Send In The Clowns

Smith himself seemed to have a fixation with bugging and surveillance. "He had five tape recorders laying on his desk," Joel Kaplan, a former director of security for Feld, said in a deposition. "He had a punch bowl, a party-size punch bowl with 150 tapes in it. . . . He had boxes of empty tapes. . . . He had videotapes."

Smith was fired in 1997after Fairfax police arrested him on suspicion of surreptitiously videotaping his girlfriend, a circus employee whom he suspected of cheating on him. Authorities concluded that no crime was committed and dropped the charges.

But Smith took Feld to court in a battle over compensation in which Smith alleged that his boss wasted corporate assets on retribution against enemies. Smith's suit claimed that Feld "improperly disbursed large sums of corporate monies to combat and thwart groups he perceives as opposed to the interests of Feld."

In June 1998, Smith's attorneys obtained an affidavit from Clair George laying out the Pottker operation. (George also mentioned "surveillance of, and efforts to counter, the activities of various animal rights groups.") That fall, Smith arranged a meeting with Pottker at a Chevy Chase restaurant and spilled his guts.

He told her that Feld had been gathering information about her for years. In a later deposition, Smith said he'd even seen Feld in a conference room at Ringling headquarters, watching a video of Pottker. The video was taken at a mall, probably with a tiny camera that looked like a wristwatch.

To confirm the snooping, Smith told Pottker to visit the federal courthouse in Alexandria, where his suit against Feld was filed, and fish out George's sworn statement and the attached "Pottker memos." (Smith, 60, who settled his suit against Feld for $6.5 million, signed a non-disclosure agreement and would not comment.)

Pottker describes reading the file as an out-of-body experience: "I felt like I was observing things from the ceiling. The scales fell off my eyes."

Everything started to snap into place: "The car that had been sitting in front of my home, the constant clicks on the phone, all the bad breaks I'd had in publishing. . . .

"And imagine seeing the memos about my life that were sent on a regular basis to Kenneth Feld. Detailed things about my kids, my haircuts, a party I'm giving, the editors I'm talking to."

Seeing Clair George's statements, "I thought I was going to pass out. I had to go to the ladies' room to collect myself."

Her husband was with her. As managing director of the Federal Communications Commission, Fishel wields power over a considerable bureaucracy, but that day he felt "frightened and helpless," he says. "When you realize that it's an ex-CIA agent you're up against, you realize there's nothing the average middle-class person can do."

But should he have known? "It eats me up," he says, sitting in his living room with his wife. "The feeling that I did not protect my family. I failed them."

A Career as a Writer

Pottker and Fishel met as undergraduates at American University, married in 1969, earned advanced degrees at Columbia University and wrote two academic books together. Returning to Washington, both became civil servants, but her goal, she says, was to write books full time. While raising two daughters and working as a policy analyst at the Department of Education, she wrote on nights and weekends.

In 1987, with a co-author, she published "Dear Ann, Dear Abby: The Unauthorized Biography of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren," which sold well. Then she cast around for a solo project and settled on a book about corporate titans -- which led her to interview Ken Feld in 1988 (the only time they met). She says she scored an advance of just under six figures to write "Born to Power: Heirs to America's Leading Businesses."

In 1990 she started shopping a proposal for a biography of Irvin Feld. Court documents indicate that Eringer obtained a copy of the proposal from Pottker's then-agent and gave it to Clair George. And for the next few years, Pottker claims, her writing career suffered because it was secretly steered by Feld, via Eringer, whom she considered her business partner. She ended up taking a much lower advance on the Mars book, for example, than she got for "Born to Power."

"I certainly had the background to be successful, and yet I kept running into roadbloacks and I had no idea why this was," she says. "I felt I was failing in my chosen career. I had to continue in a salaried job and I began feeling hopeless in the early '90s. I feel I lost 10 years of my career due to Ken Feld's puppeteering. Those are years I'll never get back, important years."

And that, essentially, is why she sued Feld, George, Eringer and others in 1999. But justice has been neither swift nor satisfying. The case has been stalled by seemingly endless pretrial maneuvering, including days of depositions for Pottker's daughters and her now 90-year-old mother. The couple's attorney, Roger Simmons, wears a weary expression as he talks about scaling the mountain of motions filed by the heavyweight Washington law firms retained by the circus.

"Feld, that is what he does -- he overwhelms you," says Simmons. "It's like 'Bleak House.' " The docket sheet alone runs 600 pages.

Simmons works out of a converted old home in Frederick, where the entire third floor is given over to boxes of pleadings and documents amassed in the case. He estimates Feld has spent at least $6 million fighting the suit so far. That's on top of the substantial sum the circus spent on the Pottker operation.

(One of the lead attorneys for Feld -- Barry S. Simon of Williams & Connolly -- did not return calls; the other -- Joseph T. Small of Fulbright & Jaworski-- declined to comment.)

A couple years ago, Simmons found help in the form of famed attorney Johnnie Cochran, who kicked in $350,000 for legal expenses and argued in court for Pottker. Though Cochran died of a brain tumor last year, his firm continues to support the case. Cochran called what happened to the writer an "outrageous attack on a free press."

Pottker puts it this way: "If he's allowed to get away with it, then any rich man, any rich corporation, can do this to anyone they want."

But Feld's attorneys portray the whole operation as benign -- "the memos contain essentially no personal information about Pottker," they write -- and, besides, "plaintiffs can point to no evidence that CIA-type activities involving a physical threat were ever contemplated or employed against Pottker."

They also argue that Eringer, the mole in her life, "actually helped Pottker publish two books."

Whatever her setbacks in the 1990s, Pottker's writing career did survive the Mars book and celebrity guide. With her daughters grown, Pottker no longer had school activities to oversee and Girl Scout troops to run. In recent years she has found a niche writing biographies about influential political women: Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and her mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss; and Sara Delano Roosevelt and her daughter-in-law, Eleanor Roosevelt. Both were published by St. Martin's Press.

But she has yet to write the book she planned 15 years ago, the one about the circus.

A Cloak of Secrecy

Ken Feld has never talked to the media about the Pottker case. He declined when Salon.com did an exhaustive two-part report in 2001 and when "60 Minutes" revisited the matter in 2003. Meanwhile, a cloak of secrecy has been woven around the case in the form of sealing orders, many of them sought by Feld's attorneys.

When he grants interviews, Feld typically touts his admiration for his father and love for the circus. As he told The Post's Sunday magazine a couple of years ago, "My heart and soul is always in the show."

He was born into the entertainment business, the only son of Irvin Feld, who got his start in the 1930s selling elixirs at Maryland fairs, then opened a drugstore in the District and branched into record sales. He became a renowned promoter of live concerts and teen idol rock-and-roll acts, including Paul Anka, Chubby Checker, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Big Bopper. (Indeed, the elder Feld once claimed: "I really invented rock-and-roll. I made the market.")

After their mother's suicide in 1958, young Kenneth and Karen Feld were raised by their aunt and uncle. Irvin bought Ringling Bros. in 1967, and for maximum PR value staged the contract signing at an ancient circus venue, the Colosseum in Rome.

The showman traveled the country and the world -- "and used his tightly knit circus community to hide his sexuality," Pottker wrote in the book proposal that so angered his son. "Irvin's story is one of a brilliant and flamboyant man who indeed saved the Greatest Show on Earth, but whose private life was beyond repair."

After graduating from college in 1970, Kenneth went on the road to learn the Big Top business from his father, and he was clearly the favored child. When Irvin Feld died in 1984, his will effectively disinherited his daughter.

Pottker described the bitter battle between the siblings in her Regardie's article and in a proposed book chapter called "Brother Dearest." After their father's death, the article says, Ken sought to evict his sister from her Georgetown home -- which was still in Irvin Feld's name.

"I mean, there wasn't any reason, it was just a nasty thing," Karen Feld told Pottker in the magazine article. Her brother also took possession of her new BMW, a birthday present from her dad. "He didn't need another BMW with all his Rollses," Karen declared.

She also told Pottker angrily: "I knew from an early age that I could never count on my family when I needed them." Now a social columnist for the Washington Examiner, she declined to comment to The Post; the siblings are estranged to this day.

Ken adored his dad. In an interview for a CNN profile in 1992, Ken Feld said of Irvin, "You met him even for five minutes and he made an impact upon your life." He described his father, who favored loud suits and pinkie rings, as an "emotional guy," adding, "I am maybe more of an introvert than what he was."

Talking about his mother's suicide when he was 9 years old, Feld said: "It had an impact. It probably -- it manifests itself in maybe the way I am today."

And his philosophy of life? To Ken Feld, it all boiled down to one word: "Honesty."

Not Moving On

Some who know Feld call him a soft-spoken, gentle, unpretentious family man who doesn't put on the airs of somebody who counts moguls like Michael Eisner among his peers. Critics call him coldblooded in his business dealings, but that charge doesn't bother him -- he said as much after Pottker's original article ran.

"The reason I and the rest of the family was so mad was not because of what was said about me," Feld explained in a draft of the circus-funded, unpublished biography of his father. "What they said about me was simply that I'm unemotional and a bastard in business. So what?

"But to say that Irvin was a homosexual -- what did that prove? That charge is an absolute lie. . . . I can't buy the statements about his alleged sexual preference contributing to my mother's death. . . . My mother's condition predated her marriage to my father. That's a fact. I resented that aspect of the story. . . . And yes, I was embarrassed for my father's memory."

One friend of Feld's, who declined to be identified, sees Feld's response as understandable, "when something cuts so close to home. . . . It was too close to the bone."

In conversation, Pottker's emotions flare between hot anger -- "Kenneth Feld is a stalker. . . . Kenneth Feld is a very twisted man" -- and a cold-eyed determination to never give up the battle. Nineteen bankers' boxes full of court documents line the walls of her basement. Buried in them somewhere is the original contract she signed with Regardie's for the 11,000-word article.

Her payment?

"Five thousand dollars and misery ever since," she says.

The boxes also hold this memo written by Eringer: "Pottker and I discussed other authors and how tragic it is when they become obsessed by their stories and cannot move on. We agreed that there are many good stories in the world and that if one doesn't work, the author should let it go and tackle other stories."

But it should be obvious why Jan Pottker cannot move on. The story isn't over yet.