by James Philip
“I joined the Prime Minister after the War Cabinet earlier today,” she said coldly, “and he remarked that this was the second successive year that the death of Winston Churchill had gone uncelebrated and unremarked within the Party, and by his surviving circle of friends, admirers and family. The Prime Minister considers himself to have been Sir Winston’s friend, and to some extent, one of his protégés. Dear Winston was one of four living Prime Ministers, or former Prime Ministers of our country who disappeared in the holocaust of October last year.”
Walter Brenckmann returned her fierce gaze with the inscrutable dead pan face of a long serving litigator. There were no questions in his grey blue eyes, no censure, simply patience for he knew from experience that even the fiercest flame burned itself out, sooner or later.
“Harold MacMillan and the Earl of Avon, Anthony Eden, from my own Party ceased to exist, as did Mr Clement Atlee, who served as Winston’s deputy in the war against Hitler. Churchill, MacMillan, Eden and Atlee, murdered and for what, Captain Brenckmann?”
“I wish I knew, ma’am.”
Margaret Thatcher glared at him. The horrible silence settled around the four people in the cold, damp room tainted with the smoke from the feebly drawing chimney.
“I lost my youngest kid,” the American said when it seemed like the atmosphere was freezing close to absolute zero. “Her name was Tabatha May, she was eighteen years old. After we’d had our boys she was...an accident. Like any kid you don’t expect she was everything to us. My wife Joanne and me, we still think we’ll wake up one morning and it’ll all turn out to have been a bad dream. Not a minute of any day goes by that we don’t remember driving Tabatha up to Buffalo to start college.” His voice choked, only for a moment. “Do you mind if I ask who you lost, ma’am?”
Airey Neave, who knew Margaret Thatcher as well as anybody in Government House, and Tom Harding-Grayson, whose acquaintance with her was of a shorter but latterly somewhat intense character – literally under fire – both feared the Angry Widow would fly at the quiet American.
They were both astounded when, after sniffing back a sob she nodded and whispered: “My husband, Denis. He was my rock.” They were even more flabbergasted, and a little shocked, when she added: “And I very much fear that a remarkable man whom I met only recently has been sent abroad on perilously dangerous work from which, in the present circumstances, he might well not return...”
“The last I heard,” Walter Brenckmann sympathised, “my oldest boy was on the USS Scorpion. For all I know, the Scorpion is riding herd on the Enterprise Battle Group as we speak.”
Tom Harding-Grayson coughed genteelly.
“In the hours before relations were severed with the United States, Captain Brenckmann visited my cottage where by chance Henry Tomlinson and I were drowning our sorrows. Henry and I came away from that meeting convinced that there was at least one man on Ambassador Westheimer’s staff who was as troubled by the turn of events as we were,” a quirk of arid humour, “and are.”
“Sir Henry is aware of this meeting?” Margaret Thatcher demanded, having hastily recovered her briefly mislaid composure.
“Not officially.”
If the Angry Widow recognised that the Foreign Secretary and her own closest advisor in Government – Airey Neave - had drawn her into a trap, she hid her vexation. Tom Harding-Grayson and Airey Neave knew that if they had her on their side then there was a prospect that the Prime Minister might listen to what they had to say, and more importantly, to what the former American Naval Attaché had to say. Margaret Thatcher had been with Edward Heath at Balmoral, and she’d backed him – to the hilt – when he sacked most of the Cabinet and put the UKIEA on a war footing. All her political credit had been banked when the Premier needed it most, and therefore, commanded a premium.
When neither of her colleagues made a move to kick off proceedings the Home Secretary took command.
“Tell me about yourself Captain Brenckmann?”
“I’m a small time Boston lawyer who volunteered for Officer Selection to the Navy Department back in forty to avoid being drafted into the infantry, ma’am.” The American waited to see how his opening gambit went down, adjusted the tone of his narrative and continued: “Joanne and me married in thirty-four the year I graduated law school at Yale. I was twenty-five; she was a few weeks short of her twenty-ninth birthday. She worked in a typing pool and waited tables to put me through law school. We met in a diner when I was a freshman. Our families were scandalised, mine no more than Joanne’s. Walter Junior was born a few days short of nine months after the wedding. Daniel arrived fourteen months later, Sam thirteen months after that. Tabatha was an accident that happened on a seven day furlough in the spring of forty-three. The doctors had said Joanne shouldn’t have any more kids after Sam came along but, hey, what do doctors know?”
“Did you see much war service, Captain Brenckmann?”
“My fair share, ma’am. I’d hoped they’d send a lawyer like me straight to the Judge Advocate’s Department. Washington wouldn’t have been that far away from Joanne and the boys; instead I got assigned to a DDE, that’s a destroyer escort. After Pearl Harbour I spent most of my time crossing and re-crossing the North Atlantic. Convoy escort duty. By the time I got home in forty-six I was a Lieutenant-Commander in the USN Reserve. I got called back when the Korean War kicked off; they made my third half-ring into a full ring and gave me a Fletcher class fleet destroyer to drive. After that I went back to lawyering again. Joanne and me were thinking about selling up, moving down to the Florida Keys when I retired. Only somebody blew up the World first and I got put on a plane for England.”
Margaret Thatcher absorbed the story.
“I qualified as a barrister before I entered Parliament,” she informed the American. “My original training was as a chemist. I’ve always found the combination of a scientific and a legal training indispensible in the analysis and reconciliation of conflicting narratives.”
“Being a successful litigator requires a forensic mind,” the man agreed.
The woman didn’t reply immediately.
“It is our view,” she determined, unhurriedly, “that the attack on Balmoral could not have been carried out without the active, or perhaps, tacit, acquiescence of diplomatic staff at your Embassy.”
“I have no intelligence with which to confirm or counter that view, ma’am,” the American responded. “I didn’t come here to defend or to denigrate my former colleagues at the Embassy.”
“Why did you agree to come here, Captain Brenckmann?”
“I came here because I don’t want there to be another war.”
Chapter 12
Sunday 8th December 1963
Palácio de São Bento, Lisbon, Portugal
Seventy-four year old António de Oliveira Salazar had been Prime Minister of Portugal for over thirty years. He had founded and led the Estado Novo – New State – Party which had ruled over his country since 1932. He wasn’t an easy man to know; hardly surprising given that he and his Spanish contemporary, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, were the last of the pre-war dictators. Nevertheless, Sir Richard Templar, the British Ambassador had developed a somewhat grudging respect and admiration for the Portuguese leader in his seven months in Lisbon. Salazar lived modestly, forsaking the trappings of his office. He hadn’t come to power through street-fighting, civil war, or by persecuting or demonizing minorities, or by gratuitously misrepresenting the historical narrative of his country. By and large his rule had been without the excesses of the other European dictators and even during the 1939-1945 war he’d made it known that he detested Hitler and everything he stood for. As long ago as 1940 Life magazine had called him ‘the greatest Portuguese since Prince Henry the Navigator’. A quiet, modest academic whose manners remained professorial and sometimes overly introspective for a man in his position, Oxford University had once awarded him a Doctorate in Civil Law.
In the Second World War when Portugal had walked a fine line
between the various combatants ever mindful of the priority of co-existing with a Spanish neighbour that might – at any time up until the end of 1943 – have flipped onto the Nazi side of the conflict with disastrous consequences for the Portuguese state. During Hitler’s war Lisbon had been the espionage capital of Western Europe, the playground of the British MI5, MI6 and Special Operations Executive, the German Abwehr and its SS analogue the Sicherheitsdienst, the Soviet NKVD, and the forerunner of the CIA, the American Office of Strategic Services. In the middle years of World War II Salazar had adroitly guided his small country along a perilous diplomatic high wire; tolerating German U-boats and surface raiders sheltering and replenishing in his waters, turning a blind eye to Allied machinations on Portuguese territory, ignoring the Great Game being played out in the streets of his capital city by the intelligence communities of all the warring parties, knowing that only continuing Portuguese neutrality might preserve the nation.
Now António de Oliveira Salazar was walking the tight rope again with an intellectual finesse honed in his three decades in power. Not for him the suffocating apparatus of the Police State, nor great set piece public demonstrations. He was neither demigod nor rabble-rouser, more a chess player from the template of a former age. In a funny sort of way he’d have been more at home, happier playing the game of imperial musical chairs with the movers and shakers of a Europe two World Wars removed from the apocalypse of the October War.
Sir Richard Templar had tried to explain the manner of man with whom he was dealing to his principals in Cheltenham; often he’d wondered if they really understood that Salazar was, and had always been, a man with whom they could and should be doing business. The trouble was that Salazar’s political creed, superficially at least, was as incompatible as it was distasteful to Sir Richard’s masters in England even in the radically altered perspective of the new post-cataclysm era. The people back in England saw what they always saw; exactly what they wanted to see. Black was black and white was white, there were no shades in between but that was not the World in which António de Oliveira Salazar lived. Salazar’s regime was vehemently anti-communist and anti-socialist, it loathed many of the freedom’s most Englishmen had taken as their birthrights for innumerable generations, and viewed the liberal philosophies of most pre-war Western European governments with hostility and deeply-ingrained suspicion. However, there was a dichotomy at the heart of the Portuguese ‘totalitarian’ state that took the edge off its dedicated nationalist, controlling proclivities.
Salazar frequently spoke of a doctrine of lusotropicalism; the conviction that Portuguese imperialism was in some way uniquely ‘better’ than that of other European nations. The theory held that having been conquered and civilized by successive waves of invaders – Celts, Romans, Visigoths, the Moors and by various Christian peoples in more modern times, including the British – the Portuguese were somehow innately more humane, friendlier and better qualified to rule benignly in its overseas colonies; the two largest of which were Angola and Mozambique. This belief was supported by the fact that Portugal was the oldest of the European colonial powers; several of its territories having been continuously administered by Lisbon for over four hundred years. Notwithstanding that Sir Richard Templar thought that lusotropicalism and the pluricontinentalism it inevitably implied was largely pie in the sky wishful thinking, he retained a sneaking admiration for the way in which the Salazar regime had succeeded in using such ideas to expunge the guilt and the moral burden of Empire. For the Portuguese there was no such thing as ‘the white man’s burden’ because overseas Portuguese territories were as much Portuguese as Portugal itself, and unlike the British, the Portuguese had never stopped believing that they had a civilising mission in the world.
António de Oliveira Salazar, the academic literally dragged from his professorial chair to save the nation from the travails which in the 1930s had torn next door Spain apart, was the rock upon which modern Portugal had been built. He was an intellectual who lived a blamelessly simple life spurning the privileges of his position. When, publicly, he was compelled to surround himself with the finery of Europe’s oldest, albeit somewhat impoverished, Imperial polity he did so reluctantly for he hated the limelight and mistrusted the dangerous populism which had dragged half the world into the 1945 war.
The Prime Minister of Portugal rose to his feet to come around his desk to greet the British Ambassador as he was ushered into his grand but drab office. The first sections of the Palácio de São Bento – the Portuguese Parliament - had been built by the Benedictines in 1598. Over the centuries the building had grown and matured into a classical monument to the glory of the Portuguese Imperium. The current official home of the Portuguese Prime Minister was a nineteenth century mansion in the grounds of the Palácio de São Bento. Barring a short interregnum in the early 1950s Salazar had abjured from filling the essentially ceremonial role of the President of the Republic, in much the same way he had consistently abjured from collecting titles and spurious honours in the style of the other dictators of his era. He was too focused on the here and the now, the immediate and the long-term future of his people to trouble himself with baubles. All of this was reflected in the strange, cluttered ordinariness of his office. Even after three decades as virtual dictator of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar remained at heart the professorial university academic he’d been in a former life.
The Prime Minister waved his visitor to take a seat in one of the two dusty chairs in front of his desk.
“I asked you to come to the Palácio de São Bento so that I might personally assure you that Portugal will render all possible assistance to your stricken ships.” He spoke in the clipped, relaxed yet very precise Portuguese that the British Ambassador had, at first, found a little hard to decipher. Even now he had to listen very closely and worried that he might miss some vital nuance. However, this morning there were no subtle nuances to be detected for the dictator of Portugal was a great pains to make his meanings crystal clear. “Two Portuguese Naval vessels have been dispatched to assist your vessels and to ensure that there will be unambiguous communications with the port authorities in Oporto. I have appointed a junior minister, Hector Benes, to liaise directly with you and the municipality of Oporto on my behalf. He has full powers to do whatever needs to be done.”
Sir Richard Templar waited for the caveat, to discover what quid pro quo was to be demanded. Salazar was risking war with his neighbour, Spain; a war that Portugal could not fight alone or hope to survive, let alone win. Moreover, it was a war that in his opinion she did not need to risk, or ever wanted to fight in any conceivable circumstances.
“Thank you, sir,” the British Ambassador said, half rising to his feet and bowing his head.
António de Oliveira Salazar viewed his guest, his lined face and rheumy, wise eyes questing and betraying an underlying...anger.
“You are not alone, Sir Richard,” he said softly, “in having entertained scorpions in the nest. If the CIA,” he paused, disliking the imprecision of that catch all acronym, “if cadres within the American Central Intelligence Agency are willing to conspire with disaffected elements of your armed forces to attempt to assassinate Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and her family; who among us is safe?”
“Forgive me, sir. I have no specific intelligence regarding the involvement of outside agents in that dreadful business in Scotland.”
The Portuguese Prime Minister smiled sadly.
“Later today five members of the staff of the Embassy of the United States of America will be expelled from my country for activities incompatible with their diplomatic status, Sir Richard. Portugal is not in a position to send our trans-Atlantic friends such a powerful message as the United Kingdom, but we too, have a right to show our,” he hesitated, “offence to be treated thus by a country that claims to be a friend of Portugal.”
The British Ambassador realised that the interview was at an end.
He lingered.
“This will antagon
ise the Spanish, sir?”
The Prime Minister of Portugal spread his hands for a moment.
“I fear so,” he granted, “although I suspect that the bully Francisco Franco Bahamonde will cower in his bunker a while longer before he begins to worry about who is to blame for his latest folly. By then things will have resolved themselves. Either there will be new disasters, or the World might have begun to rediscover its senses.”
A dapper naval officer with dark, impatient eyes was awaiting Sir Richard Templar in the corridor when he left the Prime Minister’s office.
“I am Commander Hector de Oliveira Benes of the Armada Portuguesa, Ambassador.” He nodded his head respectfully. The naval officer’s English was pure Oxbridge, bell clear. “I also serve as the Prime Minister’s personal factor in matters pertaining to Navy affairs. I am at your service, sir.”
Sir Richard Templar shook the younger man’s hand.
It was all the seasoned diplomat could do to not to laugh out a loud with relief. It might be too late to save the two crippled, storm-ravaged destroyers desperately trying to reach the sanctuary of Oporto but whatever happened next his country had just found a new friend in the World. The support of former colonies half a world away was comforting, warming but immediately, of only passing utility. To have a surviving, intact European nation make an unconditional gesture that proclaimed itself an ally of the United Kingdom was pure manna from heaven. The uniform bleakness of the vista had lightened a little and every glimpse of hope was a thing to be embraced like a prodigal returning to the fold.
The diplomat took the bull by the horns.
“Are you authorised to communicate directly with your Royal Navy counterparts, Commander?” He asked casually as the two men fell into step.
“Yes, sir. The entire resources of the Portuguese armed forces stand ready to assist in this operation.”