The article appeared in The Toronto Star

November 2nd, 1986

GARMISCH, West Germany

Washington calls it a training ground for Sovietologists.

Moscow denounces it as “the school of spies.”

The United States Army Russian Institute—its official name—was quietly opened near here in 1947 and moved to this health resort town 22 years ago.

Today intelligence analysts and future ambassadors drop in for anything from a six-hour mini-course to a two-year program.

Their mission is to try and make sense of what Winston Churchill once called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”--the 15 republics, 62 nationalities and 136 languages that comprise the Soviet Union.

Each student is a specialist on the Soviet Union. “We use the word specialist, not expert,” says one recent graduate, “because we all specialize in various degrees of ignorance about the Soviets.”

When you enter Building 104 at the institute, you might as well be in Mother Russia. Vladimir Lenin and Leonid Brezhnev stare down from the revolutionary posters that adorn the corridor walls.

Soviet slogans are everywhere: “Forward to the Victory of Communism” and “Glory to the Heroic Armed Forces of the U.S.S.R.” and “Mother Wants You!” (the Soviet equivalent of an Uncle Sam poster).

All conversation among students and staff is Russian as are all notices and signs.

“You can't find the men's room unless you know Russian,” says Dr. Otto Pick, a Czechoslovakian emigre who lectures at the institute. “I've seen people running around in desperation.”

Military Reading

The first year of the two-year program includes courses in physical-military geography, Russian diplomatic history, party and government, Russian intellectual tradition, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, introduction to the Soviet national defence establishment, Russian military and thought and Soviet military readings.

Second-year students concentrate on the politics of east central Europe, the Soviet economy, Soviet foreign policy, the problems of contemporary Soviet society and Soviet military power.

The course handbook lists its objective as to “produce competent Soviet foreign area officers, proficient in the Russian language, who fully understand the U.S.S.R and in particular its military establishment, and who are capable of formulating sound politico-military estimates concerning the capabilities, limitations and potentials of the Soviet Union.”

Students receive 16 hours of classroom instruction each week and they must also participate in an extracurricular cultural program. There is a drama group that stages Soviet plays (in Russian), a cooking club that prepares ethnic dishes, a folk-dancing group and a choir.

Students unwind by watching old Russian movies (no subtitles) and by playing chess and Russian scrabble.

So exclusive is the school that in almost 40 years of operation there have been fewer than 700 graduates—but no dropouts.

“By the time you get here, you're beyond dropping out,” says one graduate.

Applicants are carefully selected—most are men and women from the army of State Department and, says graduate Maj. Sean Maxwell, “all those people from the gobbledygook of initials out of Washington D.C.

The marines, air force and navy sneak in one of their own whenever they get the chance.

“We're the only school of its kind,” says Col. Don Stovall, the institute's commander.

About a fifth of 60 current students are civilians from the intelligence community. “All of the foreign service officers that are assigned to Moscow come through this institute,” says Stovall.

Some graduates go directly to the Soviet Union as military attaches; others serve with U.S. Military liaison mission in Potsdam, East Germany, which runs observation patrols behind the Iron Curtain.

Maj. Arthur Nicolson, the young officer shot and killed by the Soviets in March 1985 while serving in East Germany was a graduate, as are White House Soviet advisers Mark Palmer and Tyrus Cobb, former ambassadors Robert Barry (Bulgaria) and William Leurs (Czechoslovakia), and Lt. Gen. William Odom, director of the National Security Agency.

The Russian Institute was created in May, 1947 in Oberammagau, a half-hour drive northwest of Garmisch. Originally attached to the Europe Command Intelligence School, its first class had just three students.

Needed experts

“After World War II we saw that the Soviet Union was going to play a big role in how our defence and foreign policy is devised,” says Stovall. “It was determined that we needed a group of experts who could serve as decision-makers in the ensuing years—who would not only understand the Soviet mind, but could also anticipate their reactions.

“If we could send out students to Leningrad University this place would not exist.”

The initial faculty members were Russians from displaced persons camps in Bavaria. For their protection, “Detachment R,” as the institute was originally called, operated under a cloak of secrecy.

Many of the instructors had defected from the Soviet Union, and, says Maxwell, “a few of them were under a death threat from the KGB.”

Today the institute has 19 staff instructors, 14 of whom were born and raised in the Soviet Union.

“Life can be painful for an emigre,” says Lev Yudovich, a Russian Jew who teaches the Soviet political system. “You can change your citizenship without too much difficulty. Escaping can be the easiest part. But the scars, worse for being self-inflicted, remain.”

Yudovich graduated in 1950 from the Moscow Law Institute, where he knew Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Professor Michael Checinski has been at the Institute since September 1984. He served 20 years in the Polish army and lectured at the Polish General Staff Academy before quietly leaving for the West.

A sometime television pundit, Checinski accurately predicted martial law in Poland four months before it was imposed. His subject is the Soviet military economy.

Not all emigres have stayed at the school. Former instructor Yuri Mickalovich Marim re-defected to the Soviet Union in 1968 after two years here. Thirty days after his return, Pravda and Red Star, the Soviet army newspaper, carried Marim's “expose” about the “spy school in Garmisch.”

“Yuri was never heard from after that,” Stovall says.

Until 1983, students visited the Soviet Union annually on group field trips. All requests for visas these days are refused, attributed to the decline in U.S.-Soviet relations.

No degree

“When we travelled there, we didn't try to hide anything,” says former student Maxwell. “People would ask me, 'Why do you speak Russian?' 'Well,' you say, 'I'm an intelligence officer.' They can't believe it!”

Before graduation from the two-year program, students are expected to prepare a major research paper, in Russian, based on information gleaned exclusively from the Soviet press.

No degree is awarded. Students simply receive a simple diploma with the institute's colorful crest and motto: “For a Better Future.”

This article appeared in the Toronto Star in 1985.

Call it involuntary servitude, illegal bondage... call it what you will.

But when a human being, with or without proper working papers, is forced to work against his will, under threat of physical violence, you have enslavement, pure and simple.

It is 118 years since the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in the United States, and this wicked practice endures.

For almost a year, a House of Representatives subcommittee on labor standards has been hearing testimony on the federal government's failure to adequately investigate numerous reports of migrant farm workers being held in illegal bondage and peonage in remote parts of the Southwest and Midwest United States.

Vincent Trivelli, a professional staff member of the subcommittee, told me that 24 separate complaints about one farm were not investigated by the justice of labor departments until subcommittee began its investigation.

At a hearing on Sept. 23, a Roman Catholic nun told congressmen that since 1980 she has been operating an improvised “underground railroad”--an escape route for “slaves” in southwest Virginia whose pleas for help had been ignored by local law enforcement officials.

One of those rescued by Sister Adele Della Valle, 47-year-old Horace Taft, gave this chilling account of his experience picking sweet potatoes after being recruited and transported south from his native Philadelphia:

“It was just horrible, the things I seen at those camps. I see men beat with rubber hoses. I seen women beat. There was always someone guarding and watching you. You couldn't get away because they were sitting out there with guns.”

“It is my conviction,” testified Sister Valle, “that the men who begged us to (help them) leave did so out of desperation to get away.”

How it works

Sister Valle cited the inhumane conditions under which farmworkers are being held—long hours, appalling food, no heat in winter, no medical care—and she declared that the system which permits workers to become indebted to their employers from the moment they arrive at a work camp is “tantamount to slavery.”

This is how the system works:

Legal and illegal migrant farm workers are recruited by a middleman, a “coyote,” who transports them to remote farms. The coyote is paid a flat rate (about $200) by the farm owner or crew leader for each new recruit. The moment the workers reach their destination—most notorious are farm camps in Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina and Florida—they become indebted to their new boss for the inflated cost of their transportation.

For 16-hour work days, seven days a week, they are paid a piece-rate wage that usually falls far short of the $3.35-an-hour minimum wage, it itself illegal. But because the workers have been grossly overcharged, on credit, for meals lodging, cigarettes and liquor, the balance owed them is in the red—so they remain continually in debt to their crew leader.

Any attempt to leave the camp is met with threats of physical violence. While working, they are watched by armed guards. There have been cases where dissatisfied workers have been set upon by dogs, locked up or put in chains. Some who have escaped have found local sheriffs unsympathetic; often they are returned to the custody of their crew leader.

The view of some North Carolina sheriffs is summed by sheriff's deputy J.P. Thornton of Johnson County: “99.9 percent of the migrants are bums, drunks, winos, been burned up on drugs or else are running from the law, and they aren't going to stay anywhere else than in that environment.”

Steven Nagler, executive director of the U.S. Migrant Legal Action Organization, estimates that up to 100,000 agricultural workers are held in illegal bondage in the Land of the Free. A former Peace Corps volunteer and civil rights lawyer, Nagler has been monitoring reports of slavery among farm workers for 3 ½ years.

His greatest lobbying triumph came last June when the North Carolina legislature felt compelled to enact state anti-slavery legislation. The new statute makes the holding of another in involuntary servitude punishable by a five-year prison term and a hefty fine. This followed the federal conviction of two Americans in 1982 in New Bern, N.C., for “strong-arm kidnapping” and holding farm workers in involuntary servitude on a farm camp in Nash County.

Recruit died

Brothers Dennis and Richard Warren had recruited migrant workers and unemployed street people in cities along the eastern seaboard. One of their recruits, Robert Anderson, later collapsed and died in the fields when forced to work after complaining that he felt ill. Ironically, the Warren brothers are black. Both received long prison terms.

There have been similar convictions in other states; about 35 cases are pending in Florida, Arkansas, Texas, and in Michigan, and even in affluent Beverly Hills, California.

In January, 1982, FBI agents acting on a tip-off raided several homes in Beverly Hills and uncovered what they alleged to be a slave ring. Ed Best, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, said that at least 30 Indonesians had been sold into servitude as domestics for $3,000 each. They had been recruited by a travel agent in Jakarta and brought in to the United States under false pretences by slavers who confiscated their documents. They were expected to remain with their “owners” for a minimum of two years, without payment.

An agent of the U.S. Immigration Service, Ambrose Laverty, said that those who tried to run away were “threatened with bodily harm.” Said Laverty: “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The Los Angeles Times quoted one woman as saying, when served by subpoena by the FBI, “All my neighbors have illegal aliens working for them.” She had paid $6,000 to a Los Angeles “employment agency,” which she declined to name, for two illegal domestics.

Since 1980 there have been 25 federal slavery convictions, Susan King, a young justice department lawyer, told me that slavery in the United States is wide-ranging. But she pinpointed domestic servants, migrant farm workers and members of religious cults as the most vulnerable. King said that her most recent case, in which arrests were made, involved dairy farmers who enslaved elderly retarded men.

King and a colleague, Albert Glenn, constitute the involuntary servitude department. Together, they appear to have their hands full.

This appeared in The Blade (Toledo, Ohio) in 1984

LONDON—A Frenchman made a fatal mistake this summer. He surrendered to an Albanian border patrol.

Jean-Marie Masselin, 29, an employee of the French Club Mediteranee on the island of Corfu, was on a fishing trip with two colleagues. They strayed into Albanian waters, and their inflatable dinghy with outboard motor soon came under fire by Albanian guards.

They dived into the water. Two of them swam off to a Greek boat nearby, but Mr. Masselin decided to take a chance with the border patrol and swam ashore. He climbed up some rocks and was apprehended by the Albanians. Simon Periatinos, a Greek eye-witness watched as Mr. Masselin was marched away.

Three days later, his body was discovered floating in the sea, a bullet wound in his head.

THE MOST surprising part of all this is that nobody is surprised—this is the sort of behavior the world has come to expect from the Albanians, not a people renowned for their tolerance of foreigners.

Albania is a country of 2 ½ million people. Some 25,000 Albanians, mostly descendants of Illyrian tribes, belong to the secret police.

The official language, an Indo-European tongue, contains Latin, Greek, Italian and Turkish words.

Albania is the only country in the world where the memory of Stalin is invoked with admiration. Enver Hoxha, Albania's iron-fisted leader for four decades, has written of the man under whose tyrannical rule millions perished: “Our beloved friend, the glorious leader, Stalin...”

RELATIONS between Albania and the Soviet Union stiffened considerably after Stalin's death in 1953. Mr. Hoxha staunchly disapproved of Nikita Khrushchev's “revisionism.”

When Khrushchev requested that Albania not spoil its seaside landscape with industry, Mr. Hoxha's reply was terse: “We have no intention of becoming a spa for Soviet functionaries.”

His opposition to the Soviet Union increased when, in 1960, Khrushchev broke with the Chinese Communists and demanded, at a party congress in Romania, that all Communist delegations offer their support.

Mr. Hoxha responded by allying Albania with Communist China, a relationship that remained until Mao Tse-tung's death, but terminated in 1978 when Mr. Hoxha decided that China, too, had become “revisionist.”

HIS LAST STRAW with Moscow came in 1968 when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. He abruptly withdrew Albania from the Warsaw Pact, making it the only country to ever pull off such a maneuver.

Albanian soldiers were dispatched to take up positions in the mountains for fear of Soviet reprisals. Weapons were distributed to every village throughout the country as Albanians braced themselves for an invasion. The Soviets never came.

Villagers are still armed to the teeth, a policy encouraged by Mr. Hoxha. (One wonders how the Communist parties of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland would fare if its citizens were permitted weapons.)

Mr. Hoxha, 75, rules supreme in Tirana, the capital. His features adorn most public places, invoking a “Big Brother” style personality cult. His birthplace is a national shrine.

He was elected secretary-general of the Communist party in 1943. For many years he ruled through Mehmet Shehu, the prime minister, and Beqir Balluku, the defense minister.

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs: “Hoxha and Shehu would sentence the accused to death. Balluku would personally carry out the execution.”

But Beqir Balluku was executed as part of a Hoxha-inspired purge in the mid-1970's, during which eight senior ministers vanished.

Mehmet Shehu suffered a similar, albeit more public, purge in a bizarre incident in 1982. Many eyebrows were raised when his “suicide” was announced. Sources say that a raging argument between him and Mr. Hoxha ended with cabinet-room shoot-out in which Mr. Shehu was gunned down. Known as “the butcher,” he was said to have shot and killed a colleague who dared argue with him during a 1950 cabinet meeting.

ALBANIA is the only country where Marxism truly works, the propaganda machine claims. Propagandists say Albanians are treated badly by both the western and Communist press because (1) the Pentagon doesn't want anyone to know that Marxism can work and (2) the Russians don't wish to acknowledge that Marxism doesn't work in the Soviet Union.

Albania is self-supporting in food. The staple diet consists of rice, bread, paprika and a little goat meat.

The country is also self-supporting in oil and is the fourth largest producer of chromium ore (900,000 tons per year). Natural resources include asphalt, coal, copper and iron.

There is no tax. Medical and dental services are free. Only a half percent of wages are paid in rent.

Churches and mosques were outlawed in 1967. So were beards.

A small travel agency in Britain offers “a chance to have a non-Christmas or non-Easter” in Albania.

There are no foreign books or newspapers.

The last time western countries attempted to interfere was in 1945. A Committee of Free Albanians was financed by the American and British intelligence services, and 300 “Free Albanians” parachuted into Albania and were never seen again. Kim Philby, the British spy, had betrayed the operation.

This appeared in The Blade (Toledo, Ohio) in 1986

Can He Buy Paraguyan Citizenship?

LONDON—Psst....want to buy Paraguayan citizenship?

A “business consultants” firm named MATRAS based in Hamburg, West Germany, is offering a complete package—a genuine Paraguayan passport, driver's license and, at extra cost, a Bolivian birth certificate in a new name.

Posing as a prospective client, I answered MATRAS' tiny classified in the InternationalHerald Tribune. The promotional bumf arrived by return mail: “In a crisis you can fall back on your emergency passport.” Paraguay is described as “one of the last places of refuge in the world.”

It certainly has been a haven for Nazi war criminals, including the notorious Dr. Mengele.

The material from MATRAS is clearly geared for someone who may one day have to make a quick getaway; the service offered is that of an escape route for persons engaged in tax evasion or other criminal activity.

CURIOUS about how the Paraguayans might feel about such assistance, I spoke with Mr. Alvarienta, the consul-general at Paraguay's embassy in London.

“Come again?” he asked, when I informed him of MATRA'S offer. “Ha, ha, ha. They must be out of their minds.”

Or very well-organized. I put it to Mr. Alvarienta that perhaps this German agency had useful connections in South America.

“Why not?” the consul-general replied. “I can't say we are all saints.”

On one point he was adamant: “Five years' physical presence in Paraguay is compulsory to obtain nationality by residence. There is no way around that.”

The Bolivian consulate was equally vehement.

THE PROPIETOR of MATRAS, Karsten K. Niemann, comfirmed by telephone that the price for Paraguayan nationality and passport would be $6,500—more if I required a whole new identity complete with phony birth certificate.

Would I have to visit Paraguay? “No, no, no,” he replied. I would not even have to set foot in what he called the “Switzerland of South America.”

Mr. Niemann said he would be visiting London and suggested a meeting: “This is no subject to be done by letter.”

Several weeks later I met him in a London hotel. He is in his late 30's, 5-foot-3-inches tall and has rugged American-Indian features.

Over a pot of tea in the hotel's lounge, he reiterated his offer: $12,000 for the whole Paraguayan package.

Mr. Niemann explained enthusiastically that he has been in the business of peddling Paraguayan nationality for six years to people “who may need to escape.”

HE BOASTED of being busy with many clients internationally. He spends half his time in Paraguay, which he first visited in 1973 while working in real estate.

I told him that I wished to move to Paraguay, under a different name, as a Paraguayan citizen.

Mr. Niemann smiled and said this was no problem, claiming that with his bona-fide documents I could “disappear” to Paraguay without a trace—many of his clients had done just that, “but, most wait a few years.”

He told me he has dealt with many clients from Britain and the United States. Most of his customers have tax problems and need new names and nationalities with which they can travel freely, he said.

Lowering his voice to barely a whisper, he explained that he had to be especially careful because Italian terrorists had acquired Paraguayan passports through the same procedure.

“We had a lot of trouble from some criminals, very bad criminals—one who killed Aldo Moro, the Italian president, the other who blew up the [Bologna] train station.”

Dr. Paul Wilkinson, a leading expert on terrorism, later confirmed that neo-fascist terrorists in Italy, called “Black Terrorists,” are known to carry Paraguayan passports.

Mr. Niemann said I would have to get a letter of good conduct from the British police to “cover” is Paraguayan contacts.

“The Paraguayan government has been blackmailed to crack down on criminals,” Mr. Niemann said with a sigh. “And therefore the letter of good conduct is most important.”

A London contact of his could arrange to get me a letter of good conduct from the police under a different name, he promised.

The whole procedure would take six to eight weeks, following which I would be a new person—and a full-fledged citizen of Paraguay.

I have passed my file on MATRAS to the American consul-general and the Internal Revenue Service, which is taking more than a passing interest.

This appeared in The Blade (Toledo, Ohio) in 1986

Britain's SIS Operates Hand-in-Glove With the CIA

LONDON—Unlike America's CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, does not officially exist.

Its address and telephone are state secrets, as is the name of its current chief.

The SIS occupies a 20-story building called Century House in south London, not far from Westminster. It is said to employ a staff of between 1,000 and 1,500.

The extensive filing system used by SIS analysts is known as “The Registry.” (The CIA's central computer is called “The Spider”).

The SIS director-general is known simply as “C.”

OFFICERS are organized geographically into regional “desks”--the United Kingdom (concerned with recruitment and the monitoring of foreign diplomats), the Soviet bloc, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

The SIS maintains only one station in the whole of Latin America, so is largely dependent upon the CIA for intelligence reports from that part of the world. It is said that the SIS station in South America reported Argentina's aggressive intention two weeks before the invasion of Falkland/Malvinas Islands.

The SIS is generally thought to be smaller than the CIA and therefore its officers more broadly trained. While they lack specialization, they are said to be strong on good political analysis.

Americans tend to have an image of British agents, whether or not deserved, as “class acts,” as characters out of spy thrillers: good at their jobs, urbane dashing, polished, in the mold of James Bo

THE SECRET Intelligence Service was created in 1907 as the Secret Service Bureau. In the 1930s it was split into MI5 and MI6. “Five,” as the former is known, is also officially secret.

Attached to the Home Office, the SIS is a sort of British equivalent of the FBI, although MI5 officers do not have powers of arrest. This function is left to the Special Branch, a department of the police which works in conjunction with MI5.

A SPECIAL relationship exists between the CIA and MI5.

They have close liaison in Washington and London, as indeed throughout the globe, sharing both secrets and defectors. They run a joint defector program.

CIA people are called the “cousins,” in the parlance of the secret world; SIS people are called the “friends.” They have jointly mounted operations including:

• An unsuccessful attempt in 1950 to topple Enver Hoxha's Stalinist regime in Albania. Their sponsorship of Albanian freedom fighters ended in tragedy, betrayed by the notorious traitor, Kim Philby, who was at that time the senior SIS liaison officer in Washington.

• A successful CIA-SIS cooperative operation in 1953 deposed the Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, and installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran.

In theory, the cousins and friends do not spy on each others. It is assumed that both the SIS and CIA keeps check on everybody, friendly or not.

The CIA tends to use Britain as a home base for operations in Africa and the Middle East. On the occasion when CIA mounts operations inside Britain, such as reported infiltration of labor unions in the 1960s, it is with the knowledge and blessing of the SIS.

In 1975, Harold Wilson, then the prime minister, said in the House of Commons that everything the CIA does in Britain is known to the government.

CIA operatives abroad are probably closer to their British “friends” than to their own colleagues in the State Department.

UNLIKE the CIA, the SIS does not possess a portfolio for paramilitary operations. These missions are undertaken by the Special Air Service, an elite counterinsurgency force. The size and structure of the three SAS regiments are, of course, secret. The nearest U.S. Equivalent of SAS is the Delta Force, based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

The most important element of the British and American special intelligence alliance is the Government Communications Headquarters, which works hand-in-hand with the supersecret National Security Agency, its America counterpart. Their function is signals intelligence and decoding.

BRITISH newspapers are banned from printing details about British intelligence. A system known as the “D Notice,” which critics call official censorship, makes the naming of names illegal and subject to public prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.

Much of the information available today on SIS is that obtained in the United States under the Freedom of Information Act.

This appeared in the (UK) Sunday People on May 4th, 1986

Terror plan to 'smash the rich scum and their lackeys'