my childhood home in North Carolina, I knew it was a good place to be, but that still didn’t persuade me to give up my dreams of being some place other than where I was born. Maybe it was some sort of presentiment that invaded my mind back then. I felt especially good being there when the rain was pounding down on the tin roof and I was snuggly tucked under the covers listening to it pound on the tin roof. Oh, it was such good sleeping that way. I’d snuggle down under all the covers and listen until it put me into a sound sleep. But it certainly wasn’t a good feeling when on a very cold winter night I had to get up and journey to the outhouse.

Now and then I feel that one who has kept as many secrets as I have, might have developed some sort of psychological package of presentiments that lead to a strong possibility of it all being just some sort of deluded memories within my mind. Do you suppose that the keeping of secrets causes one to keep secrets from himself? Is that a possibility? That might necessitate a bit of exploring if I knew how to go about it. Did it all happen the way I seem to remember it? Maybe so, and maybe no, maybe only partially. That’s the point I find myself right now, not really knowing completely how it was.

There are some memories of terrible happenings that I know are not figments of some sort of deranged part of my imagination. They were real happenings and these real happenings had a very real effect on me and my life. So, yes, I say, that somewhere in my forgotten cache of memories lies the answers to all these puzzles that often pop up into my mind. Where the dreams were sent by my mind I haven’t a clue. But I know they weren’t someone else’s dreams. They were mine and I must live with that.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I now can allow myself to go back in time and at least partially relive several significant parts of my life and the memories that come out of that time of my life. I must strongly add that it was a very significant time in my life, perhaps the most significant of all. Yes, these memories have been buried for a long time—as if they were so secret that I could not even bring them forth and think about them once again. Now, you might not look at all them the same way I do, but please remember, you haven’t been there. You probably haven’t experienced the things I have, therefore you cannot give a good explanation of how you might feel if you were in my shoes. You definitely haven’t walked that mile in my shoes.

When I finally consciously decided to allow myself to go back to those times, it all came flooding back to me as if it had never been gone. But it had been gone for a long time. The long lost memory of Anna Doli and me. These memories of things no one else knows about besides Anna and me. The long lost memories of the things we’d done and all we’d seen and gone through back in the years we worked together and loved each other. And the inevitable heartache at her loss. The heartache above all heartaches, the strong longings for her, the memories of her touch and her loving ways. Oh, sometimes I’ve felt I could not stand it, could not stand being alone without her. But I had to. She would not have it any other way. I must go on and accomplish things before I go to join her. That’s the way she would want it.

But as strange as it may all seem, I don’t seem to be able to relate to these thoughts in as significant a manner as I would like to. Seems like I’m some other person thinking those thoughts about her. But I believe indeed they are really my thoughts.

It now seems strange to me that I was always successful as far as the eleventh commandment of intelligence work is concerned. The eleventh commandment is never get caught.

And maybe my own self-imposed commandment is that you never let your thoughts and memories get the best of you, nor catch up with you.

Cowboys just need to take their spurs off once and a while. He guessed that was true of him as well as all others.

Perhaps this writing that I did some time ago expresses some things about me and my feeling that I would like to express.

My Life

As the richness of autumn descends upon the land,

The remembered sweetness of summer is disappearing.

Fading leaves toss and sway in the wind,

Controlled by the invisible forces of nature.

Winters pale light will come slanting from the north,

The invisible forces of life will yet again be manifested.

Taking away dreams we’ve placed in some sacrosanct place,

Thinking that time nor man could find nor them erode.

Do I have to know the dreams of others before I can know my own?

Tis not a sunless world I live in, so comes the unique colors.

From the long forgotten and wondrous ephemeral face of time,

But is it just my long continuous struggle to find meaning.

My life does seem to be ephemeral in length of time,

The stay here on earth but a brief blip

On the radar screen of all eternity,

Locked up tightly within my mind.

To have such a lively sense of the sins I have done,

Without the religion or means to assuage it.

By absolution would be an uncomfortable idiosyncrasy,

Perhaps leading to an end ordained and inescapable.

I came to my long lost senses being a slave to my own inabilities,

The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled and I sought God.

Calling Him to come down from on high to live within my heart,

Within my heart forever to live to remove my idiosyncrasies.

The seasons now come and go with God’s regularity,

One blending on into the next but never ending.

And I see and feel more clearly the sunlight God has provided,

And know my inevitable end will be with Him.

Chapter 1

Anna Marie Doli

Anna Marie Doli, age 37, coal black hair with a couple of blond streaks going through it, large, lovely brown eyes, 5’ 9", calls Santa Fe, New Mexico home. A quarter Navajo Indian—former policewoman—CIA operative of some merit. And a graduate of Oxford University with a PhD in languages. Some say she is not just drop dead beautiful, but double drop dead beautiful. And all who worked with her say she had an incredibly sharp mind.

When Anna was young her grandmother told her that Doli meant bluebird and that her parents felt she would become a dream catcher and a beautiful woman who would fly away to some other part of the world when she was grown up and do something useful. They told her that being a dream catcher would be very important. They said she would be able to bring out the good in people and get rid of the bad. When she asked what that meant they told her she would know when she was older. Indeed she had gone to other parts of the world, but had she become a dream catcher? At least she had flown away.

–––

She sat looking out over the mountain range at the sky above the peaks to the east. Faint indications of light began to show on the eastern horizon. It would be sunrise in a few minutes.