‘Did Altmann ever mention those he thinks might be on his trail?’
‘Well, for a start, the Nazi hunters we just mentioned.’
‘Anyone in British or French intelligence?’
The agent nodded. ‘One Britisher in particular, an SIS officer named William Catesby. Klaus hates the bastard.’
‘Why?’
‘He says Catesby killed a good friend of his. I’ve checked the records and found that the victim was one of our PAPERCLIPs.’
Angleton remained in the listening mode. He didn’t wish to share what he already knew.
‘I’ve heard about Catesby.’ The Brazil agent finished his crab cakes and topped up his bourbon. ‘The ODESSA gang hate him too.’
Jim Angleton maintained his sphinx-like face. The CIA were supposed to have nothing to do with ODESSA, but it was a rule often broken – particularly in South America. The Organization Der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen had been secretly formed at a meeting in August, 1944 when it became obvious that Germany was going to lose the war. The important thing was to stop Germany’s assets from falling into enemy hands. ODESSA became a vast money-laundering scheme, as well as an international network geared to help Nazis escape and disperse around the world.
Angleton looked at his man from Brazil. ‘How do you know ODESSA hate Catesby?’
‘It’s complicated.’ The agent wiped his lips. ‘The problem with being counter-intell in Rio is that all the nutcases get shunted to you. This particular crazy was a White Russian with links to ODESSA who came to me with a totally bizarre story. One of his ODESSA pals was one of the Germans who got stung by the crooked art dealer – and so, by the way, did the White Russian. So they had this in common and were talking about ways of getting revenge. After too much vodka, the White Russian confided that he had a friend in the British intelligence service, who would be willing to carry out a hit on the art historian. When the White Russian said his name was Catesby, the ODESSA guy burst out laughing and said he’d better act quick because ODESSA were going to kill Catesby first.’
Angleton stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I don’t understand. Why did the White Russian come to the embassy to tell you this?’
‘He wants to save Catesby’s life. He likes the guy. Apparently, he had already gone to the British embassy – and the one in Asunción too – but no one would talk to him. And you could see why – he was wearing traditional Mongolian dress and not looking especially sane. So he thought we would be the next best bet.’
‘He likes Catesby?’ said the other agent. ‘Is he that crazy or is he a Commie?’
‘He’s just plain stir crazy. He thinks Catesby is a descendant of Guy Fawkes, or someone like him, and that Catesby is part of a conspiracy to make England an autocratic Roman Catholic monarchy.’
‘Sounds better than the England we’ve got now.’
‘A lot of people,’ said the Brazil agent, ‘would pass this guy off as a cuckoo who had just escaped from the insane asylum, but I could see more to him – and I could also smell money, lots of it.’
‘Which explains the ODESSA link.’
‘Exactly. In any case, I wanted to know more about him. We all know a lot of guys, especially SF types, who model themselves on Attila the Hun. Well, this guy wants to be Genghis Khan. And, when you hear him argue the case for a new Mongolian empire taking over China and Siberia, he doesn’t sound completely crazy. But he certainly is rabidly anti-Communist and we must never ignore such allies no matter how bizarre they sound. We need all the help we can get.’
Angleton gave a slight nod. Otherwise, he seemed lost in thought behind his veil of smoke.
‘And when I got him talking about China and Russia he seemed pretty goddamn well informed. He thinks Mao started the Cultural Revolution because he’s running scared of the Mongols, the Manchurians and the Tibetans. In fact, he asked me if I could arrange a meeting between him and Nixon.’
‘Why does he want to meet Nixon?’ said Angleton.
‘Our Genghis Khan wannabe wants to persuade Nixon to visit Red China. He thinks such a visit would be a signal to the anti-Communist forces secretly at work in China and would crack the system. He thinks isolating China only gives strength to the Red Guards.’
The other agent laughed. ‘The only way Dick Nixon would go to Red China would be in a B-52 with nuclear bombs.’
Angleton got up. Lunch was over. He turned to the agent from Brazil. ‘If the President won’t meet our White Russian admirer of Genghis Khan, I will. Arrange his transport to Washington and treat him like a VIP.’
James Jesus Angleton stayed late after he got back to his office at the Langley HQ. He was again wreathed in smoke and there was a glass of Jack Daniels close at hand. The White Russian wasn’t mad – and Eliot, Pound and Yeats wouldn’t have thought him mad either. Communism was a poisonous obscenity that needed to be ruthlessly crushed, but Western democracy was an insipid alternative – a plethora of committees full of fat bureaucrats and money-grubbing brokers. No wonder Pound had admired Mussolini and that Tom had a nervous breakdown. We need strong leaders with culture, refinement and vision – Renaissance princes.
Angleton loved his FURIOSO code name. He considered himself a modern reincarnation of a Renaissance prince, a Pandolfo Malatesta tasked with defeating the Turks at any price. But as a spymaster, Angleton most admired Machiavelli and his contempt for ‘la verità effettuale della cosa’ – ‘the actual truth of things’. The actual truth was a weak contender against skilful psy-op and calculated disinformation – far more lethal drugs than an assassin’s poison.
A vision was forming in the darkened office – and the vague outlines were becoming sharply delineated. Angleton was certain that the White Russian was a key money launderer for ODESSA. The solution to the British problem was ODESSA’s money – great mounds of it. There were budget limitations as to how much money the CIA could pump into its ops in the UK – and the bookkeeper bloodhounds always wanted some form of accountability. But with ODESSA there would be neither – and, although it could never be acknowledged, ODESSA certainly owed the CIA a favour or two.
There were problems, however, and Catesby was one of them. He needed to be neutralised either by death or blackmail. There were meetings to be arranged and letters to be written.
Century House, Lambeth, London: December, 1971
Henry Bone had amassed an impressive collection of tapes beamed from the device hidden in the billiard room of the Mayfair gentlemen’s club. One of Bone’s most prized tapes confirmed that a pipeline that carried water from the Elan Valley reservoirs in Wales to Birmingham had, in fact, been damaged by an explosive charge set by what was now called ‘the action committee’. It was an agent provocateur op aimed at arousing public anger against left-wing revolutionary extremists. In the end, the explosion did little damage and the sparse press coverage it did receive suggested extremist Welsh nationalists as the perpetrators. Nonetheless, the tape was a jewel that proved the group were engaged in criminal activities.
The latest tapes revealed more of what Bone had long known. JJ, his former colleague, was now a dangerous paranoid reactionary who wanted to intern 6,000 subversives – including fifty Members of Parliament, several hundred journalists and academics and religious leaders too – on a ‘lesser Gaelic archipelago in the far North’. JJ was also a racist and a bigot. Once the Lefties were out of the way, he wanted to repatriate the black and Asian populations. He described it as ‘a question of national survival’. Henry Bone assumed that JJ’s last remark was aimed at Prime Minister Edward Heath: ‘The queer will be dethroned.’
Bone turned off the tape deck and stared into the blank opaque space of his drawn curtains. Could it happen in Britain?
Agency News: 9 January 1972
Threat of Lights Going Out as Miners Strike
Coal miners ceased work at midnight in their first national strike for fifty years. All 289 pits across the country have been closed by the strike.
Three months of talk
s with the National Coal Board broke down as the miners rejected a pay offer of 7.9 per cent and the promise of a backdated deal for an increase in productivity.
Britain’s 280,000 mineworkers are determined to break the government’s eight per cent pay ceiling. The miners want an increase of up to £9 a week on an average take home wage of £25.
The miners’ overtime ban, in effect since 1 November, has already cost the industry £20m in lost production.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has announced that it will be holding meetings at the weekend to discuss support for the strike among transport workers.
The NCB has predicted that coal stocks will quickly run down. Three-quarters of the electricity used in the United Kingdom comes from coal-burning power stations.
The miners’ strike comes at a time when power stations are facing long periods of peak demand during the cold weather.
Islington, London: 15 January 1972
It was a dinner party where the room was full of elephants. The host was a member of the Communist Party, whereas Catesby and Frances were a part of the ‘State Repressive Apparatus’. There was also a bit of awkwardness because Frances’s section was actively spying on the host. But it was very friendly and all the elephants warmly acknowledged one other. Inevitably, the miners’ strike was part of the conversation just as the serving of good claret was part of the dinner.
‘It is ludicrous,’ said the host dishing up casserole, ‘don’t you think so?’
‘Is what ludicrous?’ said Catesby.
‘That Frances’s colleagues think the Communist Party has anything to do with these strikes?’
‘You ought,’ said Frances, ‘to come in to give them a talk face to face.’
‘I would if they invited me – or they could simply read my articles in Marxism Today.’
‘We do subscribe to the journal,’ said Frances. Part of Five’s job was keeping an eye on ‘radical’ groups by reading their publications. ‘But I’m not sure how carefully my colleagues read it – if they read it at all.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ said their host, ‘that many of them have read Gramsci?’
Catesby laughed. ‘MI5 do not live in a world of intellectual enquiry and books.’
‘It’s a pity they don’t. If they did, they would have a better understanding of the world they are spying on.’
‘The problem is that SIS snaps up all the brains,’ said Frances.
Catesby laughed again. Then said, ‘Let’s get back to the miners’ strike. Do you support it?’
‘No. The strikers are pursuing their own narrow economic interests.’
Catesby smiled. Britain’s leading Marxist had just condemned the miners’ strike.
‘Can you explain why?’ said Frances.
‘Capitalism has mutated. Automation and technical advances have drastically reduced the size of the industrial proletariat. What remains of the traditional working class are divided into sections based on particular trade skills or industry – mining, car manufacture, etc. Because so few of the proletariat remain, Marx’s idea of a proletarian revolution is now just as obsolete as handlooms.’
‘I’m not sure I agree,’ said Catesby.
‘Your politics, William, belong to an idealistic and romanticised past.’
Catesby was amused for two reasons. One, Britain’s leading Marxist intellectual had, effectively, just criticised him for being too far to the left. Two, how totally absurd that the Security Service regarded this man as a dangerous subversive.
There was, however, a more serious issue that chilled Catesby’s blood. The real threat to British democracy did not come from Communist subversives – or trade unions or kids demonstrating against the Vietnam War. It came from the Secret State itself.
Agency News: 30 January 1972
Army Kills 13 in Northern Ireland Civil Rights Protest
Troops from the Parachute Regiment opened fire on a crowd of protestors in the Bogside district of Londonderry and killed thirteen civilians.
Seventeen additional people were wounded by gunfire and another was knocked down by a speeding car.
An Army spokesman said two soldiers had been injured and sixty people arrested. Major General Robert Ford, Commander Land Forces Northern Ireland, insisted his troops had been fired on first. ‘There is absolutely no doubt at all that the Parachute battalion did not open up until they had been fired at,’ he said. The Bogsiders, however, maintain that the troops opened fire on unarmed civilians.
The trouble began as the civil rights demonstration approached an Army barbed wire barricade. The mostly peaceful crowd of between 7,000 and 10,000 was marching in protest at the policy of internment without trial. Some of the younger demonstrators began taunting the soldiers with chants of ‘IRA, IRA’. Bottles, broken paving stones, and heavy pieces of iron pipe were thrown at the troops manning the barrier.
Although Stewards appealed for calm, more missiles were thrown. Squads from the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment left the barricades and chased the demonstrators.
The Army maintains it opened fire only after being shot at by two snipers in flats overlooking the street. It claims that acid bombs were also thrown.
The gun battle lasted about twenty-five minutes.
Pimlico, London: 30 January 1972
Catesby turned off the radio and continued cooking his Sunday supper in silence. He had already heard about the shootings in Northern Ireland and didn’t want to hear a repeat. It was as depressing as it was horrific. He knew that the Army were under terrible pressure in Northern Ireland, but something about the Army’s account of what had happened did not ring completely true. Regardless of who was to blame, the thing that most worried Catesby was that armed soldiers had opened fire on civilians. Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom – and if it could happen there, it could happen in Britain too. But no, that’s an exaggeration. It will never happen.
Catesby served up his food and stared blankly at the chicken. Violence always killed his appetite. He couldn’t get what had happened in Londonderry – or Derry as most Catholics called it – out of his mind. In his gloomiest moments, Catesby wondered if elements of the Secret State were using Northern Ireland to hone and test their dark skills. But then he completely dismissed the thought. Northern Ireland was a terrible tragedy. Had not the Army been sent there originally to protect the Catholics? Generally speaking, Catesby had a lot of sympathy for the ordinary squaddie patrolling the streets and lanes of the province. But when things went wrong, other agendas took over.
Catesby hadn’t finished eating his supper when the telephone rang. It was the Night Duty Officer and he had been summoned to an emergency meeting at Century House. Catesby said he’d be there and put the phone down.
It was worrying. From time to time there were rumours that he might be sent to Northern Ireland. He hated the prospect. Strictly speaking, Northern Ireland wasn’t SIS turf. It was part of the United Kingdom and, as such, was the responsibility of the Security Service. But Five were, reportedly, making a hash of things. They didn’t get along with the Army or RUC Special Branch.
The meeting, it seemed to Catesby, had been called as a panic measure. The DG began by announcing that all leave had been cancelled and that it was likely that a number of officers would be transferred to Northern Ireland on temporary duty.
‘There is also,’ said the DG, ‘the likelihood of IRA retaliation on the British mainland in response to what happened today. For this reason, our colleagues in the Security Service are stretched to breaking point. It may be necessary to give them temporary support in terms of personnel and resources.
DIR P/A, who controlled Personnel and Central Registry among other departments, came in hard. ‘I would like to point out, sir, that we are also fully stretched – and there are also statutory requirements limiting our ability to operate within the UK.’
‘Those requirements would be waived in such a situation because SIS officers would be operating under the au
spices of the Security Service.’
Catesby remained silent. He knew that, despite DIR P/A’s reservations, many of his colleagues were aching to be let loose on the UK mainland. As much as they enjoyed spying on Communists in Germany, Eastern Europe and the rest of the world, they were longing to have a crack at home-grown Reds – or anyone they could smear as a Red. It was, thought Catesby, a depressing and dangerous development. The Secret State was a beast best left to prowl in foreign places.
Agency News: 9 February 1972
State of Emergency Declared
The Government has just issued the following statement. It was made in the House of Commons by the Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr Reginald Maudling).
‘Faced with the disruption of coal and electricity supplies caused by industrial action in the coal industry, the Government must take steps to discharge their responsibility to maintain essential services and to minimise the threat to the life of the community. They have therefore thought it right to advise the proclamation of an emergency under Section 1 of the Emergency Powers Act, 1920, as amended, followed by the making of regulations under Section 2.
‘The regulations will come into operation at midnight tonight. Copies will be available this afternoon. My right hon. friend will be making an announcement tomorrow about the arrangements for debating these regulations next week. They are based on those made in 1970, with some modifications, and confer on Ministers enabling powers which they will use only to the extent that necessity requires.’
Mr Maudling was questioned by Labour Shadow Home Secretary, Shirley Williams, on ‘whether the Government have any intention of using the Armed Forces in a situation which might involve them in moving through picket lines, and whether he is aware of the considerable crisis this would bring, granted the history of the coal mining industry?’
A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) Page 24