This fading credential from 1983 says it all. Underneath the suggestively sputtering volcano  and to the right of my scared-stiff visage you'll see the acronym SPCA. The Salvador Press Corps Association.  Our motto: "They Treat Us Like Dogs."

On a good day.

My walls and drawers and memories and crooks and crannies of my brain are filled with hundreds of fragmentary scraps collected from Santiago to Salvador to Baghdad to Des Moines  and from dozens of other venues during a 35 year plus career in journalism.

They are all dear to me. Piece them together properly and you have re-assembled my life.

Each scrap or photo or scrawled note or fading memory can evoke its special mix of sorrow, joy, ecstasy, pain or laughter.

Yet, they all have two things in common. First, they remind me of the great privilege I have had to do so many things, meet so many people and learn so many things. Second, I am always to remember I am still alive to tell the tale.

Reporters' war stories, literal or otherwise, can be dreadfully boring to those outside a small circle of friends. But nary a night goes by when I don't shuffle through a half-dozen of them --perhaps only for a fleeting moment-- and re-live them almost as intensely as I did in the moment they occurred.

I have decided, then, to start writing them all down. For no particular purpose, except perhaps to fully savor them all one more time before they fully recede in time.

Over the coming weeks and months, that is what I intend to do on this blog. Purely as some sort of perverse hobby. And in no particular order. Nor with any guarantee that every detail is accurate.

Everything will be, merely, as I remember them. They are my truths. They have made my life and changed my life.

I hope you also derive something useful from reading through then. Maybe you will add your own.

I first met Che’s grandson – Canek Sanchez- in Havanain 1991.

What you above is his current facebook profile photo, which he posted as purposefully blurry.  The resemblance, though, is obvious.

The other photos you see are those of Che Guevara with Canek's mother, Hildita Gadea.

I was at an afternoon party on the patio of a Cuban friend ofmine, Juan Carlos Fernandez, a former counter-intelligence officer who had morphed into awriter. Canek, then about 18, showed up agitated and angered and accompanied by the son of another good friend., the writer Angel Tomas Gonzalez,

The two young men breathlessly told us adults of something awful thathad just happened. Canek and his pal had put together a rock band andhad just opened their first gig at a nearby Casa De Cultura – a municipal performance space. No sooner had they started playing but a squad of Cuban cops had burst in and chased everyone out, lobbing a tear gas canister or two. Seemed like the state wasn’t too pleased by such a gathering of "hippies."

As he was being manhandled by the cops Canek had told them they were pushing around Che’s own kin.They couldn’t care less, even though you didn’t have to look hard tosee that Canek had the identical dark, penetrating stare of hisguerrilla grandpa.

The story the young me told us assembled on that patio that eveningresonated deeply. Here was a gathering of maybe 25 middle-aged or sointellectuals, all with some bond to the Cuban revolution and each onenow severely shook up. As the wall came down and theSoviet Union disappeared and Fidel just seemed to dig himself andeveyone with him deeper and deeper into an historic trench, doubts and second thoughts swamped Havana's intellectual community.

The confusion eventually settled. My friend, Fernandezl soon moved to Florida. Angel Tomas moved at least temporarily to Spain but later continued commuting back and forth to Cuba..Others present that night (Cuban journalists, writers, translators,musicians etc) went to Mexico and some to Madrid or Paris. When I wentback to Havana five years later, no one was left. And I couldn’t findCanek.

His story wound up being central to my 1996 book Roll Over, Che Guevara but I had simply lost track of Canek, learning only that he was spending a lot of time in Mexico. I know now that is where he lives.

In 2004, the prestigious Mexican leftist weekly Procesolocated him and asked him to sit for an interview. Instead, Canekagreed to a “self-interview” and sent the transcript over to themagazine.

.

To finally get to the point – here’s some of the current thoughts of Che Guevara’s grandson:

“The Cuban Revolution died some years ago: it had to be killed off bythose who act in its name to make sure it didn’t turn against them; itwas institutionalized and smothered by its own bureaucracy, bycorruption, nepotism and the rigidity of the much-celebrated Cuban‘revolutionary’ state.”

“All of my criticism of Fidel Castro come from his walkingaway from the ideals of liberty, from his betrayal of his own peopleand his frightening zeal to place the interests of the state abovethose of his people.”

“Let’s be honest, a young rebel like Fidel Castro in today’s Cuba wouldn’t be sent into exile. He’s be shot.”

Canekwas a brave and bright teenager when I first met him. He had eschewedall the privileges and perks available to him in Cuba as the grandsonof the state’s leading historic icon. He obviously has matured into anequally courageous and honest young man.



On that same trip I gave a couple of conferences, one with the literary journal of the Ministry of Interior! And spent some time with my good friend and now celebrated writer, Daniel Echevarria. Just as a teaser: Daniel was an Uruguayan working with Colombian guerrillas in the late 1960's when he had to flee the country. He highjacked a plane to Havana (sort of, as he paid for all the seats on the small plane). He then became a writer. And later a Great Writer. I will tell his whole story in another posting soon. Some of the pictures from that trip, including one of Daniel, are in the slideshow above.

This picture tells most of this story.  That's me at about 5 a.m. in the National Convention Center in Managua, Nicaragua the night in 1990 that the Sandinistas were voted out of power.

I am not ashamed to tell you that I was among the dozens, or scores, of reporters that had pretty much written the story of the Sandinista victory during the previous week and we were simply awaiting the final election returns to write the new "top" of the story.

The joke was on us as by 3 in the morning it was clear that Sandinista President Daniel Ortega had, in fact, lost to U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro. A couple of poor bastards, including Larry Bensky --writing for The Nation-- had already filed their stories proclaming Ortega the winner and wound up seeing their faux pas in print.

I was working for the Village Voice and, indeed, my deadline was that very same morning. As soon as it was clear Ortega was losing, I had to redo ten days worth of reporting in just a few hours. In this picture I am finishing my rewrite at the last moment.

At just about 6 a.m. Ortega made his concession speech to a standing room only crowd in the same room. It was, no doubt, his greatest moment. He gave a great and gracious speech.

For those of you who lost track, he's back in power. And he's a real putz.

For the geeks among you. I believe the computer I am working on was a Toshiba 1100. Or a 1200? The software was probably WordPerfect 5.1. Or 4.2?

Here's another pic from the same week. I'm on the left. In the middle in then-Foreign Minister Father Miguel D'Escoto.

Ok, so in an earlier post I told you how I made friends with the late, great Marshall Frady while we were reporting the Middle East War in November 1973. Now, I'll tell you how that led to a 57 day Mexico City honeymoon paid for by Playboy.

As we became friends in Egypt, Marshall became fascinated by my recent background as a translator for Salvador Allende. He told me of his long-held dream of going to Cuba and interviewing Fidel Castro for Playboy. Turns out that back in '59, when the Revolution first came to power, Marshall was a romantic teenager and he told me a story about landing in Havana with a bike and getting booted because he was under 18.

Now he was proposing that with my Allende connections, maybe I could help him negotiate the interview with Castro. I said sure and forget about it promptly, writing it off to a typical late night booze-driven bullshit session.

In the meantime, I came back to live in Los Angeles in early '74, with no money and no steady job -- trying to break out as a 23 year old freelancer.  I was living with my sister in February of that year when my fiancee, Patricia Vargas, arrived from Chile. With no money and no job. We had 90 days to get married by the terms of her visa. And we had no plan to speak of. The beauty of being young!

Then, around the 15th of the month, out of the blue, I got a call from Marshall who was out in South Carolina where he lived.  With his deep southern drawl he told me that he had spoken to Playboy and the interview with Fidel had been approved.  Would I be willing, he asked, to go down to Mexico City with him for maybe 3 days to negotiate with the Cubans.  I was so excited, and so green and inexperienced I didn't bother to ask exactly what my role would be. But it seemed it was mostly as a "fixer." I would set it all up for Marshall and he would do it. That was a big enough breakthrough for me.

I immediately said yes. We figured a round trip ticket would cost about $200 and that I would need a another couple of hundred for maybe 3 nights at a first class hotel in Mexico City. Cool, Marshall said. And within a few hours, Playboy sent me $1000 via American Express.

There was a glitch, however. I wanted to bring Patricia along. And to do so we would have to get married first. So on the same day my mother was undergoing explorative cancer surgery and with no advance notice, Patricia and I and my sisters went to a small wedding chapel in North Hollywood where we laughed through a fundamentalist ceremony,  Indeed, the whole thing was so improvised that we had to pay $5 extra to rent aluminum wedding rings!

We were married at 11:30 a.m. We had one drink to celebrate. And by 3 p.m. that afternoon Patricia had a green card (ahh, the Good Old Days).  When I got back that afternoon, Marshall called me and told me he was tied up with a messy divorce and that he could not meet me in Mexico the next evening as planned. He would be a few more days, he said, but I should just go ahead and chill out in Mexico City and he would catch up. Playboy would wire ahead some more cash to keep me there a bit longer.

I can't remember exactly but it was more like 4-5 days until Marshall arrived. And we all had a great first night as we drank like fishies in the Plaza Garibaldi and Marshall picked a fight with some crude German tourists. I joined in the fray -- with my rudimentary German-- claiming that I was a Russian and was ready to avenge Stalingrad. A great start!

The next morning, very hung over, I facilitated a meeting at the Cuban Embassy and we had a long chat with a certain Mr. Paron.  He said he would cable Havana with out request and that we should await an answer. 

Ok, Wait where? For how long?  Mr. Paron said he didn't know how long and it was up to us where to wait as --well-- who knows? Fidel might want to see us on 12 hours notice so we should probably hang close.

We checked in with Playboy and --this is in the salad days of the man-- our editors said, no problem. Hang in there. We'll AmEx you more money for another week or so.

One week turned into two and two into four and so on.  Every day I would call Paron and every day he would tell me he didn't know. Then Marshall would call Playboy and the magazine would say hang in there. By the third or fourth week I was declared a full partner in the interview venture. Sort of like being named co-captain of the Titanic.

No matter, we were having a ball. In fact, after about 2 weeks we moved to a less expensive hotel so we could increase our food and beverage budget. I had no money and no credit cards. Ditto for Marshall. So we would fluctuate between feast and famine.  As time passed, now 5-6-7- weeks, we would tug on Playboy's teet every week or so and they would wire us $1000-$2000 at a time. We would spend it, quite naturally, and then hope the next CARE package would arrive before we were dead broke. There were a few days when we were reduced to charging all food to the room because we had zero pesos.

Our daily schedule was grueling. Get up at noon. Call Paron. Call Playboy. Have a long lunch. Do the prolonged happy hour at the Mexico City Holiday Inn. Stumble back. Go to dinner, buy lots of mariachi musc and drink ourselves into a hole. Oh yeah, on occasional afternoons, Marshall and I would practice playing dominoes, rehearsing to compete with Castro in one of his favorite games.

We finally settled on one restaurant as our HQ. The snooty Bonaparte's in the Zona Rosa. The biggest advantage is that it was across the street from our Hotel Geneve which meant we had little chance of getting lost on the dark way home every night.  And every night we'd polish off a bottle or two of Chilean red wine and then move to Gran Marnier and then on to Corodon Bleu cognac.  Because we had only cash, we would call for the bill several times during the evening to make sure we had enough to cover the spiraling tab.  I think you get the drift. One evening, we came up short and Marshall said he would go back to the hotel and pick up some more traveler's checks to pay the bill. I was too thumped to object. Of course, he never returned because he passed out in the room. The restaurant folks let us slide because they knew we would be back the next night.

I was a tyro compared to Marshall who could drink anyone under the table. But I held my own. My wife did pretty well for someone who weighed 95 lbs and most evenings would end with her dancing flamenco on a table top as bored waiters waited for us to leave.

Eventually, we buckled down and rented some IBM typewriters and wrote some respective book proposals. Marshall really mentored me and his guidance informs my work more than 35 years later. The details on all that are in the link at the top of this post in my obit for Frady.  In short, Marshall wrote a proposal for what became a classic bio of Billy Graham.  My book on Chile would not be written for another two and half decades, but the proposal was born on that trip.

After 57 days of run around from Havana, we --and Playboy-- pulled the plug. The expense tab was $17,000. That didn't count the marathon collect calls Marshall would make every night to Carolina as he battled out his divorce.

Marshall never did the interview with Castro. He did go to Cuba 20 years later while doing a book on Jesse Jackson. And the piece he wrote on Cuba more or less led to his departure as a staff writer for The New Yorker.  They didn't like it.

Ten years later I started working for Playboy, doing some of their long-form interviews.

I'm still married to Patricia.

The smell of Gran Marnier makes me nauseous.

I miss Marshall. He died suddely in 2002.





Patricia Vargas Cooper. Mexico City Bull Ring. 1974





Left to right: Marshall Frady, My wife, Patricia. Barbara Frady. 2000. Brentwood.

Imagine being awakened at dawn, not having a clue where you are, flat on your stomach, soaking wet, drunker than a skunk and thinking you're drowning. What fun!

It all started with my doing my Playboy interview with Oliver Stone in 1987 while on the set of Wall Street. He was shooting some of the beach house scenes with Michael Douglas in the Hamptons over Memorial Day weekend. Platoon had just won some Oscars and Oliver was very hot. Back in those days, Playboy demanded that you lay down a good 12-15 hours of recorded interview from which to cull the final project.

Stone had given amply of his time to me over several days and we were finishing up at mid-day in a cafe not far from the hotel we were staying in.  As we walked back toward it, just as we got to the corner, a gleaming, silver BMW pulled up with Charlie Sheen at the wheel. Rob Lowe was riding shotgun. In the back seat, well... I don't want to be sexist or gross, but the only way I can describe it was like looking at a bushel of breasts. There were two --maybe three-- knock-out young women giggling and jostling each other.

Oliver stuck his head through the window to take a peek and was more or less salivating.  Lowe looked at him and said, wink, wink, "We're having a party at my place tonight. Hope you can make it," explaining that the backseat babes were "Italian models."

Stone almost had a visible anxiety attack, explaining that his then-wife and his young son were on location with him and he would love to come and would love to be there and would love, love, love to get away that night but didn't know how he was gonna pull it off and sneak out.

After Sheen and Lowe took off, Stone asked me if I couldn't invent some sort of story another, like I needed another 5 hours with him and then maybe both of us could go to the party together.  I declined. First of all, I was and am married. Second, and hopefully in that order, it wasn't all that appealing to be at a party where some hot gal says to you: "Let's see. There's Oliver Stone. There's Charlie Sheen. There's Rob Lowe. And, I'm sorry, I forgot who you are?"

Stone and I parted company and I could see he was just about gnawing his knuckles trying to think up an escape plan.

That night there was very little to do. The place we were staying in wasn't that hot either. I had plans to drive back to see some friends in Brooklyn the next day and then catch a late plane out of Newark.  My only option that night, just to pass the time, was to take a back table at the second rate comedy improv club inside the same hotel. 

I ordered a glass of Wild Turkey and sat back to take it easy. Within five minutes, Oliver walked into the club and his eyes locked with mine and he sat down next to me. Look up the words Caged Tiger and you'll see what he looked like. He REALLY wanted to be out with the Italians but clearly couldn't BS his way past his wife so here he was stuck in the hotel with me.

He asked what I was drinking and he immediately ordered a bottle of Wild Turkey and he filled my tumbler -- and his. Things started to get pretty blurry pretty quickly. All I really remember is that soon the table was filled with Long Island groupies who were fawning over Ollie.  I also remember him ordering the second bottle.

And the third.

And then, blackness. Nothing. Zip.

The next thing I know I'm drowning. It's dark, cold, my head and stomach are spinning and I'm soaked and maybe under water.  It took me a few seconds to get a minimum of bearings and I then I realized I was laying face down in the grass on top of a sprinkler that had gone off on its 5:00 a.m. timer.

Apparently, I had tried to get back to my room at some point but had blacked out in the grass courtyard in front of it.

I have to say that the cold shower concentrated right on, um, my mid-section, allowed me to sober up just enough to figure that much out. I crawled to my room and held onto the bed face down as it pinwheeled. I had the shakes for two days and have never in my life gotten anywhere near that drunk again (I barely drink at all nowadays).

About ten years later, I was at a party with Stone in L.A. He had remarried and I think he became a Buddhist or something. Anyway, we reminisced a bit about the Playboy interview, which he remembered very well. But when I asked him if he recalled anything about getting bombed that night when he couldn't make it to Sheen and Lowe's party he shook his head.

"Nah, I don't remember that night," he said. "There's whole parts of that year I can't remember."

Here's a posting a bit out of historic sequence.

The above slideshow is built from photos we shot in the Spring of 1989 in the capital city of San Salvador. We were shooting a segment for the long-defunct CBS news magazine, West 57th.  The 17 minute segment we wound up producing correctly predicted that within months and in spite of Bush 41 assertions that the guerrilla movement was dead, the Salvadoran FMLN insurgent had in fact expanded from the countryside into the city and would soon launch a major offensive.

A few months later, in November 1989 that's exactly what happened. It was a decisive fight that proved the war was stalemated and eventually led to a UN-brokered peace settlement.  Both sides de-escalated and democratic reforms were imposed.  As history would have it, the FMLN was elected to the presidency of El Salvador in late 2009. Funny how things work.

There's also a sort of tragi-comic story behind this slide show.

In 1988, as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor TV show, I conducted the first on-camera interview with then FMLN guerrilla commander, Joaquin Villalobos.  There's a gigantic story embedded in that adventure that I will tell in a later posting.  Anyway, our 1/2 hour exclusive show was a big hit. PBS saw it and gave our team a chunk of change to go back to El Salvador and shoot more footage for an eventual 60 minute version of PBS Frontline.

That was also a big hit and by then our team left the Chri Sci Monitor. So we pitched an update to CBS who bit and more or less our same team went back to shoot the West 57th segment. Richard O'Regan was our producer. I was Field Producer. And the intrepid "KB" -- Karen Burnes-- was our correspondent.

So we get back to New York to edit this exclusive behind-the-scenes story of the Salvadoran guerrillas preparing a major offensive right in the country's capital.  It was pretty radical stuff for network TV and KB did a great job of drafting the final script.

Our segment airs and basically asserts that Reagan-Bush counter-insurgency policy in El Salvador was an abject failure. Which it was.

The next day, my contract was literally expired and I was preparing to come back home to L.A.  I'm sitting at O'Regan's desk when the phone rings and some arrogant voice on the other end identifies himself as Mr. X,  the then-V.P. of CBS News. I'm saying to myself "Sorry, pal. You can't fire me because my contract is already up."

In a curt tone, Mr X says: "Is this O'Regan."

"No. This is Marc Cooper," I answered.

"Oh," said the CBS official. "Did you work with O'Regan on that piece last night?"

"Yes. I was the field producer and I wrote the script," I said, untruthfully, trying to protect my friends from their imminent dismissal.

"Oh. Wonderful," said the CBS Veep. "Just wanted to let you guys know that was the best damned piece we've ever done on the Sandinistas."

I thanked him and didn't bother to point out that the Sandinistas were in Nicaragua and our piece was about El Salvador.

Later that day the Foreign Editor of CBS News rejected our proposal to do the first-ever full-length interview with Ayatollah Khomeini. He didn't speak English, you see, and subtitles or dubbing would be too tedious for the office.

We also learned that day that West 57th, which was a Yuppie version of 60 Minutes, was being canceled. The show was being replaced by Connie Chung's Eye to Eye.  Remember that?

Man,those CBS guys were smart.

The amazing anecdotes I collected during my brief stint reporting on the 1973 Yom Kippur War could undoubtedly become a book in itself.That is, supposing anyone would care to read it.

 

So, I will make this as painless as possible and list thechain of events in synthetic a form as possible.  Here goes:

 

Part 1: GETTING THERE: The Benghazi Express

 

In November 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, I was 22years old and had no possessions. I had left everything behind two months earlier after I escaped from Pinochet's Chile. My home was in L.A. but I wasliving out of a suitcase in NYC. I had produced a full-length radio doc forpublic radio station WBAI and was also on a speaking tour on behalf of political prisoners in Chile.

 

After a day speaking at Rutgers, I got a call from the radio station to come back to NY ASAP. The war had broken out and they were sending areporter to Israel. Would I want to go Egypt? 

 

Why not?

 

Mind you, these were the days before FedEx. So I took an early morning flight from JFK to LAX just to pick up my passport and some clothes and that same night took a return red-eye flight back to JFK. I got to Manhattan just in time to get a "special visa" from the Egyptian Embassy (who thought WBAI a friendly media source). I got back to the station and slept on the couch until 6 pm and after packing up a radio recording field kit I headed back out to JFK, hitting that airport for the 3rd time in 24 hrs.

 

I boarded a night flight to Paris (the Cairo airport was closed and planned to get to Egypt via land through Libya). 

 

I hit Paris at about 6 am (beyond exhausted) and not only did I not speak a word of French, but also couldn't figure out how to use the public phone at the airport terminal where the bus dropped me.  With some help, I got a hold of my pal,the great departed writer, Daniel Singer, and he came to pick me up.

 

This was now early Friday morning and I had a flight booked for Sunday to Tripoli. But on the cusp of the weekend, I only had this one day to pick up my visa for Libya (the Egyptians in NYC gave me a letter requesting it).  After a quick croissant chez Daniel, I hopped in a taxi and in Spanish (the closest I could come to French)and asked to be taken to the Libyan Embassy.

 

I got there and the doors were closed. It was Friday! A holy day.  I pounded on the oak doors and some guy opened it and yelled at me and slammed it in my face. From there I found the Egyptian Embassy (which was open) and the Ambassador himself called the Libyans who told him to send me on over. On my second attempt, the Libyans were courteous and gracious and gave me another sort of special visa that, I swear, took up two pages with Arabic handwriting and stamps in my passport.

 

Back to Daniel's where we shot the breeze for an hour andthen I slept for 19 hours.

 

Sunday morning I boarded a flight from Paris, via Malta, andlanded in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. My mission: immediately board a connecting flight to the eastern town of Benghazi and from there rent a taxi totake the 18 hour ride across the Sahara and enter Egypt by land.  This was known as The Benghazi Express.

 

Problem was, thanks to Col. Khadafy, all foreign languages had been banned for official use including in the international airport. In short, I hadn't a clue how to find my connecting flight. 

 

After a half-hour of bumbling around, sweating like a pig ina leather jacket and packing a whole lot of radio stuff, I got into what I thought was the line. Exhausted, stressed and somewhat spooked, I tossed all my stuff on the floor and exhaled out loud, "Shit!"

 

The portly, well-dressed gentleman -- about 50 years old--immediately turned around and said to me with a thick Arab accent: "You speak English?"

 

Hell, yes!  I latched onto him and made him my instant friend and to my great relief he was an Egyptian also heading out on the same flight as me to Benghazi and also wanting to rent a taxi to Cairo. Talk about good luck!  He was a wealthy travel agent, just returning from Acapulco. Ibrahim Gazarhim was The Greatest Man on Earth at that moment. And he was clearly ready to adopt me and was even happier that I would split the cost of the car to Egypt with him.

 

A few hours later we were airborne on an Air Libya flight,winging toward Benghazi and accompanied on board for the first and only time in my life with bona fide barnyard animals -- I kid you not. (Pun intended).

 

We did get off to a bit of a bumpy start, however, in our budding friendship. As I swirled some sort of whiskey he had brought on board,he asked me the usual stuff you ask a new friend. I lied like hell. Let me be clear that I never found Arabs to be anti-Semitic, even during the coming weeks I spent in Egypt and Lebanon.  But I wasn't taking any chances.

 

I told him Ibrahim I was of Italian origin (and did not disclose that my mom’s maiden name was a very Jewish Sosnovsky).

 

"So, do you speak any Arabic?" he asked me.

 

"Not really," I answered. "You know, just afew words. Like inshalla. And Shalom-aleichem"

 

"Shalom-aleichem?"He excitedly sputtered. "That's Hebrew! Hebrew! You mean salaam-alechem ,no? Are you a Jew?"

 

Damn, I immediately remembered I was drawing upon my elementary1st grade Hebrew tutoring. So I did what most reporters do. I lied some more."Oh, no, no, no. I protested. You know, the Zionist control of the mediais so strong in America that I just got confused."

 

Ibrahim bought that B.S. and I took a deep breath and another swig of booze. As a goat wandered the 737 aisle I closed my eyes and tried to take a nap. Instead, I suddenly wondered to myself if Arabs were circumcised too? Or would I have to be extra careful and modest when I peed?

 

                                                                   -----------------

 

By nightfall, we were in Benghazi, having dinner at the ritzy Omar Khayyam Hotel. We would have a coffee, Ibrahim told me, and then he would negotiate ourselves a car. Again, I almost blew the whole thing as, with my coffee, I lit up a Marlboro only to be nearly lynched by the wait staff who reminded me we were in the middle of Ramadan -- and NO smoking, habibi.

 

By 10 p.m. that night, literally in some dark alley, Ibrahim contracted us a car and a driver. A black Tunisian guest worker would motor us across the Sahara for a nifty fee of $900. Cool.  As long as I just had to sit there and let Ibrahim do the talking, I was ready to ride in the backseat and float. 

 

The driver had to say goodbye to his family and pick up supplies and whatever and at 1 a.m. sharp I was officially on The Benghazi Express.

 

I gassed with Ibrahim for a couple of hours and then fell into a deep, deep sleep. I was awakened early in the morning when we hit a traffic jam (!) in the middle of the friggin' desert at the Egyptian border.  Ibrahim, who had earlier checked out my passport, asked me for it again and ordered the driver to pass the long line of cars in front of us on the shoulder and go to the front of the line.Apparently, the Egyptians had declared me some sort of VIP and we buzzed right through the border.

 

I fell back asleep. And was awakened some hours later when Ibrahim started screaming at the top of his lungs at our clearly exhausted driver who had pulled off the side of the road on the outskirts of Alexandria.I didn't understand a word but sort of got the drift when Ibrahim bitch slapped the poor driver. "Fucking nigger!" Ibrahim said to me in English,showing off his own particular knowledge of America culture. "He wants to take a nap!" he said. "I told him to keep going and get us to Cairo right away or I would take him to the police."

 

Rather stunned, it occurred to me that Egypt had some way togo when it came to basic human rights but that this was not the moment to debate it.

 

Around 8 p.m. we rolled into the driveway of the Cairo Hilton Nile and it felt like paradise. Ibrahim told me he was going home and to come visit him in a few days.

 

I checked in to the Hilton just as a cease-fire was called.That was good, it would make war reporting a bit easier.  After I filled out the forms, I figured I owed my employers a brief radio report. I figured I could do a short dispatch on the mood in blacked-out Cairo as the cease-fire was called.

 

As the clerk handed me a room key, I asked for a phone call to be placed to New York so I could file my brief report before having a couple of Singapore Slings and turning in for some much needed sleep.

 

I turned over the phone number and the hotel clerk said tome. "Would you like the call transferred to your room or here in the lobby, sir?"

 

"In my room, please," I answered.

 

"Excellent," said the clerk.  "The call should come in 48 to 72hours. We will let you know."

 

"Um, excuse me," I said, feeling my heart race."I'm a journalist. A reporter. This is an urgent call."

 

"Oh, of course," said the clerk. "Press priority call?"

 

"Yes! Press priority."

 

"Very well, sir. My pleasure. Press priority call,"said the clerk. "In that case, it will be 24-36 hours. We will notify you."

 

Just as I was about to panic, I saw a recognizable face staring at me across the lobby. The Dutch radio reporter, Anton Foek, a pal of mine from Chile was smiling and walking toward me! For the second time in two days I was about to saved from my own ignorance by a chance meeting.

 

Or so I thought.

 

----------------------------------

 

Part II -- The Censors & Idi Amin

                                                                                                   Part I

This is a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver. A fine sidearm. When I lived in Chile in the early 70's I had the worst, saddest .22 ever made. I think it was called an Argentine Star and it cost me $6.Should have been called a Dud. Even though I worked as a translator for President Salvador Allende, that was not the main reason I had the revolver. I had it mostly because I was a dumb 22 old kid.  A smarter kid would have had a better gun. Thank God it wasn't. It saved me some hard prison time that would have probably ruined my life.

Here's the story:

Lest you think ill of me, I had some legit reasons to carry. After all I worked for a Socialist president at a time of great social unrest. And there were literally armed fascist gangs running in the streets. And being a good citizen and all, I had legally registered the gun with the Ministry of Defense as required. I did not, however, have a permit to carry. And I can't imagine I would have ever used the gun except to maybe throw it at somebody.

On a night in late May, the evening before Allende was to deliver that year's equivalent of the State of the Union speech, the fascists had blown up a major oil pipeline. Allende declared a state of emergency, putting more militarized carabinero police and some army units out on the street.

It really wasn't that big of a deal.  I had finished translating an advance copy of the speech that afternoon and I spent the evening with friends at a very good French restaurant called La Cascade.  On the way home, around midnight, our taxi driver spotted a police roadblock and check point. No sweat he said. No sweat, as ling as nobody in the car had a gun.

My girlfriend at that time told me not be stupid and give her the gun. She would put it in her panty stockings crotch and the polite Chilean cops would never check there.

I did my on-the-spot risk assessment and decided against the crotch option.  I figured there was little chance the police would pat down a car full of happy gringos. And if they did, it would be easier to talk my way out of it all rather than tick them off by hiding it on a girl.

That didn't work out quite so well.

About three minutes later, the very polite cop who very gently patted me down and removed the pistol from my pocket also gently put me in a waiting paddy wagon and was nice enough to neither cuff me nor take my wallet.

So there I sat with a couple of drunks and very nice older and rather bored cop keeping an eye on us. 'Too bad," he said to me. "With the new gun control law, you're going to do a mandatory minimum of two years in prison. And then they will deport you."

Christ, I remembered. He was right. To tamp down right-wing mythology that Allende was building a secret leftist militia, the had recently signed a conservative-sponsored and draconian gun control law (can you imagine the NRA doing the same?).

Now at this point, you might ask me, why didn't I just identify myself as a translator for the president and pull rank? Answer: that was unthinkable. First of all, it was plain against the law to have the gun on me. Second, nobody knew where the political sympathies of an independent police force resided and the risk was just too great,

I also felt obligated to take one for the team. If the cops reacted poorly to my story about working for the Prez it would make a wonderful scandal for the right-wing tabloid press.

Round about 1 a.m. I was taken to the sleepy little 6th Precinct station about five blocks from my apartment. The watch commander sat up front in a dead quiet room, with a few cops milling around. He was about 35, pale, small and lithe. Very soft-spoken and quite a gentleman.  He called me up to the desk and, in pencil, wrote my name and I.D. number onto the night blotter or log and then told me to take a seat on the nearby bench -- still uncuffed.

A few minutes later he called me over in front of him.

'What were you doing with this gun?" he asked.

Here I had to decide to play the Allende card or the American card. I did the American thing.

I opened my wallet as if looking for a non-existent business card. And even though Chilean street police were notoriously immune to bribes, I let him see a bunch of $20 bills in my wallet.

"You know carrying this money is dangerous," I said, "The gun was only for self-protection. It's even registered. And I am not a criminal."

"Yes," he answered with the hint of a smile. "But you don't have a permit. I also KNOW you are not a criminal."

I readily agreed.

"I know you're not a criminal because a criminal would never buy such a piece of shit gun," he said, sniffing the barrel. "You're lucky you never fired it. It would have melted in your hand."

He then opened his top desk drawer and pointed to the dozen or so identical pop guns he had seized and stashed. 'What did you pay? Like $4 or $5?," he asked.

"Six," I sheepishly answered.

"You got ripped off, my friend," said the Sergreant. "Go sit down again."

After about ten minutes of shuffling through papers and files he called me back to the desk. As I watched in disbelief, he took out his pencil and studiously erased my name and I.D. from the arrest log. he picked up my gun, smiled and said "Una mierda."

He handed me the phone and told me to call somebody to come take me home. 

While I waited 15-20 minutes for my ride to come, we amiably chatted. He told me he recently came from a desolate rural posting near his hometown in southern Chile and how happy he was to be in the big city and meet interesting people. He grilled me on Disneyland, Hollywood and his baseball idol, Willie Mays.

I gave him a big hug before I left and thanked my stars I knew nothing about guns. Being a dumbass kid worked in my favor that night. I gave him a hug goodbye and he told me to come visit him on the farm when he went on break,

There's a Part II to this story, And it gets even freakier.






                                                                                                      Part II

About a month after my temporary arrest, and about 10 weeks before Pinochet's military coup, there was an attempted coup staged by a Chilean tank regiment tied directly to avowedly neo-Nazi group. I awoke the morning of June 29, 1973 to loud gunfire. I switched on the radio and heard it was coming from ten blocks down the street where the tank regiment was amassing in front of the presidential palace,  It was an incident that came to be know as "el tanquetazo."

I lived on the 17th floor of a new high-rise whose tenants were an oddball mix of middle-class conservatives, government types like myself, some foreign journalists and a few lefty exiles.

Our building was on the main city artery, La Moneda and the entrance to the building was about 50 yards off the street and down a flight of stairs. On that bottom floor was a string of offices that belonged to the Foreign Ministry.

As I looked out on the street from my high-rise window, and trying to follow the news on the radio, all of a sudden I saw a bus of riot police pull up in front of out building. The helmeted and heavily-armed cops piled out of the bus and formed a skirmish line on the sidewalk, sealing off our building from the street.

The only problem here is that I didn't know what side these cops were on.  The radio said nobody other than the one tank regiment was supporting the coup, so supposedly these police were here to protect our building. But they might have come to seize the government offices below and then raid the whole building. What to do?

Before I could decide, I saw a foreign couple who were very good friends of mine walk up to the police line but weren't allowed to pass. Clearly, they had come to check on my.

Still being a dumb kid, I immediately grabbed the elevator, rushed to the ground floor and was headed toward the police line with the intent of telling them to let my friends through.

As I got to the top of the stairs where the cops were lined up on the street, one of the police stopped me with a sub-machine gun pointed at my chest. "Identify yourself!" he commanded in Spanish. It was a strange request; you sort of expect someone to say something like where are you going or what are you doing?  I instinctively began to explain that I was trying to catch up with my friends he had just turned away.

The cop pulled the bolt back on his machine gun, jammed it into my chest and even louder said, "Identify yourself!"

I told him, OK, not to shoot me, I was going to reach for my I.D. card. Which I did and then handed it to him.

He studied my card for a moment, pulled his riot mask up and said, "Wait. I know you."

"No, sir, you don't," I said totally bewildered. "We've never met."

"Yes, we have. I can't believe this shit," the cop sputtered. "You're the American who was arrested with a gun a few weeks ago in the 6th Precinct."

"No, sir, that's not me," I said ready to pee my pants.

"Yes, you are!," he retorted. "I was on guard duty that night. How the fuck are you not in jail? How did you get out?"

Before I could answer, he took my I.D. card (that had my address on it), put it in his pocket and told me to get back in my apartment and he would deal with me later.

Gawd, of all the gin joints, I run right into a cop who saw me got busted with that pop gun revolver! Now he had my I.D. and I figured as soon as the coup got completed he'd be kicking my door in.

I raced upstairs and pulled a Socialist Party poster off my front window. I grabbed what money I could and took the elevator downstairs.

When I got to our little lobby, the Super ( a Communist troll) had empowered himself to lock the glass doors and told me nobody could come and go. He was a rickety old man and I was a strapping 5 foot 3 inch youth.

I grabbed him by the collar and told him to either open the door or be prepared to get thrown through it.  He took the former course,

I went out our back door that could not easily seen from the street and I hightailed to my friends' house a 1/2 mile away.

By the afternoon, the coup had been squashed.  But this cop still had my I.D. not to mention a regulation Jones out for me.

I stayed out of my apartment for several days and this time I did use what official albeit indirect contacts to try and get my I.D. back. After all there was no record of my arrest s it had been erased.

A week later, I came home one day and found my I.D. card slipped under my door.

My story is a fortunate one. A much happier ending than the one for Swedish cameraman Leonard Henrichsen who was one of 23 people killed that day.  In a garish turn of events, he filmed his own death, capturing on film the Chilean soldiers who opened fire on him.  That's the Youtube video you can see above.

The then-Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats took heroic action and put down the coup by walking unarmed amongst the coup-makers and got them to surrender. Two months later, two weeks before the Sept 11, 1973 Pinochet Coup, Prats was forced to resign by right-wing pressure inside the military. A year later he was murdered along with his wife in Argentine exile when Pinochet's secret police set off a car bomb. Nice people.
    

Here's a bad photo I took of an original pretty bad photo I took, but I never claimed to be a photographer.

This is a pic of Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende riding back from the Santiago airport the day the former arrived in Chile for what would turn out to be a rather prolonged visit.  As you can see, I had pretty close access, especially when you consider that something like a half million people had lined the streets.

The whole story is in the first chapter of my memoir, Pinochet And Me,

Here's the short story on how I got the pic.

Some months later I would find myself working for Allende as his translator. But on this day in November 1971, I was a 20 year old nobody, fresh out of the U.S. anti-war movement and not quite sure if I was a reporter or some sort of would-be revolutionary. Or both, Or neither.  But for the moment, I was eeking it out, working for the original "alternative media" which was still being called the underground press. Within a few years these pubs would blossom into money-minting metro weeklies.

But I digress.

At the time of Fidel's visit, I was in possession of some or another official Chilean press pass from some recent event or another. It was issued by the Office of Information and Radio of the Presidency -- OIR. 

I didn't know of it was gonna be any good for Fidel's visit and this was before the time of the net or even of an efficient phone service so if you wanted to check something out, you had to GO and see for yourself.  So, in the mid-morning of Castro's arrival. I used my credential to get into the OIR office and ask if it was still good.

Note that this office was inside La Moneda palace, the Chilean White House.  You can only imagine the hubbub there, just a few hours before Castro's scheduled touchdown. When I showed my cardboard credential to some young kid in the office, he immediately gasped that it was "vencido" -- expired. And with no further ado, he tore it into pieces.

Well, I felt like someone had just ripped out my liver.  This was going to be Castro's first visit to another Latin American nation in more than a decade, everyone was going to be there and my press pass just got shredded.

Honestly, I don't remember to whom I appealed in that office. Finally, my case was heard by someone who would later become a friend of mine and would later help hire me to work with Allende. 

The cool part was that I was an American, not exactly a point in one's favor when trying to see Castro. And, on the spot, right there, I had no proof whatsoever that I was a journalist of any sort except I had a piece of crud camera and a tape recorder the size of a small Kenmore.

Anyway, the guy bought my story (which was true but unprovable) and re-issued me a permanent credential on the spot. Not only that, but he directed me toward a pick up truck carrying a group of Socialist Party youth heading out to the airport. Turned out they were part of a security detail and that is how we got so close to Castro and Allende. And I snapped the pic u see.

Somewhere around here there's a picture of me on that truck. When I find it, I will post it.

It was all a strange set of events as it turned out. This incident, in some ways, led me to work for Allende. It also led to me meeting, a month later, the nephew of Augusto Pinochet. Someone who also would later loom quite large in my life.