Release of Billy Mays' new book,
On the Job Training - Berlin to Vladivostok, is scheduled for sometime in October this year. It is an account of his twenty years in Central Europe from 1983-2003, and coincides with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union.
During recent phone interviews with Mays, he tells of his experience in Warsaw at the time of the failed coup attempt in Moscow in August of 1991. At the time, Mays was Country Director of Poland for FEDEX and part of a team tasked with rolling out FEDEX offices throughout the former Soviet-bloc and in the Soviet Union.
"I was in our Warsaw office watching CNN and had my counterpart in Moscow, the FEDEX Country Director for the Soviet Union, on the line, another American. The Moscow FEDEX office was just off of Red Square but Brian and his crew were holed up inside their office afraid to venture out with what was going on in the streets. I wound up telling Brian about the tanks that were moving about the city as the reports were being broadcast on CNN. Suddenly I heard a loud blast in the background over the phone (Brian got quiet at that point and I could hear a lot of excited discussion going on around him.) CNN showed, within minutes of hearing the explosion over the phone, that a tank had fired on the Soviet "White House", (the Soviet Parliament Building)."
"Letting Brian know what was up and where the "action" was in Moscow from my offices in Poland took up a good portion of that week. FEDEX European headquarters in Belgium also got into the act coordinating contingency plans for its staff if the situation deteriorated."
"Interesting to note that in Poland at the time, the FEDEX agent, the Polish National Aviation Works (PZL), was a very communist sympathetic group that was cheering on the coup attempt to remove Gorbachev. As the CNN news reports were coming in, the General Manager and his second in command were watching over my shoulder and cheering on any signs of the coup taking hold while we FEDEX reps wanted Gorbachev's or Yeltsin's economic reforms and Western style government to take control. It was like watching a college or professional sporting event. The Poles brought in vodka and herring while I called in pizza and beer as we all sat around the small TV in the FEDEX lobby at the entrance to PZL cheering our "teams" on and watching these world changing events occur."
Who won? Take a guess.
Billy Mays - The Author:
On the Job Training - Berlin to Vladivostok is the first book in a four volume series - The Rare Earth Series. It is scheduled for release in October of this year. The first book in the series documents Mays' life moving from Seattle to Poland and pursuing a career both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His career successes (and failures), meetings with famous people, involvement in spying and intelligence gathering operations, black market trading, and other dangerous encounters are described.
Mays' description of life in Soviet-modeled martial law Poland and the anarchic world that erupted after the fall of the Berlin Wall are personal accounts from those days. With the release of this book, and the rest of the Four Volume set under the name, The Rare Earth Series, Mays gives us an American's first hand account of what it was like living under communism, how more than half of Europe suffered under its totalitarian control, and what kind of world emerged in its waning stages with the difficult transition to NATO and European Union membership.
Other titles in the series include: Trading Dangerously Import-Export and a Little Thievery; Cash in Advance - CIA My Life Among Spies and Black Marketeers; and Black-Flagged - Uncensored Tales from Central Europe
Another book by Billy Mays, the first of his Cerium Tales, documents real events under Soviet bloc control in Poland. Sidetracked - One Polish Town's Unusual Secret to Success, is timed for release before the end of the year. This story takes place in a small village in southeast Poland and details how the town's citizens, in a bizarre set of circumstances, bettered their lives materially in the midst of communist control and kept their activities secret for nearly two generations. This unusual story takes the reader from the end of the Second World War, through Soviet occupation, to the imposition of martial law in 1981-83 when the town's secret was revealed and a brutal crackdown on its citizens occurred.
Mays plans on adding more titles to his newly christened series, Cerium Tales, and says, "I plan on staying focused on the events, people, and places that now make up the 'New Europe'. My experiences in Central and Eastern Europe will remain influential in how I write and what stories I think need to be told".
