Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Whoever it was, they had made a dreadful mistake.

  Never a man overly concerned with collateral damage – who got hurt just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, through no fault of their own – it was an odd feeling for the Associate Deputy Director of Counter Intelligence to find himself suddenly, unexpectedly trapped helplessly in the firing line from a quarter he had least expected.

  Somebody in the Office of Security must have betrayed him.

  Nothing else made sense.

  Forgive them…for they know not what they do…

  Chapter 20

  Thursday 2nd February 1967

  Offices of Sallis, Betancourt and Brenckmann, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC

  Walter Brenckmann only truly realised how ‘old school’ he was when he entered the packed second floor conference room of the Washington offices of the law firm he had worked for, on an off, most of his adult life and belatedly become a senior partner in two years ago. Not that he had done a lot of ‘lawyering’ since October 1962.

  Gretchen had instructed her own father to ‘stay invisible’ in Connecticut – a good place to be invisible – until further notice; nothing was going to rain on her parade today. Moreover, she had advised her husband to ‘keep his head down’, a thing Dan was good at and besides, he was clerking for the Chief Justice for the next fortnight, with the Cuban Missiles Commission not scheduled to be in session again until early March, a thing contingent upon the level of Congressional harassment between now and then.

  Gretchen had been busy, like a whirlwind, for much of the last twenty-four hours. Hiring a jet to bring her father and mother-in-law back to DC had been but the prelude to a never-ending round of telephone calls and hastily arranged meetings. She had had no idea how hard it was to get one’s hair properly styled at four o’clock in the morning!

  Dan had received the news that his father planned to run for President, and that she was going to managing his campaign in his stride. Not a lot fazed Dan and even though she had not consulted him in advance – given they had two very young children and most American husbands expected their wives to doing a lot more ‘mothering’ than she was going to have time for in the next couple of years – he had taken the news on the chin. And, as always, rolled with the punch. Because that was the sort of guy he was, had known exactly what he was letting himself in for, and loved her just the way she was.

  Yes, marrying the Ambassador and Mrs Brenckmann’s second son had definitely been one of her better life choices!

  However, she would dwell on her good fortune another day; today, she was busy. She would feel guilty – well, a little, anyway – about handing off her kids to their nanny long before dawn that morning.

  Actually, abandoning Louisa Tabatha – barely ten weeks old – was a bit of a wrench, even though she knew her daughter was probably in better ‘mothering’ hands than her own while she was rushing around Washington. Gretchen was also aware that ‘getting back to normal’ had been harder than after the birth of her son, Claude Walter, now eighteen months old. God, they were so lucky to have Sherry Marley, their African-American housekeeper, now full-time baby-minder and a lot of the time, their two little ones’ ‘mother.

  Sherry was a wonder. Forty-seven-year’s old with three grown kids of her own, divorced or separated – it was unclear which - many years since from her son and two daughter’s father she had worked for the Betancourt family for many years before, in retrospect, she had attached herself to Gretchen. That was the best part of a decade ago now, seamlessly morphing from she and Dan’s housekeeper in Philadelphia to the woman who now organised, well, everything domestic in their lives. Sherry was middlingly large, loud and Gretchen suspected she carried a flame for Dan: what sensible woman would not? In any event, without Sherry, whom she trusted, literally, with her babies’ lives and whom, although she rarely articulated it, a friend, practically a family member, not an employee or retainer, Gretchen knew she would not have the life she loved.

  In the twenty-four hours since her conversation with her father-in-law, she had succeeded in stirring the DC rumour mill to a fever pitch; unashamedly milking the pandemonium stoked by The Washington Post’s revelations.

  WELCOME TO THE SURVEILLANCE STATE!

  Now that Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee had called the Administration’s bluff, the second editions of most of the other papers had picked up the clarion call: put up or shut up, sue us, arrest us or confess!

  The White House had gone silent; hurriedly circled the wagons while a couple of tame GOP stalwarts had brazened it out on the steps of the Capitol.

  The CIA’s ‘information machine’ was already in high gear, although mainly spinning its wheels because today, nobody was buying anything Langley wanted to sell.

  A small, floodlit – for the TV companies – rectangle of floor space around a lectern with seven or eight microphones had been preserved for Gretchen’s principals.

  Magically, the buzz of conversation faded and the newsmen parted in a feeble imitation of the Red Sea draining aside, so as to allow Moses and his tribes to carry on to the Promised Land.

  Gretchen was surprised, and despite herself, impressed, by the respect the DC press pack paid to Dan’s parents.

  My, my, Jo is smiling at these people like they are her favourite nephews and nieces and they…love it. And the Ambassador is radiating…decency and authority.

  Please, please, nobody is to shout: “Captain on the bridge!” right now…

  Gretchen wished she had had more time to rehearse her part in the forthcoming drama. Five run throughs would have to suffice!

  She tapped one of the microphones.

  There was a satisfying ‘thump’ over the room’s freshly set up public address system which instantly got everybody’s attention.

  “Thank you all for coming to Pennsylvania Avenue at such short notice,” she began, smiling with a genuinely mischievous twinkle in her eyes, “on such a busy news day!”

  Even hardened news hacks chuckled.

  “This morning we learned that our Government has been spying on us. Worse than that, that our Government has threatened, and presumably is still threatening to throw anybody who dares to make public its dirty washing, into prison. Whatever happened to the First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen?”

  She let this sink in.

  “But you have not come here to see me.”

  Gretchen noted that Walter Cronkite was giving her one of his ‘patient uncle’ looks, as if to say ‘don’t overplay this’.

  Good advice!

  This was not her day.

  “So, without further ado, I am going to stand aside. Let me present Captain Walter Brenckmann!”

  This caught both her father and mother-in-law a little by surprise, both were still soaking up the atmosphere, a febrile animal, when the spotlight, literally fell upon them.

  Walter Brenckmann squeezed Joanne’s hand as they stepped forward. He looked around. Right then he would much rather have been on the rolling, pitching deck of a destroyer in a storm than in the eye of the Washington media pack.

  Joanne clung to his hand.

  “We, um,” her husband smiled, ruefully, “came stateside for a vacation and a chance to get to know our grandkids a little better. However, that was before I discovered that the CIA and the FBI were tapping my phone, and following me and members of my family as they went about their normal, lawful business.”

  He spoke with court room gravitas, precision. His voice would likely have carried into every corner of the room without amplification. Like an actor he had learned long ago to project his words; one could not persuade anybody about anything unless one was heard.

  “We were told that enemies of the people had to be uncovered, spies and fifth columnists unearthed, terrorists hunted down before they could do ‘the people’ harm, and yet,” he shook his head, sadly, “nobody seemed to see the coup d’état in this city in December 1963 coming, or the atrocity at Wister Park, or the f
irst rebellion in Wisconsin, or the ten-one cowardly terrorist attacks in Philadelphia in October 1965, or the nuking of American cities and the Civil War in the Midwest. We were under surveillance by our Government all the time, and yet nobody in the CIA or the FBI, or any other organ of the police state, seemed to see any of the disasters which have befallen us coming until they were, tragically, already upon us. Nobody…”

  He sighed, shook his head.

  “My friends, I think we are all entitled to ask what went wrong? Sadly, one is bound to reflect that if the people we trust to keep us safe had been a little less preoccupied bugging hotel rooms in Manhattan and listening to the pillow talk of private citizens, they might just, have noticed that the Union was damned near broken.”

  Walter Brenckmann had anticipated a ragged salvo of questions by now. Nobody said a word, a problem because it gave him no clue as to whether or not he was striking the right note.

  “I believe our country has a problem,” he went on, more in sorrow than condemnation. “A country which spies on its own people; a country governed by men who have lost their moral compasses, a country in which the rule of law is routinely, systematically flouted by those we have elected to preserve and to guard that same rule of law, cannot be a happy country.”

  He was beginning to relax, breathe evenly.

  “If what we read in The Washington Post is true, and I have no reason to doubt that, substantially, it is true; then we live in a country where those in power believe it is okay to spy on the Chief Justice, his clerk, his clerk’s wife, on an Ambassador and his wife, or on anybody they want, in fact.”

  He started making eye contacts.

  “I have worked, and fought, all my adult life to defend the constitution of the United States; I plan to go on fighting to defend the rights enshrined in that proud constitution. It is with a sinking heart that I tell you today that I cannot, in good faith, or in accordance with the oath I took as an officer in the US Navy back in 1940, continue to serve an Administration which is more interested in covering up its complicity in spying on its own people, than it is with serving the people.” He stood ramrod straight, at attention. “It is with immense regret that I must inform you that immediately prior to attending this press conference, I telegraphed my resignation – with immediate effect - as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, a post I have been honoured and privileged to discharge, to the President. My formal letter of resignation should be delivered to the White House about now. In that letter, a copy of which has been lodged with the State Department, I lay out the legal and the personal reasons for my departure, and demand that the Department of Justice take the appropriate steps against several named persons.”

  “Who?” Barked two or three reporters in unison.

  Walter Brenckmann pretended to be deaf; looked to his wife.

  “Jo and I will miss all our friends in England. Although we served in Oxford in good times and bad, we were always treated with unfailing courtesy and respect. We both look forward to visiting the British Isles and renewing the countless friendships formed in our three years in post.”

  He suspected Gretchen would chastise him for drifting ‘off message’.

  “Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover, Associate Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, and Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence,” he said with a rising edge of indignation. “Each have presided over a corrupt regime, or been directly involved in heinous crimes against the people of the United States.”

  There were more shouted questions.

  He ignored them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it is never enough simply to ‘cry foul’ when one witnesses a crime. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men, and women, to turn a blind eye, to walk on by on the other side of the street. Therefore, I do not propose to be simply a man with a grievance railing against the iniquity of an Administration in which I have lost faith.”

  Walter Brenckmann grimaced.

  “Let us be frank, brutally frank, about this, ladies and gentlemen,” he warned sternly. “President Nixon is barely half-way through his four-year term in office. He ought to be impeached but with the GOP in control of both Houses on the Hill, we all know that there is not a snow flake’s chance in Hell of that happening this side of November next year. So, I hereby give notice that I plan to put my name forward to be Democrat candidate for the Presidency of the United States!”

  Chapter 21

  Thursday 2nd February 1967

  Clermont-Ferrand, The Auvergne, France

  The first Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov, the Troika’s Commissar Special Plenipotentiary to the Front Internationale in Clermont-Ferrand, had known about the bombing raid on the ships anchored at Villefranche, had been when he received a panicky telephone call from the airfield to the west of the city.

  It later transpired that the Troika had sent him a long, convoluted briefing paper about the raid, and how he was to present the destruction of the ‘French Mediterranean Fleet’ to his ‘Front Internationale Comrades’. Unfortunately, the message had been broadcast in four separate parts and three of the ‘parts’, had been garbled, resulting in a long delay while the people in Sverdlovsk processed the requests for re-broadcasts. And then, inevitably, there had been a hold-up with the decoding protocols. This latter had occurred because it was not immediately recognised in the Soviet Mission’s Communications Room that the re-broadcasts had – in contravention of normal practice - been re-coded in the ‘transmission day code’ rather than re-sent in their original coding. It made for a very unfunny comedy of errors; the upshot of which was that when Rashidov was peremptorily summoned to explain what was going on, all he knew for sure was that there must have been some kind of botched attempt to sink the Villefranche ships by the Red Air Force.

  Then, as he prepared to leave the Soviet Residence situated in the Place de Jaude, more messages delayed his departure for his meeting with Maxim Machenaud.

  It seemed that several Tupolev Tu-95 bombers had attempted to land at Clermont-Ferrand.

  ‘The fucking French shot down one of them!’

  The confusion would have been laughable had it not been so obvious that the Troika had decided to burn its boats with the Front Internationale; which left Rashidov in a more than somewhat awkward position.

  The Commissar Plenipotentiary had still been digesting the – somewhat unlikely, barely plausible reports – when the man at the other end of the line, the Red Air Force Transport Division Duty Liaison Officer, at the airport blurted: ‘The Revolutionary Guards have arrested the crews of the two aircraft on the ground. Another aircraft has just crashed. There’s a bloody great big fire, I have no idea if any of the crew survived…’

  ‘Why the fuck would the FI shoot down one of our aircraft?’ The Commissar Plenipotentiary had demanded.

  ‘They claim it didn’t have its transponder switched on so the idiots manning the SS-75 batteries in the hills targeted it with a full salvo of missiles…’

  Given that the last time Rashidov had spoken to Maxim Machenaud, the First Secretary of the Front Internationale, he had spoken of the ships at Villefranche as ‘my ships’, Sharof Rashidov did not anticipate that there was going to be a great deal of fraternal back-slapping going on when he confronted the little shithead.

  It transpired that ‘Comrade Machenaud has already left for the airport’ by the time the Soviet delegation arrived at the FI’s headquarters at the old Michelin Factory.

  Under the escort of grim-faced, Kalashnikov-toting Revolutionary Guards the Russians were ‘escorted’ out of the city and driven across the great, mostly empty expanse of the airfield. There was a large crowd gathered around the two big, silvery bombers parked on the northern side of the field. To the east a plume of black smoke still rose from the scatter of burning wreckage just short of the threshold of the main runway.

  The convoy approached neither the parked bombers or the site of the crash; instead,
it carried on across the runway and headed for the as yet still uncompleted bunker complex located to the south west, where the aerodrome butted up against Clermont-Ferrand’s derelict pre-war industrial sprawl.

  Rashidov thought it was stupid locating a command bunker anywhere near the airfield. The RAF had decapitated the Soviet leadership with a couple of big bombs back in 1964, wrecking a bunker complex far larger, far better-engineered and much deeper than the one Maxim Machenaud’s people were building.

  The convoy halted.

  The Russians stepped onto the tarmac; grateful they had grabbed their heaviest coats when they left the Mission that morning. A fiercely gusting northerly wind was ripping at their faces, attempting to lance through their layers of warm clothes.

  Rashidov glanced to the distant, burning wreck.

  Any aircraft with significant damage would have struggled to land in weather like this. There would be unpredictable winds falling off the surrounding mountains, worse, to his untrained senses it seemed as if the wind was ripping directly across the runway…

  “Those were MY fucking ships!” Maxim Machenaud screamed in Sharof Rashidov’s face as he strode up to him.

  The thin woman hovering in the background, three metres behind the ‘great leader’ was in her thirties, or perhaps, a little older, it was hard to tell these days.

  Nobody seemed to know a lot about her.

  However, since Rashidov’s encounter with Maxim Machenaud at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, he had demanded to know more about her.

  Rashidov’s people had confirmed that her name was Agnès, or rather ‘Comrade Agnès’. She was a member of the Central Committee of the Front Internationale, in charge of the Forst Secretary’s Secretariat. She had no personal power base, no friends; she was usually with or close to hand at executions. There were also suggestions that she sat on the FI’s ‘Revolutionary Court’. This latter body had not been convened in recent months but up until a year ago, it had rubber-stamped, legitimised Maxim Machenaud’s rule of terror.