Interpol recruited Bannon at age 19 while he was serving time in a Korean prison for smuggling peanut butter and Jack Daniels. He’d been serving as a Christian missionary when his quest for American munchies got him tangled with a smuggling operation that, on one end, traded in harmless Yankee foodstuffs and, on the other, trafficked in children and child pornography. While Bannon believes a number of his traits led Interpol to approach him, the fact that he spoke fluent Korean–and was a third-degree black belt in the martial art of hapkido–didn’t hurt.

Hired first as an undercover “snitch,” he was eventually recruited into Archangel, a covert team within Interpol that worked to hunt down and punish those who raped, tortured and killed children for profit. Interpol is the largest intelligence and law-enforcement organization in the world and is second in size only to the United Nations. Funded by member nations, it functions with virtual immunity around the globe, including in the United States.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:00 PM  |