Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOSHUA KURLANTZICK writes regularly about Asia for Newsweek and the New Republic. He also contributes to Mother Jones, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, and Time. In 2007, Yale University Press published his book on China's soft power, Charm Offensive.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Praise for The Ideal Man
 
"Joshua Kurlantzick has written a sad, evocative tale of an American voyager who conquers a strange land only to be lost in it, caught between cultures and his own demons. The Ideal Man will appeal to readers of Graham Greene and The Ugly American, but it's also a timeless story of innocence and knowing too much."
--Evan Thomas, author of Sea of Thunder and The War Lovers
 
"Here is a more troubled and troubling Jim Thompson than we have previously encountered: the silk king enters the heart of darkness. After narrating the ultimate Asia hand's unrequited love affair with Thailand, this remarkable book makes Thompson's legendary and still unsolved disappearance at the height of the Cold War seem almost inevitable."
--Duncan McCargo, author of Tearing Apart the Land
 
"Woven throughout Kurlantzick's biography of Our Man in Thailand is an essential question for our times: When Washington goes on ideological rampages overseas, running wars that trample on the aspirations of the local people, no matter how hard those aspirations may be for outsiders to discern, don't these wars tend to boomerang? Doesn't cultural clumsiness undercut military power every time? Kurlantzick's glamorous protagonist, the 'silk king' Jim Thompson, saw American anticommunism wreak such havoc in Southeast Asia that it helped give rise to a later communist victory. This fascinating book will leave you wondering how often this pattern is going to be repeated, on large and small scales, in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and beyond."
--Roger Warner, author of Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos

Aus dem Klappentext

In the 1950s, U.S. foreign policy makers and intelligence agencies faced a momentous choice: Should America, as former OSS officer Jim Thompson believed, fight the Cold War by helping other nations build democratic, capitalistic futures while preserving and strengthening their traditional cultures? Or would it be more practical, as Thompson's old OSS buddy Bill Bird argued, to help local strongmen seize power and prop them up with financial and military aid in return for their staunch anticommunism and the establishment of American military bases on their soil? History makes two things perfectly clear--America chose the latter course, and anyone who disagreed with that choice, including Jim Thompson, was in serious danger.
 
In The Ideal Man, journalist and Southeast Asia expert Joshua Kurlantzick tells the compelling and tragic story of an OSS officer posted to Thailand in 1945 who fell in love with that then-remote nation and made it his home. Through this powerful lens, Kurlantzick offers insight into a pivotal moment in Cold War history that set a course for American foreign policy that is still being followed today.
 
Kurlantzick reveals that, as a civilian, Thompson epitomized all that was best about postwar America. This former society dilettante quickly discovered the disappearing Thai cottage industry of silk farming and weaving and rebuilt it into a vast new source of wealth for the nation and thousands of its workers. But Jim Thompson was leading a double life.
 
Thanks to his growing business, his passion for his new home, and his innate curiosity, Thompson had access to people and places that no other American could equal. He quickly became the go-to man for agents of the newly formed CIA. But he made no secret of his support for nationalist fighters in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, or his opposition to America's increasing military presence and support of Thai generals. Soon, he and Bill Bird found themselves on opposite sides in coups, congressional investigations, and what was, at the time, America's largest-ever covert operation.
 
Thompson's very public opposition to what had become established American policy earned him plenty of enemies, especially among Thai generals. His disappearance in 1967 became an international mystery that has fostered decades of speculation.
 
Bristling with thorny insider tales of OSS and CIA exploits, political gamesmanship, and international intrigue, The Ideal Man is ideal reading for anyone who loves history, spy stories, and behind-the-scenes accounts of how diplomatic policy decisions are made--for better or worse.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Ideal Man

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

A twenty-five-year-old Irish American from South Boston with a boxer's jaw and sharp blue eyes, Horgan had for years feared being sent to Vietnam. Back home, in his working-class neighborhood, most people disdained the Vietnam objectors who demonstrated in Harvard Yard, and since it was only early 1967, the antiwar movement had not yet built up its roar and fury. So Horgan kept his mouth shut at home, but he knew his mind. "I didn't know what we were doing there, and I certainly didn't want to fight," he said.

When Horgan finally was drafted, he didn't flee, but he snagged an assignment almost as perfect, and one that would transform his life. He was detailed as aide to Brigadier General Ed Black, commander of the headquarters of U.S. forces in Thailand, where the U.S. military launched its bombing raids into Indochina, planned its overall war strategy, and generally enjoyed all the luxuries of life unavailable in places like Danang or Cam Ranh.

In the early days of the Vietnam War, back during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the Americans serving in Thailand had come to the country on tourist visas and kept a low profile, for fear that the Thai public, so proud that its nation had never been colonized, would resent a U.S. Army presence. But by 1967, with the United States lavishing so much aid on Thailand, the Americans and the Thais had dropped that pretense, and now thousands of GIs arrived in the country every month. By 1968, the United States would have forty-six thousand troops in Thailand, housed on bases around the country.

Still, Thailand wasn't Vietnam. Instead of having firefights with the Viet Cong, Black and Horgan roamed the dusty, baked-earth Thai Northeast, site of most U.S. bases. In the Northeast, the two men toured U.S. Army outposts, shared banquets of sticky rice and grilled catfish hosted for them by village leaders, and made sure that the general found courts in every small Thai town so he could get in his regular tennis game.

Most weekends, the general and his young aide, like most men detailed to the Northeast, came to Bangkok. The Thai capital still seemed exotic to anyone who arrived from the United States. Three-wheeled pedicabs jostled for road space in the potholed streets with vendors hawking dried squid and creamy banana leaf curries and crunchy fried locusts. Monks' chanting rang out in the morning from the courtyards of temples glittering with gems inlaid in the spires.

But Bangkok was becoming more Americanized, and you could grab a real, juicy burger and a Coke over on Sukhumwit Road and then head over to Petchaburi Road's go-go bars to run through the street of brothels. By 1967, Bangkok already had such a reputation for male pleasure that the U.S. military routinely sent men exhausted from tours in Vietnam to the city for R & R tours, and Time magazine wrote, in a lengthy article on the country, "Any jewelry store on Oriental Avenue has star rubies for the asking.... Equally abundant are instantly available women." The bars filled up with young Thai women from the countryside with sweet round faces and hard, flinty eyes; they latched on to the GIs' clothing as the men walked past, the start of a long night of negotiation.

Barhopping for girls wasn't Ed Black's style. Generals didn't do that, at least not where enlisted men could see them, and being a general had always been Ed Black's dream. A squat-shouldered, square-jawed man with hair brushed straight back, and with a nose that seemed to have been flattened against his face, Black stood spine-stiffeningly straight and looked like the answer to a casting call from an army recruitment advertisement. Even now, in his sixties, the general completed his daily regimen of push-ups every night, no matter where he and Horgan bunked.

The army had been his life since he had enlisted more than twenty years earlier, in the days before World War II. The general hadn't risen as quickly as he had hoped—his blunt speaking style and love of press conferences didn't exactly endear him to the higher brass, and Horgan sometimes wondered if the general had picked him as an aide just because Horgan had once worked as a journalist—but Black had now made it to a command in a real hot war. He had a wife, who would join him in Thailand, but for now he was alone in the country, his time filled only with the lives of other men and the vast details of managing a massive military buildup.

Without bars on the agenda, when the general and his aide came to Bangkok, they stayed instead at the antique teakwood mansion of Jim Thompson, one of Black's oldest friends. This weekend, like most, the routine at Thompson's residence varied little. As the sun began to set in the soupy, hundred-degree Bangkok heat, Jim Thompson arrived home from his silk shop over at the Suriwong Road business district, and Black and Horgan joined a seemingly endless parade of guests for a tour of the house and of Thompson's enormous art collection, for scotches on the veranda, and then for dinner.

Horgan did not have much familiarity with American high society, but he knew enough to know that he should be impressed by Thompson's guests: Eleanor Roosevelt, the du Ponts, Truman Capote, various counts and countesses, and marquises. Each time Horgan showed up at Jim's house with the general, some other famous person would be joining them for dinner.

As the dinner crowd sat down on the terrace—passing through rooms surrounded by bronze Buddha heads, Ming bowls, and Burmese tapestries inlaid with gold leaf—the out-of-town visitors, always overdressed for the Bangkok weather, oohed over Thompson's food and offered quick, uncomfortable bows back to the retinue of servants who saluted Thompson and his guests with the hands-together Thai gesture known as the wai. Black and Horgan knew that dinner would just be ordinary curries and steamed rice, bought by the houseboy Yee from some street vendors nearby for less than twenty-five cents a dish.

Still, no one really came to Jim Thompson's house for the food. They came for Jim Thompson. By 1967, Jim Thompson did not just manage his extravagant house; he was the curator of another exhibit: his own legend. The best-known American in Asia, he lived the life that all these visitors to his house wished for. Now sixty years old, Jim was not very physically memorable upon first meeting: a soft putty chin, a permanently tanned and creased face from years in the Thai sun, thinning sandy hair, an eggplant nose and a high brow, bright blue eyes, a simple white shirt and khakis, and delicate soft hands—usually wrapped around a cigarette, against his doctor's advice.

Unlike some expatriates, he never boasted, or at least it did not seem like boasting. The scion of an old, wealthy Delaware family, raised alongside the du Ponts and the Rockefellers, Jim still spoke with a clipped, boarding-school accent, and he still knew that it was bad manners to tout your money, your connections, and your adventures; perhaps his life as a spy had made him naturally secretive, too. Thompson might actually have loved flattery, but when people praised him, he played...