A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  Margaret Thatcher had always known that placing her trust in Jack Kennedy was a huge risk, literally a leap in the dark. Back in January the gamble had been worth the candle, if for no better reason than that anything was better than the outbreak of a shooting war with the United States. Nevertheless, having hoped for the best and prepared for the worst, it did not mean that she was anything but appalled by the downward trend of recent Anglo-American relations. She did not so much feel as if she had been let down; as if she had been betrayed.

  Margaret Thatcher understood that Jack Kennedy was confronting apparently insuperable problems at home. In retrospect the failed assassination attempt on the life of Dr Martin Luther King in February – an event which had gone practically unremarked outside the United States - had lit the fuse on renewed widespread and bloody civil unrest across the South. At the same time the President’s reversal of the ‘peace dividend’ defence cuts having reinvigorated the American military, had enraged and alienated powerful vested interest lobbies which had been counting on spending the proceeds of that ‘dividend’ to feather their own nests. And all the while a great American city, Chicago, was cut in half by the battle lines of what was with the coming of spring likely to be a war zone. All in all, Jack Kennedy’s decision to run again for the Presidency had only served to unite his enemies. Worse, at the same time the Southern Civil Rights Movement was planning to ‘March on Philadelphia’ the first court hearings of the cases against the leading figures of December’s failed coup d’état – the so-called Battle of Washington – were shortly scheduled to commence. It was hardly surprising that the Kennedy Administration was so fixated with crises at home that it was turning a Nelsonian blind eye to the terrifying developments in the Middle East.

  “I will be speaking to Secretary of State Fulbright this evening,” Tom Harding-Grayson announced. “Always assuming he actually takes my call this time!”

  Margaret Thatcher blanched at this.

  One school of thought maintained that J. William Fulbright was the one remaining voice of reason in the Philadelphia White House. The Secretary of State’s avowedly internationalist stance was, the Administration’s apologists claimed, the last bulwark against a return to isolationism.

  The Prime Minister had grown impatient with such sophistry. Things had reached the point where the country needed to know where it stood. Was the United States at its back or not.

  “No, Tom,” she said, biting back her annoyance. “No, no, no.”

  All eyes fell on her in the sudden silence.

  “Please inform the Philadelphia White House that I wish to speak to the President this evening. Please make sure that they understand that if the President is unable to take my call there will be consequences!”

  Chapter 9

  Monday 13th April 1964

  Christ Church College, Oxford, England

  “Ah, we meet again, Rachel,” Tom Harding-Grayson observed ruefully as he stepped forward to take his visitor’s hand. “As lovely as ever, I see?”

  The woman greeted this remark with weary forbearance. Her hair, straw blond was cut short almost like a man’s and the grey-blue dress she wore was an abysmally tailored sack that was far too thin for the chill of the late April day in England. Worse, she had foregone the use of makeup for several days and she felt horribly, inconsolably guilty and ached with loss. Not one scintilla of her guilt attached to the butchering of the Red Army parachutists – somewhere between twenty and thirty, she had not been counting - she had gunned down in her rampage through the Citadel at Mdina on the afternoon of the Battle of Malta, no, it was more subtle and insidious than that. She kept asking herself if she could have done anything to warn anybody what was about to happen? If she had kept closer to Arkady Rykov might he have let something slip? What had she missed?

  “You look older, Tom,” she said, looking around the Foreign Secretary’s cluttered office. The state of the office reflected the mind of the man; endlessly curious, acquisitive, restless. His was a mind that worked in unique ways and saw things few of the people around him would ever see.

  “I feel older,” he confessed. “I should probably ask you what you’ve been up to the last ten years,” he went on dryly, “but I won’t.”

  The woman frowned.

  “Just drink poison and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson chuckled.

  “The Shah of Iran came to a sticky end,” he remarked for no particular reason. Except that they both understood it was anything but a casual observation.

  Rachel Angelika Piotrowska’s eyes narrowed a fraction.

  Otherwise, her composure was perfect.

  “He was a pig,” she replied blandly, “like most men.” She shrugged. “The bastards didn’t have to kill those girls. That was cold.”

  “Very Russian, you mean?”

  “No, Russians are human beings too. What we and the Americans did on the night of the war; that was pretty cold, too.”

  “More the Yanks than us, actually,” the man objected dryly.

  Rachel fixed him with a quizzical expression.

  “The first we knew about it was when the Soviets started lobbing medium range ICMs at us from the Baltic,” he explained. His tone was that of a man explaining away the foibles of a dissolute younger brother, as if to say these things happen.

  “You’re joking?”

  “No. We lost over forty V-Bombers on the ground. One day our people will find out what really happened on that night,” he shrugged. “Hopefully, future historians will endorse the RAF’s decision to fly east not west that night.”

  The woman stared at him.

  “We didn’t start it? The war, I mean?”

  The Home Secretary shook his head.

  “No. So far as I can tell JFK wasn’t taking Harold MacMillan’s calls the day of the war. For what it is worth, our hands are clean. We only attacked the Soviets after we came under attack ourselves.”

  The man waved for Rachel to take a seat in a well worn upholstered chair near the guttering fire. She sat down and ruminated on the coals in the hearth, her thoughts roiling with the implications of what she had just been told. She waited for her host to make the next move.

  “Presumably,” Tom Harding-Grayson probed, “your spell in Tehran with the Shah would have been your last assignment before Dick White sent you off the grid looking for our friend Arkady Pavlovich Rykov?”

  Rachel nodded, her lips sealed and her eyes drawn down again into the glowing remnants of the fire.

  “That was before the war, of course,” the man mused out aloud.

  “You didn’t order me to come here to discuss Arkady.”

  “I didn’t order you to do anything. That’s Dick White’s job.”

  The woman snorted disdainfully.

  “I ought to bullet in that man’s brain.”

  “I don’t think you’d be very popular with Airey Neave if you did a thing like that!”

  Rachel fixed the Foreign Secretary with a hard, dangerous look.

  “Airey, too,” she added with a sigh. “I suppose they told you I didn’t want to come back to England.”

  “No?” Tom Harding-Grayson’s expression had become unyielding. He had heard the tales about what his former protégé had done in Mdina at the height of the Battle of Malta; and queried the wisdom of bringing her back into the fold. But then the twin imperatives of bringing the man who claimed to be Nicolae Ceaușescu, the First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of Romania to Oxford, and the necessity of neatly tidying up the loose ends contingent upon the execution of the traitor Samuel Calleja had concluded the debate. “Why ever not?”

  Rachel ignored the question.

  “You should talk to Ceaușescu,” she said abruptly.

  “This fellow really is Nicolae Ceaușescu?”

  The woman nodded.

  “How do you know? How could you know that?”

  “I met him several times be
fore the war. That would have been after you got yourself sent into internal exile, Tom,” she remarked, nowhere near as cattily as she intended.

  Rachel did not have her heart in clawing out his eyes, figuratively or for real today. All her anger was gone; burned out by the knowledge of the grief that she was partly responsible for bringing to the lives of her good friends Marija Christopher and Rosa Calleja. Even though she had only known the younger women a relatively short time, they were her friends, Marija particularly had been there for her when she was at her lowest ebb and even now she did not blame her for any of that had happened. If Marija and Rosa were sisters, she had become their honorary step sister.

  “Bucharest was a dreary, horrible place but perfect for talking to the Russians,” she went on. “Switzerland, Berlin or Vienna were always far too public, and there were always too many people looking over your shoulder. The first time I met Ceaușescu he thought I was a KGB whore. He almost wet himself with relief when he discovered I was actually only interested in ‘opening up channels of communication’ with the West. A direct line to the ‘Free World’ was always going to be his trump card when he finally wormed his way to the top. He’d keep Romania under his thumb and still enjoy the benefits of having friends in the West. The thing you must never forget with little shits like Nicolae is that it is all about them. I doubt if he’s given his wife and kids – the ones he left behind in Bucharest for the KGB to pick up – a second thought since he escaped from Romania.”

  “And what about the other times you met him?”

  “Courier in plain sight,” she murmured, somewhat elliptically.

  Her meaning was not lost on the man.

  “This man is the real thing then?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the woman with him?”

  Rachel smiled, she had to.

  “Eleni. The little monster was the reason her nephew and her uncle were murdered, killed,” again she sighed, ‘but in some twisted way I think she genuinely love’s the little shit. Still, I’m hardly one to talk, I suppose. Not after I let Arkady Pavlovich get so deep inside my head that I started to forget who I was...”

  When the Foreign Secretary and Rachel Piotrowska entered the small ground floor annexe where Nicolae Ceaușescu and his nurse Eleni had been parked awaiting Tom Harding-Grayson’s convenience the middle-aged Greek woman immediately began to complain about the treatment she and her ‘friend’ had received since they had got off the plane earlier that day.

  Rachel held up her hands.

  “I’m sorry. People are going hungry in this country,” she explained in the woman’s idiosyncratic, very Cypriot tongue. Then she looked at the one-legged prematurely aged man viewing her with cool, calculating eyes from where he sat in the creaky old wheelchair the people at RNH Bighi on Malta had found for him. Rachel switched to Russian and spoke slowly so that Eleni could understand a word, here and there, as she spoke. “You should not complain about your treatment, Comrade,” she cautioned sarcastically. “The people in this country have every right to have you shot for your part in the Krasnaya Zarya abomination.”

  “Red Dawn,” the man hissed, his English was grotesquely, clumsily accented with his mother Romanian vowels, “was,” he hesitated, struggled for the right word, “inflict, yes, inflicted on my people!”

  And there it was in a nutshell.

  Nothing that had ever gone wrong in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s life was his fault; always he had been betrayed, let down, disappointed by others and that was never, ever going to change because that was the sort of man he was.

  “If you say that often enough they will put you up against a wall and shoot you,” Rachel told him in Russian.

  Tom Harding-Grayson had pulled up a chair for Rachel, which she accepted with strained good grace. The Foreign Secretary sat directly in front of the man in the wheelchair and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “Ask him if he knows who I am and if he doesn’t know, tell him please.”

  “You,” Nicolae Ceaușescu stuttered, pre-empting Rachel, “Foreign Minister...”

  “Very good,” Tom Harding-Grayson nodded. “Tell him you will ask the questions, Rachel. You will ask the questions in Russian and he will reply to you in the same language so that you can translate whatever he says to you word for word.”

  He waited while the woman conveyed this to their ‘guest’.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu shrugged and nodded.

  Eleni began to protest but he stilled her babbling by a single touch of her arm. She frowned and shut her mouth, glaring at Rachel.

  “Tell me,” the Foreign Secretary invited, “about your life and career, Nicolae Ceaușescu?”

  Rachel translated obediently.

  “What do you want to know?” Was the answer in Moskva Russian that she repeated verbatim in English; and so it began. It put her in mind of the first time Tom Harding-Grayson had ‘debriefed her’ all those years ago. So long ago that she had still been a scrawny student nurse at St Bart’s Hospital. In those days ‘Sir Dick’ White had been the poster boy of MI5, just plain Richard Goldsmith White, and Tom Harding-Grayson had still been a full time spook masquerading as Principal Officer at the old Foreign and Colonial Office.

  “Your life story, Nicolae Ceaușescu? Only your life story? We can start with your date and place of birth, the names of both of your parents, their dates of birth and places of birth, and then you can tell me about your siblings?”

  Now that he understood the game the one-legged man in the wheelchair relaxed a little; desperate to convey to his interrogators that he was unafraid, in control and that he sympathised with their dilemma.

  He started to talk and went on talking until Tom Harding-Grayson held up a hand. Notwithstanding Rachel’s personal verification of the man’s identity – however unlikely and implausible it seemed that he was actually who he said he was and had survived the adventures that he claimed to have survived – he had had to be certain. Before the October War MI6 would have had a weighty file on Ceaușescu; that had gone up in flames in the war but the Foreign Secretary knew enough about the real Nicolae Ceaușescu to be able to make an informed judgement.

  If this man was an imposter he was a superbly good imposter.

  Not many people in the West knew that Nicolae Ceaușescu had owed his rise to the deputy premiership of the People’s Republic of Romania almost entirely to a chance encounter with the man who became his mentor and protector, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Ceaușescu had been a member of the Romanian Communist Party since the age of fifteen in 1933, the year of his first arrest by the Romanian authorities. He had been in and out of prison throughout his teens. During the Second World War the pro-Fascist regime of Ion Antonescu had cracked down hard on all known and suspected communist sympathisers and activists; and Ceaușescu had seen the insides of several internment camps; Jilava in 1940, Caransebeș two years later, and in 1943 first Văcărești, and then Târgu Jiu in the Carpathian Mountains.

  It was at Târgu Jiu that he first shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the man who within a year would become the leader of the ‘prison faction’ of the Romanian Communist Party, and the Party’s General Secretary.

  At Târgu Jiu the prisoners ran their own cell blocks; the result of an unofficial pact that guaranteed that nobody would attempt to escape. Gheorghiu-Dej used this ‘freedom’ to assert his control over the other inmates, running so-called ‘self-criticism sessions’ in which Party members were forced to confess to their failure to interpret the gospel of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic as understood by Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej. Nicolae Ceaușescu's role in the ‘self-criticism sessions’ was as his master’s bully boy, enthusiastically beating up ‘comrades’ who refused to engage with or were insufficiently enthusiastic in their ‘self-criticism’.

  After the war Ceaușescu’s rise had been meteoric. He had become a major general in the reformed Romanian Army; Gheorghe Dej’s deputy mister of defence and his mentor’s most faithful ally on the Central Commit
tee of the Party by 1952. By 1954 he was a full member of the Romanian Politburo, and long before the October War Gheorghiu-Dej’s ‘enforcer’ had become the absolute master of the Securitate, the feared and loathed Departamentul Securității Statului – the Department of State Security – and consequently, the natural leader in waiting.

  It had been a heady, breakneck rise for the third child of an impoverished drunken, wife-beating despotic father in Scornicesti in the obscure rural south of the country born in 1918, who had run away from home at the age of eleven to live with his elder sister Niculina in Bucharest...

  Eventually Tom Harding-Grayson had held up a hand.

  “Well, Nicolae Ceaușescu,” he conceded, a half-smile on his lips but cold purpose in his eyes, “now that we have established that you may be who you claim to be, let us talk about how exactly you came to know the particulars of Operation Nakazyvat.”

  Chapter 10

  Tuesday 14th April 1964

  Oxford, England

  The United States Ambassador to the Court of Woodstock had been unusually quiet, almost non-communicative most of that afternoon. He remained so now. This troubled Joanne Brenckmann as the couple walked unhurriedly down Beef Lane towards St Aldate’s Church.

  The security people had wanted to get out the armoured limousines for the half-mile or so journey from the embassy, located almost in the shadow of Oxford Castle, to the Foreign Secretary and his wife’s rooms at Christ Church College. Walter, her husband, had irritably and with rare discourtesy towards subordinates, brusquely vetoed this suggestion.

  ‘I didn’t come over here to hide in the goddammed Embassy!’

  He had called the head of protocol back a few minutes later and apologised for his ‘rudeness and inappropriate language’. The poor man had been so surprised he had not known if he was coming or going! Walter’s predecessor had treated the Embassy staff like hired help; whereas her husband’s quietly spoken, ‘gentlemanly’ demeanour and her own, somewhat ‘down home’ attitudes to housekeeping and the domestic management of the Embassy –a compound of several old buildings linked with passageways and what might once have been ‘priest holes’ – had promoted a relaxed, collegiate atmosphere more in keeping with their surroundings in historic Oxford.