4
Wheeling & Dealing in War & Peace

      "Early in the war my parents and I were evacuated to Plymouth, where a big naval base is located. It was a highly foolish place to be evacuated to. We stayed there for a year until we were bombed out. Nothing had happened in London. We went back to London and then the massive bombings started. The rest of my early life was spent in air raid shelters."

      After the war John decided that he wanted to become a veterinary surgeon. Although the University of Edinburgh accepted him, they couldn't place him for a couple years because the returning veterans had priority. So he did the next best thing. He persuaded Burroughs Wellcome Company to take him on in veterinary medicine research. But it didn't pan out; he left the field after two years.

      Meanwhile John had developed a burning desire to see the world. Being low on funds, he prevailed on his father, who was managing Shell's tanker fleet from London, to find him a crewing slot. This turned out to be a pivotal point in John's life. When he got to Kenya, he decided to stay with some farmers, friends of his grandparents, and earn some money before resuming his travels. Initially he was hired as an assistant manager of a 6,000-acre mixed farm in the highlands of Kenya. Soon the manager left and John, at the tender age of twenty, became the new manager.

      But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make the farm turn a profit. So he borrowed one thousand pounds, and with another thousand pounds from the farmer, they started a joint venture: a cannery and cheese factory.

      The farm never made money and was sold off. But the factory thrived and was named Doinyo Lessos Creameries, Ltd. (Named after a Masai Chief Lessos, who valiantly fought the British at the turn of the century.)

      "I have been the chairman of that company ever since. It has expanded and is now the biggest cheese factory in Kenya. We make most of the emergency rations for the Kenyan armed forces. It is a very successful little enterprise. My partner, Brian Cuthbert, runs it. I go there twice a year to tell him how I think it should be done. But he does it his way and knows far better than I on how to do it."

      In 1952 the Mau Mau insurgency started in Kenya. The British needed volunteers to control it. The local authorities notified John and his partner that one of them would need to join the police force. Since his partner had a young son and John was single, John joined, and for a month served as a policeman.

      A call went out for District Officers (D.O.), John volunteered and became the D.O. of the Kikuyu Guard in charge of security, surrounding Nairobi, Kenya's capital.

      "I was very fortunate because during my first two years I was one of three from some four thousand selected to join her Majesty's oversees civil service. I became a permanent and pensionable civil servant.

      "I stayed as a D.O. and had a very exciting time of it. Ambushes were frequent. We were often shot at. Lost quite a few of my men, but survived myself without a scratch. But there were a lot of close calls."

      John Golds, as a the leader of the British counterinsurgentcy effort against the Mau Mau, told me that he wanted to correct an important historical misconception:

      "Most people think of the Mau Mau as having been entirely anti-European. That wasn't the case at all. It was very much the Kikuyu tribe settling old scores and long-festering land disputes. Although there are no precise statistics on the casualties, best estimates are that approximately 20,000 Mau Mau died during those four years. Ten thousand loyalist Kikuyu tribesman that supported the British government perished in the conflict. And the European fatalities in the insurrection? Only eighty-one! Forty-one of these died through accidents on operations, driving their cars too fast, bungling into their own ambushes... So only forty Europeans were actually killed by the Mau Mau. But if you had heard all the world publicity at that time, you might have been convinced that the figures were the other way around."

      When people ask "What was the most valuable thing you have done in your life?" John doesn't talk about his war exploits; he describes his new duties when relative peace returned to Kenya.

      "I was appointed to do what was known as land consolidation. LC was very simply this: for the Africans of Kenya, the system of inheritance is that every little piece of land is divided up between all their children. If a family has five different pieces and five children, each of these pieces of land is divided up into five pieces. So as you can imagine, what might have started out as 20 acres of land rapidly became a mixture of tiny little pieces. Some of them in fact were just a few feet square. So the government started a system to measure everyone's piece of land, establish who really owned it and then they lost the rights to this land but gained the rights to a similar piece all together in one place with a full title deed, which was a negotiable document. I did this for two years and I measured up with my surveyors something like five million little pieces of land and converted them to about 200,000 title deeds.

      "During my regular visits to my cheese factory I used to stop by and have dinner at the Nakura railway station restaurant with a young, aspiring politician, named Moi, who is now President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya. That has not been unhelpful in my life."

      Then John was briefly appointed as secretary to Kenya's first black cabinet minister.

      "Because he was the first black cabinet minister he was invited all over the world and I wrote speeches for him, sometimes three or four a day. One, say, was for the Boy Scouts, the next dealt with health, the third on something entirely different. A huge range of subjects, which neither of us knew anything about."

      This "glamorous" assignment came to a screeching halt when John was reassigned to be the District Commissioner (D.C.) for Wadjir, the northern part of Kenya, covering an area about the size of Great Britain. He was responsible for patrolling a thousand-mile border with Somalia and Ethiopia.

      "Slowly, as independence got closer and closer for Kenya, the last thing that the indigenous, ethnic Somalis, who were Muslims, wanted was to become part of an independent Kenya. Suddenly I found myself involved in an even bloodier emergency than the Mau Mau. The Somalis even put a price on my head. It was jihad - a holy war for them.

      "The Muslims were rising up against the Kenyan government which at that time was still under British control. We had three years of bloody confrontations. Yet, virtually my entire staff was Somali. I only had eleven Europeans all together. I had to control an area the size of Great Britain with a staff of two hundred regular police, 185 tribal police and a camel corps of thirty-five. It was a real battle. We were ambushed frequently. I remember somebody taking a picture of me sitting in a Land Rover after one of those attacks when it was full of bullet holes. Fortunately I wasn't hit. The years '62 and '63 were extremely violent.

      "Another incident occurred when one of our border police post was attacked. There had been heavy rains. I went off to their aid in a single engine Beaver aircraft with six of my tribal police, who had never flown before. As we landed, the plane turned upside down on the slick, water logged strip.

      "No sooner had we extricated ourselves from the plane than we were attacked. After a fire fight we managed to drive off the invaders. Then we were wondering how we were going to get out of this place. We turned the plane, which didn't seem to be too badly damaged, right side up. The pilot, after checking it out, thought that we could get off. We roared down the water logged, improvised runway, clipped trees at the end of the strip, with foliage flying in every direction, just managing to get airborne.

      "When we got back closer to headquarters we didn't know whether the undercarriage had been damaged or not. We eventually landed with the wheels collapsing just as we were coming to a full stop. Miraculously none of us was injured. About this time one of my tribal policeman said to me: 'Boss, we've never understood before why you enjoyed flying so much. Now we know. It really is exciting. We loved it.'

      "Kenya gained its independence in December, 1963. My intention was to take six months of leave. I flew to Stockholm. While sitting in the Stockholm Opera House, I heard my name being paged. I was told that my New Zealand successor, the person who was acting in my behalf, had been assassinated and my orders were to return to Kenya forthwith.

      "When I came back I found out that not only my successor but my number two was assassinated as well. So the battle went on. It was mainly instigated and supported by the Somali government. They had even put a price on my head to anyone who would do me in. I was furious because it was only 500 British pounds, that's 750 U.S. dollars. Admittedly that was thirty years ago, but even so I did think I was worth rather more than that. Anyway they had five goes at me and I'm glad to say that each time they missed."

      During this period John became a celebrity of sorts, with CBS doing a twenty-minute segment and a magazine doing a lavish spread, with dozens of photos, one with a flag flapping in the foreground, setting off a military formation and captioned: "The Union Jack flutters over sun-backed Wajir as village police and dubas, or tribal police, form for a sundown inspection by John Golds, the District Commissioner. But one day soon the D.C. shown above on a safari with his dubas, will vanish, along with the flag, as independence comes to Kenya." The article is titled "End of the Road for a Kenya D.C. - A Flag Still Flies in a Setting Sun."

      The next stage of John's life was initiated by his former boss, Sir Evelyn Baring (subsequently Lord Harwick) and former governor of Kenya. He had now become chairman of CDC (Commonwealth Development Corporation). CDC is involved with commercial overseas aid to underdeveloped countries. John was asked to join his organization.

      "Six weeks later I was in Guyana, South America. Initially I didn't even know where it was; I had to look it up on the map. Among my duties as CDC's representative in Guyana was being the managing director of the biggest sawmill in the world, named Guyana Timbers. We were building 3,000 low-cost houses a year. We had our own mortgage companies. I did that for about three years, before I was promoted to comptroller for the Caribbean, covering fourteen islands. During that period I spent most of my time in a little plane flying all over the Caribbean and investing CDC monies to further economic development.

      In 1970, mysteriously, John's civil service career came to a screeching halt. "For a year I became the highest paid office boy in London, doing nothing, but sitting in the head office waiting for a job assignment. Finally, I decided that I was bored enough and took an early retirement.

      "What do I do now? My real intention was to go back to Kenya. My cheese factory was flourishing. I had a very nice house on the coast of Kenya. But events intervened once again. I was offered three positions in the Caribbean. One was managing director of the Mustique Company which operates that island. The second was managing director of Cap Estate, the largest retirement community in St. Lucia. The third was the operation of the Caribbean holdings of Ocean Transport and Training, a world-wide conglomerate.

      "I thought about these three jobs and at a dinner with the three chief executives, who had offered them, I told them 'If you like I'll do all three of these jobs, but I'm not interested in doing one.' So I was hired for all three of these positions. I in turn appointed three managers to run the day-to-day operations. Then I spent another period dashing around in little planes. I'm still consultant for the Mustique Company. In the case of Cap Estate and Ocean Transport I thought the investors would be better off if we sold off the companies. And that's what we eventually did."

      John's operations room is on the third level of his condominium at Rodney Bay, St. Lucia, which has a slip in the back for his 46-foot yacht Lessos III. John starts out each morning with a brisk walk even though he claims to be a card-carrying member of Athletes Anonymous - an apocryphal group that spurns exercise.

      When he is not traveling to oversee his far-flung enterprises in Kenya, England and the Washington D.C. area (where he is developing retirement housing), John's passions are sailing, dining, opera and vacationing. He manages to squeeze in a fortnight of salmon fishing in Scotland each year and takes off occasionally to sail the inner passages along the coast of Alaska to watch whales, polar bears, eagles and mountain sheep. He partakes in safaris to observe gorillas and other wild life in Zaire. Australia and southern France are some of his other favorite spots.

      He was engaged once to a leading architect in Kenya who had designed many of the game lodges there. Presumably because of their heavy travel schedules they never got around to getting married. Sadly, on one trip her plane crashed into a mountain, killing her.

      "I should admit to the one really major mistake in my life. About ten years ago I became what we call a "name" in Lloyd's of London, which of course has been suffering huge losses over the last four years.    Under this arrangement each "name" or member has unlimited financial responsibility for Lloyd's losses.

      "It's a wonderful idea when Lloyd's is making profits. It's not so good when it is sustaining losses. I have been more fortunate than most people: I lost more than I can afford but I haven't lost more than I can pay."

A footnote to history: Since John Golds has had vast experience in dealing successfully with the Somalis when he was the District Commissioner in Wajir, twelve months prior to my interview with him, the U.S. State Department sought his help on the dicey situation the American and U.N. Forces found themselves in during the recent Somali operation. Instead of following the game plan John Golds spelled out in his report to the State Department, the U.S. and U.N. Armed Forces made a fatal strategic error. They tried to superimpose their will directly on the Somalis, rather than through native intermediaries, thereby going totally against the cultural grain. From then on the Somali operation was all downhill: one disaster followed another.