The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

by James Philip

  Bundy was the second son of a wealthy Boston family intimately involved in Republican politics. Emerging from Yale he had spent Hitler’s war in US Army Intelligence; after that war he had co-authored Henry L. Stimson’s – FDR’s Secretary of War’s – autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War. Stimson had been a family friend for over two decades and in the way of such things, McGeorge Bundy’s early career had met very few obstacles. Which was not to say that his career would have been any less brilliant with or without Stimson’s influence; because Mac was that sort of guy. In 1949, aged only thirty, he had joined the Council on Foreign Relations – along with Dwight Eisenhower, Allen Dulles and the diplomat George Kennan – to study the Marshall Plan. In 1954 Bundy, aged just thirty-four, was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Art and Sciences. Later when he became Jack Kennedy’s National Security Advisor many considered Bundy the most brilliant of the ‘best and the brightest’ men around the charismatic young President.

  But all that was before the fall.

  Coffee was poured and the men settled around the crackling, sizzling log fire. Fulbright wondered where Jackie and the kids were hiding; he had heard that the Secret Service had nightmares about the security of the Kennedy’s Hyannis Port compound and the President’s young children now lived at Camp David when their parents were on the stomp.

  The Secretary of State did not think it was any coincidence that Bundy had returned to the Administration within days of the President’s declaration that he was running for re-election that autumn.

  “The Egyptians and the Israelis will not sign up to a mutual defence pact,” he announced, “and that is the problem at the heart of all the other issues in the Middle East.”

  “Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt in combination are militarily more significant than the State of Israel,” McGeorge Bundy countered. “Persia,” he quirked a grimace, “or Iran, whatever, is still effectively a quasi-British protectorate. I don’t understand why we aren’t looking towards putting Americans on the ground. Specifically, to guard the gulf oil industry?”

  “Guard it from whom?” Fulbright inquired flatly.

  “Local insurrection? The British are struggling to keep a grip of things in Oman and Yemen. Abadan could blow up in their faces at any time.”

  The Secretary of State nodded.

  “We have re-supplied several British garrisons in the region and will continue to do so but there is a problem. You know that, Mac.”

  “The Arabs don’t want our GIs on the ground.”

  “Quite. They don’t like the Brits hanging on either but they know the Brits aren’t strong enough to be more than an under-strength, glorified colonial police force. But for the October War the Brits would already be pulling out and the Arabs expect that to happen sooner rather than later, anyway. Egypt’s concerns, obviously, are of a different character and magnitude following the atrocity at Ismailia. But don’t imagine for a minute that President Nasser has suddenly had a change of heart about the British Imperial yoke; it is just that he is a realist. He has a regional threat – Israel – on his eastern borders, and now Red Dawn threatening, at the very least, free navigation in the Eastern Mediterranean not to mention randomly lobbing H-bombs in his direction. Given that Egypt was a Soviet client state before the October War you can understand the regime in Cairo feels a little,” he grimaced, “schizophrenic about recent developments.”

  “We are guarantors of the State of Israel,” McGeorge Bundy rejoined, testing the older man’s logic.

  There it was; the fracture point between the President’s two closest foreign policy advisors. Whereas Fulbright wanted a new, pragmatic Middle Eastern policy based on the geopolitical strategic vital interests of the United States; Bundy advocated an adulterated version of this approach which treated Israel as a ‘special case’. Similar fault lines would inevitably become evident elsewhere in the World. In South East Asia, for example, where despite the ‘peace dividend’ cutbacks to the military, the Administration was still Hell bent on propping up its proxies in South Vietnam and elsewhere. The ‘Saigon Problem’ had been put on the back burner after the Battle of Washington but Fulbright knew that sooner or later he and the President might easily be at loggerheads over it. However, the ‘Saigon Problem’, and others, palled into insignificance in the light of recent developments in the Mediterranean.

  Fulbright tried hard not to frown at Bundy.

  A vocal minority within the House impeachment lobby received substantial campaign and other political funding from Zionist and other pro-Israeli groups, supposedly based in the United States and therefore entitled by the strict letter of the law to lobby, who were afraid that the Administration was going to abandon Israel to the wolves if the going got too tough. He sympathised with Israeli concerns, if only because nobody understood as clearly as the Government in Tel Aviv that the long-term strategic interests of the United States in the Middle East, did not, and rationally, could not, lie with unconditionally supporting one small country surrounded by hostile neighbours bent on her destruction. The fact that Israel was the solitary fully-functioning democracy in the region won it brownie points with the Administration – a lot of brownie points – but it did not materially alter the geopolitical calculus. America’s primary interest in the region was oil. For better or worse the Arabs – and the Persians, of course - had the oil. That did not mean automatically betraying brave little Israel, but it did mean that it was a big mistake to take one’s eye off the main thing – the oil – and spend all one’s time and energy addressing the preoccupations of the Israeli Government at the cost of neglecting all the legitimate interests of all the other parties. This he had spent many fruitless hours in Tel Aviv trying to explain to the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, and the legendary elder statesman of the small republic, David Ben-Gurion.

  Levi Eshkol was a fascinatingly pugnacious and dignified man who had been born in Russia and emigrated aged nineteen to Palestine in 1914 at a time when the Holy Land was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. By 1948 he was a member of the high command of the Haganah, now he was the leader of Mapai, the Workers’ Party of Israel, something which would have played badly in sections of both the Republican and Democratic caucus, as would Mapai’s party’s red hammer symbol, but for the weight of recent living history. The Holocaust was still very raw in human memory and not even the genocidal carnage of the October War could wipe away the stain it had left on the psyche of civilization. Fulbright might be cerebrally pro-arabist; but that was irrelevant because the sanctity of the State of Israel was a given. What was not a given was the wisdom of America acting as the unilateral guarantor of that sanctity.

  “Are we really the guarantors of the State of Israel?” Fulbright queried provocatively. “That’s an easy thing to say but is it helpful? In what meaningful way are we the guarantors of the State of Israel, Mac?”

  McGeorge Bundy turned the argument around.

  “Before the war we were looking at a situation where, sometime in the next decade, Western industries and societies were going to become totally dependent on oil from the Middle East, mainly Saudi oil but increasingly that of the various, at that time, pro-Western despotic emirates and sheikdoms around the Arabian Gulf, and in Iraq and Persia. Because of the October War the West no longer needs all that oil, Senator. Let’s be honest about this, Europe won’t be burning any appreciable globally significant tonnage of oil for the foreseeable future. The British will need our help to get by but to all intents, the United States will be broadly self-sufficient in terms of our domestic energy needs for the next twenty or thirty years. Moreover, because the previously rebuilding and re-industrialising post-World War II economies of Western European are no longer competing on the global oil market the price of oil will remain low – dirt cheap, frankly – for years to come. In this scenario there is no reason whatever for us to carry on compromising our principles sucking up to the Arabs. Sever
al of the regimes in the Middle East are medieval, Bill! Hell, we ought to be telling the Saudis to stop meddling in the affairs of their neighbours!”

  Fulbright was too wise an operator to rise to the bait.

  It was not as if the Saudi Arabians were the only guilty party when it came to ‘meddling in the affairs of their neighbours’, or for that matter, in clinging to medievalist traditions. Many of the countries in the region were hardly countries at all in the modern sense. Syria and Iraq were creations of the Versailles Treaty, nations whose borders were created because hard-pressed colonial civil servants were under pressure to draw lines on maps – any lines would do – so that the leaders of the victorious Great War powers could return home claiming they had solved the problems of the World, not just sown the seeds for future wars. Syria and Iraq were jigsaws of ethnically and religiously incompatible territories and factions, and Iran, under the rule of the Shah, the son of a usurper who had seized power in a coup d’état in the 1920s, yearned to behave as if it had somehow inherited the mantle of the ancient Persian Emperors.

  Although McGeorge Bundy was right in one way, he wrong in another that was much more important. If the recent past had taught any lesson it was that the American people were best served by a foreign policy which employed the power and prestige – what remained of it – of the United States to maintain the peace of the World. If that meant focusing on damping down the potential for conflict across a whole region, then allowing policy to be dictated and distorted by a single – albeit an island of fiercely democratic ideals, the State of Israel - country was simply not pragmatic.

  “We should be the guarantors of the security of our friends and allies throughout the World, Mac.”

  The President had been watching the two men fencing.

  “Bucharest?” He asked, changing the subject.

  The latest over flight and intercept analysis had been put under Bundy’s and Fulbright’s doors that morning. A high-flying RAF photo-reconnaissance Canberra had been chased out of Romanian air space by two MiG-21s as it approached the ruined city at fifty-two thousand feet. However, not before its ultra high-resolution side-scanning cameras had catalogued the utter destruction of the southern suburbs of the former Romanian capital.

  “A random terroristic type attack,” McGeorge Bundy suggested. “Red Dawn must have a stock of recovered ICBMs. Every time they get one or two operational they shoot them off...”

  The Secretary of State quashed this instantly.

  “Romania was most likely being used as the jumping off point for Red Dawn military operations in the surrounding territories. Bucharest might have been Red Dawn’s western capital for all we know. Why would Red Dawn nuke its own capital, Mac?”

  Bundy shrugged.

  “We’re dealing with crazy people, Bill,” he conceded. He moved on. “The British think Red Dawn has ‘shot its bolt’.”

  It was the President who shook his head.

  “That’s just what’s in their newspapers and they’ve told the BBC. Red Dawn may have ‘shot its bolt’, or it may have achieved its initial objectives and called a halt. Nobody knows for sure. The reality of the situation is that the whole north-eastern quadrant of the Mediterranean is either in Red Dawn’s hands or threatened by it. Moreover, apart from on Cyprus we have no viable forward operating bases and no boots on the ground anywhere in the region.”

  His Secretary of State nodded his agreement, and expanded on his underlying concerns.

  “The problem is that in the Arab World the Lebanese, the Syrians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Persians and the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia, with the notable exception of Egypt, are perfectly happy going with the ‘Red Dawn have shot their bolt’ scenario. The presence of British, and Commonwealth forces – mainly Australian – at places like Abadan, in Aden and the main airfields in the Arabian Peninsula, is promoting an unwarranted complacency.”

  “Most of those countries are a long way from the nearest Red Dawn lodgement?” Bundy put to Fulbright, who did not reply. “Look, without wanting to sound parochial, we have problems we must confront closer to home. The Administration has more trouble than it needs attempting to fulfil our treaty obligations to the United Kingdom. The last thing we need is to start accruing new overseas obligations.”

  The Secretary of State scowled. Ivy League academics like Bundy probably had their place, it was just not in the real world of international relations. The younger man had been ill-advised to return to the Administration. Fulbright could live with Mac’s meddling if that was all it was. The Warren Commission would have ripped off Dean Rusk’s head if he had still been alive; if it came to it he would not hesitate to offer them McGeorge Bundy’s head as a substitute.

  Chapter 20

  Wednesday 19th February 1964

  Samothrace, Aegean Sea

  Nicolae Ceaușescu’s fever-wracked body lay a little apart from his Securitate bodyguards and the surviving crew members of the Mil Mi6 former Red Air Force helicopter. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong after he had been driven away through the streets of Bucharest in a convoy of armoured cars. Elena and the children had not been in the park where they had agreed she would wait to be picked up; but AK47-wielding plain clothed KGB men had been. Two of his people had been killed and the constant stabbing, fiery tendrils of pain in his right calf reminded him of the fragmentation round which had torn away a fist’s width of flesh and muscle. He was sitting in a puddle of his and the other dead and wounded Securitates’ blood by the time they got to Otopeni. They had patched him up in the helicopter; but there was only so much the flight crew medic could do with a standard emergency dressing kit other than dose him up with morphine. An injured Securitate had bled out on the flight south, during which the helicopter seemed to have been a magnet for small arms fire.

  Fortunately, the Mil Mi6 was a new, robust machine. If it had not been they would all have been dead by now. One stray pot shot from the ground had ricocheted around the cockpit, missing both the pilot and co-pilot before disabling the compass. Another hit, unsuspected until its consequences were self-evident, had resulted in a partial hydraulics failure and a fuel leak. By then it was pitch dark, a storm had enveloped the craft and they were flying on fumes. It was only in the morning when a party was sent to investigate the nearest village that it was discovered that they had crash-landed on the Greek island of Samothrace.

  That was five mornings ago. Ceaușescu’s bodyguards had carried him to the nearest settlement, the eerily deserted port of Samothraki. Many of the sun-baked one room houses had been burned, some had been destroyed by explosives, there were bullets pocking the walls. However, other than a few bodies decomposing in the ruins there was little trace of the people who had lived in the shadow of Mount Fengari, rising over five thousand feet into the clear blue Mediterranean skies. From the shore they saw several small boats sunk in the harbour, otherwise the moorings were empty. They had found a little tinned food, dried fruit and fish, some ragged cloth that could be torn into bandages, catgut to sew up his wound, but nothing else of any utility except firewood from the smashed houses. Now the food was gone and every fresh water cistern they had discovered had been fouled with the carcasses of dead animals.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to lash out.

  The idiots had brought him to the wrong fucking island!

  He had wanted to shoot the pilots. He would have ordered it without a moment’s hesitation – even though a quick clean death was better than the traitors deserved – had not some small voice whispered in his head, counselling caution. There were only nine survivors in his group, few enough to defend him if they encountered hostile forces, or to carry him.

  The pain in his leg had grown steadily worse each day. Feverish perspiration bled off his brow and soaked his increasingly filthy clothes. Even his wife, Elena, had betrayed him. If she had listened to him she would have known where to go in an emergency, not wasted time arguing the toss. But no, she always knew best. His lifetime of
experience within the Party, most of it within its higher echelons counted for nothing. Only Elena knew the infallible paths to the top. Nothing he achieved was ever quite good enough for Elena...

  The plan had been to fly to Thasos where there was known to be a well-equipped and highly organised communist guerrilla group fighting the Military Junta in Athens. They might have provided him with a boat and a crew to head south. He had to get to somewhere with a radio so that he could talk to the British or the Americans, and somewhere far enough away from the hub of Krasnaya Zarya’s operations that his signal would not draw down the vengeance of the horde down about his head.

  Krasnaya Zarya!

  Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had been a fool, duped by his former Soviet masters. Why had he not seen through the lies? Now at last he understood why Gheorghe had been so sentimental about the business of bringing the Troika to Bucharest. Gheorghe had never wanted the Securitate to lay a finger on the members of the Troika. Yes, they had agreed Andropov would have to be disappeared; beyond that, they could afford to be civilised about things. That was what Gheorghe had decided. The members of the Troika were not their enemies, simply men who did not understand the new realities of their own situation. A short, sharp object lesion should suffice while the Romanian Army and the Securitate brought Krasnaya Zarya back under control. The important thing was to be able to go to the West with clean hands; stabbing former allies in the back was a price well worth paying if it saved their necks.