A Very British Ending (Catesby Series)

by Edward Wilson

  JJ shook his head.

  ‘Stalingrad.’

  Somehow, thought JJ, that explanation sounded more likely than a deal with Moscow about Vietnam. But both were good. Verifiable factual details weren’t important; they were often boring and distracting. The important thing was a wider truth; that the UK was in thrall to a Communist conspiracy. Sometimes you needed to use lies to expose the truth.

  Pimlico, London: 18 November 1967

  Catesby had inherited Frances’s old television, but only used it to watch football and the news. The thing that most depressed Catesby about television news – and news in general – was the economic scaremongering. Catesby sat slumped in a chintz-covered armchair, another of Frances’s castoffs, with his 9mm Browning cradled in his lap on a greasy rag. He wasn’t feeling threatened, but needed to clean the pistol prior to his annual marksmanship qualification session at a shooting range in Aldershot. He stared blankly at the TV with his hand on the pistol butt.

  Downing Street has just announced that it is lowering the exchange rate from $2.80 to $2.40. This means that the value of the pound has been cut by just over 14%…

  The voice of the presenter was momentarily blocked out by the klaxon of an ambulance rushing down Tachbrook Street. Too late, thought Catesby, to save the pound.

  …decision followed weeks of feverish speculation about the future of sterling and frantic last-minute efforts by the Bank of England to shore up the pound from its gold and dollar reserves.

  The image on the television screen switched from the newsroom to Downing Street. Catesby thought that Wilson looked tired and fed up as he stared at the camera.

  ‘It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.’

  Catesby smiled bleakly. The most interesting things about the PM’s speech were the implied messages and the words unsaid.

  ‘The only alternative was to borrow heavily from governments abroad – but the only loans on offer were short-term ones.’

  By ‘governments abroad’, Wilson meant the Americans, who were obviously trying to punish the UK for not sending troops to Vietnam.

  ‘…the war in the Middle East, the closure of the Suez Canal owing to hostilities and the disruption to exports caused by the dock strikes had all contributed to the pressure on the pound.’

  None of what Catesby was hearing came as a complete surprise. As a Whitehall insider he had his ear to the ground, but there was one more rumour – a very important one – that still hadn’t revealed itself in the Prime Minister’s speech. Wilson paused and stared at the camera as if he was finished, but he began again. Catesby waited and it finally came.

  ‘We’re making further sharp cuts in defence spending…’

  Catesby had heard that the cuts were massive, £100 million – and would also affect SIS and the Security Service. The MoD were already furious – and the Americans wouldn’t like it either.

  Catesby turned the television off and continued to disassemble his Browning automatic for cleaning. He remembered to make sure the safety was locked back to make sure the slide didn’t fly across the room when he withdrew the retaining pin. If he damaged the pistol, it didn’t look like SIS would be able to afford to buy him another one. On the other hand, they could melt it down to be part of a ploughshare.

  When Catesby had finished taking the pistol apart, he stared at the wall. He suddenly felt a Kafkaesque chill of alienation run down his spine. He wanted out, but realised that he was part of a thin protecting veil. He needed to protect the Prime Minister and those like him who were prey for the dark elements of the Secret State.

  CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia: 21 November 1967

  Angleton was pleased at the news from London: the socialist British economy was foundering as chickens flocked home to roost. Although Johnson was too timid to use outright financial blackmail to force Britain to send troops to Vietnam, he certainly wasn’t going out of his way to save the pound. But how long would it be, thought Angleton, before Moscow intervened to save their agents in Downing Street from the economic catastrophe for which Britain was steaming at full-speed? If the Soviet Union was propping up Castro, they would soon be propping up Wilson as well. And what favours would Moscow demand in return? Naval bases? Military and nuclear technology? The secrets that others in Washington were stupid enough to share with London? The UK was rapidly approaching a crisis scenario. But Angleton found it impossible to make his voice heard. The power players in Washington wore blinkers devised by America’s own liberal left-wing press and intelligentsia. And, of course, his own agency – the CIA itself – had been penetrated by agents from Moscow. Angleton whispered the motto that had so endeared him to Allen Dulles: ‘If you don’t always – always – fear the worst, you shouldn’t be a counter-intelligence officer.’

  Sliding into FURIOSO mode, the Director of Counter-intelligence lit another cigarette and opened his well-thumbed copy of the collected poems of Yeats.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…

  He stared again at the words as the swirling haze of smoke turned Yeats’s poem into an Expressionist painting shouting ‘fuck you’ at the world.

  A letter fell out of the book. The book was bulging with yellowing letters that Angleton had exchanged with poets and writers in the 1930s. There were several about and from Yeats. He opened one and read the handwriting, which in itself was aesthetic: It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is satisfied with thought … The chance of being shot is raising everybody’s spirits enormously. He then turned back to the poems.

  Once when midnight smote the air

  Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

  On every crowded street to stare

  Upon great Juan riding by…

  James Angleton felt a sense of existential despair as he stared out the window towards Washington. He couldn’t actually see the capital because the view was blocked by the trees and gently rolling countryside of northern Virginia. And that was just as well, for Washington was a shabby town. The rulers of Washington were not noblemen with the fine faces of Bronzino’s Medici princes, but anonymous millionaires, fat-assed, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and sleazy lobbyists offering cheaply scented call girls. Worse than Yeats’s eunuchs, for they would be oblivious to the ‘great Juan’.

  He carefully opened another letter. The years had turned the paper into diaphanous parchment. He felt warmed by the dead embrace of a fellow soul. Even violence and tyranny are not necessarily evil because the people, knowing not evil and good, would become perfectly acquiescent to tyranny. Everything must come from the top. Nothing can come from the masses.

  Angleton folded up the letters and put the book away. He opened up his daily copy of the Director’s Log. Once again, he wondered if there were reports that had been deleted, censored, from the copy circulated to him. There certainly were things that Angleton, as Director of Counter-intelligence, found necessary to keep away from the eyes of the DCI. They went by the daily diplomatic bag rather than cable. It was too easy to monitor cable. But how could he be certain that someone wasn’t opening and reading his handwritten communications via the supposedly secure diplomatic bag? In one of his first letters he told his man in London – who was only third in the London station hierarchy – that he would include a hair in each correspondence to verify that there had been no tampering and the London man would do the same. Later, when Angleton met his London man face to face, he told him they would not place hairs in their letters. Ergo, a hair would be evidence of tampering. But could he really trust the young Dep Asst OSO? Counter-intelligence was ‘a wilderness of mirrors’. And how dare anyone insinuate that he was becoming paranoid?

  ‘I am not paranoid,’ whispered James Angleton as he opened t
he Director’s Log. ‘Otherwise, I would be suspicious of this log which I know – at least for now – is unaltered.’

  OSO London to DCI. SM/OATSHEAF has handled the devaluation badly, but the fall of his government doesn’t seem imminent. His majority in Parliament is too large. Unrest, however, among the British Security Services, military, financial establishment and press continue to bubble. Will closely monitor and assist when necessary.

  SM/REVEAL, our most valuable friend in the press, appears to have been targeted by the KGB. The murder of a number of London prostitutes remains unsolved. An anonymous informer contacted the police reporting a suspicious automobile that was allegedly parked near where the body of one of the prostitutes was found. The automobile it turned out belonged to SM/REVEAL. When the police investigated, they found bloodstains in the trunk of the auto. SM/REVEAL told the police that the stains were the blood of a couple of pheasants that he had recently shot. The police forensic lab later backed up SM/REVEAL’s story. There is obviously a conspiracy to smear and discredit SM/REVEAL. And whoever reported him must know he hunts pheasants. We’re checking to see if anyone from the Soviet embassy has also been hunting in the same place.

  SM/HOUND reports that England winning the World Soccer Championship was entirely because of the help of the KGB. One of the referees was a KGB agent who gave England a goal that never came near to crossing the goal line. It turned out to be the winning goal. Moscow helped England win as a thank you to OATSHEAF for not sending troops to Vietnam and also to prop up OATSHEAF’s regime.

  Agency News: London, 17 March 1968

  Anti-Vietnam Protest Turns Violent

  The trouble began after a rally in Trafalgar Square where an estimated 20,000 demonstrated against the American war in Vietnam. At first, the anti-war rally appeared to be good-humoured. The violence broke out when the protesters marched to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  The American embassy was cordoned off by hundreds of police. The police stood shoulder to shoulder to block access to the part of the square closest to the embassy. The protesters refused to back off and then pushed against the police cordon. The violence began when mounted police charged the demonstrators.

  The demonstrators managed to break through the police cordon and poured onto the lawn of the embassy breaking down a fence and pulling up a hedge. A vicious and prolonged battle ensued during which stones, sticks, fireworks and smoke bombs were thrown.

  Earlier, a counter-demonstration numbering a few hundred Conservatives and Monday Club supporters had taunted the first protesters to arrive in Grosvenor Square with shouts of ‘Bomb, bomb the Vietcong’ and ‘Treason’. They were later separated by police.

  The battle at the embassy continued for more than an hour before the demonstrators were finally forced to disperse by the police. Scattered groups of protesters and anarchists then headed for the Dorchester and Hilton hotels, but failed to get in.

  A senior police officer accused the organisers of having exercised ‘no control over their supporters’ and of ‘failing to abide by the agreed arrangements.’ ‘This,’ maintained the senior police officer, ‘is why the demonstration degenerated into a disorderly rabble. As soon as they entered Grosvenor Square, it was obvious that a hard core of troublemakers were determined to provoke a violent response.’

  More than 300 people were arrested and over 100 were injured. Fifty people required hospital treatment including 23 police officers.

  Pimlico, London: 17 March 1968

  Catesby hadn’t been at the demo, but his stepchildren had and they came to his flat to tell him all about it. The stepson was full of it. He had obviously enjoyed himself and was still cruising on an adrenalin high. Catesby recognised the symptoms. He had felt the same way the first time he had been in battle. It was exhilarating – particularly if it was your first time and neither you nor your friends got badly hurt.

  ‘The police attacked first,’ said the stepson, ‘and then all hell broke loose.’

  ‘Were you,’ said Catesby, ‘part of the group that broke away and attacked the US embassy?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t tell Mum that. Basically, it got really exciting and I wanted to see what was happening.’

  ‘I was there too,’ said the stepdaughter, ‘but I wasn’t there for the excitement. I was there to make a point – to let the fucking American Ambassador know what we thought of his fucking war.’

  ‘Right on,’ said Catesby without a hint of irony.

  ‘I wish that you had come with us,’ said the stepson.

  ‘I think in my position,’ said Catesby, ‘it’s best that I operate from the shadows.’

  ‘I bet,’ said the stepdaughter, ‘it’s because you don’t want to lose your OBE.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have worn it.’

  ‘You ought to have worn it, Will. That would have been really cool.’

  ‘I keep it in a safe place, because someday I want you to inherit it as an heirloom.’ Catesby kept it in the safe at his house in Suffolk – along with important papers. There had been a spate of burglaries in London involving people in his position.

  ‘Do you really think you should have accepted the OBE?’ said the stepdaughter.

  ‘It would have blown my cover story if I hadn’t.’

  ‘Wow, who do you really work for?’ said the stepson.

  ‘I was joking,’ said Catesby.

  ‘Back to the demo,’ said the stepdaughter, ‘there were some strange people there who were not only very violent, but didn’t seem to belong.’

  ‘In what way didn’t belong?’ said Catesby.

  ‘They didn’t look or sound like students or protesters.’

  ‘And one of them,’ said her brother, ‘had 2 Para tattooed on his forearm.’

  Catesby smiled bleakly and nodded.

  ‘What is it, Will?’ said the stepdaughter.

  ‘Thank you for being so observant – and, one more thing, I admire you for your idealism.’

  ‘We got it from you.’

  Catesby choked back the tears.

  Belgrave Square, London: 17 March 1968

  The group, except for the general who was on duty, had gathered at the peer’s lavish townhouse. They were in the smallest sitting room of the four-storey house where the peer kept his only television. They had just finished watching the BBC News on the anti-Vietnam demo.

  ‘Did you hear that idiot socialist MP blaming the violence on the police?’ said the banker. ‘He was what? “Particularly outraged by the violent use of police horses which charged into the crowd”? That’s exactly what mounted police are supposed to do.’

  The retired colonel put his hands around the cut crystal glass reflecting the amber glow of twenty-five-year-old single malt whisky. The colonel winked at JJ. ‘I don’t believe Mungo has been fully briefed on what happened today.’

  JJ looked away and said, ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You’re looking more than usually enigmatic, JJ, behind those National Health specs of yours.’

  ‘You shouldn’t make fun of my spectacles.’ JJ cracked a rare smile. ‘I hate Socialism, but I’m not going to pass up a bargain.’

  The colonel smiled. JJ was oblivious to fashion or looking smart.

  ‘Both of you,’ said the peer, ‘seem to want to change the subject. Can you please tell Mungo – and myself – about what we have not been “fully briefed”?’

  ‘One of the oldest tricks in the book,’ said the colonel. ‘The agent provocateur – in this case several. Did you not notice the athleticism and professionalism of a small number of the protesters attacking the police?’

  The banker nodded and the peer droned a ‘Yesss’.

  ‘The lads loved it,’ continued the colonel. ‘All of them are exparas who like a good punch-up. Of course, we provided them with “get-out-of-jail-free” cards to give to the police when they got arrested.’

  ‘Was anyone else involved,’ said the peer, ‘anyone more official?’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t want
to be known at the time. Not leaving fingerprints is paramount. Which is why those of us who are not players on the government payroll are valuable assets.’

  ‘You’ve become a big fan of privatisation,’ said the banker.

  ‘The best people,’ said the colonel, ‘like adventure and money – and when you put the two together you get the best results. The regiment’s motto ought to be “Who pays wins”.’

  ‘The idea,’ said JJ, ‘is to raise the level of tension.’

  ‘We need to create a sense of dire national crisis,’ said the colonel. ‘Did you see the blood? We issued the lads with plastic bags full of artificial blood. It makes for good press photos.’

  ‘The US press,’ said JJ, ‘has handled the story much better. One TV station called it “a bloody riot such as Britain has never seen before.” The BBC coverage is appalling Lefty rubbish.’

  ‘The next phase is to ratchet things up to the breaking point.’ The colonel gave a sly smile. ‘By the way, I’ve managed to acquire some very nice plastic explosives.’

  London: May, 1968

  The usual suspects – the barking madmen and the gin-soaked generals – were not part of the intended coup. At least, not at first. The press tycoon, who tried to organise it, was not a right-winger. In fact, his newspaper had supported Labour in the past two elections. But once the attack dogs had picked up the scent, they were let slip and the cry was havoc. The problem, as Napoleon had once observed, is that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

  The meeting took place in an elegant townhouse a five-minute walk from the peer’s London home in Belgrave Square. It wasn’t the home of the press baron, who had convened the meeting, but of a member of the Royal Family. The press baron’s plan was that the Royal would replace Wilson and lead an ‘emergency government’.

  Originally, it was planned as a meeting of three: the press baron, the editor of his largest paper and the member of the Royal Family. The Royal, however, had summoned the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor to attend as well. He regarded the advisor, Sir Solly Zuckerman, as ‘safe and sensible’.