Wry Martinis (19 page)

“You know what they
really
ought to sell,” Geoffrey Norman said one day in the fall of 1991, after the news reported that in order to raise desperately needed hard currency, the former Soviet Union was selling items from its space program and KGB Cold War archives, “is Lenin.”

“Hm,” I said.

Thus was born OPERATION RED BOD, the code name we adopted around the office. At 4:30 on the afternoon of November 5 we faxed a galley page of the article—minus the accompanying photo illustration showing Lenin under a glass coffee table in the midst of a cocktail party—to dozens of news organizations, which were by then starting to close their evening broadcasts and next day’s editions. And went home.

Two hours later I was exercising on my cross-country ski machine in front of (my favorite) evening news show, ABC’s
World News Tonight
, when on came Lenin’s waxy face on the screen next to Peter Jennings’s bemused own. This was the last time Jennings would smile for several days.

Early the next morning my phone rang, for the first of many times that day. It was
Forbes
Chairman Steve Forbes, my boss.

“The Russians have gone ballistic,” he said. “We’re going to refer all calls to yow.”

The fiftieth, or perhaps fifty-first call (before noon) was from the BBC, informing me that Minister Barannikov had been forced to break into regular Moscow TV programming to assure an anxious nation that he was not, in fact, secretly planning to auction off their former dictator, even if he was a god that failed. Moreover, said the BBC, Minister Barannikov had some strong words for
FYI
’s editor. The phrases “international incident,” “brazen lie,” and “serious provocation” occurred. I
suggested to the BBC that Minister Barannikov “chill out.” This caused some confusion but was eventually translated into English as “relax.” I then received a number of subsequent phone calls from persons with thick Russian accents suggesting that relaxing was not a viable option.

Peter Jennings was very gracious, under the circumstances. He called personally, without an intervening secretary, “to get your exact title.” That night, with the expression of a headmaster informing assembly that one of the students had let down not only the school, but himself, he retracted the story. To the quite numerous reporters who called him for comment, he said that he had believed the story because it had come from
Forbes
, which he regarded “up to now, as a responsible news organization.” Paramedics were summoned to the offices of
Forbes
editor Jim Michaels, who had devoted a lifetime of hard work to establishing
Forbes
’s reputation as a paragon of reputability.

Reactions of other news organizations ran the gamut from bemused to outraged. One newspaper called for me to be “drummed out of the international press corps.”

Postscript: Half a year later I picked up
The Washington Post
to a large story that the Kremlin had been “inundated” with bids “ranging from $10,000 to $27 million for the pickled corpse of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”

One letter, from the director of a Virginia printing company, read, “We are in the final planning stages of our new corporate headquarters. We were recently discussing the new lobby and saw the need for an appropriate centerpiece. Our interior designer has agreed with us, and feels that suitable arrangements can be made to house Mr. Lenin’s body here.”

A Merrill Lynch broker in Houston who submitted the $10,000 bid said, “I don’t think my wife would allow me to keep Lenin at home. It wouldn’t go with the furniture. If my bid is accepted, I will probably donate it to our Museum of Fine Arts. There is quite an interest here in culture.”

Minister Barannikov’s sense of humor had by now been restored. His spokesman told the
Post
that everyone who submitted a bid would receive a polite letter declining their offer, but thanking them for their interest.

Mr. Lenin was last reported still resting comfortably on Red Square; the dead mouse, as it were, on the floor of Russia’s living room.

—
Forbes FYI
, 1995

Guy Stuff

“You’d be surprised,” said Andy, surveilling a row of smashed-up cars, “at how few people know how to properly ram a vehicle.”

It had been an interesting morning so far. It started off with a slide show featuring the last mortal remains of various German executives, Italian politicians and U.S. diplomats. The classroom was a windowless room hung with the sayings of PLO Party Animal George Habash, quotes from the Baader-Meinhof training manual, autographed photos of FBI agents duded up in Ninja outfits, bomb diagrams and a “
DEFEND FIREARMS DEFEAT DUKAKIS
” bumper sticker.

Next came the lecture on how to steer and brake properly—chances are you are doing it all wrong—how to “swerve to avoid,” and drive off the road without requiring surgery. Very useful stuff, this.

You don’t have to be an exec who’s just gotten the happy news that you’re being sent to head up the Lima, Peru, office to appreciate the three-day Executive Security Training course they give out at BSR in Summit Point, W.Va., two hours down the road from Washington, D.C. Suppose, as one of the instructors put it, you have a loved one who is going to die unless you get her to the hospital in ten minutes, and the hospital is 20 minutes away? You
will
learn how to do that. That’s how they talk, the instructors, most of them former military sergeants: “I will give the first lecture tomorrow on surveillance detection, and you
will
find it compelling.”

Right now we
were
about to get into a Buick LeSabre and ram a Volvo station wagon, and I
did
have a burbly sensation in my stomach. Angel, a 150-pound knot of muscle with a Zapata mustache, two tours in Vietnam with the 101st, and he won’t say how many with Delta Force, was
our ramming instructor. Here’s the situation, he said: you round the curve, and there’s a car blocking the road and two guys standing in front of it with guns pointed at you. “You can try to turn around, do a boot-leg or a J-turn. Or,” he added, insinuating his preference with just a crease of a smile, “you might just decide you want to put a little Goodyear on ’em.”

What you will find out about ramming is that it is counter-reflexive. All your life you’ve been hitting the brakes when you see a car stopped in front of you. Here they tell you to align either your right or left front wheel with the center of the other car’s rear (usually) axle, to downshift into first gear one-and-a-half car lengths away, then to hit the accelerator and to
stay on the accelerator
so that the other car absorbs the energy of the crash, not yours. You will do this twice during your three days at BSR. You
will
like it better the second time. The first, you’re too busy concentrating on keeping your head from going through the windshield, which Angel assures you it won’t, but you do not entirely believe him.

My classmates were natural rammers. They got the hang of it right away. One was with the Department of Labor’s Inspector General’s office, here so he would be able to drive the Secretary of Labor through harm’s way. I could not for the life of me remember when an attempt had last been made on a Secretary of Labor, but who am I to begrudge the lovely Lynn Martin and her successors this consolation?

The others did not pass out business cards, or even last names. They were lean, fit, had short haircuts and Berettas. They were not in the least put out by the photographs of German industrialist roadkill, and when it came my turn to be ambushed, they shot me upside the head easy as pie, though they were considerate enough to say afterwards, “Sorry about killing you. Shoulda seen your face.” Yuk, yuk.

I was not able to get a straight answer from Calvin Frye, who at the time was director of training programs at BSR, as to just who these cheery killers were, but I was able to determine that BSR is where they all send their people for special driver’s ed: all branches of the military and government agencies, CIA, et cetera, et cetera. American executives come here as well, especially the ones who get those plum overseas postings that come with the name tags saying, “
HELLO MY NAME IS JIM. MY COMPANY WILL GLADLY PAY MANY U.S. DOLLARS IN RANSOM
.”

There are other executive training schools. The advantage of BSR—aside from the fact that it comes with a two-mile, ten-turn racetrack
upon which you
will
have a gas—is that this is where all the feds go to train. The instructors have security clearances, meaning that they get state-of-the-art antiterrorism input from the agencies whose people they train. They don’t pass along classified information to noncleared clients, but the expertise they impart is based on it.

The key theme of the course is:
force the bad guys to pick on someone else.
The way to do that, of course, is to make yourself a difficult target. Vary your route to the office every day, never set patterns, spend the five to six minutes every morning to see if they’ve wired a mercury switch and C-4 to your windshield wiper, phone in fake restaurant and airline reservations, change your plans constantly, and at the last minute, reschedule, cancel again. “If you can get them to pick another victim,” said Cal during the Attack Recognition class, “then you’ve been 100 percent successful. Once you’re attacked, your chances of survival are about 10 percent.”

“All right, suppose I throw you in the trunk,” said Bruce during the Vehicle Security exercise, showing us how to detect car bombs. “What do you do?” Damn good question there, Bruce, and hell if I knew. Suffocate? Wet my pants? Bruce reached into the side of the trunk, pulled out the two wires leading to the electric hood latch. With a pocketknife, he cut through the insulation and then pressed the wires together, shorting the circuit. The latch popped open. What if you don’t have a knife? “Use your teeth,” said Bruce. Better yet, carry a penknife.

We found a half-dozen bombs in the car, under the hood, on the exhaust, attached to the windshield wipers, underneath the seat, in the headrest. They kept going off before we found them, too. The bombs consisted of ten-inch-long sections of dowel painted red to simulate sticks of TNT, and Play-Doh to signify C-4, attached to mercury switches, heat sensors and plain old plastic traveling alarm clocks. Angel gave the lecture on bombs, demonstrating some seventeen different kinds. Once you learn how, it only takes five to six minutes to safety-check a car, using just a small 40,000-candlepower Maglite and a plastic tie as a probe.

Every time Angel introduced a different bomb, he’d say, “Now this one’s my favorite.” See that can of Coke on the backseat floor? “Pick it up, and next thing we’ll be reading about you in the newspaper, in orbit up there with Sputnik.” Ever heard of a “Firefly”? I’ll refrain from divulging the precise recipe here, but it’s pathetically simple to make:
you fill a gelatin capsule with a certain household chemical and drop it down the gas tank. The water in the bottom of the tank will melt the gelatin, the chemical will make contact with the metal, causing a spark, causing the car to turn you into ground chuck. This seemed to me a darn good argument for locking gas caps, but Angel said no, no, “Those only keep honest guys out of your gas tank.” What you do is dust the cap—as well as the door handles—with talcum powder. If that dust looks disturbed the next morning, take a cab.