Napier, MSCNewsWire, 20 February, 2016 - The Russian military presence in Fiji complete with arms and instructors and the way in which it has gone unchallenged is the sharpest indicator to date of the way in which the region has slid off the old western alliance radar.What a difference 29 years makes. In 1987 the United States saw Fiji as the anvil on which to hammer home a supremacy in the Pacific unchallenged since 1942.Enter now the Anglo-American Lieutenant General Vernon Walters who proceeded to run rings around men half his age along with most of the Australasian intelligence community.They were though in good company, notably that of the media.The old coup-master on this, his last hurrah, played fortissimo, especially in radiating misinformation.It was about indigenous rights, and tribal conflicts. It was about possession of hardwood resources.It was made known that the changing of the guard in Suva had nothing to do with Fiji’s position as the most vulnerable link in the anti US Navy nuclear vessels embargo contagion then sweeping across the South Seas.General Walters was in Fiji on holiday, reported one New Zealand newspaper.Even if he was on holiday General Walters was always on duty, as he was in Fiji just before the revolving door series of coups that began in 1987.The most useful tool in his covert operations kitbag?He always hid in plain sight, as he did in Fiji. His bluff, jovial, sympathetic persona tended to deflect the suspicions of even the most cynical.Who could believe that General Walters had been a cog of one dimension or other in every set-piece regime change from the end of World War 2?As a seasoned bureaucratic practitioner General Walters always knew that the hardest thing for a clever man to do was to appear simple. He was always careful to underplay any role that he was involved in which, in his case, involved covert operations across South America, the Middle East, Asia, and now the South Pacific.When in later life people would ask General Walters for the secret of his success he would often reply that his lack of a university education probably had something to do with it. Only when pressed would he concede that his years at Britain’s Jesuit Stonyhurst school might have been a contributing element.From there he joined his father’s insurance business in New York. He joined the US Army in 1941, Walters shot up the ranks. He was much aided by an extraordinary gift for languages of all descriptions that is still considered unrivalled to this day.It was this talent as an interpreter that saw him now at the side of successive United States Presidents of a Republican stripe starting with President Truman, then Eisenhower, Nixon, and now in Fiji, President Reagan.The Fiji of today in terms of geo-politics is light years from the Fiji of 1987. Then, the South Pacific, especially the southern South Pacific was the wobbly lock nut of the US nuclear umbrella.Now from the United States point of view New Zealand (think back to David Lange) is a reliable ally, and even more so, Australia (think Gough Whitlam.)It is of little use now supposing that if someone of the calibre of General Vernon Walters with his carefully disguised subtleties had been at the presidential side, then the United States would now not be preoccupied with the vacuums it caused to happen in the Middle East.General Walters died peacefully in his bed in Florida in 2002.The clandestine division of the public sector is no different from any other vocational endeavour in that it is a learning experience.When old ANZAC operatives get together and chew over lessons learned, they can take one comfort from the events that unrolled in Fiji all those years ago.They were wrong-footed by the greatest practitioner in their craft of the second half of the last century.From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk