My Enemy, My Friend
My Enemy, My Friend
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Over a basket of chips and salsa, Robert Hall asked his restaurant companion if Prison Fellowship could help locate ex-prisoners. “I don’t know,” said Jeff Kimmel, who works at PF’s national headquarters. “Who are you looking for?”
A man he had helped send to prison more than 20 years ago, said Robert, a retired CIA operative. He’d felt bad about it ever since. The prisoner’s name was Ron Humphrey.
“I almost choked!” recalls Jeff, whose office sits two floors up from Ron’s—in a building less than three miles from Robert’s Reston, Virginia, home.
A few weeks later Robert and Ron met for the first time since Robert’s trial testimony helped secure Ron’s 1978 conviction of espionage. Back then they squared off as adversaries. This time they embraced as Christian brothers.
“Only Jesus could bring a reconciliation like this,” said Ron.
Robert had testified what information the CIA had collected, how they got it, what countries were involved. But “quite frankly,” he admits, “I didn’t think Ron was worth prosecuting. He made a bad choice, and unfortunately he was forced to suffer more than he should have. He suffered in the place of the real serious culprits who got away.”
Long after the trial, “I really wanted to be able to reach out to Ron,” Robert adds. “I wanted him to understand that I thought he was a victim.” Robert hoped to visit Ron in prison, but his superiors objected. After Robert committed his life to Christ in 1981, he tried to get word to Ron that he was praying for him—but the message was never delivered.
Until 20 years later—after Ron got a job with Prison Fellowship, then Jeff got a job with PF, then Robert retired to Virginia after various overseas assignments, then Jeff started driving miles from home each week to attend a men’s Bible study that was led by Robert, who got to know Jeff well enough that the two started meeting for dinner once a week and started chatting about their present and past, then Robert asked about Ron, and Jeff gave Ron Robert’s phone number, then Ron made the call.
“A God thing,” Jeff summarized it.
They met in person when Ron invited Robert to PF’s staff devotions on June 6—the very first time, in all those years, that Ron publicly shared the details of his and Kim’s entwined lives.
“I felt really honored by that,” says Robert. “I was a little anxious [about meeting Ron]. But I was really grateful to God that all of this had come together. I felt God’s grace.”
