CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE MOLE

A red, white and blue rainbow arched over his hut when Mamadou Tutu was born. He was a bright boy growing up poor in a third world country. There was no newspaper for a paper route to earn money, so he made his lunch money gambling behind the school before classes began.
More than a few times he was late for school and sometimes never made it at all as the poker pots went up and down depending on lady luck’s whims, and he couldn’t leave till he had won for the day. Sometimes he had to write and sign excuses from his mother saying he’d been too sick to attend school that day.
Mamadou was smart enough to go to college, where his skills at one card stud (they couldn’t afford five card stud in his country) and the two card monty games he set up in the quad between classes paid for his tuition.
Once though the campus cops arrested him for gambling and a letter of reprimand was sent to his parents about it. Soon afterwards though, his parents got another letter from the college president saying it had all been a mistake and Mamadou was just an innocent bystander and to send him a box of cookies to make him feel better. The first letter was from the president, the second one was from Mamadou himself copying the president’s signature.
He graduated from college and then joined the diplomatic corps to get paid to see the world. He felt he was on the fast track to get a top diplomatic job. He was confidant enough to marry his village sweetheart and they proceeded to have four children, a dog and a monkey as pets.
He moved around the world’s embassies and became the chief aid to the ambassador, an important step on the ladder to success. But he stumbled on one of it rungs the night he got smashed on vine wine at the ambassador’s birthday party. Blind drunk he made a pass at the ambassador’s son Dutu, who was dressed in drag for a fraternity initiation.
This passionate encounter consequently turned Dutu into a transvestite, as he was questioning his sexual identity at the time, and it was discovered that there was no fraternity initiation. Dutu eventually joined a sorority instead and became their Queen.
The ambassador was furious and demoted Mamadou to be the aid of an aid. His pay was cut drastically and he was transferred back home. He started gambling again to make ends meet, this time on chicken races.
But his country was so poor that when someone saw a chicken running it would be snatched up immediately, killed and cooked for supper. Consequently, none of the chickens actually made it to the finish line so there was never a winner.
Since the races were his idea, Mamadou soon became a public laughingstock. He had to leave town and country and was transferred to Rome, where he became addicted to pizza and ate out so much he couldn’t pay the bills. His wife was about to leave him, his kids were looking around for another father they could be proud of and his beloved monkey turned against him.
Suddenly he came up with this killer idea. There had been rumors around for years about his country’s sale of uranium to Iraq, so he decided to capitalize on this need to feed into Iraq’s weapons of mass d. His skills from school came forth and he forged some documents showing that Iraq was trying to buy uranium ore from his country Niger in 1999 and 2001. In effect, he became his own mole making up secrets to quench this thirst for terrorist ties.
But his skills had peaked when he forged his mother’s signature on school sick excuses and he had poor equipment. He had to use obsolete letterheads, incompatible dates and poorly forged signatures. In his haste, he even addressed a letter to the president of Niger signed by the president of Niger, and used the wrong symbol for the president’s office.
He took these documents to the Italian secret service and crossed his fingers. Yippee, they bought them for a thousand bucks! He was rich, rich! Mamadou’s terrible forgeries went on to fool both British and American intelligence and actually ended up in President Bush’s State of the Union address and were used as a reason to invade and attack Iraq.
This lowly Niger diplomat, turned mole conman, is now the most famous person the CIA wants to kill, even more so than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Truly, this is a chicken soup for the mole inspirational tale.