The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rolling the Dice with Russia, and a Conversation with Pam Grier

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

The complexity of world events can’t be modelled by a flow chart or even the most sophisticated algorithms. Instead, military officers, diplomats, and policy analysts sometimes turn to an old but sophisticated set of tools: war games. Simon Parkin observed officials playing one in order to predict and contain a potential geopolitical conflict. And Michael Schulman speaks with Pam Grier, the pioneering star of blaxploitation films like “Coffy” and “Foxy Brown,” about her singular career in Hollywood.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you do a quick recap of the international news this past month, it might give you a panic attack. There's the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus, missile strikes in the Middle East, all kinds of headlines. And if they cause you anxiety, and they probably should, think for a minute about the people. who have to respond to all these developments in real time, hour by hour. The complexity of world events can't be modeled by an algorithm, at least not yet, so diplomats, policy analysts, and senior military officials sometimes turn to very unusual tools to develop strategies. They play games.

In 2018, Simon Parkin, who writes about gaming for the New Yorker, traveled to the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom to see one of those games firsthand. There's a story from the Second World War that you probably haven't heard before. It's about U-boats. They were the Nazi submarine fleet, and they were causing a great deal of trouble for the British. This is not addressed-up propaganda story. It's telling you that this U-boat, one of the wolves that hunt in packs in the Atlantic,

is as dangerous to your home as a thousand-pound bomb from the air. The Germans were using the U-boats to sink convoys of supplies en route to England and an alarming rate, sometimes hundreds, each month. Winston Churchill came to believe that the outcome of the entire war rested on dealing with the U-boats. So he called up a retired naval captain named Gilbert Roberts. Roberts was a tactician and outside of the box thinker. And at a secret naval base in Liverpool, he came up with an unusual plan to help the Navy sink those U-boats. He designed a game.

Imagine a game of a game of. battleship, but the board is the size of an entire room. One person plays the U-boat commander, and the other plays the convoy commander. They give their orders from the side of the room, and AIDS draw out the battle in chalk on the floor. Here's Major Tom Moat. He's an expert on war games. The movements of the escorts and the convoy were done in white chalk, and the movements of the German submarines were done in brown chalk that was exactly the same colour as the wood so that the escort commanders who were giving orders for their ships

couldn't see where the submarines were. A lot of the naval staff was out at sea commanding escorts, so the players in Roberts' game were mainly new recruits to the Women's Royal Naval Service. These Wrens, as they were known, were mostly 18, 19 years old. Every day they played out different. naval battle scenarios in Robert's game. After a few months, an admiral, one of the most successful submarine commanders of the

First World War, in fact, went to Liverpool to see what progress, if any, Robert's group was making. He said, I'll have a go. I'll be the submarine commander and I'll play against the convoy. And he was sunk six times out of six. So he said, who was commanding the escort? and it was one of the 19-year-old Wrens. Her name was Janet O'Kell, and she was actually 18.

By playing this war game, she and the other women had come up with a strategy to sink German U-boats. And it worked. Now, there's a moment there where, you know, the senior officer could get very crusty and very angry. But he didn't. He was like, that's incredibly effective. That was then made in to naval instructions

and radioed out to the convoys. And two hours later, they sank their first U-boat. Before one could say, hell Hitler, the escorting warships closed in around their precious charges, and proceeded to teach the Nazis a lesson. It's a story that probably deserves a Spielberg movie, but it's not unique. For hundreds of years, war games have been powerful tools

for military commanders and diplomats. Even today, they are played at the highest levels all around the world. I've played Matrix games in the USA. I have played Matrix games in China. Haven't done it with the Russians. Don't think I'm going to get permission. But Tom's games aren't about drawing lines on the floor. In the era of ISIS and fake news, you need a new kind of war game.

Matrix games are very simple games based on oral arguments. And Major Tom is an expert on Matrix games. If what the Wrens were up to in Liverpool looked like battleship, Tom's games looked like a cross between risk, Dungeons and Dragons, and a rat battle. I visited Tom at the Defence Academy of the UK, where he teaches young officers how to wage international war on a tabletop. Could you just tell me a little bit about,

so we've got on the table a board about the size of a picnic blanket that sort of got Ukraine at the top and goes all the way down to Egypt? Is this something you use in various? Tom's games, each player represents a country. You all sit around a map, and when it's your go, you say one thing that you'd like your country to do. A facilitator, which is kind of like what the military calls a dungeon master, asks the other players if they think that'll work.

Because, of course, the academic theory behind it is crowdsourcing the result. There's a debate about whether you'll succeed, and if you can't all agree, well, that's where the dice come in. I tend to use casino dice, just in case, so they're properly balanced. Tom takes dice very seriously. Now, of course, some people go, oh, you're rolling dice. It's just a game of chance. If you think that, then you don't understand risk.

And if you don't understand risk, then perhaps you really ought to be in another job. Major Tom's games have a simple framework, but they do allow players to bring an almost infinite amount of complexity to the table. You can do anything you can imagine, or at least anything you can make an argument for. That flexibility makes these war games very useful for untangling the complicated reasons why countries act the way they do.

I talked to David Schlepac. He's an expert in wargaming at the RAND Corporation in Washington. I've been at this for a very long time. I go back to the Cold War. And so we use them to look at global nuclear war and how you get into it and how you manage not to get into it. The major success for us is do we move the needle on policy? Do folks take what they learn from the games and use it to change what they do when they go back to their day jobs? When we were first starting to imagine a world where North Korea had nuclear weapons.

And so we set up a series of games where we asked the question, what would it mean for North Korea to have a small number of nuclear weapons? And we brought in a very senior player, a very smart man, a very good friend of mine, actually, who had done time in the Department of Defense as a senior policymaker. And he walked into the room at the start of the game and said, well, look, I don't understand why this is even a problem. They have two, three, five nuclear weapons. we have 1,500 nuclear weapons. I can do this math.

And then we played the game. And he walked out of the room going, oh, holy Christmas, this is a gigantic problem. This changes everything. So to see firsthand how wargaming can change your perspective, I sat in on a game Major Tom was running at the Defense Academy. It was kind of a big day in international relations. You may remember it.

The British Prime Minister Theresa May has explicitly blamed Russia for the poisoning of the former double agent Sergei Kli Pahl and his daughter and has expelled 23 Russian diplomats in response. Come on in. No, we haven't actually started yet. So who would you like to be with? I'd like to be with Russia. I thought you might.

Grab a seat. Like many people, I spent a fair bit of time worrying what Russia is up to. And this seemed like a pretty good way to get some insight. Now, for security reasons, all the players have to remain anonymous, but I can say that the guy playing Russia looked to me like a friendly university professor. He didn't much resemble Vladimir Putin, but he certainly had a talent for Putin's style of diplomacy. Okay, Russia, what do you want to happen this, though? I'm going to make a public televised announcement.

Well, we're basically going to indicate that the UK is a third-rate power, is throwing a tantrum in order to distract attention from its own political problems at home. That idea was debated by the group. Very few people believe Russia anymore and they know and they believe full well that it's just obfuscation. Does anyone think that that's going to make the UK government look worse or better? I think it's very arguable. And the dice came out. So, that was a four.

So the way it would be interpreted in the game is that Putin's attempt to discredit Theresa May actually increase her standing in the rest of the eyes of the world. So sadly that one didn't work very well. Ukraine, what are you up to? A setback. But it didn't discourage our Putin much. The next turn he made a similarly gutsy move,

offering to send humanitarian aid convoys to eastern Ukraine. Now, you may remember that's the part of Ukraine that's sporadically under attack by Russia. When I say a humanitarian aid convoys, the urge to put air quotes around it is overpower. Okay, now, Ukraine, will you accept these aid convoys? Absolutely not. Last time they sent aid convoys in, they were full of little green men that suddenly all had a clash. They'd off the jumper.

Turn after turn, the other countries in the game tried to hemrush her in. The tactics they used were worryingly creative. Also demand that the Russian ambassador attend the Secretary of State when we get anyone. I'm taking Russia to the International Maritime Court. We will conduct joint operational trials. Chechen sympathizers and separatists, firebom and attack Sotchy naval base. It can be easy to forget how complicated international relations are until someone gives you a seat in the situation room.

11. 11. Congratulations on a spectacular bit of diplomacy. I don't know who you got to run it, whether it was Bill Gates. When the game is over, Tom asks everyone what their nation's goals were. Okay, Russia, what were your objective? Well, the first one, you could take it one of two ways, one of three ways, is to ruin Britain's international reputation. That, on the face of it, went completely wrong.

The second one was to basically, maintain the position of our good ally Assad in Syria. So basically, the Russians have managed to manipulate events to achieve their goals. Even with five extremely creative antagonists and some bad luck with the dice, Russia still kind of won. They controlled the game. This, Major Tom tells me, is not unusual. Outside the realm of professional sports,

with their stratospheric salaries and primetime TV coverage, Games are usually viewed as frivolous, something that should be set down after childhood, probably only picked up again in retirement. But those who work at the highest levels of defence and national security view games pretty differently. Here they are seen as perhaps the most efficient, tactile way in which theories can be tested and refined, and through which vital, potentially life-saving experience is gained. In war games, the actions of nations, aren't. armies and diplomats can be understood, maybe even predicted.

And as warfare grows ever more complex, ever more frightening, the war games adapt, and the knowledge, the understanding they provide, could mean the difference between victory and defeat, even between war and peace. Simon Parkin, his new book, A Game of Birds and Wolves, tells the story of the war games that helped to defeat the German U-boat menace. And it's out now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Michael Schulman is a staff writer covering pop culture of all kinds. And he's interviewed an amazing roster of talent. In the past couple of years, it includes Peter Dinklage, Parker Posey, Frank Oz, and recently, none other than the great Pam Greer. Pam Greer has a very unique place in popular culture because she emerged in the 1970s as the heroine of a genre, of a genre usually called black exploitation.

And these were black action movies that were like nothing else that had come before. This is you skinny. Before you start talking tough, I better warn you, I got a black belt and karate. So let's you get out of here quietly. They still got some teeth like that other face. They're outrageous, they're raunchy.

They have sex and violence and drugs. While there had been movies before she came around like Shaft and Superfly, she was the first female heroine of this genre. She's so much fun to watch and was sexy and funny and empowered and really like no one else who had been in movies. This is California. I'm supposed to be warm. We were on the set of Bless This Mess, which is a sitcom about a city couple that moves

to a small Nebraska town to be farmers. And Pam plays... a woman who owns the general store and is also the town sheriff. You all had an intruder. What? Oh, hey. Yes, I called 911, but that was last night. You're just coming now.

Believe it or not, there isn't a code for a dead chicken. You can't call a sheriff when a chicken dies. Just like you can't call a gynecologist when the internet goes dead. Now, I want to point out that even though you're not actually filming any scenes today, you are still dressed as if you could be sheriff of a small town. I just like this all the time. I'm sorry. Did I offend you?

Amazing. The smell of leather. It's deer hide. Why did you come here to Hollywood and what were your first impressions of it? Another planet. It's Nirvana. It's like a place from where I've been, you know, military bases and all my childhood. And the only place I had a beautiful outdoors experience was at the farm in Wyoming.

and it was just dirt and the gray barn, you know, and then to come out to California and drive down the Sunset Boulevard, I said, if I can just stay here, this is what I want to do. And I met some film students who were loading up a van of cables and cameras. And I had on a plaid shirt,

kind of probably the same Levi's in the same Timberland boots that I have on now. And that's all I had. About 10 years ago, she wrote an autobiography called Foxy, which is now being developed as a biopic. And in it, she revealed that she had been the victim of sexual assault multiple times, starting when she was six and then again when she was 18.

And she talks about how that experience made her withdraw into herself. She was extremely shy. She developed a post-traumatic stutter. And she saw her own attractiveness as a real deal. danger. I didn't find myself sexy or pretty. I didn't even shave my legs. You know, it's tricky because I think her image in those movies like Foxy Brown were so empowering for women and so alluring, I'm sure, for men who just thought she was hot.

And she was coming up at the time of, you know, Black Power and Angela Davis. and she was kind of the pop culture version of that. By a patriarchal society that allowed it just, it was okay to slap your mom or push women around or berate them or the food wasn't right. You would see that in many families. And that was the nature of the beast back in the 50s and 60s. So your characters like Foxy Brannicoke,

you were obviously so empowering and witty and fun. Part of what I love about those movies is that you could tell that they were doing things in all kinds of exploitation movies that they couldn't have done in movies just a few years before. There were some black critics who... Very conservative critics who thought that it was perpetuating stereotypes of drug dealers and pimps and everything. And I kept telling them, where do you think we get them from? Those aren't stereotypes. We get them from reality. When a woman takes out her earrings and her shoes, she's going to whoop your behind.

Okay? So that's in my movies. Okay. And certain cultures understand that. And other cultures would think it's black exploitation. It's exploitation. We don't fight. We're conservative. Black people. We don't do that. The hell you don't. One of her biggest fans from the 70s was Quentin Tarantino, who in 1990s, who in 1990s, cast her as Jackie Brown. Jackie Brown is a caper based on an Elmore Leonard novel called Run Punch, but Quentin Tarantino wanted her to be in the movie so bad that he actually changed the main character from a white blonde woman to a black woman.

Well, I've seen Quentin Tarantino point out that one thing he loved about your movies is that you didn't have an equivalent in white cinema. There was no white girl action hero. It was you, and I thought that was an amazing observation that you were just a true original. It was interesting because my mom had a lot of white women friends, and they weren't allowed to speak back to their husbands like a black woman would. It was different in culture. Hey, we both go through so much discrimination and oppression. I'm not going to let you talk to me that way.

Right. And there's not that oppression in a white family. Can I ask you something like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? because I was amazed at, first of all, the fact that you were dating him when, but really before either of you were really famous, but also that he was converting to Islam at the time and wanted you to be his submissive Muslim wife. First wife. I want to be first and the last.

So the two lives that you were choosing between, essentially, were so different. And you say that you really struggled with that decision. How did you decide what path to take? I decided on me because I'd seen being married and validated by men in marriage. Some people fall in love with the idea of being in marriage. Yeah, but if he decides to take it away from you, how do you hang on to it? And this decision came down to this one incredible moment when he called you up and said, I'm marrying someone tomorrow unless you come up.

No, today. Today? When he called me on my birthday and he says so, I want to be able to give you your Muslim name. And I'm going, okay, you've had three months to decide and I've given you the books. I'm here at the temple. And if you don't commit to marrying me and becoming a Muslim woman, I will marry someone this afternoon who's been prepared for me. Without all of that, he was the perfect. He loved jazz.

He loves sports. He was an academic. He was just perfect for me. He could have been that first love. Yeah. But that day, that day he kind of took the eraser and went, and I said, okay, but I couldn't make him happy. He was so happy when he talked about his conversion and the religion. And I said, God, he just beams.

I don't, I walk in the room. I don't make him beam like that. I don't make him, you know, be that happy. In the mid-70s, she was in a relationship with the comedian Richard Pryor, who was at the height of his fame, but also very deeply. in the middle of his drug problems as well. And Greer tried to be a positive force in his life, but ultimately, as she writes in our book, the relationship deteriorated.

And the end of this relationship is particularly surreal. And I wanted to hear about this story, which was that Pryor was gifted a miniature horse, and he thought he should keep it around because Pam loved horses. I come home, I get the call. And the horse is bleeding and has been attacked. And I'm going, and Richard's going to fall off the wagon. He's going to be so depressed and he's been really good.

He has no drugs, no drinking. I got to see a good side of him. You know, it was nice to see that. I just knew he's going to, there's going to be a bad time if this horse dies. And I saw him really, really, really love animals. He was sobbing from the core of his body like you'd never seen. And I said, we got to go. We got to go.

He says, I don't have a horse trailer. The vet can't come. We've got to put ginger in their back seat. But it's a jaguar. Shut up. Let's go. Stop crying. Push.

I pull. She got in and she was on her knees or head off the window, tail out the back. The car went down, hit the asphalt, the pipes. I thought I was going to break down. The axle brake. And he's getting in the car. He's in his bath row barefoot. He's crying.

I'm like, oh, my God. Richard's going to have a heart attack. The horse is going to die. And I'm going to get in an accident on a freeway. So let's go. point out that anyone passing your car would have seen Pam Greer at the driver's seat, Richard Pryor crying in a bathrobe in the passenger seat, and then just horse hooves, like flying out of the backseat. That is nuts. Yes, it was. And the vet said,

we're all going to be outside when you drive up because we want to see this. They gave her anesthesia and stitches and surgery and everything, and she survived. And Richard said, you know what, you're funnier than I am. He said, I'd never, I said, that's the purity of where I come from, country. We're going to take care of what we have to take care of. Well, it's a real honor and a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for talking with me. Oh, thank you for your interest and your consideration.

Pam Greer. She spoke with the New Yorker's Michael Schillman on the set of ABC's Bless This Mess in Santa Clarita, California. And we should note that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's relationship to Islam and gender relations have evolved since he was in his 20s. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening today. And please join us next time for The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putuguello, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Monfei Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.