12/30/2023 0 Comments Cia undercover agentBy the end of his career at CIA, which ended in 2018, Blocker reckons he performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at no less than eight U.S. “There was nobody else over near where I was, so I looked at them and said, ‘How are you all?’ They said ‘Are you in a band? In Kampala?’ and I said ‘yes’ – and she hit him like, "I told you that was him!’”Īchieving local fame in Uganda during his two years with the band was never part of Blocker’s plan, and hardly the extent of his vocal career during his decades spent with the agency. During an ATV tour, Blocker and his family stopped at a mountaintop. During a rare respite from his busy life in the city, Blocker brought his family to Jinja, a lakeside tourist destination 60 miles west of the Kenyan border. So big, in fact, that Blocker started getting recognized. “So in that sense,” Blocker continued, “my singing expanded my circle of potential contacts to pursue.” Blocker said performing on stage “exposed me to a whole lot more people than I would have only met at the diplomatic receptions.” Other times, Blocker claims, his status as a local celebrity served the United States’ national security interests. “They know and you know that you avoid each other as much as you can.” “You just learn not to show any more interest in them as you would anybody else,” Blocker said. “We just blew up," Blocker added, "to the point that it was starting to get in the way of the reason I was in Uganda" – there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to both meet with assets and keep pace with his band’s demand. “But for a cover band doing jazz, nobody came close.” “There were maybe a few pop stars that definitely had better following than we did,” Logan said. Logan described Blocker’s voice as a tenor, “but it was a little bit of a smoky voice that fit well in a band that did a lot of jazz instrumentals.” The group developed a following, playing to a packed house of locals, diplomats, and ex-pats at Bubbles O’Leary’s week after week, according to Logan and Blocker. Eventually, Logan approached Blocker and told him that Blocker’s then-wife gave the band 15 of his favorite songs, including his “signature song,” as he calls it, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” – and the band had learned them.īlocker says he rehearsed with them later that day. Blocker demurred, but over the next few months Logan persisted.
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