The Bangkok Asset

19

In Phnom Penh Dr. Christmas Bride has booked us into the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, with splendid views over the river, just before it joins the Mekong. Actually, it isn’t a foreign correspondents’ club at all, although the old colonial mansion (long verandahs, high ceilings, slow fans) looks the part. It is a private hotel named by its owner in honor of those intrepid reporters who used it as a base from which to file stories about the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, after Nixon and Kissinger destabilized the country with blanket bombing-as in Laos.

The riverside was wild and dangerous at that time, a great place to buy opium, heroin, and as many M-16s and AK-47s as you could carry before you got mugged by a gang carrying even more. Rape was the local sport, along with prostitution, child abuse, and knife fights. Now all that color has moved upstream somewhat, and loud, threatening posters proclaim in English draconian penalties for anyone caught with underage children. There’s not a lot of enforcement against local transgressors, however: the campaign is targeting Western men in the hope of jailing them before they return home and abuse European kids; the posters are paid for in euros, after all.

Despite that Cambodia is only an hour by plane from Bangkok, once you add on the rituals of security and state control (they take a mug shot at both ends, you are not allowed to smile or wear glasses) you end up with half a day of travel, which is why the sun is going down even though I left home this morning.

It’s still hot, though, hotter than Bangkok, and despite the fans an overwhelming lethargy pins me to my wicker seat in the bar of the FCC, so that all I can do is watch a fisherman with a throw net stand in his boat on the river and cast away just as if the city has grown up around him over the past few hundred years and will no doubt crumble in due course without any effect on his fishing style, or indeed any claim on his attention at all. I order a glass of cold white wine and give myself a moment to think. Travel is a stressful bore these days, and I’ve spent most of the last few hours checking my passport, completing visa applications, checking that I’ve not contaminated clothes or luggage with powder from my gun, which of course I could not take (they can pick up a single molecule of saltpeter with those floppy wands they wave all over your bags; if they find any they torture you with interrogations for the next few days). What I am wondering now is, so to speak, merely a lowercase version of my life’s most constant theme: What am I doing here? I have come on the strength of a single phone call with someone in Saigon. But his name is Christmas Bride. Now an old farang man enters the bar.

He who I have come to meet is over six foot and skinny in khaki walking shorts, money belt, and T-shirt. Long white hair springs out from his head in all directions. Polar-blue eyes. I am sure much vigor remains in that eighty-something body, but it is the long mobile face one fixes on. Tragic craters transform into blooming smiles that fade into whimsy; a gaze of half-focused benevolence tightens into an interrogator’s stare; the mouth taughtens and looks vicious, only to relax again into a grin, which replays every nuance of every kind of grin from sardonic, cynical, cruel to naïve, happy, vulnerable-and back again. The mind behind it all has known and lived every major event in the history of the human psyche from Adam to Mickey Mouse. He is a walking history of consciousness, starting with reptiles and including congress with angels. He is the kind of man you assume is insane until someone tells you he is a psychiatrist from the sixties, when you say, Oh, right, one of them.

As he strides toward me with the purposeful grace of yesteryear, hand outstretched, his expression now is deeply and gratefully welcoming, promising hospitality and sensitivity of the highest order.

“Thank you so much for coming,” he says in that same tone I first heard on the phone: cultured, clear, beautiful, without the snobbery an inferior soul might express with that Brahmin accent. “Awful bloody trip, isn’t it? What are you drinking? Wine? I think I need a double scotch on the rocks.” He calls for a waiter using fluent Khmer.

The charm works. I am relaxed, impressed, instantly well-disposed without being intimidated. I am charmed into leaving the narrative, and the explanation, to him. We sit opposite each other at my table on the terrace.

“Names are important, so we should not dispense with the ritual. I am Christmas Bride, at your service.”

“I am Sonchai Jitpleecheep.”

He bends his head to grasp his chin with a large ruddy hand, frowns. “Hmm. I don’t know much Thai, but why Sonchai-not Somchai? Somchai is the common name, no?”

“Somchai is the common name. Sonchai means to think or dream. Apparently it arises from a mistake my father made.”

“Ah-ha! Sonchai means to dream? And Jitpleecheep is pretty much unpronounceable for the Western tongue.” I smile. “So you are a dreamer camouflaged from one half of yourself-not to mention the world?”

“Got it in one,” I say.

Bride takes out a packet of Camel cigarettes, knocks one out, fits it to an ivory cigarette holder, and lights up with a Zippo. He speaks through the first burst of smoke. “Oh, no, please. I’m not being clever here. I’m admiring your clever labeling. You’ve used the barricade to grow behind it beautifully-and in secret-that’s the key. Just imagine being lumbered with a moniker like mine.” Now the cratered face descends into tragedy tinged with rage. “The bitch was a Catholic of the old school, you see? She’d probably be illegal today.” He glares. “Christmas? And coupled with Bride? She thought she was nailing me to the cross at the baptismal font for the duration. I promise you, with a name like that you either crawl under a rock at age twelve and stay there, or you-” He stops himself and smiles.

“Drop acid more than a thousand times and kill God?”

His face is transfused with delight. “Excellent. Excellent. You play the apostate inadequate, then, when the timing’s right: wham! Fantastic life ploy-wish I’d known of it when I was your age. You must be one demon of a detective.” He drops his voice and leans forward. “So, you met dear old Joe Goldman. How was he with you?”

“I watched him through radar for about ten minutes. He was rather involved with the task in hand. He didn’t pay me any attention. Then we met again when he showed a promotional video at his apartment in Bangkok. That’s all.”

He nods. “I have the feeling this is a new field for you. Let me tell you, spies are fascinating, one of those professions like prostitution that has never been properly studied, perhaps because of what it reveals about the world we have made. Goldman is a more or less standard example.”

“But your relationship with him is what? How do you know so much? What is going on? Why am I sitting here talking to you in Phnom Penh?”

He takes a long toke on his Camel while he eyes me shrewdly. “Since when has the acquiring of knowledge and experience been that simple, Detective?”

I make signs of frustration. He turns his head to one side and lets some beats pass. “It really is just as I said over the phone. There is no technique for explaining all this in a way that anyone would believe, let alone a trained detective. I beg you to allow me to narrate the thing in my own way.” I do not ask, But why would you want to explain it at all to a total stranger from Bangkok? I nod instead. “Good. Tonight the prologue, tomorrow the story and the evidence.” He orders another double scotch, leans back in the wicker seat, stares out over the river for a good few minutes, takes a long toke on the Camel, then begins:

–

“Let us go back in time by half a century. We are somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties, our sample subject has been brought up according to the old WASP catechism: it’s basically old-fashioned sexism and racism, but the takeaway message is that democracy only works when it is undemocratically controlled by fat wise old white male Protestants. Socialism is the ultimate evil, which you must be prepared to die fighting against if you want to call yourself an American. Oh, yes, I forgot. There’s also the best-friend syndrome. A best friend is of the same WASP background as you to the point where he is indistinguishable from you. You will not at any time feel the slightest sexual attraction to your designated best friend, but you will be prepared to die for him if necessary.”

He pulls on the cigarette, inhales, exhales with relief and gratitude.

“Don’t believe what they tell you about tobacco. Without it I’d have died of boredom twenty years ago. It’s just a question of not overdoing it-we need wisdom, in other words, and there’s precious little of that left in the world.” He points to the pack he had placed on the table. “A habit my American friends taught me in the jungle. Do you see, the animal on the front is not a two-hump Bactrian camel as one would have expected, but a dromedary? The manufacturers knew that, of course, but were advised by industrial psychologists that one hump was somehow easier for the average Joe to take in than two. A primitive example of mind control-we’ve come a long way since then.” He sighs. “Not that we Brits are in any way innocent, you understand? I don’t mean to imply that. Every dirty trick in the book they learned from us.” He muses. “As a matter of fact, there are very few serious geopolitical problems today that were not created by the Foreign Office in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kashmir is probably the best example, after Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Tibet, sub-Saharan Africa, and pretty much the whole of the Near and Middle East. In Tasmania we annihilated a complete race of humans. That all happened when we were civilized Christians, of course.”

“What are you saying, Doctor?”

“What am I saying? I’m saying that when we consider a case like-well, let’s call him Private Jack Doe as a twenty-year-old GI-we need to strip out a few erroneous assumptions, like he gives a damn about democracy or the plight of third-world Asians, or even has an idea of what those words might mean, or even has a precise idea where Vietnam is. Or is even aware of the excuse for being there at all, except that Uncle Sam knows best. You see, in a nutshell such a background is essentially tribal and shamanic. A lot closer to the mind-set of Crazy Horse or Red Cloud than anyone cares to acknowledge.”

“But who exactly are you talking about when you refer to this hypothetical Private Jack Doe?”

He pauses, waves a hand, says, “Later,” and continues. “Then some truly world-class idiot grabs Jack and half a million like him and sends them to the other side of the world to kill as many fellow humans as he can manage. If he wants to know why, it is explained using a metaphor from infancy: dominoes. Almost from the start Westmoreland and the CIA turned it into a body-count war, which is to say a war of extermination.

“Naturally, since Jack has already been initiated he hardly needs to be told that the people he is killing are inferior. The way he has been taught to see it, not only are they socialist, but they are brown-skinned slope-headed communists who have Stone Age technology and eat on the floor. Of course it’s okay to kill them. You have to kill them to save them, obviously.”

I am upset. The implication of blatant genocide is a little hard for a half-caste like me to take. I try to control my thoughts.

“Right. Then something happens to change his head around? Fall in love with a local girl, for example?”

He looks at me with the curiosity of a man who expects little of life but can still enjoy the thrill of busting a fool’s naiveté. “Well, that might do it, temporarily. But it’s as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall into it. Very often we fall out of love as a defense against threats to our core identity. I doubt such a boy as I’ve described could be in love with a communist, for example, for very long. No, I’m thinking of a more radical experience.”

“Death? The death or mutilation of a close friend?”

“Certainly, the presence of death is the essential factor in any initiation of depth. But what I’m talking about is something that blows the whole shooting match out of the water. Something so radical it really can break down all that tribal programming in one fourteen-hour period.”

I can guess where he’s going so I shrug and stare in expectation.

“Lysergic acid diethylamide.” He chuckles. “Oh, they were so right to be scared of it, with that uncanny instinct of theirs. Of course, it never came close to screwing up as many lives as alcohol, but it was infinitely more threatening to WASPs.” He shakes his head. “I’m not a religious man-as you correctly pointed out, acid helped me kill God-but there was something quite uncanny about the way it appeared at exactly that time.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean just when it was so desperately needed.” He catches my eye. “You know what I’m talking about of course?”

“I have an idea, but please tell me.”

“Omega Unit 197 of the MKUltra project, to be precise. LSD was my specialization. They were pretty much forced to recruit me, because no one had done as much research on it as had I. Mostly on myself. Acid was universally available in Vietnam, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of the men took it. For many it was simply a psychedelic trip experienced purely at the level of sensory distortion. For others, though, who happened to take it at exactly the wrong, or, according to my perspective, the right moment-particularly those who volunteered for Ultra, or were volunteered by Ultra, so to speak-you ended up with an absolutely fascinating case of psychic nudity. A human soul stripped to its very variable essentials. A cloud of consciousness that suddenly sees. All too frequently, American servicemen who received such sudden wisdom could no longer function.”

“As soldiers?”

“As people. It was a terrible scandal. The military and the silent majority can only tolerate demons they are familiar with. The tribal programming allowed for all the usual battlefield psychoses and could even tolerate the extremely high incidence of heroin addiction among the men, not to mention alcoholism and suicide. But when the hippie movement threatened to spread to ’Nam, the idea of sending boys out there who would have their heads totally turned around by LSD supplied to them not by Charlie but by subversives straight out of Haight-Ashbury-what would be next, love-ins with the Vietcong?”

He pauses and rubs his chin. “But there was a parallel narrative. The CIA maintained a low profile because they were the ones who inadvertently caused the acid craze to spread by experimenting with it on human guinea pigs, most of them military personnel and not always volunteers. The public got the truth in tiny drops that precluded scandal, and all was going well until the news of the murder by the CIA of Dr. Frank Olson, more than twenty years after the event, hit the fans. Olson was a bacteriologist and CIA officer involved in the Company’s LSD experiments. Hell broke loose.”

He smiles. “You see, I was famous professionally, because of dozens of papers I had written on the subject of LSD. Famous, too, in the subculture, for singing its praises. They needed me even more than they hated me.” He frowns, takes out another Camel, and lights up. “I think it was my long hair they most resented. Their in-house shrinks were all gray men in suits with crew cuts. I was psychedelic, big time.”

“Why did they need you so much?”

“Collateral damage.” He taps his head. “Right here. And we’re talking thousands of souls. Uncle Sam doesn’t screw up by halves.” He sighs. “It really is a miracle drug. D’you see, it acts like an electron microscope-and that’s the problem. The teeniest, weeniest neurosis is magnified ten thousand times-and that’s merely with recreational use in favorable circumstances among friends. Imagine how it might affect one-” He stops to stare at me, as if unsure of the wisdom of continuing.

“What?”

“If some bastard is butchering a child in front of you, for example, as part of the experiment? Or ordering you to do so?”

I stare at him. Blood has drained from my face. I feel gray.

He remains quiet, giving me space. When he thinks I’ve recovered, he continues. “All their own shrinks wanted out pronto. The thing had gone horribly-and I mean horribly-wrong. The reputations of upward of a hundred psychiatrists was on the line. Not to mention the Company itself. I was an ideal scapegoat, a grinning clown with a doctorate in hallucinogens. Confident, too. Stupid, I suppose. But not so stupid that I didn’t realize how much they needed me. This was my moment. As it turned out, my nationality worked in my favor. They could blame everything on an alien-as usual.”

He looks at me as he coolly takes a toke. “I told them I needed a very big space where no one could find us. They said, ‘Not U.S. territory.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ They said, ‘How about Cambodia, we’ll buy a chunk through a shell company. We’ll do a secret protocol with the government so they leave you alone.’ Usual thing. I said, ‘Okay, but I need money.’ They said, ‘Money is no problem.’ I said, ‘I mean funding for the next twenty years. You don’t fix heads the way you fix broken legs.’ They said, ‘Funding for the next twenty, okay.’ They weren’t so sharp when it came to bargaining. They’d let me see how desperate they were, so I said, ‘No, funding for the next forty.’ They said, ‘Look, just make the problem go away. Whatever you need, you’ve got it.’ I said, ‘Seclusion. Absolute seclusion. Most of these guys and gals are never going back to the world. They need a special space to live and die in.’ That made them very happy. They even smiled. ‘How about dense jungle, twenty acres, only one way in and out, land mines all around?’ They were particularly generous with land mines. I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘We’ll send in the engineers to do the earthworks for you. Army huts good enough?’ I said, ‘Water? Electricity?’ They said, ‘No problem. As many army generators as you need. Wells as deep as you need. Pumps and pipes.’ I said, ‘Fuel?’ They said, ‘We’ll bury linked ten-thousand-gallon tanks for diesel, you’ll be self-sufficient for decades.’ I said, ‘Food? Cooking?’ They said, ‘Your problem. No normal person is allowed in. It’s you and the crazies. Grow what you need.’ ”

Bride draws another long toke on the Camel. “Of course, I saw what they were up to. They thought I’d never last more than a few years, but that was enough to pass the buck. They’d find a way of saying it was all the fault of this crazy Brit shrink: ‘Only have to look at him to see how mad he is. Don’t know how he got away with it for so long, trying to build some kind of LSD utopia in the middle of the Cambodian jungle.’ ” He smiles. “Actually, they were quite right. The man I was then would never have lasted. I had to become someone else, didn’t I? I had to go further with the LSD initiation. Further than anyone ever went. Much further than Leary would have dreamed possible.” He gives a wan smile. “Poor Timothy-I knew him well-so much talent, but he fell prey to the vice of evangelism.” He closes his eyes for a moment and allows a sardonic smile to bloom. “I’m talking about the early negotiations. Once we were settled they found reasons to take a deeper interest in us. But we’ll save that story for later if you don’t mind.”

Now he gazes over the river: mostly wet-look black with some reflection of city lights. “Most of them died, of course. Beautiful boys and some girls too-the women who had volunteered at Langley. Heads all fucked up. Know that poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg? ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’? It was worse than that by a thousandfold. Make that a million.” He is quiet for a long moment. “Suicide usually. I knew it would happen. What you will see tomorrow are the survivors. The best of the bunch. The toughest, anyway. The remnants.”

I am put in mind of a weekend seminar where the first evening is spent on introduction of the topic, prior to more serious learning the next day. After a few more minutes it becomes clear the Doctor has delivered his welcoming talk and now descends to entertaining anecdotes about life in Southeast Asia over the past forty years, how much has changed and how much has not. It seems he survived Pol Pot’s brutal regime, but he does not explain how. He is a gifted raconteur, though, and keeps me fascinated until it is time to go to bed.