The word "virtually" appears above. Two examples, one personal, one not.
A colleague and I arrived in Milan and hired a car. We had come for a meeting in Switzerland. We crossed the Swiss border and headed for our hotel on Lake Locarno. At 8.00 pm, on a good road, our car, which contained two middle-aged men in suits and was being driven within the speed limit was stopped by police and we were asked to show our documents. Not a major incident, I agree but it's the only time in many years of overseas travel, business or pleasure, that this has ever happened to me outside of a border crossing point. And that includes trips behind the Iron Curtain, before the fall.
A bigger example is that of Jon Snow, he of Channel 4 News. The incident gets a mention in his book but I have had him recount it to me personally too. (My daughter-in-law is a Channel 4 News producer and was his researcher on the book.)
In January 1991 talks were being held in Geneva between US Secretary of State James Baker and his Iraqi oposite number Tariq Aziz to see whether Saddam Hussein could be persuaded to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait before war broke out. Snow was in Geneva to anchor Channel 4 News live from the city that night.
He was in a deep sleep in his third floor room at the Intercontinental Hotel when three men burst in, having knocked down the locked door. One of them, who Snow noticed was armed, ordered him to get out of bed and made him stand completely naked in front of him. A second whipped a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around him. "Come with us!" he barked. One of the men worked for the hotel, the two with guns were Swiss policemen. They frogmarched him, wearing just his blanket, out of the hotel and down to the central police station.
It was five in the morning when he was flung, still without clothes, into a solitary cell in the police station. It appeared that he had committed an offence but as none of the police spoke English and Snow's French was somewhat erratic he couldn't make out what it was. They flashed documents in front of him. He asked to make a telephone call or for them to make one on his behalf but they refused.
He sat in his cell, wearing his blanket, with no further visit from the police until 8.00 am. He knew that soon his crew would be wondering where he was and that his office in London would be calling him, as arranged, in his room. Once again a policeman came to the cell door flashing a paper he wouldn't let him read. Snow asked again for a phone call and was again refused. His main concern was that he had fought hard to get an interview with Tariq Aziz and that he would lose that. Soon he began to feel that he would be neither clothed nor free by 7.00 pm to present the news.
Finally, at 11.00 am, more than six hours after his arrest he was allowed to make a phone call. He knew the British manager of the Intercontinental Hotel and he called him, telling him that he was naked and had no idea what the hell was going on. The policeman then explained to the hotel manager why they were holding him. "You've failed to pay a speeding fine," his friend told him. "I'll come down and pay it and put it on your bill, it's only 60 Swiss francs (about £25)."
When his friend arrived Snow told him that he had indeed paid the fine that he'd incurred several years earlier when speeding to the offices of Swiss television to report the story of Jasser Arafat at the UN.
"Ah, but you were fined twice," said his friend. "Once for speeding and once for going through a red light, 60 francs for each." Snow had thought that the second fine was a duplicate and had kept it as a receipt to claim on his expenses.
Later Snow discovered that when James Baker had arrived on his official plane at Geneva airport, the US press accompanying him had jumped off the flight first to report, film and photograph his descent down the aircraft steps ahead of the make or break meeting that might or might not avert war in the Gulf. The Swiss police had altogether other ideas and demanded that the press get back on board and file through immigration after Baker had left the airport. As Americans tend to, the press just carried on with what they were doing and the police set about them, beating them with truncheons and manhandling them. Baker's people made a complaint to the Swiss Minister of the Interior. He in turn contacted the police and they decided to run the names of every journalist accredited to the talks through the computer. That's how they discovered the "criminal" J Snow.
Jon Snow claims to have learned two morals from the story: always work on the basis that Switzerland is a police state; and never sleep in a Swiss hotel in the nude.
