Interview with Max Winkler Interviewer: Stephany Goodbread Transcriber: Stephany Goodbread Date of Interview: November 17, 1988 Location: Mr. Winkler’s Home, New Braunfels, TX _____________________ Begin Tape 1, Side 1 Stephany Goodbread: This is Stephany Goodbread. Today is November 17, 1988, and I’m conducting an oral interview with Max Winkler, former mayor of New Braunfels, Texas, and three-term city councilman. During the 1960s, Mr. Winkler worked for the United States Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]. Max, why don’t you tell us how you got started with the CIA, I think most of us are interested— Max Winkler: Sure, a lot of people, I think, are interested in how a person gets involved in this. In 1947, we had an outbreak of Hoof and Mouth Disease in Mexico, the disease is fatal to cloven-hoof animals. Those are animals that have the split hoof, such as goats, pigs, and cows— and accordingly, we had in previous years had a small outbreak of the Foot and Mouth Disease in California. It was necessary to slaughter, to kill, five thousand cattle in one county in order to eradicate this disease. They were buried in a fourteen-foot ditch, and fortunately the quarantine was successful, and the disease was eradicated. We knew this was very serious, that this disease had occurred in Mexico, it was brought into Mexico by a Zebu bull that was transported into the southern part of Veracruz from Brazil—and the United States thought certainly that since it was so far from the border, and since Mexico is sort of funnel shape southward, to the small end of the funnel, it would be easier to go down there to the spot where we had the disease and eradicate there rather than wait until it got to a three thousand mile-border, from Brownwood [Brownsville] clear up to San Diego—and accordingly, I was selected to go down on that program. I had worked on a ranch, rather a very large ranch in Texas and was somewhat fluent in Spanish, and I went down to Mexico on this assignment as a personal officer—the—it was very difficult trying to eradicate the disease because the people were illiterate, and there were no fences, and the cattle crossed territory where there were outbreaks, and there was heavy jungle and also desert areas and just every type of hazard that you could imagine—in addition to the opposition that the people had to the program. Many—practically every farm family and many city families depended on the livelihood for the children from the goat milk or from cow’s milk, and here the Americans were coming down the eradicate this disease, and we were—we had a coworker, a Mexico worker with us and every activity that we participated in. The disease got completely out of hand before—in less than six months, it just spread like wildfire, and the first thing we knew, it had come through Yucatan, come into Veracruz, spread out into the center of Mexico, and we found evidence of it as far as Saltillo and Monterrey. As a consequence, we Max Winkler Interview, November 17, 1988 1 Texas 150 Oral History Collection. University Archives, Texas State University made a quarantine line at Monterrey and Saltillo over toward the border at Mazatlan—the Pacific border on the west in the area of Mazatlan and on the east at Tampico—and we endeavored to have all vehicles sprayed that came through any road beyond this point entering in the vicinity of the United States. In order to travel by air, you were required to walk through vats with certain chemicals that would prevent the infestation of this disease. And likewise your cars were sprayed—railroad traffic was impaired by this procedure in seeing that the disease was not transported beyond that area. During this time, we knew that they had had outbreaks in Europe, and we consulted and researched our situation with the—some of the veterinarians from Switzerland, and [they] were able to develop, after a period of time, a vaccine that was effective for a six-month period, we had a thousand Americans down there, mainly cowboys because— cowboys from the border because they had worked on horseback. They had to be fluent in Spanish, and we worked also with Mexican veterinarians, with an American veterinarian as a coworker, and it imposed a tremendous demand on the United States colleges, there are only seven colleges in the United States that produce qualified veterinarians and graduate students, and as a consequence we were scrambling to get veterinarians—and we didn’t care about their Spanish because we had interpreters that could work with them. Well, in working on this program—we were involved with a number of transactions with the State Department, and we were included with the diplomatic group, and we were invited to their receptions, parties, and so forth that they had—by coincidence, I was fluent in German, and when I went to some of these parties during the la[t]ter part of the program in 1951 and ‘52 and ‘53, there were certain—there were a pair of Russians that invariably—were friendly to me, and they came over to speak to me in German because they did not know English—and they would have been a little bit ostracized in the group that was in attendance at the party because not many of the State Department officials were fluent in German and certainly none were fluent in Russian. Well, this relationship was not anything close at all, it was just—probably on a once every two month basis that I would see these fellows. However, during all this time, we were working on Foot and Mouth Disease, and we finally had it under control and had been able to push out quarantine line from Saltillo and Monterrey clear on down beyond Mexico City southward, and at the very tip of Veracruz we still had outbreaks of this disease, despite the fact that the cattle in that area were confined to a certain area and were quarantined. No cattle were permitted to go beyond the fence line of certain ranches in that area, and most of the cattle in that area had already been killed. We were curious that we continued to have outbreaks because we thought our control was 100% effective. And as a consequence, I fled down to Minatitlan and then drove over to Coatzacoalcos, which are two towns in the very southern tip of Veracruz, and from there we went in—on the Minatitlan River, I believe is the name of it—a river as wide as the Mississippi, we went—we had a guide with a kayuka, which was simply a hollowed-out log, like a canoe. And he took us up the river in the direction of these ranches that we were interested in where we were having outbreaks. I had long ago learned that whenever you travel in the jungle area and there were monkeys and all types of multi-colored Max Winkler Interview, November 17, 1988 2 Texas 150 Oral History Collection. University Archives, Texas State University birds, and it was a beautiful situation—and in a situation of that sort—whenever you pass anybody coming along the river going in the opposite direction or in the same direction, you visit with them and have an exchange, a conversation and share some drinks with them if you have anything to drink and a meal or something of that sort. However, after we had gone—we had a three-day journey that we were going to make up that river, to the location, to our destination, but by coincidence on the second day out, we saw in the distance a kayuka was coming down the river and they—changed their course on a wide river, they changed their course to go to the opposite bank from where we were, and they attempted to hide it more or less—or seclude their kayuka over there—in the jungle. We put the binoculars on these individuals, and I identified them as the two Russians that I met at these diplomatic parties—functions that I had attended. Well, we waved to them, and we didn’t get any reactions at all from them, so we continued up the river another day, and we got to a ranch owned by a prominent Mexican, and a rather large ranch, and we served him generously some tequila, and we stayed up late into the night after we met him, and he talked rather freely, and he did admit that these two Russians had been there to visit with him, that they had left him a suitcase full of pesos, and that for that courtesy he was releasing his cattle beyond the quarantine area—his cattle were infected and were spreading the infection again in an area that we felt was devoid of any disease. Well, we didn’t spend any long period of time with this individual, the next morning we left early, and we came down the river as rapidly as we could, but it still took us two-and-a-half-day trip, and we flew back to Mexico City, and I gave the report to the assistant secretary of agriculture, who was the director of our program in Mexico, Dr. Noise. He heard a part of my story, and he said, “Wait a minute,” and he got on the phone and he called the president, President Alemán of Mexico over to the conference room and also the secretary of agriculture who was—Lazaro Lopez, I believe, I’m not positive, but anyway, the most prominent officials in Mexico, the two most prominent individuals concerned with this disease, as well as the American chief of our program, were interested in the conversation that I imparted to them, and as a consequence, the president ordered these two Russian diplomats out of the country in twenty-four hours’ time.