by James Philip
Margaret Thatcher allowed herself a grim smile.
She had had her doubts about bringing the older woman into the Cabinet when she moved her old friend and mentor Airey Neave into the hot seat at the new Ministry of National Security. Although Alison Munro had not been an unknown quantity - she had had many dealings with her in her year at Supply in Edward Heath’s immediate post-October War Interim Emergency Administration of the United Kingdom - she had worried that she was inviting a bull into a china shop. Airey’s reassurances to the contrary had swayed her in the end and Alison Munro had stepped into the breech as if to the manner born, even if she and her Prime Minister were sometimes temperamentally and intellectually at cross-purposes.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, the one surviving grandee from Harold Macmillan’s pre-October War government and very much the elder statesman and the keeper of the flame of what was left of the old Conservative and Unionist Party, chuckled almost but not quite under his breath.
“I think that Margaret was the first among us to embrace the fact that the time for half-measures was over, Alison,” he observed dryly. “The reality of the matter is, as you know, that the United Kingdom is bankrupt and has been since the war. Our overseas treasure, meagre as it was in October 1962, is exhausted and practically everything in the country is now mortgaged to Wall Street. The pound sterling is worthless outside the Commonwealth, much of our gold and precious metal reserves are buried in vaults beneath the rubble of London, we have no banking system and our civil and military economy is sustained solely by the fiction that ‘notes’ issued by the UAUK are actually worth something. In effect we have replaced a money economy with a rights economy in which work carried out, or services supplied to the state and humanitarian rights, such as the right of our citizens to be fed, have been converted into tokens exchangeable for vital commodities; food, fuel, medicines if they exist and so forth. Self-evidently, this is not any kind of long-term basis for running a viable economy or a sustainable financial system. As Margaret has remarked many times, this ‘Soviet’, or ‘command’ economy is intrinsically ‘un-British’ and sooner or later will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.”
The Prime Minister nodded, her face wearing a slightly vexed look.
“Whatever happens in the Middle East or in the South Atlantic,” she declared, rather more trenchantly than she intended because the proximity of Alison Munro always made her oddly competitive. “It is imperative that we put the country on a sounder economic footing. The United States may not want to get involved in somebody else’s ‘foreign wars’ but that does not mean it wants to stop trading with and attempting to harvest the wealth of other nations. We may not have much economic influence in the World anymore,” she held up a hand knowing that Peter Thorneycroft was going to remind her of the links with the Commonwealth and other long-standing mutual obligations around the globe, “in comparison with our former glory,” she qualified, “but we have immense power, of the moral, political and in the final analysis military, with which to frustrate American economic ambitions. Moreover, if the worst happens, we reserve to ourselves the right to come to a separate accommodation with the new Soviet regime.”
Tom Harding-Grayson, who had been silent for some minutes, was suddenly in the spotlight. He returned his colleagues’ looks with sphinx like inscrutability. Back in the late 1950s his brilliant career in the Foreign and Colonial Office had faltered and then imploded because he had advocated – in a passable impersonation of King Canute attempting to turn back the incoming tide – a more pragmatic reconfiguration of the transatlantic relationship; essentially, one more closely aligned to a more Euro-centric accommodation with willing like-minded Commonwealth allies. His career in ruins, drinking heavily, his marriage on the rocks he had become a pariah in Whitehall for proposing a ‘special relationship’ with the United States that was not predicated by the transient political moods of American Presidents and British Prime Ministers, but upon the firmer ground of what was actually in each country’s long-term national interests. In other words, a relationship that recognised the military realities of the World but which also recognised that US global hegemony ought to come at a price; that British acquiescence should never be a given and that no British government would never again blindly follow where the American behemoth went. Before the October War such talk had been apostasy, heresy in the corridors of power in London and he had suffered the Whitehall equivalent of the fate of all heretics down the ages.
Even now after all that had happened in the last nineteen months the Foreign Secretary was a little bit surprised that finally, in the wake of the cataclysm, a British government of which he was a senior member was actually about to take the first step towards establishing a ‘new special relationship’ with the World’s last remaining superpower.
Between twelve and fifteen million Britons had died in America’s war of survival with the Soviet Union in late October 1962; now Margaret Thatcher was travelling to meet Jack Kennedy at Hyannis Port to demand the first down payment on the debt the United States owed its oldest ally.
Chapter 48
Monday 1st June 1964
Hall of the People, Chelyabinsk, Russia
This sort of thing might have happened once or twice in the old days just after the revolution, or been mimicked in the preliminaries which often preceded Stalin’s ‘show trials’ but Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian was under no illusion that not just his career, but his life rested in the hands of the lynch mob assembled in the inappropriately names ‘Hall of the People’.
The ‘Hall’ was a former Red Army canteen, somewhat smartened up, serendipitously located conveniently adjacent to a deep fallout shelter on a heavily camouflaged military base abutting the eastern suburbs of Chelyabinsk. It was one of three regular venues for the monthly – or in times of emergency such as this, weekly conclaves - of the Politburo. Until the last couple of months the collective leadership had employed the full Politburo as nothing more than a rubber stamp on the decisions it had already taken and put into effect. The ongoing, worsening delays and travails of Operation Nakazyvat had changed all that!
One of the most ominous changes was that Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin, the ambitious Stalinist First Director of the KGB had used the gathering crisis to strengthen his own personal power base in the Party at home in exactly the same way that his embittered acolyte, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was insinuating himself into every aspect of the military campaign in Iran and Iraq.
“Operation Nakazyvat.” Shelepin reminded Babadzhanian, “envisaged that Basra would be in our hands three days ago and that at this time our troops would be moving forward to seize the Faw Peninsula and into advanced positions from which to assault Abadan Island.”
No man rose to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union who did not understand that to betray weakness in situations such as these was fatal. Moreover, Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s predominant emotion at this moment when his career and his life was balanced in the hands of the cold-eyed men sitting behind a half-circle of polished desks, was not one of fear but of anger. Anger that they understood nothing, anger that they had weakened his forces by deploying KGB battalions behind his fighting troops allegedly to encourage the others to fight harder, and angry because one of, if not his biggest headache, was the collapse of his Army Group’s logistical organisation in Russia. Reinforcements, vital parts, and ammunition were not reaching ‘the front’. All along the elongated, horribly stretched lines of communication back through northern Iraq, Iran and Soviet Azerbaijan the cronies of many of the men sitting in judgement of him this very day, were siphoning off his supplies to sell on the black market in the Motherland to feather their own nests!
Babadzhanian, who had been compelled to stand before the Politburo like a naughty schoolboy turned to face Shelepin.
“I have no need of non-combatant KGB supernumeraries in my Army, Comrade First Director,” he sa
id coolly. “Had the men currently inhibiting my operations in Iraq been deployed in Iran and at home safeguarding my supply lines and cracking down on theft and corruption at home, my tanks would have been in Basra by now.”
Babadzhanian had always regarded the original timescale for Operation Nakazyvat as being ludicrously optimistic but this was not the time to concede ground to his enemies.
“In the matter of the KGB ‘police’ units operating within Army Group South they are consuming huge amounts of fuel, food and other war supplies needed by the men who are actually doing the fighting. This further drain on the pitiful level of supplies reaching my spearheads securing the north and currently ‘pacifying’ Baghdad means that I must shortly order a halt to all offensive operations in central Iraq.”
Shelepin looked as if the top of his head was about to explode with rage.
“My troops are also taking part in those pacification operations, Comrade Marshal.”
Babadzhanian snorted derisively.
“I don’t need fucking policemen who’ve been sitting on their fat arses ever since they put on their uniforms intimidating old ladies and so-called ‘enemies of the state’, I need fucking soldiers, Comrade First Director! The first time your boys get into a serious fight they shit their pants and run away. It’s like Budapest all over again; the Red Army always has to clean up your shit!”
The veteran of Kursk and a score of other battles turned his attention back to the three men seated to his front, curious to discover if they still ruled the new Union of Soviet Social Republics. If they did he might get out of Chelyabinsk alive, if not, well so be it...
The silence that followed was of the icy, frightened kind.
While each member of the Politburo wordlessly considered his next move there were heavy sighs, shaken heads and hooded glances across the crescent of tables as the strength of untested alliances was gauged, and the risks of breaking cover to throw the first stone were meticulously calculated by men who had spent their whole adult lives plotting and counter-plotting to attain their current positions of power.
Eventually it was the oldest among them; the last ‘Old Bolshevik’ who broke the silence.
Sixty-eight year old Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, whom the collective leadership had elected Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet – a largely honorific sinecure in the post-Cuban Missiles War governmental arrangements – was a grey, ashen shadow of his former self. He had almost died from radiation sickness sixteen months ago and had been an infrequent attendee at Politburo sessions. Infirm and without any kind of power base within the Party, Brezhnev and Kosygin had kept him close; he was a vote in their pocket and a tangible, albeit fading, link to a more glorious past.
“I am not long for this world,” the old man said, his rheumy eyes fixed on the face of the soldier at the nexus of the firestorm. Like Babadzhanian, Mikoyan was an Armenian but nothing he planned to say had anything to do with any kindred spirit he might have felt for a fellow countryman; that was not the kind of man he was, he had never been in any way sentimental in his devotion to the Motherland and the Party and he was not about to change the habit of a lifetime at this late juncture.
Only Mikoyan had served in and survived the governments of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and now that of the ‘Troika’, or as it was euphemistically know ‘the collective leadership’ of Brezhnev, Kosygin and Chuikov. No man had survived more purges and internecine Party wars than Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, and before he died – which would be soon now – he intended to make his voice heard.
Born to a father who was a carpenter and a mother who was a rug weaver, Mikoyan was the elder brother of Artem Ivanovich Mikoyan, who with Mikhail Iosifovich Gurevich had founded – and still at the age of fifty-eight remained with Gurevich the guiding light of - of the MiG aircraft design bureau. The brothers had been educated in Tiflis in Georgia, and at the Georgian Seminary in Echmiadzin in their native Armenia. While Artem was too young to play a leading part in the Revolution, Anastas, aged twenty had formed a workers’ soviet in Echmaidzin, enlisted in the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – the forerunner of the Bolshevik Party – and become a leading figure in the revolutionary movement in the Caucasus. In Baku he had edited subversive newspapers, robbed a bank in Tiflis and brawled in the street like a ‘good’ revolutionary ought to!
In retrospect those were days of innocence.
The Revolution of 1917 was only the first of many terrible struggles. Bringing down the Tsar had been the easy part; the ensuing civil war against the anti-Bolshevik, ‘White’ Russians was a desperate and dirty business. It was in those days when he was a commissar in the newly formed Red Army that he met and saved the life of Grigol – generally known as ‘Sergo’ – Ordzhonikidze, a close associate of another Georgian Bolshevik, a certain Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, now better know to history at Joseph Stalin. Together, the three men became known as the dreaded ‘Caucasian Clique’.
At the time of the Cuban Missiles War, Khrushchev had asked Mikoyan to go to Havana to talk sense into Fidel Castro. Ever the dutiful, utterly reliable staunch right hand of the Party’s leader he had been preparing to leave on his mission – notwithstanding that his wife was dying at the time – when the ‘crisis’ had exploded into the cataclysm of the war. He had been at his dacha north of Moscow when the first bomb went off; and stumbled into his shelter just before the next two strikes arrived. He had been sick, dying basically, ever since.
“I am not long for this world,” Anastas Mikoyan repeated wearily, “so whatever I say probably has little or no weight in this forum. No matter. I will say what I must say and then I will have done my duty. In times such as this that is all a man, a true Party man faithful to the Revolution can do.”
The Old Bolshevik paused to regain his breath.
Unconsciously he brushed his formerly boot black, now silver moustache before clasping his emaciated hands on the table before him.
“After we threw back the Fascists before Moscow in December 1941 it took us over three years to get to Berlin. If any one man in this Politburo actually honestly believed that the great work upon which the Red Army embarked a little less than two months ago could sweep all before it in sixty days then they were deluding themselves, Comrades.”
Mikoyan coughed hurtfully, fought for breath.
“How would we have fared at Stalingrad if after a month or two we had thrown up our hands in horror and said ‘the battle is lost because it is not yet won’? What would have been our fate if we had surrendered Leningrad to the Germans after only two months of siege?” The questions were asked with slow, excoriating sarcasm.
Presently, he nodded to Babadzhanian.
“Comrade Marshall Hamazasp Khachaturi is correct to demand that the KGB start shooting the counter-revolutionary traitors at home and behind the lines responsible for the failure to adequately support our armies in the field.” He forced a cruel smile. “On that subject it seems to me that we could do worse than to shoot a few Red Air Force generals at the same time; if only to ‘encourage the others’ to get on with the job of supporting the courageous men on the ground in Iraq.” He glanced at Shelepin as his exhaustion threatened to slur his words. “It doesn’t matter which generals, the example is the thing, Comrade Alexander Nikolayevich.”
Nobody spoke.
The last Old Bolshevik had not yet finished.
“There were those around this table who said we should hold our hand. Wait another year until we are stronger. That was a counsel of despair. Our enemies surround us and they will always be stronger...”
This time the coughing was agonising and the rag he held to his mouth came away bloody.
“Stronger, as they were in the recent war over Cuba. We must strike now and again and again while we still have the strength or we are finished...”
Chapter 49
Monday 1st June 1964
Kennedy Family Compound, Hyannis Port, Barnstable, Massachusetts
His and Marija’s brief idyll at Camp David had been cut short two days ago with an urgent summons back to Philadelphia, where within an hour of reaching the British Embassy he and several members of the Ambassador’s staff had boarded a US Air Force transport jet bound for Otis Air National Guard Base, located some fifteen miles from the Kennedy Family Compound at Hyannis Port. On arrival in Massachusetts, the Ambassador, Lord Franks had asked Peter to travel with him to ‘have foresight of the summit venue’ while the rest of the Embassy party went ahead to check the security of the small hotel in New Bedford where the Prime Ministerial mission would be staying.
The Ambassador wanted to talk to Peter about his ‘conversations with the President’ at Camp David.
Both Peter and Marija had been bewildered by the personal hospitality of the President and the First Lady. They had dined with the First family twice, albeit with other dignitaries present; Marija had been introduced to the Kennedy children at a ‘coffee morning’ with the First Lady while Peter had been called to a surprise late night chat beside a crackling log fire in the Presidential chalet on the couple’s second night at Camp David.