Friday - May 06, 2011

an obit but … a bit unusual. take a look.

An unusual obituary cos parts reads funny. Actually, a sort of Inspector Clouseau without meaning to be.

Colonel Albert Bachmann (RIP)

Colonel Albert Bachmann, who has died aged 81, was Switzerland’s best-known and most paranoid spymaster, in a country that traditionally has no enemies and refrains from foreign entanglements.

Mustachioed, pipe-smoking and blessed with an ability to wreak havoc within his own organisation, Bachmann’s resemblance to Inspector Clouseau was striking; by the time his plots and schemes were uncovered by an astonished commission of inquiry, he had reduced the Swiss military intelligence agency, in which he had mysteriously managed to rise to a senior role, to a state bordering on chaos, not to mention bankruptcy. So catastrophic was his impact that, when he was finally unmasked, many assumed he must be a double agent. He was not.

His most controversial, some would say delusional, acts occurred between 1976 and 1979, when he took charge of top-secret operations for Switzerland’s military intelligence force, the Untergruppe Nachrichtendienst der Armee (UNA). Though Bachmann had flirted with communism in his student days, he was by then a fanatical Cold Warrior, and brought the zeal of the convert to the fight against the Soviet Union.

His first significant move was to buy a country estate in Ireland for use by a Swiss government-in-exile in the event of a Soviet invasion. His second bold step was Projekt-26 (P-26), the creation of a clandestine army of Swiss guerrillas trained in weaponry, bombing and assassination techniques to repel the dreaded Soviet attack.
The problem was that neither the Irish venture nor the secret anti-Soviet army had been officially authorised, and were the fruits of what Bachmann called his “initiative”. Others would come to call it insubordination or even fantasy.

But neither plan stalled Bachmann’s rise. Indeed, his intelligence career was curtailed only after a top-level investigation into an operation he sanctioned in 1979 that deeply embarrassed Switzerland and Austria — friendly neighbours with the same neutral status and few if any military secrets to hide from one another.

In November that year, Austrian troops on manoeuvres in the city of St Pölten tapped on the window of a parked car at 2.30am and were surprised to find inside not a courting couple but a Swiss management consultant called Kurt Schilling.
Schilling, an expert time-and-motion man but an inept spy, was sitting in the front seat with binoculars, map and notepad, staring into the darkness. He had been ordered there, he was happy to recount, by Bachmann, his case officer.
When Schilling asked the soldiers for particulars about their positions, they marched him straight to the state police. His arrest on charges of spying for information freely available to Swiss and other foreign observers at the manoeuvres was portrayed in the press as worthy of a comic opera.

At his subsequent trial for espionage, it emerged that Schilling had been seeking to establish how long Austria could hold out in the event of a Soviet invasion. Taking account of the botched execution of his mission, the court leniently sentenced him to a suspended five-month term and deportation back to Switzerland.

The press mocked Schilling as “the spy who came in from the Emmenthaler”, after Switzerland’s famous cheese. But it was Bachmann’s career that never recovered. In the wake of the Schilling debacle, it became clear that Bachmann and his department were out of control. His boss was forced to resign, and Bachmann himself – exposed as a loose cannon, unchecked and unregulated – was consigned to early retirement.

read more here

Posted by peiper     on 05/06/2011 at 11:28 AM   
Filed Under: • OBITITUARIES •  
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