3

In Like Flynn

We never endured another trip to Chiang Khong. The thirty days came and went without a call from Phoumano Nosavan. The Lao contacts had melted into the misty far shore of the Mekong, never to be heard from again. Rule number two: Nothing was what it seemed. Not even the indisputable Carr photo, which turned out to be a world-class hoax perpetrated by unknown parties, although Bailey and Phoumano topped the Pentagon’s list of suspects. The startling picture was not of Donald Carr, the MIA Green Beret, but of his doppelgänger, Gunther Dittrich, an East German expatriate who lived the low life in Bangkok as a smuggler of exotic birds.

In late October 1991, as the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was to begin its fifteen-month, two-million-dollar inquiry (it would eventually come down conclusively on the side of inconclusiveness), my “curtainraiser” series on Jay Sullivan’s travels, “On the POW Trail,” ran for three days and for over two hundred column inches in the Boston Herald. The stories generated scores of telephone calls. A haunted Special Forces veteran claimed to have been part of a 1969 search to “terminate” two MIAs in Cambodia. From a pay phone, a nervous Lao refugee said he had a friend back home, a prison-camp guard, who knew where dozens of American POWs were held in caves. A Bayonne, New Jersey, conspiracy theorist argued that a CIA hit team had killed Elvis Presley: the King, an Army vet, was about to throw his considerable weight and prestige behind the POW/MIA cause.

And then there was the call from Bernard J. “Barry” Flynn, III.

“Vinnie Arnone is a fat tub of shit!” Flynn blurted by way of introduction. Arnone, an Army veteran and former Boston-area private eye who had resettled in Ubon Ratchathani in northeastern Thailand and now worked as a “security consultant,” had merited a single, innocuous paragraph in my POW series. Arnone had had a small role in Operation Lazarus, a 1982 cross-border raid into Laos organized by Bo Gritz.

“Vinnie Arnone is a liar and a thief!” Flynn continued. “He never crossed the Mekong. He can barely cross the Patpong!”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard disparaging words about the balding, bespectacled Arnone. As if to back his charges, Flynn offered his bona fides. His father had been the Massachusetts State Police detective who had investigated the Chappaquiddick accident involving Senator Edward M. Kennedy and campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne. Flynn went on to describe a vitae as colorful as it was farfetched: minor Hollywood actor in television dramas such as “Room 222” and “Medical Center”; aide to billionaire Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and his son, Mohamed; Bangkok station chief for Bo Gritz. Flynn said he now lived in northern Thailand, where he was persona non grata for his association with Khun Sa, the Shan rebel commander–cum-druglord, and tried to pay the bills by brokering rubies smuggled from the famed gem mines of northern Burma. “I’m charged by the Thai with crimes from drug running to murder to arms smuggling,” Flynn said. “They’re all lies.”

He was passing through his hometown, New Bedford, a depressed fishing port with a burgeoning heroin problem, when he read my story. Flynn promised to call again before he returned to Thailand and his home in the ancient city of Chiang Mai, four hundred miles north of Bangkok. He never did. And when I tried the New Bedford number he had left me, it was no longer in service. Flynn had disappeared into Southeast Asia, I imagined, to dodge Thai immigration and cook deals with Burmese insurgents. Here was a character born of a collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Hunter S. Thompson: the mysterious farang who lived in the last house on the river, who got by on brash charm and clever guile, who consorted with billionaires, soldiers of fortune, and opium warlords. I wanted more. I was hooked.

Nine fallow months would follow before my next fix.

Then, in July 1992, a handwritten letter landed on my desk. Faxed by Flynn, who was still at large in Chiang Mai, the scroll contained the words any reporter would love to read: “Anytime you want to visit the General you are welcomed.” Here was a chance to interview one of the world’s most-wanted men, to tramp again through lush jungles, as I had done for hours as a child in Panama, imagining myself a conquistador, a buccaneer, an archeologist. From the tone of Flynn’s communication, scheduling an interview with Khun Sa would be a breeze, no more difficult than arranging a sit-down Q & A with a TV personality on a promotional tour. Over the next eighteen months, I would learn just how lengthy, costly, and maddening a process “anytime” could be.

It seemed a good idea to check up on Flynn, whose résumé sounded too good, too surreal, to be true. I didn’t know any Thai or Shan nationals in Boston who could vouchsafe for his character, but Flynn’s father, now retired from the state police and living on Cape Cod, backed his son’s story.

“He’s telling you the truth when he talks about these people and what he’s done,” marveled Flynn père. “I went out to Hollywood in 1982 and he introduced me to well-known actresses and they all knew him, which amazed me. I’m talking about people you’ve seen in the movies in the last ten years. It’s absolutely incredible, and I’ve been around. I shake my head in bewilderment.”

In her neat, wood-frame house on the west side of New Bedford, Debbie Flynn, a local junior-high teacher, showed me snapshots of her fancy-free brother. Her mother, she said, had similar pictures of Barry in a scrapbook entitled “I Can’t Believe It.” There were pictures of Barry in the French Riviera aboard the Nabila, the yacht Adnan Khashoggi had named after his daughter, and aloft in the billionaire’s private jet over Utah. Pictures of Barry with 1979 Playmate of the Year Monique St. Pierre. Of Barry in a scene from “Columbo.” Of Barry in the jungles of Burma with General Khun Sa.

“He’s not a nine-to-five person,” said Debbie Flynn of her brother.

“I’ve been around,” said actor Paul Cavonis, a friend of Flynn’s since the early 1970s. “I’ve known a lot of people and the most interesting madman I ever met was Barry Flynn. No one surprises me more, time after time, than Barry. His survival skills are incredible.”

In A Nation Betrayed, his self-published screed alleging a massive cover-up by the federal government about evidence of live POWs in Southeast Asia and the involvement of U.S. officials in the heroin trade, Bo Gritz described Flynn as his Bangkok station chief. But Lance E. Trimmer, a former Green Beret who served as a member of Gritz’s Operation Lazarus missions to Laos, offered a less-than-ringing character reference of his former cohort.

“Barry Flynn?”

The incredulity came through all the way from Great Falls, Montana, where Trimmer hung his shingle as a private investigator and bounty hunter.

“Jesus Christ! He’s working with Khun Sa, selling gems. He’s a fucking wacko. I don’t know how he’s lived so long.”

The secret to survival, it seemed, was constant movement. Flynn was out of touch with me until September 1992, when he called collect from Chiang Mai International Airport. Because of fighting in Burma, he said, Thai troops were positioned all along the border, effectively sealing the smuggling trails to Khun Sa’s camp. We could still go to Shan State, he offered, but we would have to ride horseback through China and Burma. That meant somehow getting to the outer limits of Yunnan Province, buying horses, hiring guides, then dodging armed rebels, dacoits, and Chinese and Burmese soldiers for several hundred miles. I declined.

Flynn did have a spot of good news. He would be passing through New Bedford before the end of the year, but first he had to chase potential business in England, where an auction house and a nobleman, Lord Brocket, Member of Parliament, had expressed interest in top-quality Burmese gemstones. My entrepreneurial contact had also arranged meetings with war-memorabilia collectors about a possible expedition to salvage two Japanese Zero fighter planes from an overgrown airstrip in the hinterlands of Burma.

“It’s in northern Shan State, Wa territory,” Flynn said over the din of the Thai public-address system that was announcing his departing flight. “It was the last Japanese airbase, put there just before the end of World War II. Six Zeroes were just left on the airfield. The jungle has grown back and Wa blacksmiths have taken metal off four planes and made farming utensils. But two planes are basically intact. They’re worth a fortune to collectors or museums.” His solution for salvaging rusting, priceless planes from a trackless wilderness inhabited by lapsed headhunters turned Iron Age farmers? Disassemble the Zeroes, then float them aloft on hot-air balloons. I wanted to ask how the vigilant Thai military massed along the Burmese border might react when those airborne relics hovered into view, but this long-distance call was on my mounting account. The question, and a hundred others, would just have to wait.

*   *   *

He opened his black address book to the letter G. There, among the scrawled names and numbers, was a sketch of a bearded man. I didn’t understand. Goatee, he said, for John Goatee. I still didn’t understand. Goatee, he said, as in Gotti, as in John Gotti. Now I understood. He flourished an American passport. Although he had flown from England to Boston, there was no U.S. entry stamp. Was he using another, false passport? He grinned, evasive, self-confident.

“I’m not here,” said Barry Flynn, sitting in the offices of an old high-school friend who owned a Boston-area software company. Flynn arched his eyebrows and, in his best British accent, he pronounced, “I’m in England, old boy. Who said I’m over here as Barry Flynn? Barry Flynn is in the U.K.”

He laughed. But then, I was to find that Flynn often laughed. It was constant, natural punctuation to his swashbuckling life story, which seemed a series of serendipitous, free-association events. After graduating from high school in 1968, he left New Bedford for Los Angeles to study engineering. His bad asthma kept him out of the military, and before the school semester began, he was introduced to an agent and became a male model. Soon he was walking the runways with a designer name: Richard Lawrence Harlow.

“For Jean Harlow’s illegitimate son,” he said, then laughed. His agent’s idea of mystery and glamour.

After several months, he said, he quit modeling and enrolled in acting school. He landed actress Tyne Daly’s sister Glynis as his manager and began to get steady work. In old head shots where he posed in a torn sweatshirt, a jumpsuit, and a turtleneck, Flynn looked like actor James Brolin, but with a harder, more worldly edge. In Hollywood, Flynn changed stage names the way Imelda Marcos changed shoes, from Harlow to Seth Granger to Bernie Flynn to Bernard Flynn to Barry Flynn. A member of the Screen Actors Guild, he still received residual checks made out to his many pseudonyms. His biggest credit came in “Room 222,” the ABC schoolroom drama that aired from 1969 to 1974. Flynn had a recurring role as the cocksure high-school quarterback and boyfriend of Helen Loomis, “the class problem girl.”

When other parts were slow in coming, he did “The Dating Game,” trying to lose, not to win. You lost, you got money or lovely parting gifts and could reappear in three months. You won, well, you had to go on the date. Worse, you couldn’t go on the show again for two years. “The Dating Game” was “survival money,” a sure thing every three months—until the day that Flynn’s luck, or rather Seth Granger’s luck, ran out. The homely girl picked Seth, bachelor number one. Shit, an all-expenses-paid date, and not to Waikiki, not to Acapulco, not to Aspen, but a forgettable night in a chauffeur-driven Chevy Impala to the opening of the annex of the Beverly Hills Hotel. That was entertainment for you.

The Beverly Hills Hotel, however, would prove lucky to Flynn. It was there that he met Dodi Al Fayed, whose father, Mohamed, would later purchase Harrods, the English department store. Fayed wanted to get into the film business; Flynn was in the film business. Flynn was soon employed by Fayed’s company, Allied Stars, which would produce the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. Flynn eventually gravitated to Fayed’s uncle, the billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, for whom he worked as an aide de camp. Among his duties was riding herd on Khashoggi’s son, Mohamed. According to Flynn, that meant doing Mohamed’s coursework at the University of Utah, even taking the young playboy’s tests. With seed money from Mohamed, Flynn got back in the movie business, forming Nexus Productions with Cavonis, Tyne Daly and her husband, Georg Stanford Brown.

But the wanderlust soon struck Flynn. He began tagging along on surveillance and repossession jobs with a new acquaintance, David Scott Weekly, a former Navy SEAL nicknamed “Doctor Death” for his demolition expertise. It was like being a kid and going along on stakeouts and drug busts with his father back in New Bedford. It was through Weekly that Flynn found his passport to full-time adventure: Bo Gritz.

The articulate, telegenic Gritz, who was mounting private, illegal missions into Laos in search of American POWs, seemed a perfect subject for a Nexus Productions documentary. And Gritz, a forceful, persuasive man, had an irresistible proposal for the adventure-minded Flynn: why not sneak across the Mekong with the Lazarus team and film a POW rescue attempt? Flynn had a lifelong fascination with the Far East, believing he might have been Asian in a past life. He jumped at the chance to go to the Orient and never looked back. After the failed mission—the Lazarus team spent six fruitless days in the Lao panhandle near the provincial capital of Savannakhet—Flynn decided to resettle in Bangkok. He became Gritz’s Bangkok station chief, living in the Lazarus “safe house” near the airport.

Flynn followed up reports sent by Gritz, working with Loh Tharaphant, a lawyer who lived in Nakhon Phanom, a Thai town along the Mekong River where the search for MIAs had spawned a cottage industry in bogus documentation. Flynn said he also served as a “cut-off” for William J. Gadoury, Jr., a Rhode Island native working out of the U.S. Embassy for the Joint Casualty Resolution Center, which investigated MIA cases in Southeast Asia. When the information seemed too farfetched, explained Flynn, or the sources too unsavory, the government relied on cut-offs—men at home in the world of shadows who were willing to do the thankless spadework and take the fall unflinchingly should something go awry.

From his black briefcase, Flynn produced a 1988 letter sent from a Vietnamese refugee to Gadoury, then routed to him. “Why would Barry Flynn get mail from the U.S. Embassy?” He smiled. “It’s a cut-off. In any operation, you have a cut-off, where they can deny any kind of existence. I was Bill’s cutoff for Mister Loh; I was Bill’s cut-off for Phoumano. Anybody that had questionable character, I was the cut-off.”

In this capacity, said Flynn, he checked out the claims of POW hunters like Jack Bailey, Vinnie Arnone, and Al Shinkle, U.S. veterans who lived in Thailand and solicited money for their private “rescue” operations along the Laotian border. “Bill would give me the information they gave him,” he said. “I’d send a report back. One hundred percent of it was not true.”

Flynn had nothing but contempt for the over-the-hill Soldier of Fortune types that congregated at Lucy’s Tiger Den, a raucous expat bar on Surawong Road located just a few staggering steps from the licentious Patpong. “All these bums hang around the same bars and try to fuck the same pussy,” Flynn said.

Thailand was a wonderful life. Gritz’s activities were the stuff of legend among MIA activists. And to be single, handsome, and farang in Bangkok, which produced beautiful women the way a greenhouse nurtured orchids, was to live like a conquering hero, particularly for a man like Flynn, who had a singular talent for connecting with powerful people. “Bo would tell people: Barry has his incapabilities and he has his whiskey, but one thing about Barry—you can parachute him into any country in the world without two nickels to rub together and by that evening he’ll be having dinner with the president,” Flynn recounted.

That life changed abruptly in November 1986 when Gritz heard a rumor that Khun Sa might have access to live American POWs purportedly held in western Laos. Gritz and Weekly flew to Bangkok, met up with Flynn and headed north, bound for Khun Sa’s camp. With few roads in Mae Hong Son Province, the team rode mules through thick jungles and across razorback mountains for three days and two nights to arrive at Khun Sa’s headquarters in Ho Mong, Burma. Their effort proved futile. The warlord had no POWs, but offered to send his men into Laos to search. He did, however, have opium, tons of it, and was only too happy to tell Gritz, on the record, that he had done business with American government officials.

The trip was a watershed experience for Flynn. Here was a stronger personality than Khashoggi, a more charismatic leader than even Gritz. Here was a man vilified by all but his own people, a man who would use any means necessary, even narcodollars, to carry on the fight against the reviled Burmese, a man who played all the angles. To Flynn, it seemed downright romantic: guerrillas who trained in an armed camp deep in the forest, who lived in simple huts and subsisted on what they could shoot, trap, or gain in trade, and who nurtured the long-held dream of liberating Shan State from the yoke of Burmese oppression. This was paradise. Flynn left Gritz and cast his lot with Khun Sa.

“He’s attracted to the players,” said Cavonis, his old friend. “A lot of people are sycophants and get a different kind of sustenance. For Barry, it’s about the game, it’s about the play.”

Flynn did earn money guiding a few Western journalists, including ABC’s Tom Jarriel, into Shan State to interview the warlord. He also brokered Burmese gems, some from the fabled Mogok mines north of Mandalay. There was more, he said, to Shan State than just heroin. “I’m their door to the West,” said Flynn of his efforts in the Shan gem trade and warlord public relations. “I’m the only white man they trust.”

By early 1990, Flynn’s freewheeling activities had landed him in trouble with Thai authorities. Among the charges, he said, were weapons smuggling and escorting newsmen into Burma to interview Khun Sa, whom the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had labeled a major heroin trafficker. There was also a murder warrant in Burma, he added. The Burmese apparently considered Flynn a killer because he had videotaped a 1990 battle between Khun Sa’s Mong Tai Army and soldiers of a rival opium force, the United Wa State Army, including footage of dead Wa troops. The reformed headhunters had allied with the Rangoon junta against Khun Sa in hopes of taking control of the lucrative cross-border trade in contraband. Flynn recounted all these accusations as if describing unwarranted parking tickets. A Chiang Mai neighbor, Colonel Vichit Vechasart of the Thai Border Patrol Police, had jokingly told him, “Barry, with all these charges you shouldn’t be persona non grata—you should be a Thai general!”

Flynn lived openly in Chiang Mai with his wife, Malee, a Shan he said was a niece of Khun Sa, and their two children, daughter Ploipailin (whose name, which meant “precious stone,” was conferred by the General), and son, Kevin Shan (whose initials matched those of Khun Sa). “They’re both godchildren to Khun Sa,” Flynn said. He reached into his briefcase and proudly produced a picture of himself and his daughter posed with Khun Sa’s pet Bengal tiger. “I want to take a picture of her and Khun Sa with ten thousand of his troops behind them. I want to put it on the wall in my house so when she’s sixteen and boys come by to take her on dates, I can point to the picture and say: Be home by ten o’clock, right?”

He laughed. His whereabouts in Chiang Mai were no secret. He rented a house in a quiet, upper-middle-class suburb off Changklan Road. He got drunk on Maekhong rice whiskey with Colonel Vichit. His friends included an exiled Wa leader, Mahasang, the son of the last saopha prince of Vingngun, a remote fiefdom along the Sino-Burmese border. Flynn’s “office” was a bamboo table at a neighborhood restaurant along the western bank of the Ping River. Of course the Thai knew where he lived. “It’s a game,” he said, striking his best matinee grin.

As part of the game, Flynn entered Thailand in discreet, roundabout fashion. He flew from Los Angeles to Singapore, then on to Penang Island, a resort off the western coast of Malaysia. He then took the ferry to the mainland town of Butterworth and caught the Singapore-to-Bangkok train for a rail journey up the Malaysian Peninsula. At the border crossing, Flynn hopped the train, walked into Thailand, hailed a song thaew—the pickups that function as jitney buses (the name means “two rows,” for the facing, lengthwise benches in the truck bed) in every corner of the country—and rode to Hat Yai airport. A few hours later, he was back in Chiang Mai, drinking Singha along the banks of the slow-moving Ping River.

*   *   *

On his next back-door trip to Thailand, Flynn carried my request for an interview with Khun Sa. I wrote that I would be accompanied by Sullivan, who was only too happy to put his business aside for two weeks of high adventure. Sullivan, like Gritz before him, wanted to hear if Khun Sa might have any MIA information. Maybe Gritz hadn’t asked the right questions of this man whose influence extended deep into Laos, Sullivan reasoned. The rationale seemed hopeless, but I didn’t criticize his motives. I was thrilled to have him along. With his firearms knowledge and Eagle Scout survival skills, he could be a life-saver should matters go awry, and on the road to Burma, that seemed a very real possibility.

Protocol dictated that my letter of request be sent to the External Affairs Department of the Shan State Restoration Council, the administrative body of the rebel-held territory. Two months later, in March 1993, a reply came, written on SSRC stationery, from liaison officer Khernsai Jaiyen. The news was bad, wrote Khernsai. Because of skirmishing between Thai and Burmese forces in Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand had sealed the border. Relations had been strained since the previous October, when SLORC soldiers seized Mae Hong Son officials in Burma. The functionaries were investigating the disappearance of Thai villagers and elephants involved in illegal logging; the woodcutters had not paid protection money to the Burmese soldiers and had been kidnapped. Now security promised to remain tight for several months, since King Bhumibol Adulyadej was expected to leave Bangkok and spend the upcoming hot season in the cooler north. One of His Majesty’s royal summer palaces was located in Pang Tong, just a few miles northwest of Mae Hong Son, the staging area for any trip to see Khun Sa.

“Best to let things as they are so as not to complicate matters,” Khernsai advised.

Rule number three: “Anytime” seemed to slip from my grasp with maddening, quicksilver frequency. There was a small chance for entry, Khernsai continued. Contact the Thai Border Patrol Police. I contacted Flynn instead.

“Calling the border police is the last thing you want to do,” said Flynn. “They’ll say, ‘You want to do what? Go visit Khun Sa?’ They’ll take your passport, flag your name in the immigration computer, tip off the DEA. I don’t trust Khernsai, that little snake. I’ll take you in.”

There was no chance of entering Shan State during the summer rains, the “slide time” when the smuggling trails were either muddy morasses or slick as slate. My mood worsened when Reuters ran a story by a Thai reporter who had wangled, through Khernsai, a brief interview with Khun Sa. The story bore the dateline of Ho Mong, Burma—my magic, fugitive target. But at last, a brief phone message from Flynn awaited me in early September: “Everything is set. Meet me in Chiang Mai on October 20. The trip is a go.”

Five days later, a two-week-old letter arrived from Khernsai. After several deliberations, he wrote, it was decided my visit should be delayed “until the return of a more suitable climate, both political and seasonal.” He blamed the brief Reuters report for renewed border tensions. But perhaps, he added, by mid December “the clouds will be cleared enough to invite you again.” The man did know how to run with a metaphor, and how to artfully sabotage Flynn’s efforts. Khernsai, who was not part of Khun Sa’s original band of brothers, held the foreign-relations job that Flynn coveted. Flynn loathed him; the feeling seemed mutual. Khernsai was determined to put off, however politely, any reporter associated with Flynn, the farang from Hollywood who had earned the general’s confidence.

Protocol be damned. I wrote another interview request, far stronger in tone and addressed directly to the general. Flynn then prevailed upon Mook Keaw Kam, a Khun Sa confidant who supervised mining operations in resource-rich Shan State, to read the back-channel letter directly to the warlord. In late September, a terse letter arrived from Khernsai. This time, there was no talk of the weather, literal or symbolic. There was only one sentence: “This is to inform you that your request to visit the free Shan Territory has been accepted, subject to conditions prevailing at the time of your entry.”

I called Sullivan, told him to reserve early November for a journey to Burma. We were in, in with Flynn. It was all a game, and the first round was ours.