Last fall, while researching my book The Great JuBu Karma Con, I came across a curious person by the name of Charles “Abe” Abramson. Who is this guy? Is he just a real estate guy? A library board guy? A Burning Man guy? Or, perhaps, Charles “Abe” Abramson is a CIA guy? Now, why would I think that?
Charles “Abe” Abramson came to Missoula – “just for the summer” – after graduating from The University of Florida, in 1963. Three years ago, he hosted a party to celebrate his fifty year running bar tab just around the corner here, at The Stockman Bar, a tab which he opened the day he got here – and he still has never paid completely it off.
Abe has been in the real estate business here in Western Montana since returning from East Asia in 1975, where he served part of his thirty-seven years as an Air Force Officer in various Active and Reserve assignments, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel on his 60th birthday in 2003.He is a founding and continuing Trustee of The Missoula Public Library Foundation, a Mentor in Missoula’s Veterans’ Court, and has been on staff at The Burning Man Festival for thirteen years.
His chief guiding principle is: “First things first – but not necessarily, in that order!”
At the end of 2016, Abe Abramson took the stage at the Wilma for a night of storytelling put on by Tell Us Something. I listened to his “story” about being a young Air Force Officer and nearly creating an “international incident” in Taiwan. Here’s what I transcribed from Abe’s little story:
“So, uh, I’m a young Air Force Officer in the Middle East, and, uh, I’m a Reservist on active duty, which is—there is a lot of detail that’s not important—but at a certain point the Air Force decided they didn’t need a Reserve Officer on “active” duty in the Orient, and I became, in Taiwan, a Reserve Officer in the active reserves, not on active duty, ok, enough of that…so anyway, but the things is, when you’re on military orders in a foreign country, there’s a thing called the SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement, and it controls more than you know in the beginning…”
“So I’m in the Reserves, I’m studying Cong Dynasty poetry two hours a day five days a week and I’m studying a Korean martial art [unintelligible] two hours a day, six days a week, and recovering from—I had Hep A, which, uh, for reasons I don’t understand I had pretty much totally licked—and one day it comes to my attention that some people were looking for me because how would I know that if you’re no longer on active duty, and the country doesn’t know you’re there, and they hear you’re there, they want to know why you’re there…so…so, uh, it’s a little bit more complicated, but, basically it could have been an international incident…
Abe then describes having to talk to someone from Taiwan’s secret police and, like a three-letter agency miracle, it turns out Abe knows one of the Taiwanese guys from “school” in Missoula and, because of this relationship, Abe bonds with the Taiwanese secret police over their shared knowledge of the restaurant, Four B’s. What a small world!
If you’d like to hear Abe tell the story himself, I clipped the last four minutes, which you can listen to here. I think Abe’s chuckle-cagey sounding audio context is helpful in determining, for yourself, who this guy might actually be.
Now, on to the next clue!
Like Tom Robbins’ fictional CIA character, Switters, Abe loves James Joyce and the impenetrable tome, Finnegan’s Wake. Somehow, despite being a VERY BUSY guy, Abe even found time to teach James Joyce on campus!
To better appreciate just how widespread Abe’s influence is, and why someone like me–who has wondered for six years how a black homeless man could be taken off life support at St. Patrick’s hospital before his family was notified–came to be VERY curious about this curious man, examine these screenshots from a “deleted” Wikibin file:
If you’re a foodie family serving up food to Montana with “Mediterranean” themed cuisine, like Ray Risho and sons have done for many years, Abe Abramson sounds like a good guy to know.
So do they? Of course they do.
This pairing of “Abe” and “Ray” makes more sense when you go to the same story-telling platform, Tell Us Something, where Abe told his funny Taiwanese secret police story at and you see this like I did this morning:
Ray Risho shares his story ” You Have Ten Minutes”. In 1964, Ray Risho has his last 2 weeks in the US army after having been drafted. He was stationed in Korea and assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division in the DMZ. When it comes time for him to re-up, he changes his mind.
Founder of the celebrated Perugia Restaurant in Missoula, Montana, chef and independent scholar Ray Risho has spent a lifetime of travel studying global cuisine. Besides European travel, Ray has traveled extensively to South Korea & Japan, and the Middle East: Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian West Bank & Gaza Strip, Syria and the country of Yemen. He has presented more than one hundred popular teaching-dinners featuring classic menus from around the world, and frequently gives workshops and cooking demonstrations on global cuisine. He regularly teaches courses on cuisine at the University of Montana Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the UM campus. In 2008, the Missoula Cultural Council awarded Ray and his wife Susie the Cultural Achievement Award for supporting the arts and enhancing the quality of life in Missoula. In 2011, the University of Montana presented Ray with the Outstanding Volunteer of the Year Award.
This is going to get a lot more interesting, since the subjects I’m interested in–homelessness, smokejumpers, smoker jumpers who are interested in homelessness (Sam Forstag), drug/human/gun trafficking, narrative-control, conspiracy theories, and local roles in how stories get shaped, like newspapers–also pop up on the relatively minimal timeline of @MontanaAbe’s X account. Here’s a curated list of what stood out to me:
I’m glad to see that I’m helping to bring Charles @be Abramson EXACTLY what he ordered-KARMA! It even comes with additional packets of karma for narrative controllers, like Gwen Florio, who saw the writing on the wall before fellow narrative controllers, like Tobin Miller Shearer, decided to pack up and leave, but not before cooking up his own pending restraining order against me (not yet served) so I can have a matching pair for my terrible blog writing and lyrical terrorism, accompanied by my puppet pal and accomplice in terrorism, Pirate Booty.
Before getting to the middle book authored by the absolute scummiest of CIA operatives, Allen Dulles (the one Switters spits on the floor every time he hears the name mentioned in the Robbins story), I just want to re-emphasize how broadly influential Charles “Abe” Abramson has been in Missoula since 1975 using screenshots from his own Facebook page, especially when you have the kind of questions the Stevenson family has about their son’s death at St. Patrick’s hospital, and the subsequent coverup about what REALLY happened inside the Poverello Center on January 3rd, 2020:
Moving on to one of the last data points for today’s post, the paperback copy of Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence, which I found for a buck and a half the same day I posted the last part of last week’s AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN series, got my attention because of a reference to Montana’s Mike Mansfield, a pretty key figure in American politics, post WWII.
Michael Joseph Mansfield (March 16, 1903 – October 5, 2001) was an American Democratic Party politician and diplomat who represented Montana in the United States House of Representatives from 1943 to 1953 and United States Senate from 1953 to 1977. As the leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus from 1961 to 1977, Mansfield shepherded Great Society programs through the Senate; his tenure of exactly sixteen years was the longest of any party leader in Senate history, until the record was broken by Mitch McConnell in 2023.
The context of the following excerpt from Dulles’ book is the now-historical question of the young CIA and oversight, and it shows how closely Montana, through Mike Mansfield, was tied to those early efforts at watching the watchers of “foreign” intelligence:
When you know you’re history, and you know where money goes–like the money plus hilarious AOC endorsement to Smokejumper, Sam Forstag–it makes posts like this much more entertaining:
I’d mention someone else I know who is a Smokejumper, but I’m not the brightest bulb when it comes to my first amendment right taking a back seat to local lawfare, so instead I’ll just accept that I’m destined to become a part of someone else’s legal argument to prevent the public from seeing embarrassing DUI footage, and my woes over the legally actionable shit I’ve experienced will just have to be documented for posterity, like this AI-rendered dramatization of the temporary wallpaper that my co-workers at Silk Road got to enjoy for a whole weekend:
If you don’t understand the forced-humor of how I interpret my big feelings over nasty bullshit from exposing what I know about the inverted nature of this little town swinging big in the information war, well, maybe it’s your first time here.
Thankfully, it’s not mine.
Welcome to the show!
