阅读弗农·阿·沃尔特斯 Vernon A. Walters在小说之家的作品!!! | |||
弗农·阿·沃尔特斯，美国人。美国中央情报局前副局长。
作者从五十年代起，曾担任美国历届总统翻译，并陪同他们多次参加首脑会议和其它重要出访活动，还曾陪同马歇尔、哈里曼等政界重要人士参加一些外交活动。一九六八年至一九七二年，在他担任驻法国武官期间，奉尼克松总统和总统国家安全事务助理基辛格之命，负责安排美国与中国、越南的秘密谈判。
《秘密使命》本书是美国中央情报局前副局长弗农·阿·沃尔特斯的回忆录。选择了本书中有关外交活动及其它重要事件的章节，辑录翻译出版。书中所描述的都是历史上关键时刻的情况，作者以其亲身经历提供了背景情况、侧面材料以及外交场合的趣闻、秘闻等，具有一定的史料参考价值。
六年战争使整个欧洲陷于瘫痪。德国的长期占领，盟军的轰炸和解放前夕的激战，几乎把这个大陆摧毁殆尽。一九四八年，笼罩着欧洲的气氛只是一片绝望。历届政府接踵倒台，持续不断几个严冬，特别是欧洲人深感不能从这个泥潭中自拔的心情，严重地动摇了欧洲各国人民复兴本国的决心。
欧洲工业设施被摧毁，大批熟练工人由于战争而四处分散；经历了六年紧张的战时生产，机器设备已经破料不过，而且缺乏零件；所有这些问题使欧洲各国无法自行补充机床，更新设施或生产足够的商品来偿付恢复工业所需要的原料。可以作为新的投资或用以重建工厂的资金少得可怜。大部分欧洲货币不是不能兑换，就是按完全不合理的汇率兑换。对货币流通实行财政限制的情况几乎普遍存在。各国都企图关起门来自己搞建设，对于邻国在干些什么都不很关心。战争已结束三年，食物还几乎到处都实行配给。由于交通中断和分配制度失灵，农业机械化不足和肥料短缺，欧洲各国经济的生产率普遍下降。
Background
Walters was born in New York City. His father was a British immigrant and insurance salesman. From age 6, Walters lived in Britain and France with his family. At 16, he returned to the United States and worked for his father as an insurance claims adjuster and investigator.
His formal education beyond elementary school consisted entirely of boarding school instruction at Stonyhurst College, a 400-year-old Jesuit school in Lancashire, England. He did not attend a university. In later years, he seemed to enjoy reflecting on the fact that he had risen fairly high and accomplished much despite a near-total lack of formal academic training.
He was fluent in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese as well as his native English. He also spoke German fluently but, as he joked, inaccurately, and knew the basics of several others. His simultaneous translation of a speech by United States President Richard Nixon in France prompted French President Charles de Gaulle to say to Nixon, "You gave a magnificent speech, but your interpreter was eloquent."
Military career
1940s and 50
Walters joined the Army in 1941 and was soon commissioned. He served in Africa and Italy during World War II. He served as Link Official Between the commands of Brazilian Expeditionary Force and U.S. Fifth Army, earning medals for distinguished military and intelligence achievements.
His served as an aide and interpreter for several Presidents. He was at President Harry S. Truman's side as an interpreter in key meetings with America’s Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin American allies. His language skills helped him win Truman's confidence, and he accompanied the President to the Pacific in the early 1950s, serving as a key aide in Truman's unsuccessful effort to reach a reconciliation with an insubordinate General Douglas MacArthur, the Commander of United Nations forces in Korea.
In Europe in the 1950s, Walters served President Dwight Eisenhower and other top US officials as a translator and aide at a series of NATO summit conferences. He also worked in Paris at Marshall Plan headquarters and helped set up the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe. He was with then-Vice President Nixon in 1958 when an anti-American crowd stoned their car in Caracas, Venezuela. Walters suffered facial cuts from flying glass. The Vice President avoided injury.
1960
In the 1960s, Walters served as a U.S. military attaché in France, Italy, and Brazil. Two decades later he was a high-profile U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. From April 1989 until August 1991, during German Reunification, he was Ambassador to West Germany. He also served as a roving ambassador, performing sensitive diplomatic missions that included talks in Cuba, Syria, and elsewhere. He was sent to Morocco to meet discreetly with PLO officials and warn them against any repetition of the 1973 murders of two American diplomats in the region. (In a much earlier visit to Morocco, he had given a ride on a tank to a young boy who later became King Hassan II.)
While serving as a military attaché in Paris from 1967 to 1972, Walters played a role in secret peace talks with North Vietnam. He arranged to smuggle National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger into France for secret meetings with a senior North Vietnamese official, and then smuggle him out again. He accomplished this by borrowing a private airplane from an old friend, French President Georges Pompidou.
1970
President Nixon appointed Walters as Deputy Director for Central Intelligence (DDCI) in 1972. (Walters also served as Acting DCI for two months in mid-1973.) During his four years as DDCI, he worked closely with four successive Directors as the Agency—and the nation—confronted such major international developments as the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the subsequent oil crisis, the turbulent end of the Vietnam conflict, and the Chilean military coup against the Allende government. According to a close colleague, Walters also "averted a looming catastrophe" for the CIA in connection with the Watergate scandal:
Despite numerous importunings from on high, [Walters] flatly refused to...cast a cloak of national security over the guilty parties. At the critical moment, he... refused to involve the Agency, and bluntly informed the highest levels of the executive [branch] that further insistence from that quarter would result in his immediate resignation. And the rest is history.
Walters himself reflected on those challenging days in his 1978 autobiography, Silent Missions:
I told [President Nixon’s White House counsel] that on the day I went to work at the CIA I had hung on the wall of my office a color photograph showing the view through the window of my home in Florida…When people asked me what it was, I told them [this] was what was waiting [for me] if anyone squeezed me too hard.
Diplomatic career
Beginning in 1981, Walters served under Ronald Reagan as roving ambassador. He was then United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 1985 to 1989 and ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1989 to 1991. Here he was responsible on behalf of the United States for the preparations of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.
Retirement and death
During the 1990s, after he had retired from public life, Walters worked as a business consultant and was active on the lecture circuit. He wrote another book, The Mighty and the Meek (published in 2001), which profiled famous people with whom he had worked during his life. In 2001, he gave an interview (in French language) in the mockumentary Dark side of the Moon by William Karel.
On November 18, 1991, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush.
Walters died in 2002. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
In popular culture
Walters was portrayed by Garrick Hagon in the 2002 BBC production of Ian Curteis's controversial The Falklands Play.