Retired Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters lives by a creed: To seek what “no academic texts or intelligence documents can give you: the scent of daily life, the temper of the people, the taste of the land. Traveling, you take in far more than you understand, calories of knowledge waiting to fuel some future intellectual labor.”
Peter’s life is a binge on such calories. First as a long-haired student and erstwhile musician, and later as a commissioned Army officer, he has traveled to more than 70 different nations on six continents – none particularly peaceful.
Through Russia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, Peters, national security columnist for The Post, developed a keen eye for real global conditions. “The way in which the finest artists see more acutely than others mirrors a top-of-the-game intelligence analyst’s ability to block out humanity’s white noise and listen to the revealing undertones.”
He traveled with official sanction, but all too often on his own hook. “There was nothing like firsthand exposure to dialectical materialism to teach you that the dialectic seldom delivered the material. Leftist rhetoric is wonderfully seductive. The tragedy is that those stirring promises are worthless.”
When his duties permit, Peters heads for the back of beyond – Yerevan, Samarkand, Bukhara, Groznyy, Nagorno-Karabakh. In Tbilisi, he finds himself at four in the morning with a drunken local madman at the wheel. “Instead of stopping we launched into the air, ripped through the bushes, and thumped down on the grass and flowers of the island. Still rolling at speed but with the front wheels wobbling madly, the rest of the car complained like the patients in a Manhattan emergency room on a Saturday night.”
Peters meets a faded yet imposing songstress who was beloved by Stalin. Urged to recall her past triumphs she begins to sing: “Her voice was no more than a croak. But her eyes flamed . . . Her faulty pitch and stumbling memory for lyrics meant less with each refrain. Another pair of verses and she reveled in the dignity of remembrance. As she entertained foreigners again after half a century – we might have been ambassadors in gala uniforms – her spine grew more erect with every chord until she was imperious Queen Tamara.”
He also encounters Boris Yeltsin, at the time little more than a seatmate on an Aeroflot flight to St. Petersburg but on the cusp of his historic run in history. There’s also a disillusioned MVD officer (Russia’s dreaded security police), who is more interested in venture capitalism than the fact that his new mentor is an American intelligence officer who has simply stumbled into his station. “But you must know something about joint ventures? Even if you are only military officers? I don’t know where to start. I need a partner. Someone who will invest, who will help me.”
We are transported to a safe-house in Mexico, a meeting with a corrupt mayor in South America, dedicated army officers in Pakistan and a frightening warlord in Thailand oddly addicted to karaoke and dressing like Elvis. “If I resembled John Calvin stranded in Sodom,” Peters writes, “my host was an effervescent Caligula. I had never seen a general so merry. But his joviality wasn’t contagious . . . Responsible for the counter-narcotics effort up-country he was said to be corrupt and murderous. He wished to use us, and we hoped to use him.”
Repeatedly, Peters submitted written reports of what he had seen and experienced up the chain-of-command. All too frequently his input was ignored, pigeon-holed or relegated to the circular file, with the bureaucrats responsible for our international relations dismissing his concerns, and instead plodding ahead into catastrophe. Returning from his trips Peters would often find “no one in the U.S. Intelligence was interested. If the data didn’t come from a satellite it didn’t count. The human factor was messy and unpredictable. Better to count tanks and ships and wait for a revival of the Cold War. Intelligence failure is as old as it is willful.”
If anything, the tales and lessons of Peters’ volume stands as rebuttal. Satellites and high-tech gadgets cannot replace a perceptive human being willing to wear out his passport.
Frederick J. Chiaventone taught National Security Strategy, Counter-insurgency and Counter-terrorism at the U.S. Army’s Command & General Staff College.
Looking for Trouble
Adventures in a Broken World
by Ralph Peters
Stackpole Books
