Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  The US Secretary of State struggled to stop himself raising his hands to his head in despair. The Falkland Islands-South Georgia issue was the last thing the Administration wanted aired on the floor of the new United Nations!

  “What I am saying,” Roy Jenkins continued, “is that you and I are not the only people who will arrive on board the USS United States with agendas. In that we have more that we agree about than not, and many key interests in common, we will probably be the exception to the rule.”

  Roy Jenkins was very aware that Henry Cabot Lodge had flown to California not to oversee the final arrangements for the re-inauguration of the United Nations, rather to attempt to identify what, if any, room for manoeuvre remained in the British and therefore, the Commonwealth, stance on the Chinese question. More broadly, he was preoccupied with possibilities of re-establishing the US’s pre-war global economic ties on a ‘business as before’ the October War basis, hoping to appease the loud and persistent Congressional demands ringing in his President’s ears.

  Problematically, several Commonwealth countries – especially those within the protective umbrella of a CMAFTA Treaty - had embarked on programs to re-nationalise factories, farms, mines and infrastructure hoovered up by American companies and banks in the fire sale confusion of the weeks and months after the cataclysm, in which global markets had crashed, international trade had stalled and traumatised governments had snatched at any credit lines they could find. In those dreadful days, as the denizens of the last great power still standing, Wall Street’s robber barons had made hay and now, were feeling hard done by – and not a little sorry for themselves - on account of the brazen retaliatory measures ‘unjustly’ bearing down on US ‘interests’ throughout the New Commonwealth. Predictably, those self-same thieves – that was how Roy Jenkins and, unofficially, Her Majesty’s Government privately regarded the men responsible – were now shamelessly applying pressure to the White House, Congress, and funding aggressive nationwide advertising campaigns to undo the ‘socialistic conspiracies’ which now sought to deny them the lucrative fruits of their opportunistic malfeasance in the winter of 1962-63, and the long springtime of greedy acquisitive opportunity which had lasted until the high summer of 1963.

  ‘It is just business; and business is the business of America!’

  A contract is a contract…

  Of course, Standard Oil and all the other US ‘drillers’ unceremoniously edged, or just plain ejected, from Arabia and the Persian Gulf after the war of 1964, felt even more aggrieved, especially as it was no secret that cheap Arabian, and subsidised Texan oil was what was filling the United Kingdom’s ‘energy gap’ while the wells and refineries of Abadan were recommissioned.

  “I’m sorry, Henry,” Jenkins shrugged, “there’s no way to phrase this that won’t come across as deeply offensive to you. Certain elements within the American business and banking community behaved disgracefully in the aftermath of the Cuban Missiles War. Now, the worm has turned and they are receiving their just deserts. It is profoundly unwise to conflate their mealy-mouthed protests with the broader foreign policy objectives of the United States.” He paused, shrugging sympathetically. “I believe that the United States has made a terrible mistake not whole-heartedly embracing the re-establishment of the United Nations. At the present time, the World is looking to America for leadership in a way that, perhaps, it never will again.”

  One only had to look out across San Francisco Bay to where the USS United States was moored off the Alameda Naval Base to appreciate how little hope, or interest, the Nixon Administration had invested in the re-dedication of the United Nations.

  The US Navy had not even bothered to give the great liner a fresh lick of civilian paint; the fastest transatlantic liner in history had been sent to the West Coast in her drab, battleship grey livery. And as to why the ship was anchored within two hundred yards of the nearest Polaris submarines of SUBRON15, great low-lying black missile-packed whales lurking ready to unleash untold global thermonuclear destruction, only a psychiatrist would know!

  The huge grey slab of a ship in the Bay, the threatening presence of the nearby missile boats and in recent days, the public bickering of mid-level Administration staffers, the calculated, snide leaks to the DC press corps to the effect that everybody seemed to be ‘leeching off America’ might have been specifically designed to intimidate the visiting delegations and to sour the atmosphere.

  Roy Jenkins put down his glass, regretfully.

  “I seriously doubt that President Nixon will come away from the forthcoming events with anything to show for it,” he decided.

  Henry Cabot Lodge grimaced involuntarily.

  And I thought Lord Thomas Carlyle Harding-Grayson, my counterpart in Oxford, was Machiavelli incarnate!

  This guy is just as bad!

  “Why the heck should we bother with the United Nations at all?” He inquired pointedly, albeit with impeccable courtesy and in the most level of correct, civil monotones.

  “Because it is the last best game in town, Henry,” Roy Jenkins told him, as urbanely. “NATO and the re-creation of a new ‘special relationship’ with the United States is what is in it for us; what’s in it for you, the United States, is a rehabilitation settlement with the rest of the free World post-October 1962, and longer-term, the re-establishment of legitimate economic and strategic global partnerships which will ensure that you, and only you, remain the globe’s solitary super-power for the rest of this century. That is not to say that you will not find this as onerous, and ultimately, as expensive and unsustainable a burden as we back in the British Isles, eventually found it to be in the decades before and after the Second War.”

  “China?” The US Secretary of State asked, archly.

  “Sooner or later a US Administration is going to have to do business with the real China, not the fake one; you know that as well as I do. You also know as well as I do that an ongoing open-ended commitment to South Korea, or to the countries of South East Asia, had the potential to be a nightmare for the US taxpayers, not to mention a graveyard for the sons of those taxpayers. Again, I repeat, I am not telling you anything that you, or the President does not already know. Likewise, if I suggested to you that those same taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars would be much better spent over the next fifty years rebuilding European civilization and markets for American manufacturers than fighting wars in Asia you cannot possibly, in the end, win: that such a new Marshal Plan would be the best investment your country had ever, or could ever make, I don’t really think I would be telling you anything you had not already worked out for yourselves.”

  Henry Cabot Lodge was not about to split hairs about any of that. Notwithstanding, the Englishman’s logic completely ignored domestic US political reality – the mood of Congress and on Main Street America was fundamentally intolerant, or at any rate, it was at present, of the bothersome sophistry inherent in what actually mattered ‘long-term’ to the country – he knew he was probably right. Those oil fields in the Middle East were not about to fall again like ripe, low-hanging fruit into the United States’ lap, the pre-war booming overseas markets for US manufacturers were not about to magically re-open to Uncle Sam at the click of Richard Nixon’s, or any other President’s fingers.

  America first, America alone, were slogans not strategies and sooner or later the country’s continued massive re-armament, the root of the current seemingly runaway but in many ways false, economic boom, was going to have to slow down. There were already an awful lot of soldiers, airmen and sailors on the Federal pay check with not a great deal to do, and no real mission now that the war in the Midwest was won. True, a quarter-of-a-million US serviceman now garrisoned the Philippines, the Japanese archipelago and Taiwan, supported by a much enlarged Seventh Fleet operating out of Hawaii. But what was the role of the US military in the World as it was now when so much of the intellectual superstructure which still governed its existence belonged, frankly, to an ante-diluvian age that no longer existed? />
  Cabot Lodge had already had this conversation with Henry Kissinger, the US National Security Advisor. The trouble was that unlike the Harvard Academic, he had to factor in the complexities of the politics presently besetting the President.

  Irrationally, trying to do the right thing in foreign affairs was invariably painted by one’s enemies as ‘weakness’ and presently, with the re-emergence of the Warwick Hotel Scandal, and the rumours that Judge Warren Burger’s stalled – because the Department of Justice had secretly ceased to bankroll it – ‘Special Investigation’ looking into evidence of cover-ups within the White House, Richard Nixon could not afford to show so much as a scintilla of weakness in San Francisco.

  Right now, the American people and the suddenly very twitchy GOP majorities in both Houses of Representatives, needed to be reassured by the sight of a President banging the table and demanding that the United States got the respect it rightfully deserved on the global stage.

  Henry Cabot Lodge reached again for his wine glass.

  His problem was that he was the man who was supposed to lay the ground work for that ‘table thumping’.

  All in all, he reflected, it was hardly surprising that the President’s pre-San Francisco summit with the British at Camp David had been, in his absence, a ‘real car wreck!’

  Chapter 8

  Tuesday 31st January 1967

  Commonwealth One, 42,000 feet over Crawford County, Ohio

  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could never really make up her mind if she was talking to Lady Rachel French, the wife of one of the vital lynchpins of the new transatlantic concord; or Sir Dick White’s most remarkable secret agent.

  The problem was that this strange question, never far from her mind when she was in the other woman’s company, was impossibly complicated by the fact she was one of the few people – anywhere – who actually was ‘in the know’ about Rachel’s part in the savage fighting for Admiral Sir Julian Christopher’s Headquarters in Mdina at the height of the Battle of Malta, and her now semi-mythic contribution to the eventual relieving of the siege of the Wister Park Embassy compound just three months later. Dick White, assisted by Airey Neave and more recently, by Sir Daniel French, in a confidential interview, had clarified…everything, about those two affairs, if nothing else.

  Rachel’s was a story that frankly, was so extraordinary that knowing ‘everything’ about a part of it, albeit a significant ‘part’, really resolved very little. She had been more than somewhat miffed that her ‘security chiefs’ had only told her a version of the truth after they realised that Dan French was determined to marry her, come what may. He had still been the Governor of Malta at the time, his name inked in for the extremely important, and sensitive post he now held at Boscombe Down; so, that had suddenly forced a lot of hands.

  Subsequently, Sir Dick White, ailing fast by then had acquiesced to a face-to-face interview, something of a confessional.

  Margaret Thatcher still suspected that but for the great spymaster’s illness – he had seemed glad to confess his sins before it was too late – and Airey Neave’s reluctant admission that basically, she ‘had to know’ or she would be in an impossible situation if later some kind of scandal blew up, she would still have been none the wiser.

  But she was, wiser, that was.

  It helped that the events of the spring and summer of 1964 seemed like very ancient history, so much water – and regrettably, blood and misery – having flowed, somewhat like a river, in full spate under the proverbial bridge in the intervening two-and-a-half years.

  Overnight, the sad news of the death of Sir Richard Goldsmith ‘Dick’ White, under Airey Neave’s watch at the Department of National Security, the Joint Director of both MI5, MI6 and the entire intelligence gathering machinery of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) since April 1964, had been received. Although, it was expected, Dick had been terminally ill and fading in recent weeks, the blow had left both Airey, and Tom Harding Grayson, possibly – along with First Secretary of State, effectively her deputy, Lord Carington - her closest lieutenants and confidantes in government, understandably down in the mouth.

  The Prime Minister had decided that she would break the sad news of the death of the nation’s greatest post-war spymaster to his most illustrious agent.

  Much to Margaret Thatcher’s surprise, Dick White’s death had brought tears to Rachel French’s eyes and with a sniff of apology, she had asked for a few moments to compose herself before again presenting her customary, coolly watchful face to the world.

  “Who will step into Dick’s shoes, Prime Minister?”

  “Sir Maurice Oldfield. He was appointed Deputy Joint Director a couple of months ago…”

  A glimmer of smile touched the other woman’s grey eyes.

  Margaret Thatcher inclined her head in askance.

  The two women were sitting a little apart from the others towards the rear of the aircraft, both having taken heed of their pilot’s advice to arrange their seat straps across their laps.

  Several rows away Major Sir Steuart Pringle, since the death of his predecessor in the IRA atrocity at Cheltenham in April 1964, the – sometimes suicidally – devoted head of Margaret Thatcher’s personal security squad, tried not to eye the two women with too obvious concern. Preux chevalier to the core he had once been moved to admit to the Prime Minister that he did not, ‘always feel comfortable’ when she was in close proximity to Lady French, and nothing his principal had said to him to allay his fears had done a great deal to soothe his nagging worries.

  Steuart Pringle was not privy to the real secrets of the lady, now enjoying a tete-a-tete with the woman whose life he, and every man jack of his AWPs – among themselves they were proud to retain the old nickname ‘Angry Widow’s Praetorians’, a motivational handle coined by the man into whose steps Pringle had stepped – had sworn to guard with their lives. However, he knew enough, and had probably guessed enough of the rest of her story to know that the woman was nothing, if not a natural born killer. Although he had no idea how her marriage to a senior RAF officer – whom he knew to be a thoroughly good egg, a fine officer and a gentleman to boot – worked; if he was Sir Daniel, he would live in fear every waking second, minute and hour of the day. As for entertaining Lady French on a long continental flight in close contact with half-a-dozen of the key members of the British Government, well, that seemed to him to be just…bizarre, actually.

  The Royal Marine’s brooding thoughts were interrupted when the aircraft’s intercom burst into noisy life.

  ‘Rather than fly a lengthy diversion to the north into Canadian airspace, air traffic control has requested we fly about eight miles high for the first half of our trip today. The US Air Force is in the middle of a big exercise down below us, apparently. Anyway, it so happens that forty-two thousand or so feet, is quite close to Commonwealth One’s safe ceiling, and the air being somewhat thin up at these rarefied altitudes, we are liable to drop or soar a few hundred feet without warning…’

  As always, Group Captain Guy French’s voice was marvellously laconic; as befitted the man who had dive-bombed the then biggest warship in the world in a Handley Page Victor V-Bomber and somehow, he claimed to have no idea or memory of how exactly, survived to tell the tale.

  Rachel listened to the broadcast, a wry smile threatening to touch her eyes if not her pale lips. She half-suspected that there was an inner woman within the Angry Widow’s complex psychological make-up, which was just a tiny, little bit tempted to swoon every time Rachel’s unlikely stepson’s cultured, insouciant tones came over the public address system.

  Much to her surprise, all things considered she had always got on a lot better with Guy – who was only around ten years her junior - than was reasonable, although, not so well with his wife, a very self-possessed Japanese-American nurse he had met the day after the sinking of the USS Kitty Hawk on board the USS Berkeley. She was one of the team of US Navy doctors and nurses who had saved her future husband’
s life.

  As the Prime Minister had been known to observe: ‘It was a funny old world…’

  “What is it?” Margaret Thatcher inquired when the intercom went quiet, and the two women continued their interrupted conversation.

  “I imagine John Rennie would have expected to be given first ‘dibs’ at the job,” Rachel suggested neutrally.

  For the current head of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service, responsible for spying and counter intelligence abroad) to be passed, literally on the rails, by a man he must have thought he had seen off in the run-in to the winner’s post, would not be an easy thing to swallow. Whereas, Martin Furnival Jones at MI5 (the Security Service, the watchers and the secret policemen at home in the British Isles) was a different case. The last Rachel had heard, Martin was still only ‘Acting Director’ of his service; presumably, happy just to be back in the fold after his exile in Scotland looking after the dwindling band of ‘incurables’: persons whom in other, less enlightened times might simply have been ‘disappeared’; but these days were simply interned, far from the madding crowds, lest their secrets corrupt the minds or twist the attitudes of the general populous.

  Both Wellington College and Baliol-educated Rennie, and Maurice Oldfield were old ‘America hands’, and therefore acceptable to the New Romans. Of the two, fifty-one-year-old Oldfield, a man from a less privileged background, who had studied under the historian A.J.P. Taylor at the University of Manchester, probably had the better connections in Washington and was by far the wilier of the pair. Rennie broadcast ‘establishment’; Oldfield ‘detachment’ as befitted the man who was, or the two, the born case officer. Maurice Oldfield, who had been knighted, made CBE as long ago as 1959, must have been Dick White’s nominee.