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11 June 2023
The Finders
DC’s Cult of Tricksters
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - After publishing my first book, Spies and Provocateurs: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Persons Conducting Espionage and Covert Action, 1946-1991, I was hungry to drill down on something interesting.
A Newsweek article on a very strange cult called The Finders operating in Washington, D.C. claimed connections to the CIA, child sexual abuse, Satanism, computer hacking, China, etc.
Records indicated they had attempted to adopt children from Hong Kong and had made trips to North Korea.
It was a weird story and seemed no one was covering it.
I made the mistake of diving in without knowing it was a shallow pool of bullshit that would consume a year of nearly 12 hour days of digging and phone calls. My phone bill after a year was outrageous.
However, it was a crash course in investigative journalism. I procured tons of books written by retired private investigators on how to find government, university, and family records. I discovered there was no difference between Private Eyes and Investigative Journalists.
Today I recommend Michael Bazzell’s annual Open Source Intelligence Techniques: Resources for Searching and Analyzing Online Information. Try to procure the latest edition.
In the beginning it became an obsession, only to die out after a 1995 trip to D.C. to coordinate with Eddie Dean of the Washington City Paper to publish separate pieces on the Finders at roughly the same time.
Dean’s provocative writing style and slightly Gonzo approach to subjects made him a legend and the very reasons I reached out to him. I shared all the documents.
You have to remember that this was written when word processing was antiquated and paste-up columns were actually done with real paste. So forgive the amateurish nature of the below publication.
I was slightly ashamed of the publication I was forced to submit my article to, as no mainstream publication would take it. Unclassified was a bimonthly newsletter amongst the many anti-CIA publications of the era, including the Covert Action Quarterly and Lobster.
If you are interested in the old publications that delved into conspiracy, counter-CIA, spot-the-spy, etc., please read Hayden Peake’s The Reader’s Guide to Intelligence Periodicals (1992).
After a year of research and interactions with The Finders, I just wanted to put the story to bed. They were annoying, with phone calls in the wee hours of morning reminding me they were “watching” me.
It did not intimate me, but it did reveal their hand. They were kooks, not spooks.