Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Chapter 43

  Saturday 11th February 1967

  USS United States, San Francisco Bay

  Fifty-nine-year-old Lin Chieh, the Permanent Representative to the United Nations of the Republic of China, was the last man to arrive in the stateroom for the late morning meeting his government had been unwilling for him to participate in until less than an hour ago.

  George Bush, the United States’ Ambassador – why on earth the Americans could not call him ‘Permanent Representative’, his actual United Nations title, nobody knew – had finally prevailed upon him that ‘it would look bad’ and ‘disappoint the President’ if he was a ‘no show’ at the meeting mooted by the British, and consented to by Bush because it would have been discourteous to have refused.

  It went without saying that Lin Chieh was attending under protest. And that he also thought it was a completely pointless exercise.

  Whatever game the British were playing it would take a two-thirds majority of the member nations of the United Nations to remove the Republic of China from the ‘big five’ Permanent Members of the Security Council, or to vote the Communist People’s Republic into the UN itself, let alone promote it to, or replace the ROC on the Security Council. Nobody seriously believed that was on the cards, and besides, Lin Chieh would not have the slightest compunction about vetoing any application by the Communists to join the ‘UN family’.

  In fact, he would not have turned up at all had George Bush not personally reassured him that the People’s Republic could stay out in the cold forever, so far as the Nixon Administration was concerned. So, despite his near permanent frown, Lin Chieh was actually, a significantly happier man now than when he had boarded the US Air Force plane which had transported him to San Francisco, via Hawaii, three weeks ago. With the fortuitous departure of Henry Kissinger, what little pressure there had been to include the Communist usurpers in Chongqing in the mainstream of the international community had effectively, evaporated.

  The ‘United States stands by its commitments to the Republic of China, our Second World War ally,’ Bush had unequivocally declared.

  Lin Chieh was in no mood to sweeten the pill; he had come to the meeting to ‘humour’ the British.

  Sir Roy Jenkins, his host, was perfectly well aware of this: ‘Rome was not built in a day, Margaret,’ he had reminded his Prime Minister.

  ‘No,’ she had retorted waspishly, ‘but we have treaty obligations to the Mainland Chinese and I do not intend to be remembered as one of those British Prime Ministers who reneged on their word. Nor,’ she had added, ‘do I intend to bow to pressure from the White House on this.’

  From What Roy Jenkins had divined, the meeting with President Nixon at the Sequoyah Country Club in Oakland, had been another, albeit smaller scale ‘car wreck’ on the model of the near disastrous non-meeting of minds at Camp David at the end of last month. The American side had been preoccupied with their own domestic woes and it had been a testy affair all around; hardly a good omen for the two sides co-operation at the United Nations get together.

  Today’s meeting was a deliberately semi-informal, relaxed occasion with just the Permanent Representatives and a couple of translators in the room, mainly for the benefit of Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov.

  The aging, patently unwell Russian had hardly said a word to anybody outside his own Soviet circle since he had been in America, leaving all the talking and the haggling over quarters, security and the domestic arrangements, to Anatoly Dobrynin, whom personally, Kuznetsov knew would be much better employed in the UN role than to go on being wasted as Ambassador in Washington. Not that the Troika listened to an old Foreign Ministry apparatchik like him!

  Unfortunately, he got the impression that more than one Politburo member, and perhaps even Alexander Shelepin, did not entirely trust Dobrynin. Old ways, old attitudes died hard. Dobrynin had not stepped foot in the Motherland for five years now; for over a year he had been under house arrest in the United States. Had he been turned? In the good old days, he would simply have been called home and liquidated.

  Roy Jenkins had been ambivalent about holding this meeting but Tom Harding-Grayson had insisted. If the Chinese or the Russians boycott it, we can at least say ‘we tried’, that we ‘sought to mediate’; and if they,’ specifically, Lin Chieh, ‘turn up, you can have your first and probably, last, frank face-to-face exchange of views with representatives of every member of the current Security Council. Trust me, there will not be many opportunities to have a good, old-fashioned row in private going forward!’

  The Foreign Secretary had reminded him that if he managed to get the Chinese and the Russians in the same room at the same time, it would be a thing that Cordell Hull, and Lord Halifax, respectively the US Secretary of State and British Ambassador to Washington had failed to do at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944, when the first conference had been held to discuss what should replace the failed League of Nations after the Second War.

  Lin Chieh, an Oxford-educated lawyer, had been an advisor to the Chinese delegation at the conferences which had established the League of Nations after the First World War. Later, he had served as First Secretary at the Chinese Embassy in London before the Second War, and as ambassador to the Philippines and Canada, and represented his country at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, and at the subsequent San Francisco conclave in 1945 which set up the United Nations.

  However, back in 1944, the original United Nations talks had had to be conducted in two separate phases: the first with all the other parties and the Soviets; and the second with the Chinese!

  At the time of the October War, like Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, Lin Chieh had been his country’s Permanent Representative in New York.

  “Gentlemen,” Roy Jenkins prefaced, waving his guests to seats around the table in the middle of the stateroom as fresh coffee was served by two of Steuart Pringle’s immaculately attired Royal Marines. On board the USS United States only US Navy personnel and Secret Service men were permitted to carry firearms, so the Marines probably felt stark naked. Notwithstanding, unaccustomed as they were to stewarding duties, because the two men were Royal Marines, they performed their duties with aplomb. “Thank you all for coming to this tete-a-tete.”

  He waited briefly while Vasili Kuznetsov’s translator caught up.

  “It is the British Government’s position that the United Nations failed in its primary task in October 1962. Frankly, we are lucky to have a second chance to get things right. I am aware that Lord Harding-Grayson put everybody’s nose out of joint yesterday. Deliberately so, gentlemen. If the United Nations is to be a grand talking shop, all well and good. Jaw, jaw is a lot better than war, war. However, if it is to be more than that, the United Nations cannot continue to be an adjunct to world affairs, it must be able to act on, and to genuinely influence the course of events on the world stage.”

  George Bush stirred.

  “That’s very high and mighty,” he said, “but Congress won’t ratify anything I sign up to here on the basis of high-minded moral principles. Heck, twenty years ago Congress would have thrown out the whole Bretton Woods settlement if they hadn’t been told, and believed that the US was running the show!”

  The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, attended by over seven hundred representatives from forty-four nations under the umbrella of the Grand Alliance fighting the Germans and the Japanese, held at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in July 1944, had established the future regulation of the post-war global financial system. Both the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Monetary Fund had emerged out of the Bretton Woods talks, as had systems to manage the convertibility of national currencies, and general commitments to global ‘open trade’ and to the removal of artificial barriers to free trade. The Bretton Woods settlement remained the basis of international monetary regulation, despite the years of the Cold War, World War III over the Cuban missiles, and the volatile and often blood
y chaos of international relations since October 1962.

  No diplomat could do much better than to dream of one day designing a treaty which, despite everything thrown at it, had shown such fundamental resilience. In fact, the underlying driving force behind the gathering of the nations on board the USS United States, had a lot more to do with shoring up the Bretton Woods ‘system’ than it had to do with celebrating ‘World peace’.

  Restoring order to the international currency markets, attempting to reinvigorate the GATT – General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – process, and moving to a situation in which the US and the Royal Navies could stand down, at least in part, from their onerous trade route protection roles; all stood much higher on the British, Commonwealth and American agendas than arcane questions about who, exactly, should sit on the Security Council of a body that had not actually, sat in session for over four years when the World was reeling from a nuclear war.

  “I agree that Bretton Woods must be our ‘bottom line’, George,” Roy Jenkins agreed. “However, one cannot help but suspect that had those protocols agreed in New Hampshire been respected more in the spirit than the strict letter, many of the tensions which tore us asunder in 1962, might not have been quite so,” he grimaced, “dangerous. Bretton Woods,” he extemporised, with scholarly regret, “disadvantaged the poorer, and the less open economies of the post-1945 players…”

  George Bush grinned.

  “Heck, we’re not going to have one of those ‘our system is better than yours’ fights, are we, Roy?”

  Jenkins shrugged.

  “No, of course not, George. All I am saying is that mistakes were made back in the 1940s, mistakes we have it in our power to avoid repeating. Whether by design, or from choice, the Soviet Union was excluded from the economic and commercial benefits of the peace of 1945; and inevitably, that deepened the resulting Cold War and was instrumental in what later transpired. In any event, we are where we are,” he concluded, unconsciously pushing his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose.

  Aware that he had fallen into the trap of speaking only to one of the other four representatives, Roy Jenkins decided to carry on striking while this, particular iron, remained hot.

  “Forgive me, George,” Roy Jenkins continued, “I have been in politics most of my adult life. I recognise that it is very easy to be cynical about things. Nonetheless, while I fully understand that President Nixon feels as if he has enough on his plate already, closing off foreign policy options which might be the saving grace of his Presidency in the months and years to come, would be a mistake at this time.”

  George Bush was intrigued.

  “Okay, I’m listening, Roy.”

  The two men had met last night over drinks in the US suite on board the liner, while the rest of the British Party had returned to the Presidio, where, to everybody’s surprise it had been discovered that the senior members of the Soviet delegation had also found sanctuary. As it happened, in a ‘lodge’ only a couple of hundred yards from that which it occupied.

  Apparently, Steuart Pringle’s Royal Marines and their KGB counterparts had circled each other warily until the Prime Minister had called off her AWPs, and to a degree, somebody on the other side had told his own security people to do likewise, much to the relief of the US Army and Secret Servicemen terrified of being caught in the middle of a huge diplomatic incident.

  Jenkins had already decided that George Bush was a man with whom he could do business; and hoped, fervently, that the other man had come to the same conclusion.

  “Several days ago, a force of Red Air Force heavy bombers attacked Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera,” he reported to his fellow representatives.

  A flicker of irritation crossed Lin Chieh’s face.

  Maurice Schumann – who, of course, like the Americans, was fully ‘in the know already’ about the incident and the subsequent ‘rescue’ of the surviving ships of the pre-war French Mediterranean Fleet - inadvertently smiled like a Cheshire cat for a moment; then he sobered.

  Vasili Kuznetsov’s face was unmoving, his eyes inscrutable; unsurprised that nobody had thought fit to keep him abreast of purely ‘military matters’, regardless of how they might impact, or blow up, ongoing diplomatic initiatives.

  George Bush sat back, clasping his hands over his belly.

  Apart from the Frenchman none of the others knew where this was going and privately, admired the way Roy Jenkins let them wonder a few seconds longer.

  “The objective of the Red Air Force Raid was, presumably, to destroy the surviving ships of the former French Mediterranean Fleet anchored in Villefranche Bay. Several ships were indeed sunk during this attack.” Roy Jenkins met Vasili Kuznetsov’s granite gaze and held it. “At the time of the attack, three Royal Navy warships were present in the anchorage, and Fleet Air Arm Sea Vixen Interceptors armed with Top Hat air-to-air missiles and thirty-millimetre Aden cannons, were, flying combat air patrols above the Riviera.”

  Vasili Kuznetsov felt physically sick.

  This he tried to hide.

  Had British vessels or war planes been damaged or destroyed?

  What would that mad woman Thatcher do?

  Several nightmare scenarios began to flash before his widening eyes.

  Roy Jenkins decided not to keep his guest in suspense overlong. That sort of thing was strictly for the movies. So, with a melodramatic flourish he looked to his wristwatch, an ancient thing with a cracked face.

  “About now,” he declared, his tone regretful, “strike forces from two Royal Navy fleet carriers, HMS Eagle operating in the Bay of Biscay, and HMS Victorious in the Bay of Lions, and Vulcan V-bombers and Canberra medium bombers - between thirty and forty aircraft, all told – are conducting operations over the Massif Central, attacking targets in and around the city of Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the so-called Front Internationale.”

  Jenkins leaned forward, fixing Vasily Kuznetsov with a genuinely sympathetic scrutiny.

  “The attack will have lasted about three minutes. In that time higher flying aircraft will have dropped a large number of bombs on the air base at Clermont-Ferrand and precision low-level strikes will have been conducted on a number of military targets within the city. Simultaneously, ground attack and strafing operations will have been conducted against far-flung targets all across the Auvergne. I am also advised that other ‘special’ operations are presently in progress in the south of France in support of the Free French general offensive in the north.”

  Roy Jenkins did not have leave to tell, nor did he see any profit in telling, his colleagues on the ad hoc Security Council of the United Nations, that the Prime Minister had, after much soul-searching, green-flagged the Chief of the Defence Staff’s request to authorise bombing missions to attempt to decapitate the leadership of the Front Internationale.

  “At this time,” Roy Jenkins concluded, “After several days of patrolling and skirmishing operations, Allied forces in France are on the move en masse in a general offensive against enemy forces in the south and to secure the Rhine against interlopers from the east.”

  Vasili Kuznetsov feigned disinterest.

  “Why are you speaking of this?” His interpreter stuttered.

  “Because several of the aircraft that attacked Anglo-French naval forces at Villefranche, flew on to Clermont-Ferrand, to where they were, presumably, given succour by the Front Internationale, a Soviet Krasnaya Zarya proxy.”

  The Soviet minister shrugged.

  However, beneath his mask of indifference he was privately appalled.

  Stoically, he said: “I know nothing of this.”

  Chapter 44

  Saturday 12th February 1967

  HMS Victorious, 43 nautical miles SSE of Montpellier

  The first of the returning De Havilland Sea Vixen FAW2s thumped down onto the carrier’s deck far overhead, as Rear Admiral Henry Conyer Leach surveyed the situation board in the dimly-lit Command-Information-Centre (CIC) of his flagship.

  The
Victorious had launched her aircraft – five Blackburn Buccaneers S2s of 801 Naval Air Squadron and eight De Havilland Sea Vixen FAW2s of 893 Naval Air Squadron - approximately two-hundred-and-twenty nautical miles to the south of Clermont-Ferrand, within fifty miles of the coast near Montpellier.

  Simultaneously, out in the Bay of Biscay, HMS Eagle had launched – eleven Buccaneers of No 800 NAS and ten Sea Vixens of 899 NAS – from a position some thirty-five miles off the mouth of the Gironde Estuary, the best part of two-hundred-and-fifty miles, more or less due west of the target. Both carriers had put three Fairey Gannet AEW3 unarmed turboprop aircraft of 849 Squadron, from Flights B and C respectively, in the air nearly an hour in advance of the strike to reconnoitre the routes to the target, and to be in position at the critical moment of initial contact over the Auvergne, to attempt to electronically suppress enemy radar, communications and anti-aircraft and surface-to-air missile guidance systems immediately before, during and afterwards, in the withdrawal phase.

  Throughout the operation information uplinks from the Gannets had kept both the Eagle’s and Victorious’s CICs updated in real-time as to the progress of the mission, including, during its latter stages, painting the ground tracks of the three Avro Vulcans of No 617 Squadron based at Scampton in Lincolnshire, the seven English Electric Canberra B5s of 100 Squadron flying from Wittering in Cambridgeshire, and the three unarmed electronic warfare countermeasures Canberra B6s of 360 Squadron, from Watton in Norfolk.

  The Eagle’s and the Victorious’s Buccaneers had been carrying four one-thousand-pound iron bombs on their external hard points; the Sea Vixens a pair of Top Hat air-to-air missiles and two pods loaded with sixteen 68-millimetre unguided ground attack rockets. Fuel consumption had not been mission-critical for the Buccaneers – which were capable of striking targets up to a thousand miles distant – but all the Sea Vixens were operating with under-wing fuel tanks, which impacted their straight line speed and manoeuvrability by perhaps five percent; but importantly, meant that they could, if necessary loiter over the Auvergne for up to half-an-hour after the end of the attack.