The Whitehall Mandarin

by Edward Wilson

  The American nodded.

  ‘It must have been a very impressive fire-fight. It was the only time in history that two Western intelligence services faced each other in open combat. Savani’s SDECE colleagues fought side by side with Vietnamese river pirates, dealers, pimps and a handful of Corsican mafia flown in especially for the event. But somehow the CIA and the Ngo family prevailed. It must have been your finest hour; pity you weren’t there. I wonder if CIA called in some Chicago mafia to help? In the end, there were more than five hundred dead. Ngo Dinh Diem was the best Vietnamese leader you guys ever put in the ring. You shouldn’t have had him murdered.’ Catesby paused and looked at the American. ‘Were you part of that?’

  The CIA man stared through Catesby, his eyes like cold blue bullets.

  ‘I’m sure the gangsters you replaced Diem with also have their merits, but I’m not sure that fighting to the death is one of them. Still, I’m not here to lecture, I’m here to do a deal. Warning you about Antoine Savani is a friendly service – take it as such.’

  The American’s eyes softened.

  ‘As Savani and his river pirates fought a rearguard action in the tangled mangroves of the Rung Sat Swamp he offered a reward for the head of Lansdale, the CIA chief of station. Not just his head; he wanted Lansdale’s body gutted and filled with dirt – and his sex organs shoved down his throat. Take care, my friend, for Savani’s contract may now have your name on it.’

  The American sat back. ‘How the fuck do you know this stuff?’

  ‘I dug it up while I was investigating the article you just paid me to spike.’

  ‘I haven’t paid you to do anything – and don’t you forget it.’

  It was turning into a ‘through the looking glass’ conversation, but Catesby played along. ‘Sure, I must have been mistaken.’

  ‘And now I want to give you some help – concerning a matter of mutual interest. That camera of yours is too big.’ The CIA man was referring to the .35mm Nikon Catesby carried in a bag as part of his journalist cover. ‘It’s too conspicuous.’ CIA opened a drawer and took out what looked like an Olympus Pen Double E camera. ‘It’s smaller, but you get only three shots – and they’re just .22 calibre rounds. It’s best to aim straight into an eye.’

  Catesby picked up the camera and looked at the American through the viewfinder: ‘Bang.’ He shook the camera and put it down on the table. ‘Shit, it wasn’t loaded.’

  ‘I bet you were the class clown at Eton.’

  ‘How did you know I went to Eton?’

  ‘Because all Limey assholes go to Eton.’

  Catesby laughed. ‘Well, you certainly got that one right.’

  The American looked back in the drawer and picked up three cartridges. ‘Here, you’ll need some rounds. And here.’ He scooped in the drawer again. ‘Have three more. You ought to practise using it before you go.’

  Catesby put the camera and bullets in the pocket with the banknotes. It was quite a haul. ‘Who do you want me to kill?’

  ‘First on the list is Lopez. He’s worth 40,000 more gringo dollars. And you’ll need a real camera too, because we’d like to see some photos showing his sorry-ass dead body.’

  ‘Like Che in Bolivia?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘You ask too many fucking questions.’

  ‘And who’s next on the list?’

  ‘Burchett. But he’s only worth 20,000 bucks – hey, but maybe you ought to ask your colonial friends in Canberra to throw in some Australian bucks if you nail his entrails to a tree.’

  Catesby was impressed. The American actually knew the capital of Australia. ‘And what about the third bullet?’

  ‘Just take out the highest-ranking gook you can find and submit an invoice.’

  Catesby frowned. ‘But I’ve got to get there first.’

  ‘Your itinerary begins with a flight from Long Binh airfield. You can get a lift there on the embassy bus. Then you need to find your way to the northern sector – that’s where Special Forces send all their crazies, like Lopez, the ones they don’t want to see again. The person who will point you in the right direction is Bucksport the Sailor. He’ll love you.’

  »»»»

  Catesby was the only round-eye on the embassy bus. It was used for transporting the Vietnamese cleaners and cooks. Catesby sat next to a shy young woman who hid her face behind long silky hair. The driver went out of his way to drop Catesby at the Long Binh base. The bus wasn’t, however, allowed through the gate. Since being attacked during the Tet Offensive, ‘indigenous personnel’, usually called indigs or slope-heads or gooks, were not allowed on the base unless they had a special pass and a round-eye to vouch for them. But Catesby wasn’t high-status enough to do the vouching.

  Catesby’s trip north began with a C-130 flight to the base at Cam Ranh Bay. All the other passengers packed into the cargo plane were replacement soldiers wearing green fatigues that were crisp and still unbleached by the sun. They looked tired, confused and resigned to being herded from place to place. At Cam Ranh, Catesby was picked up by a three-quarter-ton truck with 5th SFGA stencilled on the bumpers. Catesby could see that the soldiers on this truck were a different breed from the young livestock on the plane. They were older, harder and wore twisted cynical smiles under their green berets. The truck followed the coast road for thirty miles to the Special Forces headquarters at Nha Trang. No one spoke to Catesby – and they didn’t say much to each other either. A sergeant sitting opposite Catesby drank can after can of beer with slow deliberation. At one point, he stood up and hurled a half-empty can at a Vietnamese woman walking beside the road with baskets balanced on both ends of a stick, shouting ‘Have a drink on me, slopehead.’

  When they got to Nha Trang a captain with a clipboard ticked off the names of the replacements. When they had dispersed, the captain came over to Catesby. ‘Slimeball said to be expecting you.’

  Catesby assumed Slime-ball was the CIA officer.

  ‘He says I’ve got to put you on a Blackbird heading up to the SOG FOB. You’ll be sharing the plane with a load of CCN replacements. Don’t talk to them – and don’t go with them when you get to Da Nang. Someone from C Company will pick you up. Got that?’

  Catesby nodded. The very earth of the 5th SFGA compound oozed testosterone. They were headed for Command and Control North, the Forward Operating Base for the Studies and Observations Group unit that operated illegally in Laos.

  The Blackbird was a C-123 painted with dark night-operation camouflage. There were no identification markings, as if that would disguise the plane’s origins if it went down in a place where it shouldn’t be. The eight replacements wore jungle hats dyed black instead of berets. They were very quiet. Catesby sensed an aura of death so intense that their bodies seemed already to swell and putrefy.

  It was dark when the plane arrived at the huge airbase south of Da Nang. The officer sent to fetch Catesby had a brief chat with one of the CCN black hats, then motioned that Catesby follow him to a jeep.

  ‘I used to be with them before I got wounded, but now I’ve got a Mickey Mouse job at the C Team.’

  ‘Not badly wounded, I hope.’

  ‘Bad enough. You’re British?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘One of my cousins is the Duke of Edinburgh – on my mother’s side. She’s Greek.’

  ‘Can you speak Greek?’

  The officer launched into Greek and sounded very fluent, but Catesby didn’t know the language so he couldn’t judge. ‘Have you ever met the Duke of Edinburgh?’ asked Catesby.

  ‘No, but my mother has. She’s from Corfu.’

  Once again, Catesby felt as if he had stepped through the looking glass.

  »»»»

  Bucksport the Sailor was actually a lieutenant colonel commanding the C Team on China Beach and all the Special Forces camps in I Corps. The colonel bore an uncanny resemblance to Humphrey Bogart and had a similar voice and manner. Catesby and Buck
sport were sitting in the commanding officer’s quarters, which were sparsely furnished. The only decoration was a framed watercolour of an oil tanker on the plywood wall. Bucksport pointed to it.

  ‘That was my ship. She was torpedoed on the Murmansk run in early ’42. Only two of us survived.’

  ‘Is that why they call you Bucksport the Sailor?’

  ‘It’s also because I come from a place called Bucksport in Maine, a tiny place on the Penobscot River. Can I top up your whisky?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The room was dark. The only light was a desk lamp pointed at the lower wall.

  ‘There wasn’t much to do in Bucksport other than go to sea. I went when I was fourteen. I’ve been all over your country: Liverpool, Glasgow, Portsmouth, London. I liked it.’ The colonel paused. ‘Listen. Can you hear the sea?’

  It was a quiet night, but the compound was practically built on the beach. Catesby listened and could just detect the surf murmur of the South China Sea. ‘Yes.’

  ‘After getting torpedoed, I decided I’d had enough of being a sailor so I joined the Marines. That was a mistake, but at least all the bad things that happened to me happened on land. The worst was Tarawa, but I survived. Forgive my being so talkative.’ The colonel looked at Catesby. ‘But there is a reason for it.’

  Catesby nodded and kept eye contact. He didn’t know what to say. Bucksport wasn’t completely mad, but it was obvious that he had lost a few marbles. At least, thought Catesby, he knew the marbles were missing and was willing to look for them.

  ‘I think,’ said Bucksport, ‘they are sending you to me as a provocation. And if you understand who I am you might understand what they are trying to do.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  ‘Everything that is brainless, pointless and evil about this war.’

  Maybe, thought Catesby, he wasn’t mad at all; in fact, he could be the first sane American he had met. But that must make you pretty lonely in the asylum. Catesby felt comfortable with Bucksport. The American was another working-class kid, a wharf rat like himself, from the other side of the Atlantic. And the two of them had risen to some rank in the business of killing and spying.

  ‘You need more whisky,’ said the colonel, ‘and so do I. It’s Canadian rye.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘They patched me up and sent me back for more. After the Japanese surrendered, I came back to the States and married my childhood sweetheart. I had changed, but she understood that. I got a job as an insurance salesman in Bucksport, but I wasn’t any good at it and began to drink too much.

  ‘When Korea came along I joined up with the Marines again. They were desperate and made me – a kid who left school at fourteen – an officer. In December 1950 we were sent up north to the Chosin River. Things were going fine until the Red Chinese Army crossed the Yalu River, but the biggest enemy was the cold. It got down to minus 37 degrees Fahrenheit. It was so cold the medics had to put morphine syrettes into their mouths to defrost the morphine before they could inject it into the screaming wounded – and frozen plasma was, of course, useless. Our weapons malfunctioned because the cold was so intense that the springs on the firing pins would not strike hard enough to fire the round.’

  Catesby sipped the rye whisky. He knew that Bucksport’s story was part of a pattern. But you had to ignore the human suffering to see where the dots connected.

  ‘Most of my platoon died of cold when we were cut off during the retreat. Not a glorious way to die. When the Chinese overran our position I hid myself beneath a pile of my marines’ bodies. But they dug me out and found me.’ The colonel laughed. ‘Not a glorious way to be captured. I was a PoW for nearly three years and that was an education too.’ The colonel refilled both glasses and looked at Catesby.

  ‘What did it teach you?’

  ‘It taught me that heroism only works on the day and only if your side is lucky and you win. The first few months were pretty bad. We were in a camp run by the North Koreans. More than half the Americans in my barracks died of frostbite or disease. No medicines, little food. I had dysentery, scurvy and was covered in lice. Yeah, I know the joke – but otherwise I was fine. Then we were sent to a Chinese camp and things were much better. They dressed us in Chinese quilted uniforms, which were warmer than our American ones. The food wasn’t bad and when the weather got better they even gave us baseballs and basketballs so we could exercise. Naturally, there was a reason for all this better treatment – and the reason was what they were telling us in the daily political lectures. Not exactly brainwashing, but it was indoctrination – sometimes very subtle. I didn’t resist, but didn’t succumb either.’ The colonel smiled and looked at the warm amber glow of his whisky. ‘But your man did.’

  An alarm bell went off in Catesby’s brain. He knew exactly who Bucksport was talking about. ‘I didn’t know I had a man in Korea.’

  Bucksport gave Catesby a searching stare. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know him. He was an Englishman like you.’

  Catesby winced. ‘An Englishman like you’ was uncomfortably close to the mark. He had known the PoW turned Soviet spy very well. They had worked together in Berlin and sometimes chatted in Nederlands, their common language. That was a mistake because it aroused the suspicions of their SIS colleagues. Years later, after the spy was uncovered, Catesby had been submitted to long hours of interrogation. In retrospect, he wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t spotted his colleague’s treachery. He had always been so honest, so sincere and morally earnest. But maybe that was what had turned him.

  Bucksport wasn’t going to let Catesby off. ‘You must have known him. You’re a journalist and it was in all the papers.’

  ‘Of course I knew about him. But I thought you were asking if I knew him personally.’

  Bucksport looked shifty. ‘I must have been misinformed.’

  ‘Who informed you?’

  ‘I run the best network in Southeast Asia and that’s why they’re out to get me.’

  Catesby shrugged. He was sure they would come back to that later. ‘You were talking about indoctrination sessions?’

  ‘It wasn’t just Red Chinese indoctrination. There was a Catholic priest in our PoW camp who was a professor before he became a chaplain. He used to give lessons about books to educate us ignoramuses – and the guards didn’t stop him. One of the books he talked about was by Cardinal Newman, an Englishman. The book was called Apologia Pro Vita Sua. I didn’t much like the book, but I liked the title. Of course, I never learned Latin. The priest told me the title meant “a defence of my own life” – well, I thought, “an apology for my own life” would be a better one.’ Bucksport sipped his whisky and stared into the darkness. ‘That’s what I’m trying to give you, if you’ve got time to listen – and I won’t blame you if you don’t. An apology for my life.’

  ‘I’ve got the time.’

  ‘In the end, I got pretty bored with the priest’s lessons. It was all about angels fluttering around on top of a manure heap and arguing about whether it was bread and wine or an actual body they were eating. I, being a simple man, wanted to learn more about the manure heap. Why was it there and who owned it?’ Bucksport laughed. ‘I think the priest and his nonsense did a better job of making me see the Red Chinese point of view than the Chinese did. More whisky?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘You sound very hoity-toity with all this please and thank you. Your English spy friend would have called you bourgeois.’

  ‘He wasn’t my friend.’ Catesby smiled. The spy had, in fact, often called Catesby ‘bourgeois’. At the time, long before the spy’s arrest for treason, Catesby thought the bourgeois taunt was teasing. But now he saw he really meant it.

  The colonel topped up Catesby’s glass. ‘One day something odd happened at the camp. Things got a lot better – especially the cleanliness and the food. They seemed to want to clean us up and fatten us up too. Then we found out why. One day a bunch of photographers and reporters turned up. One
of them was an Australian called Wilfrid Burchett. Of course, we were grateful for the visit because it made things better. The Chinese even issued us swimming trunks and took us for a swim in the Yalu River. Propaganda stunt or not, it was good. Afterwards, Burchett interviewed a group of us and said the camp was “like a holiday resort in Switzerland”. I quickly put him right and told him about the months of lice and dysentery. The Chinese didn’t like that much. And Burchett, to be fair to him, apologised for the Swiss resort remark.’

  ‘Did the Chinese take it out on you?’

  ‘No, on the contrary; they made even more of an effort to convert me to the cause. I ended up assigned to a Marxist study group with that Englishman you never met – and found out he wasn’t an Englishman at all, but half Dutch and half Egyptian. But that, I suppose, made him an even better spy.’

  Catesby realised, once again, that if he hadn’t had a Belgian mother and learned languages he would never have become an intelligence officer. Spies were cosmopolitan.

  ‘And,’ said the colonel, ‘that’s where it all started to go wrong.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’m not a very good student. I don’t like being preached at.’ Bucksport paused. ‘And I was missing my wife. It happened during a talk about class structure. I must have looked bored and the Chinese group leader asked if I had fallen asleep. Nothing nasty, it was meant in good humour. But I turned nasty. I said, “I’m bored because you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. I was born into shit poverty in a shithole. My pay as a merchant seaman was stopped by the capitalist shipowners the minute my ship was sunk by a Nazi submarine. So don’t you tell me about capitalist oppression and inequality – I know more about it than any of you will ever know.” Then I shouted, “Now you’re oppressing me. Why don’t you send me home to my darling Harriet?” Then something must have snapped in me. I picked up the book we were studying and threw it at the Chinese leader. I regretted doing that. It knocked his glasses off and they broke. Pity – he wasn’t a bad person and couldn’t see a thing without his specs. I shouldn’t have done it.’ Bucksport stopped and looked at his whisky.