Down Among the Backwoodsmen
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Down Among the Backwoodsmen The setting was a small French restaurant beside the Mediterranean, but the man I was having lunch with was an officer in the English...
...Who goofed— the Home Office or simply the Chief Constable of Kent...
...France is usually one of the favorite countries of educated British Conservatives...
...policy is not always a factor in such incidents, but Leftists supporting Libya's Colonel Qaddafi have smashed McDonald's windows...
...Obviously, close Anglo-French cooperation and mutual confidence are vital in all sectors of this colossal project...
...Intelligence men know that if they don't hang together, they risk hanging separately...
...the Sun...
...Tongue in cheek, perhaps...
...Admitting," he said, "that people connected with SIS have been a bit silly from time to time, the difficult question is still: Were initiatives like these merely individual dirty tricks...
...The other day I heard that someone is thinking of basing a film on a classic wet botch: the 1956 dispatch by SIS of a diver—yet another secret service alcoholic, appropriately named Buster Crabbe—to look at the hull of a Soviet cruiser off Portsmouth...
...Although hedid not mention Brits, the Sun and other London papers had no doubt whom the cap fitted...
...The Chunnel police force will have to be ready to handle some interesting, perhaps unprecedented, human and technical problems, plus such routine matters as antiterrorist precautions and the English yobs expected to flock southward in search of cheap French alcohol and return northward biliously drunk...
...Shipping companies have been financing ferocious propaganda against the Chunnel...
...How,' asks a Kentpoliceofficer,"doyoustopagang battle or a drunken riot aboard a crowded train in a tunnel on the sea bed...
...A few days ago the Sun, Britain's best-selling daily, referred to Spaniards as "dagos" and described King Juan Carlos, in an editorial, as "an upstart...
...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Down Among the Backwoodsmen The setting was a small French restaurant beside the Mediterranean, but the man I was having lunch with was an officer in the English police force...
...British rail officials are grumbling that their track and equipment are inadequate to handle French high-speed trains...
...He is not being unfriendly...
...but if the boss has an obsession, you can't always tell...
...We can fly to the moon and tunnel under the sea, but we have failed to educate ourselves out of the 19th-century tribalism that bred two world wars...
...Hot dogs, on the other paw, are considered German...
...What do you expect," an SIS man commented, "ofa service that is still half-military...
...The SIS was all the readier to overlook the silliness because the French had refrained from blowing the whistle some years before when a threeman British team did something similar in a Mediterranean port, blaming an Arab group...
...Fourteen months later, a headless body was found in the sea, but Crabbe's girlfriend denied that it was his...
...and it folio wed the Sun's example in referring editorially to "royal insults" (Juan Carlos insulted no one...
...As a Spanish writer has said, hamburgers are seen as the "quintessential America...
...Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's Conservatives have since reversed that trend and opted for la privatisation (which the Académie wants to spell privétisation to hide its English origin...
...In a French Pacific base he went out of his way to meet the two officers captured in New Zealand in 1985 when France's external secret service (DGSE) attacked a ship belonging to the ecolo-pacifist Greenpeace movement.(They were released by New Zealand on condition that they serve an agreed sentence in French custody...
...it may be the ozone...
...SpanishattitudestowardtheU.S...
...SIS people tend to agree with Georges Clemenceau that military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music...
...The Castilian for a place thai sells hot dogs and beer is now "un frankfurt...
...In those days, Spanish democrats denounced the pact as a crutch for the Franco regime—then almost bankrupt—and a betrayal of America's democratic principles...
...He vanished, and the next day a British " security officer" clomped into the hotel where he had been staying and tore a page out of the register...
...Today, many of their sons are hostile to it and to NATO, which they say involves Spain in an alliance against distant Russia that offers no support should Spain be attacked by a hostile North African autocracy...
...The UK Customs wants to halt all trains and have their passengers alight for baggage inspection, whereas the French are content to carry out checks aboard trains so as not to delay travelers...
...Even the Star admitted that the environment created by British tourists is "tacky"—drunks here, a vomiting blonde there, violent skinheads, the impact of " cheap booze" on " the worst possible taste...
...Was that deliberate sabotage of Anglo-American relations, or was it just bureaucratic idiocy...
...The King had recently said in Majorca that he regretted the "lowering of standards" in the behavior of visitors to the island...
...Who can say...
...Parliament has approved the Chunnel, therefore public employees can't legally oppose it...
...yet both are in the city center and owned by the same Catalan partners...
...The Times also quoted the "robust call to patriotism" by "our distinguished contemporary...
...Spanish Grill Since the 1930s, progress has become dissociated from enlightenment, and neither has kept pace with technological advance...
...Chirac hoped both to please his party's Right wing and to remind the public of a Socialist-sponsored scandal that had damaged French prestige...
...and a traditional way of producing a snafu, by accident or design, is to appoint the wrong man to the wrong job...
...More than one American in Madrid has lately said something like: "Why don'twesay we'd be happy to quit these Spanish bases...
...The French ones tend to be what are called in Paris black comedies, while the Brits have a weakness for seedy melodramas...
...but Tories couldn't help grinning when Mitterrand's 1981-2 Socialist Cabinet skinned its nose in a splurge of nationalization and welfare spending...
...Tourists who ask a Spaniard where they can find a good beer are offended when he replies "Frankfurt...
...McDonald's two outlets in Barcelona have been assaulted about 20 times in the past year...
...If one had to award a decennial Bearded Oscar for "intelligence" blunders it would be a hard task choosing the winner...
...One attracts demonstrators supporting Left-wing causes, the other Rightwingers and football fans...
...I asked myself similar questions when, a little later, I learned that an English police superintendent who, my source said, "hates the French and knows very little about them" had been appointed to head the British half of an AngloFrench organization that is being set up to plan and supervise the security of the projected Channel Tunnel and its approaches...
...unconfirmed reports said he had surfaced in a Black Sea port and was training Russian frogmen...
...Remember, for example, the Foreign Office's appointment of Burgess and Maclean [two notoriously anti-American drunks who turned out to be Soviet spies] to the British Embassy in Washington...
...Anglo-French relations have improved in the past two years under the aegis of Conservative governments, on both sides of the Channel, nourished by the same ragoût of economic dogmatism and political pragmatism...
...They can, however, observe A. H. Clough's Victorian commandment: "Thou shall not kill, but need not strive/ officiously to keep alive...
...A police officer reputed to hate his future colleagues is unlikely to inspire teamwork and trust...
...The anti-Hispanic bias of Rupert Murdoch's Sun (see Janice Valls-Russell's "Donkey Business and Asinine Jounalism," NL, April 6) is becoming an obsession...
...He had read the NL column of mine in which I wrote that employees of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) "organized the murder of King Abdullah of Jordan, the only Arab ruler Whitehall could rely on, and betrayed the 1956 Suez operation, endangering British and French troops and intelligence men...
...On two points his upmarket daily, the London Times, fell in behind its stablemate...
...Hamburger restaurants tend to come under attack when restless crowds gather to protest or celebrate...
...Praising a young British butcher who had called the King "a pillock,' it announced that it would " emblazon" his "immortal words" on T-shirts that it will offer as prizes for the funniest Spanish (meaning anti-Spanish) "jokes" its readers can invent...
...On the whole, " he continued, "I'm hostile to conspiracy theories...
...Having muffed the operation, the DGSE miffed Whitehall by seeming to blame SIS for the fiasco (the French team had obtained equipment in London from a supplier who allegedly had an SIS contact...
...Snafus are far more important in British affairs...
...and petty xénophobes and backwoodsmen in British politics, the Home Office, the Customs and the police dislike the project...
...There has been a qualitative drop in the class of tourists who come here," headded...
...Incredibly, the Foreign Office does not appear to have been consulted...
...Many Spaniards, for their part, are arguing obsessively over the American bases installed in Spain in the 1950s under the U.S.-Spanish Mutual Defense Agreement...
...and NATO are attentively studied by what might be called Spain's hambourgeoisie...
...On the contrary, the French President and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher have become rather like middle-aged neighbors flirting humorously over the garden fence: Margaret makes friendly remarks and good little speeches in French, and François, it is now clear, is a country gentleman as well as a social democrat...
...Secret services tend to get light-headed over maritime matters...
...The anti-Greenpeace operation was, of course, anaberration...
...The shock might have a salutary effect on Spaniards—and on other dithering West Europeans...
...Only Murdoch's Sun responded with insults...
...The allegation was finally attributed to a "silly commentator" on France-Inter, a government radio station, who was posing as an expert on covert action...
...Under the headline "Carlos Clobbers Holiday Louts," the tabloid Daily Express reported frankly that "drunken British holidaymakers" had fouled things up in Majorca as in Portugal and elsewhere...
...Or were they a response to orders—or winks or nods— from someone higher up the heap eager to help Arab radicals oust Western influence from the Middle East...
...But, the Star commented pathetically, "for thousands of young Britons it's their first taste of freedom...
...Chirac, eager to acquire a statesmanlike, even presidential, aura, has just been on another overseas trip...
...It reported, inaccurately, that the King had singled out the British...
...In too many European and other countries, politicians of Left and Right and mass-circulation papers still appeal more to chauvinism than to decency...
...The pale-pink presence of François Mitterrand has been no obstacle...
Vol. 70 • October 1987 • No. 14
