roadrunner

Misleading and Self-aggrandizing

Revisado: 09-22-22

Read between the lines of this smarmy, self-aggrandizing and bloated memoir and you'll encounter a rogue soldier of Richard Nixon's ill-conceived 'war on drugs' who, if he wasn't an agent actually facilitating the opium trade in Afghanistan, manifestly did not put much of a dent in it. He seems to get his kicks busting dope-smoking hippies and retail drug dealers more than the big suppliers of hard-core drugs. His previous role as a CIA agent in the notorious Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia raises questions, since we know that the CIA was involved in the drug trade during his time there. Soon after he arrived in Kabul he frightened his BNDD superior out of town, as he glibly describes in Chapter 2, and proceeded to carve out his own niche as an outlaw in the demimonde of Afghan drug lords, apparently with the winking support of Ambassador Neumann. He claims to have had 'little or no supervision', which begs the question, who was he really working for?

He displays his sadistic sense of humor as he describes an associate in Kabul breaking the finger of a harmless hippy. In Chapter 3 he tells a preposterous story of USIS teachers selling cocaine to their students. I find the story absurd because I was working in Afghanistan during Burke's time there, and was quite familiar with the USIS agency. The punch line of his fabricated tale is that US citizens can not expect their embassies abroad to accord them the same basic rights they enjoy back home.

As someone who knew Kabul in 1971-72 and spoke Farsi well, I can attest that his descriptions of the city are often inaccurate. He shows utter disdain for Afghan people and culture, and the snide, arrogant voice of the narrator, rife with mispronunciations of place names, perfectly complements the sarcastic and preening tone of the text.

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