 Chitral is the name of then a princely state and now it's just a part of the northwest frontier That's my father-in-law in a cartoon drawn while he was in Karachi in India by US Coast Guard artists who was famous before the war and was Enlisted in the Coast Guard and then even more famous after the war to put together who he was his signature is very difficult there But once I finally figured it out and put it into Google like many of the other things with search engines now It's possible to learn things that you could never hope to do otherwise Let me tell you Some of the people who wrote covers Comments on the back cover are Admiral Harry train who I knew after the war He was the NATO commander of the in Atlantic I knew him after the war as a volunteer in the American catch site and he agreed to write the The first of the comments on the back cover. His father was the chief of naval intelligence in World War two and was therefore my father's ultimate boss small world Joe Callow is a Reservist who has written several books on the Navy Barnett checker as a friend who has also written his books about history and Jed Williamson my Who he and I have both been presidents of a little college up in northern Vermont? And he is a noted Himalayan climber and past president the American Alpine Club and very interested in this area of the world, of course Five out overlapping stories here, and I'll try to touch on each of them And if we have a chance to talk a little longer, you might ask me to Elaborate on them. There's probably too much elaboration anyway But I have to tell you that some of the things you'll see and some of the pictures you'll see here had to be eliminated from the book For reasons of length and also because the the Naval Institute Press wanted to have only original photos And some of the photos that I will show you on these images are historic photos anyhow, so the the story of the discovery recovery and study of That is is just one piece of this and for those who are interested in history and That that would be enough just to look at the details there a family story of Mainly of my father's family But the interlocking connections with my own family's background and the other people that you'll meet in this literally Almost every important person that you can imagine in World War two is about within two degrees of separation from the people That you see in this story including Hitler, Hirohito and the rest. It's just amazing Naval intelligence. This is one of the few maybe the only intelligence officer of World War two of all the Thousands who were trained through something like 1500 trained in naval air intelligence the only one whose story has been preserved and reasonably Complete and has ever been told is this story and that's just by accident There are some other stories about naval intelligence as you know The story of the code breakers and so forth in general stories about naval intelligence, but this personal story I think is interesting most of the the thing that sold the book to the Naval Institute was the unique trip which would was We'll come back to later. That's the trip in the Jeep and It all also offers us an opportunity to think of the great game the game that began for control of Central Asia For various reasons. It was the Silk Route. It was Alexander's route to the Indian Ocean the ocean he called it He didn't it wasn't called the Indian Ocean and it has been since then and up to the present time an area of Intense concern for so many countries and will be forever Central Asia the great game Proceed to Peshawar Is based on the wartime papers of my father-in-law including only thing that was known about it Until the rest of the papers were found was a letter that he wrote in November 1943 from Peshawar as he was in the middle of the trip half of the trip completed Wrote a letter to his wife past the censor. There was some stuff in that in fact I when I found that in family papers I transcribed it and Did a bit of editing of it cleaning up the language from what my mother-in-law had tried to understand and Did a little bit with it and sold it to the Naval Institute press Which never published it because it was probably not publishable at that point but then because The rest of the papers three-foot lockers of family papers were found in my sister-in-law's attic as she was about to go into Retirement home and wondered if my wife would like to come and take home any family pictures And I look and I drove that day To Pennsylvania and looked at the attic and I saw all these photographs and Naval orders and things and I just scooped it all up and put it in the back of the car and then spent the next Several years sorting it and figuring out what it was So there some of them are called autograph letters others are type reports and so forth And it's all now at the Naval Institute. I've saved the family of the family stories Go back to into the 1870s of scrapbooks and so forth But the the stories of this trip and my father-in-law's experiences are now in the special collections at the Naval Institute in Annapolis The trip, which is the focus of the book was Departed Karachi India on 12 November 1943 they arrived in Peshawar by train. He arrived in Peshawar joined two other British intelligence officer and an American army intelligence officer And they traveled through the northwest frontier province through through the northern areas of SWAT deer The Lowari Pass to Chitral back in Peshawar 23rd November and then they went down through north and south was ira stand to Quetta in Balukistan And we're back in Karachi by train from from Quetta in Just a month later Now Isn't it true that every naval and naval officer is an intelligence officer? Some do it better than others some are more interested in it than others But every one of them is always on the lookout medical intelligence is real intelligence and The best way to understand that and how I got interested in intelligence and the bridge between medical intelligence and and Real intelligence is when I read Dr. Maturin's Story fictional story in Patrick O'Brien's novels and that was what led me actually to get an invitation to speak at the National reconnaissance office on this subject a few years ago. I gave the keynote address to the Navy Day there Now the great game, of course Didn't didn't exist by name for Alexander. He spoke what Greek or Macedonian but He was the first European to Invade India and he went across the same territories that my father went through He didn't go through the Kyber Pass because he was smart He got some guidance and he went north of the Kyber when the Kyber was very very heavily defended even at that time and he Got into Chitral and all the same places Ivan the Great Expelled the mongrels and then began to move south and There's the great game starting the great game intensified during the time of Lord Curzon he arrived in As Viceroy in 1899 but he'd been there before and he tried to get into Chitral the same route that my father did couldn't make it several other people tried to Do it and that was we'll talk about that a little later Others who were involved in this area, of course was Rudyard Kipling who who coined the term the great game based on a Phrase that had been put into a letter about 30 years before that by a man named Arthur Connolly who was a British adventurer captain and was held at that point in prison in Bukhara now in Uzbekistan and He wrote that this is a great game. He wrote to somebody. This is a great game. You're about to enter He thought he was in a great game the emir had him beheaded and he's buried there somewhere and you could In the main courtyard, but the term was picked up by Rudyard Kipling and he used it over and over in his novel Kim Which is the Kim is the the the the name that has been used over and over Kim Philby Kim Roosevelt Kim became popular as a result of Kipling's novel and Kipling popularized the name great game for for the contest For Central Asia focused in Afghanistan Along the same border between Afghanistan and India that we're talking about here Winston Churchill had been there and my father Referred to to Winston Churchill's first book Malachand in his letter back to his wife just to let her know where he was the letters all had to pass the sensor So he had to use terms like that and a lot of nicknames and and odd little ways of Expressing things that would pass the sensor and that led to some difficulty for me in trying to figure out what it was all about Other people who appear in this story and some of them met by my my father-in-law There's Lord Wavell on the left Aukenleck in the center both of my my father met both of them my father-in-law and Lowell Thomas who had been there 20 years before and Traveled along some of the same route From the south to the Khyber Pass not not in the northern part at all The USSR continued to play the great game even after They said they were giving it up. They secretly planned to set the east of blaze said Lenin Stalin actually called it Bolshei Yigra the great game and that's the name of a Russian freighter in that day and and Set the east of blaze they planned to do it indirectly by activating the Communist Party of India the CPI Looking ahead to the great game the struggle for the control of Central Asia is now Struggle for gas and oil and access to the Indian Ocean as it always has been the five stand republics are still on the border and You know them in Pakistan Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan the largest of well Kyrgyzstan is probably the largest anyhow All the other countries are involved in this right still to this day Iran Russia China Afghanistan Pakistan India and Pashtuns on both sides of the border the Durand line The stated purposes of this trip that my father-in-law was on for Gordon Enders the army intelligence officer it was to be a tour of the frontier in Baluchistan from Chitral to Quetta with the idea of making it clear to the American legation in Kabul What our frontier problems and our ideas and policy in dealing with them and the Afghans? that was in a secret message from the intelligence officer in Quetta to the intelligence officer in Karachi and copies that I were preserved in in these papers that I found a Naval intelligence officer was to be added for a unique opportunity For background to use in any reports emanating from the US sources in Kabul or Delhi and the reason for that I may not I I'll get back to that later But I think that really my father-in-law was put on the trip because Gordon Enders who engineered it and who always dreamed of it was a windbag and Nobody could believe him for sure so In order to have somebody Be able to tell the truth about the trip They they put my father-in-law on it and how he got on the trip and how he was identified as another piece of the story Which we may not get to anyhow more about the purpose of the Northwest frontier trip Intelligence Officers are always encouraged to do things that they think may be useful That's why you go to intelligence school. They don't tell you all the details and if they tell you they tell it They tell it Verbally right they don't put it in the orders very very rare so other problems that that he emerged as I read the reports and I read what he Did and what I knew was going on at the time the problems of course with the the border tribes and how Britain dealt with them. They were very different each of the princely states had its own history The Wally of Swat the name of a deer and the may tower should travel They all stand for king in different languages. They all hated each other even though they were related The Northwest frontier province was largely governed by the Khan family and still is and the Pashtun tribes The Freedies momads was there is the the people you read about in the paper right now to this day Subtribes the mollusk and all of these things. They all had their own laws. It was called Pashtun Wally It it's it's not lawless the US newspapers call them lawless, but they're not lawless. They're just different They don't pay any attention to Pakistan law But they have they have their own way of doing things and it mostly it takes place in in Conferences called Jurgas and lawyer Jurgas and what the British learned was To go to the loyal Jurga. Let them figure out what they want and then enforce it Impartially enforce it and that worked and that's what that's what my father-in-law saw some in England believed that India would soon become Independent possibly divided into two or three parts as it was and the US would or should become involved in this part of the world and Protect British interests that would still be there even after Britain officially left the area British Money would still be there and commerce and it was important for that to be protected So all of the usual intelligence operations are involved here I either saw them in my father-in-law's reports or in other people's reports and here they are geography people cities and towns arms and intentions They make a lot of weapons there they make them very good and they make them very cheap ammunition Transportation possibilities opportunities for roads railroads and air going across the border into western China Across here power minerals storage facilities enemies and potential enemies This was a war of course. This was the war against Rommel was expecting to Get to this if he had crossed the if he had gotten to Cairo He would have gone after that all the way to India So they had landmines set up in this country that my father-in-law went through and he describes the landmines that were laid for for Rommel and for Gordon Enders the man we talked about the army man It was it was a dream of a lifetime He'd been born in Iowa But he had grown up as the son of missionaries on the border of India the same as the fictional Kim Had lived in almost the same a generation later than Kim and Then Kipling Kipling was writing about a generation earlier So it's two generations later But it's the same area and the same people and he really wanted to do this trip He wanted to to recreate Kim Now he was called a blowhard by by Rod Engert who I spoke with 50 Class of 50 at Yale OSS whose father had been the chief of mission in Kabul in World War two and as a young man He joined the OSS and he knew that that Enders very similar names, but Enders is the army man Engert is the diplomat that Enders was a blowhard and the OSS separately Called him and called him a bag of wind now there was war between the OSS and G2 army intelligence So you have to accept that there would there would not be nice things said But I also know that that my father-in-law said he was a He was a man Who had no particular modesty and talking was was one of his great virtues? and He had some other things the held back but but you could read it and for Bromhead the the British knight hereditary Baronette fifth Baronette He was he had to be the bag man. You had to give tribute in those days and probably still today I mean what's the CIA doing with all the money that goes to to the president of Afghanistan it's bag money and it is necessary there in order to lubricate The forces that you want to have work for you instead of the then being lubricated by the other side. I Can't say that for sure, but I do know that that all of Bromhead's predecessors as political agents in that area It's well recorded how much they used to have to give to the Maytower of Chitral and to the Wally of Swat and so forth. So I just assume that that was part of what was carried in the Jeep can't prove it This is the Durand line. You see the Durand line heavy there Afghanistan on the left And what was India then all of that was India at the time now it's Pakistan this was the border also between the far Eastern area of the of the The US and the the joint command the far Eastern area was called fe in Naval Intelligence and Me the Middle Eastern command which was in Cairo and this was as far away as you could get from either Base nobody paid any attention to it because there was no war going on there And it was an area where Gordon Enders the Army guy operating with with credentials on both sides He was credentialed to G2 in India, and he was also credentialed as the military attache in Kabul he could operate on both sides of the border and nobody paid any attention to him My father-in-law was a socialite no doubt about it And that's the kind of people who got into the OSS and got into Naval Intelligence you couldn't get there any other way you had to be an Ivy League or something like that and it just happened He was extremely wealthy his father his father had it said Gave a million dollars to each of his kids when they got married just for starters my mother-in-law didn't have any particular money, but she came from a Philadelphia society background and It made it possible for us to have have these papers have this experience to talk about This is the before their four children during the just before the run-up to the war War was about to start the Second World War at that time still a dreamy life there in Haverford, Pennsylvania There he was in the Navy shouldn't have ever gotten in the Navy He was colorblind, but his father-in-law was an ophthalmologist and Was a very famous one the head of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania and could write letters and so even that that age he was then of 40 years old managed to get in the Navy survived the basic training and so forth and You know they were very patriotic in those How did he get it to naval intelligence? Well, he had two personal connections with Vincent Aster who was in charge of what they called the room that was Roosevelt's study of Intelligence operations at Rockefeller Center Rockefeller own building in New York City He had two connections to Vincent Aster some connections to Roosevelt. There's Vincent Aster on the right with his Navy Navy uniform on and of course that's Brook Aster before she died There's Harry Train's father in the upper right hand corner Zacharias Ellis Zacharias Wrote his biography after the war was the man who wanted to be chief of naval intelligence But never was he got a tombstone promotion to rear admiral because he had a commanded a couple of But battleships during the war and got the lesion of merit and that was good enough to get you a promotion in those days when you Retired so he's referred to as Zacharias But he was a thorn in the side of every Office of naval intelligence chief because he spoke Japanese he understood the whole the whole Operation and he was never satisfied not being the chief himself both train and Zacharias spoke at my father's graduation from the advanced intelligence school and He was one of the my father-in-law being a great singer and and also a smooth fellow I'm sure met both of them, but they're both in his notes the program. That's all that's Old Navy there the lower right-hand corner. It's long gone now from Washington Naval intelligence is good to it. It was great My father-in-law never expected this he he thought he was going to be you know like doing the OSS and and some of his Some of the other people he knew many OSS people passed through his door and he called them Lincoln Freeman's friends that was the the code word for it In fact his next-door neighbor was actually a Marine Lieutenant in the OSS next-door neighbor They all passed through Karachi and my father-in-law was just stuck there, but he had a good time Invitation to meet the governor and Lady Dowel there. They are in Karachi lots of drinking tennis You never can tell how there he is in it in his white uniform taken by somebody else the Iranian Council's resident in October 1944 by this time my father-in-law was the the Head of the Naval liaison office in Karachi. That's what they called the the office There was no attache because there was only one attache for the whole British Empire and he was based in London though the operations in Which would now be the Naval attache type things We're then headed by Naval liaison officer. That's what it's called l al uslo in the in the acronym and There he is at the nice day at the races looking at the Indus River it flows out into the Indian Ocean through Karachi the orders Amazingly the orders. I have the original secret letter there written that I quoted from Explaining why the trip needs to be done. At least this is in the open Even though it's secret you never know about how secret papers will be but this is the What I've quoted for here quoted here now the three officers who made the trip are listed here I've told about Enders Zimmerman and Bromhead. There are others who were mentioned in this letter Briefly just so you understand it The governor was Sir George Cunningham and all those letters after his name and He was the guy who finally figured out for the British how to pacify the border and keep the the pastuans In line and just by not trying to do it by being a help being a partner with them Very brave guy. He would just walk anywhere no matter the bullets are flying and and and That's the sort of thing that people admire there being on the scene on the ground Whether you're afraid or not you don't show it Francis Smith who was a Have to say he was probably a jerk. He had been there for a long time He was probably a naval officer in in Mufti Naval intelligence officer probably before the war and then pops up as a as a Lieutenant commander he later became the comeshaw artist the bag man for the the the head Navy guy Commodore Milton Myles in in China and Myles just loved him He by this time he'd gotten fired with an in with an unsatisfactory fitness report my father's boss And had been moved out and was looking for a job and Myles picked him up and put him into into Calcutta And and he did a wonderful job there more of the same he he ran A woman a strange woman as an intelligence officer and did all sorts of crazy things and they had it They had a real battle the CNO himself got involved into it looking at the ex at the expense accounts in Karachi under under Smith angered I've mentioned before and and we He's also a liar. He he was born a You know a Russian citizen and he hid the nature of his birth managed to get all the way through and retire with an OB from the from the From the diplomat the US diplomatic service layer was involved I just discovered in this new book by Hugh Wilford America's great game he appears in there after he retired from the State Department as a as a undercover guy for the for the CIA and and he was completely unbelievable and his fitness report said that over and over again But there he was he made it to the first. He was the first US Not ambassador at that point it was a minister to Kabul and he got this I said OB but he got the CBE and And and so sometimes you can just drift along Not telling the truth, but make it believable enough and make it interesting enough and and it works John our Harris was a central liaison officer in Karachi mentioned in the letter and One that I never one of the very few people that I that appear in the whole story and all the letters and everything That I never could identify was who was I be Quetta He appears in the State Department documents also, but never named and Then there were other people obviously there were literally by the time the trip is over there were hundreds of people including many British generals and and then later after that everybody from Mountbatten to to All the people OSS everybody knew about the trip, but it wasn't interesting, you know that nobody got hurt They didn't discover anything that was unexpected. It was an interesting trip And so it never appeared in the records and all these reports and everything they're gone but anyhow Not mentioned in the letter, but others who were involved in the planning was Rex Benson. He was the British military attache in Washington and he gave a card of introduction to Gordon Enders the Army man and Enders presented it to the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province and that was two years before The trip and it took two years of kind of pestering. I'm sure before it finally happened Rex Benson was the cousin and Very very close friend family members and at Oxford at the same time with Sir Stuart mengies meant men's EIS Stuart men's East was the head of the British Secret Service He was the man called M. And of course he becomes C in in in the books What's the book? Bond yeah, the guy who wrote bond also worked for MI 6 and so he just took Menzies M and turned it into C right and Rex Benson Head of the Benson Bank at the time of the Second World War received the military cross in the First World War all sorts of stuff going on But he was the superb chief of Mission for the for the Brits in in Washington Clarence Macy the American Council and the honorable Charles there who was the guy who put it all together for my father to go on the trip Thayers the Thayers and and the Aldriches and the Astors were all very close and my father was a very close friend of the Thayers and of Of Mal Aldrich And after the war we know we learned that also two more who met the travelers on the trip were the vice-roy of India and Lieutenant Colonel Hey, who was the commissioner they called him the governor of Baluchistan The the trip This is the end of the trip the last picture on the trip Major Sir Benjamin major Bromhead was on this on the side there. That's a hereditary He's not really a night. I called him a night in the book. The that's that's I've been told that that's not quite true He wasn't a night. He was a he was a sir and but To me not being a British. I didn't understand the difference Anyhow, so there's Gordon Enders on the right wearing his Bomber jacket and his Driver who who joined them in in Peshawar on the southern part of the trip my father-in-law took the picture There's angered I mentioned before the the liar he was His mother was a Hungarian Jewish doctor he hid his birth Record and called himself by a new name and the State Department let him get away with all of that. It's really quite amazing There's Charles Thayer in the lower photograph He later went on to be one of the four or five really great experts on Russia and Was as I say the the first guy he graduated from West Point is a boy. He's a Philadelphia guy but didn't follow the usual route and there's a Wavell and awkenleck in the lower right-hand corner There's Rex Benson I mentioned him before Some of those who learned about the trip when it was underway Kurt Windsor's Stepson at the time the trip was going on his stepson was Franklin Roosevelt's grandson Give you some idea how the connections went in those days He was my he was junior to my father in in age, but he was his desk officer The Far Eastern desk officer in Washington at O and I and Gene Markey I I completely missed Gene Markey until the book was almost ready to go because my father-in-law Mentioned Markey only twice in in these letters. Just just just mentioned it once he said that Markey had been married to I forget her name Joan Bennett sister and heading Lamar. Well, I looked up Joan Bennett sister and there was no such thing about Markey So I just set it aside didn't pay any attention to it until I looked up Hedy Lamar and sure enough He did marry Hedy Lamar and there's a whole huge story that appears about him He later became one of the he's his friend John Ford John Ford, you know the movie director who was wounded at Midway sent to Midway to film it He and John Ford were very close friends and And it was really amazing goes on and on Patrick Hurley who was Traveling in the area right after the trip and I'm sure learned about it He's shown here with Milton Miles who I mentioned before on the left-hand side there is the one who hired com Smith when Smith got fired from Karachi Others who could have learned of the trip and I and I argue probably did Menzies in Donovan did not learn of it Wily probably dead and Mount Baton certainly could have because Mount Baton and and Markey were very very close Mount baton's one of Mount Baton's biographies was actually written by Gene Markey the ex-husband of Hedy Lamar and after the war In the shadows on the trip are all these people Presidents for it that Roosevelt sent a mission to Tibet about a year before that to try to bring Tibet into the American orbit for the Second World War and the the trip fell apart because Miles and others thought that it would not be a good idea Because the Chinese even though the Chinese were pretty weak at that time They still had their eyes on Tibet and the idea of setting up for instance a radio station in Tibet Would be bad news and so they pulled the mission out But Roosevelt there's a little the little guy on the left-hand side there is in the book about this trip and That's President Dalai Lama. He's all grown up now my age But at that time he he received the mission and received a framed photograph of Roosevelt in a silver frame Over the opposition of the State Department And while all this trip is going on very interesting and then it after that trip is over now my father-in-law strip starts Major Gordon Enders. I mentioned all this stuff about him already. He had written two books One of which called himself an American Kim There it is Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Gordon Enders book Gordon Enders was the first and probably the only one who ever got a passport as an official member of the Tibetan Senate Appointed by the Dalai Lama, right? There he is. I Describe him as almost oriental looking in in my book, and I think you see what I mean. He could he could easily pass Benjamin Bromhead is just barely mentioned in the book But digging into his family history through the internet and through the periods and so forth I learned all sorts of stuff about him most interesting thing. I didn't know from this study, but only when I give talks about it One of the fellows said Bromhead. That's a kind of an interesting thing I think Bromhead is the name of the guy in Zulu Bromhead's great-uncle buried in Alalabad Earned the Victoria Cross in South Africa and the movie is called Zulu And it was it was the first movie that Michael Cain starred in That's the family There's the Bromheads the state to this day There we are Zulu the real the real one and Michael Cain small world on his way to Afghanistan in November 1941 he crossed into Afghanistan on Pearl Harbor Day In in Asia it was 8th December 1941 Gordon Enders on his way there stopped by to have dinner with the commander-in-chief then later the viceroy and was Talking up. I'm sure the idea of doing the trip The most famous explorer of Asia at that time probably was Arlstein and he was dying just before the trip started dying in Kabul Afghanistan Well, I ought to mention the the conferences that are going on at that time were the Moscow Conference just before it of foreign ministers the Cairo conference one the Tehran conference Cairo conference number two Going on at the same time the trip was going on and since all of these were going on I thought it was maybe they were connected in some way No, not at all that the trip was completely independent on it, but Bill Donovan was all his his while Bill Donovan was flying all over he was going to all these different places And I thought he must be involved in it too, but it wasn't Zimmerman's orders shown here amazingly preserved nothing in it just as proceed to Peshawar and Other such places other such places with Transportation to be provided by the US Army Never mind that the transportation would sometimes be on donkey sometimes be on on horseback and sometimes be in jeeps and Sometimes being provided by the British and armored cars and so forth Very very vague as intelligence officers often get there's the route map that goes all the way from Peshawar in the center The little parents beak here. We'll come back to that later the parents beak that goes pokes into Afghanistan Just on the north side of that is where the Torah bore caves are located Okay the northern area Chitral you can see how that the that little peninsula of Afghanistan that extends off to the side is just above there the highest mountain in the In the range is there and then quite at the lower end of it They're something like 12 tunnels the railroad goes through to get from from Quetta and Balooka stand back to Karachi They departed Karachi on the 12th November in an air-conditioned car and Some other stuff there you can read it faster than I can I talked too much anyway, but Anyhow, so there he's crossing the Atok River That was crossing the Indus River at Atok. That was the same place that Alexander crossed it Alexander's memoirs Memoirs written by people who went with him Aristotle of course and others like that. It was a very famous crossing place There there is somebody not not him at the Peshawar railroad station They went up the trip to Swat up the Swat River past the Fort where and this is in is my father-in-law's words for six days the British Garrison was imprisoned and when Gunga din fictional, but that's what he said came down to the Swat River to get water They could only heliograph from the fort at this stage Churchill as a sublutinent fought in these mountains and Aachenlech in 1935 was stationed there also my father-in-law must have been thrilled by the opportunity to be crossing Historic country like this be told in a very you know just humdrum way There he is standing with the the Wally of Swat and the Malachan the Valley of the Swat River Approaching the top of the pass and there he is at the top of the Lawari Pass That's Benji as he called him in the background and that that's my father-in-law standing looking at the camera He's not doesn't understand army uniforms, but that's what he had to wear At the Lawari Pass after squeezing between a stone wall on one side and the edge of the trail on the other Which sometimes dropped and you've seen if any of you've been to the Himalayas, you know what it's like I mean you just never know the the story of Wavell's trip as a lieutenant to this to this area He was following a British Colonel on horseback and the Colonel disappeared and they thought that'd be the end of him They went up there and looked down and only about 20 feet that goes a thousand feet down From the from this very road goes a thousand feet down to the river They found that the horse and the and the Colonel was about 20 feet down there They hauled him back up again a little bloody not the worst for wear and the Colonel gets back on again and rides on And that's what that road was like until they have Improved it a little bit now the movies that my father-in-law took show what an incredible thing It was they took a rope along and they there's a lot of other people around here You don't see them in the pictures at all and with using the rope they pulled the Jeep back over and over again on to the Onto the trail onto the trail particularly on the north side as they say going down on the north side getting Getting out to see what's ahead. I think they walked most of the way But Gordon Enders who had been a pilot as a 17 year old guy He had been a pilot in World War one been shot down at least once maybe twice given up for dead like Hemingway He was absolutely fearless. He was a pilot for Chiang Kai-shek Right and he could drive this Jeep and you watch him in the movies driving the Jeep. It's really crazy I'm gonna have the movies transformed into a into a real film someday So there's just one difficulty on the zigzag and there is Terry Schmier The highest mountain in the Hindu Kush and I talked to the fellow who was on that climb the first ascent of it in 1950s an old man now and he remembers all of these things that I'm talking about he he told told me stories about Benji Brahm head Connections right to the present That's the Norwegian route went up there That's the route that my the fellow that I talked to on the phone British Colonel Tony Strather he fell on K2 and was was was caught on the rope there the famous rescue on K2 Now they're back at Peshawar again and he describes the trip Up to the tribal territory many block houses in the past the Khyber site on the right. This is the same Seen very few Americans had seen it up to this point Inters had crossed it Ingrid had crossed it. Lowell Thomas had crossed it in very very few others Until my father-in-law did it That afternoon after they went to Peshawar that afternoon the governor of the Northwest Frontier provinces had a garden party to meet the viceroy Major Brahm head arranged for Enders and me to be invited. It was a grand affair a beautiful setting on the government house lawn still there Still there all the mollocks the tribal leaders from the surrounding country were there along with important Britishers of the community That's the letters that he sent home on 6th December. He typed it and my wife re-typed it and Well that it's the typing that was done by my it was written in handwriting, but but he my wife My mother-in-law re-typed it with all the errors and so forth the viceroy had heard We'd been up to the loirians to trowel in a Jeep So he came over to where we were for we were standing and asked all about it Enders did the talking as he has a flair for it and modesty is not one of his virtues There's the dance card at the Peshawar Club that night My father-in-law had no dances card and he loved to dance And I don't know whether he was worn out from the day worn out But he got a very bad cold by the time it was all over and I think he might have not feeling so well But up to the point where he was traveling in armed cars run by the British He was keeping track of the time to the minute and the mileage to the tenth of a mile as a good intelligence officer and good engineer always would now There were over 150 pictures that he took on the trip with a borrowed camera. He didn't know whether a single one would work every single one was a keeper Everyone and everyone is labeled on the back in his very difficult to read handwriting But they were labeled and and so I wrote some of the some of the labels on here but this is the Paris beat those are the Torah bore caves up there and Tony Streather the Mountaineer that I mentioned remembers that also those that's where Torah bore was he had been there Long before Osama bin Laden Osama bin Laden was there right after 9-11 2001 my father-in-law was there in 1943 and He wrote any strip notes in handwriting in pencil Did not appear in his type notes type report did not appear in his letters home He wrote any strip notes that this is the most potentially powerful position in the world now What in the world this is 20 miles south of where Osama bin Laden was hiding it was that it was the gateway to British invasion of India in the second and third Afghan wars Lowell Thomas used almost the same language in describing the the Bolan Pass south of Quetta, but to see this and I never well Anyhow, so the southern part of the trip was very different very different terrain very different people That guy could be there right now The the paintings there were many paintings in the original manuscript that I said in that Were we're done by my father's friend bridge partner? April Swain Thomas and They illustrate things that are could not be Because they're the color and the book is black and white. They're also their copyright of hers That I just discovered wonderful Google leaves you to things that you would never see otherwise And there they are. That's the full picture at the end of the trip. I don't it didn't take a picture of the party with the The lawn party at the end of the trip in Quetta with the governor There he is Taking a picture of awkenleck in the center holding a seapoy showing a seapoy how to hold a gun and Intelligence work continues. He did one other major trip on on a camel Which he wrote up for life magazine and like his photographs which were Purchased by the National Geographic never never made it into print But it was a trip on a camel to find out what this thing was and he found out it was actually from a liberty ship It was a life raft and it must have washed overboard because I was able to look into the record of that liberty ship which had changed his name a couple of times finished the war and And so it was not a lost liberty ship and it was a thing. It was a thing That was what British intelligence received from that place and that is very close to where the Chinese port Is being built for the Pakistanis at I can't remember the name of the town that begins with G It was just a nothing town But now it's of course a big a big port that's going to be the Chinese Entry into the Indian Ocean if all goes well for them Some other visitors who came through my father-in-law's place that just many of them Were were difficult to know just friends of friends of friends and my mother-in-law certainly knew them But these two people were identified by name That was the the beach is still there and and my father-in-law made many many interesting trips there this is to meet An excellency the governor and Lady Dow request the company of lieutenant AW Zimmerman to meet the viceroy I think you see that there But can you I think you can read I can't I can't see it from here But it but he did meet the viceroy anyway at a garden party and I can't help but wonder You know you just mentioned it in passing in one of these letters. What did they talk about? He was a very close-mouth fellow. That's of course one of the virtues of naval intelligence of an intelligence officer There's some people who talk a lot like the Alsop brothers, you know, they were they were Married into the family and they were they were very talkative They maintained their cover by pushing it away by just talking all the time my father-in-law just listened the woman on the on the left later became a Baroness after her husband inherited the title and then and she was just another bridge partner there. Oh, no, there. She was on the right The and and just among the many other pictures that he took there's something like 500 photos that that I scooped up some of them in albums some of them in Loose photos and so forth all of them difficult to to make copies of because they had to be flattened out You know they rolled up into little things like that flatten them out and copy them try again try again but among the copies there there's Pichy's place Pichy's mother was a friend of theirs Pichy was one of the 12 OSS girls The most famous of them was Julia McWilliams later Julia child at Pichy's place in In Candy Salon now Sri Lanka and there's the entrance to Mount Baton's headquarters in Sri Lanka Epilogue after the war is over both my father-in-law and mother-in-law got ulcers Difficult difficult time So he got early release from the Navy But the war was winding down, you know the Pacific War The Pacific War would be taken care of by people who are already in the Pacific and they were discharging Naval intelligence officers who had been in in the East and in Europe at that point anyhow So he got TAD for courier duty. We don't know what he said He was relieved at Karachi in April 1945 returned to the US was hospitalized and then released There they are after the war my that's one of the very few photographs of my mother my mother-in-law Gene Markey married twice more. I mentioned that Joan Bennett and and I Head of the mar before the war. He also among his other exploits was we willy-winky taken We willy-winky is Kipling story set on the Durand line sat on the border of We willy-winky is a kid transformed into a girl by Shirley Temple her first starring role and this movie was produced by Gene Markey before the war now after the war that's that's Bull Halsey there on the left He is the bull the best man when Gene Markey married the woman called the the nicest girl in Hollywood Myrna Loy and then he later married Lucille Wright who was fabulously wealthy that she was the widow who inherited the Calumet farms The Gordon Enders continued his career and as a result of the article that I published in Appalachia about this I got a call from a person who knew him when when the person who called me was a little boy He knew Gordon Enders when he worked for the NSA and he said that Gordon Enders and he gave me all the information that I needed about connection with the rest of the Enders family Bromhead You can see here finish the war was promoted died and His son who was born during the trip That my father-in-law took is now eligible if he would take it to be the sixth baronette Bromhead But he probably won't take it. It'll pass to somebody else. It's very old title and there are other other males standing in line These are my father-in-law's grandchildren and Just to tell you something about them. Let's see Tim Zimmerman here the fellow on the the right with the blue with the blue sweater Tim Is the producer of them of the movie black fish? That's now the movie about the SeaWorld That's a very very contentious movie She is married In the triangle up there with my my son and the one to my son's right is is Married a fellow who is the great-grandson of Lord Curzon small world She's died of leukemia, but I Charity Metcalfe is the is the grandson of fruity Metcalfe who married Barbara Barbara Curzon fruity Metcalfe was the pimp for Prince Edward later became King Edward when he came to Peshawar and he wrote I mean he got the title for the Victorian or royal Victorian order, but but but The the the prince who you know from from Downton Abbey You know his real skirt chaser Through his whole life Of course, he wound up having to Resign as king because he couldn't stop chasing skirts and even though his wife Was not loyal to him either. That was the way he did things when as prince he went to Peshawar he wrote of he wrote back to to To fruity Metcalfe who was send just up just a lieutenant in the Indian army Thanks for that bitch at Peshawar. Thanks for that bitch at Peshawar remembers Very very very strange world now Some quotations here That the French some of you can speak French and so you probably would do better at it than I can I cannot I cannot speak French my wife reminds me that I should never try but the word of the top means the more things change the more they stay the same and I think in many ways what we see it right now about America and In that this this trip was forgotten all these messages all the everything that was learned there could have been useful was preempted by the national security strategy that I worked with when I was at the Pentagon and that everybody had to work with that the prime Decision was Russia and Europe come across the fold of gap Everything had to be done to and everything else was secondary to that now two people have reviewed the book and they say I'm wrong You know we didn't ever forget about it, but they're they're exhibiting what what is called What Charles Thayer wrote in his book? Localitis that is to say any place you are as a diplomat you think is the most important place in the world And so these people who wrote about it, and I really appreciate the they're very careful Nice nice reviews, but when they say that that it didn't fall off our radar It really I think did fall off the radar because I know what the national security doctrine was when I was at the Pentagon I know what it is now. I have a copy of it right there. It's different now It should be different, but that that at the time our list of priorities did not include that part of the world and Everybody had to be thinking we are we are instructed in the service to think of the national structure national Security strategy as what we're supposed to each piece of the work is supposed to be done with anyhow, so Tony Strather and and Rod Angert For anybody who likes to get Netflix there are all these wonderful movies that it's almost like being there again Kim has been done twice. We really winky. It's it's it's incredible Zulu gunga den so forth That's it. Thanks a lot I'm sorry. I went over time John. I just didn't watch the clock Now I'm an old man. I'm very deaf, so I need some help. You'll be my interlocutor in case I don't hear What is the most important thing? For us to learn and or for my father-in-law to learn what my father-in-law learned We don't know he never he never said But I think what he learned is what I've said, which is that the British finally figured out that forward policy Doesn't work. You don't need to be in Afghanistan to keep the Russians out of of India the Afghans will take care of it just fine and of course they They showed that when the Russians spent ten years trying to take Afghanistan They just gave up and it caused was the final thing that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union One after another once they pulled out of Afghanistan everything unraveled. I think my father father-in-law he had he had many conversations a few of them written down about his conversations with British intelligence officers and That was their position Forward policy had been tried and failed and now the present policy was to let the Afghans take care of the border And I don't I don't doubt that he believed that that was true after he'd been there Among the things I'm sure that he was looking for were Russians Russian activities There was a lot of they were looking for Nazis Italians changed from one side to the other while he was on the trip and And and get the story of what happened the Italian were the main Operators there because the Italians were the most effective the Gestapo he mentioned no no some of this comes through in other ways Partly from the National Archives Reading State Department things partly from Thayer's books They wrote a whole lot of them partly from my father's comments But what we learned is that the the Nazis were very ineffective The Italians were really smooth and they were effective the British were The the the Russians were supplying the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India was supplying a man called the Sorry can't remember it right now, but he was like He was a mullah, okay, and he the British never were able to catch him and the And he was out of control and he was always he was always mere Ali mere Ali He's the Wikipedia tells you a lot about him and you can go from that So he was seeing all these things There were only two places that they mentioned Russia in all of his letters all of his notes One was the the difficulty that the Kazakhs had there were Kazakhs that were in the south and they were going back north Now they're going back north in the winter time That meant that there had to have been a change because ordinarily they would take the crop there are animals south in the winter, but they were going north and so There was there was no Russian activity never saw a bit of it, but I'm sure that he was looking for it the other thing that appeared in Charles Thayer just amazingly at the same time Thayer came out of Thayer was ordered out of of Kabul at this time and at Christmas same same month my father-in-law got back to Karachi Thayer came down from from Karachi went around and back up to England where he He joined the American Embassy became a member of the OSS then and then went back to Yugoslavia as the chief of mission and Thayer describes being in Eastern Afghanistan at that particular moment that my father was on just across the border They didn't they probably talked about it when they saw each other, but my father-in-law never wrote about it, of course he was looking for bear and I'm I'm a bear throughout all of his books means the Russians was not looking for the Russian bear bears and caviar Various other things that the titles of his book tell me that that particular hunt for the bear was that he was looking for Russians But he never found any I think they were not there long answers