Our Man in Kiev

Chef José Andrés pals around with Zelensky, Biden, and Ryan Routh.

By the time Graham Greene published The Quiet American in 1955 and Our Man in Havana in 1958, he’d become pretty cynical about the CIA and the MI6. The first novel is about a shallow and self-deceiving American agent in French Indochina named Alden Pyle. The second novel features a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana named James Wormold who gets a job as an informer for MI6. He then proceeds to send sensational reports to MI6 headquarters, replete with sketches of “a secret military installation in the mountains,” which is actually vacuum cleaner parts scaled to a large size.

As a patriotic young American in my early thirties, I loved Greene’s novels, but I also thought he was being too cynical, perhaps because he under the influence of his old friend Kim Philby—a notorious double agent in British intelligence.

Now it seems to me that Greene was being perfectly reasonable and that his cynicism was perfectly understandable. The U.S. and British governments and their intelligence agencies are simply a bad joke.

I write this not in reference to any specific intel operation abroad, but to the overarching fact that nothing done by the U.S. and British governments makes any sense. Intelligence simply isn’t in it.

Every day I review the “heap of broken images” representing the world and find it impossible to find any rhyme or reason in any of it.

Consider the case of “Star Chef” José Andrés—a Spanish national who, after moving to the States and working in New York City restaurants for about a decade, started running in the highest institutional circles in the country.

In 2010 he taught a course at Harvard on “culinary physics” — suggesting that food preparation is subjected to something other than Newtonian mechanics. This reminded me of an old Columbian friend. He was a marvelous cook who occasionally destroyed my kitchen while cooking—drinking bottles of Spanish wine and flinging sauces and pans all over the place like a deranged culinary dynamo.

I now wonder if the acceleration and vectors of sauces and food particles that covered everything had followed their own special natural laws of physics.

In 2015, José Andrés achieved additional fame among New York bien pensants when he had a publicized spat with the management of the Trump International Hotel.

After Donald Trump made what Andres regarded as disparaging comments about illegal Mexican immigrants in June 2015, Andrés withdrew from a restaurant contract with the Trump Organization, which then sued him for failure to perform. Andrés counter-sued, and the parties reached a settlement in April 2017.

Since 2022, he has won an astounding heap of official laurels, including the Order of Merit (Ukraine) 2nd class, Grand Cross of Naval Merit with white decoration from the Spanish Navy, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the Biden administration. Why? This makes zero sense.

Various photos document him hobnobbing with international celebrities such as star TV actor and Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Joe Biden, and would-be Trump assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh.