Volume 22, Number 4 · March 20, 1975
Million Dollar Yeggs
By Alexander Cockburn
Vesco
by Robert A. Hutchinson
Praeger, 376 pp., $9.95
In 1939 a British businessman of my acquaintance was sent by the Department of Economic Warfare to Ankara. His mission was to buy up certain Turkish commodities of strategic value and thus deny them to the Germans. Generously supplied with cash, he went to work with a will. But he began to find his patriotic labors impeded at every turn by the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, a person subsequently best remembered for having had the misfortune to employ a German spy as his valet. The businessman tried to explain to Sir Hughe the strategic importance of his activities. The ambassador brushed his explanations aside. 'Don't speak to me of commerce and finance, sir,' he impatiently exclaimed. 'It goes in one ear and out the other.'
Review, 4132 words
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