GGM

The action which gave me the most immediate personal satisfaction was one I undertook just before the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. Tomás Borge, who is now the Interior Minister, asked me to think up a good way of putting pressure on Somoza to allow his wife and seven-year-old daughter to leave the Colombian Embassy in Managua where they had asked for asylum. The dictator was refusing them a safe conduct, because they were the family of no less a person than the last surviving founder-member of the Sandinista Front.

Tomás Borge and I turned the problem over for several hours until we came up with a useful point: the little girl had once had a kidney infection. We asked a doctor how her present conditions would affect this, and his answer gave us the argument we were looking for. Less than forty-eight hours later, mother and daughter were in Mexico, thanks to a safe conduct granted on humanitarian, not political, grounds.

My most discouraging case, on the other hand, was when I helped free two English bankers who’d been kidnapped by guerrillas in El Salvador in 1979. Their names were Ian Massie and Michael Chaterton, and they were going to be executed within forty-eight hours because no agreement had been reached between the two parties.

General Omar Torrijos telephoned me on behalf of the kidnapped men’s families and asked me to help save them. I relayed the message to the guerrillas through numerous intermediaries and it arrived in time. I promised to arrange for the ransom negotiations to resume immediately, and they agreed. Then I asked Graham Greene, who lives in Antibes, to make the contacts on the English side.

The negotiations between the guerrillas and the bank lasted for four months. It had been agreed that neither Graham Greene nor I would take any part in the actual negotiations but, whenever there was a hitch, one side or the other would get in contact with me to try and get the talks going again.

The bankers were freed but neither Graham Greene nor myself received a single word of thanks. It wasn’t very important, of course, but I was rather surprised. After a lot of thought, I came up with an explanation — Greene and I had arranged things so well that the English must have thought we were in cahoots with the guerrillas.