GD: Yes, Mueller once said almost the same thing. Two spirits struggle in my breast, Robert, but now I have to get to lunch so would you excuse me? The pleasures of the board and the living room floor beckon to me.
RTC: Good luck.
GD: With the lunch or the follow-up?
RTC: I assume you’re a good cook.
GD: Come out and visit with me and I’ll cook you a fine meal.
RTC: But I’m not a candidate for the living room floor.
GD: I would certainly hope not, Robert. Anyway, thanks for the nice chat and I’ll be back in touch.
(Concluded at 9:11AM CST)
Conversation No. 32
Date: Monday, August 19, 1996
Commenced: 9:37 AM CST
Concluded: 10:15 AM CST
GD: I hear conversations there, Robert. Am I calling at a wrong time for you?
RTC: No, nothing at all. They’ll leave in a minute or so.
GD: Thank you for the material on ZIPPER, Robert. Very, very interesting but not unexpected.
RTC: But we do not speak of specifics, do we?
GD: No, not necessary. Is there an original of the Driscoll [32] report?
RTC: Somewhere, no doubt, but I never had one.
GD: Did you know him?
RTC: Met professionally. I understand he died some time ago.
GD: I could check with a Russian friend about the original of their report unless you objected.
RTC: Why not just wait? Unless your connection might retire.
GD: I’ll think about it.
RTC: You mentioned one James Atwood a while ago as I recall.
GD: I know I did.
RTC: Mr. Atwood is very unhappy with you, Gregory. He accuses you of stealing money meant for us and in removing two loyal subjects of the Queen.
GD: The money was never intended for your people, in spite of what Atwood says and as far as the SAS types are concerned, I was as shocked as anyone when they vanished.
RTC: Vanished off of your boat in the middle of the Caribbean one dark night, as I was told.
GD: That’s as may be, Robert. Perhaps they decided to swim in the warm water. Who knows? You can’t believe anything Atwood says. Did you know that he worked for your people, the STASI and the KGB all at the same time while he was in Berlin?
RTC: Atwood is not an honest person, Gregory. But as to his accusations, they are private comments. I wouldn’t worry about them getting out.
GD: If it weren’t for Mueller’s tips, I would never have found the money and Atwood would still be contemplating another facelift. And I wouldn’t believe that your people would see a penny of it. When my Russian friend tipped me that Jimmy was going to detour to New Orleans and off-load our cargo, I was very upset as you can imagine. On the other hand, the next day, he was very upset when his two friends turned up missing. I never believed they were broke British tourists, stranded in Italy and willing to work their way back. Military types with shined shoes and sidewall haircuts. Atwood was about as subtle as a fart in a space suit.
RTC: (Laughter)
GD: Well, it’s true. He made such a fuss in the morning when he found we were still headed for the Panama Canal that I had to convince him he would be much more relaxed spending his time locked in his cabin. There was some expressed unhappiness there but he saw my point. We let him out off Mexico because there was nothing he could do at that point. Besides, I had tossed his piece over the side along with a few other things I found in his cabin. He was very fortunate he didn’t join the gun.
RTC: But the gold? There was trouble about that as you might have guessed.
GD: Well, probably when we docked in California and he called his chums to get his trunk full of gold, he lied to them. Imagine their chagrin when they looked inside and found what they thought were bars of gold but were really paving stones from the hotel’s parking lot. A spray can full of gold paint covers many sins, including paving bricks, Robert. Did it ever occur to the men with the pointed heads that Jimmy might have been ripping them off? I always get blamed for the dirty work of others. They weren’t too mad because he’s still alive and up to his old tricks in Savannah, at least the last I heard.
RTC: ‘In the midst of life…’ Gregory.
GD: In the midst of life, we’re in peanut butter, Robert, or something else that looks like it. Memories, Robert, memories. I would assume you have a few of your own, don’t you?
RTC: And your gold?
GD: I know nothing about Nazi gold, Robert. A dream, nothing more. If I had any, it wouldn’t be in the Bank of America. They would have run, panting with news of it, to the government years ago, eager for that thrilling pat on the head. I had quite a problem with them once, when I lived in Santa Monica. They put my paycheck into someone else’s account and it took two weeks to get the dim bulbs to put it back. And to add injury to insult, they bounced my rent check, and others, and had the testicles to charge me for each and every check.
RTC: Banks do things like that.
GD: Not to me, they don’t. I simply went down and drew out all my money, including the overdraft charges, by going to a teller I knew that was a heavy pot smoker and confused sometimes. And then I did something very entertaining. I went to the fish market and bought two very large, cooked Dungeness crabs, froze them in my freezer and put them into my briefcase along with some really gross animal pornography. I had a safe deposit box at the local branch and I opened the box, took out various objects of value and replaced them with the crabs. Oh, and of course the lovely, instructional pictures. Robert, have you ever smelt shellfish when it goes off?
RTC: I can’t say as I have.
GD: It smells worse than someone pissing on a hot stove. Believe me, that’s a smell that really stands out. And in time, the crabs thawed and began the process of filling the bank with lovely odors. Of course no one could go into the vault without vomiting so they had to find out which box had the treasures. Most local box holders were on vacation, it being July and very hot down there, so they had to drill open about ten boxes to find the prize in mine. I was moving anyway and I heard later from my old landlord that the bank was greatly upset and wanted to charge me thousands of dollars for expenses. Not that they ever got any of it.
RTC: If you could only channel your creative energy, Gregory, you could be a formidable operator.
GD: I’m aware of that but I do enjoy having fun and listening to all the methane leaking out of the bloated idiots that the people in this country think are actually protecting them. Who will protect us from the agencies? God? I have my fun and sometimes I make my point. And gathering intelligence material, and I have had my own experiences with this, is sometimes such a waste of time, Robert. No matter how true or valuable it is, it always has to be passed up the ladder where it ends up in the hands of those who rule us. And if your information, accurate or not, doesn’t please them or reflect their idiot views, then into the trash basket with it. Are you with me, Robert? Does this ring a bell with you?
RTC: Oh yes, many bells. I recall, for example, a report by Joe Hovey, our station chief in Saigon, very accurately pinpointing the coming VC Tet offensive as early as November in 1967. This was about two months before the actual attack. I mean, Gregory, Joe was spot on. And, you would say, if we knew, why did we let it happen? Why because the leadership both at the Company and in the White House and the Pentagon didn’t want to believe it. Oh, Joe’s accurate report wasn’t the only one, believe me, but it was all ignored. Johnson may have been a great politician but he was worthless as a military leader and Westmoreland was only a sycophant who always did what his bosses wanted.
GD: I’ve noticed that weak leaders want weaker men around them because subconsciously they are aware that they are poor specimens of humanity and they want no one around who might show them up. A strong leader, on the other hand, will have strong and competent men around him. This is an entirely predictable happening. And Vietnam was a mess. From both a political and a military point of v
iew, we walked right into a bog, got stuck and lost whatever it was we started out to do. And no one ever thinks about the dead their stupidity caused. A dead soldier is a piece off the board and a wounded one can’t fight so they forget them.
RTC: Well, I have quite a bit of background on Vietnam, Gregory and in one sense, you’re right but this is hindsight and hindsight is always right. We got into Vietnam a little bit at a time and for reasons that seemed to be correct at the time. The French ran their Indo-China for years and had a lucrative trade, especially in rubber. The war came, France was beaten by the Germans and the Vichy French government was controlled by the Germans. When the Japanese, who were allied with Germany, wanted to get into Indo-China, they asked the Germans who told the French to let them in. It was the rubber they were all after. It couldn’t do Germany any good so they forced Vichy to help the Japs for political reasons. During the war over there, a local resistance group started up, anti-Japanese of course. The problem was that it was run by local Communists but as FDR loved to cooperate with Communists, it was partially supplied by us. War was over, Japan defeated and the country reoccupied by the French. Political dissent and the French began to lose effective control over the rubber. We wanted DeGaulle to join NATO and his price was for us to assist France in their colony. Little by little, we did. And there was another element. JFK was Catholic and South Vietnam was filled with Catholics who wanted to be protected from the Communists and Buddhists. Cushing [33] put on the heat and Kennedy then began to send some support units over there. The French had suffered a major propaganda defeat at Dien Bien Phu and French popular opinion demanded a withdrawal. The French got us to substitute our people for theirs with an agreement to share the rubber revenues with us. And it went on from there. Ho had little to work with but he conducted guerrilla warfare that was very effective. To counter it, we had to pour huge numbers of troops and equipment into the country. We did terrible damage to their infrastructure but they kept coming back. We set Colby up with ‘Phoenix’ to neutralize VC supporters in the south and of course they launched a program of terror, as the press called it, against practically all the civilian population outside of Saigon.
GD: That sort of thing never works, Robert. The Communists are real experts at that game. The more innocent civilians that are tortured or killed, the more recruits the movement gets. They win always, you know, in the end, they win.
RTC: The Tet offensive was a huge political victory for the VC but from a military sense, they lost. Their real victory was to focus domestic anger and force a demarche. McNamara was booted out, Johnson just gave up and eventually, we got out. I mean, Gregory, it was not a military defeat but a political one.
GD: When the French pulled out, they were not defeated in the field, except for one very public battle, but as you said, it was a political victory. Once the public gets its wind up, the politicians are forced to heed the noise or they will be torn to pieces.
RTC: You do understand that we were not defeated in Vietnam, don’t you? It was the intrusive and self-serving press coupled with the perception of a useless and very destructive war from the civilians that forced us out. Not a military defeat.
GD: Call it what you wish, it was a defeat. You can parse it until the cows come home, Robert, but it was a defeat. I read that there are large untapped oil fields offshore there. Give it a few years and we will be back, cultivating the former enemy, hat in hand and money in bags for their leaders. Oh yes, and contracts for the development of the oil. Unless, of course, the Chinese beat us to it. Marx was right when he said the basis of wars was economic and Clausewitz said that war was just an extension of politics. Of course, that doesn’t do much for destroyed cities and huge civilian casualties, does it? I don’t suppose something like that matters in the long run. The victor always writes the history and it takes hundreds of years and the death of everyone connected with it before the objective truth ever comes out. And concerning the policy of torture, it is totally unnecessary and to me, the hallmark of a stupid sadistic type. Mueller, who was one of the best, used to discuss techniques with me. I’ve done my own work in this area at times and never, ever had to torture anyone. Besides, if you torture someone, they will tell you anything you want to hear just to make you stop. I recall hearing about a certain Dr. Black and Decker. Am I ringing any bells there?
RTC: Go on.
GD: One of your people, sent down from the cultural office in our embassy in Tokyo. Used to interrogate suspected VC by running an electric drill into one eye. If they wouldn’t talk then, in went the drill, right into the brain. Of course, then the victims couldn’t tell them anything because they were dead. I was told by my source, who got violently sick once viewing the messes he created, that the good man kept putting in slips for new shoes. He kept ruining them with a slurry of blood and brains. I understand after we pulled out, he left your employ and is now working at a very respectable establishment university on the East Coast, teaching comparative religion to the daughters of the wealthy.
RTC: These things happen in war, Gregory.
GD: He’s fortunate I wasn’t running his operation. I would have hanged him from the nearest tree, Robert. When he prates about the perfect love of Jesus, does he think about his ruined shoes?
RTC: I knew the man you’re talking about and I can assure you, he feels great remorse for some of his actions…
GD: He should feel the rope around his neck, Robert. Things like that always come out. Talleyrand said to Napoleon once, over the shooting of the Duc d’Enghein, ‘Sire, it is worse than a crime: it is a mistake.’ And not necessary. And all of us pay for such things. I know Colby authorized and encouraged this filthiness and, Robert, I’m glad your people put him into the river.
RTC: These things must be taken in context, Gregory. I spoke about hindsight, didn’t I?
GD: If these things never happened, we wouldn’t need hindsight at all. I recall reading a comment Bismarck once said to a German politician bent on some mischief. He said, in essence, are you prepared to carry your ideas through with cannon? If not, forget them. You know, Bismarck was the greatest and most pragmatic political leader of his time and a very great man. Can you imagine Johnson even thinking that way? Or Reagan? What did the grunts say in Vietnam? Kill them all and let God sort it out? Isn’t that a wonderful monument on the road to perfection? Oh well, read Malthus and pray.
RTC: You’re far too liberal in your views, Gregory. If you want to be successful, you have to be more realistic.
GD: I am realistic in practice but not in theory.
(Concluded 10:15 AM CST)
Conversation No. 33
Date: Friday, August 23, 1996
Commenced: 2:25 PM CST
Concluded: 2:38 PM CST
RTC: Did you see your old friend Irving’s[34] latest attack on you, Gregory?
GD: Jesus, what now? I killed Abraham Lincoln?
RTC: (Laughter) Not quite that bizarre. He claims you never knew Mueller and that Mueller died in Berlin in ’45 and they found his body. Of course that’s not true but I am astounded at the depth of this shallow man’s hatred for you.
GD: I know. I have had to deal with this idiot for years. Charles Burdick[35] put me in touch with Irving once.
RTC: Our Charles Burdick?
GD: Yes, the same one. I knew Charlie since…oh it was 1952 when he was doing graduate work at Stanford. I knew all about his work for you in ‘Nam but we seldom talked about it. Charlie spoke as a real expert on the Third Reich and, modestly, I knew more about it than he did. He was mostly into the military structure and I am into both the military and political. Besides, I was there at the time and he wasn’t. So Irving writes this book on the destruction of Dresden. Not a bad book at all but Irving kept pulling his punches.
RTC: How so?
GD: Well, he would make a strong point against the Allied policy, a nice strong point, and then stumble around and start qualifying his information. He would say, ‘could this be?’ and ‘well, mayb
e not…’ like that. No, after I met him the one time, I pegged him as a phony and tried to keep as far away from him as I could. Boorish person with a penchant for teen aged tarts. He was known as ‘Mr. Spanky’ in the historical world. Second book on PQ 17 was also a good book but David went downhill from there. There was the hilarious fake ‘Himmler letter’ I sent him about Hitler once. Charlie saw it and laughed so loud that his secretary thought he was having some kind of a fit. It was in the worst possible, ungrammatical and misspelled German you could imagine but Irving decided it was original because it suited his purpose. He bleated about it in print for some time, praising me as a wonderful expert and so on. Then when he found out the letter was a spoof, he went bananas and started in screeching at me like a whore who finds out her trick gave her a fake twenty.
RTC: (Laughter) Such a wonderful way of putting things, Gregory.
GD: A friend of mine ran three whorehouses in ‘Frisco so I have some knowledge of the patterns of behavior there. Anyway, when Irving found out about the Mueller books, he wrote to Sudholt, my German publisher. It was the work of a real nut, believe me. He wailed that Sudholt should not publish anything I wrote because I was pure evil and a terrible fraud. Sudholt told me that Irving was a nut and on top of that, made a living selling manuscripts to German publishers, keeping the advance money and never producing. And also, it seems, Dirty Dave sued anyone and everyone who dared to say a word against him. He would take the modest settlements and stick them into his bank account.
RTC: He has been quite successful, as I gather.
GD: Yes, but as Browning said, the kissing has to stop and for David, it stopped some time ago and he’s running on empty. Sudholt sent me Irving’s lunatic letter with a copy of his own response. My God, did he kick Irving in his flabby ass. He talked about Irving’s rip-offs of publishers and really smacked him down. After Irving failed to shut me up, he started in on his pathetic website. He once listed about twenty names he claimed I used. I never heard of any of them. Then I found out his mother was Jewish…
Conversations With the Crow Page 19