Man Of Mystery 

Bannon, a 39-year-old husband and father, comes across as a perfectly nice and pleasant fellow. He taught computer science at colleges in Greensboro and Raleigh for about four years before moving to Charlotte in 2000 to take a job at Information Architects, which went belly-up last year. This, of course, makes his cloak and dagger claims that much harder to swallow. But then again, how are secret agents and assassins supposed to act? And what do they typically do once they retire? Maybe they're all as seemingly normal and affable as Bannon, who also claims to have black belts in hapkido and kendo, and to speak fluent Korean and Japanese. If Bannon is making it all up, he's pretty adept at deception. He's also gone to a lot of trouble -- radio and newspaper interviews, book signings, producing copious (if somewhat oblique) documents, not to mention committing to memory a catalogue of names, places and events. And for what? He's not getting rich from the book's publication. However, he is receiving increasing attention. Since the book was released last month, he's reaped a growing amount of both local and national media coverage. Some have dismissed Bannon's story as outright fantasy, and say he's little more than a Chuck Barris wannabe (the host of the 1970s Gong Show who claims he was also a CIA assassin), and a slightly unhinged guy who craves the spotlight. Others believe Bannon is telling the truth -- that he was an actual international secret agent and assassin who has decided to come clean. So is he the real deal or a delusional fraud? You be the judge. From Missionary to Assassin
We met at a local restaurant, and as he downed one Diet Coke after another, Bannon, sharply dressed in a black suit, balding, and a little soft around the middle, told me his tale of international intrigue. Folks sitting nearby exchanged surprised looks and craned their necks to listen as Bannon related story after story of riots, prisons, assassinations, lost loves, torture and child pornographers. This is his version of events.

Bannon was born in Spokane, WA, and from an early age was involved in The Church of Latter Day Saints. It was through his involvement with the church that Bannon traveled to South Korea to do missionary work.

After he arrived in South Korea, Bannon was caught up in Korea's deadly Kwangju student riots in 1981. "The riots were very violent, and some 2,500 people were killed before American troops and the Republic of Korea took the city back," Bannon says.

While helping treat some of the wounded at a Korean school, Bannon was attacked by a rioter, who stabbed him in the back with a long knife. Using his martial arts training, Bannon snapped his attacker's neck, killing him instantly. Bannon, badly wounded in the fight, spent nearly a month recuperating in the Chonju Presbyterian Hospital. When it came time for Bannon to return to missionary life, he says his experiences during the riots left him confused.

"I had to deal with the fact that here I am at 18, and I've taken someone else's life," he says. "I had all these conflicting emotions that were playing havoc with me."

Bannon began to pull away from the mission life, and fell in with a group of smugglers. He was dealing with mostly innocuous contraband -- liquor, magazines, candy -- and it was a quick and easy way to make some money. But his stint in smuggling soon brought him into contact with some criminals who tried to rip him off. A fight ensued, and Bannon was thrown into Korea's infamous Taejon Prison, "home" to many political prisoners.

A few months into his sentence, Bannon was prematurely and mysteriously released. Waiting outside the prison for him was Commissaire Jacques Defferre of Interpol's national headquarters in Lyon, France. Defferre had heard about Bannon's bravery during the Kwangju riots, and thought he might prove useful. "The way Defferre laid it out to me was that he needed a snitch, and I was going to be it or I could go back to jail," Bannon says. "He knew I had connections as a smuggler, and he wanted me to use those connections to get him information."

Thus, says Bannon, began his career with Interpol. He was given a "legend" --essentially an in-depth cover identity -- and started working as a low-level informant. "They set me up in this apartment; I had a salary; I was traveling to France, and I was 19! I thought it was the coolest thing in the world."

Bannon soon proved himself as intelligent, capable and a quick learner. His martial arts skills and fluency in Korean and Japanese also made him valuable. Interpol began assigning him to more sensitive cases.

During this time, he met and fell in love with Sidelle Rimbaud, a beautiful French Direction de Surveillance du Territorie (DST) agent, who specialized in countering illegal drug trade, organized crime and arms proliferation. The couple moved into a small French villa, and made plans to marry. However, in 1982, Bannon, along with Rimbaud and a Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) agent named Lee Hyung-Jin, was assigned to break up a group of North Koreans who were smuggling child porn to fund their terrorist cell. After weeks of surveillance, the teams descended upon a warehouse in Marseilles, where several of the terrorists were hiding. A vicious shootout followed, and Rimbaud was fatally shot in the chest and neck.

Bannon was devastated, but also furious and hungry for revenge. He says Interpol capitalized on his desperate frame of mind, and recruited him for Archangel, a secret branch of Interpol designed specifically to hunt those who traffic in children and kiddie porn. Bannon was given an intensive psychiatric exam, which determined he had the right combination of aggression and empathy to work as an Archangel operative.

"Archangel wanted someone with a tendency to accept violence as a solution to conflict," Bannon says. "However, that had to be weighed with a strong ethical base. In other words, someone who could both negotiate with people and slap them around. I seemed to fit that profile."

He was soon sent to a giant warehouse outside Lyon, France, where he underwent an intensive training regimen to prepare for the many dark and dangerous deeds he would be asked to do. Bannon rose each morning at 5:30am, and with a few other agents underwent rigorous exercises and weight training. This was followed by classes in unarmed combat and gruesome assassination techniques using fighting knives and stilettos. Bannon soon discovered that he had a knack for bladed weapons. His specialty was known as "wet work," or close-quarter, quiet assassinations.

Bannon said he was also shown horrific images of child pornography, rape and torture.

"This was the propaganda they used," he says. "To create this demonic Other, and encourage this sense of outrage in us and convince us that we were part of something bigger than ourselves. That we were the only ones who could possibly stop these villians."

Bannon was also tutored in international business lingo and practices, which would enable him to blend into the corporate world with ease, as his legends would often require. He went through grueling interrogations where he was drilled again and again on minute details of different legends. In the dangerous world of Archangel, one little slip-up could mean certain death. After three months of this type of extreme physical and mental training, it was time to go to work.

Cleaning House
Bannon's first "cleaning assignment" took place in Romania. His target was "James," a known child molester who dealt in child prostitution and pornography. Bannon's legend was that of a young executive from a global company looking for cheap Romanian labor.

Bannon located James, who posed as an import/export broker, at his Romanian office. For several days Bannon shadowed James, and eventually followed him to Transylvania, where James took a tour of Bran Castle, better known as Castle Dracula, a big tourist trap in Romania. With Bannon looking on, James was approached by a middle-aged Romanian, and the two men left the castle together. Bannon followed the men through a network of alleys, and finally to a parked car. After James handed over a wad of cash, the other man opened the car door and pulled out a young girl. Bannon sprang into action. A quick strike to the throat of the Romanian, and a thrust of his utility knife into the heart of James, and both men lay dead.

Bannon says he spent the remainder of that evening curled up in the corner of his Romanian hotel room.

"Here was this little girl who I helped save," Bannon says. "On the other hand, when you felt the dull, throbbing horror of taking another person's life, it's hard to feel justified. It was a bizarre mix."

Archangel continued to send Bannon on investigations and "cleaning assignments" all over the world, the exact number of which Bannon won't say. But the first few years -- the early to mid-80s -- were the most intense and active.

However, it wasn't all work. In 1983, Bannon began dating "Shin," a beautiful Korean performance artist who lived in Seoul. Although a romance flourished, Bannon kept his true identity a secret, telling her he was a Canadian businessman. The two had been dating only a couple of months when Shin disappeared while in Osaka, Japan, for a performance gig. Using his Archangel connections with the Japanese yakuza, or mafia, Bannon learned that Shin was last seen in a small Japanese village called Yonago, where a known violent fetishist was bragging that he had graphic sexual pictures of a Korean woman. Bannon and his contact tracked the man to a small farm, where they found him working in the fields. While Bannon searched the farmer's house, his partner approached the suspect and started asking him questions. When Bannon heard the two men struggling outside, he grabbed a baseball bat and sprinted toward the commotion. His partner was badly hurt, and the farmer's arm was broken. Bannon, after an intense struggle, finally dropped his adversary with a blow to the neck using the bat. His partner finished the job with a hatchet.

After the fight, Bannon searched the farmer's house for his girlfriend. Eventually he found Shin. She had been dismembered and stuffed in a freezer.

It was also during this time that Bannon investigated a North Korean terrorist who also happened to be a double agent and longtime friend. He intercepted her as she was about to plant a bomb outside a South Korean national security agency. Before she could execute her plan, Bannon used lethal force to stop her. As he stood over her body, he was struck from behind and knocked unconscious. He awoke in the back of a truck as it approached Korea's Taejon Prison. Bannon says that as the truck pulled up to the prison's front gates, he noticed "wild dogs and pigs gnawing on corpses that were buried under piles of rock and stone." Bannon was stripped naked and detained with thousands of other prisoners. During this time he was tortured and interrogated, and witnessed horrors such as people being tossed alive into furnaces, or attacked by dogs. Bannon says his Archangel training prevented him from losing his mind during the ordeal. After three days, Bannon was returned to Interpol officials in what he calls a "classic spy swap."

Archangel was disbanded in 1989.

"Officials felt Archangel was guilty of vigilantism," Bannon says. "However, the head of Archangel still had a number of operatives that he wanted to slowly work into legitimate work, including me."

Bannon continued to work as an operative for Interpol for the next 10 years, investigating several high profile cases, including the famous raids on the Wonderland Club in "98. In a sophisticated operation, police arrested over 100 people from 12 different countries who belonged to a club in which the guidelines stated that members had to have at least 10,000 sexual pictures of children under the age of 13.

Finally, in "99, Bannon had had enough.

"I wasn't as young as I used to be, I had a daughter, it just wasn't working for me," Bannon says. "I did what a lot of people do when they want to get fired I got really lame at my job. I showed up late, I wouldn't return calls, and it worked."

Returning to mainstream society, however, wasn't easy. "It was like I had post-traumatic stress disorder," Bannon says. "I was almost incapable of functioning in normal society. I couldn't talk about what I did, and everyone I met I was trying to assess if they were child molesters. . . From the day I was recruited into Archangel, I lived in fear. In my book, I purposely wrote about events that happened 20 years ago. So many of those people are dead or in jail or just don't care anymore. I skipped over pretty quickly the events of recent years. I'm not ready to share those just yet."

Where's the Beef?
An amazing story, right? An amazing, incredible, edge-of-your-seat, holy shit kind of story. But is it true? Or is it all just the fantasies of a middle-aged, mild-mannered computer geek? And if it's true, why isn't it making headlines around the world?

A quote from a recent Publishers Weekly review might be one reason: ". . .if there is any truth to be found in this story, his former collaborators on both sides of the law must be allowing its publication only because they realize how completely implausible it all sounds."

Indeed, Bannon's biggest drawback is that he has too good a story. Nonetheless, plenty of folks, including members of the local media (not to mention dozens of starry-eyed fans who showed up at Bannon's recent Borders book signing) believe he's the real deal.

Charlotte Observer reporter Olivia Fortson, who wrote a story about Bannon, says she believes him 100 percent.

Ramona Holloway, who, along with on-air partner Matt Harris (the "Matt and Ramona" show on 107.9 The Link) interviewed Bannon, believes him as well. "Matt is a little skeptical," she says. "But I buy his story hook, line and sinker."

In Creative Loafing's attempt to get to the bottom of the whole saga, we did the obvious asked for evidence. Bannon and his publisher supplied CL with reams of documents, most of them ancillary copies of news magazine and website stories about Interpol and the fact that the agency targets terrorists and child pornographers; no mention was made, however, of killings by Interpol agents. The publisher also provided some rather oblique documents showing what they allege to be Korean bank statements showing money given to Bannon by Interpol, as well as alleged Interpol papers "seeking to recruit a Crime Intelligence Officer for its Trafficking in Humans Crime Sub-Directorate." The recruitment documents are so specific they even include working hours: "37 1/2 hours a week with a 45-minute lunch break." They were all documents that we or anyone else could have typed up at the office with the help of a Korean dictionary and some creative government doublespeak. There was really nothing conclusive about any of it -- no official Interpol seal, no signature, nothing.

Lynda Hatch, publicity director of New Horizon Press, Bannon's publisher, says that given the clandestine nature of Bannon's assignments, the "trail of evidence is sometimes murky and indistinct," and that "the organization (Interpol) will claim no knowledge of him."

Hatch is right. We contacted Michael Rose, chief press officer for Interpol in Lyon, France. (To date, it appears that CL is the only media outlet to have contacted Interpol to get their reaction to Bannon's book.) When asked to confirm or deny if Bannon had ever worked for Interpol, Rose responded with this official statement:

"Interpol's General Secretariat in Lyon has no record of David Race Bannon having been employed and no knowledge of individuals mentioned in Mr. Bannon's book. Interpol exists to facilitate the exchange of information between the world's law enforcement agencies and to provide analysis of criminal data and other services. Accordingly, if the claims in Mr. Bannon's book are in fact as have been reported to Interpol, they can only be seen as deceptive and irresponsible fantasy."

Bannon says he expected nothing less from Interpol.

"The official Interpol stance has always been that they're really nothing more than a clearing house of data," Bannon says. "It's so simplistic it's almost funny --that they're nothing more than a giant computer. Then why do they need this vast network across 170-plus countries with officers all over the world?" Bannon says the only way to really support his story is through the testimony of others.

CL tried that route as well. In his book, Bannon writes often about Lee Hyung-Jin, who Bannon says is a longtime friend and Korean NIS agent he worked with on many cases. There is a testimonial signed by a Hyung-Jin in Bannon's book, which, in broken English, essentially supports Bannon's story. At our prompting, Bannon said he contacted Hyung-Jin, who he says is now a college professor in South Korea, and asked him to contact us. A few days later, I received an email from a Hyung-Jin that, again, in broken English, backed up Bannon's story, saying his book was "sad but true," and even though he lived a "careful life with a college job," he would talk to CL for the story. In his email, Hyung-Jin indicated Bannon had forwarded him my number, and he would call. I responded and asked what day and time would best fit his schedule. I never heard from him again.

There's also a testimonial in Bannon's book from Jacques Defferre, the man Bannon claims recruited him into Interpol. Bannon said he contacted Defferre and asked him if he could contact CL for this story. Moreover, Fortson of the Observer received an email from Defferre, which she quoted in her story, saying he was angry with Bannon for telling everything to an "unforgiving world," but that Bannon "must write the truth as he must breathe, it is his nature." Fortson, who never spoke to Defferre in person, also forwarded my contact information to Defferre via email. I never heard from him. In fact, CL still doesn't really have any proof that Defferre or Hyung-Jin actually exists.

Bannon has also written several stories for Kungfu Qigong magazine, including one in the November/December 2001 issue about his involvement in the Wonderland Club arrests. In that story, Bannon, using a knife and baton, busted into a hotel room and rescued an 8-year-old girl who had been kidnapped by members of the child pornography network. After the story was published, several people wrote letters to the magazine, some saying the story was absolute hogwash, and others --including, yes, Hyung-Jin and Defferre -- to commend Bannon on a job well done. We tried to contact Martha Burr, who was executive editor of Kungfu Qignong at the time, to ask if she believed Bannon's story. Associate Editor Gene Ching responded, and informed us that Burr no longer worked for the magazine. When we asked Ching if he believed Bannon, he replied, "To be honest, I don't really know. I've never really interacted with Bannon personally so I haven't formed an opinion of him either way. When that article was published we had a few skeptics, but we also had many supporters contact us. I will be very interested in your findings."

Bottom line, Bannon was unable to produce a single document or piece of evidence to prove his claims. But then again, no one has yet to produce a piece of evidence that disproves his story. There is, in fact, no "smoking gun" from either side.

"I wish there were," Bannon says. "It's certainly legitimate for people to ask if this is all real or not. But in the end, people are just going to have to make up their own mind."

Contact Sam Boykin at 704-944-3623 or sam.boykin@cln.com