by James Philip
The news from Washington had burst upon the Anglo-Australasian Party an hour before Commonwealth One, her tanks topped-off, was scheduled to take-off on the ten-hour long-haul south. What had been, until then, a most convivial flight from San Francisco to the Hawaiian fuelling stopover with the British, Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers in conclave, and their staffs socialising, the wheels well-oiled by Steuart Pringle’s Royal Marines smoothly adopting their secondary roles as stewards, was instantly over-shadowed by the looming scandal thousands of miles to the east.
Airey Neave had been shoe-horned onto a scheduled Pan Am flight back to Los Angeles, from whence he would fly straight on to Washington. Problematically, everybody knew that by the time he got to his destination it would be too late.
‘We’ll just have to let Nicko smooth things over as best he can, Margaret,’ her friend had assured the Prime Minister as they said goodbye.
Tom Harding-Grayson had been uncharacteristically quiet on the flight south and had it not been for his wife, Pat, assuming the duties of hostess the trip would have been even more thoroughly miserable than it had been. For the British contingent, leastways.
The Australasian passengers mostly took the Prime Minister’s word for it that it was ‘all a storm in a tea cup’, and tried to enjoy the journey, or even better, attempted to catch up on all the sleep they had missed in the last few days.
Group Captain Guy French had come over the intercom eight hours into the flight: ‘I do apologise but we’ve encountered rather strong headwinds and detoured quite a long way around a nasty storm, which means it would be rather more touch and go, fuel-wise, to carry on all the way down to Canberra. I have advised the Royal Australian Air Force that we will need to land at Amberley, before a final ‘hop’ down to our final destination.’
As laconic as ever, it was apparent to all his listeners that he felt that he had, in some undefined way, let them all down.
At Ian Gow’s suggestion, earlier in the flight Margaret Thatcher had gone up to the cockpit, posed for photographs sitting in the captain’s left-hand seat while the Officer Commanding No 10 (Transport) Squadron flew the Super VC-10 from the co-pilot’s right-hand chair, casually explaining the controls to the Prime Minister. At one point he had invited her to ‘take the wheel’.
The small gang of journalists from British and Australasian papers had been most appreciative, as Ian Gow had hoped, in fact positively eating out of the Prime Minister’s hand on account of the unexpected photo-opportunity, and the two or three page spreads their editors would lap up as soon as they got a chance to post their copy. A BBC radio man had waxed lyrical at one stage, his soundman chuntering to himself as he tried to exclude as much as possible the background noise of the jet in flight out of the recording.
For about half-an-hour the cockpit diversion had partially distracted Margaret Thatcher from the unprecedented, unmitigated diplomatic disaster unfolding in Washington DC.
Normally, she would have found the hastily organised welcoming ceremony at Amberley Air Force Base a little tiresome, that day it was a blessed escape.
The base commander and honour guard stood to attention as the Prime Minister of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies, who had seemed terribly tired and worn in California, briefly re-invigorated, led the British Prime Minister and his Kiwi counterpart, the Right Honourable Keith Holyoake down to the tarmac. Afterwards, while Commonwealth One was being re-fuelled for the short ‘hop’ down to Canberra, where, in comparison, a truly regal reception had long been planned, the premiers and their senior colleagues, including the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Australian Opposition, Arthur Calwell, who had probably enjoyed the American trips a great deal more than his long-time opponent, Menzies, looking fresh and sounding optimistic, enjoyed drinks and a light meal in the Officers Mess.
‘It will be very nice to see Peter and Marija again,’ Pat Harding-Grayson had reminded her younger friend as Commonwealth One lined-up for take-off.
The Prime Minister brightened a degree; she had a new godson – Miles Julian – born shortly after the Christophers arrived in Australia last year whom she had never seen, and never held in her arms. The thought prompted a twisting pang of guilt, Carol and Mark, her thirteen-year-old twins were in the care of Diana Neave in her, and Frank’s, prolonged overseas absence.
How much better would it have been to have brought them with her this time…
That said, Frank had felt that it would be good for the twins to be around other ‘young people’; the Neave’s youngest son, William was the same age as Mark and Carol, and Diana tended to run an ‘open house’ for all the other youngsters cooped up in the ‘Government enclaves’ of Oxford.
Her husband was probably right, she was too over-protective and it really was not good for the twins…
There had been no news from Washington since leaving Honolulu and this played on the Prime Minister’s mind as the aircraft roared into the air and turned southward, to begin the nine-hundred-mile final ‘hop’ to its destination.
Once the aircraft reached its cruising altitude, Ian Gow, today attired in his Hussars uniform on account of the full ceremonial welcome awaiting Commonwealth One at Canberra, settled in the seat opposite his principal.
He began his customary briefing.
“Order of events, Prime Minister,” he prefaced dutifully. “The Governor-General and his wife will be at the head of the reception line at the foot of the steps. Sir Peter will escort you and Prime Minister Holyoake down that line, Lady Marija will hang back and attend Sir Robert and Mister Calwell. Our High Commissioner, General Leese, will attach himself to Lord and Lady Harding-Grayson. There will be a guard of honour to inspect. Now then…speeches.”
Margaret Thatcher took the two sheets of paper.
She scanned them in a moment.
“Yes, that’s fine,” she confirmed.
Honestly, she had no idea what she would do without Pat Harding-Grayson, her friend seemed to have an effortlessly light drafting touch. She could always tell when Ian had suggested – he never insisted – on this, of that minor change. If Margaret Thatcher did not know how she would cope without Pat, she would be equally bereft without Ian Gow.
Officially, depending on whether the setting was parliamentary or strictly governmental, Ian Gow was respectively her Parliamentary Private Secretary, or her Appointments Secretary but everybody recognised that he was her de facto Chief of Staff, doorkeeper and ear to the ground within her sporadically fractious National Conservative clan.
‘If you didn’t have Ian minding the shop,’ her husband had once remarked, only half in jest, ‘you’d never have a moment to yourself, my dear!’
There were times when the Prime Minister strongly suspected that Ian Gow and Sir Henry Tomlinson, the greying eminence grise of the Home Civil Service, were the ones actually running the country!
“Sir Robert will talk for a little longer,” Ian Gow continued, very much in the manner of a reassuring family solicitor, by coincidence the profession the politician-soldier-lawyer had planned to pursue had the October War not intervened. “But he plans to stick to key points only. Likewise, Mister Holyoake. Mister Caldwell will stand beside Sir Robert but he will not speak at the airport. I believe there was some kind of trade-off between the parties and it was agreed that he would have a prime slot at the official homecoming gala. Sir Peter Christopher will do the usual welcoming spiel, I should imagine we can rely upon him to keep things short and sweet. Thereafter, Mister Holyoake and his party will accompany you, the Governor-General and Lady Marija back to Government House at Yarralumla, the Foreign Secretary and others will return to the High Commission with Sir Oliver, et al. I know that you will wish to have a little personal time with Sir Peter and Lady Marija, so I have cleared your diary for the two hours or so between the arrival at Government House and the time scheduled for getting ready for the evening’s ‘banquet’.”
Ian Gow waited a moment.
“Is that satisfactory, Prime Minister?”
>
“Yes, thank you, Ian.”
Blissfully, right then she could think of nothing so guaranteed to if not obviate, then at least, to thoroughly distract her from her worries than the prospect of bouncing her goddaughter, Elisabetta, now over two years old, on her knee and cradling six-month-old godson, Miles Julian in her arms.
While she waited to hear the latest bad news…
Chapter 70
Thursday 16th February 1967
Philip Burton Federal Building, San Francisco
“What are you saying, Lady?” Dwight Christie demanded, careful not to raise his voice because he knew, he just knew, that was not going to cut it with the slim, grey-haired woman whose blue-grey eyes threatened to see straight through him to the wall five feet behind his head.
Professor Caroline Constantis sipped her coffee. Remarkably, it was nowhere near as bad as she had imagined it would be. In her experience FBI coffee was always over-stewed, brutally bitter but this was actually…pleasant.
The deal she had agreed with Special Agent James B. Adams, was that she would present the man who claimed to be Dwight David Christie her ‘take’ of what she had learned, deduced, intuited from the files she had been allowed to study, and the insights Adams had shared with her. She would confront the man with her version of reality and they would all see how he reacted.
It was hardly a standard diagnostic protocol but then, today, her subject was just about the most atypical ‘case’ she was ever going to encounter. Caro was about to move on when there was a rap at the door and Adams entered the room.
“A word please, Professor,” he apologised, beckoning her to follow him out of the interview room.
Leaving Erin Lambert to keep Dwight Christie company she stepped out into the corridor.
James Adams leaned close, speaking lowly as they wandered a few steps away from the door to the interview suite.
“It has been confirmed that the man shot at the Lincoln Memorial was the Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence, James Jesus Angleton. He was with Lady Rachel French at the time of the shooting.”
Caro was, understandably, nonplussed for several seconds.
“Is she?” She asked, not yet forming coherent thoughts.
“She was uninjured. However, there is speculation that she was part of the assassination plot. Specifically, that she lured Angleton to his death…”
Caro shook her head, emphatically.
“No. The only man she was interested in was Billy the Kid.”
“And you know this, how?” The man demanded urgently, his voice a hoarse whisper.
“Because she told me so!”
“And you believed her?”
“Yes, I did!”
“Okay, okay. I had to ask you.”
“Rachel French is not the problem,” Caro retorted, getting angry. “Hans Mikkelsen and his son are the problems. Whoever thought it was a good idea bringing that poor woman back into this thing – after what she’s been through – ought to be ashamed of themselves!”
James Adams backed away, held up his hands.
“Not guilty, Ma’am. All that’s way above my pay grade.”
“Sorry. I don’t usually shoot the messenger,” Caro apologised, forcing a tight-lipped smile. “I keep hoping that somebody is going to tell me what’s going on, that’s all.”
The FBI man grinned.
“That’s the story of my life, too.”
Caro took a few moments to compose herself before she went back into the interview room, settled, took another sip of her coffee and fixed the man on the other side of the table with a quizzical gaze.
“Everybody tells lies,” Caro offered gently, “little white lies mostly, we all do it all the time, to avoid embarrassment, often to avoid offending, or injuring the feelings of somebody we care about. Sometimes, the lies are big lies; but not always badly intentioned. The problem comes when those lies, big or small, become incorporated into our pasts as if they were true, real parts of our histories, our lived experiences and personalities. There is nothing worse than not knowing what is true and what is not, of losing a sense of who one was, and is.”
“What’s your point?” The man calling himself Dwight Christie put to her, irritated.
“Would you agree with the proposition that the FBI is an inherently secretive organisation? That it operates on a need to know basis, especially the closer one moves to day to day operational activities?”
The man nodded.
“Yet the first thing Agent Adams found odd – I won’t put it stronger than that – when he got hold of your personnel jacket and began to read the transcripts of your interrogations at Quantico, was that you claimed to know an awful lot about areas of the Bureau’s work that you had never had any direct contact with?”
“I keep my ear to the ground and my eyes open.”
“Very commendable,” Caro breathed. “I was fascinated to digest your own account of how you fell into the ‘Red camp’; not to mention your moral justification for betraying your country and, presumably, although you are more reticent about it, or should I say, evasive, in the way you justified your involvement with the so-called ‘American Resistance’.”
This drew no reply.
“Before the war,” Caro went on, “I was developing a diagnostic tool for clinicians to assist in the categorisation of persons with psychopathic personality disorders. Psychopaths were very much ‘my thing’; that was how I got to work with Edwin Mertz. There were fifty points on the scale I developed; one day I’ll publish my paper on the subject, always assuming the Bureau de-classifies my research.” She grimaced. “But I’m not holding my breath on that one. Somewhere along the line I must have upset the Director because most of my work is still embargoed. Anyway, enough of my troubles. We’re here to talk about you, Dwight.”
The man was giving her the silent routine.
That was okay, he was a fascinating subject; she would love to know, to be able to establish it, on the record, if his psychosis had morphed from relatively benign narcissistic delusions to full blown psychopathy – from a harmless Walter Mitty type character to a sociopathic killer – before or since, or perhaps, as a consequence of the October War.
Caro did not go along with James Adam’s idea that the man across the table from her was not the real Dwight Christie.
That was too much of a stretch.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
More things should not be used than are necessary; or more prosaically, given two or more explanations for a given circumstance or event, the simpler is more likely to be true.
For the man sitting in front of her to be somebody other than Dwight David Christie, a lot of complicated, unlikely things would have needed to have happened and this thing was already, far too messed up…
“The way this works,” she explained, “is that I’m going to tell you a story. Your story. If you want, you can put me right as we go along. Trust me, that will be less painful for you. Or, I can tell you,” she hesitated, “well, take intelligent guesses, as to which parts of the history are pure baloney. Then you’ll feel really dumb and hate me for it. Whatever, the reason Captain Lambert is sitting next to me is that Edwin Mertz’s ghost put a curse on me. It’s not true that psychopaths don’t have a sense of humour. It’s just not funny, that’s all. That’s how I already know, that unlike Mertz, you are way down on the psychopathy scale.”
“I’m not a…”
“I didn’t say you were a psychopath, Dwight. The problem with you is that one minute I’m talking to a former patriotic FBI agent and the next I’m looking into the eyes of a narcissistic traitor with delusions of grandeur, who is displaying unmistakable, identifiable signatures of sociopathic-psychopathic behaviour. One day you demonstrate empathy, selfless comradeship; the next, I concede, not routinely, you cold-bloodedly murder men you’ve worked with for years.”
Dwight Christie shrugged, feigned indifference, yawned.
Caro turned to Erin. “More coffee would be good. Where on earth did you find this stuff?”
“One of the secretaries was feeling sisterly. She put fresh grounds into her boss’s machine. I’ll go see her again.”
Caro drained her cup.
She waited until she was alone again with Dwight Christie.
“Okay, we shall begin at the beginning. Once upon a time there was an idealistic kid called Dwight,” she commenced, wryly. “He was bright, too. In fact, he’s always reckoned he was the sharpest knife in the drawer, isn’t that right, Dwight?”
The man shrugged with carefully understated contempt.
“Life was good and then one day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. His folks wanted him to go to Law School; he walked through the Army’s officer candidate selection board. He figured he’d be a hero; but the Army saw his IQ scores and made damned sure none of those pesky Japs or Nazis got a chance to shoot him; because, like all armies, it needed its best and brightest men fighting the good fight at home because it always knew, that its biggest problem was not the ‘official’ enemy abroad but those grasping, amoral profiteering bastards at home in corporate America.”
Dwight Christie had been an acting Captain, attached to the Department of Defense Procurement Office by the end of the war. All his commanding officers spoke highly of him but he had never uncovered any huge scam, or managed to highlight a particularly grotesque example of industrial-scale profiteering. No, he had kept his nose clean and lived the good life in the American North West and DC while tens of thousands of other young Americans had fought and died on foreign beaches, islands, lands, or in the air or on the seas of the world. There had clearly been times when he thought his superiors were giving certain contractors an ‘easy ride’ but he had never been prepared to go to the wall over it. Perhaps, that was when the well of guilt began to overflow?
“I guess,” Caro continued, “you’d been having the time of your life, working in Seattle, at Hanford, spending one week in every four or five back in DC reporting to the Pentagon. That must have been a real buzz for a young guy? You were having a great time right up until you got the news your kid brother, Vernon, had died in Normandy. You still hadn’t got over that when your big brother, the guy who’d always protected you – the clever, sensitive kid all the bullies picked on – was killed on Iwo Jima. Your parents never got over that, and neither did you. They died young, you didn’t know how to cope, or to go on living with the reality of your life, so,” Caro quirked a sympathetic smile, “over the years, you invented a new world. Bit by bit your damaged psyche constructed an altered, safer, better reality in which you lived, quite harmlessly, I imagine, until the Cuban Missiles War.”