The Envoy

by Edward Wilson

  George, Jennifer’s father, was an uncle by marriage. He was a retired colonel and had been a classmate of Eisenhower’s at West Point. George never got a general’s stars, not because he lacked ability, but because he lacked guile and duplicity. In most ways, Kit preferred George to his own blood relations. He didn’t seem to have a dark side. Whenever Kit visited the States, he preferred staying on the farm with George and Aunt Janet. And they liked having him too. In a way, he felt they needed him as a surrogate son.

  Kit put his hand on George’s shoulder and gave an affectionate squeeze. ‘I’m really grateful that you picked me up at the airport and brought me here. With Mom in France, I didn’t want to be stuck alone at Maury House.’

  ‘What about your sisters, are they still in New York?’

  ‘Yes, they’re sharing a flat in Greenwich Village. Caddie’s qualified now and Ginny’s still trying to make a name for herself.’ There was, thought Kit, a certain serendipity to the careers of his sisters. Caddie was a doctor who specialised in venereal diseases and Ginny wrote avant-garde plays and hung around with beatnik poets. In some ways, their worlds overlapped.

  ‘Have they got boyfriends?’

  ‘I don’t know, but somehow I doubt it.’ Kit wasn’t greatly interested in the sex lives of his sisters. They did go to bed with people, but more, Kit thought, out of clinical or psychological curiosity than love. Caddie must be an impossible partner. Kit imagined potential lovers being examined for genital warts, primary chancres and urethral fistulae. She also liked showing off her collection of medical photographs illustrating the latter stages of terminal syphilis and advanced cases of granuloma inguinale. And it was Caddie, bless her heart, who had told Kit about eproctophilia: a condition where people become sexually excited by flatulence.

  ‘Well,’ said George, ‘I’m glad that our Jennifer’s settled. Do you see them?’

  ‘Quite a bit. I’ve bought a boat that I’ll be keeping near where they live in Suffolk.’

  ‘If Janet was a better traveller, we’d go see them.’

  Kit smiled. It was Uncle George’s coded way of saying that his wife wasn’t sober enough to make the trip. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not bad. Having you here’s a help – but don’t think that means you have to stay here all the time.’

  ‘I love being here.’ Kit meant it. It was a way of being close to Jennifer that no husband could ever experience. He could see where she came from and what had shaped her – all the way back to the womb. It was all there: the river, the bay, the rickety old jetty where a pre-pubescent Jennie sat wearing muddy knickers with her feet dangling in the water and minnows nibbling at her toes; the marsh whirring with hummingbirds; musical soirées and candlelight; the long rambling wooden house with polished oak floors bearing the furtive footstep echoes of Mad Betty, the ghost of an early nineteenth-century maid. And her father – a scarred soldier who tried to gentle and calm everything he touched.

  ‘I’m trying,’ said George, ‘to grow Chinese artichokes this year. Very rare plant. We love Jerusalem artichokes, but they make Janet fart. I’ve just found this book called Five Acres and Freedom. You don’t need much to survive. We could all be self-sufficient, you know – and tell General Motors and Standard Oil to go to hell.’

  ‘You’d better be careful, Uncle George, you’ll end up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.’

  ‘Screw them. What’s more American than the frontier spirit and looking after yourself? Capitalists aren’t real Americans – they’re parasites.’

  ‘You remind me,’ laughed Kit, ‘of when you were in that play.’

  ‘That’s was all your sister’s idea.’

  ‘Perfect casting though. You stole the show.’ George had played the old counsellor, Gonzalo, in The Tempest. Ginny had directed it with a local amateur drama group.

  ‘Well at least I didn’t forget my lines. Listen,’ George drew himself up straight.

  All things in common nature should produce

  Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,

  Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine

  Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,

  Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,

  To feed my innocent people.

  George sat back down. ‘I fear I may be boring you.’

  ‘Far from it. Do it again.’

  ‘Now, sir, you mock me.’

  ‘Actually, George, you were fantastic in that play.’

  ‘Was I?’

  Kit nodded. He could tell that George enjoyed the praise. The harmless little vanity made Kit warm to him even more. ‘You know I’ve got to go to Washington tomorrow?’

  ‘Would you like to borrow the car?’

  ‘No, Anne Truitt’s giving me a lift from Easton.’

  ‘Oh, I like Anne. Are you going to be staying with them in Georgetown?’

  ‘No, I’m going to be staying with Cord and Mary Meyer.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘That sounded like a very serious hmm. What’s hmm mean?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know? What sort of intelligence agent are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Unfortunately, we don’t pick up the latest salacious gossip over in London town. It sounds like something’s wrong chez les Meyer.’

  ‘The junior senator from Massachusetts.’

  ‘Poor Cord. He doesn’t deserve this.’

  ‘The Kennedys have moved in next door – that big place, Hickory Hill.’

  ‘Thanks for filling me in. If my bedroom door opens in the middle of the night, I’ll have to remember not to moan “Jack honey” in a throaty Vassar purr.’

  ‘My generation weren’t saints either – so I’m not going to pass judgement.’

  The cherry trees were no longer in blossom. Washington springs came early, then flopped into long sweaty summers that stretched from May to October. The British Foreign Office classified the town as a semi-tropical posting. Kit had no affection for the capital: a Potomac fringe of grand white government buildings, a handful of wealthy enclaves – then miles and miles of slum housing and poverty sprawling further than the eye could see or a taxi driver would venture.

  The State Department Building was the ugliest piece of architecture that Kit had ever seen. It was a long seven-storey slab of beige brick and concrete with metal window frames. Kit showed his ID to a policeman in a glass cubicle. The cop pressed a buzzer and Kit entered the entrance lobby. The floor was highly-polished reddish-brown linoleum tiles that made your shoes squeak and echo. The State Department coat of arms was mounted on the wall facing the entrance. There were also photo-portraits of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Kit pressed a button to summon the elevator and checked his tie and hair on the gleaming stainless-steel doors while he waited for a lift to ‘the Seventh Floor’. There were plans to renovate the lobby into a fake eighteenth-century reception hall. And that, thought Kit, would be worse: the epitome of nouveau riche vulgarity. From time to time he penned memos begging that the plans be scrapped. He could hear the sneers of the French Ambassador already.

  Kit exited the elevator and walked down the corridor to John Foster Dulles’s office. In the reception area outside the office was an oil painting of Key House. It had been painted in 1903 by the grandson of Francis Scott Key who wrote the national anthem. The style of the painting was about a hundred years out of date even in 1903, but Kit always looked at it with affection because the beautiful eighteenth-century house was set in an early American Arcadia. The house lies on a slight rise above the Potomac River; the thickly wooded banks are turning autumnal; there are dogs and horse-drawn carriages in the foreground, boats with sails in the background. The house was demolished in 1949 to build a four-lane freeway.

  A door opened and an assistant undersecretary of something or other told Kit to ‘go straight in’. Foster Dulles seemed much more relaxed on his home ground than he had in London. This time there were aides dancing in attendance to take no
tes and fetch documents. After the usual small talk, Dulles got straight down to business. ‘It seems, Kit, the next few months are going to be a very challenging time for Anglo-American relations – probably the most difficult this century.’

  ‘Things were,’ said Kit, ‘pretty bad over Indochina.’ Kit knew that Dulles had been in favour of using atomic weapons to stave off a French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, but Anthony Eden’s firm opposition had defeated the plan.

  ‘The problem with Anthony,’ – Dulles pronounced it Ant’nee, an affectation that annoyed the British – ‘is that he never understood the danger of a Red Asia.’

  A cloud of foul breath drifted across the desk. Kit tried not to breathe in.

  ‘But,’ the Secretary of State continued, ‘the problem has now shifted to the Middle East. What do you think Eden’s trying to pull off in Egypt? He doesn’t seem to be handling Gamal Nasser very well.’

  Kit looked closely at Dulles. ‘I’ve had a few indications, but…’

  ‘Indications about what?’

  Kit looked around nervously at the others in the room. Dulles made a gesture and the aides left the office. As soon as they were alone, Kit continued. ‘Last winter I was invited to a drinks party at the private home of the Minister of State at the Foreign Office. When I went to have a pee, I noticed a telephone in the hall between the minister’s bedroom and the bathroom. So I did the natural thing, unscrewed the earpiece and put in an MOP transmitter.’

  Dulles frowned.

  Kit continued. ‘At first, most of the stuff we picked up was “cabbages and kings” – that’s what we call worthless chatter – but eventually the FO minister received a late-night call from the Prime Minister.’ Kit took two sheets of paper out of his briefcase and handed them over. ‘That’s the transcript of the telephone call.’

  Dulles adjusted his bifocals and began to read aloud from the transcript. ‘“What’s all this poppycock you’ve sent me about isolating Nasser and neutralising Nasser? Why can’t you get it into your head that I want the man destroyed?”’

  It was odd to hear the Prime Minister’s words spoken with an American accent. For a few seconds Kit wondered if Dulles was speaking his own thoughts. The illusion was broken when the Secretary of State looked up at Kit. ‘I didn’t realise that Eden could get so mad. What brought this on?’

  ‘The Prime Minister thinks Nasser is stirring up trouble in Jordan and other neighbouring countries. And some of it may be down to medication: Benzedrine and sleeping pills aren’t a good combination.’ For a second Kit thought about MK-ULTRA: they were experimenting with the same drug mix to induce hysteria. ‘Read on, sir, it gets better.’

  ‘“I don’t care if there is anarchy and chaos in Egypt. I just want to get rid of Nasser …’” Dulles finished the Eden transcript and looked intently at Kit. ‘You can see where this is heading, can’t you?’

  Kit felt very uncomfortable under the heavy Dulles stare. ‘Are you suggesting, Secretary Dulles, that the British are planning to assassinate Nasser?’

  ‘That’s a question that we should be asking you – you’re supposed to be our eyes and ears in London.’

  Kit was used to sharp criticism: harsh words were background music in the corridors of power. ‘I’m sure that assassination plans exist, but…’

  ‘But you haven’t been able to penetrate the secrecy around them.’

  ‘It depends on how you define penetrate.’ Kit began to feel resentful. It wasn’t Foster’s job to question his role as an intelligence officer. On the other hand, you can’t tell the US Secretary of State, the second most powerful man in the world, to fuck off. ‘I know that experiments have been carried out at Porton Down …’

  The Secretary of State’s face looked blank.

  ‘Porton Down is the British Ministry of Defence laboratory for chemical and biological warfare. In any case, there have been recent experiments involving nerve gas, ricin and poison-tipped darts. They carry out practice assassinations on sheep.’ Kit paused and remembered his father’s tales of how tethered farm animals were used to measure blast and radiation effects at the US nuclear test sites. We use animals, he said, to harden our souls for cruelty to our own species.

  ‘If a Nasser assassination is planned, how likely is it to succeed?’

  ‘Less than ten per cent. Most of Britain’s undercover intelligence assets in Egypt have been blown and rounded up. Their only hope is a handful of dissident army officers.’

  ‘What a pity. We would not be adverse to such an assassination, but we can’t be seen to have anything to do with it. We have to protect our reputation in the Arab world. But it would suit our policy just fine if the British got rid of Nasser – and then,’ Dulles smiled for the first time, ‘we would condemn them for having carried out a beastly and illegal act.’

  Kit was surprised by Foster’s open cynicism, but then he realised that it was the first time that he had ever been alone with him. Perhaps the high-minded pulpit persona was something the Secretary of State saved for more public settings – or for his kid brother. Different people, different faces.

  ‘The problem,’ continued Dulles, ‘is that Nasser thinks he can play ball with both sides. He accepts Soviet military aid with one hand while his other hand is grabbing American aid to build the Aswan dam. We’re not going to let Nasser get away with that. We’re going to pull out of the Aswan project.’

  Kit wasn’t surprised. Development aid wasn’t about helping the world’s poor; it was about blackmailing Third World countries to follow US policy. Without the Aswan dam, Egypt would end up an economic cripple. No food, no power, no jobs. The Gringo Dollar was just as deadly as poison gas and nuclear bombs. If a country gets out of line, you wreck their economy and starve their kids.

  ‘Well,’ said Dulles, ‘we know that Nasser is going to be mad as hell. But since he won’t be able to get back at us, he’s going to take it out on the Brits instead. What do you think?’

  ‘I suspect,’ said Kit, ‘that Nasser will kick the British out and seize the Suez Canal.’

  ‘And how are the British going to respond?’

  ‘Eden will go bananas – he might even take military action.’

  ‘And that,’ said Dulles, ‘is where we are going to fall out with our British cousins. We’re going to have to tell them that it’s finished, that their empire is over.’

  Kit looked at the Secretary of State with detached amazement. Dulles came from a family of diplomats: John Foster was, in fact, the third member of his family to occupy his present post. And yet, thought Kit, this man goes about international diplomacy with all the grace of a trained chimpanzee putting out a grass fire with a wet sack.

  Dulles took out a penknife and began to sharpen a pencil as if it were his personal view of world history. ‘They have to understand that “Pax Americana” is the only song that the West is going to sing. As things develop, we’ll keep you informed of what lines to take and who, on the British side, to groom and cultivate.’

  Kit began to get up for he assumed the interview was over.

  ‘Stay there for a second.’ The Secretary of State frowned at his pencil and shaved off another sliver. ‘It is not in the interest of the United States that Britain possesses an independent nuclear deterrent. We’ll keep you briefed on what line to take.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘But I won’t keep you, Kit, I believe you’ve now got a meeting with my brother over in the Kremlin.’

  The Kremlin wasn’t that Kremlin, not the one in Moscow. It was State Department slang for the dreary complex of office buildings on E Street that housed the CIA. There were plans to move to a pleasant site called Langley across the river in Virginia – where the DCI could watch deer and other woodland wildlife through his office window while he plotted overthrows of disobedient governments.

  The DCI seemed flushed and ebullient as Kit entered his office. Kit suspected that Allen Dulles had got laid over his lunch break. The Director’s womanising was gossip
so stale that it was no longer mentioned.

  The DCI got up and held Kit in a manly bear hug. His jacket carried a whiff of cheap perfume. ‘You did a fantastic job in Portsmouth Harbour.’ Dulles hugged him tighter and for a second Kit thought his boss was going to kiss him on both cheeks like a French general handing out a Croix de Guerre.

  ‘I hope I didn’t go too far.’

  Dulles let him go. ‘No, not at all. But any more British nonsense about unilateral détente with the Sovs has been truly scuppered. The Russians will never again trust perfidious Albion. And, by the way, I’ve just heard that John Sinclair has resigned as Head of MI6.’

  Kit already knew, but feigned surprise.

  ‘I hear,’ continued Dulles, ‘that Sinclair’s replacement is Dick White, the fellow who was running MI5.’

  ‘I’ve met him – we call him Blanco.’

  ‘What’s your impression?’

  ‘Smooth and devious – not to be underestimated.’

  ‘Add your impressions to his file before you leave.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Kit watched the DCI walk back to his desk and noticed the limp. Like Lord Byron, Allen Dulles had a club foot – not a fact that either man had tried to make known.

  ‘The thing about our British cousins,’ said Dulles, ‘is that they seem to be becoming more secretive and furtive. Which is a pity, because they’re pretty damned good at knowing what’s what on Arab Street. There’s a certain sort of upper-crust Britisher that likes nothing more than to dress up like a Bedouin and learn the lingo – T.E. Lawrence, Wilfrid Thesiger, St John Philby. I suppose we could be crude about the reason why – but even some of the girls, like Gertrude Bell, get into it. And, I have to admit, they do it with dash and style. Replacing them in the Middle East won’t be easy.’

  ‘Are you going to send me somewhere to learn Arabic?’

  ‘No, Kit, but I want you to keep us posted on Eden – and also keep an eye on Macmillan and Butler. See which one is more, shall I say, congenial to our interests. Did you know that Macmillan’s mother was an American? It seems we’ve crossbred most of their ruling class. As for Wallis Simpson … your Baltimore girls get everywhere.’