Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [147]
†Brown was right: in May of 2009 the North Koreans detonated a bomb as powerful as the atomic weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.
*Slimp also worked for a time in the London office of Enron before its spectacular collapse in late 2001. On October 16, 2001—this was shortly after 9/11 and three months before Enron filed for bankruptcy—Slimp sent an e-mail to a colleague at Enron in Houston, looking for a new job. “I’d appreciate any ideas you may have on where things are going,” Slimp wrote. “And where a former spy/bandwidth trader might want to position himself.”
* Gurkhas are the tenacious Nepalese soldiers who have fought alongside the British army since the 1800s.
*During World War II, Maclean parachuted behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia with orders from Winston Churchill to link up with Tito’s communist partisans and “find out who’s killing the most Germans, and how we can help them kill more.” Years after Maclean’s death in 1996, his widow, Lady Veronica Maclean of Dunconnel, denied to The Scotsman—a newspaper in Edinburgh—that Maclean had ever been a spy, but admitted that he had loved the rumors that he was the inspiration for James Bond. And, she noted, “we always had a travelling vodka set wherever we went, and that was very Bond-like.”
*Carroll’s Flour Corporation would later receive billions of dollars in contracts for reconstruction in Iraq from the U.S. government. In 2003, Carroll himself was named chairman of the U.S. effort to rehabilitate the post-invasion Iraqi oil industry. In Iraq, he got caught in a struggle between neoconservatives in the U.S. government and American oil companies over what to do with the Iraqi oil industry. Carroll sided with the oil companies. In 2005, he made this revealing comment to the BBC: “Many neoconservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that, and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don’t have a theology.”
*Hanssen spied against the United States for the Soviets for more than two decades. The story of his capture was told in the movie Breach in 2007.