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The Bottom Line:  Also, see the review: http://www.epinions.com/content_101776920196 

DEAR FIDEL: MARITA'S STORY is a promising subject for a documentary. From a perspective of 40 years, it tells the tale of a young woman (daughter of a German sea captain and an American actress) who had an affair with Fidel Castro in 1959. She claims to have become pregnant by him, being forced to abort their child, and as a result, ready to attempt to assassinate Castro -- the revenge of a proverbial woman spurned. When that effort failed, she says, her CIA handlers in Florida trained her as a guerilla fighter and secret agent. As one of her assignments, to gather money for raids against Cuba, she carried on a liaison with the ex-dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Jimenez Perez, which resulted in the birth of her daughter, Monica.

Then, she tells us how she accompanied two Dallas-bound shooting teams to assassinate JFK in November 1963. Sometime following her cold feet on that assignment, she evidently transferred to the FBI, becoming a surveillance agent in a condo complex which catered to visiting Communist dignitaries and officials at the United Nations. In 1976, she testified to activities related to the JFK Assassination, which according to her, resulted in the loss of her FBI position. After the birth of a son by her husband and FBI partner, she took up with a Mob figure for several years. 

DEAR FIDEL finds her writing a wistful letter to Fidel Castro in 1998. Then 58, crippled with an injured hip, nearly destitute, she resolves to return to Cuba one last time, to look up people she knew there in her youth. She died in 2002, subsequent to the completion of the film in 2000. 

[UPDATE: Fidel and Marita are obviously both survivors. Thanks to the inquiry of a reader, I checked back and discovered that Marita's daughter Monica appeared with her on a reality show in June 2005, in which they took lie detector tests to prove that Monica was also the daughter of the former Strong Man of Venezuela, Dictator/Presidente Marcos Perez Jimenez. Marita was still kicking. If true, it is rather like spying the ghost of Harry Lime in the Strand!] 

Unfortunately, Writer/Director Wilfried Huismann's documentary does not begin to suggest the complexity, the ambivalence, the opportunity for various shades of political mischief and disinformation in the material. Due to space limitations, I was unable to include some of those aspects in my recent review of the movie. Here are a few things I had to leave out or only sketch in -- 

Consider the dramatis personae of Marita's documentary: 

*Comandante FIDEL CASTRO: Aged 76. His hold on power in Cuba slowly loosening. His very life, a reflection to some of Jesus Christ, and to others of Satan Incarnate. Despite the seeming initial successes of the Fidelista Revolution, a 42-year American economic embargo has impoverished his people and the large island upon which they live. His citizens' general literacy may be the highest in Latin America; their day-to-day ordinary freedoms not much more encroached upon than those of most neighboring **"democracies"; their normal medical attention as satisfactory as any -- available to a larger percentage of population than that afforded in America. The infant mortality rate one of the lowest in the World, lower than that of America, in fact. 

It doesn't matter. His people are tired. They are poor. They want "reality TV," lots of worthless gadgets and the greater variety of unhealthy processed foods which Americans enjoy. The high spirits with which they greeted their young macho hero, when MARITA LORENZ met him in 1959, like all things, have dissipated and grown old. Operatives of "Team Bush" are closing in, and the Old Dictator is making mistakes, playing into their hands. It doesn't matter. Should he not die soon, reckless as they are, the Bush Administration may conceivably invade Cuba before the next Presidential Election in 2004. 

AL CHESTONE [what a change-up!]: Retired. An FBI Special Agent in charge of spy activities against Eastern Bloc diplomats at the UN in the 1970's. He tells us MARITA LORENZ was one of his operatives, bugging Communists. Now retired from the Bureau, CHESTONE is an official in Alexandria, Virginia, of "Picture Them Home," which puts photographs of missing children in various kinds of advertising. Sometime poet, elegist for those who died at the Twin Towers and in the Pentagon. 

SAM "Mooney" or "Momo" GIANCANA: Dead. Chicago Mafia leader, successor to, and enforcer for, Tough Tony Accardo of the Capone Crime Family. It is said that, over a grudge, Giancana personally cut the throat of Comedian Joe E. Lewis (immortalized by Frank Sinatra in Charles Vidor's 1957 THE JOKER IS WILD). Sinatra's reputed friend, Momo, according to FBI reports, introduced shared-mistress Judith Campbell Exner to John F. Kennedy. In order to recover Mob assets in Havana, GIANCANA joined with the CIA in attempts to assassinate Castro, one of which supposedly utilized Marita. Just prior to giving testimony in 1975 before a sub-committee doing spade work for what became the House Select Committee on Assassinations -- while under 24 hour FBI surveillance -- GIANCANA was found in the basement study of his home, shot multiple times in the head. No one was ever arrested for his murder. 

GERRY PATRICK HEMMING: Retired and possibly on the lecture circuit. Salty, brash Soldier of Fortune, Ex-Marine HEMMING organized in the Florida Everglades, presumably in service to the CIA, the International Anti-Communist Brigade, which almost from the start, carried out terrorist attacks against Castro, and continued them for nearly 20 years. HEMMING tells us that he trained Marita in making espionage and propaganda raids on Cuba. Coincidentally or not, HEMMING appears to have trailed alleged Kennedy Assassin LEE HARVEY OSWALD everywhere he turned up. He followed him into the Marines, through his training stations, to Atsugi U-2 spy plane base in Japan; then, after OSWALD's return from Russia, back to Texas, to New Orleans, perhaps to Miami. HEMMING was questioned by the FBI about his connections with people thought preparing "legends" for OSWALD, before and after the ***JFK Assassination. 

ED LEVI: Presumably, still alive. Introduced in DEAR FIDEL as a New Jersey stud farm owner. Marita calls him a member of the "Kosher Nostra." He was evidently one of Marita's lovers in the late 1970's and beyond. He hired Marita's Brother JOACHIM (Joe) LORENZ as a guard on his estate. GERRY HEMMING suggests that LEVI somehow inducted Marita into the service of the Israeli Mossad. Elsewhere, in his account of the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations' work, Congressional Investigator Fonzi suggests that a Mob figure resembling LEVI set Marita up in an apartment on the East Side of New York for some years.

ALICE JUNE LOFLAND LORENZ: Dead. Claimed to be a cousin of Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (which would make him a blood relative of Castro's mistress). After her marriage to Captain HEINRICH F. LORENZ of the Norddeutscher Lloyd Line's "Bremen IV," American Actress ALICE JUNE LOFLAND LORENZ went to Germany to live with her husband. They had at least two children, Joachim and Marita. When the Bremen, being refitted as a troop ship at Bremerhaven, was sabotaged in 1941, CAPTAIN LORENZ came under suspicion by the Gestapo because of his wife's nationality. Subsequently, he was transferred to the Navy duty as a Lieutenant Commander, where he became involved with Admiral Canaris, Chief of the Abwher, now known to have been a longtime Allied double agent. Later, after Canaris was arrested for treason in 1944, the Gestapo took into custody MRS. LORENZ, allegedly for fomenting a resistance group among French slave laborers. She and her children were sent to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. MRS. LORENZ, JOACHIM and MARITA survived the War, but after a stint as assistant to the Military Governor of Bremerhaven, MRS. LORENZ moved her family back to the United States. According to her, as of 1960, she had been a career employ of the United States Government for over 13 years. When CAPTAIN LORENZ re-joined the German Liner services, her daughter preferred to live at sea with him. 

Captain HEINRICH F. LORENZ: Dead. Father of Marita. Before World War II, related to the ****C. Lorenz Family, which later manufactured the Folke-Wulf fighter, LORENZ commanded the swift German Liner "Bremen IV" and other flagships of the Norddeutscher Lloyd Company. 

[Interesting, perhaps as you may see, the company merged in 1933 with the Hamburg-American Line (now Holland-American), controlled by Brown and Harriman holdings under George W. Bush's grandfather, CEO Prescott Bush. It is documented that Hamburg-American used its influence, financially and politically, to prevent a crackdown on Hitler's activities at crucial interventions in the late 1920's and early 1930's.] 

When the Bremen docked in New York Harbor in 1938, CAPTAIN LORENZ was questioned in connection with the smuggling of Nazi agents from his ship into the U.S.A. 

[In 1935, Irish-American seaman Bill Bailey had scaled the bow of the Bremen, in the same harbor, as a protest against Nazism, and torn down the Swastika flying there -- the inspiration for Irwin Shaw's distinguished short story, "Sailor off the Bremen."] 

CAPTAIN LORENZ married American Actress ALICE JUNE LOFLAND (a reputed cousin of Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.), who appears also to have been an espionage agent. ILONA MARITA LORENZ was born in 1939. 

JOACHIM "Joe" LORENZ: Status unknown. MARITA LORENZ's big brother. Preceded Marita to America with his Mother in 1946, where he studied to enter the State Department in the Graduate School of Foreign Relations at Columbia. Said to have lost a career as a United States diplomat over Marita's associations and activities, but as of 2000, Joe was working for the Republican Party and teaching Political Science. He remained loyal to Marita. 

ILONA MARITA LORENZ: Died 2002. Reared in Nazi Germany by her mother, latterly at Bergen-Belsen. She began to travel with her Father on his Liners after the War, but not before, she claims, she was raped by an American soldier, at the age of 7. [If so, it might explain some of her troubles as a woman and mother later on.] In 1959, a few weeks after the Revolution of the Sierra Maestra's successful conclusion, she sailed into Havana Harbor with her Father's Motor Ship, Berlin. CAPTAIN LORENZ entertained on board FIDEL CASTRO, the new revolutionary leader of Cuba. Marita, 19 years-old and darkly beautiful, hit it off with Fidel. The feelings were mutual. 

When the ship continued on to New York, CASTRO sent for her, and she stayed with him for six months in Havana, where she became acquainted with FRANK FIORINI STURGIS, who, while working for both the Mob and the CIA, had run guns to CASTRO and fought side by side with him in the mountains. As a result, CASTRO had made Captain of Secret Service in the Cuban Air Force, and had him helping in the conversion of the Mob's Havana's casinos to other purposes.

When Marita learned that she was pregnant, and wanted to leave Cuba, CASTRO forced her to have an abortion at the end of her second trimester. Her Mother, ALICE J. LORENZE, with the assistance of perhaps FRANK STURGIS and others, arranged her return to the United States. STURGIS then took her to Miami, where he introduced her to GERRY PATRICK HEMMING, both of them employed by the CIA, and according to Marita, she agreed to return to CASTRO, and to try to assassinate him with poison.

When that fell through, HEMMING put her through guerilla training with his International Anti-Communist (Penetration?) Brigade, in the swamps of Florida. By her account, that training set her onto a career as a counter-revolutionary, associate of assassins, FBI informant, Mob lady, and sensational witness at several highly publicized hearings and trials. 

She was later yet, though she does not bring it up in the film, an informant for the New York City Police, and an employee of the United States Immigration Service in processing Cuban exiles; plus, according to one of the Film's participants, an unwitting agent for the Israeli Mossad. In DEAR FIDEL, she re-covers some of this ground, in New York and in Cuba. Much of what is in the film flows directly from her recollections, memorabilia and acquaintanceships. 

MARK YURASITS LORENZ: Now in his early 30's, he is Marita's son by the condo building manager she married and persuaded to become an FBI informant. Mark is said to be a geology student. As a boy, his mother taught him to search trash cans of the leased or rented apartments near the UN for piles of shredded documents, and she showed him how to paste them together to reveal the confidential information they sometimes contained. He is very loyal to his mother. 

ROBERT AIME MAHEU: Still living, as of a couple of months ago, at age 85. Runs investigations in Las Vegas for the Casinos and private corporations. ROBERT MAHEU obtained a law degree and joined the FBI during World War II. [One early assignment involved people posing as Nazi sympathizers.] Moved over to the CIA in the late 1940's, where he accepted his first "cutout" assignments, at which he became a master. His name can be found attached to almost every conspiracy theory (Castro Assassination attempts, the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate, Howard Hughes, etc) from the late 1950's to nearly the present day. 

It was MAHEU who persuaded Mobsters GIANCANA and ROSELLI to combine forces with the CIA in a series of unsuccessful attempts on the life of CASTRO. It was MAHEU, working for the Agency's original "Cowboy," William Harvey, so he proudly says who casually brought deadly Haddock fish toxin in his pants pocket to Miami. He delivered it to JOHNNY ROSELLI, who according to Marita, gave it to her. But a coincidence of accident and a romantic heart, she says, saved the 33 year-old Dictator's life. The task was later taken over, in turns, by two other of the CIA's deadliest operational chiefs: Desmond Fitzgerald and Edward Lansdale. 

[Some say the last mentioned, in his salad days, was the model for Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Landsdale's plan was to plant among Cuban Catholics the idea that the Second Coming was near, and after a leaflet and whispering campaign, the Cubans would rise up and destroy CASTRO, in gestalt recognition that he was really the Anti-Christ. Nuts, huh? Sort of like the ideas floating around Washington today!] 

Strangely, none of the mainstream accounts of these conspiracies mention MARITA LORENZ. 

MARCOS PEREZ JIMENEZ: Dead, at age 87, September 20, 2002. Former "Iron Man of Venezuela," PEREZ JIMENEZ took power in Venezuela as part of a three man junta, in 1948. When the smoke cleared by 1952, he was the last man standing. Possibly because of the country's oil exports to the United States, we overlooked the barbarities of the PEREZ JIMENEZ regime, the imprisonment, torture and murder of rival politicians, the censorship of the media and the looting practices, which allowed the PEREZ -- "P.J." as he was affectionately known to American functionaries -- to accumulate a private fortune of $250,000, 000. President Eisenhower gave him a medal, the Legion of Merit, for his services to the Free World.

P. J. just went on torturing, murdering, stealing, and building grandiose skyscrapers, palaces and statuary to gratify his ego. However, he was cast down in a 1958 coup. In his haste to escape to the United States, he left suitcases of incriminating documents behind, and for over four years, the New Venezuelan Government attempted to extradite him. 

It was during this time, on a mission for the CIA to procure money from him for more Cuban raids, according to her, that Marita met the former dictator in Miami. Her daughter, MONICA MERCEDES PEREZ JIMENEZ, was born of that liaison. PEREZ JIMENEZ was eventually sent home by his old American handlers to face the Big Joropo. Always lucky, he was sentenced to four years, and afterwards exiled to Spain. 

MONICA MERCEDES PEREZ JIMENEZ: In her early 40's. Daughter of Marita and the Venezuelan dictator PEREZ JIMENEZ, a stunt woman by trade, she is less friendly to her Mother than her brother, Mark. She would have liked a less clandestine childhood. In The Last Investigation, Private Eye Gaeton Fonzi tells a story of how, when he was vetting Marita as a House Select Committee witness, he was called from Washington to her apartment in New York City. She was frightened for her life, she said, because of a leak in the press intimating she was going to appear before the Committee. (Fonzi thinks Marita herself was the leak, I gather.) When he arrived at her door with two Latino assistants, Marita, not recognizing the Latins, nearly blasted them with a double barreled shotgun. It developed that 13 year-old Monica was in the custody of City police for purchasing weapons on the black market on behalf of her Mother that morning.

JOHNNY ROSELLI: Found, in 1976, all chopped up in an oil drum in Bisquayne Bay, off Florida, a few weeks after he testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. ROSELLI was considered "the diplomat of the Mafia," in that he spoke and dressed well, moving easily from one circle of American society to another. Formed dealings with the CIA after the fall of Cuba, assisting in plots to kill CASTRO. The initial plan was to have the revolutionary dictator's favorite apple pie poisoned by a waiter at a seaside resort, but one waiter failed to insert the poison, and a backup lost his nerve. 

According to Marita, ROSELLI gave her capsules of poison to mix with CASTRO's food while he slept, in the Havana hotel room where they had a reunion. She, too, changed her mind. (ROSELLI later implicated CASTRO and Cuban agents in John Kennedy's Assassination.) Of late, a theory has surfaced that both ROSELLI and New Orleans' DA Jim Garrison (subject of Oliver Stone's *JFK, 1991) were employed to take the heat off the Mob in Kennedy's death. By this reasoning, ROSELLI had to die, not for what he had said before the Select Committee, but what he knew intimately about too many events. 

FRANK FIORINI STURGIS: Dead, of natural causes. Another Ex-Marine Soldier of Fortune, like GERRY PATRICK HEMMING. According to an affidavit he signed, FRANK STURGIS was born a home town Norfolk, Virginia, boy in 1924, who used that location as a base to which he often returned. 

STURGIS served as a Marine in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. Upon his discharge, he joined the Norfolk Police Force for three years, at the same time [curiously?] managing two bars. In this period, he began to adopt what would become a total of over a dozen aliases and three code names. In 1948, he joined the Naval Reserve; and in 1949, the Merchant Marine, shipping out to Europe and back for almost two years. In 1950, the restless STURGIS joined the Army and spent two years in Germany. Returning, he managed a nightclub in Virginia Beach during the years 1952 to 1954. The year 1955 is not accounted for, but from 1956 to 1961, he worked for the CIA in Cuba [with CASTRO, in the Sierra Maestra], Miami, Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, and the Bahamas. 

[In other words, all the Latin American hot spots during the Cold War.] 

STURGIS lists the years 1961 to 1970 on his resume simply under the heading: "The Bay of Pigs." In The Warren Commission Report, there is a STURGIS memo, claiming to have seen Lee Harvey Oswald talking to Cuban Intelligence agents. 

Early in these years, he officially worked with Marita. Afterwards, in 1972, of course, he became a household name for a time, being arrested for burglary at the Watergate Hotel with a group of Intelligence veterans: Bernard L. Barker (Codename: Macho); Virgilio Gonzalez (Villo); Eugenio Rolando Martinez (Musculito); and Team Leader James W. McCord, Jr. (Later the police arrested E. Howard Hunt (Eduardo), an important CIA leader in The Bay of Pigs, and G. Gordon Liddy [both working directly out of the White House] and charged them also as participants in "the third rate burglary" which sank Richard Nixon's Presidency.) 

Over the years until his death not long ago, popping up occasionally in some nefarious action, FRANK STURGIS evidently kept in touch with MARITA LORENZ. In promotional material for the film, FIDEL CASTRO is quoted as saying; STURGIS was the "best and most dangerous CIA agent of all time." 

JESUS YANEZ PELLETIER: Died September 2000, at Age 83, shortly following his appearance in DEAR FIDEL. In 1953, he was a prison officer when, after leading a quashed attack on Santiago's Macado Barracks, FIDEL CASTRO was put under his charge. PELLETIER received orders to poison Castro, but he refused and protected the young revolutionary against other attacks. CASTRO remembered these acts and made PELLETIER his aide-de-camp when he took power, six years later. He had a falling out with CASTRO in 1960 over what is described cryptically as his "pro-Americanism," and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, of which he served ten years. It was he who first introduced CASTRO to Marita on the M.S. Berlin in Havana Harbor. According to her, it was also PELLETIER who guarded her when she was pregnant and trying to escape from Cuba, who threatened her with death, and who, as Marita's Mother wrote, was in charge of the squad that brought Marita to the doctor who aborted her child. Still, Marita has a forgiving and sentimental soft spot for PELLETIER and wanted to see him in the course of making DEAR FIDEL. 

[Pretty incredible, huh? Or a gaze into the psyche of a sado-masochistic personality.] 

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NOTE: These profiles were prepared from materials available at the DEAR FIDEL website, information gained through Google on the Internet, incidents recorded in the THE LAST INVESTIGATION by Gaeton Fonzi, items from OSWALD TALKED by Ray and Mary LaFontane, and references in The Warren Report. 

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*What does Fidel Castro think about current relations between his country and the United States? I recently came across the text of an interview he gave on Cuban Television: 

April 25, 2003 -- CASTRO: "Even before the election, at a rally held on August 5 commemorating the 26th of July in Pinar del Río, I literally said to Mr. Bush, and I quote: 

"I am very much aware of what you have recklessly told your close and indiscreet friends in the Cuban American mob: that you can solve the problem of Cuba very easily, in clear reference to the methods used in the sinister period when the Central Intelligence Agency was directly involved in assassination plots against our country's leaders. 

Bush's pledge was that he would solve the problem by literally removing me, something that, quite honestly, after 40 years of aggression and crimes against Cuba, could neither surprise me nor worry me much." 

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** A recent news article published in the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that General Rios Montt, a born-again Christian tyrant, implicated in the torture and massacre of Mayan indigenous people, is poised to return to power in Guatemala. If so, a nearly 50 year-old civil war may begin all over again. It started in 1954, when the CIA, lobbied by United Fruit Company of Boston, overthrew the first democratically-elected government in that nation's history. Note: In 1954, Proscott Bush helped his son, George H.W. Bush establish Zapata Oil Company, which in 1969, acquired for a time United Fruit, long identified with the CIA clandestine operations.  

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***A conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976): 

"1-C: The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy." 

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****C. Lorenz, A.G. -- In the early 1930's, major portions of this company was acquired by Sosthenes Behn's I.T.T. and Brown and Harriman (CEO Prescott Bush, negotiated by the Dulles Brothers -- John Foster and Allen). Behn, born in the Virgin Islands, son of sugar brokers, was educated in Corsica, and served with distinction in the First World War, where he made the acquaintance of George S. Patton. Retired from the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1929 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Behn formed International Telephone & Telegraph and began to buy up depressed communications companies here and in Europe. After Behn and Bush acquired controlling interest in the company, C. Lorenz got the contract to develop 25% of Folke-Wulf aircraft for the Luftwaffe, at its Bremen North German Atlantic Cable Company site. In World War II, Behn and Bush, among others, continued to do business, with European countries, from South America and Switzerland. 

In Germany, they continued to deal with people such as Reich Air Marshal Hermann Goering and Gestapo Leader Heinrich Himmler, both of whom maintained a strong interest, financial as well as strategic, in aircraft war industries. Though Prescott Bush and Brown and Harriman were ordered, with others, to cease and desist, under the American "Trading with the Enemy Act," Behn continued as before. At one point in 1943, U.S. Liberator bombers (for which Behn provided intercoms) bombed the Lorenz Plant outside of Bremen. Folke-Wulfe 190 interceptors, which the Behn and Bush finances had helped build (perhaps the best single radial engine plane of the War) shot down Liberators, and vice verse. While Prescott Bush's German assets were frozen until ten years after World War II, Colonel Behn joined General George S. Patton's famous Black motorcade following his Third Army across Europe. Behn personally got his factories up and running again quickly, with the help of his old Army comrade. After the War, Behn sued the United States Government for damages done to his factories by American Army Air Force bombers, and collected $27,000,000. 

Prescott Bush, whose Brown and Harriman frozen holdings included the Union Munitions Factory at Auschwitz-Birkenau [featured in THE GREY ZONE, 2002], had to wait to collect his booty until his old German partner, Baron Fritz Thyssen, died in Argentina in 1951. Some of those funds were used by U.S. Senator Prescott Bush to help finance the early business ventures of his son, George H.W. Bush. It is conceivable that some of that money has passed on down as part of President George W. Bush's fortune today. 

I found it curious, then, to see pictures of President George W. Bush stalking around recently the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau (of which his grandfather had been part owner), watching his wife Laura leave a single, long-stemmed red rose "in remembrance" on the railway into the death camp, signing the registry, "Never Again -- George Bush." 

Not a word of remorse about his Family's deep involvement with the whole sordid business. 

What hypocrisy! 

Who said, "Irony is dead"?

History, at least, is not.

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For Macresarf1 reviews of Movies mentioned in this piece, click on the hyperlinks below: 

JFK -- 

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-5706-D4DFA80-3926DE72-prod3 

THE GREY ZONE -- 

http://www.epinions.com/content_79403585156