by James Philip
That sounded like good news. Not for the British, obviously but clearly that consideration was incidental.
Sorensen waited patiently.
“Additionally,” Fulbright continued, “the Russians will ‘blow’ all their intelligence networks in the North American continent and send KGB officers to the US to work with the FBI in the rooting out of surviving Red Dawn cells.”
It sounded to Ted Sorensen that this was going to be a ruinously expensive bill of purchase. Intuitively, even before he had heard what it was going to cost he asked himself if it could possibly be worth it.
“In return we must make certain ‘gestures’ to Soviet sensibilities about the Cuban Missiles War...”
Sorensen’s ears picked up the disingenuous note in the Secretary of State’s voice.
“What sort of gestures?” He inquired with a vile taste in his mouth.
“In due course General LeMay will be stood down from his current post...”
The President intervened.
“We haven’t settled anywhere near all the details yet, Ted. This is all still broad brush strokes. Re-jigging the makeup of the Joint Chiefs Committee is window dressing. Before any of that comes into play both sides need to commit to confidence building measures. For the Soviet side the first such ‘measure’ will be declaring a unilateral halt at the Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian borders in Iraq, and a unilateral cessation of hostilities in Iran. On our part we will reciprocate by guaranteeing that the war in the Persian Gulf does not go nuclear.”
Sorensen did not believe he had just heard his friend say that.
“How can we make that guarantee, sir?” This he asked before he thought better of it. He knew exactly how the President could make a guarantee like that stick. Everybody in the room knew how. The bile rose in his throat.
Jack Kennedy looked him in the eye.
“The Chief of Naval Operations is flying out to Bombay to consult with Read Admiral Bringle, the Commanding Officer of Carrier Division Seven. The CNO has personally assured me that the Navy will do its duty.”
Chapter 24
Tuesday 16th June 1964
Prime Minister’s Rooms, Hertford College, Oxford
At the time of the no confidence vote the governmental machine, the administrative infrastructure underpinning everything the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom did, had been in the process of establishing itself on a ‘longer-term’ basis in Oxford. Things had originally been set up on an ad hoc, emergency basis in the spring but now what had been foreseen as an unfortunate, albeit unavoidable three to sixth month disruption of the University and the City would be extended to at least a year, or perhaps two. Consequently, the major departments of state were being hastily re-configured as semi-permanent establishments pending the completion of a new ‘Government Administrative Complex’ on the London Road between the city centre and Headington.
While most major offices of state were expanding or re-settling their current host Colleges, the Cabinet Office had been removed – practically overnight to its new home in the Old Quad of Hertford College. Although the college traced its lineage back to the thirteenth century, the oldest building in the ‘Old’ Quad was of relatively recent – ‘recent’ in Oxford terms - construction, having been completed as ‘recently’ as the 1570s.
The Bodleian Library was directly opposite the main gate to Hertford College across Catte Street; and the famous Bridge of Sighs, one of the city’s most famous architectural landmarks spanned New College Lane within its boundaries. William Tyndale, John Donne, Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh were all Hertford men; but the Cabinet Office, the Private Office and the official residence of the Prime Minister had transferred to Hertford not because of its antiquity, or the credentials of its past alumni but because the Old Quadrangle, with its vines and still perfectly manicured lawn, offered sufficient ‘working’ space in a location which the Royal Marine detachment responsible for Margaret Thatcher’s safety deemed, appropriately ‘defensible’.
One of the first things the Prime Minister had learned when she became ‘first among equals’ was that it was essential to place distance between oneself and the hurly burly, minutiae of government business. That had not been easy at either King’s College or Corpus Christi College where her rooms and Private Office had been sited cheek by jowl with departments and ministers competing for her attention and favour, and sometimes intent on dragging her into strictly ‘departmental’ matters which she expected her ministers to resolve.
Once the chaos of the removal to Hertford College had eventually subsided, the dust had had a chance to settle and everybody had got their feet under their new tables; the Prime Minister was confident that the benefits of reverting to a system analogous to No 10 Downing Street being the Prime Minister’s secure base within the Whitehall milieu in pre-October War days, the relocation exercise would bear fruit. Unfortunately, presently the Old Quad was Bedlam!
It was for this reason that she had invited Airey Neave and Dick White to brief her on the latest disastrously bad news in her private rooms, a relative oasis of calm. She naturally assumed that when her Secretary of State for National Security and his chief spymaster asked for an urgent audience that they were bringing bad news, and she had braced herself for this eventuality.
Nobody ever brought her any good news these days.
The Prime Minister frowned as one of her AWP’s – a robust, crisply uniformed Royal Marine - followed the two visitors into her rooms carrying a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder. There was nowhere to put the device other than on the floor adjacent to the nearest available electric wall socket. The Marine snapped to attention, careful not to crash his booted feet on her somewhat moth eaten carpet, turned and marched out.
“What’s happened now?” The Prime Minister inquired briskly, and then mellowed. “I’m dreadfully disorganised, what with the move. I can’t even offer you gentlemen a cup of tea at the moment, I do apologise.”
Airey Neave glanced mischievously to his tall, elegant companion.
Sir Dick White, the Director General of the Security Services half-smiled and turned to Margaret Thatcher.
“We thought you would like to hear the latest intelligence from the de-briefing of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Prime Minister.”
“Oh, I thought we’d locked that horrible little man away in Scotland for the duration, Dick?” The woman queried, waving her visitors to take seats in the pool of evening sunshine dustily filtering into her ‘meeting room’. There was a long table in the shadows, but beneath the window there were several comfortable chairs close to a cold hearth.
“That’s what we hoped he’d think, too,” Airey Neave chortled.
“We knew he wouldn’t tell us everything he knew,” Dick White went on. “In retrospect I think the decision not to employ ‘coercive’ measures against him was wise.”
Trouble touched the Prime Minister’s eyes for a moment; one of the IRA men responsible for the Brize Norton atrocity in April had died whilst under interrogation. He and his two associates had ‘broken’, told their torturers everything they knew; thankfully absolving senior Irish Government ministers and officials of all responsibility and thus making it possible to actively consider some relaxation of the UAUK’s initially harsh sanctions against the Irish Republic. Nevertheless, that man’s blood was on her hands and one day his name would no doubt be added to the growing pantheon of Irish Republican Army martyrs.
Margaret Thatcher had been a little shocked that the subject of ‘coercion’ had even been raised in the case of a half-dead, one-legged shipwreck survivor but then they lived in very strange times.
“We had Nicolae and his lady friend, Eleni, installed with the other ‘incurables’ up at Inverailort. I went up there and spun him a line about how much the Americans would love to have a chat with him and he swallowed it hook line and sinker,” the Spymaster reported. “Anyway, we brought Nicolae and Eleni down to a safe house in Hereford and produced a couple of CIA men. Nicolae was unde
r the impression he was straight off to the US but my tame CIA men put him right on a few things, just to soften him up. They sold him the line that they thought he had been leading us up the garden path and that frankly, they did not think he was a big enough fish to justify the ‘gas to fly him back to Langley’.”
Margaret Thatcher checked to confirm that she understood what her spymaster was telling her.
“Your CIA men, Dick?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. A couple of Americans on our payroll we recruited in Berlin a few years ago after they ran into a little trouble with their own people over some rather embarrassing smuggling allegations. They were well and truly ‘blown’ with their own people so it was a case of working for us or having to face the music back home. Anyway, we’re still putting together a full report of the two sessions they had with Nicolae but we thought you’d like to hear one or two of the juiciest ‘edits’. To give you a flavour of some of the gems Comrade Ceaușescu served up in the belief that they would get him and his lady friend on the next flight to America.”
The tall man rose and went to the tape machine, clicked a switch.
‘Nicolae,’ a man with a gravelly Bronx accent growled through the static background hiss. ‘We’re not here to pussy foot around. My boss in Langley wants to know if he’s being sold a line by the Brits. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve seen the transcripts the Brits have handed over but all that’s about Red Dawn in the Eastern Mediterranean, or what was about to happen in Iran two months ago. You didn’t tell the Brits about Tehran? That would have been a clincher. But if you didn’t know about Tehran, what the fuck did you know about? The way I see it the Brits have lost interest in you. If you want us to help you, well, you’ve got to tell us something we don’t already know.’
There was a crackling, whispering silence that went on and on and on for what seemed like minutes but must only have been only ten to fifteen seconds.
‘Bucharest, or to be more accurate,’ Nicolae Ceaușescu said slowly, as if he was feeling for the right words, ‘Atopeni Air Base, was used by the Russians to clandestinely fly supplies and personnel to Western Europe. In the beginning there were flights to Germany and Austria, but not so many by the end. Most of the flights were to southern France and to Corsica. There was a continual traffic in men and mainly light weapons in both directions right up until the last few days in February. Many of the western leaders of Krasnaya Zarya had been in exile in the Soviet Union before the Cuban Missiles War,’ the man paused, gasped what might have been a laugh, ‘in prison, obviously, or in mental hospitals where most of them deserve to be. The war changed everything. The mad dogs were unleashed.’
‘The mad dogs?’ This was a different, Ivy League Bostonian accent, cutting into the interrogation.
‘I only know what that KGB stooge Andropov told us. Before then we’d only suspected what was going on; once Andropov started singing everything suddenly made sense....’
There was a new hissing, clicking interlude.
Dick White spoke quickly to fill the void.
“Nicolae reeled off a long list badly pronounced aliases, dates, places and so forth which will take a long time to decipher. My men brushed all that aside at the time so as to not let the little scoundrel take over the interview.”
‘...The Collective Leadership, the Troika back in Russia lost control of Krasnaya Zarya so it did what Russians always do when they lose control of a thing, they turn on it like wolves and tear it limb from limb. Red Dawn, as you call it, had become a bigger threat to the Soviet Union than the West; capable, some feared of turning what remained of the Motherland’s nuclear arsenal against itself. Even now the Soviets only have tenuous footholds in Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Anatolia, they actually control little or nothing, Krasnaya Zarya controls the mountains, the hinterland of Asia Minor, and the forests of Transylvania. But that doesn’t matter, the Red Army controls the banks of the Bosphorus, Red Navy submarines control the Aegean and the Black Sea; Krasnaya Zarya stands between the West and any realistic prospect of reintegrating anything between Italy and Syria back into its sphere of influence. Central Europe is a depopulated wasteland; Krasnaya Zarya guards the ground to the south and when the Red Army stands on the shores of the Persian Gulf the Russians will be safe as if behind a great wall. And they will have their hands on seventy percent of the World’s oil...’
‘Most of that is schoolboy speculation and surmise, Nicolae,’ the educated voice interjected urbanely. “What do you know that we don’t know?’
There was a pause of about five seconds.
‘In the south of France the Front Internationale, the faction that Krasnaya Zarya infiltrated and took over after the Cuban Missiles War is nominally under the control of a man called Jacques Duclos but the real power, behind the throne as the British say, may be a Krasnaya Zarya apparatchik called Maxim Machenaud. He was trained by the man you know as Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, one of whose aliases I borrowed to escape from my enemies after I was forced to flee from Bucharest. Duclos was Stalin’s man in the French Communist Party, and after Stalin, he was Khrushchev’s puppet.’
It was apparent that the interrogator had had no interest in Jacques Duclos; presumably because it was a name he was already familiar with. He moved past the subject of the French ‘leader’.
‘Maxim Machenaud?’
‘The man is a fanatic. His father fought with the Marquis, the French Resistance. He was a communist, one of the many communist freedom fighters that hypocrite Churchill sold out to the Nazis to curry favour with de Gaulle’s Free French in 1944. His fifteen year old sister was raped and murdered by Nazi collaborators a fortnight after D-Day, his older brother was executed in Paris by the Gestapo two days before the city was liberated, and his mother died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in January 1945, probably of starvation and typhoid.’
‘Okay, so the guy’s got a beef against the Brits?’ The Bronx-accented phoney CIA man asked impatiently. ‘A lot of people have got a beef against the Brits! So what?’
‘Around the beginning of the year the Soviets suspended shipments of arms to the Front Internationale. Partly, this was because of an acute shortage of long-range transport aircraft, but also I think it was because Machenaud was making increasingly onerous demands. He wanted nuclear warheads, for example. Not bombs or missiles, just warheads; presumably to load onto fishing boats to sail into English ports. Anyway, around the time Bucharest was destroyed I learned that the KGB was talking to the Front Internationale about ‘diversionary operations’ in the Western Mediterranean. The larger part of the French Navy in the Mediterranean was wiped out, more or less, by the strikes on Marseilles and Toulon and although the surviving fleet receives a trickle of oil from North Africa and from a refinery in Genoa, the ships that remain have been forced to stay in port most of the time due to a shortage of fuel. The deal was that the Red Air Force would fly gold bullion into Italy to buy oil, and the French Navy, or rather the ships based in Corsica would attack the British. The quid pro quo was that the KGB would undertake to start flying in weapons and Spetsnaz detachments to help the Front Internationale push back the ‘armed bands’ threatening the eastern and northern borders of the area under its control. Machenaud controls practically all the undamaged territory of France south of the line Nantes-Tours-Dijon-Besancon but the eastern border with Germany and Switzerland is almost completely porous. The eastern border of the Front Internationale’s territory is more or less the north to south line of Besancon-Grenoble-Nice. The local chieftains in and around Toulon and Marseilles already act independently of Machenaud and his followers in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, and to all intents these two ‘factions’ of Krasnaya Zarya might by now be physically separated by elements coming into southern France from the east...’
‘What elements?’
‘I don’t know. Andropov said the bandits were survivors of American and British armed forces and their civilian camp followers.’
‘And these armed grou
ps are powerful enough to push back the Front Internationale?’
‘In some places, yes; or at least that was what my people were telling me in the weeks before Bucharest was bombed.’
Chapter 25
Tuesday 16th June 1964
Headquarters of Army Group South, Baghdad, Iraq
Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had spent much of the previous twenty-four hours helpless in his sick bed, wracked with agonizing spasms that set his guts on fire every few minutes. Never a man prone to putting on weight he had lost nearly ten kilos during the campaign, his ribs were starting to stick out and he felt weak all the time. This was his second debilitating bout of dysentery; everybody in Baghdad had the runs from the bad water, and was worn down by fevers and bites, boils and ulcers caused by the clouds of insects, and the dirt and the physical wear and tear of continually being on the move along crumbling roads and over rough ground. During the day the temperatures in the open were forty to fifty degrees Celsius, and if the skies cleared at night the temperatures plummeted, and men awakened – if they could sleep at all – as if their bones were filled with ice.
He hated this country.
He hated an enemy who would not stand and fight.
The Iraqi Army had evaporated into the deserts that flanked the broad marshy flood plains of the Euphrates in the west and the Tigris in the east. Whole units had abandoned their vehicles on the side of the road, thrown their uniforms on the ground, picked up their rifles and disappeared into the endless marshlands, or gone home, melting into the anonymous, sullen-faced populations of the towns and cities Babadzhanian’s mechanized divisions had driven through on the way south.