by James Philip
Ironically, by the mid-1960s, the CIA’s operations had been subsumed, much in the same way the House Un-American Activities inquisition had relegated the FBI’s crime-fighting role to that of an under-staffed public relations operation as progressively, its focus shifted towards a witch hunt for ‘Commies’ in the 1950s. Of course, when the McCarthy witch hunts ended, or more correctly, fizzled out in a welter of recriminations that left the reputation of the old FBI indelibly tarnished, J. Edgar Hoover, had simply shifted those ‘anti-Commie’ resources to the ‘fight against African-American subversion’. Essentially, in his eyes, the Civil rights Movement had become the exemplar of a new ‘Un-American activities’ threat.
The CIA, on the other hand, prided itself on never having lost sight of the ball.
The recent war had, inconveniently, cast an unwelcome spotlight on the scale and the range of its domestic activities; it had hoped that with the end of major hostilities in the Midwest, that the American people would complacently assume that it had gone back to spying on foreigners. Therefore, the notion that Operation Maelstrom was about to be placed front and centre of the national debate was nothing short of a…nightmare.
That was a given.
For Rachel, the real imponderable was why, exactly, she had been whisked back to DC – without a word of explanation other than that ‘this had been cleared by the British Ambassador’ – and why she had been driven straight from Andrews Field to the Headquarters of the CIA in Langley.
To meet James Jesus Angleton?
That hardly made any sense.
Unless, that was, he wanted her to kill somebody for him.
Chapter 5
Sunday 29th January 1967
Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, Clermont-Ferrand
Citizen Maxim Machenaud was sitting on the step below the platform where the great altar had once stood at the far end of the great medieval cathedral, when the Soviet delegation entered the building. Although a detachment of Republican Guards patrolled outside in the cold of the winter’s day, the First Secretary and Chairman of the Front Internationale was almost - but not completely alone, today he was accompanied as he often was, lately, at a distance by the thin, severe-looking, lank-haired woman Machenaud called Comrade Agnès, who customarily recorded everything he said in shorthand in her note book – in the sepulchral stillness within, his breath frosting faintly in the clammy, frigid air as the Russians marched purposefully down the length of the knave, their booted steps ringing on the flagstones underfoot.
The Frenchman seemed not to hear them coming until, when they were still some ten or so metres away, he slowly rose to his feet. He had forsaken his normal civilian suit and donned the matt black uniform of the heavily armed storm troopers at the doors.
The expression of Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov, the Troika’s Commissar Special Plenipotentiary to the Front Internationale in Clermont-Ferrand, was unreadable. The longer he was in the Auvergne, the better he understood the wisdom of his masters in the Sverdlovsk Kremlin, sending a man such as he, to such a godforsaken place as this. Nobody but a man who had come up the hard way, paid his dues sucking up betrayals large and small, fighting for everything he got, was going to stick it out among these people!
He glanced at the woman standing ready with her pencil and note book. He had not noticed her at the time, if she had been present, she must have been lost in the crowd that first day he arrived in the Auvergne. That was the day he had witnessed a middle-aged French woman hung with piano wire, and Jacques Duclos, the leader of the pre-Cuban Missiles War French Communist Party and Maxim Machenaud’s last surviving rival, and a terrified teenage girl burned to death for the amusement of Comrade Citizen Machenaud.
Today, Comrade Agnès’s face was a mask, her eyes seemingly dead. It was a look many Russians had had to cultivate in the Stalin years.
Rashidov focused his whole attention on Maxim Machenaud.
It was as if his whole life had been a preparation for this…test. His upbringing as the son of an impoverished peasant family in Jizzakh, in remotest Uzbekistan, born on the day before the Russian Revolution, his youth had hardened, tempered him to withstand suffering and cruelty. Despite being wounded so badly he was sent home from the front in the Great Patriotic War, invalided out of the Red Army, fifteen years later he had risen to First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, a thing no man without an excess of feral cunning and a streak of ruthlessness as wide as the Steppes themselves, could have possibly achieved and yet…the lithe, dapper, wholly evil man standing before him in the gloom of the ransacked Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, remained a dangerously closed book to him. A complete, lethally dangerous enigma, a mystery that beneath his stolid, poker-face mask, had the unique capacity to scare the shit out of Comrade Commissar Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov.
“Do you know what I did to the last Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand?” Maxim Machenaud asked urbanely. As always, he never bothered with civilities, for such were no more than ‘false bourgeois reflexes’, superfluous to the Revolution.
“No, Comrade,” Rashidov intoned respectfully.
The Frenchman replied without waiting for the interpreter to do his work.
“I had Monsieur Pierre-Abel-Louis Chappot de la Chanonie crucified in the Place de Jaude,” the First Secretary of the Front Internationale said, bloodlessly, as if it was nothing of any particular consequence. “Right next to that bloody statue.”
“Oh…”
“The one of the noble savage Vercingetorix, the Chieftain of the Arveni Tribe who stupidly allowed himself to be captured by the Romans and paraded through the streets of the Eternal City. Do you know what Julius Caesar did to him afterwards?”
Rashidov shook his head.
“He was garrotted to death.”
Sharof Rashidov listened to the translation. He had no idea where this was going; so, he waited, patiently. Some days, Machenaud communicated in his prissy Moskva Russian; today, he was pretending not to understand a single word said to him in Russian.
“J'ai pris les armes pour la liberté de tous.”
I took up arms for the liberty of all.
The Russians had learned not to exchange looks, or to interact in any human fashion with each other, when Maxim Machenaud was in this sort of mood; apparently lost within his own twisted reality…
The Frenchman waved idly at their surrounds.
The great church’s fixtures and fittings down to the last pew and icon had been stripped out, now the building served as a communal meeting place where the faithful stood corralled often for hours on end, while the First Secretary ranted and Kalashnikov-wielding Revolutionary Guards mercilessly watched for the minutest signs of inattention, or a failure of…rapture.
The Russians, having been briefed that the terror had been dialled down in the last year or so; had discovered that their arrival had in some, indefinable way, ramped it up again to a new apogee of random violence.
“Bishop Chappot pleaded to be closer to his God,” Machenaud went on. “But we were in less of a hurry than he was. So, we nailed him to a cross. It took him four days to die. Amazing what the human body can withstand if you put your mind to it? Such is life, do you not agree?”
Rashidov shrugged.
“As I have explained previously,” he reminded his ally, “the methods that you employ to further the cause of the Marxist-Leninist International is your affair, Comrade First Secretary.”
Maxim Machenaud was hardly listening.
“We are standing in the fourth cathedral built on this spot, which was originally a knoll or small hill in the centre of the ancient town. Le Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption took over a hundred years to build, substantially, that is. They were still building and rebuilding in the fifteenth century, and then again in the eighteenth, and for a period in the nineteenth. We make a mistake when we think that what we can achieve in the short span of a human lifetime can really change the course of history, do you not agree, Comrade Commissar
?”
“The march of history is unstoppable,” Rashidov retorted, doggedly, hardly crediting that he was having this conversation.
The smaller man shook his head.
“This place was inspired by Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; some say that it is Notre-Dame in black,” Maxim Machenaud half-smiled, ghoulishly whimsical in that moment, “but my ancestors chose their building material wisely. The local volcanic stone is of the Trachyandesite variety of extruded igneous rock; it is the strength of that material which allowed the construction of such apparently slender, load-bearing pillars around us holding up the great vault of the ceiling.”
Sharof Rashidov recollected that somebody had told him that the colour of the cathedral – black – was not a result of industrial pollution but of the rock from which it had been erected…
“Your man Kolokoltsev led my Revolutionary Guards into a trap at Villefranche,” the First Secretary of the Front Internationale declared without warning.
Rashidov was caught off guard; and reacted angrily.
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“He tricked my people into believing that he was going to help them seize the Villefranche Fleet. Instead, he led them into a trap.”
Rashidov was sorely tempted to take the smaller man’s scrawny neck in his muscular, calloused hands and to shake a little sense out of him.
He had seen Dmitry Kolokoltsev’s preliminary report on the condition of what was left of the pre-war French Mediterranean Fleet, now holed-up on the Riviera. He had noted with interest but little surprise that the majority of the ships were in need of overhauls, time in dry dock and ‘incidental’ refits – whatever that meant, he was no Navy man and Kolokoltsev came highly recommended and seemed to know his business – and Rashidov had had no qualms passing a summary of the KGB man’s report directly to his superiors back in Sverdlovsk. He guessed that Comrade Admiral Gorshkov would be interested, and assumed that the irascible Minister of Defence and First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would, in due course come back to him with the normal raft of queries, both technical and political. Frankly, he had thought no more of Kolokoltsev’s guardedly optimistic report…until now.
“I have no idea what you are talking about, Comrade!” The Troika’s Commissar Plenipotentiary complained, trying very hard not to lose his temper. “Why was I not informed that you planned to seize the ships at Villefranche? Surely, that would have been an operation best co-ordinated with the special forces troops attached to my delegation?”
Privately, he was thinking: “What the Hell was Kolokoltsev up to?”
Suddenly, there was animation in Maxim Machenaud’s cold grey eyes.
“One hundred and fifty-seven men of my personal guard were flown down to Nice,” he ground out between clenched teeth, trembling with rage, “where, assisted by the garrison at Nice, another two hundred and eighty men, they mounted a combined operation to secure the port of Villefranche, and under the leadership of your man, a force of over a hundred men was attempting to board the battleship Jean Bart, the flagship of the traitor Rene Leguay, when the whole fleet opened fire on the boats carrying my men, and upon the Revolutionary Guards and their vehicles parked along the dockside and the corniche!”
Neither Sharof Rashidov or any of his escorting KGB officers and Party officials, were any the wiser.
Their blank looks enraged the Frenchman.
“The bloody battleship opened fire with its big guns at point blank range!” Machenaud hissed accusatively. “My people had no chance. Then the survivors were ambushed by fighters in the hills as they tried to escape. Only about twenty men made it back to the fortified perimeter of eastern Nice and many of them were seriously wounded!”
Sharof Rashidov’s mind was working overtime.
Admiral Gorshkov would be unbelievably pissed off; it had been a pipe dream but potentially, those ships at Villefranche might have tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean.
And as for Chairman Shelepin; he had sent Rashidov to the Auvergne to ‘get a grip’ and that was even less likely now, than it had been twenty minutes ago.
One of the reasons Rashidov had, to all intents, forgotten about the French Fleet, and decided against wasting effort fomenting more Soviet-friendly groups among the southern and coastal enclaves ringing the Bay of Lions and clinging, like sickly limpets to the rocky coast of the old Riviera, was that any idiot could see that apart from in and around Clermont-Ferrand, Maxim Machenaud was clearly not the only game in town. Increasingly, he was suspicious about claims the FI also had a tight grip on the larger, former industrial city of Lyon; all his intelligence suggested the place was a deserted ghost town.
In fact, contrary to the wishful thinking behind Warsaw Concerto, there was absolutely no evidence that the people in Toulon, or Marseilles, Perpignan or anywhere else in the south – with the possible exception of the fanatics in control in Bordeaux - wanted to pick a fight with the British, especially on their own initiative. As for the Villefranche fleet, even if the ships wanted to sally forth into the Western Mediterranean there was no bunker oil to keep their boilers firing, there was hardly any ammunition in their magazines; and besides, those fucking cretins on Corsica had already found out exactly what happened to anybody who was stupid enough to pick a fight with the English Royal Navy!
Fuck it!
One would have thought that after the Malta fiasco, even Gorshkov would have learned his lesson!
Warsaw fucking Concerto!
When Rashidov had explained his part in Warsaw Concerto, Maxim Machenaud must have wet himself. Hearing that the Sverdlovsk Kremlin planned – albeit at some unspecified future date - to send him enough arms and Spetsnaz to drive the Free French all the way back to the English Channel, must briefly, have been real music to his ears!
Of course, Machenaud did not want to wait; he wanted everything now!
Sharof Rashidov forced himself to calm down.
If that the little shit had ever been taken in by what the Troika had sold him, for a single moment, it said everything one needed to know about the severity of his psychosis.
Rashidov misunderstood the psychology of the olive branch his masters were dangling in front of their French comrades. All they had to do was hold on until the spring and then the Red Army and the Red Air Force would come to the rescue and together, the Front Internationale and the USSR would be triumphant…
That the object of the exercise was primarily to stop the FI imploding; to sustain it as a thorn in the side of the Free French and their English friends, ought to have been transparent from the outset.
Now, belatedly, it was clear that Citizen Machenaud had smelled a rat. The first consignment of weapons ought to have arrived by now. The Soviet submarines supposedly lurking in the Black Sea ought to have broken out into the Mediterranean, and lifted the British blockade by now. Russian gold ought to have persuaded the merchantmen trapped in Italian and Spanish harbours to begin to land heavy equipment, even crated Red Air Force jets, bombs and rockets of every description at Toulon by now.
None of that had happened.
None of that was ever going to happen.
Long live the Revolution!
Chapter 6
Sunday 29th January 1967
Nikolaev, Ukraine
Fifty-two-year-old Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, the Deputy First Secretary of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the USSR’s second most senior secret policeman, always felt uncomfortable when he was required to leave behind the ‘Sverdlovsk Lubyanka’, and travel anywhere near the outlying regions of the New Soviet Union.
This was not entirely unnatural, given that he had very nearly been beaten to death in a Bucharest dungeon, been assigned the task of ‘cleaning the stables’ in Turkey – a euphemism for overseeing a genocidal campaign against Krasnaya Zarya and its associated clans which had left Istanbul in ruins and large areas of the Turkish littoral bone fields – and on
ce, when he was at his lowest ebb, been sent to France to try to treat with that maniac Maxim Machenaud and that deluded, now dead fool George Duclos. He would bear the scars and the life-changing injuries inflicted upon him by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Securitate goons until the day he died, and carry the deeper, invisible, none the less indelible scars of his other ‘missions’ with him always.
Since his appointment as the number two man in the Sverdlovsk Lubyanka, Yuri Andropov had taken on many of the duties of his boss, Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny, who was now firmly installed as the third, junior partner in the ruling Troika. Semichastny had acquired new responsibilities for the current Five-Year Plan and for maintaining internal party discipline; and Andropov had been invited to become the Troika’s ‘enforcer’, a role he relished. Andropov, an ambitious but very patient man, had learned that although one day his time would come to climb the Politburo ladder, it was not now. Having earned the trust of his superiors for the foreseeable future he had dedicated himself to building his reputation for steadfastness and reliability, obedience and absolute loyalty to the Troika, and in particular, to the Supreme Soviet, Alexander Shelepin.
Nevertheless, when he received the peremptory summons to report to the peripatetic court of the Head of the Troika, Alexander Shelepin, at a half-wrecked city sixty kilometres north of the Black Sea, it crossed his mind that it might, conceivably, be his turn to be purged. Such a fatalistic attitude was characteristic in all echelons of the Party, the higher one progressed the nearer one was to the razor’s edge. Although, thus far – if one excluded the ruthless purges which had followed hot on the heels of the July 1964 coup – Alexander Shelepin had shown an odd, positively counter-intuitive disinclination to conduct the regular ‘sort out’ or ‘exemplary’ winnowing out purges which had been the stock in trade of most of his predecessors.