David Dean

David Dean, my workmate from 1988-97, was an American 101st Airborne Vietnam veteran who’d survived carrying his dead friend’s body off Dong Ap Bai (Hamburger Hill*) while under enemy fire on 15 May 1969. Fifty years later he was sent to an early grave by a tweet, mine of 6 January 2020; two days later Dean hired a boat at a marina on Lake Hartwell in the US state of Georgia and motored across the water for ten minutes. The boat was found empty and adrift the same day with the local sheriff describing Dean’s disappearance as “very suspicious”. He’d spoken to Dean’s family and said they were “saddened but not surprised” at Dean’s apparent suicide. This is the tweet with my very serious allegations that caused my old friend Dean to kill himself:

“More info on the US sales agent who I believe was a CIA contractor
(same career history as Billy Waugh) coming soon - I believe he set-up
the machine sales for the Al Qaeda front company in Yemen”

Dean’s chosen method of suicide was both very public and painful (drowning in cold water). That’s opposed to him doing it at home, in the car or at a motel with an overdose or gun - a self-inflicted death that may not have even made the news. But Dean did make the news and for several days running too - his public and painful demise was Dean’s final message: validating my claims and expressing his remorse. I now feel a duty to tell his story as best I can, to use his final selfless act as I believe he intended it to be used – to expose the Truth about the origin of the 9/11 attacks, near Al Qaidah town in 1997 Yemen.

I think this is David Dean aged nineteen in 1969 Vietnam, next to a 2019 photo of Dean taken for a Czech engineering company's website (that Dean was a new sales representative for)

I’d first met Dave in summer of 1988; my parent’s engineering export business had a sales stand at the IPEX international industry exhibition in Birmingham, England and Dean was their new US sales agent. I was eighteen years old and working as a gofer for my parents in the holidays between school and college. My first job with my elder brother Paul was collecting Dean from Manchester airport and driving down to Birmingham together. Nine years later we were doing the same in America, setting up a sales stand at the very similar CMM exhibition in Dean’s hometown of Chicago, only now Paul was living in America, I was an international field service technician, and Dean was at the top of his game. He wasn’t just a charming and successful sales agent, Dean was a Deep State operator too, with Special Forces and CIA contacts from his days serving in Vietnam. He used his company Dean Printing Systems as his cover; my British Secret Intelligence Service linked parents also allowed JM Heaford Limited (their legitimate engineering export company) be used as a Intel agencies / Deep State asset. Over the course of his career my father was rewarded with three Queen’s Awards for Export Achievements (1977, 87, 95), so whatever he was doing was clearly endorsed by the British Crown. And on 14 April 1997, the first morning of the exhibition in Chicago, JM Heaford Limited was selling printing machinery to furnish a terrorist front company in Yemen. Although that sale (via a series of front companies registered in London and the Cayman Islands) was portrayed as being to a new customer, it was in fact the second terrorist front company JM Heaford Limited had furnished for the same customer in Yemen. The first was furnished by my brother Paul in 1993/94, specifically just before JM Heaford Limited were given their Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1995.

There were five of us working the sales stand in Chicago: me, Dean, my other brother Nigel, my father and his old friend Jerry Stevens (a British military veteran and our electronic control systems contractor too). My brother Paul who’d installed the first machine in Yemen and who lived in America working directly for Dave Dean, helped setup the sales stand but was strangely absent from the exhibition. At about 9.0am on 14 April 1997 - the first morning of the exhibition - Dean checked his watch before speaking quietly with my father. He then vaguely explained that he wanted to show my father something before they wandered away together. What made their half-hour absence notable was the $100,000 machine sale that we – me, Nigel and Jerry - made while they were gone. Ten minutes after they’d left the stand three middle aged Arab businessmen approached and asked me to demonstrate our flexographic printing plate mounting machine for them. Within twenty-minutes our new customers were walking away having signed a contract with us for our highest specification machine purchased at list price (no negotiation). The three of us then saw a group of half-a-dozen men discretely following the big-spending Arabs on their shopping spree, watching whose sales stands they visited. Jerry declared “There’s something very suspicious about them”, talking about the Arab businessmen who’d just arranged for payment to be made up front via an off-shore Cayman Islands company, and all for a third-party end customer in Yemen whose name they made up and factory address they refused to give. Nigel replied, “Don’t ask any questions, they just paid list price for our machine!”.

Ten minutes later Dean and my father returned, clearly having had a serious conversation. My father feigned surprise at the $100,000 machine sale we'd made in their absence, while Dean very strangely declined his US sales territory commission of approximately $4000. It took me another twenty-two years to finally establish what had really gone on that April morning in Chicago, a realisation that came in December 2019 when I found evidence linking Dean to CIA contractor Billy Waugh via their Vietnam service. Waugh was a Special Forces legend in Vietnam, serving with the top secret MACV-SOG unit (Military Assistance Command Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group) that conducted clandestine cross-border operations into Laos and Cambodia. In his 2004 autobiography Waugh details his subsequent career as a CIA contractor that included working with Al Qaeda in 1990s Yemen. Waugh’s MACV-SOG and Dean’s 101st Airborne units both fought on Hamburger Hill, putting them in very close proximity, plus Dean told me his military career ended suddenly with a parachuting accident during in-country (Vietnam) training for jungle landings. In December 2019 I found an original account of MACV-SOG’s 1970/71 in-country HALO parachute training that was run by Waugh and which I concluded caused Dean’s parachute accident. They both medically discharged from the army due to injury circa 1972 and, I believe, continued to work together as CIA / Deep State operators, up to and including working with Al Qaeda in 1990s Yemen. America and Al Qaeda fighters fought on the same side during the 1994 Yemen civil war, and at the same time (1993/94) JM Heaford Limited was furnishing Al Qaeda linked front companies in Yemen with legitimate business fronts – printing factories - making their 1995 Queen's Award hugely significant. The factory I visited for JM Heaford Limited in 1997 Yemen was inside a secure hilltop compound in Taiz city, 17-miles south of Al Qaidah town. That’s How, Where and When I met 9/11 accused Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

April 1997: Converting Machinery Manufacturers exhibition at McCormick Place Chicago,

My April 1997 photos from Louisville (#4-13), Chicago (#15-20), Canada (#26) and California (#27-28)

My April 1997 work diary noting visits to the Sky Box (Dean's private bar in O'Hare airport), dinner at Morton's Steak House, the Baron (Robert J Bechtoldt?), etc

Sgt Major Billy Waugh, 5th Special Forces Group Vietnam to CIA contractor in 2001 Afghanistan, via Al Qaeda in 1990s Yemen:

“I worked right there with these al-Qaeda operatives and heard these arguments [about badness of US policy] firsthand many times, especially during an assignment in Yemen.”
- Billy Waugh, Hunting the Jackal (2004)

Most significantly, after witnessing the April machine sale in Chicago and before being sent to Yemen in September, I gave my first 9/11 warning. I’d flown from Boston’s Logan airport on 11June and was so shocked at the complete absence of security that I stopped at the aircraft door to tell the aircrew. From arriving at the airport in a taxi I’d only had to show a credit card as identification and had not undergone any security checks – I could’ve carried any weapon onto that flight in my hand luggage. I raised this concern with the hostess checking boarding passes but she just smiled and said “Don’t worry, that’s normal”. As the nearly empty plane ascended and I noted the unsecured cockpit door I realised how easy it would be for hijackers to take control of an aircraft and how, with basic pilot training, they could then use that aircraft as a kamikaze piloted missile. That was the moment I predicted a 9/11 style attack and distinctly remember turning in my seat to survey the other passengers, literally looking for potential hijackers on that flight. Scared that raising such a concern could be confused as a threat I decided to wait until I reached the customer the next morning, where someone could vouch for me being a regular business traveler. That customer was Sunworthy wallpaper printers in Toronto where upon my arrival I repeated my fears from the flight and actually refused to start work until the factory manager had assured me he’d pass my warning and my business card details on to a security contact he said he knew. In retrospect I now realise the first person Bob Wilton will have called was the Canadian sales agent who’d arranged my visit – Dave Horsman of Canflexographics, a friend and work colleague of Dave Dean. There was no feedback to my warning from Bob Wilton and although I don’t remember discussing my warning with Dave Horsman I do remember that when we played golf together that week he asked me a curious question at a golf tee he called the Devils Pulpit. Thinking at the time that my 9/11 style hijacking fear had been passed on, I didn’t mention it again until 22 September, when the Pakistani employees at the factory in Yemen asked me about visiting New York as tourists. I gave them the same warning but this time including the fact I’d accidentally carried my box-cutters on several domestic flights without being stopped. I’ve detailed those chain of events in My 9/11 Timeline.

I believe my June 9/11 warning was the reason I was chosen over the other service technicians to be sent to Yemen in September, and that the Pakistani employees there had been primed to ask me about visiting New York. I believe my June warning was shared with Dave Dean who, together with CIA contractor Billy Waugh, wanted me to repeat the vulnerabilities I’d seen to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s terrorist cell in Yemen. Why would they do that? They were the Deep State operators enacting their bosses’ desire for America to have another ‘Pearl Harbor’ moment – as per the Project for the New American Century’s speculation. And that is, I believe, how we went From Vietnam to 9/11, via the CIA (and Deep State).

* “ Private Dave Dean, one of the stretcher bearers for Lyden, felt as if he were in a bad dream, a terrible nightmare that try as he might, he could not awaken from. Dean had likewise been good friends with Lyden, and having to carry his friend now - a man he had partied with on many weekends at Lake Charles just outside of Fort Polk - was almost more than he could bear. And now the rain on top of it all, and all the wild shooting and screaming… it had to be a dream. A moment later, he found out for sure that it was not a dream. It was real, as real as NVA manoeuvring at the column from the draw. He and three other bearers dropped Lyden, fell into the oozing mud, and cut loose at the pith helmets emerging from the jungle below. Half a dozen M16s ripped away at the enemy soldiers on both sides of him. Dean picked up his corner of the poncho a moment later and started struggling forward again. But a little farther down the trail he again had to stop, this time to shoot at snipers who were in the trees in the draw. He fired and he fired, but in the rain, he could not tell if he was hitting anything or not.”
- Hamburger Hill: The Brutal Battle for Dong Ap Bai, May 11-20 1969

Dave Dean and Billy Waugh

Billy Waugh’s Vietnam service is well documented, a significant figure in the recently created MACV-SOG. In this video clip James ‘Sneaky’ White, a US helicopter pilot who flew on SOG missions, states they operated with four 101st Airborne transport helicopters. The official SOG site says they and Sneaky were involved in the July 1970 battle for Fire Support Base Ripcord, a 101st Airborne operation. That information puts Dean’s 101st and Waugh’s SOG very close to each other in time, location, and in an operational sense. Sneaky also talks about ‘strap-hangers’ with specific reference to Waugh accompanying missions he wasn’t assigned to, showing the often informal and unauthorised nature of some of SOG’s activities, especially Waugh's. His role and the timing are further confirmed by this most detailed history of SOG’s HALO* parachute training and operations:

".... by August or September 1970, Waugh was asked by Shungel* to take
over Recon Company at CCN* and continue recruiting for the HALO* team."

*Shungel was Lt Col Dan Shungel, a MACV-SOG commander responsible for reconnaissance missions into Laos and Cambodia.
*CCN is the Command-and-Control North area of operations which included the A Shau Valley, where Dean’s 101st Airborne were operating.
*HALO - High Altitude Low Opening was the specialist parachute technique SOG were using to insert teams behind enemy lines.

That most detailed of documents, The History of HALO Operations Vietnam 1970-71 For The Special Forces Association Chapter I-XVII, also says:

"While taking up the HALO idea, Waugh found a firm ally in Colonel Dan Shungel, the Special Forces officer perhaps best known for his role in the battle at Lang Vei near Khe Sanh in January 1968. Since February 1970, Shungel had taken over as commander of SOG's Ground Studies Group, known as OP 35, which was responsible for reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia and the DMZ. Billy recalls that Shungel literally put his military career at stake in order to get MACV to accept his concept of a HALO mission by select SOG personnel. A freefall enthusiast after receiving HALO training during his prior posting at Fort Bragg, Shungel that summer brought over a trio of skydivers [HALO instructors] to quietly flesh out Waugh's concept."

Waugh jumped on the third HALO mission on June 22, 1971, but his role is best captured in this video quote by MACV-SOG veteran Cliff Newman:

“Billy Waugh comes up: ‘Hey you two, we’re going to put together a HALO mission and you guys are on it’…
I said, ‘Billy I’m a skydiver man, I ain’t a HALO guy’.
He said, ‘You’re a 1-0 [team leader], you got a lot of experience – you’re on it!”

From the available evidence I’m content with my assertion that Dean was injured during Waugh’s HALO training, most likely in summer 1970. He doesn’t appear on any MACV-SOG registers I’ve seen so I assume his parachute accident occurred before his training was complete and before he was badged Special Forces. Dean’s service record should confirm the accident and his subsequent medical discharge dates, records I don’t have access to. But I do know Billy Waugh’s medical discharge date – February 1972 – and his self-professed route into CIA contracting. Waugh said he went from SF operator to postman after his discharge. Dean told me that after his discharge he spent the rest of the war (till 1975) running a go-go bar in the Philippines. He said it was in Angeles city, next to Clark air base - the biggest overseas US air force base in the world at that time. Clark air base had been a CIA and Air America hub since the 1950s and those working there were Dean’s bar customers and his go-go dancer’s clientele. Dean’s connections to powerful Filipinos continued into the 1990s, as demonstrated when I had some legal issues in April 1994 Manila.

I’d spent a night in jail and two weeks on bail after being caught smoking a joint outside a go-go bar. I was able to resolve the matter myself, but Dean later told me he could have sorted it all out with one phone call if only I’d asked. Also in Manila in April 1994 were Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – I think I saw them one night. There was a group of four or five south Asian men walking in the tourist area, ten metres in front of myself and some other backpackers. They turned into the Hobbit House restaurant, not far from this café/bar front with an aeroplane crashing into its upper floors. I do think KSM’s and my paths crossed in 1994 Manila, three years before I was introduced to him in Yemen. Interestingly, I returned to the Philippines on business in February 1998 to install a machine in Manila. It was one of several unusual visits (Jakarta, Manila, twice to Dubai and once in London) I was sent on after my meetings and conversations in September 1997 Yemen. They all strike me as related and in hindsight I wonder about Dean’s involvement in Manila and the true purpose of my visit there. Oh, and the Filipino terror group Abu Sayyaf – they’re named after a CIA asset and strongly supported NATO ally in Afghanistan – Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

A 1990s Manila cafe front

Meanwhile, after his claimed time as a postman, by 1977 Waugh was part of a private military contract to train Libyan special forces and supply them with twenty tons of military-grade C-4 plastic explosives. It was a dodgy enterprise that landed Waugh’s boss Edwin Wilson in prison for twenty years. But because someone at the CIA had given Waugh a camera, he was able to claim he was working – spying - for the agency and thereby avoided prosecution. I’m not sure of Dave Dean’s career path after managing the go-go bar but I expect it was similar to Waugh’s – using his certain set of skills as a military contractor wherever he was tasked. I suspect Dean met my father in 1986 El Salvador, where my father was installing a printing machine and when Dean may have been part of the School of the America’s program of training right-wing Central American dictatorships. My father told me how his customer in San Salvador – the government mint - had driven him slowly passed the body of a recently executed young man lying on the pavement, fresh blood still seeping from a head wound. That’s a textbook School of the America’s intimidation tactic and is why I suspect my father met David Dean in 1986 El Salvador. It is pure speculation on my part but does tie in with when I first met Dean in 1988 Birmingham, and with my father winning a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1987. Clearly whatever did happen in San Salvador was sanctioned by the British Establishment.

David Dean and my father, John Marland Heaford

I’m not sure of my father’s route into the clandestine world of Intelligence agencies, but it’s essential I explain how I think he became involved with men like Dean in 1986 San Salvador. His father, my grandfather, was personal accountant to an heir of the Cunliffe-Brooks banking dynasty*, Dick Cunliffe, who was also his brother-in-law and my father’s uncle. His father was also a member of the White Shield Club with perhaps a dozen members, all Manchester’s most prominent business interests represented, who met informally one Saturday a month, alternating between members’ homes. That prestigious membership was passed to my father upon my grandfather’s death and so, it is fair to say the family is well connected, and worldly too. His two brothers (my uncles) and his eldest daughter spent much of the 1970s/80s/90s living and working as accountants in the Bahamas, Switzerland and Dubai. Aged about sixteen my father made his own way in life starting a draughtsman’s apprenticeship at Manchester’s Metropolitan Vickers (Metro-Vicks) engineering company, one with its own links to Intelligence agencies. The 1933 Metro-Vicks Affair erupted when six of their employees were arrested in the Soviet Union accused of industrial sabotage and spying. And so Metro-Vicks could’ve been my father’s entry point into that world of industrial espionage too – he was very active with Metro-Vicks old boys clubs all his life. Around 1970 his Uncle Dick Cunliffe started an engineering firm in Manchester called George Moulton Successors (GMS), making specialist printing machinery – rotogravure proof presses. Dick Cunliffe employed my father who became GMS’s managing director. My father’s hard work and Dick Cunliffe’s business acumen paid off in 1977 when GMS was given a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement after selling printing machinery in places like the US Treasury in Washington, Mexico, Brazil and many other countries too. He was a very frequent flyer in the 1970s, we’d moved to a bigger house in 1977, and he appeared to have everything in life – family, travel, success. And then Dick Cunliffe died in 1979 and the remaining directors of GMS's owners replaced my father as managing director with someone called Damian McCurdy. I don’t know why that happened, but it caused my father to walk out of GMS, unemployed with five children and a mortgage.
* I’m not putting these names into the public domain out of spite or malice. I’m including these details because I think they’re significant to solving 9/11. I believe the split with GMS’s directors after Dick Cunliffe’s death, and my father’s US connections evolved within the world of entities like the Yankees and Cowboys, two competing factions within the trans-Atlantic Deep State. I often wonder if the Merchant Venturers of Bristol might have played a role, and about my mother’s family Free Masons connections. That is pure speculation on my part but given my father’s customers included the US Treasury, his family links were to banking dynasties, and his three Queen's Awards (1977, 1987, 1995), I think it’s fair to say this was all quite high-level stuff.

After leaving GMS he worked as a British sales agent for an American company called Pamarco for a while then in 1982 he and another former GMS employee Peter Hughes began to design their own rotogravure proof press in direct competition to the Cunliffe family-owned GMS. But then he reneged on Hughes when he and my mother registered their own business building rotogravure proof presses. Hughes started his own business building rotogravure proof presses in communist Hungary and married a Hungarian wife. When reemployed by my parents in 1996 one of my first tasks whilst on a bogus delivery trip was to take a discrete photo of Hughes’s house and car in Devon. From those early days my father remained personally indebted for the rest of his life to a friend who helped him, Alan Burgess, an Englishman with an American wife living in Miami. I’m not sure of his role but I think it was significant given my father's forty years of gratitude to him. My parents worked incredibly hard, sacrificing much but rewarded with business success, especially in America through David Dean's sales agency, Dean Printing Systems. If asked to guess when my father entered industrial espionage, I’d say the 1970s based on his career path described above and my memories of the time. I’d also speculate that much of his success in the 1980s and 90s was linked to his Deep State connections and his ability not to question his customers about recently executed young men lying in the street near their factories, like at the government mint in 1986 San Salvador.

Dave Dean and me, Anthony C Heaford

There were a few curiosities I noticed about Dean in 1988 at the Birmingham exhibition. I’d been told he was a new US sales agent, at the exhibition to familiarize himself with the product and customers. But it was clear he and my brother Paul were already familiar, as Dean was with David Hughes, the company’s senior service technician who spend months at a time abroad. One evening Hughes goaded Dean to speak about his military service, which he wouldn’t, then teased Dean about his having memorized every English / British monarch’s name, place and politics. While it appeared to be drunken, if curious banter at the time, the connotations are significant. It showed Hughes knew Dean’s military experience extended beyond fighting for his life on Hamburger Hill, and it illustrated Dean’s professionalism. Learning Britain’s history and power structures wasn’t a party trick, it was operational research for a Deep State operator. Hughes laughed at Dean one time in the exhibition hall too when I tried to photograph them both by our main display machine, a rotogravure proof press. As I went to take the photo Dean ducked behind the machine, out of view. Standing up after the photo was taken, he said he’d had to tie his shoelace, causing Hughes to look away quietly chuckling to himself. Dean clearly didn’t want his photograph taken and, whatever the reason, Hughes was in on it. Dean never allowed his photo to be taken in the ten years I knew him so it is spooky that within a year of him allowing his photo to be taken for a Czech company promotional in 2019, Dean was compelled to take his own life.

During our first meeting Dean told me he had no experience in the print industry but did have applicable electronics and chemistry knowledge. Toluene is a key chemical used in both rotogravure printing and the manufacture of TNT explosives. In August 1996 the US embassy Yemen and State Department Washington helped source industrial quantities of toluene for KSM’s Yemeni hosts, the Hayel Saeed Anam Group. Dean Printing Systems is listed as offering equipment, chemistry, electronics and supplies for the rotogravure industry. Dean was thirty-eight years old in 1988 but already had white hair, as seen in his 2019 photo (below). He explained it had turned white overnight, alluding to but not disclosing an extremely traumatic event in his life. I asked what foreign languages he spoke; he said just Spanish. I next saw Dean at an exhibition in April 1991 Dusseldorf, then at the CMM exhibition in his hometown of Chicago later that year. I don’t recall anything of note other than Dean appeared to be liked by all, an integral part of my parent’s business and key to its success. Then about a year later, over dinner at home in Manchester, my parents said Dean had been fired. It felt like a very touchy subject and I didn’t inquire further. Then Dean was quietly reengaged as their sales agent a few months later and again I sensed not to ask why. I now know that Dean had caught my father in an Italian honey trap after recommending a young and attractive Italian sales agent to my father*. My father financed the affair from the company’s accounts that my mother managed and by getting me to drop off £3000 cash to a fashion boutique in 1990 London. He told us it was a bribe he had to pay to a customer in Italy. He’d even spent days and shared a hotel with her when he and I were working together at an exhibition in 1991 Brussels, so he did have a lot to hide. But when the trap was sprung rather than be blackmailed my father confessed all to my mother. She forgave him on the condition Dean was fired for introducing them. She remained a company director but never went to the office again and did accept Dean being quietly reemployed a few months later. Dean went through a second fire / rehire cycle with my family’s business about a decade later; I don’t know the reason why. It does indicate that whoever was benefiting most from Dean’s employment as sales agent for a British engineering export company had a lot of power and influence over my parents’ business decisions.
*This is not salubrious gossip; it shows the true nature of Dean and my father’s relationship, and it is significant to 1997 Yemen too. I met an Italian engineer onsite in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s front company, measuring up for a $1,000,000 Bielloni flexographic printing press whose sale I think Dean setup in April 1997 Chicago.

Around 1993 my father started spending less time in America at the same time my brother Paul* went to live in Louisville Kentucky, working directly for Dean. And I left the family business to go backpacking in December 1993. The family company’s first machine sale to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s financiers, the Hayel Saeed Anam (HSA) Group, was in 1993 too. That machine was installed by my brother Paul in 1994 Yemen - on a HSA Group industrial estate 10-miles from Al Qaidah town - suggesting the sale was setup by Dave Dean. Dean did setup the second machine sale to the HSA Group in 1997, but they used a fake company name and I was told it was the first sale to this customer.
* Paul was initially refused entry to the USA due to a prior drugs conviction. David Dean was able to circumvent those US visa restrictions and get him a resident / work visa, again demonstrating Dean’s high-level contacts and influence.

After backpacking in 1994/95 I was contracting for Air BP at Manchester airport, on the administration side of British Petroleum’s aircraft refuelling division. Then my parents asked if I’d rejoin the family company as an international field service technician. Air BP offered me a coveted permanent contract if I stayed with them; my parents said that being family they’d offer me better job security than BP. I started back at the family firm in October 1996 and was made redundant in April 1998, but not before I’d seen Dean again. We spent a few days together in April 1997 Chicago, at the CMM exhibition being held in McCormick Place. It was the last time we met and was when I saw him at the height of his powers, on top form and as smooth as James Bond.

1997, When Dave Dean’s Plan Came Together

The first time I arrived in Chicago with work I was taken straight to watch the Chicago Bears football team play at Soldier Field, tickets courtesy of Dave Dean. The next time Dean collected me from the airport and we went straight for lunch at a diner. The diner’s theme was the staff being rude and insulting to customers, but I wasn’t let in on the joke until after I’d been roasted by the waitress. When I stepped out of O’Hare airport arrivals on Thursday April 10, 1997, Dean was waiting in a convertible Saab sports car with his beautiful girlfriend driving us. Our first stop was his private bar, the Sky Box, on the other side of O’Hare airport and inside a warehouse in the cargo handling area. We had a drink in the Sky Box with my brother Paul who explained to me that he wouldn’t be at the exhibition starting on the Monday due to work commitments elsewhere. My father, brother Nigel and the company’s electronic specialist Jerry Stephens were all flying over from Britain for the exhibition so Paul being absent was odd. Was he distancing himself because he and Dean knew the Yemeni customers who Paul had installed a machine for in 1994 were going to be at the exhibition in Chicago? In 1997 Chicago those Yemeni customers were introduced to me as new customers, and they used a fake company name too, so that is one possible reason for Paul’s absence.

There was a celebration at the end of the week, on Friday 18 April. We shared a meal to celebrate my father’s birthday before going to Dean’s Sky Box for a last drink – there was Dean, his girlfriend Joanne, and a couple of their friends, Mario and Irene. There was someone already at the bar when we arrived – the only person there - a mysterious man sat at the far end of the bar. The only thing of note I remember about him is I was kept as far away from him as possible. As soon as we walked in I was guided to a plastic darts board by Mario and Irene, and kept there all night. Joanne joined the darts game after serving drinks, as Dean my father and the mysterious guy huddled at the far end of the bar deep in discussion. Joanne said his name was Baron, an old friend of Dave. I don’t know how far this goes but the only person named Baron I can find that Dave may have known from Vietnam was SOG veteran Robert 'Baron' Bechtoldt. The last time I clearly remember having a conversation with Dave was on the Thursday, when he introduced me to Bloody Mary cocktails at one of Chicago’s best hotel bars. That’s how I wish I could remember him, but I know too much and have too many questions that’ll never be answered now. How involved was he? Was he just a salesman with dubious contacts making a buck, or a real player, someone calling the shots?