‘The Lady’ And The Tramp

For years, John Yettaw had experienced visions that warned him of events to come. Sometimes the Missouri resident ignored them and came to regret it. This time, though, he intended to act. In early 2009, the 53-year-old told friends and family that he had seen himself as a man sent by God to protect the life of a beloved foreign leader. He arranged for his kids to stay with a friend, borrowed money to buy a plane ticket and printed new business cards, as if launching a new life. He seemed calm at first, spending hours at the local Hardee's, where he used the free Wi-Fi to download music—Gladys Knight, Michael Bublé—and Mormon sermons from Salt Lake City. But as his flight date approached, he also showed signs of nervousness. He broke down on the shoulder of his best friend, and didn't sleep at all on his last night at home.

Sometime after 3 a.m. on April 15, he woke his son Brian, 17, and his three younger children for a family prayer, and piled them into a minivan for the hourlong drive to the airport. Unlike the backpack tour Yettaw had taken through Asia late last year, this trip would propel him into the heart of Burma's repressive regime and an ongoing crackdown on dissidents that has drawn condemnation from Barack Obama and United Nations Secretary--General Ban Ki-moon, among others. On the 20th, he flew to Bangkok, where he spent a week waiting for his Burmese visa and sending whimsical e-mails home, including a final cheerful message: "Pray. Study peace. Live calmness. Kindness toward everyone. Love and pray."

The next word the family got regarding Yettaw came in a 5 a.m. phone call from the consulate at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon. He had been arrested just past dawn on May 6, seized as he kicked through the soupy brown waters of Inya Lake, a man-made reservoir some four miles from his hotel. He had made an unauthorized and uninvited two-day visit to the weathered colonial-style home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize–winning leader of Burma's pro-democracy movement. Suu Kyi says that she asked Yettaw to leave, but relented when he complained of hunger and exhaustion. "The Lady," as locals call her, trounced opponents in the country's last open election in 1990, but the junta refused to recognize the results, and has kept her under arrest for 13 of the past 19 years for trying to unseat the regime. She was due to be released on May 27, ahead of next year's landmark national elections—the first in two decades. But now Suu Kyi, the Oxford-educated daughter of Burmese revolutionary Aung San, faces five more years for violating the terms of her imprisonment and breaking the country's law forbidding unregistered guests from staying overnight.

Yettaw, too, is on trial for charges including "illegal swimming" and breaching security laws; judging from the line of questioning in court, Burmese authorities suspect he intended to help Suu Kyi escape. At the start of the legal proceedings last month, they presented two black chadors, two long skirts, three pairs of sunglasses, six colored pencils, flares, flashlights and a pair of pliers as evidence of a getaway plot. Yettaw was also carrying empty jugs he used for buoyancy, and a camera wrapped in plastic with a picture of the improvised flippers he used for the mile-long swim. Since his arrest, he has been held in Insein (pronounced "insane") Prison. If convicted, he faces as many as five years behind bars—perhaps more if he is found guilty of trying to spring Suu Kyi. Both he and his host (Suu Kyi's lawyer says, "This is a political case, not a criminal one") have pleaded not guilty. "He had no criminal intent," Yettaw's lawyer, Khin Maung Oo, told newsweek, adding that the only charge he should face is "lurking house-trespass," a lesser crime on the books in Burma. "He has no relationship with anything political. His only mission was to save her."

A troubled dreamer who lives down two miles of gravel road in Missouri's backwoods and didn't have a passport until last spring, Yettaw is an unlikely protagonist on the international political stage. Why he made his move, and who, if anyone, encouraged it are questions clouded by conspiracy theories and confounding reports about the man and his motives. The junta believes that antigovernment activists used Yettaw to embarrass its leaders, while Suu Kyi's supporters say that the government used the quixotic American as a pretense for keeping their best-known critic under house arrest rather than risk igniting the opposition ahead of the 2010 elections.

Yettaw's friends and family tell a different story, describing a well-intentioned and highly spiritual person whose struggles with alcoholism and mental illness may have pushed him into history's path. "I don't think he's well," says Yvonne Yettaw, the third of his four wives—echoing the sentiments of other loved ones who believe that he may suffer from untreated bipolar and posttraumatic stress disorders. The only problem is neither Yvonne nor anybody else seems to fully understand the often secretive father of seven. As a result, they offer contradictory, incomplete and occasionally fantastical ideas about what Yettaw was up to.