Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last month freezing more than $8 billion in Iranian assets held by U.S. banks. Because of it, no sizable bank anywhere in the world is willing to extend credit to Iran. Most banks are also unwilling to handle Iran's international transactions, with the important exception of the Swiss and Japanese. They have made it possible for Iran to keep making oil sales, which amount to about $1 billion a week...
Their quarry was Kurt Schilling, 57, a Swiss business consultant working, he insisted, in "the interests of Swiss defense." At first the Austrians laughed: they thought he was an East bloc spy. Then Swiss officials discovered that Schilling had indeed been dispatched on an information-gathering mission, albeit unauthorized, by one Colonel Albert Bachmann, a defense department intelligence officer. Reflecting the surprise shared by Austrians at the revelation that a freelance spook from their equally neutral neighbor had been snooping on them, the Vienna daily Die Presse dubbed Schilling "the spy who came in from the Emmentaler," the best-known...
Bachmann dreamed up the assignment for Schilling, a military buff, on his own. The colonel, whose zeal was said by the Swiss to have been "a problem," said that Schilling was an apprentice agent whose prowess he wanted to test in an easy job. The Swiss suspended Bachmann from duty. As for Schilling, the Austrians last week announced that he would be tried on espionage charges. The price he could pay for his spy tryout: three years in prison...
...dump the dollar as the currency of the world oil trade, a move that would undermine the value of the greenbacks they already hold. But Iran and Libya are urging OPEC to switch from dollars to a so-called basket of currencies, which presumably would include German marks, Swiss francs and other Western money, and a fight at next week's meeting seems likely. In the doubtful event that OPEC did take such a step, demand for those currencies would send their value soaring on money markets as the dollar plunged...
...that he had difficulty understanding her. That would make for bad acting and a bad movie. Change the fraulein, as Hollywood often does, to a mademoiselle? Great Scott, not in this case. At Scott's insistence, Sanda was paid $350,000, packed off to Paris and replaced by Swiss Marthe Keller. At least that's the reported dénouement. Neither Scott nor Sanda would talk about it. Her only comment was a brusque "No comment." No accent there...