Walters, the American who was in them all – 03/30/2024 – Elio Gaspari

This morning, 60 years ago, American Ambassador Lincoln Gordon arrived at his office at around 9:15 am. He knew that the coup had been going on for days, but he did not know that General Olímpio Mourão Filho, commander of the Military Region based in Juiz de Fora, had decided to rebel. The person who warned him that things had started was his military attaché, Colonel Vernon Walters, a burly man, a friend of Brazilian soldiers since the Second World War.

Walters struggled throughout that day. At the end of the afternoon, it was believed that General Castello Branco, his fellow soldier in Italy and chief of the Army General Staff, was trapped in the Ministry of War. (False, he was on an apparatus in the South Zone.) A marshal warned him that a loyalist troop from Vila Militar was marching towards Minas Gerais. At 7:05 pm his prognosis was grim: “The rebellion appears to be losing momentum.”

In those days, Rio de Janeiro was experiencing energy rationing and entire neighborhoods were without electricity at night. Around 11pm, Marshal Lima Brayner, chief of staff of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force during the war, heard knocks at the service entrance of his apartment in Copacabana, opened the door and saw, illuminated by a candle, Colonel Walters. Brayner told him, “Kruel just released a manifesto.” “Thank God,” replied Walters, a devout Catholic.

The support of General Amaury Kruel, commander of the São Paulo garrison, had decided the parade. Marshal Cordeiro de Farias, patriarch of all the military uprisings of the period, summarized the issue: “The Army went to sleep as a jaguar and woke up revolutionary.”

On April 2, Walters passed by Castello Branco’s house, in Ipanema. On the 4th, again, and also that of the former president, Marshal Eurico Dutra (1946-1950).

Elected president, on his first day in office, Castello invited him to lunch at Palácio do Planalto. Walters presented him with a pineapple.

Colonel Walters entered the mythology of American military interventions as if, with his enormous feet, he crushed governments. He would have helped to overthrow King Farouk in Egypt (1952), Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran (1953), Presidents Manuel Prado in Peru and Arturo Frondizi in Argentina (1962), nine outside Jango. He’s an exaggeration.

In real life, he was more than that. Where there was trouble or mystery, there he is. Secret conversations with Chinese and Vietnamese? It was Walters who knocked on the door of the Chinese embassy in Paris with a message from American President Richard Nixon. It was in his house that Henry Kissinger hid to negotiate with the North Vietnamese. Watergate scandal, which brought down the president of the United States? He was the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1972 when the White House devised a ploy to freeze FBI investigations. Walters and CIA Director Richard Helms blocked the maneuver.

Walters joined the Army to defeat Nazism and continued his career to defeat Communism. In 1989, he was ambassador to Germany and from his window he saw the end of the Berlin Wall. He died in 2002, aged 85.

The man who spoke eight languages

Walters was a direct conversationalist with a sarcastic sense of humor. He used to say that he spoke seven other languages ​​(French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian and Dutch), but he didn’t think about any of them. His Portuguese had little accent, like Roberto Campos.

When Fidel Castro told him that he studied with priests, he said:
— Yo también, pero me que défidel.

When he was accused of knowing everything about Brazil, he responded:
— If I were all that, I wouldn’t have bought an apartment at the Panorama Palace Hotel.

(Launched in Rio in the 60s, Panorama was a bummer and is now called Favela Hub.)

Walters enlisted in the Army in 1941 before the United States even entered the war. His father had some money, but lost it in the Great Depression of the 1930s. He had a talent for languages ​​and honed it as a teenager, as a messenger for a Babel insurance company in New York. He thought that this would give him a good position, but from the outset he became a private.

A year later he was a lieutenant, in the information area, and a colonel ordered him to learn Portuguese. In 1943, he was assigned to accompany Brazilian officers in the United States and, later, in Italy. From then on he was an interpreter for conversations between American presidents and Brazilians, from Dutra to Médici, from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon. He had two godfathers, President Eisenhower and Averell Harriman, millionaire, diplomat, former governor of New York and grand duke of the Democratic party.

After living in Rio for a few years (and becoming a Flemish fan), he was a military attaché in Rome in 1962, when Ambassador Lincoln Gordon asked President Kennedy to remove him to Rio, reinforcing the embassy’s military structure. Walters moved heaven and earth not to leave Rome, he thought about asking for passage to the reservation. In October, the colonel arrived in Rio and had 13 generals to receive him at the airport.

On the night of March 13, 1964, he saw João Goulart’s speech at General Castello Branco’s house. (The top of Castello’s forehead reached below the base of Walters’ chin, who would describe him as: “Short, stout. His very short neck and large head give the impression of a hunchback.”)

Walters left Brazil in 1967 as a general. A week after the publication of AI-5, when there was pressure for the US to move away from the dictatorship, he wrote to Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, defending the alliance: “If Brazil is lost, it will not be another Cuba. It will be another China”.

Walters was military attaché in Paris, deputy director of the CIA, ambassador to the United Nations and in Berlin. There, due to his loquacious manner, the Secretary of State, James Baker, avoided him.

Washington orders and Walters delivers

In 1966, the Federal Police arrested two Americans for smuggling minerals in the Amazon. A powerful senator went to the Secretary of Defense and asked for them. Walters received the following telegram: “We appreciate your frank comments as to whether there is anything that can be done in this case through your good contacts with your Brazilian military interlocutors.”

Walters went to Castello Branco saying he was embarrassed for referring the management. Days later, the Americans’ cells woke up with the doors open and they fled.

Mission impossible, rescue Kissinger

When: 1970.
Where: Paris

General Walters is in his military attaché office in France and receives a message from Washington informing him that the plane carrying Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for another secret meeting with the Vietnamese is over the Atlantic and will be forced to land at Frankfurt airport. , in Germany.

Mission: Bring Kissinger, incognito, to Paris.

Walters got out, walked to the presidential palace and asked to be immediately received by French President Georges Pompidou. He stated his case: he needed a plane to pick up the secretary.

When Pompidou asked him what Kissinger was doing in Paris, he replied that the trip involved a lady.

Pompidou lent him a military jet, he landed in Frankfurt, crossed the runway, ordered the lights to be turned off and rescued Kissinger. Following routine, she took him to her apartment, where the maid never knew who the guest was.

Service

Walters wrote two memoirs, the first, “Missões Silenciosas”, very good, published in Portuguese.