41. Cold Sunset with William Boyd

Do you know what was also wonderful about that was Gabriel Dax chatting to a member of the United Fruit Company and taking the piss out of him.

I think he says, the United Fruit man says something like, didn't you know that bananas are number four in the...

I tell you what I laughed.

I was reading it late at night and I laughed long and half about 10 minutes and annoyed my wife.

What are the

other three?

Yeah, exactly.

He doesn't answer.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, it's a

great way of making fun of these, these people who were, you know, uh, involved in these really shady.

There's quite a lot of humor in the books as well, you know, um, and, um, it's not just all, um, dark and dangerous work in this being our game, but, uh, no united fruit company uh would if they were unhappy with the government would just ask for ask the president of the united states to get rid of that person and in guatemala in particular it happened several times you know um and that was the original banana republic hence the name you know because they grew millions and millions of bananas there But the country was effectively run by this enormous U.S. enterprise, United Fruit Company.

And they didn't want anybody getting in the way of the flow of dollars.

So they quite ruthlessly and efficiently got rid of governments that they didn't like.

And that included Eisenhower.

Harry Truman, JFK, they all signed off on these regime changes.

And we saw Trump do it in Venezuela just a few months ago.

So it's the history of CIA meddling in Central American, South American politics in the Cold War in the 1960s is just mind-blowing.

Well, they're trying it, I mean, with Iran at the moment as well.

It's slightly less well thought through.

No, it's the Iran thing.

You can't bomb a country into submission.

Hitler tried it with Britain and failed, and so did we with our bombing raids on German cities in World War II.

But you can decapitate, as the word, is now you can decapitate a leader.

And in the very first novel, Gabriel's Noon, I look at the assassination of Patrice Lubumba in the Congo.