Mad Tom's Almanack

The Greatest Show on Earth - the Jaipur Literary Festival by Bruce Palling

2011-03-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

Bruce Palling travels to the colourful Jaipur Literary Festival and is impressed by the long list of prestigious authors, the hugely enthusiastic participants… and the free curry

The more insular residents of the West probably imagine that half the Indian population is illiterate, while the remaining hundreds of millions spend their time gyrating in slums to the anodyne tunes of Bollywood musicals. When it comes to functional illiteracy, however, there is quite a lot we in the West have to offer.

I still recall my fruitless attempt to find one of the world’s most celebrated novelists in a large bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, the original home of the modern book festival. ‘Do you sell modern first editions?’ I enquired. ‘What are you looking for?’ came the curt reply. ‘Evelyn Waugh.’ To assist his rather basic RAM in processing this information, I noticed that he carefully wrote down on his notepad ‘Evil and War’, which to judge from his demeanour, was a perfectly normal request in his shop at least.

In India, this would never happen – instead it would be ‘Sir, will you be needing the Penguin paperback edition or the somewhat more expensive but sturdy Everyman’s Library series?’ Or to take another incident – when was the last time a beggar accosted you on the M4 from Heathrow and tried to flog you a Booker prize-winning book for half price?

Well, the Indian equivalent happened to me just the other day as I flew into the functioning anarchy otherwise known as Delhi International Airport. No sooner had I settled into a hopeless traffic jam, partially created by the chaotic digging of the new Metro, when I was offered a vacuum-packed hardback of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger for less than £3. Later I was admonished by literary friends for buying a bootleg item and also told I was lucky the pages inside actually had ink on them.

Still, it dovetailed neatly into the purpose of my visit, which was to attend the annual Jaipur Literary Festival, held at Diggi Palace, just a few hours south of Delhi in the capital of Rajasthan. The train journey down showed how all-pervasive the piracy industry is. In the next-door seat, there was a passenger watching a bootleg DVD of Slumdog Millionaire on his laptop – a day before it had even been premiered in India.

I was slightly gritting my teeth about attending the festival as I imagined it would have all of the usual literary figures performing in tents to many of the familiar chattering-class groupies. Given the explosion of literary tourism in Asia, I imagined it might be along the lines of ‘If it’s Wednesday, it must be Jaipur; Thursday, Galle; and next week, Bali…’

William Dalrymple, Simon Schama and Vikram Seth Photo: Aradhana Seth

Well, thankfully, I was wrong on all counts. For once, this actually delivered the message on the wrapper – it was indeed a festival, with festooned buildings, colourful drapes, performing artists, hundreds of people milling around and more than enough entertainment being offered simultaneously to keep the most jaded participant amused. Oh yes, and there were 160 authors too, ranging from Thomas Keneally, Simon Schama, Patrick French and Colin Thubron to local superstars such as author Chetan Bhagat, editor-turned-novelist Tarun Tejpal, William Dalrymple, Vikram Seth and Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan. And unlike the Hong Kong and Shanghai literary festivals, which are dominated by expatriates, there was hardly a European to be seen among the thousands of Indian participants. The only Western tourist I observed had a baby boy on her knee, so I assumed she was an Embassy wife here for a day out. In fact, it was actress Julia Roberts, who had heard about the festival while staying with Bubbles Jaipur – the Maharaja – and came along anonymously to see what all the fuss was about.

Nick Coleridge impressing the local schoolgirls

And it wasn’t all highbrow either. There was Tina Brown attempting to tell the packed audience about the joys of creating a new website (www.thedailybeast.com), though judging by the post-talk questions, she was more renowned here for her memoir on Lady Diana Spencer. And who could miss Condé Nast managing director Nicholas Coleridge being pilloried by strident Indian feminists for daring to use thin models on the cover of Vogue India? (‘Well I am sorry to have to tell you that our readers have a distinct preference for beautiful, slender, six-foot tall models rather than ones that are ugly, short or fat.’)

Pico Iyer Photo: Aradhana Seth

This was a far cry from the traditional literary festival, which first came into existence in the spa town of Cheltenham in the late Forties. After that, literary festivals were spin-offs either of music or arts festivals, such as Edinburgh or Adelaide, before they took hold in their own right with the launch of the Hay Festival in 1988. The problem with the traditional literary festival is that it is usually just a vehicle to sell books and the closest to any excitement is when the author fluffs his lines while reading an extract of his latest work.

Perhaps the apogee of the celebrity side of literary festivals was when Hay spent £100,000 to have Bill Clinton speak in 2001. By contrast, in Jaipur no one was paid a fee and, more to the point, the entire festival was free to attend. To cap it off, excellent Indian cuisine was served to thousands of participants free of charge and superb live music was performed into the small hours every night. Instead of relying on entrance fees, the Jaipur Literary Festival has managed to shame or cajole institutions like the company that built the Delhi-Gurgaon Freeway into becoming major sponsors along with the usual suspects such as the British Council, the Rothschild Foundation and Oxford University Press. The revelation for many participants was the quality of the new Pakistani writers, such as Mohammed Hanif, whose novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes explores the dictatorial rule of General Zia, along with Daniyal Mueenuddin, who writes for the New Yorker and Nadeem Aslam, author of Season of the Rainbirds and Maps for Lost Lovers. Hindu zealots had threatened to burn any bookshops that stocked Pakistani literature in the wake of the Bombay terrorist attacks but fortunately the organisers decided to ignore such bombast. Sadly, Ahmed Rashid, the foremost expert on the Taleban and Central Asian Jihad, cancelled his appearance in the wake of such threats but promises to return next year.

What made the entire festival so memorable was the enthusiasm of the participants – and the fact that virtually every event was standing room only, with Punch and Judy style video boxes outside the palatial main hall so hundreds more could watch outside.

The organisers, including local author William Dalrymple, were slightly taken aback at the success of the festival, the fourth one so far. It was more than three times larger than the previous year and next year promises to expand into the seven-acre grounds behind the rather quaint gardens of Diggi Palace. And it was not just literary groupies from around Asia – hundreds of schoolchildren were given free tickets and apart from soaking in the lectures and events, they swamped the startled participants for their autographs.

What was especially heartening for me was to see a homegrown event like this rival or even out-perform the more commercial international literary festivals. The Hay Festival just had one in Colombia and is launching new ones in Beirut and Nairobi this year. They have the expertise and clout to roll them out wherever there is a literary culture. Yet Jaipur, which attracted more than 20,000 participants, is an endearingly ramshackle not-for-profit event that promises only to get better, despite no international input, save for the authors themselves. Note the date in your diary – 20 to 24 January 2012. I’ll see you there.

More info on the festival at http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/

Bruce Palling travelled as a guest of The Ultimate Travel Company (Tel: +44 207 386 4646; www.theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk) which arranges tailor-made trips to the Subcontinent and elsewhere.

(This article about the 2009 Jaipur Literary Festival first appeared in The Spectator Business magazine)

Chalmers Johnson Obit in The Times Dec 7, 2010

2010-12-10T03:32:00.000-08:00

Hawkish economist who experienced a dramatic conversion and became a darling of American liberals

An academic voice crying in the wilderness, Chalmers Johnson was the latter-day Cassandra of contemporary statecraft. He fought in the Korean War and went on to become a passionate advocate of the Vietnam War and the Cold War until, after a dizzying turnaround, he ended his days as the pathologist, both practical and ideological, of the American Empire.

No one ever doubted his patriotism. He always wished the best for his country. But Johnson’s Damascene conversion to the cause of live-and-let-live, predicated on the belief that the US, through its serial engagement in war and occupation, was sowing the seeds of its own destruction, was rare and wholly remarkable.

His trenchant 1970s analysis of the Japanese and Chinese postwar experience, in which he rejected the assumption that free-market principles were the sole means of achieving global power and prosperity, was revolutionary enough. Simultaneously — some might say incongruously — came his support for America’s doomed effort to defeat communism in East Asia and his work for the CIA aimed at subverting the Soviet Union. But it was his Empire trilogy, beginning at the turn of the present century with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, that had the deepest and perhaps most lasting impact on the psyche of his country’s ruling class.

The Sorrows of Empire followed in 2004, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, in 2007. Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, a summation of his views, came out as recently as August this year.

Ronald Asmus, a former leading adviser to Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, wrote that Johnson’s work was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger”. It conveyed, he said, “a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the US has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms”.

Some would argue that he was a classic case of buyer’s remorse, or of the regret of a man in old age ruefully reflecting on a lifetime of lost causes, Whatever the truth, he remained sharp as a tack even in his final days.

Chalmers Ashby Johnson was born in August 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona, then a windswept desert town. His father, David, had fought in the US Navy in the Pacific in the war; his mother, Katherine, made homes for Chalmers and his younger sister, Barbara, first in the Phoenix suburbs, then in Alemada, California, where both children went to high school and from which Chalmers went on to study economics at the University of California in Berkeley.

After graduating with honours in 1953 he was drafted into the Navy, serving on a patrol boat that spent much of its time being repaired in the port of Yokohama. This was where he learnt Japanese and became fascinated by the resurgent Japanese economy, as well as by the triumph of Maoism in China.

Returning to the US at the end of his service, he took a master’s in economics at Berkeley in 1957 and his PhD four years later, afterwards joining the political science faculty and embarking on what he thought would be his life’s work, the study of economic development in East Asia and, in particular, the phenomenon of state-sponsored capitalism.

Johnson was an economist, but like all the best of his profession did not neglect the political and social circumstances in which growth occurred. In Japan he had noticed the prevalence of anti-American feeling, which he concluded was a function not of defeat in the war but of the ill effects of occupation. This was a theme to which he would return. A series of books followed, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China and An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring. Johnson was by now acknowledged as one of America’s foremost authorities on the politics of the Pacific Ring, which he feared could go communist if America and the West did not take a stand. It came as no surprise when he was recruited as a consultant to the CIA in the 1960s, during which time he championed the cause of the Vietnam War while advising on the likely impact of the Cultural Revolution in China.

In 1982, as a leading member of the so-called Japanese Revisionists, he published his landmark book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, a study of Tokyo’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry which posited the view — then thought heretical — that capitalism could successfully be led by government and did not have to arise out of the unfettered competition of a free market.

By now, Johnson was well into his stride. But it was not until 2000, when he was already 69, that he truly found his voice. As he reflected on the growing hegemony of the United States in a post-Soviet world, he began to wonder if Washington was not wandering down a dangerous path. He had witnessed the implosion of the British Empire after the Second World War — a process that, in the sense that it was both ordered and deliberate, he rather admired. He had also read deeply on the Chinese and Japanese empires, as well as on the decline and fall of Rome. Now he feared that America was, however unwittingly, becoming a New Roman Empire, establishing military bases across the globe and requiring the “free world” to acknowledge its suzerainty in support of a selfproclaimed Pax Americana.

The Blowback trilogy was the logical consequence of this train of thought. The books, outlining a nightmare scenario in which his country wastes blood and treasure in support of an impossible construct while incurring the hatred or resentment of most of the world’s people, struck a nerve with liberals across the world.

In Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Great Hope, Johnson sought to show how his country could turn the situation around and perhaps re-establish itself as a democratic society at peace with itself and the world. But he was not optimistic.

Writing in August in the online Huffington Post, he observed: “I foresee the US drifting along, much as the Obama Administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T. S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’.”

A long-standing member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, he decided late in life that the extent of his differences with the body’s overall ethos were such that he could no longer remain. His resignation was rejected. The only way in which a member of the council could resign, he was informed, was to die. “In that case,” he reportedly replied, “consider me dead.”

Johnson is survived by his wife, the anthropologist Sheila Knipschee, whom he had met at Berkeley. They had no children.

Chalmers Johnson, economist and political commentator, was born on August 6, 1931. He died on November 20, 2010, aged 79

Mert Perry and Maurice Cavalerie: a Memoir by Ed Vankan

2010-12-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

Ed walking down Tu Do, Saigon, c.1972 photo: David Hume Kennerly

Ed Vankan (cameraman 1960 -1972), ex UPI-TV, NBC-NEWS, ITN-London, was introduced to Indochina through the peace talks at the Plain of Jars in Laos in 1960. He wrote this fascinating essay recently and posted it on the Old Vietnam Hacks site and kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. He is describing a period in Laos when the various rival factions - royalists, neutralists and Communists - attempted to keep out of the Indochina war, something that was impossible given the priorities of the North Vietnamese and the Americans. There is another interesting account of Maurice Cavalerie in this early posting by his son-in-law http://madtomsalmanac.blogspot.com/2010/04/last-of-great-indochinese-hoteliers.html.
Laos was my first foreign assignment - from May 1972 to July 1973 - and remains a very special place in my memory. (BP)

I was still a kid when I was first sent to Saigon in 1960, just in from the Congo covering their atrocities as a staffer for UPI-TV. The man picking me up from Than Son Nhut Airport was tall and very fat. He was sweating profusely and carried a king size bath towel around his neck to stem the flood of acid body juices relentlessly flowing down his chest. To stay dry, he had to continuously wipe his face and armpits. When evening came and temperatures fell to an agreeable level he finally found some comfort. Despite his handicaps, Merton Perry was an extremely pleasant person to work with…a kind and humble Goliath. Mert must have been one of UPI’s first bureau chiefs in Saigon and had more contacts with the right people in the right places than anyone I knew in those days. He became my, ever so gentle, giant Hammer shark. I was the pilot fish following in his wake. Only when we had to communicate in French I became the hammer, Mert the pilot.

Just two days after my arrival there was a message waiting for me at the reception desk of the old Hotel Continental. It was located next to the “Art-deco” Parisian bird-cage elevator, lavishly decorated with polished wood, etched mirrors and shiny windows. In my memory it went up or down no more than twice a day. In between… it needed a rest.

“Get ready...bring camera, plenty raw-stock”, my marching orders read, “We’re off for the land of a - thousand and one elephants - to Laos”.

I was wondering why this country was called the land of 1001 and not as expected 1000 elephants. There must be some mythical explanation to this unusual number of beasts. Said my giant...“As long as I am in the Kingdom it will be known as the land of the 1001 elephants”.

In those days hardly anybody had ever heard of Laos and its funny currency the “KIP” (which in my native Dutch means CHICKEN). It was no surprise my night editor Carl in London had to find a world map to locate its position. Later that day I received a message from my man reading: “Got it...Lagos capital of Nigeria... thought you’re in Far East. Explain???”.

Before we left, Mert had stuffed his pockets and mine with millions of devaluated KIPS and two return tickets SGN-BKK-VTN.

The early morning Air Nuoc Mam flite, a dilapidated DC-4, brought us to Bnagkok where we changed planes for an even more miserable Air Laos DC-3. I noticed every one avoided being seated next to Mert. Without any trouble he managed to keep two seats to himself, was pretty comfortable and fell asleep. I slipped into a seat next to an Italian UN representative. The only words this diplomat uttered during our flight were: “TUTTU ROTTI, TUTTI ROTTI”, describing the state of the aircraft and his displeasure about being aboard.

There was no place to put our hand luggage. The small cargo compartment in the rear was stowed with wooden boxes painted army green and the spare space underneath our seats stuffed with small 30x 30x15 cm boxes made of heavy brown lacquered carton. Each box securely tied with thin iron wires and a red wax seal on top. I tried to move them a little but like they were firmly glued to the floor, they wouldn't budge.

After my feet had turned numb from being squeezed in between the brown box in front of me and the floor for about an hour, I asked the stewardess could she please remove this obstruction and place it somewhere else. “Oh no, oh no...” the Laotian Barbie doll whispered in my ear “, these boxes are too heavy for me to lift. They contain our weekly gold shipment from Zurich to Vientiane.”

Her last line hit me like Doctor Death just pumped an overdose of adrenalin straight into my arteries. It made my heart speed with excitement and greed. I became Mert...sweat pouring out of my pores. Here I was sitting on top of millions of dollars worth of gold bullion. I could touch it, feel its power flashing through the carton box straight through my skin up into my brain. These boxes were hot, filled with glowing magma. They told me about riches, new adventures, a yacht, a little chateau along the Med, an E-type Jaguar (racing green, 12 cylinders of course). But at that point a voice sounding remarkably like the Dalai Lama’s, including the giggles, whispered in my ear: ”Why not donate it to a Buddhist monastery and live there in peace behind its high walls for ever after?" But before I could answer His Holiness, the “fasten seatbelt” flashed on and our air hostess told us to prepare for landing. With a bump, I fell back into reality.

After the doors were opened I noticed a Willy’s Jeep holding three men casually driving up to the aircraft. Heavy duty types, ex foreign legion, maybe Corsican Mafia boys, but certainly no accountants from the “Schweizerische Volksbank”. They were leisurely talking to each other, all having a CELTIC cigarette of heavy black tobacco, rolled in yellow, papier-mais glued to their lips. I could hear they were French and were about to haul in my treasure.

For the first and last time in my life, I was sitting on top of a million, maybe even a billion and lost it.

“Thank heaven for little girls”…

The hotel we went to was less than I had expected. Nothing compared with the great colonial palaces of Africa, the Old Oriental in Bangkok and of course the Old Raffles. In those days slowly fading memories, long tales and long bars were more important than new luxuries are now. Night after night, the very old, old hands frequenting the Long Bar on the ground floor of the Raffles, were glad to share the so-called borderline situation with you. According to them the boundary between Singapore and Indonesia ran straight through the middle of this longest bar found in the Far East. The guys pumping our Heinekens were doing this in Indonesia while we were emptying our glasses in Singapore. Sukarno, as part of his doomed "Konfrontasi" policy, had moved his country’s border line about 25 miles outward to sea. So we usually got drunk in Singapore and slept it off in Indonesia in one of these faded colonial cabins in the hotel garden, located next to the hotel’s majestic entrance.

The Constellation Hotel in Vientiane looked like none of these “Old Ladies” of hospitality and comfort. On the contrary...it was built like an upside-down shoe-box squeezed in between similar buildings in dusty Main Street, (rue Samenthai) downtown Vientiane. Its architecture didn’t differ much from any other cheap Chinese Hotel in the Far East. At least at the Constellation the bar was great, the food was excellent and the crowd (10 guests) were all reporters and photographers.

The ruler over this “squeezed in between” empire was Maurice Cavalerie, owner and organizer, advisor and to most of us a friend. A good-looking half French, half Vietnamese gentleman (he told me), always smiling like a benign Buddha. Smart and intelligent eyes peering into the depths of your soul. When you spoke he kept his mouth. No interruptions there...he listened and observed, filing every bit of information he could use in his own neatly organized drawers somewhere in the back of his head.

I never knew how or where to place Maurice. He was well aware of what was happening in the Kingdom. Some times, I thought, he was too curious about the things we did, the places we were visiting, what we had witnessed out in the field. It’s true... he shared information as well, but on a strictly selective base.

His French and Vietnamese were impeccable, his English as well but with an accent which reminded me of “Maurice Chevalier” singing “ Thanks heaven for Little Girls”. In order for him to survive in this utterly corrupt nation, with all types of foreign agents plotting their secret deals in a deadly power struggle, he must have kowtowed to many sides. Was it the French “Deuxieme Bureau”, the CIA or the unscrupulous Royal Family, the Pathet Lao, Viet Cong or just the deadly Corsican Mafia? These French Mafiosi were the movers and shakers, kept the above and below the line economy going. They were the white washers of huge sums of opium and heroin money traded in - at a profitable commission - for gold bars. They had a hand in every bar, hotel, opium den and whore house in the country.

In order to exist, let alone survive, Maurice had to stay friends with all of them, keeping one and the other at bay with morsels of information we unknowingly supplied after another night at his bar. Maurice was not like the spider in a web. He was the web itself, while we were the little spiders scuttling up and down it’s sticky surface, hunting for news, which at the end of the day was his to harvest. He was our supplier of food, fine wines and anything else we desired before we retired to our green and yellow tiled upstairs bedrooms. He made us feel at ease and was always there to help us out.

Welcome to the BAN HIN HUP press club..

Mert told me we were going to do a story about the first peace talks ever held between the Pathet Lao and representatives of the Royal Government. There was a problem...these talks were scheduled to take place the next day at a place called BAN HIN HUP, some hundred miles from Vientiane. No one had ever heard of this outpost, no map showed its name. Maurice of course knew the exact location.

The CIA had arranged a helicopter to fly a handful of American journalists to the right spot... one of these unfair “pooling” jobs. We were not included... Mert probably because of his sheer weight and I because I carried a Dutch passport, I learned later.

Maurice came up with an alternative, a grueling and tiresome trip up a dusty road in his old US army jeep. (Mais prenez donc mon Jeep, pourquoi pas???)

A five hour voyage partly through Pathet Lao land in a vehicle which looked like it could collapse at any moment? Even Maurice’s usual driver declined to guide us into this unknown territory.

The chopper junket was supposed to take off around ten o’clock next morning so we decided to hit the road at five o’clock, one hour before sun-rise. We calculated, at a speed of about 25 miles per hour, it would take us a little over four or five hours to get to Ban Hin Hup. Provided the jeep would not break down. Being stranded with a flat in enemy territory, or worse...hit a claymore was not what we were waiting for.

We knew the only asphalt road in the Kingdom turned into a narrow jungle track about a ten minutes drive from Vientiane. From there on it was no straight driving anymore... it was zigzagging, skidding and sliding from one side of the road to the other avoiding hundreds of pools of mud-water as deep as abandoned manholes, which they were. If our calculations had been correct we would be driving through government territory for at least two hours. After three roadblocks explaining in Vietnamese we were “Bao Chi” and in French what we were about to do, where we were going, we entered Pathet Land. It felt like we had landed on the dark side of the moon. Everything was quiet here; no traffic, no morning markets, and no young kids riding their water buffalo’s on their way back home. Occasionally we noticed a few burned out huts along the road, at one time a bamboo shack which looked like an abandoned military checkpoint. A little further down the track a number of burnt out pre-war French military trucks were left behind, blocking our passage way. Obviously not so long ago.... there had been some skirmishes along this road.

At regular intervals, we thought we heard the sound of an approaching helicopter with our colleagues on board, but every time it turned out our over-heated exhaust pipe warning us it was soon to give up and explode into a thousand pieces of red-hot rusty shrapnel.

In order to get to BAN HIN HUP, the chopper pilot had to navigate his way along the same road as we were driving on, but with only twenty miles more to go...still no helicopter in sight. What went wrong???

“Maybe”, we thought, “the peace talks were abandoned all together”, in which case we were abandoned as well. Driving into enemy territory without any immunity guaranteed by a ceasefire of both participants involved, we would never come out alive.

After we had past another abandoned road block, Mert, who was steering for a while, stopped the car, switched off the engine and pointed to some invisible point up the road. He cupped his ear and commanded...”Just listen”. Then I heard it too; the metallic, rattling sound of armored vehicles on their way towards us or, quite the contrary, heading the same way we were going. We couldn’t make out which way. If it was the P.L. returning back to base from Ban Hin Hup because the peace talks had been cancelled, there was only one thing to do...RUN. Turn around, drive as fast as the old Willy wanted to carry us back to safety, back to Vientiane.

On the other hand it could just as well be a column of vehicles belonging to the government heading up North, just like we did. This would create problems too. Two guys driving a military Jeep approaching them with great speed from their rear would certainly arouse some suspicion. We had no means to communicate with them, no radio but we did carry Mert’s man-sized white colored sweat-towel on board.

We decided not to return but crawl in as close as we dared, STOP, LOOK and LISTEN at every curve, until we got visual contact. After a while, quite abruptly, the sound of rusty chains plowing their way through mud and red dirt stopped. Maybe five minutes later we saw them. They were taking a break. Three vintage French APC’s and two jeeps were parked just around the corner. Their uniforms looked familiar…RLA outfit. We decided to drive up slowly, honk discreetly while Mert was waving his personal white flag up and down. Their reaction was as expected…everyone ran for their guns, turrets were turned around and facing us but no shots were fired. Later they told us because of my giant, who undeniable looked - they thought – like an American should look…

We joined their convoy and made it to Ban Hin Hup… I filmed the so called peace negotiations and was impressed by the well disciplined Pathet Lao, supported in every way by their Red China advisors, even sharing their rice bowls. A couple of CIA cowboys, flown in by an earlier chopper, behaved a little less cooperative than their Chinese counterparts. They insisted the Royal Laotian Army dig their manholes and didn’t move a finger to help them out. In fact these people were demanding slave labor from their allies paid for with their leftover C-rations. The Chinese were showing commitment, the CIA agents just contempt for their partners. Although this was my first trip to the Far East, I then knew already which side was going to win this war yet to explode, who was going to loose the struggle for the hearts and souls of the people in this part of the world.

The Press helicopter finally arrived five hours late - engine trouble of course, and had to return to Vientiane immediately. To annoy the press crowd, Mert had made up a large sign saying “WELCOME TO THE BAN HIN HUP PRESS CLUB” He and I were the only passengers on board the chopper’s flight back to Vientiane. (Mert had to file, I had to ship my film). The next morning a Laotian army officer we had befriended during our stay at Ban Hin Hup delivered the jeep to the Constellation Hotel. “BIENSURE” …un autre ami de Maurice.

Some time later, on a return visit to Vientiane, I went to the local jail for an interview with some Pathet Lao imprisoned there. Before I was allowed to enter, I noticed in the inner court a comfortable newly constructed bungalow.

Two Europeans were enjoying a cool beer in the shade of a veranda attached to it. I was told they were two French prisoners who had tried to rob the weekly gold shipment (my gold bars?) from a DC3 at Vientiane airport. I was allowed to talk freely to them and we agreed to meet at the bar of the Constellation Hotel for an after dinner drink, which they did. They told me, they too had a friend at this hotel…Guess who?

Ed now with some of his art on display at a recent exhibition in France

LA CAPELLE BIRON, FRANCE

Postscript: Mert died in 1970 of a heart attack at the age of 41.

The Albert Speer Of The Vietnam War: reassessing the legacy of Robert McNamara by Bruce Palling

2010-11-07T17:30:00.000-08:00

   (This first appeared in Forbes.com as a commentary immediately after the death of Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defence and chief of the World Bank) July 8, 2009 

It obviously wasn't just Robert McNamara who took away lessons from the Vietnam War--other participants also went through a painful learning process, but most didn't wait nearly three decades to reveal them. McNamara's headline conclusion seems to have been that Americans saw the Indochina conflict purely in the context of the Cold War and failed to comprehend it from their enemy's perspective.The most useful lesson I heard from a participant was almost trite. It came from one of the American Army's finest intelligence officers, who was married to a Vietnamese and had been "in country" from the '50s onward. He adored the place and if he was out of sight around an alley and swore in the vernacular, everybody assumed he was a Vietnamese.He too had been a true believer in the cause until the end, when suddenly the trauma of defeat made him reassess his core beliefs. His painful conclusion was that if you fervently believe in a cause, no amount of contrary evidence will ever sway your opinion, as you will always rationalize it away.

This occurs all the time in conflicts. When analysts showed the commanders of the 1944 Arnhem attacks clumps of camouflaged Tiger tanks, they were ignored because they weren't supposed to be there. In the run up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, again CIA agents pointed out numerous reefs surrounding the beaches only to be told that they must be reflections of clouds or even seaweed.

The most fateful example was the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the NSA was convinced that the North Vietnamese mounted a second attack on a U.S. Navy patrol, which became the trip wire for legislation that sanctioned direct U.S. combat in Vietnam. In fact, no such attack occurred but it was just what President Johnson and the Pentagon needed to create a casus belli for the escalation of the war. (Curiously, it was while being interrogated about this incident many years later, that Robert McNamara threatened to walk out of a TV interview with Charles Wheeler, the distinguished BBC reporter.)The puzzle about Robert McNamara is why he took so long to go public with his doubts about the war.

I covered the Indochina conflict, mainly in Laos but briefly in Vietnam and Cambodia, for The Times of London. Later, I spent three stimulating years as a producer on the acclaimed PBS series Vietnam: A Television History. In all of the hundreds of interviews we made around the world, the only retired U.S, policymaker who refused to speak to us was Robert McNamara. In fact, there were only two others who declined to explain their actions--Richard Nixon and President Thieu of South Vietnam. It is understandable that most participants still employed by the U.S. government were also reluctant to speak. The one honorable exception was John Negroponte, who gave an extremely lucid account of the Paris peace talks and the final days of the South Vietnamese regime.McNamara was no longer president of the World Bank when we continued to make our requests, by someone who even belonged to the same establishment clubs as he did.

I consider McNamara to have shown moral cowardice by refusing to explain himself in public, especially when he ended up opposing the policy that he was primarily responsible for in the first place.The reason democracies have a legitimacy not possessed by most other types of government is that the public has the right to information in support of or opposition to crucial policy decisions. If a senior official remains silent for years after he comes to the conclusion that his policy was absolutely wrong, it denies the voting public--and future governments--knowledge that might help avoid such blunders in the future. Millions of civilians and combatants were killed and even more maimed or otherwise wounded by this 30-year conflict, most while Robert McNamara held his counsel. I am not naïve enough to believe that by speaking out in the late '60s, events would have been dramatically different.

However, McNamara's agony over his actions is bathetic by comparison with that of the real victims of the war, whether Vietnamese or any other nationality.The earlier "crime" of McNamara was to apply the same business methods and bean-counter approach he used so successfully at Ford Motor Company to his time at the Pentagon. Operation Rolling Thunder, which was the most sustained bombing campaign in history, certainly killed more soldiers and civilians and destroyed more military equipment each year it was increased in ferocity. However, McNamara failed to take note that the North Vietnamese also upped the ante and in response succeeded in sending more men and material down the Ho Chi Minh trail each successive year.

In some ways, McNamara was the Albert Speer of the Vietnam War, in the sense that he was the rational technocrat not bothered at the time by any moral questions of his actions in prolonging a senseless war. Speer, however, delivered his mea culpa somewhat quicker than McNamara did. Perhaps the threat of being hanged by the Nuremberg judges concentrated his mind more than the ire of anti-war commentators did for McNamara.One truly beneficial action that McNamara did set in train was the commissioning of the Pentagon Papers into the cause and progress of the war. These opinions too were meant to remain hidden from public consideration but were revealed thanks to the initiative of Daniel Ellsburg and The New York Times.

Like many people from my generation, Vietnam dominated my life, though unlike many others, I emerged without any lifelong scars. Again, I began as a fervent supporter of the American war, fearing another "Munich" if the West did not stand up to "the downward thrust of Communism". (Perhaps I should add that this curious geographical assertion was because I am an Australian). However, by 1965, as a well-read provincial schoolboy, I was completely opposed to the war and even ended up in prison a couple of times for refusing to register for military conscription.

So what, in my opinion, is the lesson of the Indochina war? Quite simple really--never forget Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Essentially, this means when someone is involved in observing an experiment, they can never escape being part of the equation. This applies not just in quantum physics but in world affairs too. The mere presence of foreign troops in a local conflict simplifies the response of the population to that of resisting the invader to protect the motherland. Certainly this prompted a huge number of nationalists to initially support the Viet Cong. It was also a potent factor in the resistance to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan.

Perhaps I have more in common with Robert McNamara than I care to admit, as this was one of his belated conclusions too. I only hope that if there are any architects of contemporary policy in Central Asia with anything to say, they speak out sooner rather than later. Democracy only functions when deeds of all kind are subject to questioning and debate--not muffled by silence for decades after the event.

Bruce Palling is a writer and journalist based in London. He was a correspondent in Indochina in the early 1970s and was the first South Asia correspondent for The Independent of London. He was a producer on the award-winning PBS series Vietnam: A Television History

The Road from Damascus by Bruce Palling

2010-11-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

There can’t be many bazaars in the world where the main obstacles are hand-pulled carts laden with almonds or impatient peasants overtaking each other on donkeys. Then again, you have to be prepared for anything in the huge souk of Damascus. It may have the Arabic equivalent of Harrods Food Hall with amazing ice creams, sweets and pastries, but you are also confronted by medicinal shops with dried crocodiles, shrivelled tortoise shells and cured deerskins. There are several acres of stalls in this sprawling covered market selling every imaginable variant of food, clothing, carpets, herbs, spices, jewellery – and then there are the camel whips and Bedouin daggers.

And when you tire of this amazing spectacle, you walk through the columns and archways of the remains of a gigantic Roman temple to Jupiter, now occupied by the Eighth Century Great Ummayad Mosque, which incorporates an earlier church.

And I haven’t even mentioned that after viewing Saladin’s tomb and another shrine for John the Baptist, you can walk a short distance to an Eighteenth Century Ottoman town house and eat superb food in a private courtyard for less than £10. Most people probably imagine that Syria is not for the faint-hearted, what with once being on President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” shortlist. For a tourist though, nothing could be further from reality – Syria is one of the safest and most welcoming countries I have ever been as a Western tourist.

In the remotest locations next to ancient churches and villages, children would regularly pick spring flower and shyly offer bouquets to my wife. (Those tales about Arab hospitality to strangers are also all true.) Combine that with the ease of travel throughout the countryside and deserts plus hundreds, yes, hundreds of staggeringly preserved ancient towns, cities, churches, mosques, monuments and Crusader castles and you begin to understand why international travellers antennae has suddenly tuned into Syria.

In Damascus, we stayed in the Talisman, a perfectly restored townhouse in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. We spent our first full day wandering through the alleyways and drinking coffee in the charmingly ornate Al Nawfara Coffee Shop, which still has a raised platform and comfortable arm chair from where an Arabic storyteller sits each evening. There are all the treasures of the National Museum and palaces to visit but we were impatient to get on the road and head north to the Krak de Chevalier, the great Crusader Castle that was never conquered in battle.

Perched on its own levelled hill, this looming fortress looks like a stone battle ship hidden behind impregnable ramparts and towers. Lawrence of Arabia thought it “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world”. Although it eventually fell to Arab forces through trickery, the new masters never defaced or wrecked it, so that the internal rooms and churches are still remarkably intact.

Just north of here, we stumbled onto Apamea, Syria’s largest classical site, with a colonnaded street more than a mile and quarter long. The remains of a four-mile long wall surround the entire city, but what makes it so memorable is that we had it entirely to ourselves, apart from some shepherds with their scattered flocks of sheep. The wheel ruts from chariots are still etched on the cobbles, which once transported Antony and Cleopatra when they visited here on their honeymoon in 37BC. Of course there are some villagers offering you fake Roman coins or statuettes but they soon retire when they see your lack of interest. Our guide mentions another interesting development – a local sect that worships the female body and every year celebrates by having an “exchange of the blood” ceremony, which seemed to consist of some fairly riotous behaviour involving the female believers.

Shortly after leaving Apamea, you drive past a handful of ruined castles and then enter into the “Lost Cities” zone of Syria. This consists of literally hundreds of abandoned towns and cities from the fourth to sixth centuries AD. These were some of the most prosperous places in the Ancient World as northern Syria was the largest producer of olive oil, which was used for lighting as well as for cooking throughout the Roman world. There was also a thriving wine trade, with the remains of wine presses next to the villas. During the upheavals at the end of the Roman era and around the time of the arrival of Islam, whole regions were simply abandoned so they were never conquered or destroyed except by the occasional earthquake.

One of the largest – and perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful ones, is Bara, which was close to paradise on earth. The entire area has been replanted with olive groves surrounding the substantial ruins, interspersed with large trees and well-maintained dry stone walls. In springtime, the greenery is carpeted with glorious splashes of colour from the poppies, irises and daisies, not to mention scented Jasmine.

A short distance away is Serjilla, which looks a small Cotswolds village with the roofs missing. On our visit, past the huge tabletop tombs and remains of churches and olive presses, there were small groups of Syrian families having picnics. One group beckoned over our guide who then said they wished to discover a secret from my wife. “They are extremely envious and want to know how you manage to keep your legs so smooth and white”, he said.

The next port of call is Aleppo – some historians believe it is the last example of a traditional Ottoman city, with its large population of Muslims, a dozen different Christian sects and even 30 or so remaining Jews. We ate at Zmorod, the best restaurant in town where a plasma screen showed Stuttgart vs. Barcelona while next to us a Catholic Bishop wearing a crucifix and a Gold Rolex sat smoking a water pipe while sharing a half empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black label with some other priests. It is the cultural contradictions that make foreign travel so stimulating. Where else would you see three Burkha wearing women all in black sit on a park bench while one of them breast feeds her baby?

There is enough in Aleppo to keep you busy for a day or two, what with the enormous citadel where Abraham is alleged to have visited and a Souk even more exotic than Damascus, with mountain truffles being the delicacy of the moment.

The other extraordinary discovery in the citadel was the tomb of St George in one of the walls. I have no idea how much of him rests in the tomb but it doesn;t stop local Muslims treating him like a saint. The rather rundown Barons Hotel, which was the temporary home of Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie, also merits a nostalgic drink in the bar.

For us though the highlight of the entire journey was a five mile walk through the near-deserted countryside to St Simeon’s Monastery, an hour or so to the west of Aleppo. Apart from the beauty of the perfectly preserved churches, hermit towers and ruins, it offers a lesson in the power of celebrity.

The first place we visited was a barren cliff face with a Roman eagle and the figure of a Roman officer called Titus Flavius Julianus, reclining on a banquet couch above a crudely cut rock tomb. He had probably deserted from the legion in the late Second Century and lived a quiet life with his local wife, who was buried next to him. Every other detail of their lives is lost to history.

By contrast, two centuries later, a young monk called Simeon made a name for himself just a few miles away by wearing a spiked girdle that drew blood when he moved and later by burying himself up to his chin each summer. After quarrelling with his fellow monks, he eventually spent the last 36 years of his life living more than 60 feet off the ground on an exposed pillar, where he ranted at the thousands of pilgrims who came from as far away as Britain and Persia.

After his death in 459, Zeno, the Roman Emperor, decided to build a monastery around his pillar. Most of the walls and arches still stand today –a colossal structure, which could easily hold 10,000 worshippers. It is extraordinary to think that this masochistic exhibitionist inspired the construction of one of the greatest Churches in Christendom. All that remains of St Simeon’s pillar is an egg like stump as over the centuries, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of worshippers have chipped away stony mementoes. Tennyson wrote a rather ironic poem about St Simeon, including this extract which suggests perhaps it was all an illusion on the part of the quarrelsome fanatic:

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,

This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,

Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,

A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,

Patient on this tall pillar I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;

We then moved into the desert, which at one point was less than 100 miles from Bagdad. After visiting the walled city of Resafe, prudence made us decline to eat in the local flyblown tourist café. Instead, our guide managed to find some bananas and tins of sardines as well as some freshly baked bread, which we thought would tide us over until we made it to Palmyra. The problems began when we realised we didn’t have a knife, so we stopped at a tiny one roomed store on the edge of the desert to see if we could buy or borrow one.

The shopkeeper would not hear of it and quickly invited us back to his modest two roomed house covered in old carpets. The only gesture towards modernity was an enormous satellite dish but I never saw a television.

Soon he was joined by his relatives and aged father, who was a resettled Bedouin from the desert. Nothing was too much trouble and tea was brought in along with some tomatoes, scrambled eggs and ham. Then, after learning he was the local schoolteacher, we left after taking numerous pictures of his extended family and curious children. He then embraced me in the traditional manner along with kisses on both cheeks.

We spent the remainder of our journey visiting equally impressive ruins at Qasr Al-Hayr; a monastery with an Italian priest and of course, Palmyra, the greatest collection of Roman ruins in the Middle East. But even on extraordinary trips like this, it is these human encounters that make the most lasting impression.

Corinthian Travel are the best agents (www.corinthiantravel.co.uk)

Monuments of Syria by Ross Burns (Third Edition, Taurus, 2009)

More a gazeteer than a guide, but brilliant
Bradt Guide to Syria by Diana Darke (Second Edition 2010)
too PC for me but is the best for general use

A shorter version of this story appeared in the Daily Mail on Saturday November 6 2010

Asif by Magic: a profile of Asif Ali Zardari

2010-08-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

I did this profile for Tatler magazine in 1990, when Zardari was "First Gentleman" of Pakistan, if that is not pushing the definition too far....

By Bruce Palling

Even though political power in Pakistan has a long and dishonourable tradition of sprouting from the barrel of a gun, there is still no doubt that Benazir Bhutto is the most influential person in the country. Indeed, before her election as Prime Minister in 1988, the definition of Pakistani democracy could have been One Man, One Gun. Since independence from Britain in 1947, Pakistan has been ruled either by no-nonsense military dictators or by the democratically elected Bhutto family. It may be a dreadfully chauvinist place, and Benazir may be a woman, but she is still a Bhutto. And that is what counts.

Her rich, feudal family dabbled in politics even under the British and her grandfather was knighted for his services to the Raj. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, her charismatic father, was Prime Minister for six years until he was ousted in a coup masterminded by General Zia-ul-Haq. The family mystique was further enhanced in 1979 when her father was executed on trumped-up political charges, despite being offered clemency if he asked for it. At Oxford, his daughter Benazir owned a yellow MGB and stepped out with unsuitable young men, but she never forgot that she was being groomed for a political career in Pakistan by her strict but doting father.

Having established her political credentials under Zia’s dictatorship by undergoing house arrest and even solitary confinement, Benazir needed one thing before she presented herself to the electorate – a husband. Enter Asif Ali Zardari.

Publicity released at the time of his arranged engagement to Benazir portrayed Asif as a prominent socialite businessman who owned a polo team (The Zardari Four) and hailed from a similar feudal background to that of the illustrious Bhuttos. The engagement photographs showed a stiff, good-looking man in a suit with aviator spectacles and a flourishing moustache – a picture of discreet modernity and respectability –the perfect fit for Pakistan’s most glamorous unmarried woman. Her married her in 1987, then fathered a son. As it turned out, in a country as ruthlessly male chauvinist as Pakistan, the fact that she had a boy helped ensure victory.

Within a matter of months, the Zardari family was seized upon by the opposition as a synonym for what the Pakistanis call cronyism and corruption. The press dubbed him ‘Mr 10 per cent”, referring to the size of his alleged commissions on all major deals. There is no proof to this improbable claim, however.

There were similar mutterings when Asif’s father, Hakim Ali Zardari, was elected an MP and appointed to the lucrative position of the Public Accounts Committee. A brother-in-law also quietly emerged as head of the Karachi Development Authority, which is involved in complicated decisions about zoning regulations and land allocation. The Zardari name may not be one to conjure with in the West, but it is an obsessional topic in Pakistan. On one of his increasingly frequent visits to London, Asif’s father recounted a story to a British captain of industry. ‘Three years ago when Benazir’s aunt contacted my family and I agreed to give my son Asif’s hand in marriage, my family said “Hakim, you are the stupidest man in Pakistan.” They came to this conclusion because she was a controversial opposition politician in a military dictatorship. Now that she is Prime Minister, do you know what they all say? That I am the wisest man in Pakistan.’

“HE IS A BIT OF A BUCK…”

While I was boning up in my Islamabad hotel room on a nineteenth century account of the nomadic Baluch tribe, from which Asif nominally hails (‘The Bilochi is a general favourite. He is a bit of a buck…’) an aide from the Prime Minister’s department knocked on my hotel-door and escorted me to a black Mercedes which crept around the block and up the nearby hill to the Prime Minister’s residence. Until Benazir moved into Sindh House, this was where legislators and senior civil servants from Sindh province would receive instructions from whichever dictator was ruling the country. The entire compound is surrounded by a high brick wall with sentry posts placed at intervals and armed guards.

We arrived at the entrance to a pale brick mansion with a horizontal spread of patios and wide windows. It was the sort of thoroughly modern pile that would make the Duke and Duchess of York feel at home. But hat it lacked in taste, it made up for with its spectacular view over Islamabad.

Asif was lounging contentedly in a swivel executive chair at a cluttered desk with four telephones. He wore a Lanvin polo-short and jodhpurs with one high-booted leg casually crossed over the other on the desk. His only other visible adornments were Porsche aviator dark glasses and a gold Bulgari watch, one of the half-dozen or so types of trinket he complains come his way all the time. The overall sartorial effect hovered dangerously between that of a Subcontinental Biggles and Indiana Jones gone soft. He had just returned from a quick gallop in the miniature polo field he had constructed in the garden of the official residence. ‘I don’t usually speak to the press…I must be an idiot to give this interview.’

He doesn’t have a pukka Oxbridge accent, but can launch into a passable imitation of one when he sneers at what ‘the members of the Sindh Club in Karachi think of Asif Zardari’. He is at home with small talk as the most artful diplomatic envoy, only he gives no impression of putting on an act. Asif may not speak to the press very often, but he exudes charm and friendliness. I had been warned that he came on with a mock-rustic act, the little boy lost who would rather be back on the farm.

“I HAVE NEVER CLAIMED TO BE ANYTHING BUT A SAVAGE FROM THE WEST..”

He is definitely not a wallflower or a wimp but in public at least, like Denis Thatcher, he knows his place, which is usually on the side table with the local dignitaries rather than next to Benazir. During an official visit to Britain last year, Benazir was given a small private dinner party in London by one of her oldest Oxford friends. Before the guests departed, they all signed the visitors’ book. The first entry of the night was ‘Benazir Bhutto…Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Government House, Islamabad.’ Her husband simply wrote ‘ Asif Ali Zardari - a nobody’.

Many of the Sindh feudals I met in Islamabad prefer to believe this to be the literal truth. One government minister said to me over dinner that ‘When one thinks of the Baluch chieftains of Pakistan, the Zardaris don’t exactly spring to mind.’ Others were more blatant in their bad-mouthing, saying the Zardaris were merely camel-herders until some time this century.

Asif laughs at the critics who complain about his social origins. ‘Look, I have never claimed to be anything but a savage from the west. My family happens to be Baluch but it means nothing, nothing at all. My father is the chieftain of the tribe, but I have never even used the surname or the honorific of chief – I don’t really support it. We migrated from Baluchistan 300 or 400 years ago- it was a long time ago – we are basically Sindhis now.’ Asif spent a brief time at a boarding school in Quetta and a Karachi grammar school, then joined a minor army school. ‘My eyes gave up, so I did a diploma in business studies at the Centre for Economic and Business Studies in Paddington.’ He enjoyed himself, playing squash and going to discos with European and Pakistani friends. Then there was an unwelcome visit.

‘My father came one day and said I would have to come back because he couldn’t spare me. What is education? That you can spell and write a word – the rest is what you learn every day through living. So I came back after two years. One Friday I was in London and the next weekend I was on one of my farms- a place called Veeprakash – and we had no electricity there. It was late evening and so hot we couldn’t sit inside the house so I got somebody to move my charpal (string bed) to the mango plantation outside. The winds were blowing, one of the mangoes dropped on my head and I looked up at God and said, “Such is life- just a week ago I was having a good time in London and here I am in the middle of nowhere.”’

After five years on the farm, Asif headed off to the more lucrative pastures of Karachi, where he was involved in the family construction business. His father was a small-time businessman who also owned the Bambino Cinema, the smartest one in town. Rumour has it that this is where he first saw Benazir and decided on the spot, that he would like to marry her. This almost tallies with his own version. ‘I said to my father, “why don’t you get me married to Benazir?” he said “all right, let’s look into it,” and we proposed. The families remained in limbo for three years and then it was a yes.’ Benazir gave her consent after she was stung by a bee in Windsor Great Park while Asif was watching polo. He dropped everything and took her to a doctor and this excessive concern finally convinced her to take the plunge with this virtual stranger.

When they married, Benazir was still an opposition politician. Less than a year later, in 1988, following the death of General Zia in a mysterious plane crash, Benazir was elected Prime Minister, and it was this which radically changed her husband’s status.

I had first seen Asif Zardari at a reception with Benazir in the capital of Islamabad. An all-male cabal of MPs and officials were laughing and fawning over him and he was enjoying himself immensely. Embracing a steady stream of supplicants, he was slapping their backs and joking as surrounding guests looked on with the appearance of servile devotion.

One shrewd observer of the snobbish Pakistan social scene explained to me that this was clearest evidence yet that Asif was a power to be reckoned with. ‘Just after they were married, you would see only the national politicians and businessmen hanging about him in public. Now, it’s them plus these rustic types from the Provinces and you know for sure they wouldn’t waste their time with him unless they thought it was worth their trouble.’

‘I try not to be aware of my position,’ Asif explained. ‘I try to act normally. I am proud of my wife’s achievements but there are none that I could claim for myself. One can’t really think about it without a little humour. I never expected this to happen. As far as I was concerned General Zia was in no mood to die. All these generals live for a very long time. As far as he was concerned, she was his enemy, so that was a tricky position and it required a lot of guts.’

‘I WAS NEVER SALARY-CLASS”

Asif veered between saying he couldn’t care less about what the press or public say about him, to admitting it hurts to see the wild accusation against him and Benazir. One of the many stories spread by the Pakistani opposition was that Asif used to beat her. ‘Me beat her?’ he laughs. ‘If General Zia and his army of hundreds of thousands couldn’t control her, how do they imagine little old me would dare to do such a thing?’ He hands me one of the more lurid scandal rags, Weekly Facts International, which is run by opposition politicians in Punjab. The front page story clumsily claims that ‘The Bhutto and the Zardari families are learnt to have begun transferring their bank deposits in Swiss and other European banks to Senegal and Brunei Darus-salam’ because of fears about the confidentiality of numbered accounts in Zurich. Other headlines scream, ‘Bhuttos and Zardaris are transferring wealth to foreign banks’, and ‘Corruption, commissions, kickbacks’. ‘I don’t do anything about it – I just let it pass. If you react, it gives it more importance,’ says Asif.

‘When I got engaged, there were 4,000 or so guests at my house and they sat in one compound, so at least I had a house big enough to accommodate 4,000 people. I was playing polo before I came into power. I was never salary-class - if you are salary class, what money can you make? None. You can hardly look after your family on a salary.’ This sounds outrageous but ‘salary class’ in Pakistan means not having enough money to buy your own house or travel abroad.

Despite what Asif says, lack of funds has never deterred ambitious families from entering politics in Pakistan – for this is the fastest way to amass a fortune, providing your timing is right and the army doesn’t spoil it by staging a coup. But nobody in Pakistan has ever quite understood the difference between patronage and corruption –the whole place functions according to whom you know, even down to getting a telephone installed. Only a simpleton would rely on the normal functioning of the bureaucracy to get anything done at all. Asif does not deny that corruption is a way of life in Pakistan. ‘I think corruption is around – yes, you can’t deny that there is corruption –but it is in the lowest field, fixing people with jobs, favours. There are certain governmental departments that are very corrupt but it’d been a phenomenon with all Third World countries – all developing countries. It is the easiest thing to get at the Prime Minister by putting the blame on the husband. I am accused of doing things that I haven’t even dreamt of.’

TO THE BHUTTO HQ IN LAKARNA

In order to observe Pakistan’s first family in action, I headed off with the entourage to Lakarna, the location of the Bhutto family estates deep in Sindh. Benazir and Asif, accompanied by their two children, two Filipino nannies and a doctor, flew off in a Falcon executive jet, while the rest of the staff, including myself, fought to keep up in an ancient air force Fokker Friendship. Arriving at the Bhutto town house in Lakarna, there was a frenzied scramble to push through hundreds of spectators into the several acres of stunning gardens surrounding their Fifties mansion. Apart from two large Ibex skulls and horns tacked onto the entrance, it had all the charm of a village hall. A gaggle of searchlights on the roof and barred windows gave it the feeling of a fortress. Our visit was on the eleventh anniversary of the execution of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s martyred father. It was a frenetic schedule.

Twenty-four hours were to include a dinner for several hundred party-supporters in the garden, a public rally, the opening of a youth centre and the inauguration of a new train – the Zulfikar Express. For all but the last six hours of this time, there was no sign of Asif. By accident, I bumped into Benazir on her way back from the rally. She explained that Asif hadn’t gone with her because he had been up until half-past-one in the morning, helping her add some vernacular authenticity to her speech in Sindhi, which she does not speak nearly as fluently as English.

Just before noon, a sleepy Asif, reeking of gentleman’s scent, lumbered down the corridor rubbing his collar bone. ‘I’m terribly sorry but it is an old polo injury of mine that plays up occasionally,’ he explained. No sooner had he emerged from his bedroom than a group of special-interest pleaders, who had been allowed inside, rushed towards him with applications for jobs for their relatives. He might not be prime minister, but he is certainly treated as a useful substitute by the masses.

The next destination was uncertain – it was either Karachi or Nawabshah, the Zardari stronghold. Asif told me he wasn’t sure which place we would visit first. ‘Well,’ replied a protocol officer tartly, ‘he wouldn’t know any way – it is up to the Prime Minister, not her husband.’

GUNS AND DRUGS IN KARACHI

Karachi is the economic and criminal headquarters of Pakistan – it is awash with guns and drug-money, and has spawned what is known as ‘Kalashnikov Culture’. There is also political violence on a grand scale. More than 20 people were killed in one 10-hour period last February and since then, as handful of victims dies every day. Benazir and Asif’s personal stronghold here is a huge, modern mansion on a barren stretch of land in Clifton, the most fashionable suburb. My driver told me that before the buildings appeared, ‘Sir, it was a bald basin.’ Their pile is known unofficially as Bilalawal House. It was surrounded by hideous neo-classical mansions with unwieldy satellite dishes stuck on their roofs. There were piles of bricks and sand everywhere and electricity pylons rather than trees adorned the horizon.

The front garden was full of coils of barbed wire, sentry boxes and a brick wall, which, rather incongruously, was home to the two Shetland ponies Asif imported from Australia.

The entrance hall was crammed with two dozen chairs and buzzed with conversation between aides, cronies and confidants. Everyone sprang to attention and remained silent when Asif casually strolled inside, dressed in yet another polo shirt and low-cut riding boots. ‘You want to see how I spend my time here? Lets go.’ He headed towards a smoked-glass white Mercedes 500, and gestured for me to sit in the front seat, which was already occupied by a Heckler and Koch machine pistol plus another lethal looking hand gun. ‘Relax, they’re on safety,’ he assured me as we roared past a sentry box followed by a jeep load of goons bristling with rifles.

The Mercedes, which also had the useful attribute of being bulletproof, was one of a his-and-hers pair that the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi gave them and, much to Asif’s regret, would have to be handed back if Benazir ever lost power. While we swerved in and out of the traffic, Asif spelt out his dream of solving the water crisis in Pakistan by laying down a hi-tech carpet to prevent seepage along the 22,000 miles of the country’s canals. He also told me that a huge programme to provide fresh water to the slum area of towns that voted for Benazir was all his own work. ‘I got all the local authorities in the same room and bashed their heads together until they agreed to start work on it.’ The business elite may curse the project for disrupting the commercial centre of Karachi, but most residents seem happy that something positive was being done with their municipal funds for a change. The business community was also buzzing about a story in a respected Karachi news magazine alleging that the Zardari family had put pressure on a local hotelier to take over his chain. Asif was furious and told me he was going to break his rule and sue them.

However, the real objective of our journey was to drop in on an old family friend of Asif – an illegal exporter of endangered wildlife who sought his help in solving a Byzantine land dispute. At the lights he spotted a bespectacled man in a neighbouring car. ‘See that guy? He wouldn’t give me the time of day a few years back, but now he can’t wait to be my best friend.’ Asif was enjoying himself, pointing out his new multi-million pound building project in the middle of town – Trade Towers – which will have the distinction of being the first building in the Subcontinent with a vehicle lift to the rooftop car park.

Later that day, Muhammud Razziq Awan, Asif’s personal gunman, dropped by to take me to the dusty polo ground where Asif was mucking about with members of thre Karachi Polo Club. He may once have had a two handicap but it is presently zero and, although he has polo cups to show for his past exploits, these days he is lucky to play more than once a month. After the makeshift match, Fakir Syed Aitzazuddin, his polo teacher, talked sadly of the lack of time that this most important pupil puts into his game. ‘My ambition is to get him on to the back of a horse for a month but he never has the time,’ he complained.

I mentioned to him the story that Asif had imported 40 horses from Australia and a dozen of them had starved to death because he couldn’t find any buyers for them. Fakir Syed Aitzazuddin laughed and wagged his finger. ‘This is all lying. You have been talking to one of my cousins, who is a damned fool. You see, she is in the horse breeding business herself and does not like the competition.’ This turned out to be the case, and from the vast amount of paperwork Fakir displayed, none of the horses appeared to have died. Asif said that he only owned four of them anyway. Fakir confirmed this. Before he drove off in his Mercedes, Asif revealed his ultimate dream. He wanted to build a polo ground in Islamabad, but had run into problems with the local authorities because it would have meant axing some trees around the city lake. [The other dream that Zardari mentioned to me at the time was how much he coveted the American consul general’s colonial mansion in Karachi.]

NAWABSHAH, THE ZARDARI STRONGHOLD

The next morning, after my luggage had been probed for bombs, Benazir, Asif and I flew to Nawabshah, the Zardari seat. On the journey, I sent a note to Benazir asking if she would mind breaking her own rule and give me an interview about her marriage. She laughed and handed it back to me with the scrawled reply, ‘I will have to take ‘permission’ from my husband.’ ‘This is a joke,’ Asif shouted over the noise of the rotors. She looked relaxed in his company and forced him to wear ear-mufflers to cut out the noise. Two miles below us, the landscape looked like the worst Badlands in the American West – dry river beds and sand dunes – until we came down at the oasis of Nawabshah. The Zardari residence is not particularly grand – a large U-shaped bungalow behind high, iron gates on the outskirts of Nawabshah, a non-descript town. Once we were safely inside, there was no obtrusive security, just a handful of ancient family retainers, some wearing solid gold watches given to them by visiting Gulf sheikhs. For once, Benazir dispensed with the headscarf, which she wears to appease Muslim fundamentalists. Even here, there were local politicians to chat with, while the newly appointed Chief Minister of Sindh province hovered in the background. Finally, she saw them off and we sat on some cane furniture in the inner corridor of the house.

Benazir looked exhausted and refused to have any photographs taken. She said again that asking Asif’s permission to talk about their marriage was only half a joke because she has never done so before. While she adhered strictly to the fasting law of Ramadan, Asif sat cross legged on the sofa downing his lunch. She does not exude power or appear arrogant and was almost nervous as she explained that despite all the pressures, they have a satisfactory family life. She showed signs of genuine relief when I said that even the cattiest of her opponents conceded that she loves her husband. ‘There were these dreadful rumours a year ago that we had difficulties. There were wild stories that I was unhappy, that there were other affairs of the heart and that Asif used violence against me. I used to laugh at it and tell him these stories go in one ear and out the other, but it used to upset him.’

Asif looked up from his plate and said, ‘It still does.’

‘I do love my husband very much – don’t I darling?’ she said as she leant over and touched him on the shoulder. She was less positive in her defence of arranged marriages, merely stating that Pakistan was still a very traditional society. ‘Basically, Asif is a fakir – darling, don’t look so upset. A fakir is a person who would be happy sitting in a mud-hut with a stick. Asif was born under the Leo sign and that is what he is like – a lion who only gets restless when he can’t spend enough time in a cave with his mate and his cubs. It is a delicate task because of the life I lead but I am grateful to God that my marriage has been a success. Ultimately, how two people meet is not as important as whether they are compatible and willing to adjust.’ She denied that she is always comparing people with her father, whom she worshipped.

‘I am much happier as a person now,’ Benazir explained. ‘I had such an intense family life before that in a way I was lost until I married and had the warmth and security of my own family.’ She conceded that the Zardari family is far more feudal than her own and that her values are more liberal than Asif’s because of her western education.

WHAT ABOUT MY SUGAR MILLS?

After Benazir jetted back to Islamabad, I stayed on to see more of Asif’s feudal spoils. The most impressive was a six-mile canal, which he had ordered to be built (using government funds) about 15 miles from Nawabshah. Complete with a name-board saying it was the ‘Bilalawal Zardari Junior Canal’, it will transform the parched land around it for thousands of ordinary villagers. As we strolled around the banks of the project, Asif looked proud that through his connections he could pull this scheme off. ‘God, it makes me really pleased to see this. Who cares what the members of the Sindh Club say about me? This is what really counts.’

As we trundled through the countryside, crowds stopped his jeep to offer salaams. Suddenly he turned to me and said, ‘You know, you are really cruel – why don’t you ask me about the four or five sugar mills I am supposed to have bought? How can I respond to these stories unless you ask me?’ he smiled. The story doing the rounds was that Asif’s business associates have been given permission to build these sugar mills, which give a huge return because of the nationwide shortage of refined sugar. Asif admits that some of the directors are his friends, but denies that he has any other connection with the business.

Like all of the stories surrounding his family, no matter how plausible, it is impossible to prove them.

By the time we drove back to Nawabshah through the flat farmlands, word had spread that Asif was in town and a crowd of some 50 men had gathered in the forecourt of the house. The rest of the evening had been taken up with a bewildering number of local disputes mainly concerning kidnapping or robbery by one or other branch of the Zardari clan. While Asif lounged in front of this animated crowd, quietly puffing on a Dunhill cigarette, servants handed him ringing telephones while he shouted over the growing din. When newcomers arrived, they bowed down to touch him before fiercely thumping their hand over their heart as a sign of fealty. Only occasionally, when a tall landowner or senior bureaucrat appeared, did he rise from his chair and grasp them by the arm. By nightfall, the District Commissioner and the Superintendant of Police were both sitting in the front row, like spectators, while Asif delegated sub-committees to investigate the latest dispute. Clerks hurried off into the house and brought back typed statements and requests to numerous government officials ad departments. It was a medieval scene- fierce-looking farmers would be shouting their version of some complicated abduction or robbery, while Asif’s retainers literally held them apart. Asif drank the occasional glass of water, respectfully offered by a servant. ‘Do you think this would be feudal enough to satisfy my enemies?’ he shouted at me.

FAMILY FEUDS AND ABDUCTIONS

The most bizarre story concerned one of his relatives who had been abducted by a local gang, which demanded a £17,000 ransom. ‘There is no way I can start paying ransoms –otherwise none of my relatives will be safe.’ He explained. I turned to a man sitting next to me for a running interpretation. He turned out to be the local police Superintendant and he told me they knew where the gang’s hideout was, but if they stormed it, his relative might get hurt, so they were biding their time. He had no complaints about Asif’s general behaviour. ‘Sometimes he gets a bit hot-headed and asks us to do something or charge someone but he is quite benevolent and usually ends up seeing reason.’

I wandered off to bed while Asif stayed up until well after midnight. The next morning, there was an even bigger crowd jostling to explain their woes to him. At 10 a.m., I visited him in his stark bedroom, in which there was nothing but a large double bed, an air conditioner, a chair and the mobile trolley holding his breakfast. Asif, once again reeking of men’s scent, was wearing an elegant white waistcoat over his spotlessly white silk shalwar kameez. He wolfed his breakfast down while a servant wearing a psychedically-coloured Sindhi cap watched over him. Two black automatic rifles were propped against the wall and dozens of back issues of GQ magazine were stacked on the floor and strewn over the bed. He was happy to chat about his role of adjudicator. 'They take my decisions as final because they know I am just. I have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t come to me for rulings.’

Already, elderly relatives with large moustaches and clutching walking sticks were queuing up at the door to get in a quick word before he retuned to his seat amongst the crowd. He may not be the Prime Minister, but Asif Ali Zardari has no regrets about the life he leads or the power he wields. As one policeman at the house said to me: “Four years ago, there would be nothing like this… Mr Zardari is in his element. Perhaps you could say it was a marriage of opportunity and he has hit the jackpot.’

This article appeared in Tatler, June 1990

The Trouble with Oil - BP, the CIA and the overthrown of the Iranian Government in 1953

2010-07-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

By Bruce Palling

“I owe my throne to God, my people, my army – and to you!”

Shah of Iran to CIA agent Kim Roosevelt, August 1953

Oil is trouble – whether you have too much of it or none at all. It provides unimaginable wealth but its abrupt disappearance can be even more traumatic. What do Western Governments and businessmen do if their oil company (the third largest in the world) is suddenly seized by a foreign government? It is fair to assume they will stop at nothing to get it back, regardless of the conviction of the other country that it is their oil to be controlled and sold however they like.

This in a nutshell is what happened in 1951, when the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh suddenly nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). We are not talking about any old asset – it was the single most valuable possession of Britain anywhere overseas, reaping upwards of £100 million profit annually. The uproar reverberated around the globe with Britain immediately imposing an oil embargo on Iran’s exports, thus crippling the oil-dependent economy. Herbert Morrison, the inexperienced British Foreign Secretary, who had been in charge of Britain’s nationalisation of coal and steel, failed to see the justice in Iran following suit and even threatened an invasion. Two years later, Mossadegh was overthrown in a mysterious coup, which in fact was masterminded by British and American intelligence agents. It was the first – and apparently last – such joint operation between the two countries but its immediate success led the United States to consider it as a template for dealing with troublesome regimes elsewhere. A darker consequence was that it allowed the Shah to impose a dictatorship over Iran, which led to disastrous consequences 25 years later, with the seizure of power by Islamic extremists.

Who was Mohammed Mossadegh and what were his motives taking on an imperial power like Britain? The Western media portrayed him as an hysterical rabble-rouser, renowned for either fainting or bursting into tears at critical moments. He was also an intellectual from a landowning family while his mother was a relative of the last royal family before the current Shah’s father seized the throne. Although not pro-Communist, his democratically elected coalition included both Marxist and Islamic extremists. However, his overriding political position was passionate nationalism. He wanted to regain control of Iran’s vast oil reserves from the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, which had struck an exploitative contract with an earlier ailing regime. These moves led to his vilification in the Western press, with the normally liberal London Observer describing him as a “Robespierre fanatic” who was a “tragic Frankenstein” … “obsessed with one xenophobic idea”.

In effect, the AIOC paid the Iranians less for their oil than it gave the British Government in taxes on its huge profits.

The nerve centre of the Iranian oil fields was Abadan, then the world’s largest and most sophisticated oil refinery. All of the key positions were held by British expatriates, who lived in colonial splendour in stark contrast to the tens of thousands of Iranian employees lucky to be paid fifty cents a day. They lived in shanty towns with no electricity or running water. It was considered impossible for the Iranians to ever actually run the refinery without British help, so after the nationalisation was enacted in 1951, the British withdrew all of their staff in the expectation that the entire operation would grind to a halt.

Britain left a skeleton staff of a few hundred, who were finally withdrawn in October 1951, while Mossadegh was at the United Nations in New York. It was described nostalgically in the official history of British Petroleum:

On the morning of October 4, 1951, the remaining British staff assembled before the Gymkhana Club, the centre of so many of the lighter moments of their life in Persia, to embark for Basra in the British cruiser Mauritius. Some had their dogs, though most had had to be destroyed; others carried tennis rackets and golf clubs; the hospital nurses and the indomitable Mrs Flavell who ran the guest house and three days previously had intimidated a Persian tank commander with her parasol for driving over her lawn, were among the party, and the Rev. Tyrie had come sadly from locking up in the little church the records of those who had been born, baptised or had died in Abadan…The ship’s band, “correct” to the end, struck up the Persian national anthem and the launches began their shuttle service…The cruiser Mauritius steamed slowly away up river with the band playing, the assembled company lining the rails and roaring in unison the less printable version of “Colonel Bogey”. Next day Ross and Mason [the two senior officials] drove away. The greatest single overseas enterprise in British commerce had ground to a standstill.”

Adventures in Oil: The story of British Petroleum (London 1959, pp.143-4)

Because of the stir caused by these developments and the consequent fallout in the Middle East, TIME magazine, in their inimitable style, named Mossadegh as “Man of the Year” in 1951.

Not that he was the best or the worst or the strongest, but because his rapid advance from obscurity was attended by the greatest stir. The stir was not only on the surface of events: in his strange way, this strange old man represented one of the most profound problems of his time. Around this dizzy old wizard swirled a crisis of human destiny.

He was Mohammed Mossadegh, Premier of Iran in the year 1951. He was the Man of the Year. He put Scheherazade in the petroleum business and oiled the wheels of chaos. His acid tears dissolved one of the remaining pillars of a once great empire. In his plaintive, singsong voice he gabbled a defiant challenge that sprang out of a hatred and envy almost incomprehensible to the West.

There were millions inside and outside of Iran whom Mossadegh symbolized and spoke for, and whose fanatical state of mind he had helped to create. They would rather see their own nations fall apart than continue their present relations with the West.

What was the background to this impasse? The Iranian relationship with the West has a long and bitter legacy. Half a century ago, Britain was the dominant Imperial power in the Middle East, while the United States was considered an almost benign presence, except when it came to its role in the creation of Israel.

Absolute monarchy in Iran had ended less than 50 years earlier in 1906, when the British Embassy also played an active role in forcing the Qajar Shahs to accept regime change. By tradition, the 15 acres of the British diplomatic enclave in the centre of Teheran (described by the British travel writer Robert Byron as resembling a Victorian lunatic asylum) were designated a safe haven for dissenters (along with the Royal Mosque and for some obscure reason, the grounds of the Eastern Telegraph Company). Thousands of protesters camped out there for three weeks until Muzaffar-ad-Din Shah relented and granted a constitution and a Majlis (Parliament) to the protesters. Less than two years later, substantial oil reserves were discovered in south western Iran, with the Ababan Oil Refinery ultimately becoming the largest in the world. The existing Qajar regime tottered on until Reza Khan was encouraged by the British to seize power. Later, Major General Sir Edmund “Tiny” Ironside, (a bruiser who was the real life model for John Buchan’s fictional character Richard Hannay) who had been in charge of British troops in Iran, noted in his diary “I fancy that all the people think I engineered the coup d’état. I suppose I did, strictly speaking.” Reza Khan finally toppled the Qajars and became Shah in 1926. After becoming an arbitrary dictator and showing signs of Pro-Nazi sympathy, the Soviet Union and Britain invaded Iran in 1941, forcing him to abdicate and go into exile in South Africa. His designated heir was his bullied son, Mohammed Reza Shah, whom the British finally allowed to be installed as a puppet ruler at the age of 21.

Britain withdrew its troops from Iran at the end of the Second World War but the Soviet Union only left grudgingly from the northern province of Azerbaijan after protests were made at the United Nations and elsewhere. There was no stability in Iran’s internal affairs, with the Soviets still hankering after a warm water port in the Persian Gulf while the West kept a close eye on the goings on amongst the Tudeh, the pro-Soviet Iranian Communist Party. Two thirds of the West’s and Japan’s imported oil came from the Middle East and pressure was beginning to emerge amongst Iranian politicians to renegotiate what was obviously a blatantly unequal treaty with Anglo-Iranian Oil.

There was further pressure on Britain to renegotiate their unequal agreements in 1949, once the American Arabian Oil Company (ARAMCO) agreed to a fifty-fifty split of profits with Saudi Arabia. At this critical juncture, it was left to Sir William Fraser, the bone-headed Glaswegian accountant who was chairman of Anglo-Iranian, to hammer out a deal. He rebuffed American attempts to reach a more equitable arrangement with the Iranians by declaring, “One penny more and the company goes broke.” Even the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who was supremely stubborn when it came to compromising with the Iranians, declared that “Fraser is in cloud cuckoo land”. Later, Monty Woodhouse, who was the MI6 station chief in Teheran, described the directors of Anglo Iranian Oil as “stupid, boring, pigheaded and tiresome”.

On the international stage, President Truman was becoming increasingly concerned about what was perceived as a newly aggressive approach by Stalin in his consolidation of power in Eastern Europe, not to mention the gains of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party against the ailing Republican government in China. The optimism following the end of the Second World War was rapidly becoming eroded by Stalin’s desire to expand his control beyond his borders. The legal basis for the CIA’s new role in subverting and overthrowing regimes was a top secret 1948 National Security Council directive (NSC10/2). In response to the Soviet Union’s “vicious” covert activities to defeat the aims and activities of the US and the West, the government gave the green light to “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups.” It ended the directive by saying that any such activities should be done secretly “and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” (Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston 1994) p.293)

Then three events occurred within less than a year to confirm the notion of an expansionist Communist movement worldwide – the explosion of the first Soviet nuclear device in August 1949; the communist victory in China in October 1949 and then the most dramatic of all - the invasion of South Korea by the communist North in June 1950. In the midst of these key events, President Truman commissioned a National Security Council report (NSC 68) which encapsulated the growing fears of Communist expansion and led to the conclusion that the Communist threat was no longer merely to be challenged in major specific pressure points but also in regions that were once considered peripheral to American interests.

The Iranian crisis deepened as nationalist politicians put pressure on the faltering government of Prime Minister Razmara for the nationalisation of the Iranian oil fields. The United States was also intrinsically sympathetic to the Iranian demands and felt that the British were completely out of touch with reality. Various attempts by the Americans to get Anglo-Iranian to compromise were rebuffed. Razmara was opposed to the nationalisation but was badly undermined by the hardline response of the AIOC to any meaningful compromise.

Shortly afterwards on March 7 1951, Prime Minister Razmara was assassinated by a member of a militant Islamic group who supported nationalisation. A week later the Iranian parliament voted “accepting the principle that oil should be nationalised throughout Iran”. The following month, parliament met to consider appointing a new Prime Minister, which against all expectations ended up being Mossadegh, who immediately passed a formal bill to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Shortly after he was elected, Mossadegh pardoned the assassin of his predecessor.

At this very critical juncture, the newly appointed British foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison was hardly up to the job. His proudest achievements were rearranging the London transport system and overseeing the construction of Waterloo Bridge while he was a London Labour councillor. His attitude towards granting Independence to British dependent territories was summed up in 1943: “It would be like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shot-gun”. (Prime Minister Atlee later reflected that Morrison was “the worst appointment I ever made”). Critics claim he spent more time devoted to the Festival of Britain than dealing with the nationalisation of the oil fields in 1951. Although he was in charge of the British nationalisation programmes after the Second World War, he approached the Iranian position with outright hostility for their impertinence. He personally favoured invading the oil fields but was met with such opposition from all quarters that he dropped the idea. Instead, he commissioned a working party on Persia, which included a background briefing on “Iranian psychology” which makes interesting reading

The “ordinary Persian” (according to the anonymous British diplomat who penned the portrait) was driven by an unabashed dishonesty, fatalistic outlook, [and] indifference to suffering… is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perseverance and energy, but amenable to discipline. Above all he enjoys intrigue and readily turns to prevarication and dishonesty whenever there is a possibility of personal gain. Although an accomplished liar, he does not expect to be believed. They easily acquire a superficial knowledge of technical subjects, deluding themselves into the belief that it is profound.

(All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer (New York 2004) pp81-82)

President Truman then decided to send a senior envoy to Iran, Averell Harriman, the formidable wartime politician and envoy, who had been Ambassador to the Soviet Union and then Britain. Nicknamed “the crocodile” for his ability to snap his jaws at unexpected moments, he found that the attitude of the British was as blinkered as that of his hosts. In a cable to Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State, he said:

In spite of the fact that the British consider oil interest in Iran their greatest overseas asset; no minister has visited Iran as far as I can find out, except Churchill and Eden on wartime business. Oil company directors have rarely come. Situation that has developed here is tragic example of absentee management combined with worldwide growth of nationalism in undeveloped countries.

This and other attempts to start serious negotiations faltered and by September, Foreign Secretary Morrison and Sir Francis Shepherd, the British Ambassador to Teheran, began to brooch the idea of deposing Mossadegh and landing British troops at Abadan ostensibly to protect the oil fields and refineries. Within days, Mossadegh heard of such plans and denounced them publicly. This air and seaborne assault would involve 70,000 troops but due to vociferous American opposition, they were dropped.

After Atlee had finally ruled out any British military intervention, Morrison decided to turn to two scholars to pursue the overthrow of Mossadegh through covert means. His chosen duo were A. K. S. (Nancy) Lambton, an Iranian scholar in London and Robert Zaehner. Zaehner, who worked for S.I.S. in Iran, later went on to become Professor of Eastern Religions at All Souls, Oxford. He was renowned for his interest in alcohol, opium and hallucinogenic drugs and recommended anyone interested in understanding Iranian affairs to read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Perhaps he was thinking of Mossadegh’s demand for £50m of reparations from Britain, who instead were asking for a similar amount for denying them future profits. He was said to have spent a total of more than £1.5m through the Rashidian brothers, covert British collaborators from a well-to-do business Teheran family. The contact man with the Rashidians was Sam Falle, the British Embassy’s Oriental Secretary – an ornate name for the political officer. A distinguished diplomat and war hero, Sir Sam Falle was the first British diplomat in Iran who actively advocated the overthrow of Mossadegh. He quickly gathered that while the educated elite were intellectually in favour of nationalising their oil reserves, they were becoming frustrated at the growing economic hardships that Mossadegh’s intransigence was causing. More than half a century later, now in his ninety second year and in a retirement home near Bath, he has not wavered once about his position. He admitted that it was indeed ironical, that he, an instinctive Labour Party supporter, should have advocated the overthrow of a populist government. “I considered it was the only way to avoid World War Three as we feared that if the situation continued to deteriorate, the Communists would gain power and that this would be absolutely intolerable to the West, given all the other things happening in the world at that time.”

Falle liked the Rashidian brothers, who he found hugely entertaining though “probably mercenary”. Like him, they thought the Shah was indispensible but they also shared his contempt for him. “They referred to him in Persian as ‘Poor bastard, he’s as scared as a dog!’” Falle had an equally low opinion of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company and considered Sir William Fraser as a menace, who was ultimately responsible for the entire fiasco.

Falle then liaised with General Fazlollah Zahedi, who was thought to be the best alternative leader to Mossadegh. Zahedi was considered the ideal candidate for two fairly obvious reasons – firstly, he was the only major figure publicly seeking the position and secondly, he had been kidnapped and imprisoned in Palestine during The Second World War by Britain for being pro-Nazi, so he would not now be considered to be a British puppet. (His kidnapper was Sir Fitzroy MacLean, the British agent, who made an inventory of the contents of Zahedi’s bedroom: a cache of German automatic weapons; a supply of opium; a large supply of silk underwear; notes from German agents in Iran and an illustrated guide to the leading prostitutes in Teheran.)

However, Falle became careless and his regular meetings at Zahedi’s house, along with C.M. “Monty” Woodhouse, the MI6 Teheran Station Chief, aroused the suspicions of Mossadegh who ultimately expelled the entire British Embassy in October 1952.

The British Government wasted no time in pursuing the overthrow of Mossadegh with the assistance of the United States, now that they no longer had any diplomatic or intelligence presence on the ground in Iran. Anthony Eden, who had returned as British Foreign Secretary, conceded to Woodhouse that the only way to oust Mossadegh now would be with American collaboration. Britain moved to impose a blockade on Iranian oil exports, which succeeded through the assistance of the United States. Consequently, the Iranian economy was crippled and there was rising frustration amongst Iran’s small middle class and wealthy elite. The critical moment was the 1952 election of President Dwight Eisenhower, the former commander in chief of the western armies in the Second World War and a strong anti-communist. The thinking of the new Republican government was more of the likelihood of communist subversion in Iran rather than a question of the justice or otherwise of Britain’s claim to maintain total control of the Iranian oil industry. Just after the election victory of Eisenhower in November 1952, Falle and Woodhouse flew to Washington to press the urgency of overthrowing Mossadegh. While the State Department were still hesitant, the CIA had fewer qualms. Falle explained: “Monty and I went to Washington in November just after the 1952 presidential election and talked to the state department and the CIA and persuaded them that Mossadegh had to be gotten rid of – their view was that he was a good patriotic Iranian and just the sort of chap that good freedom loving Americans should support. Monty and I had to argue against this. He was perceived as a moderate nationalist. To think that Monty and I persuaded them to carry out a movement against him says something, but the State Department were very keen on keeping him but the CIA was more on our side. We had a number of long and very interesting meetings – I don’t think it was publicly known, but we started the ball rolling.”

Woodhouse admitted that he had to tread carefully when proposing the coup in Washington:

Not wishing to be accused of trying to use the Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire, I decided to emphasise the Communist threat to Iran rather than the need to recover control of the oil industry. (Something Ventured by C.M. Woodhouse(London 1982) p117)

He named the plan “Operation Boot” while the Americans later referred to their scheme as “Operation Ajax”.

Still nothing definitive came out during this transitional period in Washington. However by March 1953, John Foster Dulles was now installed as Secretary of State and his younger brother Allen in charge of the CIA. These powerful members of the Republican East Coast establishment were more than willing to act decisively to overthrow a troublesome government especially if the spectre of a Communist take over was involved, given the traumatic events still occurring in the Korean war. British Foreign Office reservations were also overcome by Woodhouse, when Winston Churchill was acting Foreign Secretary in July 1953 while Anthony Eden was recuperating from an illness. Always willing to take a robust approach to defending British interests abroad, he was quite happy to give the green light to Operation Boot, never having had much time for timid Foreign Office concerns about complication or even the illegality of the plan.

The senior CIA operative was Kermit Roosevelt, the civilised grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt. The British spy Kim Philby, who later defected to the Soviet Union, described Kermit, or “Kim” was he was also known, as “the quiet American…the last person you would expect to be up to his neck in dirty tricks.” (Roosevelt’s PhD thesis at Harvard had been “Propaganda techniques in the English civil war”) Ever the gentleman, he did not go public on the Mossadegh coup or his part in it, until after the Shah was overthrown by angry Islamic mobs in 1979. Operation Ajax, which had now replaced Britain’s Operation Boot, was ultimately hammered out in four days of secret discussions held in Beirut in June 1953 and then taken to London for MI6 and the Foreign Office to endorse, which they did with no meaningful changes before taking it on to Washington. When Roosevelt arrived to see JF Dulles on June 25, he was carrying a 22-page paper what was a modified version of the British draft.

Dulles’s response in front of a secret meeting of the senior diplomatic and intelligence decision-makers in Washington was “So this is how we get rid of that madman Mossadegh!” (Counter Coup by Kermit Roosevelt (New York 1979) p8)

The decision to proceed with Operation Ajax was endorsed by the group of half a dozen senior intelligence and State department officials in the office of John Foster Dulles, accompanied by his younger brother Allen. Although the ad hoc meeting was supposed to review and endorse the plan, Roosevelt remarked “I soon realized that most of the group had already concluded that anything but assent would be ill-received by its chairman.” It was duly approved after a cursory discussion between the Dulles brothers and the assembled officials. The American Ambassador to Teheran, Loy Henderson, concluded the discussion by stating “Mr. Secretary, I don’t like this kind of business at all. You know that. But we are confronted by a desperate, a dangerous situation and a madman who would ally himself with the Russians. We have no choice but to proceed with this undertaking. May God grant us success.” After hearing Roosevelt claim that “I think this simply has to be done”, Dulles closed the meeting with a quick grin: “That’s that then; let’s get going!”

Roosevelt left the meeting, which was over in less than an hour, feeling flattered that it had been approved but also with a sense of foreboding.

On the other hand, this was a grave decision to have made. It involved tremendous risk. Surely it deserved thorough examination, the closest consideration, somewhere at the very highest level. It had not received such thought at this meeting. In fact, I was morally certain that almost half of those present, if they had felt free or had the courage to speak, would have opposed the undertaking.” (Roosevelt pp18-19)

Regardless of any misgivings that Roosevelt or other operatives might have had, this was no rogue elephant, as it had been endorsed at the very highest levels of the American and British governments. Roosevelt entered Iran under the assumed name of “James Lockridge” in July 1953 and then worked undercover in a villa in Teheran with a budget of $1m. The coup plans were hardly a secret – on July 7, the clandestine radio of the Tudeh (Communist) Party broadcast that the Americans, along with a motley crew of spies and traitors, including Zahedi were trying “to liquidate the Mossadeq Government.” (Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (New York 2007) p 87)

The Americans were anxious to ensure that after the overthrow of Mossadegh, Britain would agree to a peaceful resolution of the oil nationalisation, which they agreed to do. The Shah of Iran, the young and inexperienced monarch, was under considerable pressure from the CIA and MI6 to sign a firman (law) commissioned by Roosevelt sacking Mossadegh. He wavered and as one British diplomat remarked, the Shah “has no moral courage and succumbs easily to fear”. In order to bolster his confidence, British and American agents met up with his twin sister Princess Ashraf, then in exile in the south of France. After the gift of a mink coat and an undisclosed amount of cash, “her eyes lit up” and she quietly returned to Teheran to convince her brother to oust Mossadegh. When this too failed, the next emissary was General H Norman Schwarzkopf (father of the hero of the 1991 Gulf War) who had been based in Teheran during most of the 1940s. Again, the Shah dithered, so it was arranged for Roosevelt himself to convince the Shah that both Truman and Churchill were intent on launching a coup. In order to confirm that he really did speak on behalf of the American and British secret services, it had been arranged by Churchill himself for the BBC Persian Service to broadcast a special code the following night. (Instead of ending the broadcast day by saying “It is now midnight” it was agreed that the BBC announcer would declare “It is now exactly midnight’). The Americans too, had to supply a code for authenticity – in their case it was an address by President Eisenhower, where he added a phrase on the dangers of Soviet expansion in the Middle East. After further agonising, the Shah finally agreed to endorse the coup. However, by now all of the comings and goings from CIA safe houses to the palace had alerted other ears that something was afoot and by the time the actual coup began on the night of August 15, loyal troops surrounded Mossadegh’s residence. One of the Shah’s Imperial Guardsmen was himself arrested at Mossadeq’s residence when he went there to arrest the Prime Minister. The Shah had already panicked and fled to his seaside villa after reading allegations in a pro-Mossadeq newspaper that the royal court was a brothel and that he should be executed. Once he heard that one of his officers had been arrested, the Shah jumped into his twin-engined Beechcraft plane and personally flew it, with his wife (as well as his Master of the Horse) to neighbouring Baghdad. From there, they fled to Rome on a scheduled international flight, without bothering to alert anyone in the government or the CIA officials in Teheran. By what looked like complete chance, the Shah and his entourage stayed at the same Rome hotel as Allen Dulles and his wife, who had arrived from holiday in Vienna. Dulles wanted to be able to view the considerable radio traffic coming out of Teheran via the Embassy and understandably made no attempt to renew his acquaintance with the Shah.

Radio Teheran announced at 0545 on August 16 that the coup had failed. Some of the original plotters began to waver and two threatened to abandon it later on the day until Roosevelt threatened to kill them if they did so.

By this stage, it was assumed in Washington that the coup was a terminal failure. Roosevelt was told by CIA headquarters on August 17 to cease the entire operation and leave immediately if he thought his life was in danger. In the CIA report written by Donald Wilber but only published in 1980, Roosevelt explained why he did not report more information through to his superiors while the operation was considered a failure in Washington.

“He pointed out that if they had simply reported what they were doing, London and Washington would have thought they were crazy and told them to stop immediately; if they had reported the reasons why they felt justified in taking such action they would have had no time to take action; accordingly, they followed the third course which was to act, and report practically nothing. This decision was initially made on the assumption that they had very little more to lose by following up the last hopes, and everything to win. As the hours passed, evidenced that the action had great hopes of success increased rapidly, but they still had no time or energy to prepare and present the evidence.” Wilber P59

Instead, Roosevelt decided to give it one more try, so he secretly visited the coup leader, General Zahedi, the retired officer who had already received $100,000 from the CIA.

With nothing to lose as he was already being sought by the police for his part in the coup, Zahedi quickly agreed to come under Roosevelt’s protection while he planned to further destabilise Mossadegh. Using his considerable network of paid informants and pliable newspaper editors, Roosevelt spread rumours than in fact the failed rebellion was an attempt by Mossadegh to seize power from the monarchy, rather than the other way around. He then secretly hired rioters with $50,000 through the Rashidian brothers, to spread mayhem and polarise opinion in order to galvanise the military to step in to maintain law and order. The street unrest on the morning of August 17 was supposed to be thought of as the work of leftists and Communists but they quickly realised it was a staged event and urged the rioters to go home.

Undeterred, Roosevelt then met secretly with the American Ambassador and General Robert A McClure, the creator of the US Special Forces, who was in charge of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Iran. After a four-hour discussion, McClure convinced Iranian officers to call in troops from outlying regions to bolster the coup. Roosevelt then did a complete volte face and decided to hire more mobs but this time to demonstrate against Mossadeq. (Weiner pp88-89)

The most effective of the thuggish gang leaders was called “Shaban the Brainless”. He even bribed Muslim religious leaders, who were already hostile to the left-wing government of Mossadegh. One of the more outlandish schemes was to hire not just street thugs by whole groups of members of Teheran’s traditional athletic societies. They were used on festive occasions to march along with parades, twirling their batons or even juggling and performing acrobatics. In leaner times, they also helped out with protection rackets in the local markets, so they were more than willing to perform for the Iranian agents awash with cash. Roosevelt later described the result in his memoirs, which sounds more like something described in the Beatles song “For the Benefit of Mr Kite” than a serious plot to overthrow a government:

They started with the Zurkaneh giants, weight lifters who developed their physiques through an ancient set of Iranian exercises, which included lifting progressively heavier weights. The Zurkanehs had built up tremendous shoulders and huge biceps. Shuffling down the street together, they were a frightening spectacle. Two hundred or so of these weightlifters began the day by marching through the bazaar, shouting “Long Live the Shah!” and dancing and twirling like dervishes. Along the edges of the crowd, men were passing out ten-rial notes…. The mob swelled; the chant “Long Live the Shah!” was deafening. As the throng passed the offices of a pro-Mossadegh newspaper, men smashed the windows and sacked the place.

By the time the mob had reached the centre of Teheran, four newspaper offices had been burnt down along with the political headquarters of a pro-Mossadeq party. The police were actually leading the demonstrators and there were no counter demonstrations because Mossadegh had foolishly decided to urge his own supporters not to contribute to any of the unrest on the streets. In one of the biggest ironies of the whole affair, one of the demonstrators was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future clerical leader of Iran. The only other group that could have proved dangerous to the demonstrators were Tudeh, the large local communist party, but they did not act as they only took orders from Moscow and in the wake of Stalin’s recent death, there was no clear strategy.

An eyewitness to the street unrest was Parviz Rajdi, then a Cambridge undergraduate home for the holidays – and much later to become the Shah’s last Ambassador to the United Kingdom, where he still lives. Like many of the educated Iranian elite, he was fed up with the chaos and economic limbo that Iran was in following Mossadegh’s confrontation with AIOC. On August 19 while in Teheran on holidays from Cambridge, he recalled seeing street gangs calling for the overthrow of Mossadegh.

“There had been vague hints from various people that something was going to happen so it was not completely unexpected. There was considerable commotion with people driving around the streets with photos of the Shah and chanting calling for the end of Mossadegh. I went home and turned on the state radio, which had just been re-taken by Shah loyalists. What staggered me was that twice they played a recording of the Star-Spangled Banner (The American National Anthem). I have never found out what it was about though at the time it seemed to be some sort of code to say that everything was proceeding as planned.” (Interview with the Author in London)

Another eyewitness to the unrest following the coup was Parivash Saleh-Moazami, the wife of Mossadegh’s Minister of Communications. When her husband failed to come after work, she went out on the street to see what was happening: “Basically, there was mayhem there, with gangs shouting slogans and massing on street corners, shouting things like ‘Death to Mossadegh’. Suddenly a few hoodlums came out of a car and boasted to me that ‘We have just cut Mossadegh into small pieces’ ”.

She later learned when the attacks on Mossadegh started at his house, her husband put him on his shoulders and went over five or six backyards to his father’s house, where she went to see them “As I was approaching the house there was a massive number of thugs screaming and shouting “We are going to destroy you”, there were pro-Shah slogans and all the way into the house a lot of army and police people.

The house was a two storey building and as I looked up I saw this frail old man coming down the stairs – it was Mossadegh. I jumped up and embraced him saying “I will protect you – you will not be killed” Mossadegh was so affected that he fainted in my arms. Then the army arrived with an arrest warrant – he had actually called them to surrender. My husband was also put into a truck and then driven away with Mossadegh.” (Telephone interview with the Author)

At least 300 people had been killed in the street clashes before Mossadegh was arrested. Woodhouse was not around for the coup de grace, having flown to Japan and Korea on pressing business. He actually heard of the successful outcome of the operation on a battery powered shortwave radio while listening to Mozart on the side of a beautiful lake near Kyoto. While later expressing relief at the outcome, he conceded that “One can never be sure about revolutions” but thought on the balance of probability, that the Western intervention was directly responsible for the success of Operation Boot or Ajax.

Woodhouse did admit that it was not as clear-cut about the long-term benefits, given how capricious and tyrannical the Shah became, though at the time there was merely general relief that a threat to British strategic interests had been removed.

Once the coup succeeded, the Shah was quickly urged to return from Rome. After arriving back in Baghdad on a commercial flight, he flew his Beechcraft back to Teheran to a tarmac welcome by Prime Minister Zahedi. He received a bonus of $1m from the CIA, who also injected a further $4m into the government’s coffers. (Shaban the Brainless was immediately rewarded by the Shah with the gift of a yellow Cadillac convertible, which he drove around the boulevards of Teheran with a pistol on each hip. After the Khomeini Revolution, he moved to Los Angeles and published a memoir denying that he had ever been involved in the coup.)

Although Roosevelt had now resurfaced in Teheran, the American Ambassador arranged his immediate exit in the US Naval Attaché’s plane, which flew him to Bahrain, where another American military plane picked him up and took him on to Beirut without ever being told his identity.

Monty Woodhouse had feelings of pride at the overthrow of Mossadegh with some regrets for the ultimate outcome of the Shah’s brutal dictatorship.

What we did not foresee was that the Shah would gather new strength and use it so capriciously and tyrannically, now that the US government and the Foreign Office would fail so abjectly to keep him on a reasonable course. At the time we were simply relieved that a threat to British interests had been removed. Eden, who heard of Mossadegh’s downfall while enjoying a convalescent cruise in the Aegean, recorded that he ‘slept happily that night’.

There had been allegations from the Mossadegh camp that the coup was foreign-orchestrated, but no such thoughts crept into The Times of London, which stated in an editorial on August 24

“None can say the uprising was sponsored by foreigners.” It concluded that “Three years of promises, demagogy, hate campaigns, and dictatorship, tending to the establishment of a “popular democratic republic” will not have been in vain if the Shah and his Government show modest but solid results instead of Utopian promises. There is an excellent opportunity also for the western Powers to show respect and sympathy for Persian’s legitimate demands, thus providing an antidote to the poison spread by the last regime.”

After President Eisenhower was fully briefed about the role of the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt, he wrote in his diary “It seemed more like a dime novel than an historical fact.” The AIOC was unsuccessful in having its oil concessions returned but it was awarded 40% of the newly formed National Iranian Oil Company, which became the cornerstone of the renamed British Petroleum (BP) Company. At his trial, Mossadegh said in his defence that “My only crime is that I nationalised the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth.” The result was hardly in doubt – three years imprisonment and then indefinite house arrest at his country estate until his death in 1967. The Shah did not take any risks with sharing power again and became more autocratic during his 25 years in power. The CIA assisted him to rig elections immediately after he returned to power while he also relied to a considerable extent on the brutality of his intelligence service, SAVAK. This too was in fact a CIA creation, as William Colby, the Director of the CIA in the Seventies, later admitted. Roosevelt also disclosed that “certain Israeli friends discreetly joined the CIA in helping to organize and give guidance to a new Iranian security service.” (Roosevelt p9)

At the end of 1953, Woodhouse visited Washington DC.

We had a few days in Washington, where I called on Allen Dulles. ‘That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!’ he remarked. It was in fact unique in more than one respect. So far as I know, Operation Boot was the first such operation successfully carried out by the Americans, and probably the last by the British. It was also the only one they ever carried out together. (Woodhouse, p132)

The key CIA document outlining the history of the coup, only became public in 2000, when The New York Times published it in defiance of government pressure to keep it secret. It spelt out how close to failure the entire enterprise was and how in the end, luck played a major part in its success. The report’s author was Dr Donald Wilber, an expert on Persian architecture, who was directly involved in the coup. Dr. Wilber's own memoirs were heavily censored by the CIA, but he was permitted to refer to the existence of his secret account. ''If this history had been read by the planners of the Bay of Pigs,'' he wrote, ''there would have been no such operation.''

''From time to time,'' he continued, ''I gave talks on the operation to various groups within the agency, and, in hindsight, one might wonder why no one from the Cuban desk ever came or read the history.''

Kermit Roosevelt was similarly concerned at the immediate effect of his story when he brief President Eisenhower, the two Dulles brothers and other senior figures at the White House in early September 1953. John Foster Dulles was leaning back in his chair and “seemed to be purring like a giant cat.” Roosevelt chose to conclude his remarks to the officials with a warning note:

“Gentlemen, there is one thing I want to make very clear. We were successful in this venture because our assessment of the situation in Iran was correct. We believed – and we were proved right – that if the people and the armed forces were shown that they must choose, that Mossadegh was forcing them to choose, between their monarch and a revolutionary figure backed by the Soviet Union, they could, and would, make only one choice. With some help from us, but mostly because Mossadegh, the Tudeh and eventually the U.S.S.R. itself, forced the choice upon them, the populace made a choice. And most convincingly. The people and the army came, overwhelmingly, to the support of the Shah. You can have no idea from here – you really had to be in Iran – of the heartfelt strength of that support.

If our analysis had been wrong, we’d have fallen flat on our faces. But it was right. If we, the CIA, are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that people and army want what we want. If not, you had better give the job to the Marines!”

But Foster Dulles did not want to hear what I was saying. He was still leaning back in his chair with a catlike grin on his face. Within weeks I was offered command of a Guatemalan undertaking already in preparation. A quick check suggested that my requirements were not likely to be met. I declined the offer. Later, I resigned from the CIA – before the Bay of Pigs disaster underlined the validity of my warning. (Roosevelt pp209/10)

Roosevelt went on to work for various American companies in the Middle East and later as a lobbyist for foreign governments in Washington, including that of the Shah. He died in 2000 at the age of 84.

Other senior CIA officials were not so sanguine about the use of Iran as a blueprint for regime change in the rest of the world. Ray Cline, one of the founders of the CIA and later its deputy director of Intelligence, later observed that while Dulles basked in the glory of the coup’s success, “The trouble with this seemingly brilliant success” was “the extravagant impression of CIA’s power that it created.”He concluded “It did not prove that CIA could topple governments and place rulers in power; it was a unique case of supplying just the right amount of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time.” (Secrets, Spies and Scholars: Blueprint of the essential CIA by Ray Cline (Califiornia, 1976) p 132

The Shah remained the lynchpin of American foreign policy in the Middle East, receiving huge arms shipments. President Nixon reflected in 1971 on the Shah’s foresight “and his ability to run, basically, let’s face it, a virtual dictatorship in a benign way.” (Weiner, p.368)

The United States remained insensitive to Iranian disquiet over the role of the CIA in ousting Mossadeq by appointing Richard Helms, the recently fired CIA director as US Ambassador to Iran in 1973. Henry Precht, the US Embassy’s chief political officer at the time, was shocked: “We were amazed that the White House would send a man who, after all, had such associations with the CIA, which was deemed by every Iranian responsible for the fall of Mossadeq. It seemed to us to abandon any pretence of a sort of neutral America and to confirm that the Shah was our puppet.” (Ibid, p368)

When Muslim fundamentalists spearheaded the campaign to oust the Shah in the late Seventies, neither the USA, CIA nor Mossad were able to save him. The whole issue of the SIS/CIA involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government still remained a major reason for Iranian hostility towards Britain and America after Khomeini became the spiritual leader of Iran. In March 2000, President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, acknowledged the coup's pivotal role in the troubled relationship and came closer to apologizing than any American official ever has before.

''The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons,'' she said. ''But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.'' Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei considered the mea culpa “deceitful” adding that it “did not even include an apology”.

Iranian hostility towards both Britain and MI6 and the USA and CIA continues to the present day and has resulted in a rather warped belief in the prowess of both intelligence organisations to influence events far beyond their wildest dreams. If anything though, the American desire to overthrow or neutralise the current Iranian government was stronger under President George W Bush than at any time since the successful conclusion of Operation Ajax more than half a century ago. In the current crisis in Teheran, President Obama has decided to restrain his comments to avoid exacerbating these old wounds.

ENDS

Nice vs. Naughty

2010-06-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Cleveland Amory wrote a wonderful trilogy of books on American society in the Fifties and Sixties (The Proper Bostonians, The Last Resorts and Who Killed Society?). The Last Resorts is a history of smart hideaways and how their client base changed over the years. These observations still apply to all fashionable places, such as Aspen, Cap Ferrat, Bali or Barbados.

The following groups have come to the social resorts in this order: First, artists and writers in search of good scenery and solitude; second, professors and clergymen and other so-called solid people with long vacations in search of the simple life; third, “nice millionaires” in search of a good place for their children to lead the simple life (as lived by the “solid people”); fourth, “naughty millionaires” who wished to associate socially with “nice millionaires” but who built million dollar cottages and million dollar clubs, dressed up for dinner, gave balls and utterly destroyed the simple life; and fifth, trouble.

How do the rich differ from mere mortals?

2010-06-07T02:00:00.000-07:00

This is the best definition I know about the difference between the v rich and the remainder of the population

What I discovered travelling with very rich, powerful people is that everything is beautiful until something goes wrong with the transportation: The helicopter is seven minutes late, the plane can't leave because of fog, one of the drivers can't be found. Very rich people can lose $200 million in a single day in the stock market and that doesn't faze them at all, but when something goes wrong with the transportation, they go completely ballistic.

Jean (Johnny) Pigozzi, socialite/collector/photographer

Bangkok in Turmoil

2010-05-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

Jim Pringle is one of the last of the great British war correspondents working mainly for Reuters and The Times in Indochina and elsewhere. When in Peking, he was responsible for winning the still legendary "Gobble in the Gobi" contest. In recent years he has been based in Phnom Penh and Bangkok, where he wrote easily the most interesting accounts of the Red Shirts Revolt. Here are his personal emails to his old colleagues (which he has happily allowed me to reprint)...

Old Hack James Pringle reports:

Bangkok - It is just like old times in South East Asia. War on the doorstep, and the prospect of it changing to a civil conflict, and spreading throughout the country. Schools are closed, and there is talk of curfews in this vast capital of 13 million, and its large central commercial area has become a hazardous warzone. The great shopping emporiums, where you can buy Maseratis or Hummers, and have Botox beauty treatments, are in rebel hands, and the goods are likely rotting in the 104-degree heat at the end of the dry season.

At 1 am this morning, with the sounds of fighting in several directions - and most was incoming, as the redshirts, largely country folks, are fighting the army with home-made bows and arrows, hand-held catapults and a medley of improvised weapons - a Thai redshirt woman, seeing my 'Press' armband, asked me if I was scared.

Putting a brave face on it, I said that I wasn't - but I did not want to die just yet. She smiled, and indicated there were indeed good reasons for living..... Later, when I tried to get out past roadblocks on Sukhumvit avenue, to return home to the presently safe district where I live, a series of grenades were fired or hurled, and the redshirts said I must try to find another exit.

As I was engaged in this mission in the near-darkness, I could not help but think that it was a quarter of a century this year since Old Hack cameraman Neil Davis was killed - accidentally or not - by the Thai army in this same city. I was aware that I was pretty lucky to be an eye-witness to what was happening, and how so many of the Old Hacks would have enjoyed being here. (Not least because the redshirt zone seems to contain an inordinate number of attractive young women who seem to think that older Caucasian men, as one once told a colleague of mine, then a middle-aged writer for the 'Spectator,' are 'sexy senior citizens.'

(In the redshirt zone, you can get a cheap haircut, food for next to nothing, beer in discreet improvised pubs for 25 cents a can and, believe it or not - and surely it could only happen in Thailand - have a stimulating massage. The only disadvantage is that it is rather public, and the girl masseuses are muscular rural types built like the proverbial brick shithouse.

Other local characters that in earlier weeks were to be seen in the redshirt zone were bar-girls, who are mostly country girls from north east Thailand, where the redshirts had their origin, who came down from Soi Cowboy after the bars closed at 2am. Another Thai stereotype to be seen in the red zone are a small group of Bangkok's famous lady-boys, some wielding bows and arrows, wearing high heels and seemingly ready to do battle). Later, with another journalist, Bill Barnes, a freelance for the Financial Times, and who, from weeks of coverage, thoroughly knows the tiny lanes, we managed to creep - and I found this particularly surreal - round the side of the American Embassy, which has been closed to the public for the past few days (as has the British Embassy nearby), and dodge across a wide road under Thai army guns. Bill was wearing a bright white shirt, but he said he did not want to wear dark clothes, like some of the toughest of the redshirts, who guard the periphery of the surrounded zone, as the Thai army were liable to shoot at them - so it was a kind of Hobson's choice, don't you think? Anyway, no shots rang out.

As most of you know, this seems like a fundamental revolution in Thailand, the long scorned, put-upon country folks are sick of being treated as an underclass by the so-called elite in Bangkok, based around mainly ethnic Chinese big business, aristocracy, and those close to the monarchy or the army. I noticed that last night, there seemed fewer redshirts than the previous night, when I had crossed zones at 10pm after getting in from the Thai-Cambodian border, and it seems likely the crunch is coming.

The government, which is descended from a military coup junta that seized power in 2010, and which I then covered, is not quite legitimate in that it is unelected and achieved power in parliamentary jiggery-pokery. The redshirts demand that fresh elections are held soon - that is the main issue. To add to the potential chaos, the police are said to support the redshirts, as the exiled, elected ex-prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was overthrown in the 2006 coup, was a police colonel, who had helped improve the lot of rural folks.

For once, you should tell friends and relatives on no account come to Bangkok for the moment, though the Thai beach resorts are OK, and the airport is safe. But all Old Hacks who themselves want to come to Bangkok to see history being made will be welcomed by Les Pringles. (I believe the many young freelances seeing a form of war for the first time will remember it in the future - like we all did, though this is, of course, nothing like the scale of Indochina).

To sum up, the redshirts may be beaten this time, but Thailand will never be quite the same again. I trust that the beguiling Thai smile will survive, and that this does not turn into some version of former Cambodia. … and talking of Patpong when I finally got out of the redzone, and passed the similar Nana Plaza girlie area, I noticed troops hunkered down on the ground with rifles pointed down Sukhumvit, with home-going bar-girls and ladyboys milling all around as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

I seem to have dropped a sentence describing how I crossed from the army side into the redzone while it was still light and tried to get back when it was pitch-dark. It's a very different world approaching a military checkpoint with nervous troops in the dark, as we Old Hacks all know.. What I was trying to do in the piece was give Old Hacks a flavour of the redzone unlike the one they might get in the New York Times, excellent though the reporting of Seth Mydans and Thomas Fuller is.

Further earlier, Patpong is now occupied by military side and all bars are closed. The offer from the Welsh Old Hack to fight for Patpong came too late. Other entertainment venues such as Nana and Cowboy still open, though plenty of troops at the former, though of course, because of my Presbyterian upbringing, I give these establishments a wide berth.

Those interested in Bangkok lore will not be surprised that Thailand's lively bar-girls are mostly red supporters, according to those in the know, coming as they do from the north east and north where resistance to Bangkok among the rural population is at its strongest.

Report of 18 May:

Bows and Arrows - and another Flynn

Monday afternoon, and I decide to take Milly to see Ridley Scott's 'Robin Hood,' before heading for the redzone. It's symbolic of the other worldliness of the Thai capital that people can be killing themselves in one part of town, while watching just released movies in another. Lots of folks with bows and arrows, just like Bangkok.

But Russell Crowe makes a leaden Robin, and Sherwood Forest, the remnants of which I drive through every year on my way to Edinburgh, is mentioned only once - this is because this over-long movie is a prequel: we are going to have to suffer a second round before we actually get to the main part of the legend. Yet it was King John, the English monarch at the time, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Such citizens rights are also needed here.

I grow extremely anxious to go; after all, there is a real conflict in Bangkok. The cinema finally closes at 7pm, the same time as the department stores in a self-imposed curfew. I tell Milly that Errol Flynn's 'Robin Hood' was much better. But an Old Hack, given our history, would say that, wouldn't he?  

Stay in one piece, with your friendly local motorbike taxi driver

I pull on my green 'press' armband, courtesy of the Thai Journalists Association, and take a taxi down to the redzone entry towards the end of Sukhumvit Road. The Thai military let me through, but the road is in complete darkness, and there are rumors of an 8pm attack on the redzone here. Discretion being the better part of valor, I decide to visit Rama 1V, a broad avenue at another redzone a mile or so away. I wave in a motorbike taxi, and tell the driver where I want to go. He says that will be 40 Baht, just over a dollar.

The motorbike taximen switches off his lights. He knows how to cross in semi-darkness between the battling sides by taking tiny lanes that avoid the checkpoints, and he deposits me 40 yards from Rama 1V. But there is a good bit of action - burning tyre roadblocks, loud but harmless bangs, and the firing by redshirts of rockets which are little more than fireworks. I don't know if the army is shooting back, because the redshirts, ever solicitous, stop me from getting closer.

'Stay in Melbourne,' he told his daughter that day

I get back to Sukhumvit, and take a taxi around a huge section of the city. I'm aiming for the Dusit Thani Hotel, which is at the edge of the military-controlled part of Bangkok. The previous night it had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, in apparent retaliation for allegedly housing a sniper who a few days before had shot through the head a renegade general, then with the redshirts, who had died that afternoon. The guests spent the night in the basement and were asked to check out that morning.

The driver is a cultivated Thai of Chinese origin, who tells me his business has failed in the recent downturn. That day, he had talked to his daughter at the university in Melbourne, Australia. "She told me she would like to stay in Melbourne, and I said urged her for God's sake do - there's no point in coming back to Thailand," he said. Like most Thais he was anguished about the situation. He drops me after a 40 minute ride, cost US$5, in Silom, and I pass the closed and barricaded banks.

After a bit of give and take, the soldiers pull back the barbed wire, and allow me through to walk one kilometre towards the hotel.

A sinister transformer box

There are only a few groups of soldiers and some rather bored TV journalists on the road. A middle-aged Japanese film cameraman points me towards the hotel, and when I - as a precaution - asked if there had been any shooting, he said he would accompany me. I said it was not necessary, but I felt this was in the true tradition of Old Hacks.

About 50 yards from the hotel, he sits down on the sidewalk and says 'Good luck.' But he had had the decency to stay with me till the last moment. I walked towards the hotel, but after 30 yards, I can see nobody around this strategically important crossroads, and the hotel is empty.

Two nights previously I had been on the redzone side just 40 yards from me, and knew I would be watched by redshirts observing me from behind the wall of rubber tyres, now thankfully not burning. Maybe they had bows and arrows (shades of Robin Hood) or maybe AK.47s and M.16s, as part of a black uniformed detail of the redshirts is believed to have. There was an eerie silence.

There was also one of these sinister transformer boxes, about 4 feet high, behind which Old Hack Neil Davis was only partly protected when he was killed 25 years ago this year filming a failed coup attempt here. I could not see any Thai soldiers on my side, in fact not a living soul in this usually busiest part of Bangkok, and I turned and walked back.  

Patpong - the 'Land of Smiles has become the land of guns'

I crossed the road, and some few hundred yards down, I looked up and saw 'Patpong Entertainment Zone.' Patpong, which Old Hack John Edwards, the Welsh wizard, had volunteered last weekend to defend, was once Bangkok's most notorious stretch of nightlife, but now, I had been told, the bars had all closed because of its proximity to the warzone. The street was empty apart from scurrying rats and ambling cockroaches - it's easy to see these creatures will remain on earth long after we are all gone.

I walked into the void, but pretty soon I could make out some dim lights ahead to my left. Was it an oasis in the dark? It was indeed, and there were two bars, kind of half open.

One was the infamous Kangaroo Bar, up which many an Old Hack had climbed in the old days, when he was on leave from Vietnam, his heart pounding.

The other that was open was next door, the Kiss Bar; the girls were a little clunky, being from the rural north east, source of the redshirts, but they were dancing on stage.

Now, Elizabeth Becker kindly said the other day that in the 19th century, I would have been 'celebrated as a diarist.' I wonder if she meant Samuel Pepys, the 17th century diarist. Pepys' success at his craft rested in part on his piquant disclosures - romps with the servant maids, and such things.

Though I would not be so bold as to rank myself on anything like that scale - I'm a workaday Old Hack after all - what follows in somewhat piquant.

The girls at the Kangaroo were known for their skills in - what shall we say? - the Monica Lewinsky aptitude. The two girls who had braved the bullets were pressing in their invitations in that direction. I insisted in my dedication to my duties to the Old Hacks, and they politely desisted.

One of them said to me, in philosophical mode, that 'the land of Smiles had become the land of guns.' When she saw me writing it in my notebook, she put her hand out and said: "That will cost you forty pounds." 'Only joking,' she added.

The cold light of dawn

I was down in mid-morning today in the central redcamp. Enthusiasms for the struggle, I have to say, seemed to be ebbing, as no kind of breakthrough towards serious negotiations with the government seemed apparent.

Numbers are down by two thirds, though food was still being delivered - rice, vegetables - even the government had sworn that lack access to food and water would be thoroughly enforced.

A little 'bonjour' - the Cambodian catchword for bribe - works wonders here too.

Rubbish was still being gathered up and removed, but a sour aroma hung over the camp. A sense of defeat may not have hung in the air, but there was a decided lack of confidence.

The government seems to have no stomach either for a fight, and they keep moving forward deadlines for the rebels to give up.

The Thai soldiers one meets are apparently not brutes; they clearly do not seem to want to slaughter their fellow Thais. They are often, one has to say, courteous to foreign journalists, and let us through their checkpoints.

Stimulating as it is here, and although social change cannot be avoided, it is better it is done peacefully.

One slaughter, as in Cambodia, in the region is enough for anyone's lifetime.

Ends  

Damn, Jamie, it sounds like the time 1n 1971 when you cautioned me not  to drive down Blvd. Norodom in Phnom Penh, because "There's shooting  down there." But it's where my home and wife were, so I had to head  that way.     Now here I am basking and marinating in Florida, and you're getting  shot at a block or two from where I lived in Bangkok for two years in  the '80's, Soi Ruam Rudee, just around the corner from the now-closed  US Embassy.     And the question remains, theoretically, if the embassy is closed and  Patpong is occupied, how can dignitaries from DC get a glimpse of  bananas and ping pong balls?    Great reportage --and take care of yourself.    Bill Stubbs  

hon. pringle:

second the notion that you are doing a lovely job at painting a word picture of a sputtering civil war among a usually civil and gentle folk.

in 1975 after the fall of phnom penh another upi stalwart and i stood on the steps of the amazing Grace Hotel in bangkok at 3 am and vowed that this was where we were drawing the line. if the rat-bastard commies came this far and threatened so vital an after-hours emporium we would fight to the death.

thank God it never came to that. in our state we could have been taken down by a smallish troupe of girl scouts....anyway. thanks for the splendid reporting.

it isn't cleanliness that is next to godliness; it's CLARITY.

best

Joe

your note Reminds me of a comment made the day Saigon fell by one of our Brit colleagues that they would defend the British Club (or whatever it was called) to the last gin and tonic. Meantime, me, Arnett and Esper went to have a late lobster lunch washed down with a 1962 Verve Cliquot.

Matt

Veuve Clicquot '62? Good but not great. I think Matt you misheard. What we said the day Saigon fell was we would defend 'The Pink Pussycat Club' to the last gin and tonic. Not the British Club. And you will remember how successful we were.

John

Report of 20 May:

The last redshirt?

A 54 year old nurse, Ms Phusadee Ngamkham, may be the last redshirt in Bangkok, at least for the present. There she sat, in front of a stage used by the movement's leaders, still defiant and carrying the movement's red flag, and wearing a red T-shirt, as soldiers try to persuade her to go home.

"I will stay here until they take me to prison, or until they kill me," she told me. "There is not another country in the world that would treat their citizens this way. I no longer wish to live here, I will go somewhere else, if I survive."

Of course, there are other countries like this, the Burmese generals, China at Tiananmen, Guatemala in the past.

Ms Wan Pen, an elegant woman of about 40, a Bangkok hairdresser, was making her way to the edge of the camp. "This is not the end - it is just the beginning," she said, unwittingly paraphrasing Churchill's words after the battle of El Alamein, which go: "This is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning."

I had met Ms Wan Pen earlier in the day when I crossed into the redshirt territory through a hole in the barricade made of rubber tyres and bamboo. From where she stood, the Thai army was just visible, but there was no shooting at this crossing point. Pointing derisively in that direction, she said: "They may killl us, but they will never defeat us."

Sgt Major Weeran and his Ist Cavalry

He and his troops were soldiers from Kanchanaburi, home of the Death Railway, the Bridge over the River Kwai and Hellfire Pass. He told me a series of jokes that I found hard to get the point of, but he was full of goodwill. I had spent much of the long day, since just after eight in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon, in his troops' company, except for several brief incursions into the redzone.

He was in the First Air Cavalry, he told me, and was proud of his unit. His soldiers were country boys, too, but from the west of Thailand near the border with Burma. In war, these days, it is OK for the troops to call their mothers on their mobiles. Phones were continually in use, as anxious relatives called.

I had latched on to Sgt Major Weeran because I guessed that the entry in to the redzone might be made first by the two companies of soldiers here at Ploenchit, about 600 men. He asked me to sit down on a red plastic chair behind a pillar supporting the Sky train, Bangkok's overhead railway, which had not been running since Thursday last week. His troops were sheltering behind the railway support too, both from the broiling sun at the end of the dry season, and any fire that might come from beyond the barricade 50 yards ahead. I knew there was no-one behind the barricade - I had been behind it several times earlier - but it wasn't my job to tell the army. in Cambodia, the Lon Nol army used to ask our advice on tactics, as you know. Thankfully they don't do that here.

The army was attacking at three other major entries into the redzone, but apart from a walk to the American Embassy residence, where I was stopped by another unit for good reason - there was the whine of bullets coming from just ahead, and a solititious sergeant wouldn't let me go further without body armor, though the top team from a major broadcaster who were at the same place, were allowed forward with their spiffy flak jackets and helmets. (The TV correspondent told me none of his team were covering the story inside the redzone, because of the risk of being entrapped by troops coming in from different directions; it seemed to be sensible). It's said that the Italian photographer who tragically died today was too far ahead of the troops.

I worried during the day, however, that although the Aircav had large earth moving equipment it was not using it to shift the barricade. But, in the end, we were the first to enter the redzone. Before they did so, they had a bulldozer to knock down the barricade. I warned several other reporters, new to the game, to stand clear, it might be mined, and sure enough there was a round report of a mine exploding, though little damage was done. There was what sounded like heavy rifle fire, but it was just the bamboo crackling as it was moved by the bulldozers.

Two monks, an old man, and three boys

Entering behind the troops, as the Sgt. Major insisted, I came upon some POWs, two monks, an old man, and three boys, one a 15 year old and two 16 years old. The monks were from the improvised buddhist wat that had been erected in the camp. The boys had been fighters - and their weapons were laid out: three measly catapults.

When the mobile phone rang in the back pocket of the 15 year old, one of the soldiers fished it out for him, and handed it to him. He was talking to his mother, who seemed dumbfounded to hear he was a prisoner.

Another monk was brought along and sat with the other two (when I left the redzone, an hour later, I saw this third monk walking to freedom past a military roadblock, and I presumed the other two were released). Other prisoners, who were marched past, their arms pinioned behind their backs, were young adults; they looked neither afraid nor arrogant.

Chris, a German lawyer

I had met a German who would only give his name as Chris, after I had seen him lurking behind the barricade before we were permitted to cross in. When he was able to come out, I stopped him and asked what he had been doing. He was a 37 year old lawyer, and he said he had spent 20 days in the redzone - he did seem knowledgeable and on the level. He said he had been there an hour or so before, when the redshirt leaders told an audience of 1,500 remaining hardcore redshirts, mainly women, that they were going to hand themselves over to the police, rather than risk more deaths.

"The audience, mostly women, turned their backs on the stage, and shouted 'No, no - no surrender. We are ready to die here."

The redshirts had been surrounded by luxury brand stores since the sit-in began on 12th March.

"I was so proud of them, to be in front of such luxury and never to have taken a thing," Chris said.

"It was such a disappointment today that the people were so angry that they smashed some windows and looted some clothes. They were trying on T-shirts."

He said he had not seen any brutal treatment by soldiers that day, though last week he had witnessed soldiers shooting down two boys who had shot a firework rocket - a joke squib really - at them, which fell well short of the target.

"The boys were shot at and fell down, one was wounded. The crowd shouted at the soldiers to stop firing at them but every time they tried to drag them to safety, the soldiers opened fire." In the end, he thought the wounded boy had died.

Inside the zone, and given that shooting in the neighborhood had died down, I got ahead of the troops, in order to visit a real buddhist wat adjoining the camp, where the women and children had taken shelter that morning. People here seemed to be getting ready to go home to north east and north Thailand where their homes were. Their faces were sad, wistful, but determined that this was not the end.

I looked for a young man of 25 called B-Boy who had taken me on a tour of the redzone by night 48 hours before, and showed me where a renegade army general had been shot by a sniper, but B-Boy was lost in the mob of people.

The army has shown some solicitude, it seems to me. It appeared the soldiers were not entering this part of the camp, but was leaving the redshirts to clear up their belongings under the improvised tents they had slept in for so long. (Chris had told me that as soon as the leaders surrendered, the soldiers did not fire more, and stopped moving into the most heavily populated part the red warzone).

I did see a beautifully made bow, with only one arrow - had the others been discharged? I didn't touch it - one does not want souvenirs of this day. It would be a kind of looting anyway.

It is true that our small band from the Ploenchit entry are the first to reach the center of the camp. (This is not a boast, it was just good luck, but I did persist here). But other commanders might have been less willing to cooperate with the press.

An empty stage

I walked back to the central square inside the redzone, and looked at the fancy shops and their products, Boss, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the rest, but could not see where windows had been smashed and clothes looted. However, I was so completed dehydrated and exhausted by this time that I probably couldn't find them anyway. I went back to the center stage where for hours every day and night the redshirt leaders had addressed the crowd, and singers had sung. It was now empty, and I clambered up on to it.

In front of the stage, the ground was empty except for Mde Phusadee staging her one-woman sit-in. The rest was a mass of abandoned clothes, petty possessions and redshirt souvenirs. The redshirt leaders had stood on this stage exhorting their people for more than two months. One could not but think of Shakespeare, and I quote from memory: "All the world's a stage, and all the people on it but players. They all have their entrances and exits."

End of the Beginning.

The army and this illegitimate Thai government was born of a military coup and is sustained in power, as I said the other day, by jiggery-pokery. Hearing already about the demonstrations and burnings in North East Thailand, where most people speak Lao, and feel put upon by the Bangkok elite, I was not surprised at the violence there. I was certainly not surprised about threats here against TV Channel 3, a government propaganda station, and against the leading English language paper, whose reporting of the whole two months of unrest has been outrageous. I don't know where all the good Thai journalists have gone.

As I indicated before, this is a fundamental revolution brought on my exploitation and the treating of country folks as kind of slaves - the same kind of thing one had seen in Cambodia, and had contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge - that, and the illegal Nixon-Kissinger illegal bombings. Thailand's country people, many of whom had accepted gratuities in the past to vote a certain way, seem to have thrown all that vote-wasting away; they have enfranchised themselves.

A Smell of Burning

With so much good reporting from the agencies and no doubt the dailies tomorrow, I've written this in diary style, rather than repeat the news file. I write at an open window in my apartment, two miles from the former redzone. A smell of burning pervades all. The city, normally one of the most lively on earth, is deadly silent, under a 12 hour curfew. The banks won't open until Monday. The clean-up job is enormous. The Skytrain, which normally hurtles past the window out of earshot 500 yards away, is not running. You can hear the dogs barking several blocks away. The bars are closed, and the bar-girls are having what they never have - an early night. The tourists have been given permission to go to the airport, if they can get a curfew pass, probably no mean feat.

There may still be bands of hardcore redshirts moving around. When I came back on the back of a motorbike, most of Sukhumvit was closed. The redshirts had tried to outflank the army and briefly seized a big intersection.

Even although it is past 11 o'clock local time, there is a red glow to the West, though long past sunset. It is a burning department store.

Of course, tourism will recover; Thailand's beaches, and the exquisite service in its hotels, will see to that.

But the redshirts will be heard from again; nothing is surer. Hopefully it will not be civil war, though that cannot be ruled out. This is, to repeat, just the end of the beginning.

James Pringle

Jamie, I must join the legions of Old Hacks congratulating you for your usual superb reporting from the scene. But, as a lifelong purveyor of news visuals, I must also ask you: Where are your photos? Surely, by now, you have learned to make a few snaps along the way. I can just visualize that redshirted nurse sitting in front of the empty stage... Horst would be very upset if you haven't.    Best,  Steve

Steve,

Many thks for your note, and you are right of course. I did badly want to take a picture of 'the last redshirt,' and the boys and buddhist monks held as prisoners with the pathetic catapults in front of the boys, and the empty stage and the desolate view from it.

But I learned during the Vietnam war that, if I took pictures, my reporting was less thorough.

Also, aren't we, by doing that, depriving photographers of their living?

Best, Jim  

jimmy   bless you, old pal...along with your usual astonishing eye, wry  wit, and deep understanding, you're still holding the line. can't  imagine you getting all that rich stuff into a 140-character twitter  feed and flickr panels while you're pointing a flip camera, doing  audio feeds and racing home to blog. as northrup pointed out a while  back, enough people are already depriving photographers of their  living. stay safe.     Mort

Sorry, Jim and Mort. No excuses allowed! As Herr Faas would say: "Vere ist zuh photo! You risk your life for a notebook? Zuh AP vants your photos!"    Steve - Dallas    

right up there with, "500, f11, and i save you in ze darkroom." Mort

point acknowledged Steve. Jim

In 1976 serious trouble had started on the Thammasat campus well before dawn. A Thai staffer heard (and separately, a Thai AP photographer was advised), and they went to campus. The reporter returned to file about dawn. He phoned the bureau chief who asked the Thai reporter, "You have let Photos know, right?"    Wrong. I received a call from the reporter then. He said there was trouble on campus. He didn't say he'd covered it for hours. I grabbed a taxi and went to Thammasat. In the meantime the Thai photographer returned to bureau.    Providentially, for me at least, I arrived shortly before the horrific climax - wild shooting and two lynchings - and managed to survive. A year after Vietnam, and I had rarely been in as much wild shooting. I returned to the bureau. I told them what I'd seen. The Thai staffers didn't believe me. Denis Gray believed me but still seemed a bit incredulous. After about 30 seconds of this I said, "I have to develop film now. Then you can look at the pictures."    Providence was less kind to an excellent Thai photographer working for UPI. He was shot in the neck shortly after arrival. He survived. Thai police confiscated film from the Bangkok dailies.    At the time radiophotos had to be transmitted as phototelegrams via PTT. With each new captioned print or two we dispatched a courier to the Post. I feared the government would shut down international communications, but that didn't happen until evening, after the coup. By that time we had sent 17 wirephotos, mostly mine but also some taken by our two brave Thai shooters.    Neal

Jimmy, The best yet. Deserves a much bigger readership, which I will do my best to encourage. Thanks, Mike

Thks Mike. It's been a great story to cover. Best, Jim  

Not to mention giving succour to the unfortunate young women of Patpong.... Tony

Jim,    So enjoying reading your vivid reports and so being in the thick of it  with you vicariously. A nasty climax. I wonder if the battle of  Bangkok is over and the civil war in the Land of Smiles begun. The toll  among journalists sadly has been particularly high.    Very best Jon

Jon,  Many thanks for your note. I can't tell you enough how you would have enjoyed this story.  I hope I have answered your queries in the diary piece. I apologise for typos and, sometimes, syntax, about which I'm usually particular. It's just the race to get things done.  Best, Jim.  

Carl and all,

Amazing déjà vu yesterday. Three old hacks from Cambodia War days – Al Rockoff, Rolland Neveu and myself – covering the operation to retake ``Red City.’’ Sorry couldn’t get a foto of the three of us together at any point.

Best, Denis  

Bangkok

20.5.2010

Joe,

I appreciate these sentiments, thanks. I also like your emphasis on clarity.

I noted yesterday that reporters trudging through the defeated redzone did not have their notebooks out as they interviewed people, or viewed the scenes of chaos. I still very much believe in getting names, accurately taken down, ages, occupations and marital status, then direct quotes. It shows respect for the people interviewed, too.

Unless you are noting down things, like the bow with one arrow I saw, in your own grubby notebook, you forget it when you write the actual story. For instance, the catapults taken off the boy fighters - those, I remembered, but they had other interesting possessions, but because I did not write them down, I already forget what they were.

With good wishes

Jamie Pringle  

Thank you, Jim, for appropriatiate admonitions in this noteless electronic age.

Lance

Jim:

I wondered if you'd had discussions about name taking with any of the reporters in the Redzone?

Why?

Well on BBC Radio's flagship news show, The Today Programme, this morning their guy on the scene asked everyone he interviewed to give their name.

Well, I didn't know even one of them! But it gave the piece authenticity.

Glad you came through it safely. Another notch on the famous notebook old chap.

Best regs,

John  

No, John. that's what I usually do. Glad to see the BBC doing likewise.

Best, Jim

JP:

I meant it the other way around...

Had you mentioned it to them.

Anyway, they did and I hadn't heard it before.

Report of 21 May 2010:

The opinions of taxi-drivers

To anyone who spends any time in Bangkok, the recent invasion of rural folks from north and north east Thailand into the heart of the shopping malls here came as no surprise. That's not because of the time one spends listening to the 'nattering classes' at diplomatic receptions, or round the cozy bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.

It's because one passes a fair bit of the day in taxis, especially when there are big traffic jams.

Taxi fares are dirt-cheap, the traffic chaotic, and finding parking spaces hard, so I, like many foreigners, don't keep an automobile. 35 Baht, or US$1, is the cost of most taxis rides to the supermarkets or bookships or multiplex cinemas.

This puts one in constant touch with taxi-drivers, and the great majority of them come from the north east region called Isaan.

Not only are they mostly homesick, getting back to the village only in May to July for the rice-planting season, but they feel outsiders here, alone without their families, and unwelcome by Bangkok noveau riche who regard them as country bumpkins, and don't hide it.

Most of the city's taxi and motorbike drivers, building site brickies, maids, cooks, bartenders and waiters, massage parlor masseuses and bar-girls are Chao Isaan, or Isaan people. I have hung around the neighborhood long enough to have picked up a few Lao words, which never fails to delight the Isaan exiles.

Their lives are better than they were not so long ago, but they are at the bottom of the heap, and along with the hairdressers and nurses that I interviewed for my last diary, one saw a lot of them inside the late redzone.

Especially with a foreigner, they are not slow to talk about their dissatisfaction, the hardness of making a living driving taxis in a city of too many of them, their families in Isaan, and what they - and all the other Chao Isaan - send back to them to send nephews and nieces to school, and pay the medical bills.

They are the people, and those in north Thailand, slightly over half of Thailand's 67 million people, who benefited from the populist policies of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted in a coup in 2006, but by far still Thailand's most popular and electable politician, bagman and patron on the redshirt movement, and implacable enemy of the Bangkok business elite, and those close to them in royal and aristocratic circles, and army bigwigs.

Now exiled, and not flawless in character, while in office he poured money into the villages, and gave everyone a chance of medical treatment. "Once, we in Isaan used to sell our votes," a taxi driver told me recently. "But not now; we understand how important it is to vote in a democracy."

At the dinner tables of Bangkok's elite, however, the Chao Isaan are talked about mostly in terms of vote sellers.

They don't know that the Isaan people have moved on out of that childish era, and were ready to fight for what they had gained, as we have just seen in Bangkok.

Looting in the nicest possible way

Yesterday I returned to the fortified camp to take a closer look at what was left behind in the precipitate departure when the army came in.

What was clear that most people had fled in whatever they were wearing, and raced to escape the army's push.

I walked down luxurious Langsuan, a street of the elite and rich foreigner apartments, to Lumpini Park, Bangkok's best relaxation green patch. There was a terrific blast, and I was stopped from going further. "We are still clearing mines and bombs," a sergeant told me.

A few Thai middle-class types pointed out 'weapons caches' that the redshirts had left behind, but to me they looked like a naughty young boy's playroom armory - catapults, bows and arrows, not seriously tipped. Yes, I also saw a dozen Molotov cocktails primed for throwing, one M.79 grenade launcher and about 16 grenades, and one hand-grenade. But those wouldn't get you far in a punch-up

There was also a bit of oh-so-polite looting, done with embarrassed smiles. One woman filled a plastic bag with small cans of baby powder. She looked at me sheepishly.

I noticed some soldiers putting chairs from the improvised tents the redshirts had slept in for two months on the back of pick-up trucks; looting, I suppose, but nothing to write home about.... But on the platform was a magnificent set of professional drums, for the songs that intersperced the political speeches, and expensive television equipment for the redshirts' station, which had been abandoned. Who would fall heir to it, I don't know.

The only sign I would have liked was one saying 'Foot massage, 15 Baht,' (40 cents) at one of the massage tents I wrote about earlier.

I reached the buddhist wat, where women and children had been originally sheltered, and which I had entered at 5pm on Wednesday, the day of the assault. There, a middle-aged woman told me that six people, a nurse and five men, had been killed by soldiers at 6pm. She had not seen the killing herself, she said, but had heard the shots and seen the bodies. A second version was that the six dead people had been killed elsewhere, and their bodies had been dumped by the army here.

I tended to believe the woman at the wat, whose name I have but will not publish. She was crying quietly over the death of the nurse. She said there had been a fracas, and some redshirts had thrown firecrackers. The soldiers had responded with bullets, perhaps thinking they were under fire. I had not saying I know where the truth lies precisely, just trying to fill out the picture.

Curiously, I had felt the redshirt crowd, which had just been defeated and were preparing to go home to the north east while I was there, seemed unfriendly, for the first time.

I was the only foreigner around, and one woman I had met before, the hairdresser Ms Wan Pen, whom I named in the last diary, said I should be very careful. She didn't say why. Today (Friday) I read another account by a journalist who said he had been bumped and jostled here by redshirts.

The Democratic Gladiator

I picked up a thin booklet called 'Questions and Answers: United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) - Red in the land.'

Ever on the lookout of evidence of something that could turn, in the end, into a kind of Pol Pot-style 'Year Zero,' I put it into my pocket, salving my conscience by telling myself this was really for handing out to foreign journalists earlier. "We want a free capitalist state, in which the gap between the rich and the poor is reduced," I read.

"We want to create more opportunies for the poor.

"We want the country to move forward with economic progress, and with a competitive economic edge on the world stage."

Nothing too revolutionary there, nothing Maoist about 'political power growing out of the barrel of a gun.' One does have to be careful, as there is an extremist black-uniformed military force working alongside the redshirts, and may have been responsible for many of the fire-bombings on the night the redzone was occupied. One of them is said to be a woman with dyed blonde hair.

Could another be Miss Parichart Lunjum, 'The Democratic Gladiator,' whose red ID card I saw lying on the ground at the site of some unused Molotov cocktails? She looked somewhat like a Thai La Passionaria from the Spanish Civil War!

Sergeant-major Weeran again

I again met Sgt Maj. Weeran, with whose soldiers I had entered the redzone on Wednesday. He greeted me warmly, told another couple of his torturous jokes, and we posed for a picture again. He and his men were looking for redshirt documents. (Remember the captured documents in Vietnam that could prove anything?)

I had learned by then why the military company I was with had been the first to reach the redshirts central platform and command center.

This was because an army unit at Lumpini Park, having made progress against the redshirts, was withdrawn after beginning to bog down, while a crack unit was sent in. Correspondents with the first group were also pulled out.

Weeran's boy went in....and the handful of hacks with them. They are from the Bridge over the River Kwai, after all.

What lies ahead

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said on Friday his government has restored order in Bangkok and the provinces. That remains to be seen. The curfew is still in place, and there is a heavy military presence, and bristling roadblocks. There have been outbreaks of violence, and the firing of government property in the north east and north. There are still, no doubt, rebel groups lying low.

Abhisit, an elegant Oxford graduate who may have ruined his political fortunes by being linked to this mess and the killings that went with it, has said that his earlier offer of elections in November was now off the table.

What he should be doing is re-instating the elections, and attempting a compromise with the redshirts, who may grow in strength from all this.

We know why he doesn't - because Thaksin the populist would win again in any election.

The iron fist has turned many more people against the government. The immediate future of Thailand, once one of the most seriously developing, and charming countries one has known, is far from settled. There could be more violence ahead that will make these recent events pale in comparison.

Trying to untangle the mess that is Thailand

2010-05-18T05:44:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Race was one of the "Best and the Brightest" in Vietnam - a research scholar who wrote WAR COMES TO LONG AN, one of the most perceptive accounts of the modus operandi of the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam (It has just been reprinted by the University of California Press). He has lived in Thailand for the past 30 or so years. This account below is his explanation of what is wrong with Thai politics and is easy the best explanation I have seen in print. He has further interesting material at a website http://www.camblab.com/palling.htm

The Wheel of Life Turns at Rajprasong
   by Jeffrey Race  

Many sense something important is changing in Thailand. Actually it's just  repeating. If we understand what's the same this time, and what differs, we  can see more clearly the meaning of each day's events.  

THE RED SHIRTS' FACE TO THE WORLD  

The United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship presents itself as  combatting present power holders, to advance the interests of those neglected  at the bottom and particularly in the countryside. They identify their enemy  as the military-bureaucratic-aristocratic-royalist nexus dominating state  policy. They assert that deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was  sincerely helping those kept under foot by this power elite, and that he was  removed for that reason alone.   It is certainly true that Thaksin innovated many policies with an unprecedented  focus on those lower in the social and economic scale and outside the capital  city. As a clever businessman and aspiring politician, he clearly saw the  market opening left by self-satisfied rulers in the capital. He built a  powerful support base among those denied both symbolic and material rewards.  Some novelties had genuine merit and long-term viability; others were  financially unviable yet a hit with the public.   Another innovation undid him: personal inability to follow the Middle Way of  compromise and accommodation, seen in his insistence on dominating every  sector of the economy and state on behalf of his family and friends: banking,  communications, the press, foreign affairs, the courts, the police. At the  end he was moving on the military and the last bastion of resistance: the  palace. His departure exemplified the novelty of his approach to controlling  the state: predecessors have in a typically Thai way risen, taken their  share, and (mostly) left the table with a smile to enjoy their winnings in  Thailand or abroad. Thaksin declined to share, was rejected, and declines quietly to accept his rejection. Since he lacks materially for nothing for  this and a hundred future lifetimes, one must assign his behavior to a quirky  personality or failed socialization into Thai politesse.   

THAKSIN'S PURPOSE IN THE OPENING TO THE NEGLECTED

  Is there any evidence as to the deposed PM's purpose? His first fortune came  from a sweetheart deal vending radios to the police, his former employer.  Again using monopoly led to his next fortune: violating an international  agreement banning the unrestricted locking of GSM sim cards and handsets.  The next step was securing near monopolies in the various spheres of political  and economic power, for the same purpose: to magnify his family's fortune.  To become in a few years one of the richest families in the kingdom entailed  heavy doses of corruption and abuse of power. To control the political and  legal systems and so prevent crackdowns on this corruption, a political base  was necessary. Thaksin's populist policies were an expedient to gain this political base. Amounts spent for such programs were trivial compared to  the loot in hand, and it was not the looters' money anyway that funded such  programs.   And were the neglected (the Red Shirt followers we see in the streets this  very day) upset to be thus used? Not at all, if you ask them. They reply  that of course Thaksin was corrupt; that is the goal of political power. But  at least he gave them something. It was and is a marriage of convenience.   

THE CYCLE REPEATS

  So is the Rajprasong rally as billed actually an assault by the deprived on  their oppressors?   No; it is an assault by an aspiring fragment of the elite denied power by  the traditionally dominant. Country folk are just tools, and it's not the  first time. We can learn a lot by looking back to the People's Party of 1932, a group of upwardly mobile Thai (many sent abroad on government grants) who  felt their prospects didn't match their credentials and who resented the  self-seeking of the aristocratic-royalist nexus of the day at the expense of  the public at large. Redistributive policies--prefiguring Thaksin's--were put  in place, with harsh words for the royalists--prefiguring today's Red Shirts. This aspiring elite fragment brought constitutional rule to Thailand; it also  brought the nation's first experience of class warfare. Some died in the  ensuing Boworadet Rebellion, a lot of assets of the ruling class were  confiscated, and the king went into exile.   Eventually (to unduly shorten a very long story) a self-interested military  faction among the People's Party gained the upper hand over the public- interested civilian faction, made its own deal with remnants of the ancien  regime, and gave us the military-bureaucratic-aristocratic-royalist nexus  ruling today. The underclass for whom the People's Party seized power were  lost to sight. The rulers genially ruled, and rule, over a highly corrupt polity which poorly serves its public. They survive their neglect of the  public due to the nation's wealth and to the charming deference of the Thai.   

SO MANY COLORS IN THE RAINBOW  

Why are the Red Shirts' shirts red? The color proclaims return to class warfare as a political stratagem, as does their constant invocation of the  deprecated term 'phrai' for commoners.  Let us look ahead by considering the People's Party's past. Their leaders  had a normal mix of personal and ideal motives, but eventually idealism lost  and concern for the public was abandoned. This despite leader Pridi Phanomyong's commitment to ideal values, to the rule of law, and to his country  (shown by the risk he assumed in supporting the Free Thai while serving as  Regent, right under the noses of the Japanese invaders).  The Red Shirts lack a leader of such moral stature as Pridi, and are bankrolled by an angry fugitive, lacking in mindfulness and focussed solely on recovering  his fortune, power, reputation and personal liberty.   If Pridi failed, it is not hard to believe that Red Shirt leaders will abandon  the neglected as soon as they can take their place in the circle of power.   

AND WILL THEY GAIN POWER?

  In 1932 Interior Minister Prince Paribatra Sukhumbhand dithered on the evening  of June 23 in ordering the arrest of People's Party leaders, whose plan he had  discovered. And so the next day their coup d'etat succeeded, changing the  course of Thai history.  Do events at Rajprasong display comparable dithering? Present leaders have  announced political plans and deadlines, then withdrawn them, announced  crackdown measures and then not implemented them, then announced a clearing  operation without effective follow-through. Defiant crowds still mill about  blocking the center of the nation's capital.   In fact sound practices exist for dealing with such situations. They end  when a force arrives in darkness, tears aside the barricades at both ends (one announced for free exit) and enters with a solid rank in close-order  formation with fixed bayonets covered by water cannons and tear gas. Noise  and light shock and demoralize those who have thoughtfully surrounded themselves in an enclosed space. The matter (at least in the city center)  is over by daybreak as the leaders are captured. The action moves elsewhere:  courts, parliament, countryside. No live ammunition is provided to the  troops; else a bloody and needless tragedy ensues.   

BEST AND WORST PROSPECTS  

The kingdom's decrepit legal system is now at least beginning to twitch under  the king's relentless encouragement. Should the Red Shirts take power in one  way or another, prospects for the rule of law in the kingdom (never very  bright) will be poor indeed due to the methods they have chosen to use, the  demands of their paymaster, and of course the precedent set in 2009 by the  Yellow Shirts. Should present leaders retain power with their present vision,  one could at best hope for continuation of present stagnation. Many are mystified why none among them sees the fantastic market opportunity identified  by their deposed predecessor.  Everyone at the top or aspiring to be there understands that to rule Thailand  is to live in impunity and grow rich fast. Billions are at stake, a number  worth killing for to get or to keep. Only the intelligent exercise of power  will settle this conflict.  Who now has that vision, on either side? If no one, we are in for a long  struggle.  

May 18, 2010

Those TV Debates

2010-04-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

Cameron vs. Brown – a re-run of JFK vs. Nixon?

By Bruce Palling

A lot has been made about David Cameron appearing to be a latter day version of the late President John F Kennedy. The similarities are certainly there – both attractive, highly privileged individuals who went to elite educational institutions, with charming young families. Another cross-cultural similarity is their aristo connections: David Cameron is connected through his wife to the Anglo-American Astor family while Kennedy’s sister was married to the heir of the Duke of Devonshire. On a more sober note too, each suffered from the sudden death of one of their children. But the real link between them is in both cases they represented a new generation for their party or country, challenging the existing establishment, whether it was the stiflingly conventional Republican America or the decidedly old and tired “New” Labour Britain. In both cases, their attributes also laid them open to the accusation of being too young and untried for the burdens of power. Admittedly, Cameron’s looks and wealth are not on a par with JFK’s, nor has anyone ever suggested that Samantha was quite as stunning as Jackie…. but you get the picture (Aldous Huxley couldn’t get the Jackie craze – he thought American shop window dummies always looked like her).

What has not yet been explored is the rather more intriguing similarities between their two opponents – Richard Nixon and Gordon Brown – and it does not make comfortable reading for the British Prime Minister.

Vice President Richard Nixon had been number two for eight years under President Eisenhower in the Fifties and also had many frustrations at being patronised and ignored by the man at the top. Gordon Brown played second fiddle to Tony Blair for even longer – he had an entire decade as Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. There was certainly no love between these two modernisers of the Labour Party with Brown bearing an eternal grudge at the effortless Kennedyish way Tony Blair dealt with the party and the public.

Brown, like Nixon, was always seen as the inevitable candidate to succeed his leader, though in Brown’s case he sulked and plotted virtually from the day he was appointed Chancellor. Nixon and Brown both came from the lower middle class and were state educated. They also have eerily similar contempt for the urban elite. But where this game becomes interesting is when you look a bit deeper into the political DNA of Brown and Nixon, which is remarkably congruent despite them representing political opposites.

Both are seen as brilliant strategists while being seriously light on the people side of politics (“All substance but no style”). Nixon and Brown only appear happy when huddled together with their strategists (men only) plotting against political opponents, real or imagined. Brown has not relied on Dirty Tricks to the extent Nixon did, but several of his aides have had to resign because of their propensity to mount scurrilous attacks on their political opponents and Alistair Darling recently vouchsafed to the vicousness of his attack dogs. More telling are the signs of awkwardness both show when performing publically – those strange laughs, flashed grins plus those out of synch body grimaces. They are also both accused of being solitary workaholics, over-secretive and bearing grudges far beyond their sell by date. Both are also keen to emphasize how they are humble outsiders compared with their relaxed, urbane, elite opponents. When Nixon finally made it to the White House in 1969, eight years after his defeat by Kennedy, he wrote a memo to himself stating “I have decided my major role is moral leadership” – something that Brown was also keen to promote at the last Labour Party conference and throughout his political career. Brown, the son of a vicar, is someone so obsessed with being seen to be upright and beyond reproach that he actually devoted a week of his summer holiday to doing charity work in his constituency. This is in contrast to David Cameron, who confessed that the first thing he does on holiday is to sit down on the beach and read “trashy novels”. I think most voters will at least admire this admission for its honesty, whereas with Brown, they must think, why can’t he just relax and forget about working at being earnest and high-minded for once?

Compared to Cameron or Kennedy, neither Nixon nor Brown look as if they have any life beyond politics. We have heard that Gordon Brown has to be reminded when it is time to eat because of his indifference to such mundane matters. Let us hope that he has more interest in what is on his plate than Nixon, whose usual five-minute solo lunch in the White House, was cottage cheese with a canned pineapple ring. Again, in contrast, both Cameron and Kennedy are known for their pleasure and ease with social life although there is no suggestion that Cameron has Kennedy’s sexual appetites or that Brown is capable of masterminding a Watergate scandal. However, Brown is seen as a solitary figure like Nixon with unhealthy signs of control freakery and keeping himself cocooned with a small number of loyalists. By contrast, both Kennedy and Cameron have almost made a fetish out of calling on a wide spectrum of advisers from all over the political spectrum. JFK made a big thing about calling on the “best and the brightest” regardless of who they voted for and Cameron has even called for non-Conservatives to put themselves forward as candidates in the next election. This was a smart move because the British public have grown weary of the existing “professional” politicians from all parties in the wake of the disastrous parliamentary expenses scandal.

This year is the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kennedy vs. Nixon Presidential debates. Some believe that this event heralded the real beginning of the modern era, rather than the discovery of electricity of the invention of the internal combustion engine. I know what they mean – for the first time, tens of millions of people could witness a live debate between the two contenders for the most powerful position on the planet – the Presidency of the United States of America. It was the beginning of the media age, where a person’s image rather than just their beliefs is the paramount factor in creating or swaying support for them. (What is overlooked though is that Nixon won far more approval from radio listeners than those who watched the TV debates). America had to wait another 16 years before both Presidential candidates agreed to debate live on TV – Nixon certainly wasn’t going to risk all for such an event in his next two Presidential elections. It has taken a long time for them to occur in British politics. In the last British election, Tony Blair did not possess the political courage to go head to head with the opposition leader in televised debates, despite being way ahead in the polls.

Recently Lord Mandelson, the slightly sinister former Brown enemy who is now de facto deputy Prime Minister, leaked that Brown would welcome a TV debate with Cameron. Although I initially dismissed this as fantasy, it is now going to happen but under seriously controlled circumstances. Just remember we are talking about a Prime Minister who has avoided all attempts to even appear in the same studio as Jeremy Paxman, so the moderators will be chosen for their harmlessness. The involvement of the Liberal leader Nick Clegg will also make the debates a bit more diffuse than if they were merely Brown vs Cameron. But we shouldn’t really blame Brown - after all, it was the image of JFK as the youthful, charismatic underdog in those 1960 Presidential TV debates that destroyed the chances of the awkward, sweating, six o’clock shadow–clad Nixon. And that is precisely how Brown appears on TV too, regardless of how much work goes into crafting him as the caring, compassionate, experienced leader. This is a tragedy of Brown’s own creation – he has always been a ruthless, bullying, single-minded politician who takes no prisoners. Now, after focusing on becoming Prime Minister all his working life, he will probably fail to be elected to the office. This is what will truly haunt him all his life – Blair won three landslides for Labour but Brown hasn’t won a single one as he was merely appointed to the job of prime minister when Blair resigned. And one thing that is completely different from Nixon’s Gubernatorial defeat in 1962 is that failure in this election will be the political death knell for Brown, regardless of how he performs in the tv debates.

The last of the Great Indochinese Hoteliers

2010-04-15T01:23:00.000-07:00

Maurice Cavalerie founded and managed the Hotel Constellation in rue Samsentai, Vientiane. For the period of the conflict in Laos, it was the foreign correspondent's hub, call/nerve centre and sleeping quarters. I got to know Maurice in the early Seventies, when I began my career as a stringer in Laos, primarily for the BBC World Service but also managing to be AP, Far Eastern Economic Review, NBC, Newsweek and Washington Post correspondent. Maurice was also counsellor, intelligence chief, money changer and friend. I liked his comment "I never break the law because in Laos, everything is legal". Here is an Obit from his son-in-law, the distinguished Indochina academic Martin Stuart-Fox.

This brief obituary for my father-in-law, Maurice Cavalerie, may be of interest to those journalists who covered the wars in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, and who knew him personally. As Carl has already reported, a requiem mass was held on 12^th April 2010 attended by many friends, his eight children (four from France), and all his family in Australia (including grandchildren and great-grandchildren).

Auguste Maurice Cavalerie, 1923-2010.

Maurice Cavalerie was born in Kunming, China, on 27 May, 1923. He was named Auguste by his father, but always known as Maurice – apparently because his mother found Auguste hard to pronounce. His father was a botanist from the Massif Central region of France, who was sent by the Museum of Natural History in Paris to study the plants of southern China, many of which he named. His mother was a teacher, the educated daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family, from the last generation of such ladies to have bound feet.

When Maurice was five his father was murdered by Chinese bandits. He was brought up by his mother, with the benevolent assistance of the principal of the French School in Kunming.

Maurice attended the Lycee Albert Sarraut in Hanoi to complete his baccalaureate after which he enrolled in the medical faculty of the University of Hanoi. On the side Maurice began trading in commodities like sugar, which were in short supply and high demand in Indochina. At the same time he tutored at the Lycee, where in 1942 he met another young instructor, his bride to be, Rosalie Erembert.

In March 1945, Japanese forces staged a lightning coup, interning all French military and civilian personnel in Indochina. Maurice went underground and escaped internment. After the Japanese surrender six months later, Maurice was invited to become an interpreter for the Chinese army of occupation in their negotiations with the returning French. So valuable did the Chinese commanding general consider his services to be that he was assigned the honorary rank of major, a vehicle, a driver and two body guards.

Towards the end of 1945 Maurice received his call-up papers for national service, which had arrived via Kunming. So by the time he received them, the date of his call-up had passed. When he reported for duty, the sergeant was less than polite. Annoyed, Maurice warned that he might have to call upon his body guards, who were waiting outside. A quick check revealed that this was not an idle threat. Negotiations followed, and Maurice’s language skills were transferred from the Chinese authorities to the French – at a time when negotiations were underway for the withdrawal of the Chinese army of occupation from Indochina. As you can probably imagine, Maurice’s telling of this story (and many others) was hilarious!

In 1946 Maurice took advantage of the offer of evacuation to France for French citizens to further his education. He and Rose settled in Paris, where Maurice enrolled in the prestigious Ecole Superieure de Commerce. Their first two children, Elisabeth and Monique, were both born in Paris. In 1949, Maurice decided to return to Hanoi, leaving Rose to follow with the children. The Vietminh insurgency was by then well and truly established, fuelled by the communist victory in China in 1949. Maurice’s mother and sister fled Kunming for Hanoi, leaving behind not only the family compound and other properties, but also all the family gold.

The war years provided opportunities for a young man with entrepreneurial flair, a love of adventure, and considerable courage. Maurice expanded his business interests to include wholesale distribution, driving trucks laden with tyres and other items in short supply through rural areas infested with bandits and communist insurgents. From Hanoi he ran the gauntlet of Vietminh checkpoints to transport goods to French communities in towns across northern Vietnam. It was a risky, but profitable venture that soon enabled him to expand his business interests to include the importation and distribution of products from France, notably French Champagne and wines, food, and luxury goods including perfumes and underwear – all in high demand by the French Community and the French army.

By 1954 Maurice was a wealthy and respected member of the French business community in Hanoi. But when the Geneva Agreements of that year handed North Vietnam to the Viet Minh, Maurice and his growing family (Mireille and Danielle were born in Hanoi) were forced to evacuate – leaving behind a fortune in fixed assets. Maurice settled his family in Dalat, where Rose taught in the Lycee and the girls attended the Couvent des Oiseaux as boarders under the strict care of French nuns. Maurice meanwhile canvassed business opportunities, first in Saigon, then in Laos, which then seemed less threatened by a communist takeover.

In Vientiane Maurice started a new business in hospitality and catering by establishing the soon-to-become famous Hotel Constellation, with its associated restaurant serving French food and wine. Being the entrepreneur he was, he soon expanded his business interests to include importation of a wide range of products, real estate and several airline agencies. A little anecdote illustrates his creative approach to business. Maurice contracted to import Heineken beer. As the brand was then largely unknown in Laos, Maurice hired a couple of well-dressed Lao and sent them to every alcohol outlet in the city. In each they asked to place an order for beer for a large function, demanding Heineken and refusing any alternative. In no time Maurice was inundated with orders, and Heineken was established as the only beer to serve on all important occasions.

In 1958 Maurice moved the family to Laos. Eric and Jean had been born in Dalat, and Brigitte in Saigon. The trip was by road, from Saigon through Cambodia and north along the Mekong River to Vientiane. In those days of rough dirt roads this was a major expedition that took days, but the family arrived safely (minus Elisabeth and Monique, who stayed on as boarders for two more years in Dalat). Once established in Laos the last child, Luc, was born.

As Laos lurched from one political crisis to another, journalists flocked in from around the world. Many stayed at the Hotel Constellation, which in those days, as some of us remember, was the hub of contact, not just for visiting journalists, but also for Air America pilots, embassy personnel and spies from every agency in town – including the Russians and Chinese. During the battle for Vientiane between opposing factions in 1960, Maurice protected both his family and his guests. The only casualty was the water tank on the roof, which was holed by machine gun fire and flooded several rooms.

Maurice changing money in Vientiane in the Mid-Sixties

Maurice was well informed on political developments in Laos – but was always discreet about what he said about it, and to whom. On this discretion he built a reputation as someone who could be trusted. Nothing told him in confidence was ever passed on. I never heard him gossip about any journalist, or speak ill of anyone, for that matter – even those to whom he had lent money that was never repaid. Judging by the comments of Old Hacks in response to Carl’s RIP notice, among the press corps Maurice was always treated with respect and affection.

In 1975 when the Pathet Lao seized power in Laos, and once again Maurice lost all his fixed assets. As a French citizen he could have gone to France, but he and Rose preferred the climate in Australia. Maurice decided to move to Brisbane, but not before he had quizzed me on Marxist influence in the Australian Labour Party. Having been dispossessed by communist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Laos, he wasn’t going to risk the same thing happening in Australia. On this I was able to reassure him.

The family settled on acreage in the outer suburb of Brookfield. Maurice decided not to go into business, but rather to spend his time managing his investments and gardening, which he loved. He remained proudly French, but developed a considerable affection for Australia. He became an active member of the Union des Français à l’Etranger (UFE) and joined the French-Australian Chamber of Commerce. He also donated generously to support the French language service of a local radio station and to the Société de Bienfaisance.

Maurice remained a genial and generous host. He loved nothing better than presiding over family gatherings at home or in good restaurants – with the more members present the merrier. My own memories of Maurice will always be of his warmth, kindness and generosity, and of the many family dinners we shared together.

His courage and fortitude were tested in his final days after being diagnosed with terminal cancer of the duodenum, but he died as he had lived, with dignity.

Adieu Maurice. Merci pour tout.

Martin Stuart-Fox

Luang Prabang

2010-01-31T00:15:00.000-08:00

The most undeveloped and completely unspoilt destination in all of Asia is not in Bhutan or Bali: it’s tucked out of sight in the mountains of northern Laos – the forgotten country sandwiched between Vietnam and Thailand – and set on the banks of the Mekong river.

This is Luang Prabang, the former Royal capital, and it’s one of those rare places that have actually improved with time. Thanks to its UNESCO World Heritage status, it is even more glorious and captivating than it was on my last visit more than 30 years ago at the tail end of the Indochina war. Although it was not physically damaged by the Indochina war, it was completely cut off from the rest of Laos - except by air, as the danger of ambush was too great either by river or road. Laos was my first foreign assignment - I was the BBC World Service special correspondent in the early Seventies, but based in Vientiane. Visits here were infrequent as it was cut off by the Pathet Lao but it remained a glorious escape. It is worth remembering though, that American fighter/bombers had peppered the countryside with anti-personnel mines - just 20 miles away.

The best way to get the full impact of Luang Prabang is to arrive the traditional way – by boat, rather than endure eight hours on a rickety road or fly in from neighbouring Thailand or Vietnam. Ideally you should take the two-day boat ride from Ban Houei Say in North western Laos. After being exposed to jungle and mountain ranges for the entire journey, the town suddenly looms ahead like a stationary promontory at the junction of the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers.

Facing us on our arrival was a wide stone staircase to the entrance of Wat Xieng Thong, which is still guarded by four stone lions all with blood coloured paint spattered over their teeth and jaws. The temple itself remains in perfect condition after standing guard over the town for nearly 500 years. But when we walked around the corner and along Sakkarine Road, we were struck dumb by how totally unchanged everything else is too.

The road itself is the High St of Luang Prabang but it seemed to be deserted. One enlightened piece of legislation means that foreigners are not allowed to drive around on motor cycles, although they are encouraged to rent bicycles for fifty pence a day. Instead of traffic jams, the eye is drawn to the 20 Buddhist temples interspersed between a glorious array of perfectly preserved French colonial villas, offices, traditional Lao houses on stilts and even a royal palace, which now houses a museum.

I have always had a soft spot for Savang Wattana, the anachronistic but blameless King of Laos. His chief interest apart from his royal orchard was Proust, whose prose he could recite effortlessly from memory to his stupefied guests. On one of his numerous journeys to the region to sort out the refugee crisis, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan was staggered to be served a flawless bottle of Latour 49 in the monarch’s modest palace.

While the population did not have to suffer the barbarities of the Khmer Rouge, the communist Pathet Lao gained a reputation for a haphazard version of “Stalinism with a friendly face”. In their zeal following victory in 1975, the royal family were sent off to the countryside for “re-education”, where they all perished through disease and starvation. Fortunately no attempt was made to nationalise or otherwise destroy property belonging to the other members of the royal family. This means that the charming guesthouses and hotels are frequently either owned or run by the Kings relatives.

Although Laos is still technically Communist, private enterprise and petty corruption is gradually returning while Buddhism is still flourishing throughout the country. In fact, one of the most colourful ceremonies requires you to rise before dawn and witness the hundreds of saffron-clad monks ambling down the streets to receive rice and food offerings from the local populace. Such is the fame of Luang Prabang, that fashionable Thais fly up from Bangkok to offer alms to the monks, which they then gleefully record on their video cameras to show their friends back home how much merit they have made.

For non-Buddhists, the main point of Luang Prabang is simply strolling around, stopping in any of the stylish and simple coffee shops or eating in the exceptional (and dirt cheap) local and French restaurants.

The whole town is dominated by a steep wooded hill called Phousi, which takes 328 steps to reach. At the pinnacle is a shimmering golden shrine, which can be seen from most parts of town. It was from here that a royal drummer would announce the 16 segments of the day before the French introduced more conventional time. By chance, the day after my last visit coincided with the annual boat races, which are an amalgam of Ascot, the Cup Final and the Oxford and Cambridge race. All 12,000 residents head down to the banks of the Nam Khan River to sing, shout and swear at their favourite vessels, which are at least 40 foot long with crews of 20. Each village within the town enters a boat, which then race in a series of heats, which last the entire day. In the early stages, the cox often scrambles to the tip of the vessel and performs erotic dances to the rhythm of the oarsmen. By the end of the day, the majority of the spectators are howling drunk on the local lao lao, a potent form of rice whiskey while occasionally the boats end up semi-submerged due to the frenzy of the competitors.

Although it is becoming necessary to book accommodation during the busy season (November to March), the real point of visiting Luang Prabang is to simply slouch around, taking in as many temples and other architectural gems as you feel like while enjoying the genuine friendliness of the local population. Mick Jagger first came to Luang Prabang with his children a couple of years back and Jamie Oliver has also visited the town and gave some impromptu cooking lessons in a local restaurant. My two favourite places to eat were Le Elephant (www.elephant-restau.com/) and the Apsara (www.theapsara.com) which is also my favourite hotel. L’Elephant is an atmospheric French restaurant on a corner, which can be opened to the elements. Easily the most popular place for French food in Luang Prabang with a wine list of 20 and set dinner for £15. At the Apsaa, the airy open dining room is dominated by large Vietnamese lanterns and serves some of the best food in town. English owner Ivan Scholte was a London wine merchant and has some superb wines and Champagne on the menu. He personally taught Them, the young Lao chef, how to make excellent western food. This is also the place to stay. During the high season, stylish young Westerners (thanks to it being in Herbert Ypma’s Hip Hotels Orient) who want to be the first to visit an unknown destination. Out of season, it attracts foreign expatriates from neighbouring countries plus Hong Kong and Singapore.

This simple two-storied villa overlooks the Nam Khan River. The décor is modern Asian but not traditional Lao (no monotonous hill tribe wall hangings). Brightly coloured with fabrics from Vietnam and Thailand plus modern pictures commissioned specially. The in-house guidebook has wonderful advice such as:

“Mrs. Choumaly’s beauty salon on the Mekong will do a simple wash and blow dry; any attempt at more than this may end up with you looking like Imelda Marcos.”

The best bedrooms are the top five bedrooms all with their own private terraces. These are large air-conditioned rooms with simple furniture custom made in Vientiane.

Each of the seven rooms in the main building has large open bathrooms at the far end of the room.

There are six smaller rooms in a neighbouring villa but these only have large shower spaces. There is a new Amanresort in Luang Prabang, formerly the colonial French hospital, called Amantaka but I have yet to try it.

Other things to take in include the National Museum, which was formerly the Kings Palace. It is also home to the Royal ballet Theatre. Built at the turn of the last century by the French, it is an amalgam of French colonial and traditional architectural styles. The throne room is stunning and the whole palace is well preserved. All of the late Monarch’s possessions appear to still be on display, including his wind up 78 record player complete with Pablo Casal’s Bach Cello Concerti. My favourite oddity was a piece of moon rock donated to him by Nixon.

The Ban Phak Ou Caves (as described in my previous piece) are a two-hour river journey north of Luang Prabang on the Mekong. A series of caves with hundreds of Buddha images brought by local worshippers. The surroundings are paradisiacal.

There isn’t much to purchase except hill tribes’ embroidery or silverware and while the local markets are well worth spending an hour or two in, it doesn’t seem to matter that they don’t have a lot of produce of interest to foreigners. Instead, the real contentment of Luang Prabang is just the feeling of well-being that such a glorious place still exists.

ENDS

A ride down the Mekong

2010-01-30T11:00:00.001-08:00

My only previous visit to the Laotian border town of Ban Houei Xai was more than 30 year ago. It was a hurriedly arranged helicopter ride provided by the American Embassy in Vientiane to witness a bonfire of opium to show the world how plucky little Laos was eliminating the opium crop of the Golden Triangle. The keen interest shown by my fellow journalists was more to do with how the quality compared with their nightly pipes at Madame Lulu’s rather than the efficacy of this doomed drug eradication programme. Now this scruffy little town is the jumping off point for one of the world’s most magical river journeys to South-east Asia’s least spoilt town 200 miles downstream – the former royal capital of Luang Prabang.

The dawn journey to the river crossing is one of the signature drives in Thailand – skirting the surprisingly undeveloped Mekong river valley while mist amputates the top of the highest mountains. Travellers have to depart from Thailand in what are called long-tail boats – precariously unstable tubular shaped open vessels with small car engines attached to the rear propellor. The journey across the river is also a bit of a time warp as while Thailand has undergone all sorts of economic miracles with its free-fire zone capitalism, Laos is rather cautiously emerging from 30 years of futile state socialism. The arrival in Ban Houei Xai on the Laotian side of the river is charmingly inept with an apologetic speech from our earnest guide that was all the world like a local rendition of the Four Quartets: “Sometime we have time but no time so we go now to make up time”. Then the ancient motorized tricycle van taking us to our boat on a different bend in the river wheezed up the muddy hill before conking out. “Oh sorry sir, mechanical!” But we ultimately jolted down the other side to the departure point, which was monopolized by a makeshift ferry and another boat disgorging its load of Lao beer for the neighbouring Thai market.

The Luang Say, our resting place for the next two days, was a marvel of technical and historical improvisation. In an earlier era, it had been a rice barge but was now transformed into a long low elegant wooden passenger vessel with two incongruous plants proudly on the helm in large terracotta pots. The entire boat was skirted with carved wooden railings with three or four seating zones each with sumptuous planters chairs, cushions, viewing platforms and centrally located tables to rest beverages, binoculars, Scrabble sets and recent published Notting Hill novels. It would be a perfect treat for a dozen or more friends to charter the entire boat. Fortunately our enterprising sons leapt on board and immediately grabbed the best seats at the front.

The Mekong is touted as one of the world’s top 10 rivers, but it is relatively unknown and under-utilized because of its huge fluctuations in volume and a series of rapids and waterfalls which render it impassable down towards the Cambodian border. Its actual source was only finally resolved in 1994, in an arid portion of the eastern Tibetan plateau.

It gains volume and speed as it passes through China and along Burma and Thailand before reaching our point of departure. Here it is relatively frisky, somewhere between 100 and 200 yards wide and the colour of a brooding muddy puddle. Within the completely untouched jungle gorges of northern Laos, it a tableau of frenzied yet discrete activities – whirlpools, eddies, rapids, islets with an occasional display of tree trunks, palms and assorted herbal detritus. This being the height of the rainy, or “Green Season” as travel PRs are desperate to recast it, the central channel is pumping down hundreds of thousands of tonnes of water every few seconds, mainly in a central channel which is up to 80 feet deep. It is also the last home to the Pa Beuk or giant catfish, which can grow to eight feet long and is thought to be the world's largest freshwater fish. One was caught in Houei Sai in the mid-Seventies and was quickly choppered by a friendly American USAID pilot down to Vientiane, where my friend Alan Davidson was the British Ambassador. Being a world expert on fish and fish dishes, he promptly served it at a banquet in the Embassy residence to the entire diplomatic corps. At the end of the meal, the lights were dimmed and a servant entered brandishing the head on a platter, which promptly caused the French ambassador’s wife to faint.

There are only a handful of settlements along the steep banks of the Mekong but they are rarely more than a half dozen bamboo huts with a number of elegant pirogues outside for fishing. The two stops to visit small local settlements on the banks of the river are not too tedious – our few dollars dispersed for fake silver piastre coins or small silk scarves probably boosts their local economy by more than any legal cash crop. But the real joy of this trip is there is no evidence of the Twentieth Century – just the occasional forest clearance by hillltribes from their previous destructive slash and burn agriculture. It is hard to convey the satisfaction of looking out on either side for hours and never seeing any sign of modern man, let alone jet trails, roads or traffic noise. For the first hundred miles of the journey, most of the time the Mekong is enclosed within steepish mist-shrouded mountains several hundred feet tall and usually not more than half a mile from one peak to the other. The putt-putt of the diesel engine and the swirl of the water engenders a bit of lazy reading and then intermittent dozing with no appreciable change in the views since French explorers were first here in the 1860s. (Henri Mahout, one of the greatest, died of malaria in 1861 and is buried just north of Luang Prabang in a beautifully preserved tomb. He rediscovered Angkor the previous year)

A ruder world is apparent when you are occasionally overtaken by ear-piercing short tail boats with oversized engines that actually makes the journey in a single day. The price you pay though is being cramped onto a wooden seat with half a dozen other backpackers wearing crash helmets and earplugs.

The overnight stay could not be more relaxing – it is in a series of wooden and bamboo guest houses strung along with river bank near the town of Pak Beng. It is the first occasion when there is physical evidence of the former war, which made a third of the population refugees while the US dropped more bombs on the territory than fell in all of World War Two. It is not however very though provoking – merely a five hundred pound bomb split in half like a lobster shell and full of flowers.

On the final day as the river widened and steeper limestone cliffs appeared, I looked dead ahead at a tiny sandbank with palm trees on the horizon and misty mountains behind. Suddenly, the whole river stretched to nearly a mile at the junction with the Nam Ou river. This natural amphitheatre, with layers of differing blue mountains at the other end, was the most paradisical setting I have ever seen. There is the added delight that this heavenly vista includes the Ban Pak Ou caves, with their thousands of Buddha images resting only a few feet above the Mekong. Two hours later, still marvelling at the beauty of this final stretch, we stop at the bottom of a wide stone staircase. We have arrived at Luang Prabang, where our mooring doubles as the stairway to Wat Xieng Thong, the grandest temple complex in town. What a place to end the journey – nothing much has changed since my last visit to the annual boat festival in 1974 – palms and temples are still the highest structures while for the moment, its UNESCO World heritage status keeps barbarian builders at bay. Time is running out though – the Chinese are busy building dams on their portion of the Mekong while super highways are planned to end just north of Ban Houei Sai. You have been warned.

A description of Luang Prabang will follow

ENDS

St Petersburg Blues

2010-01-30T07:23:00.000-08:00

St Petersburg has the same disorienting impact as visiting Venice for the first time – “Christ, how did they make all this and even more important, why here of all places?”. Uninhabitable bogs and marshes obviously inspire humans to excel themselves. Try as I did, I couldn’t truly grasp the colossal scale of the endeavour until we had tramped down miles of imperious boulevards or spent time on boats tunnelling through quays, city streets and the massive archaic port.

It has a mesmeric affect on the locals too – the traffic consists of patched up wrecks of cars streaming across the Neva with a sullen indifference to other drivers let alone pedestrians. There may be smouldering billions of untapped oil and gas largesse elsewhere in Russia, but here the only manifestation is the very occasional “Proles Royce” (Stretched limo) or glass darkened Range Rover.

My wife was here to interview Mikhail Piotrovsky, the head of the Hermitage and one of the two most powerful men in the city (the other is Valery Gergiev, the director of the Mariinsky) while the female Governor is merely Putin’s marionette. This gave us behind the scenes access to some grand functions in the Hermitage itself, which after hours takes on the feel of its origins – the most fuck off urban palace ever built. Such are the precious hoards of objects – and art – that the only way uber-precious things can be assured of security is for the head curators to place little initialled wax seals on their cases every night.

Fortunately the artistic elite of the city are not robotic supporters of Putin, the local lad made bad. Like in any autocratic regime, the best advice is to keep your head down and under no circumstances attract police attention, as it will inevitably lead to shakedowns involving bribes or worse. As a wise art dealer friend who spends a lot of time here said: “If you see a body with a pool of blood on the footpath, you step around it and just keep walking – and don’t look back”.

This is also not a place to come for eating or shopping. The streets are dirty and the window displays indifferent. There appeared to be no manufactured luxury goods worth looking at and even the caviar is not to be trusted on the black market. A number of impressive wine importers have sprung up but why pay three to four times world prices for bottles that may have just been left out in the snow for a day or two?

But you can put all of that behind you and instead just wallow in the artistic booty. For a start, there are at least a dozen museums and palaces worth visiting. Just strolling down the boulevards we came across a beautifully proportioned classical mansion only to discover that it was merely one of two extremities of a huge colonnaded palace which must have had a length of 500 feet.

But the prime purpose of visit has to be the Hermitage. Imagine the Met, Prado and the Vatican Museums all commingled into one and you approach the splendours on display at the Hermitage. My epiphany moment was wandering through high ceiling connected drawing rooms to see dozens of Van Goghs, Matisses and Picassos I never knew existed.

But stretch beyond the obvious and you can find some delightful relics from the Imperial Age, when eager foreigners heaped gifts of all sorts on the Tsars. The most compelling museum, easily visible on the other side of the Neva from the Hermitage, is the Kunstkammer, St Petersburg’s very first museum. The core of the collection is an anatomists nightmare – preserved human freaks that caught Peter the Great’s eye on a tour of Holland, including a hermaphrodite, Siamese twins and a two headed sheep. Peter the Great also generously donated the skeleton and heart of “Bourgeois”, his giant personal servant. This is a cabinet of curiosities run riot.

To see the real gem of the collection, the Gottorf Globe, a discreet “sweetener” has to be made. This was worth the entire journey – the world’s first planetarium which was made in Germany in the Seventeenth Century and turned by water power. Twelve feet in diameter, it has the known world on the outside while inside there is space for several people to sit and look at wonderful maps of the Constellations. The Nazis seized it during the Siege of Leningrad but it was recovered after the war.

We also travelled out to the nearest grand palace, the Peterhof, which lives up to its billing as the Russian Versailles. Apart from the obvious attractions of the gilded ballrooms grottoes, I managed to stumble over a visiting delegation from Pakistan, led by a diplomat I had previously met in Islamabad in the late Eighties. One of the delegation was a brusque Pathan leader who pointed got his arm out of the way when my wife attempted to shake his hand.

Our St Petersburg guide didn’t actually turn up until the day we were leaving but it really isn’t necessary to rely on anything but a first rate guide book. Predictably she took us to the birthplace of the city, the Peter and Paul Cathedral opposite the Hermitage. The glorious golden spire on this Baroque masterpiece is still the highest landmark in the city, but sadly it will soon be overtaken several times over by a monstrous tower to be constructed by the Putin-controlled energy giant Gazprom. The other aspect that I found extremely depressing was how highly educated and intelligent the young people selling remnants of the Soviet empire to passing tourists.

The last Tsar and his murdered family have been reburied at the cathedral in the past few years, which gives it a palpable sense of immediacy – after all, there are still a number of people around who in their extreme youth, would have known them. But my favourite discovery was outside the cathedral near the fortress walls. There, marooned by a workman’s ditch and looking abandoned, is a perfectly preserved Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost in its own large glass case. I was prepared to read on the plinth about another case of the ruling family exploiting the masses with their passion for luxury. But no, this was the last remaining Rolls of a dozen imported into the Soviet Union by Lenin as he wished the Commissars to have the best available transport. I wonder how long it will survive abandoned and forgotten before disappearing into some nameless Oligarchs private collection.

Sybille Bedford's Thoughts on wine

2010-01-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

I like this extract from Sybille's Obit, published in The Independent and written by Shusha Guppy

Her joie de vivre expressed itself in an abiding curiosity about human beings, a deep love of nature, and a lifelong interest in wine. One of England's best-known connoisseurs, she travelled widely all over this country and abroad, especially in France, to "tasting" and "judging" ceremonies. She described the charm and power of wine, and her own love for it, in a memorable passage in A Compass Error:

[She] loved wine from childhood on. She loved the shapes of bottles, and of course the romantic names and the pictures of the pretty manor houses on the labels, and she loved the link with rivers and hillsides and climates and hot years, and the range of learning and experiment afforded by wine's infinite variety; but what she loved more than these was the taste - of peach and earth and honeysuckle and raspberries and spice and cedarwood and pebbles and truffles and tobacco leaf; and the happiness, the quiet ecstasy that spread through heart and limbs and mind.

Sybille was a brilliant writer though nothing she wrote subsequent to her first travel book (A Sudden View) or her first novel (A Legacy) lived up to her early promise (though her biography of Aldous Huxley was v good though failed to mention she had an affair with his wife). Like many marginally titled "nouveau pauvre", she was a Black Belt in scrounging. Shusha Guppy again, on her mean-spirited approach to wine appreciation:

When Bedford read an article I had written on Persian cuisine, she invited herself to dinner. She arrived with a little basket containing two bottles of wine, red and white, already opened and half consumed: "I'm fastidious about my wine," she explained, refusing what I had provided. She poured herself a glass from her white wine to drink with the hors d'oeuvre, and another from the red for the main course; then she fastened the corks expertly and put the depleted bottles back in her basket - she seemed relieved when I told her I was a teetotaller. She made up for spurning my wine with lavish praise of the Persian dishes: "I love food, good food, simple, authentic. Taking food with friends has a sacramental dimension for me. It is part of my love of life."

She never tried this trick when she came to dinner with me in the early Eighties though she later complained to all and sundry that "the Petrus was far too warm".