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Click the photo! All my life I've hesitated to "blow my own horn" because of my former undercover work. But I suppose family and other people now have a right to know about me and my family background. We know more than we ever wanted to know about the disgusting American political scene, which has finally compelled me to speak out.
Many famous Americans (plus some infamous ones, and tens of thousands of just plain, ordinary folks) are included among my ancestors. Several U.S. Presidents, the two leading Civil War Union Generals, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a governor, and the first woman whose face is on U.S. money are among them. I can honestly claim that I was born when my "uncle" Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House, and I semi-retired when my "cousin" George W. Bush was in the White House (see my Mom at a pre-innaugural dinner with him).
My family lived in Zion IL when I was born, the fourth child of what would become six children. The three older children were born before WWII, I was born in the middle of that war, and two more were born after the war. My dad was an extremely talented accountant and became CFO of a munitions factory during the war. In 1949, we moved to Aurora CO, which was then a tiny settlement of about 3,000 people with miles of open prairie between it and Denver. Today, after being the fastest-growing city in the U.S. for several years, Aurora's population is about 375,000 souls and it encircles the north, east, and south sides of Denver. We first attended a Presbyterian church on Vine Street in Denver, but after a few years we switched to a Baptist church in Aurora.
As it turned out, that Presbyterian church was the one visited by Russian Orthodox Bishop Tikhon in the early 1900s and it has now become a Western-rite Orthodox church! Bishop Tikhon, who later became Patriarch of Russia during the early Soviet period and was finally starved to death by the Bolsheviks while placed under house arrest by them, played the leading role in the "Tikhonovite Catacomb Church", and you will see how it played a large part in my later life.
Dad had started his own public accounting firm in Denver, being one of the very first to use time-sharing services of early computers. Thus began my early interest in computing. When I was about seven, I and several other neighborhood children were molested by a homosexual neighbor and he was sent to prison. As it turned out, a "girlfriend" from the munitions factory had followed Dad to Denver and rented an apartment in the same building as his office. For about a six-month period, Dad left our family and lived with that woman, but finally re-united with our mother. Mom must have been praying real hard for her six children because all of them have spent years in full-time Christian service – including a combined 110+ years of missionary service – and all have remained faithful to their spouses, no affairs or divorces. With these incidents and with what I was to learn about later, I began to understand the devastating effect of disordered sexual behavior on family, neighborhoods, and wider society.
My father changed his ways, became treasurer of our Baptist church, Scoutmaster, and treasurer of the Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver. With just a high school diploma and some courses in accounting, he hired and fired CPAs, and through studying in the evenings he passed the CPA exams and was grandfathered in as a CPA that normally requires a four-year accounting degree. But he began showing signs of manic-depressive syndrome, attempted suicide once and I had to accompany him in the ambulance to the hospital. He had a difficult time running his business after that, with his high and low mood swings, and for various stretches of time was in and out of hospital, unable to work.
In high school, I studied two years of German, two years of bookkeeping, and two years of pre-architecture, earning A's in those subjects, but our family had no money to send me to college. Toward the end of my senior year, my high school guidance counselor had quietly arranged for me to be granted a college scholarship and called a senior assembly to announce it along with the others chosen for National Honor Society, but I refused to go up to the stage. They called the assembly two more times and each time I stayed in my seat. When she called me to her office, I explained that I couldn't accept it because I had already enlisted in the Army. The day after high school graduation, I flew off to Army basic training and then was sent to language school to become a Russian interpreter. If I had accepted that scholarship, none of the following life events would have ever happened.
Check me out, I had a Top Secret-Crypto security clearance when I served with the Army Security Agency, the military's branch of the NSA, I have an honorable discharge, and never knowingly or unknowingly divulged any classified information, like some politicians have. After three years in the Army, I went to University of Colorado - Boulder and earned a B.A. degree in "Central and East European Studies" - an area studies major consisting of Russian, German, and French languages, Russian and Central European history and Political Science, International Law and Politics, and Geography of that area. I became president of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter, where I met my wife-to-be who was its secretary and we were married just before our senior year. I graduated in three years with a 3.4 GPA and passed the written exam for Foreign Service Officers but didn't pass the oral exam because of my pacifist views. Then I was accepted for doctoral studies in Russian history at University of Wisconsin - Madison, but dropped out when my father was killed in an auto crash... probably suicide because that morning he said he was going to do it, but because he didn't leave a suicide note, it was ruled an accident. Dr. Vernon Grounds, dean of the Conservative Baptist Seminary in Denver where Dad had been Treasurer, conducted his funeral.
After I worked for two years in the insurance business, my wife Cheryl and I joined a mission agency in Toronto, Canada. It was focused on bringing Bibles, New Testaments and other Christian literature into the Soviet Union and they recruited me because of my knowledge of Russian, but I ended up learning how to run their offset press to print their fundraising newsletter and other literature. Their Russian expert and my mentor was Ivan Kaleinikovich Huk, who had been mentored by Ivan Stepanovich Prokhanov, the founder of the All-Russian Union of Evangelical Christians in 1909. Prokhanov stayed in the USSR after the 1917 revolution to lead that organization, but in 1928 had to emigrate and eventually became a U.S. citizen. Rob, our first child, was born in Toronto in 1970.
After a year in Toronto, we decided to move to Vienna, Austria "where the action was" to work with Jacob Bergen, the first missionary there just after the Soviet Red Army gave up its occupation of that city on May 4, 1953. I edited and published several Christian booklets for him in various Central European languages. During that time in Vienna, we became acquainted with a much larger team that brought tens of millions of Bibles, New Testaments and other Christian books behind the Iron Curtain, brought manuscripts back to the West to be published, and trained Christian leaders in the eastern bloc countries. We joined that team and I edited and proofread many of those books for publication. On one trip behind the Iron Curtain we met with one of our contacts, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who later became Pope John Paul II. I also took a Russian typewriter and equipment for an underground press into the East to pass on to Russian Christians. When President Nixon later visited the one official Baptist church in Moscow, some unregistered Baptists handed him a bouquet of roses that contained two New Testaments printed on that underground press.
I was also contacted by Michael Bourdeaux of Keston Institute to translate Russian documents brought out of the USSR. One was "To All Christians of the World" by Georgi Vins, leader of the unregistered Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the USSR, who was serving a sentence in a Siberian labor camp for his faith. This petition was published in The Times of London, in The New York Times, and in The Los Angeles Times, as well as many other newspapers all over the world. In addition, I translated for Michael Bourdeaux "The Sifting of Earthly Sufferings" - labor camp memoirs of Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov, a leading Russian Orthodox writer and dissident. Several of our coworkers were arrested and held in communist prisons, one in the infamous KGB Liublianka prison in Moscow and was interrogated every day for six months; four or five were killed in the Eastern bloc countries, but I was arrested only once and was let go.
Just after our daughter Tanya was born in Austria, my wife Cheryl and I returned with our children to the U.S. in 1973 and I set up "Christian Action Inc." - a mission support organization to publicize and support Christians living under communism. We campaigned specifically for the release from Siberian labor camp of Georgi Vins, who was finally freed on a Friday, flown to Moscow on Saturday where he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and on Sunday was having breakfast with President Jimmy Carter in the White House, having been exchanged for two Soviet spies. We later met him in person in the U.S. Michael Bourdeaux was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1984, right after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1983. The Templeton Prize, although less well-known, is a larger cash reward than the Nobel Prizes. I will wait to receive my reward in heaven. Our Vienna team had given me a list of their contacts in the East for safekeeping in case Vienna might be overtaken again by the Soviet armies. When the Iron Curtain came down and those communist regimes collapsed, I was amazed to see that the names of over half of the new leaders of those liberated countries were on that list in my desk!
After returning to the U.S., I enrolled in technical college to study programming and graduated with a 4.0 GPA. Even before graduation, I was hired on my first job interview, advanced quickly, and after managing a software project that handled about $100 million in annual cash flow, I became an independent software consultant, quadrupling my first IT job's salary. I have written several programs that worked flawlessly the first time they were run – something that most programmers never do even once in their entire career. While managing a software project at a health insurance company that processed about $1 billion in annual cash flow, I discovered that the company was violating federal law by miscoding abortions as miscellaneous ob-gyn procedures, so I reported it to my consulting company, saying that I could no longer work at that insurance company which was using federal funds to pay for abortions. I quoted Prov.1:10-16 - "My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, 'Come with us, let's lay in wait for blood; let's lurk secretly for the innocent without cause; Let's swallow them up alive like Sheol, and whole, like those who go down into the pit. We'll find all valuable wealth. We'll fill our houses with spoil. You shall cast your lot among us. We'll all have a common purse.' My son, don't walk in the way with them. Keep your foot from their path, For their feet run to evil. They hurry to shed blood." I explained that the principle of insurance is having a "common purse" so the insurance company was complicit in the killing of unborn babies. My consulting company laughed off my religious objections: "business is business." This effectively ended my career chance for promotion to a management position that I was being considered for, which prompted me to return to mission work - this time just as the USSR was falling apart in 1991.
As it turned out, after my 15-year career in IT, we served in Russia as missionaries during and after the collapse of the USSR for 17 years without the authorities there learning about my previous underground work and translations. There I served as General Editor of Agape-Biblia, a revision of the Russian Bible. Up to now, as I write this in early 2020, I have kept all of this undercover and translation work secret because it could make me a target for revenge assassination by the Russian secret services. After being exiled from the USSR, Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov experienced an "auto accident," run off the road by another car - clearly an assassination attempt by the KGB while living in Switzerland. He finally died in a "drowning accident" in Lake Geneva in 1991. You likely remember the polonium poisoning of the former Soviet spy who had defected to Great Britain, Alexander Litvinenko and the more recent Novicholk nerve agent poisonings of MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as well as of Alexei Navalny.
Since our return home from Russia in late 2007, we officially became Orthodox Christians and I have been writing, emailing, and posting on our websites the "Hosken-News" fortnightly e-newsletter to publicize the condition of Christianity under socialist and secularist governments. We also incorporated Agape Restoration Society to continue our work that we began in Russia with disabled and elderly people. In the past two years, I've experienced some serious health issues involving my heart, skin and colon cancer, cholesterol, blood pressure, and a prostate infection that almost took me away, so I felt it necessary to record the above for posterity.
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