by James Philip
At Willie Whitelaw’s left elbow sat fifty-one year old Air Marshal Sir Christopher Hartley. Hartley had been promoted to his current post out of the blue when the former Chief of the Air Staff – Sir Charles Elworthy – was sent to Philadelphia in the capacity of the UAUK’s ‘Military Legate to President Kennedy’. Unlike Elworthy, Hartley was a larger than life, ‘can do’ man but no diplomat. Educated at Eton College, Balliol and King’s College Cambridge, he had taken part in zoological expeditions to Sarawak, Spitsbergen and Greenland before becoming a master at Eton in 1937, only joining the RAF Volunteer reserve in 1938; and thereafter enjoying a distinguished career flying night fighters during the Second World War. Prior to the October War he had been Air Officer Commanding 12 Group, Fighter Command. Even in middle age he remained a tall, strongly built man never happier than when he was out in the country, shooting or walking.
Hartley had hugely impressed Margaret Thatcher on their first encounter as being exactly the sort of let’s get on with it and do it sort of man she needed by her side in a crisis.
Although it was becoming clear that his predecessor, Sir Charles Elworthy’s role in America was becoming increasingly invidious, there were no plans to recall him to his former post. The UAUK’s High Commissioner to New Zealand, the Hon. Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce, who had been in post since 1959 was pencilled in to return to Oxford to assume a role on Tom Harding-Grayson’s personal staff; and the Foreign Secretary had suggested the High Commissioner’s post in Wellington might be a convivial recompense ‘for the iniquities Sir Charles has suffered at the hands of our transatlantic allies lately’. In any event bringing Elworthy – who had been born in Timaru, on New Zealand’s South Island - back to Oxford now that the Air Staff had ‘bedded in’ under new leadership was unthinkable in the current crisis.
Beside the Chief of the Air Staff the new First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Cargill Begg seemed slighter, less assured and very much on his guard. This was hardly surprising because in the space of a little over a week both the men above him in the professional pecking order of the Royal Navy had been killed – the one, Julian Christopher in action, the other, David Luce murdered by the IRA – hastening him into a position for which there had seemed to be no vacancy for some years to come.
Fifty-four year old Begg had been the gunnery officer of HMS Warspite at the Battle of Matapan in 1941, in which ‘sharp action’ the Mediterranean Fleet sank three Italian cruisers - two of them, the Fiume and the Zara in literally two minutes flat – in a particularly savage night time encounter. After the war he had commanded the 8th Destroyer Flotilla during the Korean conflict, been the Officer Commanding the Naval Contingent at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, captained the aircraft carrier HMS Triumph and prior to attaining flag rank in 1957, had been Naval Aide-de-Camp to the Queen. At the time of the October War he had been slated to take over from Julian Christopher in the Far East sometime in the second half of 1963.
Margaret Thatcher quirked what she hoped was a welcoming smile to the new First Sea Lord whom she hardly knew, and the impassive, female occupant of the seat to his right.
“Before we start I would very much like to welcome our two new ‘recruits’ to this Cabinet.”
Admiral Begg half rose to his feet and nodded, returning the Prime Minister’s smile.
The woman beside him simply inclined her face a little to the right, her lips pursed in deep thought.
“The First Sea Lord and the Minister for Supply, Transportation and Distribution are most welcome,” Margaret Thatcher went on.
She had not expected fifty-two year old Alison Munro to dance a jig, or in fact, to do anything whatsoever to go out of her way to pander to any of the wearisome prejudices, and erroneous expectations of her latest set of powerful male colleagues. Many women in her place might understandably have been intimidated in this company. Not Alison Munro.
Alison Munro nee Donald had been educated at the Wynberg Girls' High School in Cape Town – where her family had emigrated in 1925 – before returning to England to attend St Paul Girls’ School and going on to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she had graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.
Very little in Alison Munro’s her life had come easily to her. Both her parents had died in South Africa when she was a young girl. Orphaned at the age of thirteen she and her three siblings – one of whom, her brother Ian was an Obstetrician in Scotland credited with inventing the first ultrasound diagnostic machine – had, remarkably, and successfully fought not to be separated.
Margaret Thatcher had initially cavilled at her friend Airey Neave’s unqualified recommendation of Alison Munro as his replacement at ‘Supply’, compelling her to read the whole of the woman’s file.
She had married Alan Munro, an RAF officer and test pilot whom she had met at university in 1939; when her husband was killed testing a Miles Magister training aircraft she had been two months' pregnant with her son, Alan. She joined the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War, first as a typist but later as the personal assistant of the legendary Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar. She had worked such long hours with the great man that within the Ministry that at one time she was rumoured to be his mistress; precisely the sort of gossip that a woman of Alison Munro’s mettle was never going to dignify with a comment, let alone a denial.
The Prime Minister had been ‘hooked’ by the other woman’s story by then. In 1945 Alison Munro had passed the Direct Entry Principal Civil Servant interview (in a year when only fifty candidates were actually selected) and joined the Ministry of Civil Aviation, then in the process of considering what to do with the United Kingdom’s 600 plus – many of them wartime built – airfields. In the 1950s she was the leading figure in the negotiation of European and ultimately, world-wide air traffic regulation and rights. Margaret Thatcher had been tickled by one story from this period when dealing with the Air Ministry of the then newly reinstated Italian government. Asked by a former Fascist Air Force general, a man called Abbriata: ‘What rank did you hold in the war, Mrs Munro?’ She had retorted: ‘General, I held no rank but I was on the right side!’ Apparently, even the Americans had been in awe – and possibly despair – as she fiercely negotiated the rights for BOAC (British Overseas Airline Corporation), BEA (British European Airways) and other home-based airlines to fly to practically every corner of the world. By the end of her stint at the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the cigar-smoking, combative and tireless force of nature that was Alison Munro had risen to be Permanent Under-Secretary for International Relations in Whitehall.
In the years before the October War the idiots who ran the Home Civil Service – many but not all of whom were vaporised on the night of the October War – had transferred Alison Munro to the Railways Department of the Ministry of Transport, where a little over a year ago she had come to the Prime Minister’s attention as being one of, perhaps, the only person in the Ministry of Transport who actually seemed to be doing something constructive to ensure that the national railway system was restored to some kind of good order.
“Right,” Margaret Thatcher declared, “let’s get started!”
Chapter 7
Monday 13th April 1964
Rezaiyeh (Urmia), West Azerbaijan, Iran
Comrade Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik commanding the 50th Guards Special Airborne Brigade – comprised of survivors from the 50th, 51st and 53rd Guards Airborne Regiments - was, for once in his rambunctious life, in something of a quandary.
He did not know where the garrison of the picturesque, peaceful city on the Shahar Chay River, had gone.
On the face of it this was hardly any kind of problem. He had, after all, seized a key communications hub – the only passable roads west of Lake Urmia from the north and the east, to the south and the west to the Turkish border passed through it - for the loss of half-a-dozen casualties of whom only two had been killed. Moreover, the whole town now seemed completely quiescent
.
Perhaps, it was because this was essentially an Azerbaijani place and so many of his troopers understood and spoke, at least in a pigeon fashion, the local language?
Several priests, imams so far as he could tell because he was not religious – having never seen the point of all that mumbo jumbo - had come to his headquarters in the City Governor’s palace; they had been worried about their ‘holy houses’ and their ‘holy days’, as if he cared. None of that was any of his business; he came from a land where the state religion was agnosticism but nobody had said anything about enforcing ‘unbelief’ on ‘believers’. That was never a good idea, especially when a man only had eight hundred lightly equipped infantrymen – that was what airborne troops had to be because otherwise the aircraft that carried them would never get off the ground – to hold a city behind enemy lines along a single relief road from the east around the top of Lake Urmia, with a population of somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand, all of whom were potential ‘hostiles’.
Kurochnik had been warned to expect tanks and artillery; if he could not achieve a secure lodgement within the city he had been ordered to harass and tie down the garrison and block the road south to Mahabad.
Somebody had told him Rezaiyeh – his maps called it ‘Urmia’ but apparently the Shah, rest his blighted soul, or his father, no probably his father, had renamed the place back in 1924 – was the ‘Paris of Iran’. Kurochnik had never been to Paris, never would now. However, Rezaiyeh or Urmia, or whatever it was called these days, was a not unattractive place for his veterans to rest up and feel the sun on their faces. From his position on the flat roof on top of the City Governor’s residence he could see most of the built up area, and the oasis green of the scrubby, forested area between the east of the city and the hazy blue grey of the waters of Lake Urmia. Beyond the lake a volcano-like mountain reared up. North and south-west of Rezaiyeh there were ribbons alternating with broad swathes of undergrowth, and trees filled the river valleys. After the arid mountains around Ardabil and Tabriz, this place was like that mythical land the Yankees and the British talked about...
What was it called?
Kurochnik lowered his binoculars, searched his memory.
“Shangri-La,” he muttered to himself. “That’s the place! Shangri-La...”
“Sorry, sir,” one of his runners asked apologetically.
Kurochnik belched a guffaw of laughter.
“Nothing, kid,” he grunted. His boys – he still thought of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment as ‘his boys’ even though he now commanded a combined force comprising his two hundred and fifty ‘boys’ and the nearly six hundred strong remnants of the 50th and 53rd Guards Airborne – had had to leave most of their communications equipment behind in Tehran and the ‘Urmia Action’ had been mounted at such short notice there had been no chance to replace the lost kit. Life was like that sometimes; so he kept a coterie of about half-a-dozen ‘runners’, fit young guys close to him wherever he went just so he knew that whatever happened, he would still be able to talk to ‘his boys’.
The High Command was worried about the northern flank of the force it planned to start feeding into Northern Iraq from Mahabad via the border crossings at Piranshahr and opposite Sardasht to the south. Anything that stopped columns moving through Mahabad would be bad news. Here on the Urmia Plain the going was not so bad but to the west the mountains effectively barred vehicular progress other than on treacherous winding roads which, in places, were effectively single-track highways that had not been repaired since being buried for several weeks by last winter’s snows. It was all very well for planners to claim that aerial reconnaissance confirmed all the roads were still open; Kurochnik was too old a soldier to take a thing like that for granted and he hoped that the Army Group Commander’s staff had not taken anybody’s word for the it either.
If he was the Army Group Commander he would have had Spetsnaz crawling on their hands and knees all over those roads through the Zagros Mountains for the last month.
Just thinking about those narrow, switchback passes gave him a bad feeling.
Raising his glasses to his face he tried and failed to make out the squat control tower at the city’s only air strip, ‘a neglected, pot-holed disgrace’, as it had been described to him by one briefing officer. Actually, the strip was not that neglected or pot-holed, although the runway was only partly concreted. The main problem was that the ‘safe landing area’ was only about two thousand metres long and that was bad news for the bigger transports in Army Group South’s already dwindling air fleet.
The Urmia Action had exposed just how badly the aircraft lost on the Malta Operation were now beginning to be missed. Once the airfield, situated six or seven kilometres north from the centre of Rezaiyeh, roughly halfway to the tiny hamlet of Chonqeraluy-e Pol, had been secured it had taken two further trips for the planes assigned to the ‘Urmia Action’ to transport the remaining six hundred troopers from Tabriz.
Kurochnik heard the distance scream of jet engines.
The fighters, four MiG-21s, were flying at some three thousand metres above the plain. Altitude was an ambiguous word in these localities since Rezaiyeh was some one thousand three hundred metres above sea level. The fighters roared south and returned a few minutes later, this time much lower and rocketed across the city less than two hundred feet above the rooftops before pointing their noses to the heavens and with their afterburners glowing red, blasting straight up into high clouds scudding across the mountains.
There was absolutely nothing quite like a show of strength!
It was a pity the concrete part of the runway of the only airstrip this side of Tabriz was too short to allow any kind of serious jet fighter or bomber to operate out of it!
More prosaically, Kurochnik regretted that while the Red Air Force possessed enough advanced supersonic aircraft available for a ‘show of strength’, it did not seem to have any old fashioned, slow unspectacular propeller driven spotter planes to spare for doing boring, mundane little things like discovering what exactly lay beyond the trees, mountains and the valleys to the south and the west. There could have been a whole armoured division hidden out there and the first he would know about it was when the opening salvo of an artillery barrage fell on his perimeter!
What did he know?
He was a mere Colonel; correction, Major General, he had been informed of his promotion to Major General as he boarded the transport to lead the assault on the so-called Urmia Air Base.
It was nice knowing he was a General at last; not so good to still be commanding only a ‘regimental’ sized ‘brigade’.
He sighed, turned on his heel and strode towards the steps down to the street. He had requested urgent airborne resupply; loads of ammunition for his mortars, as many 7.92-mm rounds as possible, and respectfully observed to his superiors that a few of the new, very scarce, shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles would be good, too. Headquarters had told him to make do with what he had. Stores earmarked for the 51st Guards Airborne Brigade had already been reallocated to other units ‘more likely to face serious enemy resistance’.
It was as Kurochnik was walking into his first floor ‘operations room’ that he felt the shock of the distant explosion through the soles of his boots. The ground flinched another two times before the sound of the first big explosion rumbled into the room like the roiling commotion of great waves breaking on a distant shore.
In a moment he was running back to the steps to the roof.
“It’s the air base, sir!”
Even as Kurochnik was attempting to focus his binoculars on the rising mushroom clouds of the huge explosions enveloping Urmia Air Base more detonations crashed out. These blasts were much louder, closer, in the south of the city.
Kurochnik’s mind was churning with possibilities.
The bridges over the river had been rigged for demolition!
The Iranians sent their people to the west to be trained; not the conscript foot soldiers but all their o
fficer class and most of their technical specialists.
In the past the Iranian armed forces had had British and American personnel embedded in their ranks, advising and supervising, trying to stop the locals breaking all the expensive kit they had acquired from the West in recent years.
But Urmia was not any kind of Iranian Army training base...
His boys had not stumbled over any obvious booby traps. Yes, they had discovered a few mines hurriedly laid in culverts and by the roadside north of the city; but otherwise, nothing...
The building around him seemed to convulse.
Kurochnik found himself on the ground coughing up the gritty dust of pulverized mud brick and stone. Strong hands hauled him to his feet.
“I’m fine!” He snarled. “Fine!”
His mind was racing faster and faster.
This was only the beginning.
In an hour it would be dark and then things would get very, very bloody.
The reason his boys had had such an easy time at the air base, the reason that, a couple of amateur snipers excepted, the 51st Guards Airborne Brigade had been able to walk into Urmia unopposed was that the whole city was a trap.
Like an idiot he had voluntarily put his hand into a meat grinder.
“RUNNERS!” He bawled like a black bear with a Leopard biting his leg. “RUNNERS!”
Chapter 8
Monday 13th April 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England
Airey Neave leaned forward and rested his elbows on the Cabinet table as he surveyed the faces of his colleagues. The Prime Minister had invited him to explain his ‘new brief’ and to describe the ‘new department’ that he had been cobbling together over the weekend. Or rather, not so much ‘cobbling together’ as spot welding those overlapping parts of the disparate, feuding organisations he had inherited wherever they abutted uneasily against another one of his collection of unwieldy ‘services’.