by James Philip
In between the first summit beyond the Urals and the preparatory bickering between lower-level officials in the meantime over a period of the last two months in Malta, further accommodations and concessions had been granted, mainly by the US side at the expense of its former, now devastated allies, without a great deal of thought – or none at all - being given to what Tony Kershaw regarded as legitimate British interests in the Mediterranean.
However, to the Russians and the Americans, the addition of a handful of ad hoc straightened or continuation lines into the Alps and elsewhere, just to ‘tidy things up a little’, seemed a logical corollary to their ‘historic’ agreement to unilaterally demilitarize – in perpetuity – over one hundred and seventy thousand square miles of Central Europe, of which approximately forty percent had been sparsely populated before October 1962, and was largely mountainous but included several north-south key strategic passes.
Inevitably, with such a botched together ‘accord’ the part of the final document detailing the implementation of the settlement, was woolly in the extreme.
For example, the Red Army and Air Force was required to vacate its bases west of the Vistula not later than 31st December 1968; but since no observers were authorised to enter the DMZ prior to that date, a great deal was going to have to be taken on trust. Problematically, for the US side the important date was 5th November 1968, the date of the election. And this consideration had been the Nixon Administration’s dominant foreign policy guiding star, not the future peace of Europe.
Lord Hull and Tony Kershaw had been witnesses to history that day, divorced from decision and responsibility, bit players as the two leaders posed for the photographers and for the mainly American TV cameras, with the stunning backdrop of the Grand Harbour at their backs.
The two Englishmen had made small talk with US Secretary of State, Bill Rogers. None of Alexander Shelepin’s supporting cast had talked to anybody outside their own delegation and the two men had eyed the prowling, surly KGB and Red Army security men treating the British troops around them with contempt.
Four years ago, British and Commonwealth troops and their Soviet counterparts and proxies had been killing each other on battlefields from Malta to the Persian Gulf; now they were just exchanging dirty looks.
That at least, was a step forward of sorts.
The Soviet Leader was first to the microphones to make his valedictory remarks after the leaders had initialled their joint ‘accord’.
Alexander Shelepin’s interpreter, a bulky man in the uniform of a Second Captain in the Red Navy translated at the end of each sentence.
“On this island which has been fought over by so many nations for so many centuries, it is fitting that the two great powers should meet to make a new peace.”
The translator’s voice was loud, harsh and his delivery without nuance, a blank succession of words with little or no rhythm other than that of a staccato rat-ta-tat. The man might have been reading a telephone directory.
“The leadership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wishes to pay tribute to the statesmanship of President Nixon in setting aside domestic and external political considerations to look to his global responsibilities.”
President Nixon, looking more relaxed than he had done in public that summer, nodded solemnly as if his co-signatory had just read a pronouncement off a tablet of stone he had just brought down from the mountains where the gods lived.
“We decry the negative attitudes of other Western nations to the ongoing peace process. Respectfully, we suggest that other nations, particularly those who attacked the Soviet Union in October 1962, and who have continued to wage aggressive war against the Soviet people in the months and years since, follow the example of the United States and turn their minds to reconciliation and restitution.”
Richard Nixon’s face froze for a moment.
There was no word in the Valletta Accords which meant ‘restitution’, nor was there any mention of anything which might have been construed, or interpreted as an expression of culpability, or of any discussion of compensation for war damage.
Behind his President, Secretary of State Rogers stood like a statue, his expression fixed as if in granite, and US National Security Advisor Gordon Gray shook his head.
Anthony Kershaw, on the other hand, allowed himself a quietly reflective sigh but did not bother to try to make eye contact with any of his American allies. He strongly suspected that right now, Doctor Henry Kissinger, whom he wished he knew better than he did, was probably bouncing off the walls of his Harvard apartment.
For the last year the Nixon Administration’s number one foreign policy goal had been to make peace; unfortunately, with the wrong enemy because that was the path which offered the line of least resistance. The Soviet Union was beaten, pragmatically, Alexander Shelepin ought to have come begging to the peace table – that was exactly how many people interpreted his coded initiative at the San Francisco re-dedication of the United Nations in February 1967 – and yet the US Government had pro-actively courted the Troika, accompanied by a public relations, gratuitously electioneering Federally paid for, publicity campaign at home.
One does not rush to make peace with a beaten enemy.
One especially does not do it when there is still a very, very real potential enemy ‘out there’ – granted not an enemy with nuclear weapons, not yet – with whom rationally, one could actually make a meaningful peace that caged in the Soviets more effectively, for longer, than the Valletta Accords which in fact, simply traded somebody else’s territory for the greater good of the American Commonwealth.
Yes, the Continental Central European De-Militarised Zone did ‘block’ one avenue of Soviet expansion in Europe but that had only mattered when it looked like France was lost, and by its loss to the Communists, Spain and Portugal were also threatened. France had not been lost; British intervention had tipped the balance against Moscow’s surrogates and democracy had been returned to that strategically vital, sorely ravaged land. Afterwards, the Soviets had had nowhere left to go in Western Europe. But that had never really been the game that mattered; for the Sverdlovsk Kremlin the game had always been about the domination of the undamaged parts of the Balkans, Greece, Rumania and Bulgaria and the vast chaotic disaster area that had been Turkey before October 1962.
The Valletta Accords did nothing to curb future Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, or Anatolia. Inf fact, it specifically left the Soviets free to carry on building their Black Sea and Adriatic empires, turning the map red from the shores of the former to the western coast of the latter, while all the time rebuilding the industrial cities of the interior behind the Urals. In time, the new USSR would threaten Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran again, and only the Himalayas would stand between it and Pakistan and northern India. Moscow, Leningrad, the Ukraine and the Baltic Republics might be gone but the surviving fragments of the old Soviet Union, fractured by Strategic Air Command was again a contiguous geographic, economic and cultural entity stretching from the Urals to the Pacific, and courtesy of the half-baked minds behind the Valletta Accords, the Nixon Administration had implicitly undertaken – presumably in a secret protocol agreed between the two leaders - to neuter Alexander Shelepin’s rival in the East, the People’s Republic of China.
Kershaw thought it was idiocy.
British foreign policy for the best part of two centuries up until 1939 had been to maintain the balance of power in Europe, to never allow one country to become dominant, all-powerful, essentially by always supporting the weaker country or alliance in any major continental war. Clearly, the real threat to the West remained the defeated, but still nuclear-armed USSR. From which, logically, it followed that it was in the United States’ vital strategic interests to have held out the hand of friendship to the Chinese, done some kind of face-saving deal with the Chongqing regime over the Nationalist rump on Taiwan, and made damned sure the Russians had too much to worry about on their south-eastern border to ever again
– certainly not for a generation, ideally two or three – be in any kind of position to threaten the stability of the western democracies.
Margaret Thatcher had tried to have this, and related conversations with the White House. Regrettably, it was not a conversation the incumbent had wanted to have, even, it seemed with the dissenters in his own camp.
Thus, as the Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs listened to the speeches he was beset by an odd feeling of déjà vu.
Truly, it was as if nobody had learned anything in the last six years.
Chapter 49
Tuesday 23rd July, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
The Amerikanskaya Mechta trundled down the main runway and laboured into the air about five minutes after the 182nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment’s only other airworthy Tu-95K, the Murmanskiy Ekspress – Murmansk Express – had climbed away to the north. Presently, two other aircraft were being hurriedly (sometime in the next two to three weeks was a big hurry for the Red Air Force’s once proud strategic bomber forces) assessed for their fitness, rather than preparedness, to re-take to the air. But that was it, just four bombers, a fifth having had to be written off for want of spare parts and a defect list that read like, and was as long – and in engineering terms, as melodramatic - as an old Russian novel.
Notwithstanding both Tu-95s were departing on no more than extended flight tests, with planned durations of less than two hours, one of Major Andrei Kirov’s men was on duty in each. Because that was the way things were done at Seryshevo, these days.
The KGB man had come out to watch the take-offs.
The sound and fury of the leviathans thundering down the runway always dragged a good crowd out of offices, hangars and messes, and briefly halted routine chores around the base. Within a mile of one of the aircraft, windows rattled and one could feel the distant shock waves of the great, multi-bladed contra-rotating propellers slicing through the air.
Andrei had seen the Commandant’s car approaching, heard the squeal of its brakes somewhere behind him; and guessed that today was the day Major General Vladimir Zakharov might attempt his enmeshment in his inescapable spider’s web of betrayal.
“I thought I’d find you out here,” the older man declared, his manner friendly. He was smoking a vile Turkish cigarette. His chain smoking was, of late, the only sign the man was under pressure, touched at all by the insane conspiracy circling around him. “Seeing our girl off on her latest mission.”
Kirov towered above the newcomer, at least a dozen centimetres taller and even without his winter coats, twice as broad as the wiry, tanned base commander.
“At this time of year, a Tu-95 needs another five to six hundred metres to safely take-off, Comrade Commissar,” Zakharov remarked. “Warm air is thinner than cold air, you see. Obviously, that’s not a problem today, neither of our aircraft is carrying live bombs, or anywhere near to a full fuel load so they are well over twenty tons light. Still, it will do the crews good to spend time in the air, do you not think?”
Andrei Kirov half-turned.
Since that night Olga had come to his dacha disguised as one of the local prostitutes, she had done her best to avoid him. Twice, she had walked out of the bar of the Officers’ Mess when he walked in; she had the ice maiden act down to a nicety.
Initially, he had not believed a word of her outlandish claim to be involved in a monstrous plot at Seryshevo designed to drag the USSR back into a war with the Americans.
It was too bizarre.
Totally implausible.
And yet from that moment onwards there had been an insidious canker of doubt, roiling in his guts.
That night at the dacha he had been too distracted making a complete pig of himself with her to worry overmuch about it. He had told himself it was just some twisted, feminine mind game – Olga had been through a lot of bad shit - or just about sex but in the cold light of day the next morning, unable to convince himself that he had dreamed the whole episode, he had begun to wonder…
Her story was bollocks, wasn’t it?
Vladimir Zakharov had a well-earned reputation for playing politics, for being a maverick. He had got away with it because he was a gold-plated war hero and most important, a born survivor. Andrei had no problem accepting the thesis that the man had finally pushed too many people – possibly, exactly the wrong people - too far, and that his enemies wanted him out of the way. It was not as if the Red Air Force was blessed with an overlarge cadre of ‘great men’, somebody like Zakharov was a wild card who might at any time magically bypass the rest of the pack and re-appear near the top of the tree. But the idea that the man was in some way the mastermind behind a plot to mount a rogue nuclear strike on the American colossus because the Motherland had signed a peace treaty with the Yanks at Malta, was well, absurd.
Olga had decreed that he and she could not risk being caught together, or suspected of having renewed their affair. Given that he was already a condemned man, partly because of that liaison, he did not care. It was as well to be hung for a rouble as a kopek. However, she had been insistent; it took two to tango, so there was not a lot he could do about it.
‘I can’t go on with an affair with a man who does not trust me!’
Which was a bit rich; it was not as if he had had to rape her or anything after he got back from Vladivostok!
The older man said nothing for some minutes as they watched the two great bombers climbing into the low clouds.
“That,” Vladimir Zakharov said, moving to stand directly to the big man’s left side, “is one of the reasons we can’t mount Operation Sudnyy Den until the autumn.”
Operation Judgement Day…
“What?” The KGB man grunted, as if irritated to be distracted from watching the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s stately ascent into the distant clouds, without wholly registering what the other man had said to him. “What’s that about…”
Vladimir Zakharov ignored his question.
“My enemies want my blood, Andrei,” he said phlegmatically. “They thought that sending me out here would shut me up; make their problem go away. Once they decided I wasn’t going to go away, they started remembering that I was one of the ones who knows where all the bodies – metaphorically, you understand – are buried. They starved Seryshevo of resources, sent me a bunch of outcasts and transferred out all my best people. Well, most of them. I’m not letting the bastards take Olga, or Dmitry Akimov or any of the other old Tu-95 hands away from me. Nonetheless, this place was run down to a shadow of its former glory by the time I arrived. Now, they’ll blame me for allowing the aircraft left here to rot, for everything that has been neglected and allowed to go to Hell at Seryshevo. I know that, they know that, that is why they think they’ve got me where they want me.”
The younger man shrugged.
“Shit happens, Comrade Major General,” he said unsympathetically.
This amused the older man.
“The KGB is like the Air Force,” Zakharov grinned predatorially. “Both empires have shrunk to a fraction of their pre-October 1962 sizes, and therefore, competition for the dwindling number of glittering prizes has become ever-more bitter. You and I might easily be working side by side in a labour battalion this time next year. Always assuming, we’re still alive, that is.”
Andrei Kirov could feel the hairs standing up, electrically, on the back of his neck. At the same time a cold hand seemed to be closing around his heart.
“Operation Judgement Day?” He murmured. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
The other man nodded.
“Neither of us has got anything to lose, Andrei. We will not be betraying our country. How could that be; our country has already betrayed us. Us and countless tens of millions of our brothers and sisters. And now the great men of the new Politburo have made peace with the Americans. How can our dead ever rest easy?”
Everything Olga had told him flooded back.
Andrei felt physically sick.
“What are you telling me?” He demanded.
“That it is our sacred duty to make the Yankees bleed again; and that here at Seryshevo, we have the tools for the job.”
Andrei turned to face the shorter man.
Nobody was within earshot, the others nearby had dissolved into groups, chatting, smoking.
He gritted his teeth: “You know I won’t let you get away with it?”
“No, I don’t know that.”
Andrei Kirov had no idea what he was supposed to say. Wisely, he held his piece.
Yesterday, he had sent the first encoded report on Zakharov to Vladivostok.
Security at the base was lax.
Money allocated to runway repairs had been spent on building new, and repairing old dachas for senior officers.
A blind eye was routinely turned to ‘improper’ relations between commissioned and enlisted personnel.
Local prostitutes regularly bribed guards at the gates to gain entry to the base.
On and on, tittle tattle, gossip, none of it reflecting credit on the man in command…
“Even if you told your boss in Vladivostok,” Zakharov speculated, “that you’d uncovered a huge conspiracy, and that I was personally directing the planning for an unauthorised nuclear strike mission; how would that help you?”
It would not help.
Not one little bit.
Nobody higher up the chain of command wanted to hear a story like that. Such was the Soviet way; the messenger always got it in the neck. It would be simpler by far for Comrade First Secretary Kryuchkov to have him quietly disappeared, and thereafter, to quietly investigate what exactly was going on at Seryshevo.