Edward Siedle is a hero when it comes to investigating pension fund malfeasance on behalf of the retired people whose lives depend on a retirement income.
I have gone to Siedle numerous times when it comes to understanding the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund and its opaque finances. He has demanded a full forensic audit of the CTPF pension fund.
He then told me about a book he had been working on for the past 17 years that involves his work in the forensic sciences, only this time rather than financial it’s criminal - the murder of his father in 1971 by Ugandan Tyrant Idi Amin.
His book is called “Buried Beneath a Tree in Africa,” about his journey to find out who murdered his father and the freelance journalist Nicholas Stroh, who hailed from the beer dynasty Stroh family in Detroit, MI. The two were investigating the massacre of 500 African soldiers during Amin’s military coup in 1971.
Amin was a monster who they say murdered up to 500,000 of his people, mostly those who opposed his rule, including opposition politicians, soldiers, professors, writers, anyone who didn’t endorse his brand of insanity. But that’s how power rolls, you eliminate your opponents.
Siedle’s book is a quick, fun read as he documents his journey back to Uganda in 1997 to meet with CIA operatives, US Embassy workers and Ugandan government people to piece together what happened more than 25 years prior. It was his first trip back to a country that finally moved on from its nightmare past.
His book sold out of its initial printrun on Amazon within a couple of days after its release this past week and he is currently in talks with Hollywood producers who want to buy the rights to turn his incredible story into a film.
Siedle was close to his father who raised him as a single parent. His father was a sociologist investigating how indigineous cultures treat their elderly. He planned to write a book when he returned to the United States to teach.
He never found the remains of his father and Stroh the journalist, but he got closer to the truth over the years when he read declassified reports including a Truth Commission Report that concluded it was the government under Amin that ordered the murders of the two Americans. This was big news at the time and involved high-level interactions.
I thought about the Netflix series Narcos, and made a connection to Kiki Camarena, a CIA operator who discovered CIA involvement in drug trafficking while they were supposed to be hunting down the drug lord Felix Gallardo. He too was murdered.
“Did my father work for the CIA,” Siedle said. “I really don’t know.”
I told him that anybody who is involved in intellectual work in foreign countries of interest to the US Empire are going to have some involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency. When I worked in Russia as a journalist and later as a PR specialist promoting the free market after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians accused me of being “TsRu” - Russian for CIA. The project I worked on was financed by the US Agency for International Development, which is connected to the CIA. They are everywhere (if they’re not assassinating ‘enemies’ abroad, they’re spying on Americans here). I also remember meeting a sinister looking swarthy character who claimed to work at the Romanian Embassy in Moscow. When I said I was a journalist, he quickly told me Bill Gallagher, the Chicago Tribune Moscow bureau chief at the time, was with the CIA. Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein documented all this in his book The CIA and the Media.
Africa was a hot Cold War battleground between the Soviets and the Americans. Rebels overthrowing African leaders were either Marxist guerillas financed or backed by the Soviets, or backed by US proxies such as South Africa or Israel.
I told Mr. Siedle I like his writing style - he can turn complex financial dealings into smooth and understandable prose so we the reader can understand how we’re being conned and what we can do. That is the essence of a journalist!
He wrote the best book on public pension funds called Who Stole My Pension. His new book, with a forward by Uganda President Yoweri Museveni, is a deep personal saga about a boy and his love for father who was murdered in Africa. His trip back in time to investigate the crime makes it another exciting read I recommend you check out.
https://store.bookbaby.com/book/buried-beneath-a-tree-in-africa
Great review, you are so right about Siedle's skill at breaking down complex situations and making them clear to a wide audience. He deserves far more credit for his watchdog activities regarding pension funds than has occurred. He's a giant in his commitment to see that "public" is honored in "public" governing bodies, I respect him tremendously, and surely all of us who admire him weep for the loss of his father in such a way.
Great story