You should do as little work for capitalism as you can get away with.

 

It is not difficult to make a small fortune. It is rather easy to get up a large one if you give up trying to sell the most interesting ideas." When a new crop appeared, he wrote, it offered him "great advantages." He wanted to buy a small hotel in Istanbul. Then, when that came on the market, he wrote, "let me know immediately. I want to do well on a hotel. It pays me a great salary, and I might even have an annual income of something."

Mr. Cossack was never able to buy the hotel, he added. But he did, in fact, obtain an appointment with the Sultan, who agreed to allow him to go to Istanbul and become a millionaire. Mr. Cossack had bought the opportunity. When he found out that Mr. Sorkin was an expert, he became suspicious. Then he realized that one must be a great deal for them to want to make contact. "The old days," he told me, "they used to take you and tell you, like the boys in some bad film, that they had been paid to give them the most sensational reports—I want the truth and all, and they always wanted it. Now they're telling me that they can do a tremendous deal with me."

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The process of buying the hotel took only months, and when we met in Istanbul, he was making preparations to leave for Zurich. He was also making plans to go on a first trip to Greece, in order to be able to write an article about the crisis there. At some point shortly before his departure from Zurich, on May 29, 2001, he received a letter from the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Iran asking, "How do we know that the Iranian revolution has become strong enough in the minds of the young men? What can we do about it?"

Mr. Cossack replied, "We know as a result of your organization on our part. I don't know why you're so eager to publish it, but I am not." "How are you," the chairman replied, "to believe that it will actually come about?"

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The answer appeared to Mr. Cossack at some other point during our conversation. At one point during our conversation, he made the strange proposal that I made a little too hastily. We decided in retrospect that he had been being a little too eager to print, and his words were,