Whipping the Sleeper - Greg Hallett and Spymaster

Whipping the Sleeper
Vladimir Putin first popped up in Wellington in the late 1970s,
then lived there from 1980–82, and returned in 198 (Wellington) and
1999 (Auckland).
Private I: “Putin dealt with me in the late 1970s over a matter involving
Vietnam and Cambodia. He wanted to know about New
Zealand operations in Vietnam, and especially down at
the Parrot’s Beak, which was where the Mekong crossed
the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. I said to him, ‘I
couldn’t tell him anything about that area, as all I’d done
for three weeks was burn bodies and we were transferred
from the NZ Army to the Australian Army to the Thai
Army to the Cambodian Army all in the space of three
weeks, and then we were denied’ . . . and he was very interested in that.
“Putin asked me if I had ‘seen any troops in strange uniforms’ and I
said that ‘That counted as the whole of Lon Nol Army, and the standard
wear was white tennis shoes, American olive drab shirts left over from
WWII and French paratroopers pants, topped off with a Tommy gun’.
“I ran into him in the Russian Information Office [in Wellington]
and it was down the bottom of Salamanca Road at that time, 49 Putin.
opposite
a part of the University that they call Hunter’s Corner . . . but he wasn’t
using his name ‘Putin’. He said, ‘How did you manage to burn the bodies?’
“I said ‘It was very difficult. You had to pull them out of the river,
leave them to dry for a day and a half, and then burn them with petrol.
And there was no fat on the bodies, but they all exuded fat and we were
slipping and sliding in it. We used to have smoko and we used to drink
rum and we used to drink rum out of bottles and jerry cans. I dragged
a body out of the river and went to sit on it, and the minute I went to sit
on it, it up and ran away.’
“Putin said, ‘How come?’
“Well it was alive, yet it had all the appearance of being as dead as
a doornail. It was a Gook. It was a Vietnamese body I think, and we all
rolled on the muck on the ground laughing our heads off.”
The lawyer Frank Haigh was paid by the Russians. He was a founder
of the firm Haigh Lyon in 192 on Shortland St in Auckland City. His son is
the QC John Haig who represented Clint Rickards, the Auckland Assistant
Police Commissioner who has 34 complaints of rape against him – most of
Salamanca Road was the same place Helen Clark’s biographer Brian Edwards was
caught in bed with a 12-year-old girl.
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