Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Even now, a part of her still wanted to believe that the relatively small number of documents she had had the opportunity to read, were the minutiae of some kind of cruel hoax, if only because it beggared credulity that the Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence had employed – had been allowed to employ - virtually the entire apparatus of the CIA’s Office of Security, to spy on the American people. There were, allegedly, over fifteen thousand ‘live’ investigations ongoing, and files on tens of thousands of other Americans, many of whom had been targeted primarily on grounds of their religious beliefs, or their affiliation with protest or civil rights groups. Many of the newest files dealt with individuals who had registered as Democrats since the defeat of LBJ in November 1964, with particular emphasis on new recruits or candidates with any connection to the Betancourt family.

  Although only fragments of their files were included in the tranche of documents thus far in the possession of The Post, it was apparent that the patriarch of the clan, Claude Betancourt, and his daughter, Gretchen, were ‘targets’ of great interest to the CIA’s Office of Security, and both were under constant surveillance, as was the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Captain Walter Brenckmann and his family, with the notable exception of the Ambassador’s eldest son, a Lieutenant Commander in the Submarine Service.

  Angleton’s inquisitors seemed obsessed with the Brenckmann family; on account of their links to the Betancourts but also because the CIA was clearly highly motivated to ‘gain insights’ on the eventual findings and recommendations of the Commission into the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War ‘at the earliest possible time’, which was currently being drafted by the Ambassador’s second son, Daniel, a Clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States, Judge Earl Warren. The clear implication was that the White House was eager to steal a march on Congress; presumably with a view to, if it was possible, heaping even more opprobrium and humiliation on the Democrats ahead of next year’s Presidential race.

  Kay Graham had been moved to remark: ‘You couldn’t make this stuff up!’

  It seemed that there were also files on hundreds of journalists, lawyers, and a whole department of the Office of Security had been created and tasked with infiltrating university campuses, and tracking the un-American activities of ‘student leaders and disloyal teachers’. All of which was overshadowed by the machinations of the ‘Political Warfare Division’, a publicly acknowledged organ of the CIA, which had been responsible for rooting out End of Dayers – spies, sleeper agents, agent provocateurs, saboteurs, terrorists and fifth columnists – during the first rebellion in Wisconsin and the later Civil War. However, far from being wound down at the close of hostilities in the Midwest, the PWD had never ceased conducting its ever-expanding nationwide ‘mole hunt’. It seemed that everybody was under suspicion; and that denunciation was the CIA’s new badge of patriotism because nobody was above suspicion.

  According to the CIA the British Foreign Secretary was a KGB spy, as was Lester Pearson, the Canadian Premier…

  It was ridiculous!

  The only person in America who was not under suspicion was James Jesus Angleton…and in Kay Graham’s candid opinion he was plainly delusional!

  According to Ben Bradlee, Carl Bernstein’s jaw had pretty nearly literally hit the floor when he read a report that the Warwick Hotel Team – whom the world now referred to as ‘the plumbers’ – sent to New York to ‘bug and to conduct general surveillance’ on Doctor Martin Luther King junior and his associates in 1964, had been a routine element in a continent-wide CIA-sponsored and financed operation, directed against the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As to the FBI’s subsequent involvement, acting as a CIA sub-contractor in the actual bugging of the Warwick Hotel…it was all too insane!

  The Managing Editor of The Washington Post hung up.

  “That was Carl,” Ben Bradlee explained. He picked up the handset again. “Hold my calls please.”

  Kay Graham’s face creased with concern.

  “He was calling from a box downtown,” her friend lied with a broad grin. They both knew the FBI or the CIA, among others, would be listening in on each and every line coming in and out of the building. “They’ve found another memo from the White House requesting surveillance and phone tapping of the DC offices of Sallis, Betancourt and Brenckmann…”

  Kay made to speak.

  Ben Bradlee held up a hand.

  “And Ambassador and Mrs Brenckmann’s hotel room in Georgetown. There’s also a partial transcript of a conversation between Gretchen Betancourt and David Sullivan, Miranda Sullivan’s elder brother and attorney in San Francisco. You can’t even get a court order allowing you to listen in to client-attorney conversations! Anyway, the documentation pretty much proves that Angleton’s plumbers are bugging the firm’s California offices, too!”

  The illegality of it all was breath-taking; straight out of the KGB play book!

  Briefly, Kay Graham was afraid that she had lost the power of speech.

  “That is just so…illegal,” she spluttered. “Isn’t it?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “The White House has to know that you don’t just wish a guy like James Angleton away. Bernstein reckons that all this shifted up a gear long before the war in the Midwest. Heck, for all we know it was LBJ or JFK who authorised the original surveillance of Doctor King and the other Civil Rights leaders back in 1963, or 1964. Those were crazy times, remember?”

  “So, what? What are we saying? It might just be that Nixon carried on with Operation Maelstrom because he honestly believed this stuff was ‘business as usual?”

  Ben Bradlee shrugged: “No, I’d guess it was more to do with realising that he could get away with it” he grinned, “and that green-flagged stepping up the level of malfeasance to a whole new level.”

  Kay Graham suddenly felt unbearably tired.

  “They’ll shut us down if we publish any of this, Ben.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. “Maybe, they’ll just throw us in jail and throw away the key.”

  “It is not funny!”

  Ben Bradlee’s one surviving phone rang.

  He scowled, picked it up anyway.

  “Okay…”

  Kay Graham noticed her friends posture alter, his eyes widen and brighten. She might have been watching a Pointer stiffen and focus when it detected the scent of a fox.

  Bradlee signalled for her to come closer.

  “I’m with Kay, Gretchen. I’d put the phone on speaker but the Feds smashed up my office yesterday and this handset doesn’t do ‘broadcast’. I guess the only reason the Feds left this phone connected was because they’re bugging it.” He paused, winked at his friend. “Gretchen says ‘hi’, Kay.”

  “I heard!” Kay Graham mouthed.

  Just when you think the day cannot possibly get any weirder…

  Guess what happens next!

  Chapter 14

  Wednesday 1st February 1967

  HMS Campbeltown, Villefranche-sur-Mer

  Dermot O’Reilly had conned Campbeltown into the bay as the first light of dawn cast long, gloomy shadows from Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. The destroyer was closed up at Action Stations, every gun loaded, torpedo tubes swung outboard, primed, and every man on deck was weighed down by heavy flak jackets and modern ‘tin hats.’

  Two of HMS Victorious’s Blackburn Buccaneer S2 strike aircraft had made passes over Villefranche-sur-Mer and loitered fifteen miles out to sea, just in case there was the least tincture of treachery; overnight Sea Vixens FAW2s had circled within easy earshot of the French fleet.

  Nearing the battleship O’Reilly saw that her forward main battery turret was still trained to port, its four mighty rifles raised five or six degrees into their loading configuration. The monster had clearly taken a large number of broadside hits; however, nothing short of a torpedo hit or a very large calibre armour-piercing round could seriously hurt a ship like t
hat. Not even HMS Kent’s eight-inch guns were capable of penetrating her main belt other than at point blank range.

  Presently, Jean Bart loomed over the old destroyer as Campbeltown slowly steamed down her port side.

  “STOP BOTH!”

  Dermot O’Reilly stepped to the starboard bridge wing.

  “FULL RIGHT RUDDER!”

  “HALF ASTERN STARBOARD!”

  “HALF AHEAD PORT!”

  The margins for error were tighter than he had expected but there was no appreciable breeze inside the anchorage, and notwithstanding her lean, greyhound lines built for speed, he had discovered that the Second War vintage Fletchers were unreasonably, pleasantly handy in enclosed waters.

  All things considered…

  The Campbeltown’s bow began to swing.

  He planned to moor along the port side of the Jean Bart with Campbeltown’s bow level with the leviathan’s stern chains, pointing directly out to sea.

  Dermot O’Reilly heard the pipe for sea duty men to move into position to pick up their lines, and to stand ready with their ropes for coming alongside. On the deck of the battleship men, women and…children were gathering, staring fascinated at the dazzle-camouflaged hunter in their midst, bristling as she did with gun barrels, exuding a particularly raw menace for all that she was dwarfed by the dreadnought guarding the entrance to the bay.

  Before first light O’Reilly had had the Campbeltown’s battle ensign flown from the main mast halyards of his ship. To her Second War namesake’s battle honours – North Atlantic 1941-2, and St Nazaire – had since been added ‘Biscay 1967’, and the proud list of actions and campaigns the ship had participated in under American colours in her former existence as the USS Schroeder (DD-501): including Tarawa Atoll, Kwajalein Island, Hollandia and Okinawa.

  “STOP BOTH!”

  “RUDDER AMIDSHIPS!”

  A burst of revolutions on the port screw.

  Ten degrees of rudder, this way and that.

  And the destroyer was drifting, slowly, slowly towards the battleship.

  The deck division were hanging old tyres and collision mats over the side of the ship; happily, in the event the Campbeltown kissed the immovable flank of the battleship so gently the meeting was barely perceptible on her bridge.

  Ropes were thrown from both ships.

  Presently, the Jean Bart put a gangway over the side where the difference in height between the battleship’s quarterdeck and the destroyers fo’c’sle was only five or six feet. That differential would have been less had not the Campbeltown’s bunkers still been seventy percent full and the dreadnought’s ninety percent empty.

  “You have the watch, Mister Moss,” Campbeltown’s commanding officer told the Navigator. “The ship will remain at Action Stations until further notice while I go aboard the French flagship. Inform the Executive Officer that he is in command.”

  Dermot O’Reilly had walked through how he planned to ‘play’ this morning’s sortie into Villefranche-sur-Mer with Campbeltown’s departmental heads. Once moored alongside the Jean Bart, he and a team of specialists would immediately board the battleship. The weapons, engineering and communication status of the big ship would be swiftly assessed while he and Amiral Leguay parleyed. At the first hint of ‘back-sliding’ by the French, Campbeltown would call down the loitering Buccaneers, put a brace of 21-inch torpedoes into the Jean Bart and the Clemenceau and ‘engage targets of opportunity’ as she attempted to remove herself from the anchorage.

  ‘Don’t wait. Leave me behind if you have to. Just so there is no misunderstanding, gentlemen,” he had stressed, “that is a direct order.’

  O’Reilly had inquired if his Executive officer needed it in writing. The other man, a reservist of about his own age, called back to the colours after leaving the Navy in the late 1950s, had shaken his head.

  ‘No, sir.’

  Lieutenant-Commander Brynmawr Williams arrived on the bridge as his captain was leaving. The two men nodded acknowledgement.

  A bearded, bear-like man who had played rugby for the Navy against the Army at Twickenham two years running in the late 1940s, Williams had spent most of the last eighteen months of the Second War on board the fleet carrier HMS Formidable. Rather more lissom in those days, his most vivid recollections were of pushing wrecked aircraft over the side after the ship had been hit by a second Kamikaze. Formidable’s armoured deck meant the bloody things caused a dreadful mess every time they crashed; but once the fires had been put out it was usually just a case of a little flight deck ‘cleaning up’.

  He had commanded a minesweeper around the time of the Suez debacle; after that it had looked as if he would spend the rest of his career steering a desk. And besides, his wife, Glenda – for reasons best known to herself – had seemed to want to see more of him, a decision she had lived to rue. They had agreed to divorce shortly before the cataclysm. He had been wondering how one got hold of a suitable tart to be ‘seen with’ so that the divorce papers could be filed when Glenda disappeared in the chaos…

  Now he was the second-in-command of the ship that was about to take the surrender of what was left of the French Mediterranean Fleet.

  Goodness…that was almost Nelsonian!

  Hopefully, all would go well when the Captain met his opposite number; it would be such an infernal pity to have to put several torpedoes into the side of such a magnificent ship; even if the Jean Bart was, in reality, no more than an obsolete museum piece.

  Which was pretty much the way Dermot O’Reilly felt about things as he strode purposefully up to the brow of the gangway, and to his surprise, given the raggle-taggle crowd at the battleship’s rail, was piped aboard the Jean Bart.

  His reception committee was, however, less than impressive and did little to qualm his nerves.

  He was greeted by a creased and unshaven man in a commander’s uniform standing beside a petite brunette in a grey boiler suit, flanked by four men in what might once have been the blues of French Navy Marines. However, he drew some small comfort from the business-like way the latter presented arms, and the shipshape fashion in which the bosun’s pipe fell silent when he looked around and eventually spied a French tri-colour to salute, flying limply from the battleship’s stern jackstay.

  “I am Capitaine de corvette Benois,” the man in the grubby officer’s uniform announced in heavily accented English, his tone indicating that he was a little ashamed of his appearance. He looked to his companion. “This is Mademoiselle Faure, to whom you spoke…previously, Captain O’Reilly.”

  “Ah, yes,” O’Reilly smiled. “La femme de Le Amiral.”

  Aurélie Faure blushed and lowered her eyes even though she realised, intuitively that the captain of the English destroyer had meant nothing by it.

  The rest of the boarding party from the Campbeltown were spreading out on the deck at their captain’s back. Six Royal Marines hefting FN L101 SLRs, and as many officers and senior rates from the destroyer’s gunnery, engineering and communications divisions whom O’Reilly had briefed to conduct a whistle stop inspection of the seaworthiness, combat readiness and the condition of the ship’s electronics suite, while, presumably, if all went according to plan, he was receiving the surrender of the French Fleet.

  Involuntarily, he glanced skywards as two Buccaneer S2s roared low over the northern hills and skittered deafeningly across the anchorage from north to south at several hundred knots, the roaring shriek of their twin Rolls-Royce Spey turbofans reverberating across the bay long after they had climbed back up into the low clouds out to sea.

  O’Reilly saluted Benois, nodded acknowledgement to the woman, who shyly offered her hand, which he shook, half-afraid to crush it.

  “Amiral Leguay was badly wounded in the battle,” she apologised. “Our sick bay was overwhelmed by the number of casualties two days ago…”

  Dermot O’Reilly forced himself to pause for thought.

  But not for long.

  He turned.

  He had warned the
Campbeltown’s Surgeon, a practical, four-square man who had been a year short of qualifying for general practice at the time of the October War, to be ready to receive casualties, or if the situation demanded, to assist the medical staff on board the battleship.

  “My compliments to Surgeon Lieutenant Braithwaite. Please ask him to report to me on board the Jean Bart at his earliest convenience.”

  O’Reilly switched his attention back to the welcoming party.

  All the time his experienced, tested Navy-man’s eyes were absorbing information. Whatever the great ship’s crew looked like – a crowd of waifs and pirates – somebody had ensured the decks were cleared of battle damage, and he could hear the fire room blowers whispering softly in the distance.

  He re-fixed his attention on Benois and the woman.

  Speaking in French he explained: “When Surgeon Lieutenant Braithwaite, the Campbeltown’s doctor comes on board, please escort him directly to your sick bay. He will need to have an inventory of your medical supplies,” he hesitated, “such as they are.” He grimaced apologetically. “Regrettably, I must now demand the surrender of this ship and the Fleet.”

  “Amiral Leguay directed me to draw up a formal document,” Aurélie Faure said nervily.

  Serge Benois had tried to stand to attention.

  “The Fleet is your’s, Mon Capitaine,” he said with gruff pride, attempting to put his shoulders back in a military pose he had not assumed in years.

  “Very good,” O’Reilly grunted, as uncomfortable in that moment as the Frenchman. “Please take me to see Amiral Leguay.”