Vigilance

This is an early morning. I sampled the January air from the balcony. The air is cold and dense enough to fly a nun. Not as cold as it is in Seoul this morning, where in January the breath freezes hard on the interior windows of the escort van and the traveling party is bundled in long overcoats that make it twice its normal size. That was the way it was in the millennium year, the last January I visited the capital of the South. I knew things were changing then, old alliances under strain, economics and politics going in a direction that the hard-eyed military men gazing at the DMZ did not recognize.

You could see it out in town. South Korea was looking around, beyond the US presence toward its neighbors. It was trying to determine what life might be like after unification, and after the Americans. There were more Russian than I had ever seen up in the Itaewon shopping area where the detritus from the subway construction was frozen on the street and the wind cut as clean and hard as a clever.

This morning the head of the IAEA is in Moscow to see if they can help with the current crisis. They may have a bit of influence in Seoul and Pyongyang. A neighbor to both. Russians of the 50th Air Army flew the North Korean Migs against the UN forces in the South. Only now are the old vets talking about it.

My pal Val was a player with me out in Itaewon, the rest of the delegation huddled in the Shilla Hotel’s fitness center. We were drinking beer and reliving younger days when this was a garrison town and GI’s were the main market for the merchants, not international tourists, and the idea of speaking Russian here was as alien as the idea of exceeding your quota of cigarettes at the Post Exchange. Unthinkable.

IN Southwest Asia, Paul Wolfowitz is in Afghanistan. Paul is the Deputy Secretary of the Defense Department. He is a smart guy and a tough minded one. I used to see him during the Gulf War, part I, when he had the Policy Portfolio for then-Secretary Cheney. Today he is working on morale for the troops and the prevention of drug traffic and the slide of Kabul back into anarchy. Vicki Barker has a special guest, live at Bush House, the Director of the UN’s Drug Control Office. He told Vicki that it was difficult to secure the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Generations of Britons have learned that lesson, including the 41st Regiment of Foot who never made it to Jalalabad from Kabul. Except for the Doctor, but that is another story.

So the bridge from Korea and the nuclear menace, to Afghanistan to domestic terror in Britain did not take much. The Special Branch is rolling up cells of Algerian terrorists. It started in London, in the flat where they discovered the crude castor-bean poison last week. The tendrils of terror lead north. Yesterday a police office died in a raid in Manchester. Four others were wounded. A suspect somehow grabbed a knife and stabbed constable Steven Oak. He died, and the press is agog with how this happened after the suspect was in custody.

Most of those picked up under the 2001 antiterrorism act have been Algerians. The BBC reported that there is a “suspicion is that there are a number of sleeper cells operating on both sides of the channel that have become radicalized and are looking to do some kind of attack.” They could as easily amend that to say both sides of the Atlantic.

Before Manchester there was panic in Dorset. Tony Blair had to comment on that one, and chief superintendent Bob Bolton issued a statement intended to calm alarm over whether the Bournemouth area, an upscale resort community with a large retiree population, was itself a target. “I mention to the people of Bournemouth and Dorset that there is no need to be alarmed by these recent events but to continue to be vigilant.”

I had cocktails at the Special Forces Club in London a year ago next week, a guest of a senior Special Branch career investigator. We swapped stories, old Cold Warriors. The American war against terror was new then. He told me we had it wrong. You can’t declare war against a tactic, he told me. Terror is just a tool in the toolkit. You Yanks may as well declare war against amphibious landings.” My friend had spent a lifetime working against an implacable enemy, the IRA. The struggle had changed the way life was lived in London, and all throughout the British Isles. It is how they are rolling up the Algerians. I asked him how they had beaten the IRA.

My friend looked at me owlishly and said “We surrendered.”

We had another drink, but we agreed it didn’t look like a good option on this one.I suppose we should remain vigilant.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra