Saving the Queen

by William F. Buckley

  Rufus smiled. “I’d make a bad Prime Minister.”

  Rufus was clearly pleased that the years hadn’t obliterated in Eisenhower’s memory the awful responsibility Rufus had taken; and he hoped he would be dead before it ever became known all that he had done to accomplish his mission.

  They sat down.

  “Rufus, we are in the goddamnedest diplomatic mess I have ever known. Or ever heard of—does that go for you too, Allen?”

  “Yes, Ike—never …”

  “Look, let’s not fart around. We can’t prove it, but we know that some of our top secrets, our big-time stuff, are getting to the Soviet Union on a regular basis by someone at the top—the Home Minister, the Defense Minister, the goddamn Prime Minister, for all we know, and conceivably it’s somebody around the Queen.”

  Rufus, though American, had lived in England, and all four of his grandparents were British. He stood up.

  “Now wait a minute, Rufus; sit down. We’re not saying that the P.M. or Queen Caroline is a Soviet sympathizer. We don’t think so. On the other hand, we can’t as a theoretical matter—I’m talking your language now, boy—exclude any possibility. That is, everything about this case is so bizarre you have to begin by forcing yourself to consider every conceivable goddamn possibility.

  “Here’s what we do know. Over the past couple of years, information that our people have given to the Prime Minister has regularly ended up in Soviet hands.”

  Rufus sat down.

  “Not just one piece of information, or two, or a half dozen; but maybe thirty, forty items of information. What the hell am I calling it information for? Our most vital secrets.

  “At first we all assumed the stuff had passed through Fuchs, and then Burgess and MacLean. Then we got comprehensive reports from British security on what those three bastards knew, and they knew a hell of a lot. But what we’re talking about now, they didn’t know, it turns out. In fact, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about now hadn’t even been developed when they took off.

  “I’ll give you an example.” Eisenhower rose, and poked the fire. “Two weeks ago, Urey and Teller came here, on Truman’s orders. They give me up-to-date information on the H-bomb, so that we can make preparations in NATO in accordance. They came directly from California, no stopping even in Washington. Just before leaving, they told me they had collated reports from various labs and interviewed a few technicians, and on the airplane the two of them made projections—that the bomb would be ready to test by the first of November. They gave that information to me. No one else was in the room, not even Beedle Smith, Dulles’s boss. I didn’t send the information to the White House, because they were both due to stop off there in a week, on the way back from the atoms control business in Geneva. They are the tightest-lipped guys in America, but even so, the Bureau keeps a routine eye on them, partly to watch them, partly to protect them. There has never been a single leak traceable to either of them.

  “The day after they left here, the Prime Minister was in Paris on an official visit, and the next afternoon he visited with me here. He asked me when the bomb would be ready, and I told him. You know, Rufus—or do you—the President, in consultation with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Senate people, ordered a complete pooling of scientific information between us and the Brits, provided they adopt our style security. I then asked the Prime Minister with whom would he share the information I had just given him. He told me he gives it out strictly on a need-to-know basis. So I said: Who needs to know?

  “‘Something like this, General,’ he said, ‘nobody needs to know. Because the bomb will be something for NATO to deploy, not the British. We’re poking along on our own in the direction of the hydrogen bomb, but we’re several years behind you.’

  “One week later, we pick up a defector in Prague. He’s a young well-placed scientist at the Lossa laboratories where they’re working on heavy-water something or other. He told us that the day before he cut out into West Germany, he and the six top scientists in his lab were taken into the director’s room and told they would have to work overtime because word had just come in from the Kremlin that the United States would be ready to detonate on November first! I am not exaggerating when I tell you that a junior scientist working on a Communist bomb had that information before the President of the United States!

  “I flew right away to No. 10. Theoretically to protest the budget cut announced in the House of Commons for NATO—dumb bloody thing to do, Rufus—I didn’t want the P.M. to know we had figured he must have been the leak, so I said that Teller and Urey, returning from Geneva, had revised their calculations, and figured now it might not be until February 1, 1953, before we could safely detonate. Then I asked him—just like that—whether the November date had been given out to anyone.

  “He replied: ‘Only to the Queen.’

  “‘The Queen?’ Obviously I looked surprised.

  “‘Oh yes, General. Queen Caroline does not like to talk to me, at the weekly audience, about royal charities, horse shows, or honors lists. She treats me the way your man does, on your program, what is it on Sundays?’

  “‘Meet the Press?’

  “‘Exactly. Her Majesty treats me like Mr. Spivak, with the significant difference’”—Ike attempted to convey the P.M.’s chuckle, without great success—“‘that I can politely decline to answer Mr. Spivak’s questions. But I am, after all, Her Majesty’s Chief of Government and her subject, and as long as she has a running curiosity about top secret matters, I have a running duty to satisfy it. About our intelligence service and its activities, about our emergency war plans, about our hidden commitments with President Truman in Korea. And she never forgets anything I tell her. One time, forgetting to correct a piece of information I gave her which proved inaccurate, she reprimanded me sharply when a different figure was published in Jane’s Fighting Ships. I must say, General, there is something to be said for the American way!’

  “We then took every leak we have been aware of over the last two years that we hadn’t traced to a particular person. A small staff was picked to classify these. We were able to establish, in a great majority of the cases, that the leaked information had at one point been given to the Prime Minister.

  “We spent six months doing everything we could to study the habits of the P.M. For this, obviously, we couldn’t very well crank up MI-6. Can you see a British intelligence official approaching the FBI to check on the security habits of the President of the United States? We obviously couldn’t get too close to him. But we did a study that seems to make it clear that he isn’t the kind of man that gives away state secrets accidentally, and we’re obviously prepared to rule out his giving them away intentionally. In fact, he made commitments to Truman in Washington in September, stuff we wanted from him—which no one in the House of Commons is yet aware of—and yet we know the Russians know about them! Obviously these could have come from our side—from Truman or someone on Truman’s staff. But there’s only one common denominator in the bulk of the leaks we are talking about. These were secrets given to the Prime Minister. And, we got to believe, handed on by the Prime Minister to the Queen of England, and where, goddammit, Allen, do we go from here?”

  Dulles answered: “We go to where your instincts have taken you, Ike. To Rufus. And I think we ought to go to Rufus with something like the mandate we gave him eight years ago. Stop what’s happening, and don’t let us know how you did it.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Needless to say, Rufus, where nothing was excluded in 1943, 1944, one thing is absolutely excluded now. Under no circumstances is damage to come to the P.M. or anyone at the top, and under no circumstances is it ever to be known by anyone, except us, who the leak is. Will you take it on?”

  Would they, Rufus felt like asking, take on his wife? But he had always half-expected that the rural life in France could not last forever; and, really, at fifty-eight he didn’t feel exhausted any longer. Besides, it didn’t look as if this mission would require him to shed blood.


  But Rufus thought slowly, and it mattered not at all to him that others should wait while he thought, and those who knew him resented it least, confident that he was thinking about something they should probably themselves have thought of, but hadn’t.

  “Two things,” he said after a silence of several minutes. “Do I understand that you wish me to clear the matter up but that you do not wish me to inform you in what way I have cleared the matter up?”

  Eisenhower looked at Dulles. “That is my feeling. But Mr. Dulles here has the responsibility for answering that question.”

  Dulles replied thoughtfully. “I do not have the authority either myself to initiate any extra-legal operation or to authorize a subordinate to authorize one. I take my orders from the director and from the President of the United States, who acts on the recommendations of the policy committee of the National Security Council, which is guided by a piece of congressional legislation. I have never broken that rule. But then I have never faced a situation like this one.” He turned to Eisenhower. “Ike, I need guidance. I know the sense in which the responsibility is mine, and I don’t propose to shirk it. But it would mean a lot to me to know what you would do in my place.”

  “If I were in your place, Allen, I would hire Rufus away from his goddamn rose garden as a consultant, on the written understanding that Rufus was free—no hard feelings—to quit whenever he felt the load was too, ah, heavy. I would specify that all reports from him be given you orally on your frequent trips to London, or on his to Washington, or through no-hands cryptography, but that these reports should be made only when he is ready to make them. I would then proceed on the understanding that when Rufus hands you his resignation, you will know only this—that our problem has been taken care of.”

  “And what,” Rufus interrupted, “do you propose to do about state secrets shared with the British, until old Rufus performs?”

  “You will have to work out a plan for that, too, Rufus.”

  “All right. But I’ll need a log of everything important that flows into the P.M.—from CIA, from the NSC, from the President, from the Joint Chiefs, from NATO, and from visiting scientists. That’s not going to be easy. It isn’t going to be easy.”

  Nothing had been easy for him in years, he thought, as he shook hands, and headed out to the car that would drive through the late spring countryside to his home, to his wife who hated England so, for the purpose of telling her that they were moving back to England for a few months, how many he could not guess. The next thing to do was get hold of Singer Callaway.

  At dinner the night before there had been, in addition to Peregrine Kirk, Queen Caroline’s mother; Henry, the nine-year-old Prince of Wales; and his second cousin who was tutoring him for a few months before going off to Stanford University in California to pursue graduate studies. Caroline had said a family dinner, and it was just that. The day had been crowded, what with the festivities that attended the departure of the Duke, and a number of greetings and allocutions the Queen needed to execute for the Duke to distribute on his rounds through Australia and New Zealand. So that not very long after a dreadful dinner—she wished the Normans had colonized British cooking—and after listening to her son’s proper tutor, James Gould, play a little Mozart on the piano, which had, at least, the undisguised effect of making the Prince of Wales sleepy, Caroline rose, a signal to everyone else to rise.

  “Good night, dear Perry. We shall have a real visit tomorrow. Ring for your breakfast when you want it, and let’s meet at the stables at eleven.”

  James Peregrine, Viscount Kirk, eldest son of the Earl of Holly, had found Cambridge boring, on the whole, after two years in the Royal Air Force shooting down, at a most extraordinary rate, Kraut fighters. He had come late to the war; he was only twenty-one when it was over, so they declined to demob him after V-E Day, sending him instead on an assignment unrelated to airplanes—helping to maintain order in Palestine. Though they had been brief, he was well hardened by his earlier experiences. Shot down over the lowlands, he spent one week in the bitter snows in command, by virtue of his rank, of a ragtag band of foot soldiers whose own leader had been lost. For better than three days they were without food, with only water made by allowing the snow to melt in their frozen hands. Kirk resolved on that occasion that he would not complain, ever. His subordinates, eighteen in number, and resentful at having to take orders from an air force officer, complained with good and ill humor about everything, about the weather, the food, the hygienic facilities, the paucity of air cover, the stubbornness of Montgomery, the tenacity of the Germans. After the first two days, he did not hear even indirectly any complaints about his own leadership. He was approachable, permitting anyone to ventilate a complaint at almost any length. When he felt it was going too far for the morale of the unit, he would stop it short with such a comment as: “Wars certainly have their unpleasant side, Tomkins. Quite right.” And he would reach for a straw of optimism. “But it can’t be long now. Monty has got to protect his right flank, and when he does that, the area will be evacuated, and we’ll be back with the main unit.” There was the one occasion—it came on the second day—when these tactics had not worked on a soldier who from heaven knows what interstice in his equipment had come up with a reserve of whiskey, listened with expressive facial skepticism to Kirk, and then interrupted him. “I don’t think you bloody well know one bloody thing about fighting. This aynt no cricket field, boy.” Kirk had calmly walked over to him and delivered three crippling strokes, one to the stomach, the second to the nose, the third again to the collapsing stomach. Kirk motioned to a sergeant to remove the corpse, and resumed, as if there had been no interruption, his estimate of the surrounding military situation. He eased, without its catching the attention of the soldiers at first, into the metaphorical language of the cricket game and was soon, referring to • “teams” and “wickets” and “batsmen,” as the men listened first with furtive amusement, finally with undisguised admiration.

  He had gone straight into the air force from Greyburn and knew how, without saying anything very much, to stimulate a sense of community. Instinctively he guessed that the key to it was: never complain, always sympathize with those who do. At nineteen he was tall and strong, though light. His eyes were a dark green, in colorful contrast to his dark red hair which, characteristically, hung loosely over his forehead, leaving a wake of pale freckles that reached to his angular nose. His father squatted over his huge estate in Aberdeen and complained in all his communications to his son that if the war did not end soon, the pheasants would disappear from Scotland for want of feeding. Young Holly did not pool his father’s complaint with those of his men.

  Later, in Palestine, he was involved in the counterinsurgency movement. He found one morning a message under his door in the King David Hotel. His master sergeant Akers needed to confer with him instantly and could be found at the empty farmhouse two miles out of the city, on the Mebev Road, at which Kirk frequently met with two or three other counterinsurgency officers to coordinate their moves. He dressed quickly, called Roberts, the corporal who, like Akers, had served with him in the air force, and together they drove out in a jeep. He found his sergeant, hanging limply by the neck from a limb of an oak tree by the farmhouse. He ordered Roberts to bring down the corpse and went inside to telephone headquarters. There he heard the explosion, rushed out, and found only bits and pieces of Roberts. The sergeant’s body had been booby-trapped. He walked back into the farmhouse and sat still for the hour it took a detachment of specialists to arrive, with their special tools for trying to track down the terrorists.

  He wondered whether he would ever again feel so close a kinship as he had felt for the two men he had just now got killed. With morbid shame he recalled importuning them to request a transfer, after V-E Day, so that they could serve out the balance of their terms with him. “It should be very interesting work,” he told them, and they both agreed. What could be responsible for the deaths, suffering, and mutilations he had seen in the la
st two years, he asked himself, and concluded there, in the stillness of the old farm, that there must be an explanation; that human nature must not be left free to do what he had seen it do.

  At Cambridge he considered two options. The first was to get it done and over with by taking a heavy academic load. The second was to treat Cambridge as an extracurricular activity, even though it might then take him as long as five years to complete the required courses. He decided on the second, in part because he was not sure what he would be racing toward if he accelerated his education. And in part because it would give him more time with his horses.

  He had begun hunting at the age of seven, closely supervised by his father. At thirteen he was riding competitively, high jumping in Dublin at the horse show and competing in the hunter trials. At fifteen he achieved, with his 14:1 pony, the highest jump ever recorded—eight feet one inch. In the summer before the war, he rode wildly hour after hour with his second cousin Caroline through the forest of his and her abutting estates—twelve thousand acres combined—and, toward the end of the golden summer before his final year at Greyburn, he confessed to her at the end of a long day together that he had nothing further to teach her in horsemanship. Though three years older, she no longer condescended to him. Her pleasure was total, and she smiled a heavenly smile that stuck in his memory until the experiences of war made him shrink from all childish, romantic memories.

  The horses were no longer a source of pleasure. They were an obsession. He was a member of the British Olympic Team in 1948, and he drove himself, and his horses, in a furious effort to win a gold medal. On the last day, Perry was determined to bring his horse over the high pole the American had nicked, and all but derricked his depleted mount over it. The horse’s heels, twisted sideways to avoid hitting the pole, struck instead the pylon that held it, breaking his leg and Perry’s back.