When England was under the constant Nazi attacks and pressure, Churchill asked for a resistance plan to be put in the eventuality that the Nazi would invade England. Little is known about this resistance plan. And of course this was never used. But I find it of good defense strategy for a nation, any one of it, to have a resistance strategy parallel to the regular army.
Imagine your home land being invaded. And your home land's army forced to retreat. Now you live in an "occuped" zone. You want to do something for your country but you don't know what. You would want to resist but you don't know who you can talk to. Is my neighbor a true patriot or is he a simpatizing coward? But if you actually are already member of a resistance party, you know your people, your are trained with the regular army. Nor to perform regular army's tasks, but to collect information, deliver messages, even... transform yourself into a terrorist against the invader.
This is exactly what Albert Bachmann did during the Cold War. Here is the obituary of a very colourful persona. And food for thoughts.
Albert Bachmann, Switzerland's least effective but most colourful spymaster, whose dread of a Soviet invasion led him to create a secret intelligence service and guerrilla force unknown to the Swiss government in the 1970s, died on April 12 2011, in Cork, Ireland. He was 81.
His family, in an announcement printed in the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, said he died after a brief illness.
Bachmann, who held the rank of colonel, brought dash and panache to Swiss spy craft in his relatively brief but highly eventful leadership of Swiss military intelligence. A communist in his younger days, he became a hard-line cold warrior after the 1968 Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, which he regarded as the dress rehearsal for a full-scale invasion of western Europe.
After being appointed to run Swiss intelligence in 1976, he created Project 26 , a secret army of 2000 resistance fighters trained to wage guerrilla warfare against Soviet troops in the event of an invasion.
To ensure the survival of the Swiss state, he bought Liss Ard, a 200-acre estate near Cork, to serve as a refuge and headquarters for a government in exile and, in the basement of of its two Georgian houses, a vault for Switzerland's gold reserves.
Loyalists regarded colonel Bachmann as a fearless visionary. Others agreed with the intelligence agent who dismissed his former boss as "a glorified Boy Scout who saw evil everywhere and believed that he alone possessed the absolute truth about national defence."
Colonel Bachmann came to grief after sending one of his operatives, a management consultant named Kurt Schilling, to spy on Austrian troops carrying out maneuvers near the town of St. Polten in November 1979.
The need for cloak-and-dagger screcy was unclear, since the Austian goverment had invited observers from all over the Eastern bloc to watch the operations. Schilling, equipped with maps, binoculars and a notebook, nevertheless spent several days snooping around military barracks and command posts before the Austrian police pounced.
Called "the spy who came in from the Emmentaler", a reference to Switzerland's most famous cheese, Schilling was put on trial for espionage. His mission, he hold the court, was to gauge the ability of the Austrian Army to resist a Soviet attack.
The affaid proved deeply embarrassing to Switzerland, and colonel Bachmann was suspended. Further investigation into his activities exposed Project 26 and related initiatives.
All were a complete surprise to the Swiss defence minister, Georges-André Chevallaz, who found them so outlandish that their architect was briefly suspected of being a double agent.
Colonel Bachmann was soon forced to resign, bringing down the curtain on one of the more intriguing chapters in the history of the cold war.
After being forced into retirement in 1980, colonel Bachmann moved to Cork, where he dealt sucessfully in real estate.
"He was an amazing character with a great sense of humour - but a lot of people thought he was a retired banker and not an intelligence officer," a local resident told The Irish Independent.
Source: The New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment