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SCHENECTADY
500 turn out to fight hunger
Schenectady among cities to host CROP Walks
BY JOHN ENGER Gazette Reporter

    There were more people out walking Sunday afternoon and it wasn’t just because of the nice weather.
    The 31st annual Church World Service CROP Walk wound from Emmanuel Friedens Church through downtown Schenectady with an estimated 500 walkers raising an expected $50,000 to fi ght world hunger.
    “We walk because the needy overseas walk miles every day for food and water,” said Schenectady Inner City Mission Executive Director the Rev. Phillip Grigsby. “I’ve seen a 5-year-old in Sierra Leone carry a five-gallon bucket for miles just so his family could have clean water.”
    Some participants, however, were too exuberant to stick to a walking pace.
    “We just wanted to help out the poor,” Christopher Rober, 21, said. “We knew if we ran, we would be doing that.”
    Rober, and Michael Akinwale, 14, friends from Trinity Lutheran church, ran the full 3.2 miles together. Rober edged ahead at the very end, but they were driven by more than competition.
    “I’m from Africa and I know what it’s like back there,” said Akinwale, who came from Nigeria in 2005. “There’s a lot of murder, poverty. God brought us out of there.”
    The two friends were also motivated by Ottavio LaPiccolo, an experienced runner with Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church, who followed at a distance that prompted Rober and Akinwale on to greater speed.
    “I didn’t want to overtake,” he said. “The youth are the future.”
    LaPiccolo’s inspiration came from a day nearly 50 years ago in his childhood home of Sicily.
    “My mother and I were coming out of the bakery,” he said. “She had spent the last of our money on a loaf of bread when a beggar came up to us. There were a lot of beggars at the time. She didn’t have any money, but she had a bag of cherries, so she reached in and gave him a handful.”
    LaPiccolo came to the United Sates when he was 17. He’s participated in the CROP Walk since 1987, when he was playing tennis at the Schenectady High School and saw the walkers.
    “My mother always said to give even when you didn’t have much,” he said. “That’s always stuck in my head.”
    At the start of the walk, staff handed out PVC rings, not much larger than the circle made by a thumb and forefi nger, strung on yarn necklaces as a reminder of the hunger faced around the world.
    “In places that might not have weight scales, they measure nutrition with these rings,” Grigsby said. “If it fits past the elbow of a 5-year-old, he won’t live past his sixth birthday.” .....................>>>>...................>>>>.............................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00901&AppName=1

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Glory Years
`In wartime,' said Winston Churchill, `truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.' Heeding the advice, spies have used deceit to win wars--and to prevent them.

By Jeff Glasser
Posted 1/19/03
June 9, 1944. D-Day plus 3. The most important wireless message of World War II came into the German High Command at 12:07 a.m. and continued until 2:09. Germany's top spy in England signaled that the Allies had planned the Normandy invasion as "a diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place." The spy, code-named Cato, based his opinion on "the strong troop concentrations in Southeast and Eastern England which are not taking part in the present operations." His assessment was buttressed by earlier reports that the Allies had shipped to that region large numbers of vomit bags, life belts, C rations, condoms, and landing craft. Thus, Cato predicted a second massive landing at one of the shortest points across the English Channel, the Pas de Calais.

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A senior Nazi intelligence officer read the message and underlined "diversionary maneuver." The operational chief of the German armed forces took it to Adolf Hitler, who was already inclined to believe it. Buoyed by Cato's handiwork, the Fuhrer countermanded his generals: The German 15th Army would stay in Calais rather than reinforce the Normandy front.

Bogus armies. The decision would be fatal, for the German Cato was also the English Garbo, a double agent code-named after the legendary actress. His line about "troop concentrations" was nothing but a figment of the British imagination. In fact, the Allies had 25 fewer divisions in England than Garbo suggested. A bogus American Army group in Southeast England was keeping 22 Nazi divisions out of the battle. If those divisions had shown up in June at the Normandy bridgehead, the Germans "might possibly have defeated us by sheer weight of numbers," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower later wrote, concluding, "Lack of infantry was the most important cause of the enemy's defeat in Normandy."

Garbo's remarkable D-Day stratagems played but one vital role in the intricate pageant of deception by British intelligence services known as the Double-Cross System. At the beginning of the war, the British broke the machine codes used by the Abwehr--the German intelligence service--and learned about the German spies who alighted in England. They offered those captured a choice: Double-cross--work for the Allies--or face execution. Most accepted the former.

Through the course of the war, the British enrolled about 120 double-crossers in their secret service. They included agents such as "Bronx," the daughter of a South American diplomat who helped convince the Germans that gas warfare would favor the British; "Brutus," a Polish military officer who gave the Germans an exaggerated sense of the strength of Allied forces; and "Mutt and Jeff," two Norwegians who helped the British stage explosions to convince the Germans they were capable of sabotage. "By means of the double-agent system," wrote MI-5 official J. C. Masterman, "we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country."

Playboy. Nowhere are the rewards and pitfalls of double-crossing clearer than in the case of Dusko Popov, a Yugoslav nationalist and international playboy from Dubrovnik. His story is detailed in thousands of pages of records, which were declassified last year and made available at London's Public Record Office. In 1940, Popov convinced the Germans that through his social connections he could provide valuable information on the British. The Nazis sent him to London, but Popov, who actually despised the Germans, promptly betrayed them by offering his services to the British. One British case officer quickly sized up Popov's motivation: "He is an adventurer who is very partial to the fleshpots of the world, and he realizes that a person of his type can enjoy the fleshpots better under democratic than under totalitarian conditions."