Passages from the FBI File on Tara Adams

Photo Credit: Flickr by Cliff

1. March 1, 1983. Our subject, born Tara Kathleen Gordon in 1975, recently came to the attention of the government due to her involvement with a group known only to the Bureau as "Scissilla." We believe this to be a code name for some sort of terrorist organization. Today, an agent engaged the subject in conversation in her third grade classroom, having assumed the guise of a friendly substitute teacher. Tara spoke freely and, in fact, passionately about Scissilla and her beliefs surrounding it and its related worlds (or perhaps, cells), while cantering back and forth and twisting the hem of her dress. (It was noted, by the agent, perhaps irrelevantly, that she was the only girl in her grade not wearing jeans.) Tara claimed that Scissilla exists in a parallel Universe which connects to ours through a magic waterfall. In Scissilla, she claims, everyone lives as a shepherd or farmer and is at peace with the world, practicing no violence. There is though, according to the subject, a neighboring world, Jipsivan, which is currently attacking both Scissilla and its surrounding worlds. Tara believes that "Jipsie" agents are currently at work on Earth and that she, a native of Scissilla, has been reborn here in order to stop them. After consideration, the Bureau believes this issue may be more germane to the field of psychiatry than national security. Due to the seriousness of any charge of terrorist activity, we will, however, maintain a file on Ms. Gordon.


2. August 15, 1994. Tara Gordon again came to the attention of the Bureau today while attempting to board a plane from Boston, having carried a double-edged knife to the security line. This peculiar series of events, which suggest a miscalculation in our previous decision to suspend surveillance of this subject, played out as follows. The nineteen year-old Ms. Gordon approached the TSA personnel at security proffering an elaborately decorated dagger and a polite expression. She explained that she had purchased this item in a store in Ocean Point, Maine for the purpose of giving it as a gift to her boyfriend and had then taken a car and Greyhound bus to Logan Airport, where she and her mother now planned to travel back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It had occurred to her at some point, she illustrated, that perhaps there might be a problem with transporting this knife onto an airplane and, in order to avoid having her baggage seized, decided that the best course of action would be to pack the item in carry-on and then retrieve it, to reveal to the TSA personnel, so that, with her accompanying explanation, they need not be alarmed about her bringing it on-board. However, at the point of her brandishing a dagger illegal in the state of Massachusetts in an international airport, things soured quite suddenly and the authorities were contacted. When agents arrived, in the guise of a small group of Hari-Krishnas, events found Ms. Gordon in tears over the loss of her dagger, which she claimed was a religious item, and the degradation of her character that accompanied this experience. Strange as it may seem, it is this agent's impression that Ms. Gordon was not engaged in a terrorist act, but was instead acting on a sort of ridiculous, unproved faith in the inherent eagerness of the world to understand her intentions. Naturally though, the file will remain open and very limited surveillance will commence, to protect the government's interests.


3.  October 27, 1994. A thorough background investigation into Tara Gordon received today reveals some troubling items. Apparently, there has been some question as to the patriotism and American values of her family going some ways back throughout their history. Her father's family hails, not insignificantly, from Russia, but her mother's family, although not Bolshevik by lineage, is worse. Apparently, Ms.Gordon's maternal grandfather, one A.Powell Davies, longtime Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., was an antagonist to the government during the years of his peak influence. His FBI file reveals notes stating that Rev. Davies awoke every morning before dawn and worked at a printing press underneath his house, producing Communist propaganda which he would later distribute about the family's neighborhood. (It is noted that his wife, Muriel Davies, was later observed frequently to have said that not only was her husband not a Communist but that he never arose early enough to do anything before dawn.) Evidence of un-American sympathies does not end there, however. Rev. Davies was actively critically from his pulpit, of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his church provided gifts of drawing supplies to the children of Hiroshima following the bombing which ended the war with Japan, a clear act of traitor-ship.
   
   His daughter, Bronwyn Gordon, is perhaps even more questionable if somewhat less influential. On no less than seven separate occasion, a note has been made by TSA employees of Ms. Gordon's behavior when passing through security at airports, her presence at the previously mentioned dagger incident notwithstanding. Her comments have included statements such as "Well, did you find an explosive?," "It's not as if I have a BOMB!" and "If you search my disabled client inappropriately, I will call the police!" It seems that Ms. Gordon also lived for a time with her then husband, Tara's father, in a tepee, on some land that did not belong to either of them, in the state of Washington. Both Rick Gordon and Bronwyn Gordon's presence in Berkeley in the Summer of Love is also a damning piece of evidence against them. At this time, both of them were caught up in notions of  "people's power" and it is suspected that they may have consumed illegal street drugs.
   
   Ms. Tara Gordon herself, the new report reveals, was present at the Gulf War protests in the company of a friend who strongly resembled Jesus Christ but was 6'2" and photographed wearing both a Russian ear hat and a pin bearing the hammer and sickle. This friend later joined the Trotskyist Party and remains, we find, an avid Trotskyist to this day. Ms. Gordon herself at this time referred to herself alternately as a utopian socialist, an anarchist and a faery. Clearly, we must keep a close watch on the activities of Tara Gordon. At some point, she will be caught in act of outright terrorism.


4. March 1, 2012. After close to thirty years of observing this subject, we believe it is finally time to close the file on the 36 year-old woman now dubbed Ms. Tara Adams. After what seemed a disturbing trend toward terrorist socialism at a young age, Ms. Adams has settled into bland normalcy in all of her daily dealings, year after tiresome year. It is noted that she has produced three children of unusually troublesome temperament, but this cannot necessarily be construed as a terrorist act. Periodically, Ms. Adams, or her husband–an outspoken Unitarian in the same vein as her grandfather–will make a remark worthy of notation in this file, but no action ever comes of this, and their activities reveal a pattern of soccer games, vegetable consumption and medical appointments. After Ms. Adams began writing her blog, Faith in Ambiguity, in 2010, it slowly became clear to agents studying her that the initial impressions of field envoys in 1983 were correct. Ms. Adams is clearly a case for psychiatry, but not, it seems, for the FBI. As of today, the file of Ms. Adams is officially closed and all investigation into her bizarre activities will cease.