In a strange way, the President thought, he may have done us a serivce. If word of this ever got out, we’d probably have an outburst of public opinion that would close down every option we have except forcing the Israelis out of the West Bank. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the table, letting his glance travel over his advisers ranged around the table, then the military men at their command consoles. “I don’t think I need remind any of you of the moral obligation this places on everyone here. There are certainly some of us who have persons very close to us who may be threatened by this. But each of us has got to remember that the lives of five million of our countrymen may depend on keeping it a secret.”
“Jack”-he glanced at his National Security Assistant-“do you have any specifics to recommend on that?”
“Well, sir, it goes without saying, only use secure telephones when talking about it.” It was well known in Washington that the Soviets intercepted microwave calls in and out of the White House-just as the United States monitored those going to the Kremlin. “And no secretaries. If anyone has to write anything, write it by hand. With no carbons.”
“How do we keep this from the press?” Bennington asked.
It was a vital question. There were two thousand journalists accredited to the White House. Forty or fifty of them were in almost constant attendance on its grounds during the day, the most able among them convinced on arising each morning that the government would lie to them at least once before sundown. Leaks were a way of life in the capital, and gossip on government secrets the main topics of conversation at its cocktail parties and dinners and the lunches at the Sans Souci and Jean Pierre’s where its luminaries picked each other’s brains as assiduously as they picked their Maryland soft-shelled crab.
“Should we tell the press secretary?” the President asked.
“I’m not sure,” Eastman replied. “If we don’t, his reaction will be more natural if he gets any queries on it. But if we do tell him, he’d damn well better be prepared to lie, stonewall and deny this damn thing right into the ground.”
“If we do tell him,” William Webster of the FBI drawled, “he can tell us right away if anyone in the media’s focusing in on it.”
“Don’t worry,” Eastman said, “if anyone in the media starts to focus in, we’ll hear about it fast enough. The most important thing is to hold this as close as possible. The Kennedy people held on to the Missile Crisis for a week because only fifteen people in the government knew about it. You’re also going to have to maintain the fagade of a normal existence. That’s the best way to keep the press off the track.”
The President indicated his agreement, then shifted his attention to the admiral commanding the center. He ordered him to begin their stock-taking with the traditional appraisal of the military situation and the options open to the U.S. armed forces.
The Admiral stepped back to the speaker’s stand. Eastman could not suppress a smile. Even at a moment like this, the Admiral moved automatically into his Pentagon “briefer’s stance,” feet a rigid six inches apart, left hand in the small of his back, his right wielding the absolute end in briefer’s sex, a collapsible aluminum pointer with a glowing light on its tip with which he once again reviewed the Soviet’s military posture. Nothing had changed. Noting that, Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, intervened.
“Mr. President. I would suggest our first action should be to alert the Soviets to what has happened. However strained our relations are, I think that in this we can count on their help in bringing Qaddafi to ground. Furthermore, they should be made aware that any military moves we make are not being directed against them.
The President agreed. “Open up the Red Line,” he commanded Eastman, “and inform the Soviets I’d like to speak with the Chairman.”
“Sir,” Bob Fundseth, the Deputy Secretary of State, said, “I think it’s also essential we coordinate with our allies any actions we take and keep them informed of this at the highest level. I’d like authorization to get off ‘Eyes Only’ messages to Mrs. Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt and, above all, President Giscard. We’ve got to assume the source of Qaddafi’s plutonium for the atomic trigger of that bomb was his French reactor. The French may be able to turn up information for us on the people Qaddafi has involved in this that will help the Bureau run them down.”
The President gave his approval, then ordered the Admiral to resume his briefing. This time a series of bright-red lights on the semidarkened screen indicated the positions of all the ships of the Sixth Fleet, most of them gathered off Crete on an anti-submarine-warfare exercise. They represented the U.S. forces closest to Libya, and, the Admiral told the assembly, they could be ordered to start southwest immediately.
Harry Fuller, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, broke into his briefing.
“Mr. President, I think there’s one point that needs to be clarified right away. There is no viable military solution to this crisis. Sure, we can destroy Libya. Instantly. But that’s not going to give us any guarantee whatsoever that his bomb-if it’s in New York — won’t explode. And that, in my judgment, precludes our taking any military action against Qaddafi for the time being.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree with that,” the President noted grimly. “What do you recommend we do, then?”
“Every move we make,” the Admiral declared in a voice that boomed through the room like a Navy klaxon sounding general quarters, “has got to be designed to remind Qaddafi of the potential consequences of his action.
He’s got to be kept aware every hour, every minute, every second of this damned crisis that we can thermonuclearize him in the blink of an eye. Let him live, eat and breathe that and see how he likes it.”
The Admiral waved a hand at the red lights flashing on the screen. “I agree we should send the Sixth Fleet hell for leather for the Libyan coast. If they’ve got any liberty parties ashore, they’ll just have to leave them on the beach. Once they get there, I’d put them right up against his coastline where his radar’s sure to pick them up. Run a high-altitude aerial screen up and down the coastline from the carriers and tell the pilots to talk in the clear so he’s constantly reminded they’re carrying enough missiles to turn that goddamn country of his into an instant ruin.” A dour smile appeared on the Admiral’s face. “The deployment of force in a situation like this is designed to alter your enemy’s perception of his actions. Maybe this will alter his.”
“Mr. President.” There it was again, that rasping drawl of Crandell’s.
“You’re not going to like what I’m going to say, but I’m going to say it anyway. Destroy Qaddafi. Right now.”
The Chief Executive gave his Energy Secretary a look of ill-concealed exasperation. It did nothing to staunch the flow of his unsolicited advice.
“The great mistake we made in Iran was not acting the very first day they took those hostages. The whole world would have understood us if we had. We waited and what happened? Everybody was holding us by the coattails. `Don’t do anything rash. Think about our oil. Think about the Russians.’ “
“Mr. Crandell, we’re not talking about fifty hostages in an embassy.” The President almost spat the words at his Energy Secretary. Despite the placid surface he turned to the public, he was, in private, a man of considerable temper. “We’re talking about five million people and New York City.”
“We’re talking about this country, Mr. President, and a man who’s declared war on us. We’ve got to show him and everybody else on this globe that there’s a limit beyond which we aren’t going to be pushed. Mark my words, if you don’t respond to this man, challenge right now, tell him he’s got five minutes to tell you where that bomb’s hidden or he and his country are dead”-Crandell was waving a pudgy finger across the table=`then before this night is over you’ll be ready to betray this nation’s friends to satisfy a blackmailer.”
“Crandell.” The President had paled under his efforts to rein in his temper. “When I want military advice from you I’ll ca
ll for it. I’m not going to put the lives of five million of our people at risk until I’ve exhausted every possible avenue of saving them and this world from an unspeakable catastrophe.”
“By talking, Mr. President, and once you’ve started talking you’ll start compromising. Everybody always does.”
The President turned angrily away from his Energy Secretary. To lose his temper, whatever the provocation, in front of his advisers at this moment would be a disaster.
Crandell looked at him, slowly shaking his head. Just like that it was a nuclear shot and want to know what we’ve face he thinks it’s raining.
At the far end of the table, Bennington had just picked up his telephone.
The CIA head listened for a moment. “Excuse me, sir, but it looks like we’ve got another problem on our hands.”
Every eye in the room turned on the New Englander. “Mossad’s just got onto the Agency. They picked up the explosion on their seismographs. They’re very suspicious that it was a nuclear shot and want to know what we’ve got on it.”
“Christ!” someone groaned from the end of the table. “If they find out what Qaddafi’s done, they’ll take him out on their own and we may lose New York.”
The President frowned. It had been almost inevitable that the Israelis would pick up the shock waves. As long as they didn’t spot the fallout, though, they’d have doubts, and none of the fallout was heading their way.
Right now what he needed was time, time to get the planning in order, time to get a grip on the problem before them.
“Stall,” be ordered Bennington. “Tell them it looks like an earthquake.
Tell them we’re checking it out and we’ll keep them informed.”
On the wall opposite the President, the bank of clocks showed it was 12:30
A.M., 7:30 in Jerusalem and Tripoli. They.had thirty-eight and a half hours left, and every minute of them had to be made to count.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “let’s try to define the areas we’ve got to address ourselves to in order of their importance. First in New York: what do we do about it?”
He twisted in his chair to face Caspar Weinberger. Civil defense fell under his sprawling Defense Department umbrella. “Do we have a plan to get these people out of New York in an emergency?”
“Mr. President, Jack Kennedy asked that question about Miami on the second day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Weinberger sighed. “It took two hours to get the answer then, and it was no. Well, I can answer you this time in two seconds. It’s still no.”
“Don’t forget,” Eastman warned, “he’s threatening to detonate that thing if we start an evacuation. He considers those people his hostages.”
The President looked at his adviser. There was an infinity of sadness in his dark eyes.
“Do we take him at his word on that, Jack?”
“I’m afraid we have to, Mr. President.”
“Even though it might mean five million lives?”
“It could mean five million lives if we call his bluff and he’s not bluffing.”
* * *
The helicopter bearing Muammar al-Qaddafi back to his capital settled down on a landing pad concealed in a grove of Aleppo pines nineteen miles southeast of Tripoli at 7:52 Libyan time. The dictator leaped out and slid into the driver’s seat of a sky-blue Volkswagen hidden in the midst of the trees.
Four minutes later, followed by a jeepload of his redbereted Praetorian Guard, he passed through a barrier of electrified barbed wire and headed down a long alley of cypress trees leading to the Mediterranean shore. No foreign diplomat, no distinguished visitor, none of Qaddafi’s fellow Arab leaders had ever been invited into the elegant old dwelling set at the end of the drive.
With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman’s villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It had, indeed, been built by a Roman, a member of the nobility of the textile trade, who had left his name on it. In the years following his death, the Villa Pietri had served as the palace of Mussolini’s Fascist Governor General of Libya, as the residence of the brother of Libya’s King Idris, and later of the commanding general of the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli. The first chief of state in modern times to employ terrorism as an instrument of national policy had taken over the noble old dwelling in 1971. It was the headquarters from which Qaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network.
The Munich Olympic Massacre had been planned in its gracious sitting room; so, too, had the assault on the Rome Airport meant to kill Henrv Kissinger in December 1973, the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers, the Entebbe skyjacking. The eucalyptus trees of the villa’s gardens concealed the antennas that radioed Qaddafi’s orders to IRA provos, West German students, Red Brigade dissidents, even Islamic zealots infiltrated into Tashkent and Turkestan. Its wine cellars which had once housed the finest Chianti classicos of the Tuscan hills had been turned into an ultramodern communications center, hooked into, among other things, Libya’s radar installations; one of its bedrooms housed a complete mock-up of the control panels of a Boeing 747 and 707 on which many of the hijackers of the early and midseventies had been trained. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: “Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good.”
Qaddafi was radiant with triumph as he drew up to the villa. “Now,” he announced to a handful of aides waiting to greet him at the villa’s doorstep, “I shall no longer have to endure being an Arab President who stands by while my Palestinian brothers are stripped of the last shreds of their homeland.”
He embraced each in turn, his Prime Minister Salam Jalloud, one of the few members of his original junta still with Qaddafi, his chief of intelligence, the commanders of his army and his air force. Then he led them into his study.
“They are criminals, these Israelis,” he declared. “The whole world has stood by watching them stealing our brothers’ lands with these settlements of theirs. Watching while a people is being systematically deprived of its homeland. This so-called peace of that coward Sadat. What a mockery! A peace, for what? To allow the Israelis to go on and on stealing our brothers’ lands. Autonomy, they said.” Qaddafi laughed. “Autonomy for what?
To let the foreigner take away your home!”
Qaddafi sighed. “I dreamt of leading a people that did not sleep at night; that spent its days in the djebels training for the reconquest of its Palestinian brothers’ lands; that respects God’s Holy Law and obeys the Koran because it wants to be an example to the rest.
“And what do I lead? A people that sleeps at night. A people that doesn’t care what happens to its brothers in Palestine. A people that dreams only of buying a Mercedes and three television sets. We trained our best young men to fly Mirage jets in the battle and what did they do? They went down to the souks to open a shop and sell Japanese air-conditioners.” The intensity on the Libyan dictator’s face mesmerized the men around him.
“Now,” he went on, “with our bomb, why do we care if we are only a small power? Let the people go on dreaming of their Mercedes. I don’t need the millions now, only the few who are ready to pay the price I ask. Did the Caliph conquer the world with the millions? No! With the few, because the few were strong and believed.”
Qaddafi contemplated the tabletop a moment, staring at the watery circles left upon it by the bottles of soda his aides had drunk waiting for the test. Although he did not say it, he knew that success would make him, overnight, the hero of the Arab world, the idol of its masses. It would secure the larger goal which lay behind his much-proclaimed hatred of the Jewish state, bringing the Arab world with its vast oil resources and the power they represented under his command.
Salam Jalloud, the Prime Minister, shifted nervously in his chair. He was the one man in the room who had opposed Qaddafi’s scheme from the outset.
“I still say, Sidi, the Americans will destroy us. Or they will plot with the Israelis to trick us, to make us think they are going to do what we ask, then strike when our guard is down.”
“Our guard must never be down.” Qaddafi indicated a small black device on his desk. It looked like a miniature dictating machine. “From now on, this is our guard.” The device, another contribution of the engineers of Nippon Electric, resembled the remote-control boxes which can open a garage door from a moving car. By tapping it with his finger, Qaddafi could send an electronic pulse to a room deep in a specially reinforced cellar of the villa. There, protected by three redbereted paratroopers of his bodyguard, was the terminal which, in response to that gesture, would send his detonation code to Oscar and the bomb hidden in New York.
“The Americans are not fools,” he continued. “Do you think five million Americans are going to die for Israel? For those settlements even they oppose? Never! They are going to force Israel to give us everything we want.”
“Besides,” he said, “we need no longer be afraid of the Americans. Until now they have been able to ignore our rights to help the Israelis trample on the nationhood of our Palestinian brothers because they were a superpower. They were immune. Well, my friends,” a thin, drawn smile appeared on his features, “they are still a superpower, but they are no longer immune.”
* * *
In Washington, the President had left the Crisis Committee’s meeting at the National Military Command Center to confer with Moscow on the red telephone line. While he was out of the room, his advisers gathered in anxious knots discussing the emergency. As unobtrusively as possible, white-jacketed Navy stewards slipped among them passing out steaming cups of freshly brewed coffee. Only Jack Eastman remained seated at the conference table, skimming through a stack of documents, most of them stamped “Top Secret.”
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