It was January (Brazil's Summer) of 1991 that I met Augusto Pinochet. I had arrived at Rio de Janeiro's Sol Ipanema Hotel two weeks earlier, after a drunken flight from New Orleans that included a lengthy Miami layover.

In Miami, I wandered the powder white corridors of the international terminal, sipping Wild Turkey and searching for someone with whom to talk Truth. "Truth" is something both dictators and drunks openly seek. After hours of searching out Truth with -- and slopping whisky upon the sleeve of -- a bewildered Latin whose card read, "Highland Imports / Bogotá to Edinburgh," my flight was called.

At sunrise the next morning and after many more whiskeys, we descended through rainy clouds above the Amazon Jungle just where Brasilia could briefly be seen below. Brasilia is a mid-jungle clearing that wrestled the forward-looking nation's capital from coastal Rio de Janeiro in an idealistic 1960's western expansion.

Greeting me at Rio's Aeroporto Galeao was an aide to the cultural attaché of the U.S. consul. He carried a small, white box with a red silk ribbon. I presumed the box was for me, but he never presented it. It was early, I thought, perhaps he forgot.

I was told the U.S. ambassador still slept in his jungle apartment in tiny Brasilia. The cultural attaché was doing likewise somewhere in giant Rio. They would both be at a party that night, the aide assured me, at Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim in elegant Ipanema, where I was exhibiting my photographic series "Bourbon Street and The Sea."

The U.S. Agency for International Development and the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro were sponsoring the exhibition and the night's party. Travel expenses were courtesy of American Airlines, which had sprung for the blessedly deep well of whiskey and my tourist seat on the long flight down.

The opening went well, and at the party, I asked the cultural attaché if I might ask the South American manager of American Airlines to boost my return ticket to first class. He crooned, "They don't even do that for us."

American Airlines' South American manager turned out to be a cultural buff who suggested I come see him next week at his downtown offices, "near the Old Opera House."

I also asked and received an advance on my stipend from the State Department. With it I bought another week at the beachfront Sol Ipanema. The Sol (sun in Portuguese) is a small hotel seemingly popular only with several of the world's diplomatic corps and the U.S. military. The thought "CIA hotel" crossed my mind, but not my lips.

Upon my arrival, the aide to the cultural attaché, not knowing of my drunken talent for understanding languages I do not speak, said clearly to the Sol desk clerk, "Treat Mr. Johnson well, he is more important than he looks." I stood by his side, burping ten thousand miles of Wild Turkey, my hair mussed, clothes rumpled, and eyes twirling in their sockets, but proud.

Outside the hotel was the famous Ipanema beach with its song-praised "Young and sweet / Pure and gentle," wearing the most revealing beachwear God has given mankind.

I, a man of girthful years, reappeared from the hotel wearing snowflake-looking, tie-dyed navy and gray boxer-baggy trunks, with a matching hip-length robe made for me by an Uptown New Orleans matron especially for this trip. On the day I met Augusto Pinochet I was so dressed.

I had walked along the shore to a neighboring resort hotel, the massive Caesar Park, in search of coffee and the Miami Herald. For reasons I never understood, the Sol had no newspapers, though it provided a lavish free breakfast and a practically free thatched-roof bar frequented by mysterious "wholesale" gem salesmen. (Brazil is the world's largest producer of gems.)

Parked in front of the Caesar Park were several large German cars and a dozen nearly as large men, each suited darkly, and unsmiling behind small sunglasses. I neither slowed my gait nor stopped but went directly to the newspaper racks and then to an easy chair facing a long carpeted corridor filled with reporters, cameras and portable lights.

I caught sight of the woman who had interviewed me for O Globo TV, on the night of the party at Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim. I had worn gray slacks and the same beach robe, that night, over a white shirt and tie - it looked a little like an Armani sports coat. I had looked "Terrific!" she gushed. Head swelling, I agreed. Then I lied, telling her I had bought the coat in Lisbon - always a good lily-gilder in Brazil.

When she came down the plush corridor I asked, "What's going on?" Lights flared, cameras whirred and she pointed and said, "We are following Augusto Pinochet on a jewelry-buying stopover before he flies on to South Africa for arms shopping."

I turned, and there he stood at my side, wearing a dark gray pinstriped suit. Out of his trademark tailored uniform, he looked neither large nor menacing. He looked like any Latin businessman, like the bewildered man in the Miami airport. He did not smile, he did not speak.

I said, "Good afternoon, Generalissimo" - not exactly right. "Generalissimo" was Spain's Francisco Franco, but it was a comparison Pinochet was said to like. He was Chile's former dictator, senator-for-life, and perpetual head of the army brought to ruthless power, some say, by a 1973 CIA-assisted coup. He was accused of "disappearing" tens-of-thousands (and the man who, come 1999, would find himself under house arrest in London).

His entourage moved on, and a white-starched waiter brought over black coffee as I read of riots in Florida.

Late the next morning, I went to see the manager of American Airlines' South American interests. His secretary led me in and brought black coffee with a bottle of Wild Turkey on the side. On his large, Amazon mahogany desk sat a small television with a built-in VCR. On its screen was Pinochet looking blankly at me. A voice-over, roughly translated, was saying, "Pinochet and visiting North American photographer Leonardo Arl Zhonson, wearing his Lisbon coat, meet in the lobby of…"

On the flight home, I sat in first class, in a single, middle, front-row seat, comfortably before the movie screen and flanked by deluxe food carts, wine, whiskey, and a white box wrapped in a red silk ribbon. Inside were expensive chocolates.