A Plea from a Colleague

Mrs. A had her pastor in Toronto contact Popoff. In October 1983, he wrote Popoff that... the problem is that three years ago [Mrs. A] began to support your ministry with funds that she was siphoning off from a savings account that her husband had put in her name. That account was not her money, simply in her name and supposed to be accumulating towards the purchase of a vehicle. When she began to receive your very direct, compelling, “personal” letters, she took this money ... and sent it to you.... It is unfortunate that your ministry did not demonstrate enough character or class to even as much as reply ... especially from one of the “faithful” who had given so much. Your actions have called into question the integrity of your ministry, and the integrity of the gospel.

The pastor went on to say that, unless some reasonable answer was received, he would have to go to the Canadian solicitor general for satisfaction. Because this pastor and the church he represented are now out of business, we cannot know what, if anything, was the result of that threat. My guess is that Popoff didn’t think twice about it. Mrs. A then attended a Popoff crusade in Toronto, hoping to contact Popoff and make her plea in person. The Sherrills told us that at that crusade Reeford was under strict orders from Popoff not to allow this woman near him under any circumstances. In contrast, they expected another woman to be there who had donated handsomely to the ministry and was likely to continue doing so. Reeford was instructed to find this woman by any means possible and to conduct her backstage into Peter’s presence immediately.

A Similar Case in Chicago

In November 1983, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko wrote about an elderly woman there who had sent Popoff her life savings of $21,000. At that time, Popoff was pleading for money to enable him to send Russian Bibles into the Soviet Union by balloons, a scheme mentioned earlier. As with the woman in Canada, this victim needed some of that money returned, but Popoff refused to do so. Perhaps she had been persuaded to give the money by a Chicago Tribune article that had appeared a year previously. It was titled “Air Strike Hits Moscow With Barrage of Bibles.” The piece by reporter Ronald Yates, quoted Popoff and his assistant Volmer Thrane as saying that they had launched 13,500 Russian Bibles from Finland aboard 700 9-foot balloons, which he claimed then floated over the border into Russia. Said Thrane:We used a formula to figure out just how far the balloons would carry. We didn’t want them to go directly into the Kremlin, just to the outskirts.

That’s quite a feat. Thrane was able to launch this armada at just the right moment so that the balloons would pop over the Moscow suburbs 550 miles away (Thrane said it was 700 miles) and deliver the cargo safely! That same newspaper article was used by Popoff more than five years later, in a January 27, 1987, mailing. On a gold-sealed letter, he had printed: Partner, The things inside this letter cannot become public knowledge or they will jeopardize our outreach to the underground church behind the Iron Curtain. I send this letter to you as my very special inner circle friend in confidence. Partner, don’t break the seal until you hold this letter in your hands and pray ... The things I am about to share with you I cannot share with just anyone. I cannot write everyone this, only a very FEW SPECIAL ONES LIKE YOU who the Lord has very specifically put on my heart.... Partner, you are on [sic] of my closest friends and therefore I want to share my vision with you.... What I have written you in this letter cannot go public because any publicity will greatly hinder our effectiveness. That is why I am writing to you in the strictest confidence.

After putting in another overdone plea for money, Popoff insulted his victims’ intelligence with this ridiculous statement:I will go to my mail box daily TO LOOK FOR YOUR IMPORTANT LETTER. Your letter is MOST IMPORTANT TO ME AT THIS TIME because the Lord commanded me to write you. Don’t put this letter down until you answer it.

That picture of Peter Popoff going to his “mail box” every day is pretty funny when you realize that he was receiving his mail in huge 100-pound sacks. The impression he created with those words was of an impoverished preacher sorting through a handful of mail looking for one specific letter containing a donation sufficient to pay for the Russian Bible delivery. I also find it hard to accept that God personally chose the recipient of that particular letter for Popoff to write to. Especially because I was that recipient! Inside the gold-sealed envelope was the Chicago Tribune article. Well, almost. The Reverend Popoff had carefully edited it, omitting anything that would date it—along with his age—and cutting it down to about a quarter of the original length, because so much of the text betrayed its vintage. Notice that this information, published in a major newspaper five years earlier, was so secret that Popoff could share it only with his 100,000-person mailing list, all of whom were his “closest friends.” During the years that he developed the Russian Bible scheme, Popoff told his faithful that he was planning to charter a 747 jet loaded with the balloons which would waft the Bibles across Russia and drop them over Moscow, and also postulated a wild plan that would float styrofoam rafts across the Baltic Sea loaded with the Bibles. His third idea, to set hundreds of Bible-bearing balloons loose from Finland and drop them in a specific location—the suburbs of Moscow—by calculating altitude, direction, and velocity of prevailing winds, was the plan finally decided upon. No thought was given to the inescapable international fuss that would most certainly result, and the faithful accepted Popoff’s Rube Goldberg plan as a big winner.