Patrick Knowlton Harassment
- Excerpts from an Internet post by Hugh Sprunt, October 30,1995

Shortly after midnight [on October 28, 1995], Ambrose [Evans-Pritchard] called the place where I was staying.... and the householder and I responded to his request. The intimidation of Knowlton had picked up again (people in his building, surveillance on the street, banging on his door again and again, repeated calls to his phone number, etc.) and he asked that Ambrose get him out of there. The three of us met on the street around one in the morning and cruised quite ostentatiously on foot around Knowlton's building. We were pretty obvious due to the hour and the fact that it was raining meant there were few people out and about.

The banging and calls dropped off, so Knowlton called Ambrose right around the beginning of this process and said he thought he should stay in and see how things went. Ambrose told him to pull his phone jack. Ambrose intended to put Knowlton up in his own home which was a brave or foolhardy thing to do since his wife (and kids, apparently) were there too. I kidded around with Ambrose, saying I knew we were safe with him, seeing as how he is an MI6 agent. He replied that I was not quite right - he was really an agent of "MI 7.5" - Welsh Intelligence. . .

After Ambrose left around 1:15 AM, I suggested to my companion that we hang around for a while....

We spotted several folks we thought were part of the surveillance team and decided to do a little harassing of our own. I had a camera (nicely simulating a "full pocket" with a possible weapon in what Chris Ruddy erroneously terms my "flak jacket"....). I was tempted to use it a few times, but didn't want things to get out of hand. No way would I have tried the sorts of things I am about to describe in Arkansas under similar circumstances. . .

We fixed on two guys that were either part of the surveillance team or doing unimaginably weird things. I started fixedly at one fellow as he approached us from 60 feet away. When he pulled abeam to my left (engaged) side, I followed with my eyes and shouted a loud "Hi!" right at him. No reaction, except that he turned into a hotel near Knowlton's building and ran down into the basement (he had been in and out of this building and Knowlton's building several times over the prior fifteen minutes). My companion hung around in the lobby of the hotel for a while, but this fellow did not resurface.

We then turned out attention to the second person we felt was keeping Knowlton's building under surveillance (there were other candidates, but we thought these were the "best" two - remember we might have been wrong). This fellow was on the opposite side of the street standing near a bar or similar establishment. From time to time, he made an effort to hail a cab, but his arm always went up late and, for the direction he wanted to go, he was on the wrong side of the street.

After watching what appeared to be a blatant charade of cab-hailing for some minutes, I asked my companion to flag down a cab on our side of the street and direct it to the fellow on the opposite side of the street ("Gee, see the poor guy over there? He has been trying to hail a cab for fifteen minutes with no luck, why don't you do a U-turn and go over and pick him up?"). Well, the cab did so, stopped by the guy, and he was so surprised he sent it away!

Then after a minute or two feeling stupid (I guess) he realized he should really get into a cab, so he did so, taking one in the opposite direction from the direction he had been trying to hail a cab for. Well, I'm no pro, but true "pavement artists" these guys definitely were not! I like to think we did a little good, but there is no objective proof we did. Knowlton did pass a quiet night and I later passed on descriptions of the two folks we played around with on to Ambrose....

I would have just as soon gotten Knowlton out of there, but at least the harassment stopped for the night. I remember telling my companion that we would have to watch our wording if we were buzzed in to extract Mr. Knowlton. We decided that it would be poor wording to tell Mr. Knowlton through his door, "Mr. Knowlton, we're here to take you out."