It was Tokyo, 1980. I was taking a break from the military coup in Korea about halfway through my 14 month one-year-tour on the Peninsula, not that I was counting.
The Generals had killed President Park the year before and Major General Chon Tu Hwan, pride of the Korean Military Academy’s Class 11, had taken off his uniform, traded in his three stars for a crisp civilian suit and set up shop in the Blue House in Seoul.
One of his first acts was to brutally put down a student insurrection in a town called Kwang-Ju. They still can’t agree on how many died there.
I needed to go someplace that did not have a lot of guns on the street. Some of the guys doing what I did would take a break in the middle of their tours. I figured I could do a year standing on my head. But after the massacre at Kwang-ju that is exactly what I felt like- inverted. I was having a hard time figuring out who the good guys were.
I caught a MILAIR flight out of the USAF base at Osan, south of Seoul. There was a charter bus that made the loop from Yongsan Garrison, and it literally was as easy as falling out of my rack in the hooch I shared with three Army Warrant Officers on South Post.
Yokota was a breeze, and the charter bus deal getting back to my old stomping ground south of Yokohama. At the Camp Zama Combined Club, I looked up Master Sergeant Jim-the-Spook Slowey, US Army.
I had met him the first time at the seedy Adam Bar at the old Hamilton Hotel in Seoul one afternoon in between shifts in the Command Alert Center. When you are working around the clock in phases you get used to drinking at odd hours, and this was a golden afternoon in late summer.
Jim was holding court to the thin crowd at the bar. He spun some tales in his clipped English voice, he did. I’m still not sure which level of him I understand even today.
As you know, the craft of Intelligence is largely about peeling back the layers of the onion. Each layer has a reality, related to but not necessarily true to the layer beneath. I have met people from all our Agencies and a good number from the other side. We all have our quirks, our manners, our blind spots.
Military intelligence is pretty straightforward. Even when the guys are being discreet they stick out. It is the haircut or the bad suit that gives them away.
They are the storm-crows of crisis. Company spooks, the ones from Langley, are credentialed as something else, and there is a sleek entitlement to them. You can feel it. The National Security Agency does our signals intelligence, grabbing things out of the air, and they tend to be a little anti-social, since they don’t have to talk to you to know what you are thinking.
National Reconnaissance Spooks are so secret that their agency didn’t actually exist. I think it is actually two air force lieutenants and the Lockheed-Martin Corporation. But they are doing you from space, not in your face, so why would you care?
The National Imagery and Mapping Agency is just looking at your picture, combing your hair, or drawing a map to your house. And all the rest of them, the Drug Spooks and the Justice Spooks and the commerce Spooks are the sideshow crowd. We Cold Warriors didn’t worry about them, unless we had branched out and got on the wrong side of a money investigation.
When I went on my rest and recreation trip I left at least six of our services behind. If you threw in the Allies, that was another five or six services collecting on each other and that doesn’t begin to talk about the bad guys. Part of the business in those days was recruiting sources. Which meant a lot of time sitting around in bars. Which is where I met Jim at the Adam Bar in the seedy Hamilton Hotel.
I think Jim was an operational Army Spook, or maybe that was just part of his legend. I looked him up at his home in Japan. Swap some lies- and in this case I couldn’t figure out even where they began, much less where they ended.
Here’s the dossier as I heard it. Back in 1980 he claimed he was 48, and he looked every day of it. He would wheel out whatever version of his life he chose to share was a ride on a roller-coaster. It started with a hitch in the British Army’s Coldstream Guards, and he claimed to service at Suez and in Kenya and Malaysia. Then on to join the UN Police Action in Korea, and then capture by the Chinese. Thence to a camp in south China in chains, he said quietly.
“Rum show, that,” said Jim in a clipped tone. “Then one day an NKVD Major showed up with the Chinese guards. The Senior Ranking Officer got us all together and told us we were for it unless we hit the wire that night. So 17 of us went for it and 4 got across.
“You did what?” I said.
“Walked out of China. We didn’t know until we woke up one morning in a rice paddy and saw rifles leveled at us. I looked at the weapons and didn’t know what to think. They were British .303s. We thought the Chinks had grabbed a group of our guns. That was the first time I heard Thai.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly, taking a sip of a very creditable whiskey. “You had walked out of China and into Thailand?”
“Quite right. Surprised us, too. We thought we had crossed over into Laos someplace. We thought we forded the Mekong, but p’rhaps it had been the Kwai. Didn’t have anything in the way of maps, don’t you know.” He polished his glasses.
I was invited to his house at Camp Zama. His cover was Army Veterinary Corps, since they do all the food inspections all over the Far East. It was a good cover for counter intelligence, since he had access to every post station and ship that fed troops.
He told me he was a Colonel when I looked at the sign by the door that said “Master Sergeant.” We had been talking about Ireland, as well, since that was his surname came from. Over drinks he took a short wooden staff from the mantelpiece and handed it to me. It was the baton of a Marshall of the Third Reich. Jim said it belonged to Albert Kesselring.
He had been the commander of German forces in Italy during World War II, and his daughter was his wife. She appeared with more drinks. She had brown hair and blue eyes as brilliant as Jim’s. She told me a little about her father, his cheerful and intimate relations with the women of France between the wars. And of his efforts to save the great art of Italy during the savage campaign. I did not comment on Monte Casino, the great monastery on the hill from which he ran the aggressive defense against the Allied landing at Anzio.
She seemed to think her father was a pretty good guy, and I realized that Jim did, too. I ran some of the story over in my mind. Captured by Chinese. Irish by birth- IRA? Married to a Nazi’s daughter. An officer masquerading as a senior enlisted guy. Or vice versa.
I live in the vice versa world. I turned the baton of a German Marshall over in my hands. It was crafted of rich ebony, festooned with gold and capped with eagles and the insignia of the Reich.
I have to say it was the Marshall’s daughter that finally spooked me. Her eyes were blue as a northern lake, and just as bottomless. Jim leaned over to me and suggested we go have some more drinks at a place the Japanese host service ran across town. I politely declined, thinking a honey trap was about the last thing I needed with our friends the Japanese, and with much protestation of undying friendship, I finally got a cab and went to the Naval Air Station at Atsugi.
I never saw him again, which is both good and bad. Whatever he was, he had a hell of a story.
I heard, years later, that he had passed on but decided to stay in Asia. The interesting thing was where he chose to be buried: at the US-Philippine cemetery up near where Clark Air Base used to be. My pal Master Chief Bobby Hubbard is there, too, and I sometimes toy with the idea of going back for The Long TDY myself.
Aside from the Embassy, it is the only place permitted to fly the US Flag in the Republic. I guess they realize the citizens there are not going anywhere.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
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Twitter: @jayare303