1977-1983: RESURRECTION

How We Won The Cold War: A Personal Account of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times

Chapter Six

1977-1983:  RESURRECTION

Her name was Jacqueline.

I thought of her as I stood on the beach looking out at the waves. It was a lonely stretch of beach in north Malibu, near the Ventura County Line. Far away from the frenetic bustle of L.A., I had moved up here where it was peaceful and quiet, where I could walk on the beach in solitude and recover from her loss.

She was born in the French Alps, the daughter of a cheesemaker. Growing up in the rustic village of Villette‑par‑Aime in the province of Savoie south of Mont Blanc, she had had a Heidi‑like childhood ‑‑ herding sheep, milking cows, gathering wild raspberries and mushrooms in the forest.

She grew up to be a tough strong mountain girl, helping her family eke out the montagnard (French mountain peasant) way of life amongst the glaciers and waterfalls, the high alpine pastures strewn with wildflowers, the valleys and crags of the Alps.

Finishing the local school, she made her way to Paris as a magician's apprentice in a traveling magic show that toured through the small villages and towns of France, from Provence to Gascony, from Brittany to Champagne. Once in Paris, she struggled at part‑time office jobs while taking singing and dancing lessons at night.

The lessons paid off when she was hired by the legendary Folies Bergère.

With her spectacular beauty, she quickly became the world famous show's principal showgirl, idolized by all of Paris and surrounded by a horde of admirers ‑‑ writers, directors, millionaires, and playboys.

"Every night," she had told me, "there would be so many roses in my dressing room I hardly had any space to change costumes. And just two years before, I was digging potatoes with my mother and herding cows with my father!"

Her life had become a dream. But her greatest dream lay beyond Paris ‑‑ it was to come to America.

"Ever since I was a little girl, America had a special fascination for me," she related. "I heard family stories about my great‑great uncle who was a missionary in Wyoming with the Cheyenne Indians in the late 1800's. At school, I read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracie en l'Amerique (Democracy in America). America is the future. It is the hope of the world."

So when she was offered the chance to star in the Folies Bergère show at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, she didn't hesitate to leave the glamour of Paris behind.

On May 3, 1977, I gave a lecture at the University of Las Vegas entitled "The Adventurous Life." It was part of a lecture tour I was on for my book, The Adventurer's Guide.[1]

I told the audience stories about the living with headhunters in the Amazon and nomads in Mongolia, about hunting a man-eating tiger and what the world's best steak was (the nerve of an elephant's tusk) ‑‑ all the while trying desperately to remain coherent and keep my eyes and mind off a face in the audience with a glowing aura of luminously blonde hair surrounding it, with two enormous golden eyes and a pair of extraordinarily sensuous lips.

I encouraged the audience to have what I called an "adventurous attitude" towards life, to get excited about being alive, to cherish the liberty they have in America, to be willing to take chances and risks ‑‑ albeit calculated and not reckless ‑‑ to strive for the best within themselves, to take their dreams seriously and never give them up

"Our lives are as challenging, or as dreary, as we choose to make them," I concluded. "Each of us has the opportunity to make of his or her life a thrilling adventure."

The day after I met Jacqueline at that lecture, I decided to move from L.A. to Las Vegas. Two days later, I asked her to come with me on an expedition to New Guinea.

"A friend of mine is a crocodile hunter on the Sepik River," I explained. "We'll be going into an unexplored area in the mountains above the Upper Sepik to try and locate a tribe that has never been contacted by the outside world. The legends say they live in trees and eat man long pig."

"Man long pig?"

"Man‑as‑pig, cooked human meat. They're cannibals. Aside from native porters and guides, there will be just the three of us. You'll be expected to keep up, and you won't be coddled in any way."

"Jacques, I was born in the Alps, remember?"

"Good point. The risks are calculated. If you know what you're doing, walking in a jungle is less dangerous than driving on an L.A. freeway. And you won't end up in a cooking pot. You'll be the first white woman these people have ever seen. When you perform your magic tricks for them, you'll be the White Goddess of the Sepik."

So the adventurer and the showgirl went to the jungles of New Guinea and discovered a cannibal tribe that lived in trees who called themselves the Wali‑ali‑fo. The expedition paid for itself by collecting primitive art from the Sepik area.

With the proceeds from sales to wealthy collectors, I started a commercial expedition business. Jacqueline went with me twice to the North Pole, and helped me run an expedition to retrace Hannibal's route over the Alps with two elephants. After all, the pass Hannibal used ‑‑ the Col du Clapier ‑‑ was in her backyard.

With the world‑wide press the Hannibal Expedition received, the business was going well. Jacqueline and I were soon to be married. Then in December of 1979, we learned that Jacqueline had breast cancer. She passed away in my arms three months later.[2]

Now here I was alone on this beach on this late April day of 1981, still trying somehow to deal with the shrieking agony of it all. My North Pole sky‑dive taught me that I wanted to live. But live for what?

It was a clear spring day, with the sun sparkling off the placid ocean and white‑breasted plovers racing around in the foam of receding waves plucking out little sand crabs from the sand. My thoughts drifted back to what it felt to make that sky‑dive, a love of life surging through me like an electric shock; to the excitement back at Bezal's in Resolute, all the phone calls from press and friends.  I smiled as I thought of Dana. Spy satellites… yeah, sure.

I remembered the first time I told Jacqueline about Dana's and my toast, "FTC."

At every opportunity, we would wander out to some lost corner of the desert around Vegas, like Red Rock Canyon or the Valley of Fire, or up into the mountains ‑‑ there's a 13,000 ft. mountain (Mt. Charleston) replete with pine forests and waterfalls near Las Vegas that even most local residents don't know about ‑‑ to hike and talk for hours.

We had taken a picnic lunch to this hidden grotto we had discovered near Red Rock Canyon. It was our sanctuary from all the crazy energy of Vegas. We shared a bottle of Moët champagne, the same kind we served on our North Pole trips. We raised our glasses for a toast, and in a moment of off‑the‑wall spontaneity, I grinned and said, "FTC! "

Jacqueline smiled back broadly. "What is 'FTC'?", she inquired with a twinkle.

"Oh, that's a long story," I coyly replied.

"Good ‑‑ I love long stories! So ‑‑ I shall enjoy my champagne while you tell it to me."

"I see. Well, where do I begin? In 1965, I suppose. It was my last semester before graduating from UCLA, and Ronald Reagan gave a speech on campus. Reagan rejected the political spectrum of ‘left' vs. ‘right.' It's much more accurate to describe the political spectrum, Reagan said, vertically – ‘up' vs. ‘down' ‑‑ instead of horizontally, with all forms of collectivism, be they fascist or communist, on the bottom, and systems that respect and protect individual liberty at the top."

Jacqueline nodded in assent. "When I heard those words, I said, 'This is my man.' My father had known Reagan casually for years ‑‑ Dad was a very popular local television personality in Los Angeles in the ‘50's and ‘60's ‑‑ so I asked my father if I could meet Reagan. He said, 'Why not?,' called Reagan up, said 'Ron, this is Jackson ‑‑ my son wants to meet you,' and Reagan said come on over.

"So Dad and I went to Reagan's home in Pacific Palisades. There were just the three of us. Reagan sat in an easy chair, Dad stood by the bar while I was on a bar stool. He talked about what he believed in, about the principles of individual liberty that America was founded upon. I told him this is what I believed in too, and that if he decided to run for Governor of California, I'd like to help.

"It had taken me an extra year to get through UCLA because I also had this business in South Viet Nam exporting cinnamon to spice brokers around the world. I started it in '63 on my second trip there ‑‑ the first was in '61 hunting tigers, as you know ‑‑ and I was trading semesters between Saigon and UCLA. Once I graduated it was back to Saigon, but when I got a call from Reagan's office asking me to be State Chairman of Youth For Reagan for Reagan's '66 governor campaign, my Dad said he'd go to Viet Nam instead.

"I was a 22 year‑old kid who had never worked in a campaign before, but I assembled a bunch of wild young Reaganites, called ourselves the "Brown Is Out To Lunch Bunch" (after Reagan's Democrat opponent Gov. Pat Brown), and had a great time. I became friends with one kid in particular, fresh out of high school. His name was Dana Rohrabacher. I made him my L.A. County Youth For Reagan Chairman.

"Well, one night Dana and I got together over beer and pizza. We talked about why Ronald Reagan inspired us. Of course, we loved it when Reagan said he wanted to 'get the government off our backs and out of our pockets.' But what really turned us on was that Reagan hated Communists.

"Dana and I both looked at the Soviet Union as the most evil country that has ever existed on the face of this earth, its leaders the most murderous in history. The Nazis came in only #3 in this department, after the Soviets and their fellow Communists in China. After all, Hitler was in power for little more than a single decade. In a certain sense, we could psychologically cope with the Nazis. There has always been evil in the world, even monstrous evil, but at least the world recognized this with the Nazis, and snuffed them out.

"What puzzled and frustrated us was why the world didn't have the same moral contempt and disgust towards Communists as it did toward Nazis. Dana and I saw no difference between them, except that the Communists had more time to kill millions of more people. Both are pathological envy‑trips: Nazis preach race‑hatred and rant against 'rich exploitative Jews,' while Marxists preach class‑hatred and rant against 'rich exploitative bourgeois.'

"I told Dana that when I was 13 years old, in 1956, and saw on television the Soviet tanks crush the Hungarian freedom fighters in Budapest, I made a promise to myself: that someday, if I had the chance, I would do what I could to help rid the world of the curse of the Soviet Union. Dana said he felt the same way.

"So we raised our glasses and proposed a toast ‑‑ a toast that has since become kind of a tradition between us: 'FTC'."

Jacqueline held out her now‑empty champagne glass. "And what does 'FTC' mean, Jacques?"

I refilled her glass and held mine up to hers.

"It means ‘Fuck the Commies'."

Jacqueline let out a spray of champagne and a peal of melodious laughter. "Oh, I love it…" She composed herself and took another sip. "So… when do you start?" The twinkle in her eye had a serious edge to it.

"When do I start what?"

"Fucking the Communists. You said you made a pledge when you were 13. What about it?"

This prompted a deep sigh. I stared into space for a long moment. "I suppose I've given up on that."

"Why?"

Another sigh. "Because, I guess, America has given up. It's been going on for years now. For the first time ever, we lost a war. Not militarily ‑‑ we won every battle ‑­- but politically. 55,000 American kids died in Vietnam fighting a war the politicians did not have the will to win.

"Then after defeat in Viet Nam comes an orgy of masochism called Watergate. Over a two‑bit burglary, the liberal press and intelligentsia tries to tear the political fabric of the country to shreds.

"And now we've reached the bottom of the barrel. We end up with this simpering invertebrate as President of the United States who whines about a 'malaise' in America and doesn't realize he was elected as an expression of it. Americans elect a President in their self‑image. If the American people hadn't lost their faith in themselves, they never would have elected a pathetic nebbish like Jimmy Carter.

"Viet Nam, Watergate, and Jimmy Carter: that's a triple whammy it will take this country a long time to recover from, Jacqueline. I made an effort: after Reagan got elected Governor, I closed the business in Saigon and went after a Ph.D. in Philosophy. I figured the key battlefield between America and Moscow was that of ideas and values. Dana went the political route and worked his butt off for Reagan's bid to get the [Republican presidential] nomination away from Jerry Ford last year [1976], but Reagan lost and Dana's unemployed and broke. He's sleeping in his car now, last I heard.

"And in the meantime, the Soviets are on the march. They've added in the last few years, let's see… ten countries to their colonial empire ‑‑ Brazzaville‑Congo, Sao Tome, Angola, Benin, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam ‑‑ and more, I'm sure, are on the way.[3] So frankly, I said to hell with it, I'm just going to lead expeditions. This isn't a good time for freedom, Jacqueline."

The twinkle was gone. She looked me right in the eye. "This is not worthy of you, Jacques. You are not living up to yourself."

She took my hand. "Mon cheri, my father fought in the Maquis[4] against the Nazis. That wasn't a good time for freedom either, yet he fought and didn't give up hope. His dream came true: the Nazis were defeated. Jacques, you must not give up your dream that the Soviets can be defeated. You must not."

*****

You must not… you must not… Jacqueline's words reverberated through my mind as I gazed blankly at the white caps. A wind had come up, the sun was behind a cloud, and I started to shiver. "What's the use?" I consoled myself as I turned to walk back home.

"The world's even worse off now, death camps in Vietnam and a holocaust in Cambodia ‑‑ exactly the future we had fought in Vietnam trying to prevent ‑‑ slaughter and destruction in Afghanistan, fascist tyranny in Nicaragua and threatening to spread throughout Central America, Cuban troops supporting a half dozen new Soviet colonies in Africa… dammit, Jacqueline, what's the use?"

This time it was more difficult than ever to shrug her words aside, as I had done so often before. She had chided me periodically, and once, when two friends of mine, both professors of philosophy, Roger Lee and Tibor Machan, and I were discussing various obscurantist intricacies of Marxism, she erupted, "Oh, you intellectuals! You talk but do not do! When are you going to put your knowledge into action, to actually help make this world a safer and freer place?"

On her death bed, before she said good­bye, she held my hand tightly, looked right into my soul, and said, "Please, Jacques, do not forget your dreams." I promised her I wouldn't.

I had to talk to someone, so I got in my car and drove down the coast to see two people I could count on for wise advice: Durk and Sandy. Among my dearest friends, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw were scientists who had become quite well known after I persuaded Merv Griffin to have Durk as a guest on his national television show.

M.I.T. had been unable to measure Durk's IQ as it was so far above the extrapolated upper limit of 220 ‑‑ they estimated that it was somewhere between 240 and 300.

"Jack, I could understand your pessimism and inertia when Carter was President ‑‑ but we've got Ronald Reagan in the White House now. You could go to work for him," Durk suggested.

I shook my head. "I've got a congenital inability to take orders. I could never work for the government."

They both laughed. "We can certainly understand that!" chimed Sandy. "But what about your friend Dana? He's one of the President's chief speechwriters. Can't you work with him in some way?"

This elicited a sigh. "It's funny about Dana," I responded. "He thinks of me exclusively as an adventurer now. With all the publicity regarding The Adventurer's Guide, the Hannibal and North Pole Expeditions, the story in People magazine[5] and being on Merv's show so many times, he seems to have forgotten that I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, that I used to teach social and political philosophy at a university [USC].

"So every time I call him now, he just wants to talk about what expeditions I'm running or what girls he's dating," I groused. "He doesn't remember the all‑night bull sessions on Marxism and capitalism, on Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, in the Youth For Reagan days. We still say 'FTC' to each other, but it's just empty nostalgia."

"Well, Jack," Durk responded, "you can't really blame Dana. He stuck with it, went to bat again for Reagan, and he's in the White House. You bailed out, and now you're well‑known as an adventurer, not a political philosopher. You may have a Ph.D., but that won't cut any mustard with the White House until you start putting it to use. After all, that was Jacqueline's point, wasn't it?"

Leave it to Durk not to coddle me. But I was still venting.

"You know what really pisses me off the most?", I announced. "Containment. Our government's all‑defense, no‑offense basic strategy for dealing with Soviet imperialism since George Kennan came up with it at the start of the Cold War.[6] Damn it, we ought to be going after the bastards, not just trying to keep them in check ‑‑ at which we are obviously failing. And it would be so easy to go after them if we had the huevos. The Soviet Union's ethnic fracture lines are mortal vulnerabilities."

With my happenstance use of the Spanish equivalent of "balls," a sudden image popped into my head: huevos literally means "eggs," so I pictured the Soviet Union as a giant fracturing egg:

"The world sees the Soviet Union as this monolithic, impregnable giant. But the reality is that the Soviet Union is Humpty‑Dumpty. If we ever pushed it off the wall, it could never be put back together again!"

Durk and Sandy looked at me with large smiles. "From out of the mouths of political babes…" Sandy noted. My eyes were open wide and staring inward. "I better get back home and start writing this up," I mumbled. Durk and Sandy smiled at each other and nodded. "Good idea," they said. "Show us the article when it's done."

*****

It took me almost two years to write it. There were a lot of interruptions.

Merv Griffin had me meet Clint Eastwood, who was making a movie entitled Firefox. Soon I was the movie's arctic location advisor, flying with Clint in a private jet to Greenland, and helicoptering out to icebergs and ice floes in Thule Bay. The most pristine moment came when I selected a particular iceberg as the best to shoot scenes on.

It was a big 'berg, some sixty feet high. The helicopter landed on a large flat area on top, let Clint and me out, and flew back to get the film crew. There we were, Clint Eastwood and myself on the summit of a giant iceberg, so alone we could have been the last two people on earth.

Being so unpretentious and likeable, Clint is very easy to talk to. For an hour we were alone on that iceberg, talking about everything from life extension nutrients to my favorite movie (Paint Your Wagon), to wouldn't it be funny if the helicopter crashed and we got stranded out here, to Suzie ‑‑ a lithe young blonde with whom we had had a midnight interlude back in Beverly Hills. All the while we marveled at the magnificent primeval vista stretching out from us in every direction, an uncountable number of icebergs locked in a frozen white sea.

When we got back to L.A., Clint introduced me to a fellow named Frank Wells, then vice‑president of Warner Bros. Frank had a beach house in Malibu and asked me to come over. When I did, he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. "I want to climb the highest mountain in all seven continents, including Everest, in one year. It would be called the Seven Summits Expedition. How would you like to organize and lead it for me?"

Breaking up the Soviet Union would have to wait. As I began putting the expedition together, I recalled that someone I knew had just climbed Mt. McKinley in Alaska, the highest peak in North America. He was a wealthy Texas oilman who owned the Snowbird ski resort in Utah.

Having read my book, The Adventurer's Guide, he had followed its instructions and climbed the Matterhorn and swum the Hellespont. I met him in Dallas where I was giving a speech; he said he was getting married, and asked if the wedding party could be flown to the top of the Matterhorn for a wedding on the summit. His name was Dick Bass.

I reminded him that the top of the Matterhorn is a knife edge in the sky: 100 feet long and 3 feet wide, with a sheer drop of several thousand feet on either side. "Forget it, huh?" he asked wistfully. I nodded. His fiancée looked very relieved.

So I called Bass up and asked him how McKinley was. When I told him what I was planning, he exclaimed, "Wow ‑‑ could I get in on something like that?" A few days later, Wells, Bass, and I were walking on Trancas beach in Malibu. They shook hands and agreed to split expenses down the middle. I suggested that the first of the seven summits we tackle be Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe.

The Continental Divide, or watershed, of the Eurasian land mass is the crest of the Ural Mountains, running north‑south, and the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, running east-­west. Geographers connect the two via the Ural River and the middle of the Caspian Sea, then run the Europe‑Asia dividing line out through the Black Sea to the Aegean.

The highest peak of the Caucasus is Elbrus ‑‑ the Greeks called it Strobilus, the mountain upon which Prometheus was chained ‑‑ and since it is north of the Caucasian crest, it is fully in geographical Europe. At 18,561 feet, it is 3,000 feet higher than Mont Blanc.

Thus Elbrus, and indeed the entire Europe‑Asia dividing line (except for the exit out the Black Sea), happened to be in the Soviet Union.

Frank made it to within 1500 feet of the summit, Dick got altitude sickness and started throwing up on the summit ridge but kept going. When we reached what we thought was the summit, we collapsed. Then I noticed a promontory 20 stories higher than we were a couple of hundreds yards off. "What's that!!??" I cried. "Oh, that is the highest point on the summit, but we've reached the summit plateau here ‑‑ you don't have to go any farther," replied our exhausted Russian guide.

"We didn't come half way around the world and climb all the way up here not to get to the top!" I yelled back. "Come on, Bass ‑‑ we're out of here." So I marched off, Bass picked himself up and followed, leaving the Russian guide behind. When we reached the true summit and stood at the apex of Europe, we cried and embraced and experienced that shared ecstasy that only victory in the sky can bring.

I had been to Moscow once more since that first time in 1958.  In 1963, when I was 19, I got a dream summer job traveling alone 44,000 miles around the world shooting stock film for a Hollywood film company.

In Moscow on my way to Outer Mongolia and Central Asia, I met a young Muscovite named Sasha who wanted to buy my shoes, or my pants, shirt, or sweater ‑‑ anything as long as it was made in America. "Everything I have on is from your country," he proudly announced. "Look, I will prove it!"

And right in broad daylight in the courtyard of St. Basil's in Red Square, Sasha unzipped his pants and bade me look at the label on his underwear: Jockey Shorts.  Once again I concluded, "This country can be had."

On the way back from Elbrus, here I was in Moscow again almost 20 years later, and it was deja vu all over again. Soviet teeny‑boppers couldn't get enough of decadent, exploitative, bourgeois, imperialist, running‑dog capitalist Western culture.

It was impossible to overexaggerate the level of invective towards America these kids had been subjected to by their teachers and leaders all their lives ‑‑ yet, at every opportunity, at discos, private parties, secretly listening to Voice of America and Radio Liberty, they lapped up anything American they could get their hands on.

"If the situation were reversed, and Soviet music, fashion, movie stars, the whole cultural nine yards, were the rage among American kids," I mused, "we'd be in serious trouble. So behind all the bloody conquests to expand their empire from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, it's the Soviets who are really in trouble as the foundation of their culture decays underneath them. I'd better finish that article I promised Durk and Sandy."

When I got back to Malibu I made an effort, but I kept getting interrupted. Mostly by girls. It was now close to two years since Jacqueline's passing and the pain was still unbearable. I tried to drown the pain in women, one physical relationship after another.

There was Denise, a gorgeous brunette from Belgium; Karen, a voluptuous blonde from Finland; Cornelia, an Austrian nocturnal emission; Suzie in Beverly Hills with Clint; an assortment of Malibu beach bunnies; plus Donna and Rosie and Candace and Rena and  Nancy and Kathy and Sally and… well,  you get the picture.

I finally got my act together when I attended a conference of Baltic‑Americans and met a fellow from Bulgaria named Alex Alexiev. He had escaped while on the Bulgarian national soccer team[7] in 1963, reached the US, and after graduating from UCLA, went to work for the Rand Corp. Fluent in eight languages, Alex became Rand's senior Soviet analyst, consulting with the CIA and the Pentagon.

Alex had the reputation of knowing more about what the Kremlin was up to than anyone, and I soon found out why. I had met the master. We began meeting on a regular basis. Although, of course he couldn't discuss anything classified, he would listen and comment on my ideas, finding it "refreshing" to talk to someone who actually wanted to do something to defeat the enemy, who actually wanted to get rid of the Soviets.

"Do you know," he divulged, "that to my knowledge ‑‑ and I am familiar with most every classified study ‑‑ that neither the CIA, the President's National Security Council, nor any branch of US intelligence, has ever attempted to devise a plan to do what you are advocating: try to put the Soviet Union out of existence?"

All I could do was shake my head in stunned amazement. I began putting a lot of time at the UCLA library, more, regretfully, than during my undergraduate Sigma Nu fraternity party animal days at UCLA twenty years before.

Due to a disagreement with Dick Bass over the advisability of attempting Everest via the North Face ‑‑ a dangerous, technical route that we had no business trying ‑‑ I had dropped out of the Seven Summits Expedition. So I wrote and studied and conferred with Alex and filled up a long paper with ideas and strategies entitled How to Dismantle the Soviet Empire.

Durk and Sandy loved it. It described the Soviet Union as not only possessing a colonial empire of "Outer Colonies" beyond its borders but being a colonial empire within its borders, composed of "Inner Colonies." It concluded:

The Soviet Union really is Humpty‑Dumpty. The "union" is not voluntary: the strong centrifugal forces within its borders are kept in check only by constant oppressive force. Today, with major demographic shifts, economic decline, disillusionment with Marxism, and the Polish situation, these centrifugal forces are coming into sharper focus ‑‑ making the present a most propitious time for programs and policies that heighten the USSR's mortal ethnic problem.[8]

I sent my masterpiece to Dana in December, 1982. He wouldn't read it.

Every time I'd call him up and ask if he'd read it, he would explain that working for the President was a time‑consuming job and that he hadn't found the time to read a 10,000 word pipe dream, ask what my latest expedition project was, and inquire about the attributes of whatever beach bunny I was currently seeing.

In frustration, I wrote up a short op‑ed length piece of just 1000 words, and called it Why There Can't Be Peace With The Soviet Union. The article explained why confrontation and hatred between employee and employer, the capitalist US and the Communist USSR, is metaphysically hard‑wired into Marxism‑Leninism. I sent it to Dana, and yelled at him that I couldn't stand anymore excuses ‑‑ "You can read the damn thing in ten minutes!" I pleaded.

The next day, Dana called. He was a changed man. Having read the article, he couldn't stop burbling about it, how he had never seen anything like it, and had "no idea you were capable of such sophisticated analysis as this, Jack." I replied that a Ph.D. in philosophy had to be good for something. "Oh, yeah ‑‑ you do have that degree, don't you?" he muttered. He finally remembered.

"Now, Dana, can we at last get to work on making our toast come true?"

"You're on, man," was the reply.

FTC meant something once again.

*****

In my office, there is a map of the world. It is a large map, seven feet wide by five feet high, with webs of lines drawn all across it, marking the various travels I've made for the past fifty something years. It was at this map that I was gazing on a Malibu afternoon in early March, 1983, during one of my now‑frequent phone conversations with Dana.

As we were talking, all of a sudden the map looked different; it assumed a pattern I had never seen before.

Have you ever been shown one of those trick collage photos that at first is a chaotic assembly of black and white blobs, and told there's a figure in the collage? You look and look, and finally, poof!, the figure emerges, a gestalt which connects discrete and unconnected elements into an intelligible whole.

A gestalt, then, emerged out of the blobs of separately‑colored countries on the map ‑‑ and it was pointing towards the biggest blob of all on the map: the Soviet Union.

Dana had begun writing speeches for the President on the emerging resistance to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. For a while now, Alexiev and I had been talking over at Rand about what was going on in Angola and a man named Savimbi; we had also heard of some kind of insurgent activity in the Soviet client states of Mozambique and Ethiopia, and against the Soviet‑supported Vietnamese in Cambodia and possibly Laos. The information at the time was sketchy and murky, rumors were hard to distinguish from reliable data.

This all came together for me on that spring day in Malibu. "Dana ‑‑ you know that big map of the world in my study with all the lines on it?" [Sure] "Well, all of sudden, it's looking very different to me." [How?] My eyes were jerking back and forth from country to country on the map. "I am looking at one… two… three… four… five… six… maybe more anti‑Soviet guerrilla wars all around the world."

Silence. After a long pause, Dana responded. "Say that again."

"Dana, there is an entire family, six or more, of anti‑Soviet guerrilla wars being fought right now in Soviet colonies on one… two… three continents around the world. Count 'em, man: Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, maybe even Laos. I'm sure none of them know of each other, some of them I've just barely heard of, but you know back in the '50's and '60's when the entire Third World was seen as rejecting Western colonialism en masse, which forced England and France and the others to give up their colonies? Dana, the same thing may be starting to happen to the Soviet Union!"

"Son of a bitch," Dana whispered. "Jack, I have never heard anybody here [the White House] say anything like this." Another long pause. "You could be on to something ‑‑ seen something that no one else has. But how are you going to find out if it's true?"

In the next beat, we both knew the answer. "There's only one way, Dana. I'll have to go there and find out."

At the time, a small number of journalists had been inside Nicaragua with the Contras, or Afghanistan with the Mujaheddin. No one, however, had ever attempted to go inside all of these insurgencies ‑‑ because no one had ever connected them together before. The concept of "anti‑Soviet insurgencies" had not been thought of yet in early 1983. That was the gestalt that flew out of the map and hit me right in the face. And with it came the thought:

This is an idea that could change history.

Such a conceptual re‑framing of the world would also change my life dramatically, as it compelled me to put my idea into action ‑‑ to make the first systematic attempt ever to study the entire phenomenon of anti‑Soviet resistance in the Third World.

For "study" did not mean armchair research in a library ‑‑ it meant in the field, "going inside," crossing borders clandestinely into guerrilla‑held "liberated" territory within Soviet colonies, accompanying guerrillas on their "activities" against Soviet, Soviet proxy, or Soviet colonial forces.

Being there ‑‑ experiencing the situation directly, not second‑hand, but first hand; getting to know guerrilla leaders and their men personally, learning what they stood for, what they were fighting for; seeing for my own eyes and not through anyone else's ‑‑ that would be the only way to authoritatively determine if these insurgencies were somehow connected, if there really was an emerging worldwide revolt against Soviet imperialism.

"What contacts do you have among these guerrillas, Jack?" Dana asked.

"None. I'll find them."

"How do you know you can get inside these countries? How will you be able to trust these guerrillas, and how will you get them to trust you?"

"Dana, I've been wandering around the world's remotest places and living with what at least the outside world considers as some of the fiercest and most dangerous tribes on earth for a quarter of a century now. I'll figure out a way."

"You realize you're putting your life on the line."

"So are the guerrillas."

"Jack, if you come back alive from this, you're going to have quite a story to tell. How are you going to pay for it?"

"I don't know."

*****

It was my old friend from graduate school, philosophy professor Roger Lee, that suggested I talk to Bob Poole at the Reason Foundation. I'd known Bob for many years, and had periodically contributed to Reason Magazine. Bob said he'd love to fund the project ‑‑ if I could find a donor.

Another friend, author Doug Casey, introduced me to a lovable eccentric named Maco Stewart, who provided the necessary grant via the Reason Foundation. I put all my belongings in storage at a friend's home, Denise Godfrey. I drove to Las Vegas and said goodbye to my Mom. She couldn't hold back her tears at the airport, as she wasn't sure she would ever see me again. I flew to New York to talk to a friend of Alexiev's at Freedom House, Roseanne Klass, about Afghanistan. Then on to Washington to see Dana.

Finally, it was time to go. Dana drove me to National airport[9]. At the gate, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Jack, you've had a lot of adventures in your life, but you're embarking on the greatest one of all. Just come back in one piece. There are a lot of people where I work that are waiting to hear what you find out." We shook hands and I turned to board the plane.

As we lifted off and I looked down at the Potomac River and the buildings of Washington below, I found myself thinking of Jacqueline's father, Francois.

On a visit to Jacqueline's family home in the Alps of Savoie in 1978, he told me that for over thirty years he had dreamed of going back to the Vercors, the mountains where he had fought the Nazis with the maquis. That's all I needed to hear. The next day, we all piled into my rental car and took off. It brought tears to the old man's eyes to be where he struggled with his comrades of long ago.

As he reminisced, he interjected, "My daughter tells me you have a dream of getting rid of the Soviet Communists, as our dream was to get rid of the Nazis." I nodded. He shook his head wearily. "It is a good dream ‑‑ but you have no maquis. Why are there no maquisards of today, fighting Communists, as we fought Nazis?" He shook his head again, and thanked me for bringing him to what was for him a sacred place.

I looked away from the plane's window and settled into my seat. If there are real maquisards of today out there, I was going to find them. At last, Jacqueline, I am keeping my promise to you.

---

[1]   New York: McKay, 1976. It has chapters on how to climb the Matterhorn, swim the Hellespont (the strait in Turkey where the Black Sea flows into the Mediterranean), live with Amazon headhunters, hunt a man‑eating tiger (although you can't do that anymore!), and explore many of the world's remotest places. Merv Griffin called it "the definitive book for anyone wishing to lead a more adventurous life."

[2]   A year before, my parents moved to Vegas to retire.  Two weeks before Jacqueline's passing, my father became ill and was taken to the same hospital Jacqueline was in.  There they said goodbye, for he passed away five days after Jacqueline.  We re-lived one last time my standing on the summit of the Matterhorn while he was waving to me in the tiny plane, and then he was gone.
 

[3]  This conversation was in 1977. By the end of 1979, the Soviets had additionally colonized Nicaragua, Grenada, and Afghanistan.

[4]   French Resistance during World War II.

[5]   June 18, 1979, pp.61‑62.

[6]   Kennan's famous "Mr. X" article appeared in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs.

[7]   Alex planned the escape with a teammate, Simon, who didn't make it. Alex promised his friend he would come back and get him. After hiding out in West Germany, Alex snuck back into Bulgaria and brought Simon out.

[8]   The article was published in the November, 1983 issue of Reason magazine.

[9]   Now named Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.