December 22, 2006 by admin.

The night crawlers bite

Many interesting and exotic animals inhabit Southeast Asia (SEA). Geckos are one of these creatures. But saying that they are interesting is an understatement. Most Geckos in the rest of the World are afraid of human contact and are not know to attack.

Then there is the Tokay Gecko. Dark scales on the top side, beige belly, awesome suction cups on the feet, able to crawl on walls and ceilings, can grow to be 12″ to 18″ long, nocturnal hunter, a mouth full of sharp teeth that have tons of bacteria, a ratchet jaw like a Pit Bull dog, and the gumption to attack humans. During the mating season, the males would make a loud eerie call at night, sounding like “Ettt ohhhh”. They were probably named after the call, since it sounded a lot like Ge-Ko. Sometimes the males would wind up their voice like an opera singer, before making the actual call. It sounded like a car engine turning over and over and not starting. When they did the calls frequently at night, I would shake in my bed with fear, knowing they were out there, waiting for some unsuspecting prey.

My Dad learned first hand how vicious Tokay Geckos could be. One night at the second house in Laos, my Dad was walking around the house outside in the courtyard, and he just happen to be carrying the old trusty equalizer, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. As he neared the side of the house, a large adult Gecko leaped off the roof and onto his shoulder, attempting to bite him. He violently knocked the Gecko to the ground and proceeded to pulverize it. When he was done, he told my brother and me about the attack, and led us outside with a flashlight. All we could see in the bushes was this tiny mound of red flesh that did not look like a Gecko; it looked more like something that went through a blender.

My Mom learned the hard way also. One day my brother and I came home from school (K6) and found a mid sized Gecko on the front door. My Mom came out the door with a broom, saw the Gecko, and freaked out. She hit the Gecko rapidly, which was most people’s reaction to Geckos. Their legend preceded them. Again the same result, which was a smashed Gecko.

Of course I had my lessons too. At the second house, a two-story water tower was next to the main house. A narrow walk way separated the water tower and the house. The water tower had been converted into small rooms, one on each floor. The room on the second floor had a cool view over the wall of the courtyard and into the neighbors, a Laotian General and his family. When the French inhabited SEA, they build many of the first Western traditional buildings that the Asians had ever seen. Since water pressure was a problem, the French built water towers next to the house and used gravity to feed the pipes. The windows to our water tower had big heavy wood shutters. I considered the water tower my “tree house”. I would climb the stairs and play in the second story room. The other window of that room looked down on the narrow walk way. It was an excellent lookout post for spying on my brother or the servants. One day I was peering out the window of the water tower on the house side, and suddenly I got his strange feeling like I was being watched. I leaned back and looked in-between the open shutter and the outside wall of the water tower. A large adult Gecko was staring me in the face, just inches away from my face. The next thing I remember was my foot hitting the bottom step of the stairs on the way down. I must have flown the rest of the way down. When my feet hit the ground, I was inside the house in a nanosecond. At least it seemed so. I then regaled my family of my brush with death. And I lost interest in the water tower after that incident. Imagine that.

The most traumatic Gecko contact that my family had was at the first house. The French colonial houses from the 1950’s had the kitchen, garage, and servant’s quarters separate from the main house. They were connected by a screened, covered, breezeway. The most direct route to the kitchen was through the breezeway and it had a lot of traffic. A very large adult Gecko decided to take up residence in our attic, near where the breezeway connected to the back of the house. At night he would make his calls and then crawl down a pane of glass, in that small gap between the house and the breezeway. He had a perfect hunting perch. He was directly overhead of anyone walking into the breezeway and going to the kitchen. But he had plans of eating one of us. His belly was so beige, pressed upon the glass, waiting for something to kill. Every night for about two weeks he was at his perch about our dinnertime. He had done his reconnaissance and knew when we traveled the most down the breezeway. Our family and the servants were freaking out. We were being systematically being hunted by this predator. And we were dinner. My Dad finally had enough of this running down the breezeway to avoid being attacked.  One night he came home from the office and announced to everyone that he had the ultimate solution for Mr. Gecko. That evening at dinnertime when the Gecko perched himself on the glass, my Dad retrieved an interesting weapon from his bag. It looked like at long sleek pellet gun, but it looked like no gun I had ever seen. He quietly snuck up on Mr. Gecko and fired one round into his head at point blank range, with the gun making very little sound. Mr. Gecko retreated and was never seen or heard from again. Years later when Senator Church was investigating the Agency for suspected abuses of their power, he discovered some interesting “toys” that the Agency had make. One of them was shown in the newspapers, with Mr. Church holding it up. When I saw the picture, I said bingo, that was the gun I saw my Father using on the Gecko. TSD used the dart gun to knock out guard dogs. But some people suspected that it was also used for shooting chemical pellets into someone. Some debate about this dual use continues to this day.

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December 22, 2006 by admin.

Eagles Nest, Berchtesgaden

When we were living in Frankfurt Germany, we took this very cool vacation all over Europe. This included Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Belgium. We visited the town of Berchtesgaden Germany, which is in the German Alps Mountain Range. The landscape is breathtaking, right out of a scene from “The Sound of Music” and the Von Trapp family adventures. One of the most interesting sites near Berchtesgaden is Adolph Hitler’s summer home and bunker called the Eagles Nest. Eagles Nest during the Nazi rule was home to several high German officials including Hitler, and a Headquarters for various Nazi groups. Eagles Nest was featured in the final episode of the HBO Mini-series “Band of Brothers”. This WWII show depicted the challenges facing a squad of American soldiers during the war in Europe. The Eagles Nest is a mountain top hideout where Hitler had this awesome underground bunker built. Above ground was a large set of stone buildings, which were the daily living quarters. But below ground was a single corkscrew staircase down into the hard rock. After descending down the staircase for a while, the bottom turns into a long zigzagging corridor. Our tour guide told us to look back over our shoulders when negotiating a zig and when I looked back I saw a machine gun port. Each zigzag in the corridor had a machine gun nest pointing into the backs of anyone walking. There were a series of these zigzags, each with a machine gun nest protecting it. With no cover and nowhere to hide, an enemy in that hallway would have been cut to pieces if the gunner decided to open up on them. Seeing those gun ports sent chills down my spine. I could just imagine the Nazi’s zeal to protect Hitler and how the machine gunners would have absolute power over life and death in the corridor. After the zigzags came a small cluster of small, very plain rooms, where Hitler and his staff could hide from air raids. The rooms were so small and ordinary that it was a bit of a let down after all the other security precautions taken to protect the underground bunker. Please don’t confuse this bunker with the one in Berlin where Hitler spent the final days of the war in, and then committed suicide in. The easiest way to get to the Eagles Nest Hotel was by cable car, and the ride was breathtaking. The hotel was very beautiful and the scenery was even more spectacular.

Mountain side gun ports were all along the winding road leading to the Eagles Nest. The gun ports were spaced about every 50 yards along many miles of this road. The ports were about ankle high and gave the gunner a great field of view to kill anything on the narrow road in front of him. Some of these bunkers were cut into solid rock and my Dad and I could not find a single entrance to these gun port bunkers.

My Dad and I decided to walk across the grassy fields near the Eagles Nest Hotel. Suddenly in the middle of one field we found a large irregular hole about 15 feet by 10 feet. We did not come prepared for exploring and had no flashlights. But when we bent down and looked in the hole, we saw a titled room. It appeared that it was an underground bunker complex that we discovered and the hole exposed a bathroom. I had vivid fantasies of find Nazi loot or memorabilia, but we could only look. To this day I wish I could get permission to go back and explore that bunker complex.

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December 22, 2006 by admin.

The Media and the spy game

Several TV shows and movies were very interesting and funny during the 60’s and 70’s, because of the way they portrayed the espionage business. My parent’s two favorite TV shows were I Spy and Get Smart. I Spy starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby as traveling tennis stars that were actually spies. Get Smart had a large cast of wonderful actors including Don Adams (voice of Inspector Gadget), Barbara Feldon, Edward Platt, and Bernie Kopell (Doc on the Love Boat TV show). Get Smart was created by Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, The Producers) and Buck Henry (Catch-22, Heaven Can Wait). One of the additional writers was Pat McCormick (writer for Johnny Carson). Both of these TV shows stretched how the spy game was played and it was great to watch the twists and turns. Of course back then I did not know what my parents actually did, but they sure enjoyed the irony.

One year for Christmas, I asked for only one big present. It was something from a James Bond movie. It was this elaborate briefcase that had a lot of goodies inside. I dreamt of it and finally Christmas morning came, and sure enough I got it. Wow, it was the coolest toy ever. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The edge of briefcase had a hidden throwing knife that could be withdrawn from the briefcase while still shut and thrown across the room into the chest of some hapless KGB agent. Alas my poor brother was always a cheap substitute, but since I had no KGB agent near by, he would have to do. Next there was a trigger button on the handle of the briefcase that when actuated would fire plastic bullets out the side of the case. The case itself was bobby trapped, in case some diabolical criminal a.k.a. little brother attempted to open the case without permission. The trap was set with a little snap cap like that from a cap gun. If I did not throw the secret switch first before opening, then the cap would fire, the smell of gunpowder would fill the air, and ahhhhhhh, you knew that all was right with the world. Once inside the case, your eyes would bounce with joy. The briefcase contained all the basic spy stuff; Gun, codebook, and code wheel. But this was no ordinary gun. It was a 9MM German Lugar, with silencer, extended rifle barrel, wire frame rifle stock extender, scope, and orange plastic bullets. The silencer was the coolest. It could be attached to the pistol or to the extended rifle barrel. The codebook was basically a notepad with a bobby trap. It had a secret switch too, just like the briefcase. It used the same caps too, to explode on the curious. The code wheel was the most interesting of all the items in the case. I had been experimenting with codes and ciphers on paper for a while, but this code wheel did all the work for me. I simply set the code wheel to a secret setting, and then each letter of my message that I wanted to encrypt was dialed into the code wheel. Then I would look into this little window on the code wheel, and there would appear my cipher text. The codebook was where I wrote my plain text and the resulting cipher text. This code wheel device fascinated me, as I saw it as a huge time saver over paper ciphers done manually. And that is why I love computers, the time that they can save, theoretically that is. My Dad must have gotten a real kick out of buying me that James Bond briefcase and watching me play with it so intently. Little did I know that at the office he played with the real thing, including concealing weapons inside ordinary objects, and hiding miniaturized crypto devices. Just like my play briefcase only a little better.

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