This from the Straypooch "small world" file.
The hard drive on my old emachine desktop (not the one I use to come on here) died a sudden and tragic death a few days ago. Kinda sucks, 'cuz the data was old and cool and NOT backed up, but I shoulda knowed better so bad on me.
I wanted to get an old 6 Gig or so IDE drive and there are only two places in town that carry that kinda thing. One employees my nephew, and I would usually go there, but since I had a service call on the other side of town I stopped in to the other one to have a look.
I went in and started browsing around. The proprietor came up and asked what I was looking for. We struck up a conversation about old computers and the good old days and all of that sort of thing. He had a European accent, but I couldn't quite place it. I discussed my very first computer, a TI-99. He said "Oh you probably bought that in the late seventies." I said, "No, it was 1981. I remember because I was in Belgium." "You were in Belgium?" He said, his face lighting up. "I come from Belgium! Where were you?" I told him I was stationed at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) for three years. "Of course! Casteau! I was with NATO too!" (I always talk about SHAPE being in Mons, Belgium, but it is actually in Casteau. Kinda like the Washington DC Mormon Temple is not really in DC, but in Kensington, MD.)
What followed was the most interesting conversation I have had in years. It turns out, this guy was actually in the Belgian military and was Alex Haig's Commo Chief while he (Haig) was SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander, Europe). I mentioned the unit I was with (a cover name) and his eyes narrowed and he said "Ooooh, so you were into some pretty hush-hush stuff!" After exchanging a few stories I won't share (old habit dies hard, even though most of the stuff is declassified and available on the net these days) we had pretty much established our credibility to each other. He then began telling me some great stories about Haig.
Baader-Meinhoff was a terrorist organization from those days that had about the same ring to it in Europe as Al Quaeda does in the US today. They attempted to (and very nearly did) kill Haig by blowing up a bridge as his motorcade crossed it. By incredible fortune, the bridge was blown up just before Haig's car hit it. The security folks in front got nailed, but Haig's limo driver spun around and drove back to Brussels (about 60 miles IIRC). This gentleman knew the story first hand. He was in the car with Haig! I was told the story when I got over there and even saw the bridge, but this was sure as heck a closer perspective on the subject. What was scary was that because of terrorist attacks, all senior personnel used random routes decided at the last minute to foil terrorists. Somebody knew Haig was going to be there and was close enough to the scene to detonate the bridge at (almost) the right time. The perps were, in fact caught, and gave up a lot of info (voluntarily of course) which helped destroy the organization. The perps were later found hanged in their cells. Apparently, the guilt of outing their fellow travellers was so terrible, they couldn't stand it. On a completely unrelated note, Bill Clinton is a fine, upstanding moral man that I would be proud to see my daughter work for.
Another, less dramatic but damned funny story. Haig was presiding over a major exercise in Germany. In the heat of the (fake) battle, a courier came to this guy (the commo chief) with an urgent package for Haig. When Haig opened it, the guy says, he "turned red as that coke machine (indicating one in his shop) and used every bad word you ever heard!" Inside of the packet was a complete listing of the "order of battle" for the exercise. That is, every unit, where they would be deployed, who was backing who, etc. Classified stuff. Sent to him by personal courier.
From the Russian Embassy.
After the exercise was over (and the General had ordered a full scale investigation into the leak) Haig told his commo chief "I'm going to show you something you've never seen." He had his driver take him to the East German border. There was a low wall, and on the other side was a small German village in a small valley. Haig gave the commo chief his field glasses. (This story would flow more smoothly if I had remembered his name!) Commodude described a beautiful church in the valley with a big steeple. But there was a scaffold on the roof with three East German machine-gunners, watching the border. Haig said "I like to come here now and then and say hello to them." As commodude watched the gunners, suddenly their eyes got big and the jaws dropped. Commodude looked around at Haig. He was giving them a special salute, one which might be more fitting coming from, umm, a REAR Admiral. ( I gotta say, though, if I had been Ivan and if it hadn't been likely to start WWIII, I woulda put a round into that big ol' General booty.) So I'm wondering whether it was the border post or his four star stern the General meant when he talked about something commodude had never seen before?
Then commodude showed me something I had never seen before. (No, it's not that kind of story!) He said "Let me show the the pen General Haig gave me." He pulled out a case with a nice, though sort of plain looking pen. I thought it would have been one of those "four-star" emblazoned pens that the big brass gave out as tokens. But no stars. He began scribbling with it and said "See? A perfectly working pen." and my spy-dee sense started tingling. He then pulled out some watch-sized batteries and put six of them in the barrel. Turns out, this was a transmitter. He pulled out a small, flat AM-FM radio. He explained to me that the AM scale was perfectly correct, and it received regular AM radio. THe FM scale, however, was inaccurate. You could pick up FM, but NOT at the freq indicated on the dial. The first half of the dial was for straight FM (though, again, not at the indicated freq). But when you turned the radio dial all the way to the right, it received a higher freq (he told me, but I'm just gonna keep that secret out of sheer, MI paranoia!). The freq, as you can guess, was the one the pen transmitted on. He described meetings where someone was carrying on a "private" conversation and someone else (sometimes him) was monitoring in the hallway with an earphone and a perfectly natural FM radio. Just killing time while the general blabbed . . .
All this is old hat now. None of it is likely classified anymore, even the James Bond pen set. I just hold back a few things because it just feels weird to talk about them, even after a quarter century. But it sure was cool to trade war stories and see the cool gadget! He worked for Haig in the late seventies, and I worked for Bernard Rogers (Haig's successor as SACEUR) in the early eighties. He is a Belgian native and I am a US soldier stationed there for a few years. 25 years after I leave Belgium, I bump into him in a small town in Virginia. Small world.
