by Mark Colvin
Plying a military attaché with booze to loosen his tongue about the way the Vietnamese mishandled their Russian missiles: that’s Intelligence Collection, Level 1.
My father also had a long-held interest, and some expertise, in East Asian ceramics, and he soon found the shop of Monsieur Dong, whose sign claimed ‘De Grande Valeur’ (‘Of Great Value’), but who was inevitably known as ‘Le Grand Voleur’ (‘The Great Thief’). He described it as one of the social rendezvous of the capital. And, he believed, it was a relatively safe place to make contacts:
On arrival at Hanoi, I had assumed that if Le Grand Voleur were not working directly for the State, he must be under close official supervision. I discovered, or think that I discovered, that this was a false impression of an omnipresent state. I never saw anyone remotely like an official, or even informant, in his shop.
He would, however, have assumed the presence of bugging devices throughout. He always did in countries in the communist sphere.
There were also occasional visiting reporters, some of whom appeared to my father to be excessively gullible in the face of North Vietnamese propaganda, but one of whom (unnamed) gave him a panoramic account of his escorted travels, including the state of bombed bridges, roads and villages, and many other significant details, which were of undoubted intelligence use but would be unlikely to get into print in the reporter’s articles. What was in it for the journalist? Presumably the analysis of an astute observer and resident of the Viet Cong capital who liked to talk, and who understood the ground rules of talking to the press.
Even within the restricted zone within which my father was allowed to walk, there was the evidence he could gather with his eyes and ears. After the massive raid referred to at the beginning of the chapter, he walked around Hanoi to inspect the damage. The power plant was, to Dad’s eye, a wreck, with collapsed chimneys, and the whole structure listing drunkenly to one side. The city’s electricity, shut down by the attack, remained out that night, and the next morning my father began composing a telegram to the effect that Hanoi’s power system would probably be crippled for a long, long time:
I concluded that there was no possibility known to me of restoring any electric services. Hanoi, my last paragraph would have read, must now be finished as a functioning industrial and economic city. Geoffrey [Geoffrey Livesey, his second-in-charge] had started to work on the accounts … I handed him my finished telegram for encypherment and dispatch … At that moment the lights went on, the fans started to turn, and the rattle of the box air conditioner began. Across the street, the repair factory was once more brightly lit.
Halfway around the world, I had had to learn to push Dad’s welfare to the back of my mind for the duration of his posting. I had The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ rigged up on endless repeat on my record player for what seems in retrospect like weeks. On television, Patrick McGoohan wrapped up Danger Man and began The Prisoner, a brilliant, mysterious psychological thriller set in a fantasy world but shot in Clough Williams-Ellis’ glorious folly, the village of Portmeirion: ‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign.’ My mother, my sister and I all watched that together.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only … But Also had just left our screens, but At Last the 1948 Show gave us Marty Feldman, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. These last two, like a lot of adults, became fans of a surreal comedy for children and teenagers, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which my sister and I were both glued to. It starred Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones. The two outfits combined, of course, would eventually produce Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Do Not Adjust Your Set also introduced me to The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, later just The Bonzos, fronted by one of the great English eccentrics of the century, Viv Stanshall. If nothing else, you might know him as the spoken-voice artist on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, but he was also one of the funniest people in England. The Bonzos’ album Gorilla was on high rotation on my turntable that year, along with The Who Sell Out, Spencer Davis, and The Small Faces’ second album. I was listening to more soul music too. Like half the teenagers of my era, I had a thing for Dusty Springfield, and her material helped lead me to The Supremes, Jackie Wilson’s ‘Your Love (Is Lifting Me Higher)’, The Four Tops’ ‘Standing in the Shadow of Love’, and many more which helped form the soundtrack to my 1967.
On other tracks of my life, this was the year of my first kiss, at a dance at my aunt and uncle’s house. If I attempted a fashion style (and I couldn’t afford much of one), it was probably closer to mod than anything else. And I had my father’s Lord’s membership card while he was away, so I went to watch Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths bowl for the West Indies against England, a display of awe-inspiring speed and intimidation I would not witness again until I saw Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson bowl at the SCG.
The Beatles, whose records had been burned on American bonfires the year before, ended the year with Sergeant Pepper’s, redefining what an album could be. The Rolling Stones responded with Their Satanic Majesties Request. Distant voices were telling of flower people in San Francisco, and a hippie revolution, but London still seemed, to a London teenager, like the centre of the universe. Pink Floyd put out ‘See Emily Play’, and their spring 1967 poster for Games for May—a concert I couldn’t persuade either my housemaster or my mother to let me go to—was the first time I remember seeing a piece of psychedelia in printed form. No-one I knew had taken acid, but the word ‘trippy’ had entered the lexicon: everyone was now talking the language of mind-altering substances.
The beat went on, but thousands of miles away, where GIs were smoking heroin through the barrels of their rifles, so did the war.
* * *
There are repeated denials in my father’s heavily vetted memoir that he had a direct line to the US State Department, then headed by Dean Rusk, but the reality, I understand, is that the indirect line, whether through the British embassy in Saigon or the British Government in London, was swift and reliable. Indeed, I’ve been told by people who should know that Dad’s key despatches were read not only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but in the Oval Office of the White House. Coming as they did from an ally inside the enemy capital, his descriptions of massive bombing raids like the one described earlier, and his frank reporting of North Vietnamese resilience in the face of Operation Rolling Thunder—the US campaign of sustained aerial bombardment—may well have undermined the morale of President Johnson, much as determined media reporting of US losses and blunders was doing among the wider public.
Late in 1967, the consulate-general met a serious setback, revealed for the first time in Paddy Hayes’ Daphne Park biography. Based on an interview with another now-dead SIS colleague, Brian Stewart, Hayes writes:
He [John Colvin] submitted a report in code to London on the aftermath of a particularly severe bombing raid by the USAF. In a follow-up report which he sent en clair [not encrypted] he referred to the contents of the previous coded message in such a way that it was clear he had been secretly reporting on the effect of the US bombing. The DRVN authorities reacted predictably by banning all future outbound coded messages. It was a bad mistake by Colvin and the result was a serious drawback; secure coded two-way communications are the lifeblood of any intelligence outpost, and diplomatic ones for that matter.
As my father’s successor in the post, Stewart had every reason to be annoyed at the restriction on his ability to communicate, but it’s possible both that he had his chronology wrong and that the reason for the action may not have been quite so clear-cut.
I have read a series of once-secret telegrams about this incident, released through the Public Records Office. A message from an official in London, Richard Fyjis-Walker, does suggest that Vietnamese sensitivities ‘may have been heightened by Hanoi’s telegrams Nos 504 and 505. The North Vietnamese could have inferred from the remark about “alleged” U.S. bombing appearing in the telegram that the confidential reporting in
the following [my emphasis] cypher telegram was unfavourable to themselves.’ My father replies: ‘I do not think they made this deduction. There have been similar instances without incident.’
There is, over several weeks, a lengthy correspondence about the cutting off of the cypher ‘privilege’, in which it is clear that the North Vietnamese at no time specified any reason for their actions other than the long-held official line that the British consulate-general held no official diplomatic status, was therefore a ‘commercial’ enterprise, and hence had no reason for enciphered telegram facilities. Vietnamese officials claimed the decision had been taken autonomously by the PTT—the postal and telegraph office—but this was clearly a fiction in a centrally planned communist state. Asked why the decision was being taken now, after thirteen years in which in practice the PTT had allowed ciphered telegrams, they were unresponsive.
My father told London in a series of messages that he believed that the reason for the cut-off was in fact heightened North Vietnamese Government paranoia about espionage. As evidence, he included anecdotes about new difficulties the French, Canadian and Indian missions had all been having at the time. Contrary to Stewart’s impression, in a telegram to Hanoi sent the day after Fyjis-Walker’s, London says, ‘We agree that the most likely reason for North Vietnamese action is “espionage psychosis”.’ This is, in its own way, pretty rich, since my father was indeed a senior intelligence officer using all means possible to commit espionage, so in point of plain fact the ‘paranoia’ had some justification. However, the whole set-up—a British diplomatic mission with no actual diplomatic recognition, a game of potential tit-for-tat being played out involving two North Vietnamese ‘journalists’ in London and a four-person North Vietnamese ‘trade delegation’ in Hong Kong—was such that a degree of comic irony was probably to be expected on both sides.
What the secret correspondence does make very clear is that, even without enciphered telegram facilities, the Hanoi mission remained extremely important to London (and presumably Washington). London weighs up in the telegrams the possibility of threatening the North Vietnamese with withdrawal of their London and Hong Kong personnel, or even to close the consulate, but comes down heavily against making any such overt threat. Regardless, there was still a slower backstop alternative in communicating with London: the Canadian mission had a weekly diplomatic bag in which reports could be sent in physical form to Saigon. But this in itself was vulnerable: my father, asked to make more use of this, points out in one telegram that
The carriage by Canadians of our bags is itself (repeat itself) secret, or at least not declared to North Vietnamese, and we act accordingly. There is an elaborate cover procedure to avoid any indication of ‘carrying bags to the Canadians’. I am trying to avoid among other things exposure of the system.
Earlier in the year, he had described one small part of this cover procedure, which had just been closed off by the North Vietnamese: a door from the kitchens of the Indian mission into the Canadian compound. However, via enciphered messages in the weekly Canadian diplomatic bags, and with occasional use of radio facilities provided by friendly embassies, one way or another, the consulate was able to continue to report to London—and through London, often to Washington. But with what consequences?
We know from an opinion piece in The New York Times in early 1988, by President Johnson’s chief of staff James R Jones, that by September 1967, ‘Johnson had begun to doubt our ability to prosecute the war to any clear-cut victory’. That was six months before LBJ announced that he would not run for another term as president, but Jones strongly suggests the decision was as good as made then. Although my father believed when he was in Hanoi—and would continue to believe—that Johnson was wrong, that the US could have won the war, it’s hard not to conclude that his own reports on ‘facts on the ground’, on days like the one on which the power plant attack took place, had their effect at the very highest levels.
Saigon would not fall until 1975, but by the time my father’s posting ended, the bombing of the North was already de-escalating, and in March 1968, President Johnson ceased all bombing of North Vietnam north of the 20th parallel. The Vietnam War had, for the Americans, become purely defensive, a question only of protecting South Vietnam. The tide had turned, and the next seven years (even though President Richard Nixon later resumed the bombing of Hanoi) would form a long, humiliating, slow-motion defeat.
Chapter 14
Standing Alone
THE CLOSEST THING I ever had to a Damascene conversion was, paradoxically, when I ceased to be a Christian. I was not on the road to Damascus, or a road to anywhere really: I was walking across Little Dean’s Yard at Westminster, on an ordinary day, when a kind of revelation struck.
Summer Fields, in addition to its other educational rote-learning and force-feeding, had provided a constant daily indoctrination into High Anglicanism. This was not the woolly faith sent up in Alan Bennett’s Beyond the Fringe parody sermon, not the institution referred to in the old joke ‘I don’t have a religion: I’m a member of the Church of England.’ Oxford High Anglicanism was very close to Roman Catholicism. We attended chapel twice a day, there were sung Eucharists, including ‘bells and smells’—gorgeously robed clerics with censers of smoking incense—and boys were encouraged to go to confession and be ‘confirmed’ as young as possible. Roped into being an altar boy partly by the promise of a decent post-service breakfast in the chaplain’s house on Sunday mornings, I was also persuaded to study for confirmation. It was a training which placed a huge and oppressive emphasis on Sin, with a capital S.
An eleven-year-old boarding school boy at that time could be sexually innocent in a way that’s almost inconceivable now. There was no sex education of any kind until you got the ‘talk’ or ‘pi-jaw’ from the headmaster at the end of your last term, aged thirteen. I had heard the ‘f’ and ‘c’ words from local kids on holidays in the country, but apart from a few playground rhymes about ‘stiff cocks’ and the like, I had no real idea about what boys and girls might do together. My mother remembers me asking ‘What’s a homosexual?’ when I was eleven, but it turned out it was only because I’d read the word in a story about a political scandal in a copy of Private Eye at my father’s flat. Half of what I had to memorise for the catechism, and indeed, the Ten Commandments, seemed meaningless. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ was easy enough to understand, but what was all that stuff about coveting thy neighbour’s wife or his ass? (I was far too young, and too English, to make the well-worn joke about coveting thy neighbour’s wife’s ass.)
I can’t remember exactly what I ‘confessed’ to the chaplain before I was confirmed, but my worst sins, of deed or thought, would probably have been along the lines of ‘I looked over at my neighbour’s paper during a maths exam’, or ‘I got in a fight’. The result was that by the time I reached Westminster I was still very definitely a ‘confirmed Christian’ in both senses of the word.
It was in 1967, with Dad in Hanoi, that I had my moment in the quad. I’d just read Voltaire’s Candide, the picaresque black comedy of a young optimist. He begins the book as a follower of a philosopher called Dr Pangloss, who believes that ‘everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. Candide’s faith in this proposition is tested by every kind of extreme misery the world can bring, short of his own death, until eventually he concludes that the best an individual can do in a world where no God ever intervenes to spare humanity from itself, or Nature, is to ‘tend our own garden’.
I’d also been reading Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, I think on the recommendation of a newish young history master called Richard Woollett. It’s probably the first book in Western culture that acknowledges the artist—Michelangelo being the prime example—as an individual genius rather than a hired craftsman, and as such makes him (for Vasari it was definitely him) a hero.
And I was working my way through EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art, while haunting the National Gallery, and starting to underst
and one of the key points about the Renaissance: the emergence of the individual from the medieval thrall of the Holy See. Gradually, first the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie started to change the nature of art’s focus. Christianity was no longer the artist’s only subject: Greek and Roman gods entered the pantheon. Where portraiture had previously had to be disguised as images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, now, princes, dukes and other nobles had their pictures painted, first as figures in Bible scenes, but eventually alone in their secular finery. I had seen reproductions of Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, in which, with staggering insolence towards the Church, he painted himself fairly unmistakably as a Christ-figure. And I had returned again and again to Rembrandt’s self-portraits, a man in the vigour of his successful prime, seeing himself with unyielding clarity grow older, poorer and closer to death.
All this somehow flowed into what happened that day. I simply remember it as a mental flash, in which I thought a series of simultaneous thoughts which all somehow added up to this: ‘If there is a God, he, she or it is not taking the slightest interest in my life or anybody else’s. I am a human being, standing on my own feet, and I can and must stand alone.’ In short, in that single moment, I became a humanist and an agnostic.
Many people throughout history have lost their faith in God, but most probably gradually, through a slow accretion of doubt. I suspect I’m one of the few to whom it has come as a bolt from the blue, on a sunny day, without a single individual trigger, and in the very shadow of one of the most famous churches in Europe.
I stopped abruptly even being interested in theology. Since that day, I have taken little interest in the arguments for or against God: I regard them as an interruption to and distraction from the business of leading a fully human life. Proselytising atheists hold as little interest for me as those who try earnestly to persuade me of the virtues of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam or Hinduism. Having felt the need for faith at one point in my life, I sympathise with other people’s attachment to it: individuals should do what they can to get themselves through this vale of tears. En masse, though, I wish they’d stop hanging, lashing, torturing and invading people to enforce their beliefs on others. Understanding the English Reformation, the Puritan ascendancy under Cromwell, the Thirty Years War and the Counter-Reformation not only reinforced this belief, but still serves as a permanent reminder to me that unspeakable brutality has not always been the trademark only of fundamentalist Islam.