For the first time in its history, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus will present a new show to its audiences without three rings, or two - or even one.

When the 136th edition of the circus opens on Wednesday at the St. Pete Times Forum here in Tampa, where Ringling maintains its winter quarters, the elephants, clowns, aerialists and acrobats will roam an arena floor. In as big a departure, the show will have a story line instead of being simply a cavalcade of acts.

The changes seem to echo the format of the circus's new-age rival, Cirque du Soleil, which in a few decades has grown into as mammoth an enterprise as Ringling Brothers, though the promoters of both shows discourage the comparison. Instead, Kenneth Feld, Ringling's producer and chief executive, attributes the overhaul to market research: The circus's family audiences say their lives are already three-ring circuses, so they want something less distracting. And "they also wanted to connect with a story in an emotional way," Mr. Feld said.

[...] The new production - at $15 million the most expensive Ringling has ever assembled - tries to celebrate the contemporary. A giant video screen will magnify live action on the arena floor, so audiences will get never-before-seen views, "such as the face of the strong man as the Jeep drives over him," Mr. Feld said. It will be presided over by a woman starring in a role that seems very much like a ringmaster's, although Ringling isn't quite calling her that. In southwest Florida's tight-knit community of active and retired circus performers, speculation about the new show has been building for weeks.

Feverish Internet bulletins dubbed it "the secret circus" after the rehearsal arena at the Florida State Fairgrounds was uncharacteristically locked down after Thanksgiving. Performers passed through tight security only after signing confidentiality agreements.

The overhaul was not a response to business reverses, Mr. Feld insisted. He refused to confirm published reports that his privately held show has annual revenues of $600 million, saying only that business "has been very good."

[...] Building the circus around a story line is also meant to invite the audience in. The conceit is that a family of four is plucked out of the crowds to achieve its circus dreams. (The family members are, of course, shills, who soon surprise the audience by doing extraordinary things, since they are actually skilled performers.) The plot turns on the fortunes of the family's 8-year-old son, a role sufficiently demanding to require the efforts of four different young, look-alike acrobats, who spell one another in performance.

"Front door open," a robotic voice warns whenever anyone enters the home of author Jan Pottker, who lives in a deeply wooded corner of Potomac. The elaborate security system doesn't seem out of the ordinary, at first -- life in a prosperous suburb requires a measure of caution.

Then Pottker starts talking about seeing strange cars lingering on her street and hearing odd noises on her phone line. And how she discovered that many things in her secluded little world were not as they seemed. For years, covert operatives monitored her activities: her book and magazine projects, her travel plans, even her hair appointments.

It was like something out of "The Truman Show," says Pottker, a petite, soft-featured woman of 57. "I'll never get the years back that they were in my life." Then, her voice rises in anger: "They had no right to interfere with my life."

She is sitting in the stillness of her high-ceilinged home with her husband, Andrew Fishel, also 57, who has the placid manner of a longtime federal bureaucrat (which he is). "You feel that your life has been kidnapped in a sense, and you didn't know it," he says evenly. "Potentially all of your intimate thoughts and activities have been shared with someone who is out for vengeance against you."

You might expect such statements from delusional types who inhabit park benches wearing tinfoil hats. But Pottker and Fishel -- married 36 years, holders of doctoral degrees, accomplished people -- can easily justify their paranoia. The infiltration of their lives, it turns out, was overseen by the former head of worldwide covert operations for the CIA, an Iran-contra scandal figure named Clair E. George. They have documented as much in a lawsuit.

But who would possibly care about what this utterly normal couple was doing?

Clues lead to Feld Entertainment in Tysons Corner, the headquarters of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. It is owned by a megamillionare who prides himself on operating a business devoted to family fun and all-American values. He runs the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Step right up, folks: It's the weirdest show on Earth.

The tale begins on a summer day 15 years ago when CEO Kenneth Feld opened his copy of Regardie's, a slick magazine that covered the Washington business scene. He turned to Page 44 and began reading a lengthy article about himself. It was written by Pottker, a freelancer who had once interviewed him for a book about corporate heirs.

Headlined "The Family Circus," the piece began flatteringly enough, portraying Feld as a hands-on executive committed to providing quality entertainment.

"Just like his father before him, Ken Feld has saved an American institution," Pottker wrote. What's more, he had doubled the revenue of his privately held company with a wholesome, magical touch that extended beyond the circus to Feld Entertainment's Disney on Ice productions and Vegas shows.

But as he read on, the business mogul grew livid. The article also unearthed family secrets that had been whispered about in Washington for decades:

Feld's late father, Irvin -- a legendary impresario, a man he revered, and from whom he'd inherited the circus -- was a closeted homosexual, the article claimed. ("An absolute lie," Feld would later say.) It implied that his mother killed herself because she couldn't change Irvin's sexual orientation and viewed herself as a failure, "both as a woman and as a wife." It portrayed Ken Feld himself as a tightwad who callously cut his only sibling, Karen, out of the family fortune.

The aggrieved CEO could have picked up the phone and complained to Bill Regardie, publisher of the now-defunct, 60,000-circulation magazine. They traveled in the same elite social circles and shared a nodding acquaintance. Regardie says he would have happily given Feld a couple of pages of space to vent in the next issue. But Regardie never heard from him; neither did any of the magazine's editors.

Feld also could have called Pottker and chewed her out. He could have threatened a lawsuit. He didn't.

Instead Feld, who once described himself to a reporter as "very much the kind of person who wants to be in control," took another approach. A covert one. Court papers allege that Feld, at an estimated expense of $2.3 million, authorized master spy Clair George to carry out a CIA-style operation to make sure the circus knew what Jan Pottker was doing and writing.

It lasted more than seven years.
Epic Legal Battle

Feld, 57, who is worth $725 million by Forbes magazine's 2004 estimate, also lives in Potomac, in a mansion not far from Pottker and Fishel's more modest neighborhood. But it's unlikely they would ever speak to one another -- except in court. Today they are intractable adversaries joined in an epic legal battle that began in 1999 and has consumed the energies of four consecutive D.C. Superior Court judges.

In a lawsuit, the couple portrays Feld as a malicious, vindictive man who ordered wiretapping, bugging and surveillance in a scheme to "destroy" Pottker because he hated the magazine article she'd written about him. Feld planted a mole in her life, a "false friend" who posed as her business partner, torpedoed her career and steered her away from writing a book on the circus, the suit alleges.

Claiming invasion of privacy, fraud and infliction of mental distress, Pottker and Fishel seek more than $60 million in actual and punitive damages. Feld declined to comment for this article, but his attorneys call the allegations "outlandish" and "baseless."

Feld's legal filings do acknowledge that the circus paid operatives to monitor Pottker from 1990 to 1997 -- and also set up two non-circus book deals to distract her from reporting on Feld's enterprises. But they say nobody did anything illegal. And in their view, the ruse helped, not hurt, her career.

It's not the only time Feld has been accused of spying on his perceived enemies. Allegations of illegal surveillance, theft of documents and infiltration are part of a suit against Feld filed in Fairfax Circuit Court by the activist group PETA, which has long opposed Ringling Bros.' use of animal acts. Feld's attorneys are contesting the suit, but details of their position are under seal and not publicly available.

[...]

During his long CIA career, Clair George was a highly regarded covert operations officer, an ebullient character known for his bravery and ability to handle crises in overseas hotspots. He rose to become chief of the agency's global clandestine service in the mid-1980s, only to see his career derailed by the Iran-contra scandal. Caught up in a grinding independent counsel's investigation, George was put on trial twice and convicted once, in 1992, on two felony counts of lying to a congressional committee. (Later he was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.)

As his legal bills mounted, George went to work as a consultant on "international issues" for Feld Entertaiment. Now 75 and ailing, he declined to comment -- he's also a defendant in the suit brought by Pottker and her husband -- but his role in the Pottker operation is detailed in contracts, memos and depositions that have since become part of the voluminous record in the case.

By October 1990 -- two months after the Regardie's story appeared -- George had already discovered that Pottker wanted to expand her Regardie's piece into an unauthorized biography of Irvin Feld, to be titled "Highwire." After getting his hands on a copy of her book proposal, George set into motion a plan that he would later refer to in a "top secret" memo to Feld as Project Preempt.

Fearing a scandalous treatment of his father, Feld signed a contract paying George $3,000 a week to oversee preparation of an authorized, "quality" book about the family business, according to court records. George had other duties, too:

"I undertook a series of efforts to find out what Pottker was doing and reported on the results of my work to Mr. Feld," he said in an affidavit. "I prepared my reports in writing and presented them to Mr. Feld in personal meetings."

George also devised a plan to "divert" Pottker from writing potential exposs about the circus, whether for other magazines or in a book. She wanted to probe the circus's child-labor practices and treatment of animals, among other topics, but the ex-CIA man took a dim view of her journalistic enterprise.

"Ms. Pottker is a professional mudslinger who was spending most of her time writing derogatory and tasteless pieces about the Feld family," George said in a deposition. "And it so came to pass that we decided that we would lead her astray from that and have her do something else."

The expert spook hired a onetime journalist named Robert Eringer, whom he described as a "very close friend," to help carry out the Pottker operation. George paid him $1,500 a week.

According to Pottker's suit, Eringer's mission was to worm his way into her life, becoming her confidant, editor and book "packager." He steered her toward researching other famous and fractious families, including the Rockefellers, the Mars candy clan and the Hafts of Washington.

A Rockefeller book, Eringer predicted in an early memo, "will side-track Pottker for many months to come -- probably a couple of years -- and this will mean she must relegate any possible Ringling book project to a back burner."

Eventually Pottker published two books that Feld had a secret hand in: "Crisis in Candyland," an unauthorized look at the Mars chocolate family, in 1995; and "Celebrity Washington," a small guidebook to the homes of media and political figures, in 1996. A Feld company even paid for the $25,000 advance on "Crisis in Candyland." Both books had small publishers and limited print runs.

In self-congratulatory memos, the operatives told Feld that they considered their mission successful. "Pottker is expending all of her time and energy on the two projects we packaged for her," says a report from the mid-'90s. "She has had no time to even think about Ringling Brothers. Our projects have effectively diverted her from the new investigation into Ringling."

It's not clear how frequently the so-called Pottker memos were produced, because many documents in the suit have been placed under seal. They're undated and unsigned, though most were likely written by Eringer. Some were spare, others detailed and chatty.

"Pottker is driving to New York City this weekend with her husband and two daughters," one says. "She has an appointment with a top NYC hairdresser to highlight her hair (she had to book this appointment six weeks in advance -- and she is very excited.)"

Another: "Pottger [sic] has found several black boys from a housing project who used to perform for Ringling and who sustained injuries during their employment. 'They make you work when you're sick,' she quotes one, 'for bad pay.' "

Another: "Pottker continues her contact with [Sen.] Howard Metzenbaum's office. She says that a Metzenbaum staffer phoned a staffer in Senator Christopher Dodd's office to discuss including the circus in child labor hearings."

One of the later memos reports: "Pottker is surprised by the level of anger from those who appeared in her Washington guide book. . . . She continues to talk from time to time about a book on Ringling Brothers."

[...]

Jan Pottker probably wouldn't have discovered any of this if not for a disgruntled circus executive named Charles Smith. As Feld Entertainment's chief financial officer, he was privy to payments made to George, Eringer and various private eyes whom Feld allegedly dispatched to infiltrate animal protection groups, including the Performing Animal Welfare Society in California and PETA, based in Norfolk.

Smith himself seemed to have a fixation with bugging and surveillance. "He had five tape recorders laying on his desk," Joel Kaplan, a former director of security for Feld, said in a deposition. "He had a punch bowl, a party-size punch bowl with 150 tapes in it. . . . He had boxes of empty tapes. . . . He had videotapes."

Smith was fired in 1997 after Fairfax police arrested him on suspicion of surreptitiously videotaping his girlfriend, a circus employee whom he suspected of cheating on him. Authorities concluded that no crime was committed and dropped the charges.

But Smith took Feld to court in a battle over compensation in which Smith alleged that his boss wasted corporate assets on retribution against enemies. Smith's suit claimed that Feld "improperly disbursed large sums of corporate monies to combat and thwart groups he perceives as opposed to the interests of Feld."

In June 1998, Smith's attorneys obtained an affidavit from Clair George laying out the Pottker operation. (George also mentioned "surveillance of, and efforts to counter, the activities of various animal rights groups.") That fall, Smith arranged a meeting with Pottker at a Chevy Chase restaurant and spilled his guts.

He told her that Feld had been gathering information about her for years. In a later deposition, Smith said he'd even seen Feld in a conference room at Ringling headquarters, watching a video of Pottker. The video was taken at a mall, probably with a tiny camera that looked like a wristwatch.

To confirm the snooping, Smith told Pottker to visit the federal courthouse in Alexandria, where his suit against Feld was filed, and fish out George's sworn statement and the attached "Pottker memos." (Smith, 60, who settled his suit against Feld for $6.5 million, signed a non-disclosure agreement and would not comment.)

Pottker describes reading the file as an out-of-body experience: "I felt like I was observing things from the ceiling. The scales fell off my eyes."

Everything started to snap into place: "The car that had been sitting in front of my home, the constant clicks on the phone, all the bad breaks I'd had in publishing. . . .

"And imagine seeing the memos about my life that were sent on a regular basis to Kenneth Feld. Detailed things about my kids, my haircuts, a party I'm giving, the editors I'm talking to."

Seeing Clair George's statements, "I thought I was going to pass out. I had to go to the ladies' room to collect myself."

Her husband was with her. As managing director of the Federal Communications Commission, Fishel wields power over a considerable bureaucracy, but that day he felt "frightened and helpless," he says. "When you realize that it's an ex-CIA agent you're up against, you realize there's nothing the average middle-class person can do."

But should he have known? "It eats me up," he says, sitting in his living room with his wife. "The feeling that I did not protect my family. I failed them."