Real Dictators - BONUS: Dictators’ Chefs

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

For this special bonus episode, Noiser writer Duncan Barrett sat down for a chat with Witold Szabłowski, author of How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks. The role of personal chef to a dictator is a fascinating one. It’s an extremely intimate relationship. These cooks have literally nourished tyrants. They’ve satisfied their culinary cravings, altered their moods for better and worse, and even influenced their policies. So what can they tell us about dictators’ appetites? Real Dictators will return soon for Season 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dictators like to present themselves as superhuman, even godly. But, believe it or not, they all have basic needs just like the rest of us. A tyrant still needs to eat, for example. The role of a personal chef to a dictator is a fascinating one. What can their memories and stories tell us about dictators' appetites? And what portrait do they paint of the banality of evil? Noyza writer Duncan Barrett sat down to talk with Witold Saplowski, author of How to Feed a Dictator, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hodja, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot through the eyes of their cooks.

Witold, you travelled to four different continents to speak to the men and women who cooked for some of the world's most brutal dictators. Was it hard tracking those chefs down and persuading them to talk to you? Hello, Duncan, and good afternoon, good evening to everyone who's listening to us. Thank you for having me. It was so hard that if I knew how hard it might be, I would actually never start writing this book. The research took me more than three years, and making those guys talk was probably the biggest achievement that I've ever faced in my work. The main reason for that was that the chefs of dictators, they know they are still alive because they knew they shouldn't talk too much.

And they knew that the silence was their guarantee of life. And the silence were their insurance. And they have this habit of not telling too much. They have this habit of not talking to everyone about your work or your previous work. Even if the dictator is dead for, let's say, 20 or 25 years, they still remain living in this silence because they have this habit. So, yeah, it was extremely hard, firstly, to find them, secondly, to make them talk. I was interested, I think it comes across very strongly in the book, the close relationship that they had, but in some ways, as you say, still have with the dictators, even after death. I mean, they're quite, in some cases, unapologetic. There's more than one time where it almost gets a bit tense between you and the chef as you're kind of asking the probing questions, and they are very much still sort of

towing this party line in a way. You know, I was thinking a lot about that, but I think the difference between me and them is that my perspective is pretty much Europe-centric. When you talk about Cambodia, let's say, when you talk about the Khmer Rouge, you know who was bad and who was good. You can name the evil. And Cambodia has never gone through this process fully and properly. They are walking on over bones of their victims of the regime, but they never really called what was bad, what was good. So you can easily say in Cambodia that actually Pol Pot was an idealistic leader who wanted nothing but good for his people. And you wouldn't go to jail, your career wouldn't be broken.

And traveling to those countries was an awkward experience because sometimes what the chefs were telling me was incredibly horrible. Like the chef of Pol Pot, she was telling me exactly that he was idealist, that he wanted the words to be better placed. And whenever I was trying to confront her with the real knowledge about what Khmer Rouge did, what Pol Pot did, about the mass killings, about the almost 3 million Cambodians who died during his regime. She said, no, my dear, it was just Vietnamese propaganda. I know the truth. And it's what you're trying to tell me is completely wrong. Amazing. I guess even if the chefs have slightly blinkered understanding of the regime that they're serving, what's fascinating is they did get to know these dictators very intimately. I mean,

they spent a lot of time with them, and I suppose they got to know their tastes. What sort of an insight do you think they give us into these larger than life characters? I have a theory that there is only two people that know a dictator really well. Because dictatorship is about lying. Like you have to lie to everyone. You have to lie to the society to manipulate them. You lie to your generals, you lie to your prime ministers, your ministers, you lie to your wives. It's the nature of dictatorship. But there are two people you cannot lie to.

First of them is your private doctor, because you can lie, but he will see your tests and he will know everything. And the second is your personal chef, because you cannot eat food that you don't like. And I'll go back to the example of Pol Pot again. And when you see Pol Pot through the eyes of his chef, and you have this political movement that he began. So he killed millions of people in the name of chauvinistic, nationalistic, communist movement of the rebuilding of the great Cambodia. And at the same time, he didn't even like the food of the tradition he was trying to relate to. So it's such an absurd and it's such a hypocrisy that Pol Pot, such an absurd and it's such a hypocrisy that Paul Pott killing millions of people in the name of the Cambodian nation didn't even respect the food of the Cambodian nation. He didn't really

eat the Cambodian food. His favorite food actually was baguette, French baguette. If he didn't have access to good cheese, good French cheese. And his chef was a simple girl from a village. And she was trying to make her bake a baguette properly. He was trying to explain a girl who had never seen France, who probably had never heard too much about France, how to make a baguette. And so whenever he could, he would ask for a baguette. But when there was no chance for a baguette, he would always ask for Thai food or Chinese food, never Khmer food.

This is the real Pol Pot. Not the guy who's telling his chauvinist slogans, but the guy who's lying about his real ideas, but when he thinks nobody can see him, he's eating the food of the other nations. That's very interesting because I suppose there's the personal tastes which come across in the food the dictator wants to eat. And then there's the political aspect of their regime and its relationship to food,

whether that's prioritizing simple peasant food, whether it's using... If I may interrupt you, because I have a very good story related to that. Being a dictator is also a sort of golden cage. So sometimes you cannot eat things that you like, but you need to eat certain kinds of things because you're a dictator. And my next book, which will be published in the UK this year and in the United States, it's about Russia through the kitchen door. So it's a hundred years of Russian and Soviet history told by the chefs from the last czar to the Ukrainian-Russian war. And I had the chance to interview the chef, Mr. Viktor Bilaev, who was the director of

the Kremlin's kitchen and the personal chef of Brezhnev, then Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin for a couple of years. So he had been working for the Kremlin for over 30 years. And he told me a beautiful anecdote about Brezhnev. Russia or Soviet Union has always been a country which was very good at the food diplomacy. So whenever you have to prove how rich you are, you just invite people for a party and they see how great food you serve. So they were serving all the most expensive food at the Kremlin. So they would serve the best caviar and they would serve the Kamchatka crabs salad, which is extremely expensive.

They would serve sturgeons, which is an extremely expensive and great fish. And they would make, they have a special Kremlin recipe. I have this recipe in the book, which will be published soon. So something extremely delicious. But Brezhnev, the head of that country, the head of the Soviet Union, he was a simple guy from a simple family with a very simple background. And he didn't like this kind of food. So whenever there was a party at the Kremlin, he was so pissed, you know, he was so angry because there was everything on these tables, but nothing he would like. So when there was a party, he was just bored and annoyed and he didn't like the food that was served. That was the golden cage I'm talking

about. And when the party was over, he went to his private apartments and then he would call his private chef, Mr. Belive that I mentioned, and he would ask him to fry some potatoes and serve it to him with sour cream, because that was the food he loved. That was the food he grew up with. That's amazing. And it's interesting, one of the things that comes across in your book as well is that when these chefs survive from one regime to another, they have to adapt. So Idi Amin's chef survives, I think, a couple of regime changes, doesn't he? And presumably has to slightly adapt his style as well, just as the Russian chef did. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Idi Amin's chef, Africa, is in the process, in the middle of the process of decolonization. And actually, the reason why he was hired as a personal chef

of the first president of independent Uganda was that he knew how to cook for white people. And then the first president of independent Uganda, Milton Obote, he wanted Uganda to be a free, independent African state. But at the same time, he loved European kitchen. And so that was the first reason. But then General Idi Amin made a coup d'etat and he asked for the African food. And exactly as you said, he had to switch and he had to learn a lot. They are all very smart. If they weren't smart, they wouldn't survive a week in a dictator's palace.

They were all very smart. But I think this guy, Otondo Odera, he was one of the smartest. And I remember, I will never forget the story from the coup d'etat when he told me his strategy of survival. He knew that Idi Amin's people are killing the people of the president, Milton Obote. And people in the palace, they were so afraid that they will be the next to be killed. But the chef, he told to everyone, guys, we have to work like it was a normal day. So all he did was he prepared the best dinner he could. And he served it with a silver spoons and silver forks that were left after the British. And when Idi Amin

came to the palace, before he started thinking, shall I kill those people or shall I not? He was asked for the greatest dinner he could have imagined. And Otondo, the chef, he told me, I knew he would be hungry. I knew making a revolution takes a lot of energy

and he would be hungry. If there would be no food, he would definitely execute all of us. But there was food. The food was excellent. And for a moment, he felt that he won. He saw the silver spoons, silver forks, amazing food, and he knew he won. folks, amazing food, and he knew he won. That was his moment of triumph. And they were all safe, and they all kept working for the new president. So all the political transformations through the eyes of the chefs are simply amazing to listen and to read about. And it's a very scary situation to be in and a weird kind of power to have that you're controlling what goes into these men's bodies in some ways. You know, it can affect their mood. It can affect their policies even to some extent. I mean, I guess these chefs were conscious that their lives in some cases and other people's lives were in their hands in terms of what they put on the dinner table.

Absolutely. The extreme example of that would be the chef of Enver Hoxha. He's the late dictator of Albania. And his chef told me openly that I probably saved thousands of lives because I could have read Hoxha's moods. And when I saw, and he used the phrase, he's in a mood of killing, I would have served him really the best food I could. And I was able to make him feel well. To calm him down. Exactly, to calm him down.

And this chef, he's sure that Hoxha had diabetes. So cooking for him was very tricky because he was a gourmand. He knew what the good food means, but on the other hand, he couldn't really eat the good food because he had very strict limit of calories per day. And it was extremely hard to cook for him. The chef, he had to deal with the doctors that twice a week he might give him something sweet. So whenever he saw that Hoxha is angry, that was the day for the sweets. And he's absolutely sure that he saved many people because he knew when is the moment to serve some sweets to Hoxha. But again, it's that kind of very delicate balancing act. It has to be

sweet, but not dangerously sweet. The previous chef was executed because Hoxha was in a bad mood. And just out of the blue, he accused the chef of an attempt to poison him. And that guy was taken on the morning. He went to work. And in the evening, he wasn't back at his home because, you know, crazy dictator accused him that he was trying to kill him. And there's a lot of paranoia about poisoning, I guess. I mean, several of the chefs in your book end up accused of poisoning at one point. One of them has to take a child to the hospital to prove that they've got a case of gas and they haven't been poisoned. A couple of others lucky to escape with their lives, really. I mean, that must have been a constant terror. And you've got other chefs jostling for

position. You've got other people informing on each other. You know, that whole kind of the danger of being in the inner circle of the dictator, you're really not protected from it as the chef. If anything, you kind of automatically come under suspicion if anything happens. Yeah. Working for a dictator is like walking on a minefield. You make a mistake only once. And those chefs I had the chance to talk with, they were those who didn't make any mistakes. It's like cooking and playing chess at the same time, because there is so many intrigues and there's so many people who would like to have to be in your position. And usually you're much more than a chef.

For example, Idi Amin's chef was the one who was bringing women for Idi Amin secretly behind his wife's, wouldn't know about it. And other people working for the dictator, they were jealous because he was very close to the president. And of course, they would try to blackmail him. And actually, at the end, they succeeded with that. He was very close to death. He was almost executed. Actually, in the last minute, Idi Amin decided to save him,

but he told him to leave the country. But generally, every day of your work for a dictator makes you very close to death. And each of those chefs, they were very close to death. At least once, the extreme case was the death of Paul Pot. She was 15 times accused of being a Vietnamese spy, Chinese spy, American spy, Russian spy. And 15 times she was close to Amazing. You mentioned this idea of them kind of playing chess with their lives as they're cooking. I was quite struck some of these chefs you actually cooked with, you know, they took you into the kitchen.

With all of them actually. With all of them, did you? Amazing. Yeah, that was the idea of the book. Some kind of unique culinary workshop with them. What kind of insight did you get seeing them cook? I mean, did they have very different styles? Were they quite methodical? Were they very careful? I mean, how did their cooking kind of express their personality, I suppose, and what they would bring to that job?

They're pretty damn dictators themselves. I have a theory that every chef might be a dictator and probably maybe not every dictator might be a chef, but many of them could. In the new book, I make an investigation about Vladimir Putin's grandfather, who was a chef, who cooked for Stalin in a few occasions. But yeah, that was my biggest discovery, that they are very, very bossy.

And you don't discuss with them. They have these characters. But at the same time, they are charming personalities. And even when you cook with them, it's a great pleasure. They're these kind of people that you like spending time with because dictators, they are naturally good psychologists. And I think somehow they have this instinct that the person who cooks for you should be a person who spreads a good energy, should be a person who's in a good mood. Because you spread that energy to the food that you prepare.

And your personal chef shouldn't be a person who's mainly complaining and who's mainly in a bad mood. And dictators, they had this instinct to hire people who mainly spread a good energy. How did these people come to work for these dictators? I mean, was it a job you applied for? Was there a test? Did they kind of just wander into it? How did they end up in this quite extraordinary situation? Mainly, there are two paths that can get you to this position. There is two paths that can get you to this position. First is that you're young, naive, not to say stupid,

and you join some sort of revolutionary movement. And you're trusted. So at some point, they make you cook for the leader. That's the case of Erasmo Hernandez, the man who cooked for Fidel Castro for many years I met him in Havana he began exactly this way when he was 15 he joined the revolution firstly he became the bodyguard of Che Guevara

and then Che gave him as a gift to Fidel because Fidel had to strengthen his security so that's path number one Fidel because Fidel had to strengthen his security. So that's path number one. You join the movement, they trust you, you start cooking. Path number two is a dictator has the power. And as all dictators do, he starts thinking, okay, how can I prove that I really have a lot of power? I want the best chef of my country to cook for me.

So that's path number two. You're the best chef or one of the best chefs in your country. And one day the security service comes to your door, they make knock, knock, and they give you an offer that you can't really refuse. So that's the story of Abu Ali, the chef of Saddam Hussein. He was just asked to cook for Hussein. And he told me about his first meeting with Saddam.

Saddam asked him personally, Abu Ali, I heard you're such a great chef. Would you give me this honor and cook for me? And Abu Ali, actually, Abu Ali didn't want to do that. Like Abu Ali knew that it's going to be a horrible job, but he didn't know if this kind of offer from a president is an offer he could refuse. So just in case, he said yes. And you convey brilliantly that sense of the danger of working around these men. I mean, Saddam at one point wants to do some cooking himself, doesn't he? And he puts this extreme

amount of Tabasco sauce in the food and he's sort of almost kind of taunting both his guests and the chef by kind of using food to play these power games, I suppose. I mean, it's a really scary situation to be in and you have to be the one saying, you know, yes, sir, yes, sir suppose. I mean, it's a really scary situation to be in. And you have to be the one saying, you know, yes, sir. Yes, sir. Oh, yes, of course. More salt, less salt, you know, trying to meet their tastes, but knowing that there's this terrible threat hanging over your head the whole time. Yeah, but this is exactly as you said, like that was the proof of his power that he can ask you if he makes you a horrible meal, which is very spicy, full of Tabasco. But Saddam made it, so you cannot even really complain about the taste of that food. And that was the same game

that Stalin was playing with his comrades, asking them to drink a lot, to eat a lot, and to dance for him. So that's humiliating, but that's the way they prove their power. Tell me a bit about the relationship with the dictator's wives, because sometimes there's a bit of tension there that the wives feel they should be doing the cooking and there's a competitiveness. In other cases, the wives seem to become quite friendly and quite close with the chefs, but it feels like there's always a danger there of, you know, how do you react to this person who also has a lot of power, but at the same time, the dictator may have views on the relationship that you're having with them. Idi Amin's chef, Mr. Oton Deodera, he told me that Idi Amin had four wives, but he was a brutal, immoral personality.

And it must have been very hard to be his wife so sometimes they would go to a kitchen because i think in many places kitchen is a natural place where you where you go it's like heart of every house even the presidential palace of a dictator so mr odetta told me that those wives would come to the kitchen to ask for some extra food, but they were trying to confess or complain about their life. But he said that that was a trap. Like he knew that becoming close with Idi Amin's wife wasn't a good idea for him. That the guy he had to be close with was Idi Amin, not his wife. Probably if the chef was too close with them,

he might easily have been accused of some sort of, you know, conspiracy relations with them or whatever. And I was quite struck Pol Pot's chef ends up becoming quite close to his wife. I mean, there's an interesting dynamic there. First of all, she seems to sort of imply to you that she and Pol Pot had a kind of, what, a flirtation or there was something between them. But then the wife had these quite severe mental health problems and the chef ended up being the one who was kind of responsible. That's a fascinating story. And one of the hardest questions I had to ask someone when working on that book was when I had to ask the chef of Pol Pot if there was something between her and Pol Pot, because her attention to Pol Pot and her approach to him was very unprofessional, I would say. It was very romantic.

She was talking about him, not like an employee talks about the employer, but she was talking about how handsome he was, how charming smile he had. And I kept that question for my last day. So I knew I had my material collected. And even if she kicks me out, because that's something very inappropriate to ask another lady in Cambodia, Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun story that I had the chance to talk personally to a person that was so close on a romantic level with one of the most horrible mass murders in the history. So I kept that question for the last day.

And I was smart enough to ask my fixer and translator to tell her, guys, tell her that I'm a stupid European, that in Europe it's something normal that we ask this kind of question. Just make a good intro to my question. And I asked that question if there was something romantic

or not even romantic between her and Pol Pot, and she answered, but the answer is in the book. Very good. And it's interesting when you were talking about these relationships, though, she's the one who even after he dies, cooks a meal for him, doesn't she? She cooks a sort of memorial meal. I mean, these relationships endured. And with some of the other chefs, long after they have left the service of the dictator, they go back and cook for them now and then. I asked her, we went together to the place where Pol Pot is buried. And she cooked his favorite soup. She didn't really want to cook for that day. And we wanted to make a documentary with her and i saw this as a last scene that she's cooking his favorite soup that was

chicken soup and and and that she goes with the pot and she's sort of giving the soup to his ghost. But when I was trying to make, like we went to the grave together, but she didn't want to cook. She told me, brother, it doesn't make sense. His spirit is not here anymore. He reincarnated and he's living somewhere, but he's not here anymore. So he's among us. He's living. Maybe he's in Brazil. Maybe he's in England. Maybe he's not here anymore. So he's among us. He's living. Maybe he's in Brazil.

Maybe he's in England. Maybe he's in the United States. Maybe he's in Poland. But for sure, Pol Pot and his spirit, he's among us. And when I heard that sentence that, you know, that new Pol Pot reincarnated, he's among us. I was like, oh my God, it's's so scary this is a book about the mechanisms how to feed a dictator means literally what to cook for them but the second meaning is we prepare the soil for them we we feed them with our fears with our fears, with our frustrations, with our complaints, and we prepare, we make them grow, we make them strong.

And if the chef of Pol Pot was right that he's among us, that's scary. And I'm afraid she might be right. she might be right. I was interested that you include the kind of testimonies and the stories of other people as well in the book, which I think sort of balances that sense that the chefs are often real loyalists, but then you have other people who carry that kind of legacy of the trauma of dictatorship. I needed someone because when I have Pol Pot's chef telling me how great person he was, even if I try to confront her with facts, it doesn't work. Whenever I was trying to confront her, she was telling me, brother, I spent 25 years of my life with Pol Pot. Who knows better? Was he a bad person or a good person? You or me? No discussion.

So I needed, very quickly I realized that for each story, I need a person who would say what the people who were living under the dictatorships, what did they eat, and how would they struggle to live in those countries? Because in many cases, they were starving. As the chef is creating, there was one guy had this signature dish that was a whole goat, right? Creating these sometimes quite marvelous feasts. There are people who are struggling for anything to eat, right? are struggling for anything to eat, right? Yeah. And in the book about Russia and USSR, I show how USSR took and used hunger as a weapon. So we talked quite a lot about how speaking to these chefs gave you insights into the dictators.

I'm kind of curious, did it also change your view of cooking? I mean, did it inspire you to try new recipes yourself? Did you learn anything from cooking with these chefs that you could kind of take home with you? Oh, one of my favorite soups now is the soup of Tikrit, which used to be the favorite soup of Saddam Hussein. And that was a home recipe. It's not a traditional Iraqi dish, nothing like that. That was a dish that Hussein's family used to cook at home. And it's such an amazing recipe because you make the soup, but you make it a little bit like a cake because you make levels. So you have apricot, you have tomato, you have fish, then you have onion, almonds. It's very Middle Eastern soup, but it's amazing. The whole recipe

is in the book, but it's so tasty. And for a moment when I was about to prepare it for the first time at home, I was like, oh my God, but this is Saddam Hussein soup. How can I cook it? How can I eat it? But then I was like, ah, come on, it's just a soup. It wasn't the soup that was killing people. It wasn't a soup that was causing wars. It's just a soup. You can eat it. And I simply love it. It's really one of the best soups that I can cook. eat it. And I simply love it. It's really one of the best soups that I can cook. Amazing. Thank you, Witold. I think that's a lovely point to end on. It's been really fascinating. And as I say, I loved reading your book and I can't wait to read the next one. That sounds fascinating as well. Thank you so much. It was a great pleasure. And thanks to you for listening to this bonus episode. Real Dictators will return in the coming weeks with further stories of tyrants the world over.

Stay tuned.