Truth And Reason Upside Down

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr

Just when the CIA thought the scandal season was over, along comes Stamp-scam. Though it has none of the drama of arms-for-hostages trades or covert wars in Central America, this latest caper centers on the appropriation of a valuable rarity: 95 misprinted U.S. postage stamps that could be worth thousands of dollars each.

The scheme apparently began on March 27, 1986, when a CIA employee on Government business bought 95 $1 stamps at the McLean, Va., post office. The image on the stamps was an austere candlestick; the inscription read AMERICA'S LIGHT FUELED BY TRUTH AND REASON. At CIA headquarters in Langley, a clerk , noticed that an orange halo that should have surrounded the candle flame was instead printed in the lower right-hand corner. The curiosity was shown to several co-workers; one of them was a philatelist who realized that the misprints were collectors' items.

Ordinary stamps were then substituted for the valuable ones. Six days later, 85 of the misprints were sold through a New Jersey dealer, Jacques Schiff. (The CIA staffers had attempted to sell 86, but one of the stamps was torn and, consequently, worthless.) A well-known trader of misprinted stamps, Schiff refuses to disclose how much the spooks were paid for their goods. Since then, however, Schiff has brokered three sales of the stamps. In the last transaction, 50 stamps were sold to the Mystic Stamp Co. for nearly $1 million, or $20,000 a stamp.

The nine CIA staffers involved later told investigators for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing that the nine other stamps they acquired were sent out on agency mail. Skeptics, however, believe that each of the employees kept a single stamp for himself. Jim Ellenberg, owner of a stamp- and coin-collecting shop in suburban Washington, insists he recently gained possession of one of the inverted candlestick stamps from a CIA man. Says Bill Bergstrom, office manager of the Schiff firm: "It is obvious one, all or some ((of the CIA workers)) were holding the rest."

The CIA will not say whether it has launched an internal investigation of the stamp switch, and so far there is no indication that the Justice Department has been asked to look into it. But if probers were to find that the nine staffers had illegally converted Government assets for personal use, the workers could face criminal indictment.

The candlestick goof apparently occurred on a single sheet of 400 stamps. The orange glow of the candle flame was printed first through a photo-offset process. After a random quality-control inspection, the sheet was reversed so that the candlestick and the words surrounding it were printed upside down. Of 100 erroneous stamps sent to the McLean post office, five are believed to have been sold to the public before the CIA purchase. The whereabouts of those five stamps remains unknown.

And the other 300 imperfect candlesticks? According to Charles Yeager, Washington correspondent for the weekly Linn's Stamp News, those rarities are circulating somewhere in the American heartland. "If I lived in the Midwest," says Yeager, "I'd go down to my local post office and have a look."

Conspiracy theorists can have a field day with Stampscam. Was it mere coincidence that 100 rare stamps were dispatched to the McLean post office, which is used by the CIA, while the other 300 misprinted candlesticks were shipped hundreds of miles away? Was it further coincidence that of all the customers at the post office, a CIA employee happened to buy the valuable issue? Why stop there: Could it be that profits from the stamp sales were being diverted to the contras? Or was the money being used to fund "off-the- shelf" covert activities? What did the Postmaster General know about the misprints? And when did he know it?

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington