by James Philip
Rachel’s pain to learn that the man who had been her ‘controller’ and at some level, her friend and a kind of strange father figure, right up until she was posted to America after the bloodbath on Malta in the spring of 1964, had passed, now.
Neither Maurice Oldfield, John Rennie at MI6 or Martin Furnival Jones were protégés, less still ‘deep’ confidantes of the departed spymaster. Among the ‘old brigade’ only Airey Neave and Tom Harding-Grayson might still have a sense of the work she had done for Dick White; or any real understanding of her history. True, they knew, or suspected that she was an assassin but it might well be that as a matter of operational ‘necessity’ or simply for reasons of plausible deniability, she had never officially existed. ‘Officially’ it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Dick had never shared…anything about her with any of the three men – Maurice Oldfield, John Rennie, or Martin Furnival Jones -now at the fulcrum of the United Kingdom’s national security apparatus.
Rachel’s soul was unquiet.
It was odd, disconcerting to think that Dick would never be there, ever again, waiting to hear her report when eventually she needed to touch base, tell somebody…what she had done.
Much as she intuitively shied away from such thoughts, Dick White really had been the nearest thing she had had to a father since her own, dear, half-remembered Papa was dragged out of the house in Lodz to his death back in 1939. She had been eleven then, and not met the handsome, really quite dashing, young intelligence officer until she was nearly eighteen. And yet, he had often seemed fatherly, strangely protective of her; the one man in her life who had always been there for her. Apart, that was, from Dan French, only it had taken her a while to get used to the idea…
Rachel realised that the Prime Minister had said something to her. She blinked alert, fixed the other woman’s face in her gaze.
“I’m sorry, I was…distracted…”
“That is quite understandable in the circumstances. I know you have hardly had a moment to catch your breath since you arrived over here.”
Margaret Thatcher seemed a little older than she had even the last time they had met, when the Prime Minister and her husband – one of those very rare men who saw exactly through her; but then he was an ex-SAS man – had dined at Amesbury last autumn. Her hair, auburn not the ‘blond’ the papers used to claim for it, was tinged by a suggestion of grey at her temples and there were new worry lines at the corners of her steely blue eyes. The leader of Rachel’s adopted country was just three years her senior, and even on the aircraft immaculately coiffured, outwardly magnificently assured. Rachel was aware that she was not wearing her own years as effortlessly as once she had; to the extent that of the two women she might have passed as the older. It was amazing how quickly the cracks began to appear when one lowered one’s guard, allowed the world to see one, at least in part, unmasked.
Rachel had been the guest of the CIA until shortly before Commonwealth One was scheduled to take off, and nobody in the Prime Minister’s entourage had yet attempted to interrogate her on the subject. Which was peculiar, an anomaly; it suggested that either they already knew what Richard Helms and James Angleton had so desperately wanted to talk to her about and they were, as unlikely as it seemed, unworried about it, or that they had no idea what she had been doing at Langley the last couple of days. Clearly, neither clause was tenable, each as improbable as the other.
“Airey was unhappy sending you back to Washington,” the Prime Minister announced without further preamble. “Frankly, everything he has told me about Operation Maelstrom is quite appalling!”
Rachel must, momentarily, have blinked in astonishment.
“But you authorised my recall, anyway,” she said, recovering her composure in an instant.
“Yes. The Camp David Summit was a disaster. It was always going to be a disaster. I could hardly refuse what was, on the face of it, a reasonable request from,” she hesitated, “an ally.”
Rachel thought about it.
“Even though you knew that there was a possibility that once the Agency had me in its hands again, I might just disappear?”
The Prime Minister frowned.
“No, Airey and Tom thought that was extremely unlikely.”
Rachel did not find that remotely reassuring.
That said, it was good to know where she stood.
She leaned a little closer to Margaret Thatcher, careful to move so slowly that she did not risk alarming Steuart Pringle – any more than he already was – or either of the two, apparently dozing but in reality, watchful Royal Marines waiting, like coiled springs, to hurl themselves into violent action at a moment’s notice, five rows farther towards the tail of the VC-10.
“May I ask you a question, Prime Minister?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have any idea at all about the things I did for Dick White,” she quirked a wan smile, “and for the Service?”
“Yes,” the other woman said softly, “and no. And, if it doesn’t sound a contradiction in terms, not coming from a background remotely connected to the secret world, I perhaps, like to think I have a more human appreciation of,” she shrugged, “things, than some of my male colleagues.” Again, she hesitated, briefly considered saying one thing, then determining to say what she had meant to say all along. “The late Sir Julian Christopher, to whom you may or may not be aware, I was affianced at the time of his tragic death on Malta; was deeply troubled by some of the decisions he had been obliged to make in his short tenure as Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. Your husband, passed Julian’s confidential papers to me after his death. So, I know that several of those ‘decisions’ concerned you, and your work with the Red Dawn agent Arkady Rykov…”
Rachel did not react; her eyes were cold as winter on the Russian plain. She said nothing, knowing the other woman needed to say what she was about to say and had probably been waiting to say it, needing to say it, to somebody for a long time.
“Julian confided his regrets in a letter to me; a sealed letter only to be despatched to me in the event of his death. I chose to believe that had he lived he would have made a clean breast of…everything to me in due course. In the event, your now husband, Sir Daniel, passed that letter to me unopened. Later, when I visited Malta, he was so good as to fill in the gaps and to answer, as best he could, my questions. At the time of the Battle of Malta, I had no idea that he had been so completely taken into Julian’s confidence, shortly after he arrived on Malta, although I could not but be aware of the real sense of the genuine friendship struck up by the two men during their relatively brief acquaintance…”
The Prime Minister realised that she had become a little over-sentimental.
“I never asked for, and Dick White never volunteered, an accounting of the service you have rendered your adopted country, Lady Rachel. Until, that was, you became affianced to Dan. Previously, honestly and truly, although I had no doubt both Airey and Tom had a good idea of the nature of the work upon which you had been engaged, I assumed Dick White would only have shared with them only what they absolutely needed to know. Which,” she concluded, “in the times in which we live, is entirely the way it should be. And,” she added, a little sternly, “before you ask, neither John Rennie, who has been standing in for Dick in recent weeks, nor Sir Maurice Oldfield, is aware of any file, or of any documentation of any description, in Dick’s personal archive, relating to you or your work for him.”
Rachel absorbed this.
She shrugged, weary now.
“But when Dick knew he was dying, you had to be told everything, anyway,” she smiled, feeling very old.
Margaret Thatcher nodded.
Rachel made and held eye contact with the other woman and said, almost casually: “The Americans think that when they unmask me at the San Francisco conference that it will, in some way, alter your Government’s policy on China.”
The Prime Minister stared at her like she was an idiot.
Okay, so Miste
r Thatcher, her former SAS-man second husband whom Rachel had discovered, belatedly, was an old partner in crime with Airey Neave, and therefore, also of Tom Harding-Grayson’s, had clearly not felt the need to mark his wife’s card in respect of every dirty little secret of the pre-October 1962 Cold War.
This confirmed that not even Dick White had known everything about her ‘grey times’ working for Uncle Sam. Never mind, it was not the sort of thing she was going to hold against her adopted country.
Margaret Thatcher’s sudden change of expression was such that Steuart Pringle instantly braced himself, and the two watching Royal Marines, seeing their commanding officer tense up, likewise began to move.
Margaret Thatcher waved distractedly at her guardians to relax.
“Which is why I need to get off this aircraft before we reach California,” Rachel explained, as if that was not going to present any kind of insuperable problem.
Margaret Thatcher had been under the mistaken impression that she was in control of the interview, that she had initiated it; now she realised her error.
Biting back a complaint she listened, very hard.
Saying nothing.
Rachel was aware that time was short.
“Prime Minister,” she murmured, “the CIA believes that a large number of documents relating to Operation Maelstrom – its large-scale counter-intelligence activities against ordinary American citizens – and the activities of people like me, not just overseas but in North America, will soon leak into the public domain. Specifically, the Department of Justice and the White House is trying to gag The Washington Post but Ben Bradlee, The Post’s editor, and Kay Graham, its owner, are or rather were, part of James Jesus Angleton’s circle. They don’t scare easily, and after all the grief they’ve had the last year or so over the Warwick Hotel Scandal, I think they are beyond caring what the Administration tries to do to them.” Rachel shrugged, almost but not quite apologetically: “So, to pre-empt The Post’s scoop, it is likely that somebody in Langley, and possibly, at the FBI also, will leak my story, or at least, what little they know about my history, to one of The Post’s competitors.”
“Surely the Administration would not stoop so low?”
Rachel studied the Prime Minister, surprised that there was a note of genuine horror in her voice. Perhaps, in some respects, the Angry Widow was still the choirgirl people assumed her to have been in the early days of her premiership?
“If you were the Prime Minister of a Latin American government who had upset the White House, you might be dead now, Prime Minister. Please, do not make the mistake of thinking, for a moment, that you are dealing with ‘decent’ people. In England I was ‘one of a kind’. In this country I was only ever one of many.”
Rachel let this sink in.
“Look,” she continued, “just as Dick White didn’t tell you things that he knew you did not need to know, or if, had you known about them, you would have faced impossible dilemmas; so, it is with the US intelligence community. The only difference is that back home all you had to worry about was MI5 and MI6, over here, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Secret Service and the FBI are just the tip of the iceberg. No one department of state controls more than one or two of the big players, CIA belong to the State Department, the FBI to Justice, other organs serve the Pentagon…”
“Angleton?” Margaret Thatcher interjected. The name was familiar but she could not recollect ever having met the man, although Airey Neave had mentioned him several times – in passing - in recent months. “James Angleton?”
“Since 1954 he has been ADDOCI, Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence, at Langley. He was an Anglophile right up to the moment he got used to the idea that Kim Philby was a Soviet spy.” Rachel thought about it: “Actually, he was one of the last people in the western intelligence community to accept that his old friend had been a traitor all the time. He tried to veto an operation to liquidate Philby shortly before the October War…”
“Liquidate him?”
“It was the last time I worked with Kurt Mikkelsen; the man you sent me to America to kill.”
Now the Prime Minister was totally baffled and starting to get very worried. She would have protested that she had never sent anybody anywhere to kill anybody but that objection seemed somehow redundant in the present context. She was head of a government that did, or at least, had sent people abroad to kill its enemies in the past; it was just nobody had told her, or her predecessors about it at the time.
Rachel continued; her tone blandly matter-of-fact.
“He’s the man the FBI believe – and our ‘friends’ at Langley – now believe, plans to assassinate the President during the re-dedication of the United Nations in San Francisco,” she reminded Margaret Thatcher.
“You were not sent to America to kill anybody,” the Prime Minister snapped with such hissing, outraged vehemence that half the people in the cabin of Commonwealth One turned their heads. “And how on earth does exposing you, assist in stopping this madman?” A gasp of air: “Or induce My Government to renege on a solemn treaty obligation to the People’s Republic of China?”
Rachel was unmoved by the outburst.
“Forgive me, but I was sent to America to kill, or to be killed, by Kurt Mikkelsen, you just did not know it at the time you authorised Airey to approach me.”
Margaret Thatcher was lost for words.
“And, for what it is worth,” Rachel went on, her tone sympathetic, patient, “unless something changes in the next few days, the White House will allow the CIA to embarrass your government out of spite, regardless of whether it is convinced that it can alter your foreign policy in the Far East. And as for the CIA, well, James Angleton knows that when the truth about Operation Maelstrom gets out his career is over. So, he is doing what any normal, paranoid, megalomaniac, high-functioning sociopath in his position tends to do; he is conspiring to bring down as many other people around him, and presumably, in friendly foreign intelligence agencies, as he can before the axe falls.”
“Surely, the President knows what is going on?”
Rachel was tempted to retort, acidly: “You’ve met the man, what do you think?”
Instead, she was a little, albeit only a little, more diplomatic.
Given that Richard Nixon had not invited his own Secretary of State, Henry Cabot Lodge II to participate in the main discussions at Camp David, preferring to send the elder statesman to the West Coast with the White House’s advance guard, she had rather hoped that the Prime Minister had assumed, from the outset, that the Catoctin Mountain retreat was going to be no more than a Presidential photo opportunity, at which the Administration made strenuous attempts to publicly cover up the worst cracks in the vaunted new ‘special relationship’.
Perhaps, the lady had worked it out for herself?
After all, they were having this conversation.
Rachel shrugged, deciding to ignore the Prime Minister’s question.
“Dick is gone. I work for you, now.”
“You no longer work for the security services…”
“People like me don’t get to retire, Prime Minister. Ask Airey, ask Tom, Lord Harding-Grayson.”
“I have no use for an assassin.”
Rachel thought that was a naïve, and oddly ill-considered remark for any British Prime Minister to think, let alone say out aloud.
“Forgive me, we misunderstand each other,” she said, resignedly. “I am already on a mission. I was from the moment I left England. You can order me to stand down. You can have me sent home in chains. What you cannot do, in any circumstances, is to allow our American ‘friends’ to take a picture of you in my company. Tomorrow, or by the day after, the media in this country is going to be so obsessed with the Angel of Death that briefly, possibly for several days, they will give James Angleton, the CIA and the President an easy ride on the revelations that the US Government has been systematically spying – driving a cart and horses through any number of con
stitutional rights and protections – on the American people.”
As Rachel spoke her acquired, practiced Home Counties English accent had begun to re-acquire the Polish lisp and vowels of her youth.
“If I arrive in California with you, Angleton’s creatures at Langley will drip feed everything they know about me into the press in the coming days. Destroying people is what they do best; a thing they have been doing at home and abroad ever since the CIA was created. Therefore, I cannot arrive in San Francisco with you. Which is why I needed to have this talk with you before it is too late. It is all a game, Prime Minister. I’m sure that Dick told you that; a brutal, nasty, immoral game and we must play it the way our enemies play it or…they will win and we will lose. If I am not on Commonwealth One when we land in California, the game will change again. The Locksmith will have to think of a new stratagem to buy himself time; or maybe, something else will happen. Either way, we will be playing our game, not their game. The decision is, of course, your’s. But remember, the life that I thought I had in England is already gone now, possibly forever.”
“I don’t believe that. I cannot let that happen!”
“It has already happened,” Rachel replied gently. “I am again what I was. Major Pringle is right to watch me every moment; right now, I am dangerous to anybody around me. So, either you chain me to a seat, or you must let me run free.”
Chapter 9
Tuesday 31st January 1967
Battleship Jean Bart, Villefranche-sur-Mer
Contra Amiral Rene Leguay was on the point of collapse when he eventually reached the top of the Jean Bart’s hastily repaired, somewhat scorched gangway that afternoon. It was one thing joking about not being able to sit down on account of his recent wounds, another entirely being on one’s feet all the bloody time!
The Jean Bart’s port side was painted – although in the main, hardly scratched – by the multiple impacts from the Revolutionary Guards’ 75-millimetre anti-tank guns. Apart from a couple of rounds which had penetrated the thin, lightly protected strake above the tapering 227-millimetre armour which extended over three metres above the main belt – itself some 330-millimetres thick to the level of the first platform deck – and having failing to detonate, pinged around off armoured bulkheads before finally coming to a rest, the Front Internationale’s supposedly elite Revolutionary Guards might as well have been shooting cowpats as high explosive rounds at the steely carapace of the leviathan.