Bankrate: That's surprising. One pictures you as being more of a scholarly kid.

Griffin: No, I used to think they were a little "delicate" (laughs).

Bankrate: Your military novels tend to touch on subjects that didn't make it into the history books, particularly spy craft and counterintelligence.

Griffin: They do. I was a soldier and I was lucky enough to be around some people who were very senior, and some lieutenants who later became very senior, so I think I know pretty much how the military mind works. I don't want to paint myself as a great counterspy, because that is absolutely untrue. But what that security clearance did for me was give me access; I could go in the files and look at things. I read things then.

Bankrate: You had written a host of books on the European theater of World War II when you discovered the largely untapped story of Juan Peron and Argentina's alliance with Hitler, which became your "Honor Bound" series. Your wife had something to do with that discovery, right?

Griffin: Well, I went down there to shoot duck (laughs) and I expected Mexico South; my ignorance of Argentina was monumental. Instead of Mexico South, we got a European-looking city (Buenos Aires), great food, and I met my wife, who ran the business of taking the hunters from the airplane to the (hunting site) and back and showed them around town. I married her; fell in love right away but it took three years to do it. She's an Argentine army brat; her father was a colonel in the cavalry, anti-Peronist. We've been married 15 years now.

Bankrate: What in Argentina fired your imagination?

Griffin: I was excited about Argentina because nobody in this country ever wrote about it before. And the doors are open to me now; I'm part of the system down there, at least the military system, because of my wife's father. And he was an anti-Peronist, which is even a smaller community. They are interesting people, done a lot of things. I like the country. The government is absolutely rotten; the president's a moron beyond description. But I like it down there. We spend half the year down there, maybe more.

Bankrate: Incompetent, meddlesome politicians are often the bane of the military in your novels. Did you experience that firsthand?

Griffin: There was a Jewish guy (American finance minister Hugo) Morgenthal who, with reason, absolutely hated the Germans, and he had the nutty idea of turning Germany into an agrarian nation. He was absolutely opposed to reindustrializing it, that being defined at the time as reopening the Volkswagen plant, which was a very good thing for Germany and the world. He thought they ought to all be farmers! It sounds idiotic, but this is true. He fought us tooth and nail. He had no idea what he was doing and he was a powerful politician trying to run the Army. And they had two very bright guys at the time, (Eisenhower deputy) Lucius Clay and John McCoy, a civilian, and this guy interfered with everything they were trying to do. I was in the same office and hung around with them, drove a car and things like that, and I heard all this stuff when I was a kid. It was fascinating to me then and still is.