- George Galloway: My encounter with a Quiet American Archived Message
Posted by Tomski
on May 29, 2019, 1:13 pm
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In the wee small hours of the morning, last week in Kazakhstan, my wife and I encountered every hotel guest’s worst nightmare. Asleep in our night clothes we both woke to the sound of someone trying to enter our room. First, a gentle then ever-more forceful turning of the handle. Then, the unmistakable noise of a shoulder repeatedly thumping against our door – the strength of which we had no way of knowing. With estimable alacrity Mrs. Galloway was out of bed like a shot and hurling anything and everything with wheels in front of the door. The barricade built, she was then on the phone to the front desk calling for help, not the easiest thing to communicate in the middle of the night in Almaty as you can imagine. Being ‘the man of the house’ I could really only offer brute force, with my two hands applying countervailing pressure on the door (which was beginning to literally bend) and my brute Scottish accent demanding the interloper cease and desist (or Scottish street words to that effect). Of course I looked through the spyhole in the door and could see enough to be sure that this was no nightmare, this was a clear and present human danger. The man was refusing to lift his head so I could see his face but was growling back at me in a clearly American accent through the door. My wife then (sensibly) asked whether my standing in front of the door was the best idea: “he might have a pistol” after all, she reminded me. “That’s a bit alarmist,” I replied, but no sooner than those words had left my throat when the man – alerted by the running of the security team towards him – finally stopped pushing and stood up straight, revealing himself to be no less than ‘Jim’ Woolsey, the former head of the CIA. So, he might have had a pistol after all (or he may just have been pleased to see me). Certainly he was dressed for action: a black under-vest, a pair of trousers, and fully laced up shoes. As soon as help arrived on the scene I tore open the door and stepped out seeking an explanation but as the one-time head of the most dangerous intelligence organisation on the earth was being led away, effectively under arrest, all I could hear him protest were the words “I am Ambassador Jim Woolsey” over and over again. And to think I’d been scared to run into President Donald Trump’s right hand man Steve Bannon that day… I’d been in the Kazakh city of Almaty to debate with the now-free radical populist, former head of the Trump presidential campaign (and others), and had fully expected it to be a short-sword encounter. Although in some ways similar – Bannon and me are both of tough working-class Irish backgrounds – I am a man of the left and he is of the right. Some media outlets have said I am far-left and he is far-right though in my case that is by no-means true. And in his case, a viewing of the debate will lead you to conclude that if he represents the far right it is very far from conservative. Etc. |
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