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About Larry J. Kolb
READ Pascal Riché's LIBÉRATION profile of Kolb
in the original French
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Our Man in Miami
by Pascal Riché, Libération
translated into English by David Ball
Friday, June 10, 2005.
Does Larry Kolb really exist? After spending five hours sitting
with him in the shade of the palm trees by the edge of one of the
most beautiful pools in South Beach, Miami—the pool of the
art-deco Hotel Raleigh—we still wonder. Slightly dazed, when
we come back into the heat of Collins Avenue and its people walking
by with fat, tanned, thighs, we pinch ourselves. Was this man real
or did he come out of an airport novel like a puff of steam? The
son of a spy, a secret agent himself, a former diamond dealer, ex-agent
of Ali, son-in-law of the arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi, fugitive...
His life, streaking along at 80 miles an hour through cash, glitz
and adventures, is just too improbable. Of course we checked out
most of what he has said before we met him, to be sure we weren’t
dealing with a mere mythomaniac. We had to face it: even if he fictionalized
his life a bit in his memoirs, Overworld: The Life and Times of
a Reluctant Spy, he didn’t make it up. Besides, he himself
has trouble believing his story: “When I think back over everything
that happened to me, it seems impossible.”
In the photos he shows us, we see him, an enormous beanpole walking
ahead of Muhammad Ali or sitting next to Khashoggi... A big kid
in a suit, incongruous, out of place. He’s Woody Allen’s
character Zelig. Or Forrest Gump: the first time he saw the film,
he recognized himself right away—minus the hero’s stupidity,
but with an attraction for intrigue added on. While gulping down
an omelet, Larry Kolb assures us, with a serious air, that he never
wanted this tortuous life. But if you answer that you don’t
believe a word of it, he laughs as a sign of assent.
Let’s try to sum it up. At the age of twenty-three, a friend
of his father’s contacts him and offers him a job working
for the CIA. Afraid he’ll be stuck in some boring office,
he refuses. He prefers to go into organizing adventure trips for
rich people. One thing leads to another, and he meets Jan Stephenson,
golf champion and sex bombshell of the day. He becomes her agent,
her husband, very soon her ex-husband. Through her, he meets Muhammad
Ali, who’s about to hang up his gloves. The photographer Howard
Bingham, Ali’s best friend, remembers that “pretty nice
guy who used to travel with us sometimes, doing business.”
Thanks to Ali, Larry Kolb is introduced to a good part of the fashionable
international elite. And in particular the arms merchant Adnan Kashoggi,
at the time one of the richest men on the planet. Khashoggi’s
wife has an elder daughter, Kim. Kolb marries her and enters the
clan. As his address book is rapidly expanding, he attracts the
attention of Miles Copeland, one of the founders of the CIA, who
has become a kind of Lone Ranger of espionage. Manipulative, and
a risk-taker, Copeland manages to convince him to “do him
some favors.” He trains him, gives him his taste for intrigue
and passion for deception. In Beirut, in the company of Muhammad
Ali and some CIA agents, Kolb participates in a failed attempt to
free the American hostages held in Lebanon. Later, he becomes friendly
with Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, in order to spy
on him, after having hooked him by throwing him a fishy Hindu guru,
His Holiness Chandraswami Maharaj.
And then his taste for intrigue takes him too far. Thinking he’s
doing Khashoggi a favor, he takes part in setting up a vast, shady,
undercover scheme to discredit an Indian politician, V.P. Singh,
a rival of Rajiv Gandhi in the elections. Kolb leaks documents showing
Singh’s corruption; the documents turn out to be fakes. (He
swears he’d been manipulated and didn’t know this.)
Interpol is called in. He has to lay low in Florida and hope they
forget about him. For a long time. “I grew up abroad. Then
I traveled abroad around twice a month. So those ten years I spent
on that beach felt like exile to me.” He brought up a son.
He wrote his memoirs. And he was bored.
Self-analysis is not Larry Kolb’s strong point. When you ask
him to explore his relationship to his father, all he does is reel
off some stories. Yet Kolb’s life is nothing but a quest for
the father. Lewis Kolb was a military intelligence officer, a real
one, a man who taught “assassination techniques,” who
served as a liaison officer in Tokyo, London, Wiesbaden… and
left from time to time on secret missions. Young Larry quickly realized
that his father was not the man he pretended to be. “That
had to be a shocking discovery; it created a fascination in him,”
thinks Michael Woodhead, a friend of his, formerly with the BBC.
“He’s had an unresolved anxiety inside him ever since:
who is my father, exactly? What made me what I am?”
The day he agreed to work for Miles Copeland, it was surely to try
to follow in his father’s footsteps. But he only ended up
with a disjointed series of adventures, a thousand miles from the
well-ordered if adventurous life of his father, an officer immersed
in the chess game of the cold war.
But Kolb still has the bug. For a year now, he’s got himself
caught up in a new intrigue. He talks about it a bit, but with lots
of “don’t-quote-me-on-this,” and “this-is-off-the-record.”
From what he hints at, we gather he’s been called on to disentangle
the threads of a political plot hatched by crooked former CIA agents,
Republicans trying to slip Al Qaeda money into the accounts of the
Kerry campaign in 2004—the subject of his next book whose
hero, of course, will be himself.
Kolb likes to ham it up; he’s paranoid, clumsy and sure of
himself all at once. He looks at you the way people do who were
once shy. His body is constantly swinging between tension and relaxation.
To relax, all he has to do is smile: he has the fleshy, sidelong
smile of Elvis Presley. Once, that got him into his most unbelievable
“Zelig” situation ever. One day in 1984, Muhammad Ali
was posing for the press with his buddy Jesse Jackson. Kolb, who
was with him at the time, was standing slightly in the background.
The photo is forgotten—until Elvis fans happen to see it,
and think they recognize their hero. The media displays the photo;
Elvis’ stepbrother certifies that it really is Elvis. So Elvis
didn’t die in Graceland in August 1977 after all! The legend
has been going strong ever since: 7% of the American people think
Elvis is still alive.
Kolb talks, tells stories. We’ve stopped being surprised a
long time ago: it seems anything can happen to him. When Hurricane
Jeanne hit Florida last year, his house was blown away—of
course. When our photographer leads him onto the beach in front
of the hotel for a photo, a storm is in the air and Kolb warns her:
“You know, there’s a good chance we’ll be struck
by lightning. That hasn't happened to me yet.”
READ
Pascal Riché's LIBÉRATION profile of Kolb in the original
French
RETURN
to bio
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