Word: colonel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parked my car outside Security Police headquarters, remembering past interrogations and harassments. Think Gershwin, I said to myself, as I had in those days 12 years ago, when mentally humming a piece of music helped ease the fear. During the last scary session with Colonel Andries van der Merwe in 1977, I had countered his aggression with the finale of Gershwin's Concerto in F. And now I had made an appointment with his successors to judge the extent of change among the dread Security Police in the new South Africa. Though I was no longer too scared...
...steel grille clanked open with awful familiarity, and moments later, Colonel Nel, a dark-haired young man, smiling amiably, held out his hand. He looked too young to be a colonel, and I remembered the saying that we are getting old when policemen and doctors start looking like teenagers...
...given a comfortable chair and a fresh cup of tea, and wondered if this was how a returning Soviet dissident would feel on revisiting Lubyanka prison. As I talked with Colonel Nel, it seemed to me that the biggest change in Security Police thinking was the death of the old obsession that international communism was all powerful and that opponents of apartheid were putative communists if not actual paid agents of the Kremlin. The young colonel agreed. The whole approach was more sophisticated these days, he said, and the country faced a different set of perceived challenges embodied...
...will remember, of course, that Bernard Samson, England's rough-cut intelligence agent in Berlin, was bamboozling communist Stasi operatives with great success until his beautiful and highborn wife Fiona defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less. This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook...
...Grenada or Panama. It would almost certainly involve hundreds of thousands of people dying, soldiers and civilians alike. Generals like to talk of "surgical strikes," but surgical strikes usually hit the wrong targets -- like the misguided air raid on Libya in 1986 that wrecked the French embassy and killed Colonel Gaddafi's daughter...