by James Philip
‘I will tell you that if the High Command of the Soviet Union thinks, for a single minute that we and our allies will sit back and allow the Red Army to invade and rape Iraq and Iran without exacting a terrible cost on it in terms of men, materiel and morale, it is tragically mistaken. It is the policy of my government to resist tyranny; and while I live we will never surrender. I say to the men in the new Kremlin – wherever that foul new incarnation may now be located in southern Russia – that no matter what ground your tanks seize we will never rest until you are expelled from it. You may defeat us in one battle, you may defeat us in many battles but we will never, ever give in. You are responsible for the abomination of Red Dawn, for the despicable use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt. You are criminals responsible for the obliteration of Tehran! After that atrocity I warned you that a further use of nuclear weapons would result in an all-out strike against your remaining centres of population. I have not yet received an unequivocal acknowledgement of this warning. I demand that the Soviet High Command provide such an unequivocal acknowledgement not later than midnight on 27th May, or face the consequences.’
Andropov waved to his man at the tape recorder.
The reels stopped turning.
The silence was instantly oppressive.
“Is that woman insane?” Andropov asked sourly.
Frank Waters had no idea why the second-in-command of the KGB was asking him that question. He had never met the woman in question and one simply did not discuss a lady in company; it just was not done. Was nothing sacred with these people?
The barbarians were at the gate!
“No, sir,” he said curtly.
“She talks about consequences? What consequences?”
Frank Waters chuckled. He could not help himself chuckling. Suddenly, he realised what he was doing in this bunker in Chelyabinsk and it more than somewhat tickled his sense of humour.
“Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich,” he explained, his words hastened by the knowledge that both the big KGB policemen were itching for an opportunity to kick him around the room. “For my sins I have had a fair bit of experience of how a lady tends to react when she belatedly discovers that she has been taken for a ride.”
Andropov’s broken face creased into a contorted frown of incomprehension.
It was time to speak plainly.
“I have never met the lady,” Frank Waters went on, struggling not to smirk, “but I rather suspect that the ‘consequences’ she has in mind are of the most violent imaginable kind.”
Chapter 37
Sunday 24th May 1964
United States Embassy, Oxford, England
Joanne Brenckmann did not think she had ever met a prospective Head of Station of British Intelligence before. Although, the more she thought about it she realised she could have met dozens of ‘spooks’ without ever knowing it. What made today’s encounter all the more surreal was that the woman in front of her seemed so ‘normal’, so ‘pleasant’ and on the face of it, ‘open’.
Unlike his wife the Ambassador was not in the least surprised that Rachel Piotrowska had decided to pay a ‘courtesy call’ on him prior to leaving for Philadelphia.
“My wife does not know what to make of your visit, Miss Piotrowska,” he smiled as his guest settled in an armchair in his private rooms. This was to be a ‘private consultation’ in the fine old tradition of such meetings.
Walter Brenckmann studied the woman over the rim of his coffee cup.
With her straw blond hair cut short like a man’s and wearing a tailored jacket over a man’s white shirt – top button undone - and grey slacks the shapely spy had made herself seem androgynous to casual observers. She wore no jewellery, scarcely any makeup.
“No?” Rachel smiled, her grey eyes gently amused. “Well,” she prefaced, looking to Joanne Brenckmann. “The United Kingdom’s relations with the United States are going through a rocky patch, there’s no denying that. But,” she shrugged apologetically, “if we’re not the best of allies at the moment we certainly aren’t any kind of enemies. More like two old friends who have had a bit of a falling out, that’s all.”
Her lilting accent was now that of a long time Polish exile; the Englishness of recent years was just a memory for she was not longer that person. Clara Pullman had died in Malta, Clara and each and every one of her former courtesan alter egos.
“I am not,” she went on, “going to Philadelphia to spy on America or Americans.” She was tempted to add ‘unlike that idiot the CIA have posted to Oxford who has already been caught twice trying to bribe civil servants at the Ministry of Defence’. A scheme was in hand to get him sent home; he was a menace. Dick White had in mind an entrapment exercise, a good old-fashioned scoop for the press in which the CIA man or one of his senior associates was found in bed with ‘inappropriate’ male or female company.
“Oh,” Joanne Brenckmann murmured, totally confused by Rachel’s apparent candour.
“I am going to Philadelphia to make sure that nothing is lost in translation between the Administration, its intelligence agencies and the UAUK. Granted, I will have certain responsibilities vis-à-vis the National Security Department desk at the Embassy in Philadelphia, and of course, I will be liaising with the various military attaches assigned to the Embassy. But I will not be recruiting ‘spies’ in America, and I will not be engaging in any activity inimical to the constitutional rights of American citizens.”
“You’ll be spending a lot of time on the cocktail party circuit then?” The Ambassador’s wife observed sympathetically.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Rachel agreed.
Joanne Brenckmann was starting to wonder what sort of country she and her husband would return to when their stint in England ended. They had only been away three months and yet things at home already seemed to have changed irrevocably for the worse.
It looked as if Jack Kennedy was going to sweep aside his opponents in the race to be re-nominated as the Democratic ‘runner’ for President; the Administration’s volte face, suddenly embracing America First as its battle cry shouting ‘let the British stand on their own two feet’ and declaring that America would have no part in defending ‘any part of the old British Empire’ had turned the tide and brought sections of the Democrat main stream back onboard the Kennedy bandwagon.
Richard Nixon, at one time the likely Republican candidate for the Presidency had been swept away – crushed between Jack Kennedy’s Damascene conversion to the ‘America First’ crusade and the rising tide of support for Nelson Rockefeller’s independent version of the isolationist bandwagon in the north and Governor George Wallace’s equally independent racist, segregationist very nearly secessionist brand of hellfire white supremacism in the south. John Cabot Lodge, that most honourable doyen of the Great Old Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower presently cut a sad figure; notwithstanding he looked a shoe-in for the Republican nomination he was already a no-hoper, running at below ten percent in national polls. People were already speculating that a Rockefeller-Wallace ‘America First’ or ‘Independent Republican’ or even ‘Independent Democrat’ ticket – however unlikely or outlandish it sounded – would almost certainly ‘walk into the White House’ on 4th November. If that happened Joanne knew that she and Walter would be on the next plane home and it would only be a matter of time, in the present political climate, before they were both hauled up before some newly convened Kangaroo court or reformed House Un-American Activities inquisition to defend their ‘outrageous and unpatriotic’ pro-British proclivities.
However, that prospect was the least of her worries.
The spring cease fire in Illinois brokered by Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, the sixty-one year old Washingtonian National Guard reservist who had single-handedly master-minded the suppression of the insurgency in the North West last year, had broken down within days of his sacking, at the behest of Mayor Richard Joseph Daley by the State Governor Otto Kerner. South Chicago, previou
sly largely intact and ‘viable’ as the surviving half of the bomb-damaged Windy City, was now threatening to turn into a battlefield and what was left of the Kennedy family political powerbase was disappearing down the plug hole of history.
Meanwhile, spurred on by the sudden sacking of General Dempsey, their military guru, the Confederation of West Coast States – Washington, Oregon and California – had activated their previously suspended ‘Military Assistance Pact’ under which Federal intervention in their affairs was strictly circumvented. The three states, including California, the most populous in the Union, had – within the last week - threatened to withhold Federal taxes until such time as its ‘legitimate grievances’ were heard and acknowledged in Philadelphia.
Across the South there were daily reports of riots and disturbances. Birmingham Alabama and several towns and cities across Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana were under martial law. Tensions inflamed to breaking point by February’s atrocity in Atlanta when Doctor Martin Luther King had been badly wounded, and nine other members of his entourage killed or injured by a sniper’s bullets, had been ignited by George Wallace’s incendiary rabble rousing, Nelson Rockefeller’s apparent indifference, and the Administration’s failure to do anything at all about the invidious post-Civil War Jim Crow laws entrenching racial segregation across the former Confederate States. At Doctor King’s rally in Bedford-Pine Park in Atlanta in February over two hundred people had died, killed in the crush after the shooting had panicked the huge crowd of between seventy and eighty thousand people. The Bedford-Pine ‘Incident’ was now the rallying cry of a new and militant Southern Civil Rights movement which its leader, Martin Luther King, only recently sufficiently recovered from his wounds to appear again in public, was struggling to drag back towards its non-violent roots.
In a little over a week’s time King was scheduled to walk at the head of his people on the first day of the March on Philadelphia. The Afro-American Southern Civil Rights movement was coming to the nation’s temporary capital. Day by day the march would gather new members on its slow progress north, arriving in Philadelphia on 4th July, Independence Day. There was a general expectation that the March would end in dreadful violence long before then, that Martin Luther King would never live long enough to stand on the steps of City Hall, and share again with the American people his dream of a better, fairer more righteous future for all Americans in a land in which the colour of a man or woman’s skin, his religion, creed or ethnicity no longer governed how he or she was viewed by his fellow citizens.
If Martin Luther King died who would be left to speak for non violence?
What price peaceful civil disobedience in a society in which the voice of reason had been silenced?
What had happened to America?
People back home were reporting that ‘everything that could go wrong was going wrong’. It was election year so nobody in Congress, let alone the Presidential contenders cared about anything except getting elected. Wall Street was in turmoil, the Stock Exchange was heading south at a rate of knots and everybody was waiting with baited breath for the first big bank to go bust. Chicago was not the only Great Lakes city in ferment, upper New York State around Niagara and where the city of Buffalo had once stood was bandit country, likewise the badlands south of Boston, where the ruins of Quincy had been taken over by the dispossessed, homeless and the hopeless who had armed themselves by ransacking the ruined navy base and the wrecked warships in the docks.
The Administration’s policy towards the nation’s millions of refugees had become one of armed containment while it fought fires elsewhere as and when they flared, without any semblance of any plan or any over-arching ‘big idea’. The wreckage of Washington DC and its surrounding heavily militarised ‘martial law zone’ might have been a ghastly metaphor for the state of the whole Union.
In Philadelphia, a relatively tranquil island of political sectarian gerrymandering kept ‘peaceful’ by a massive Army, Navy and newly recruited paramilitary ‘Special Police Division’, the House of Representatives blithely carried on as if nothing was amiss. While members of Congress and the Senate bickered angrily over the terms of reference of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War; the Department of Justice was preoccupied – to the exclusion of virtually everything else – with preparations for the forthcoming trials of the leaders of the attempted coup d’état which had sparked the Battle of Washington last December.
“We were appalled to hear about the attack on the Christophers and the Hannays in Philadelphia,” Joanne Brenckmann said. “We all believed that Philadelphia was fairly safe, but to be attacked like that in broad daylight!”
“I met both Lady Marija and Rosa Hannay when I was on Malta,” Rachel confessed. She had given up obfuscating about those parts of her personal history that were less than secret. “And again the last time I was in America. They are both very resilient young women. I’m sure they have put the ‘incident’ behind them already.”
“I understand that you have visited the United States many times?” Walter Brenckmann prompted, feeling he ought to help out his wife. He had been a little lost in his thoughts. His eldest son was onboard the USS Kitty Hawk, part of Carrier Division Seven’s ill-thought through presence in the Arabian Sea. His second son, Daniel, was an assistant counsel to Earl Warren, at the very epicentre of the ongoing political firestorm. His youngest boy, Sam, was out in California with his new wife and baby daughter; if things went wrong troops could soon be marching into that state to restore the Federal writ; while here in England he and Joanne found themselves having to repeatedly defend the indefensible.
“Yes,” Rachel smiled wryly, mischief flickering in her placid eyes. “I have been to America several times.”
In what seemed now like another lifetime she had met and been involved with, intimately in several cases, several members of the current Administration and miscellaneous Congressmen and Senators. Dick White had sent her to Washington after the Suez Crisis for nearly a year; and sent her back again when JFK had beaten Nixon to the White House. Being in America in those days had been fun; without any of the normal dangers of her profession. Returning to old ground in a new role, as oneself, unprotected by an assumed persona was another matter. This time she would be surrounded by potential enemies, by powerful men who had reputations and positions to uphold, men who would not welcome being reminded that their secrets were not their own. But then that was exactly why the new Director General of National Security wanted her in Philadelphia; to remind men who ought to have known better that the past never, ever really goes away.
“Oh?” The Ambassador queried.
“I was not always a spy,” Rachel lied. “There are a lot of old acquaintances I intend to look up in the next few months.”
Chapter 38
Monday 25th May 1964
Headquarters of Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
The days when Thomas Barger, the President of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) might have felt uneasy facilitating a meeting between a British General and two senior Saudi ministers, were long gone. Notwithstanding he had spent half his life living and working in Saudi Arabia, Barger was as patriotic as the next man but business was business and his first loyalty was to the shareholders of his company, not to a United States government that was seemingly Hell-bent on wrecking US-Saudi relations for a generation and in the process, destroying practically everything he had achieved in his whole working life. Back ‘home’ there would be people, a lot of people, who were going to accuse him of having ‘gone native’; but if it was left unchallenged the Kennedy Administration’s one-eyed America First insanity guaranteed that the region containing something like sixty to seventy percent of the World’s known ‘recoverable’ oil reserves, was about to be plunged into decades of chaos.
The very idea of the Red Army lurking on the northern borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and dominating the northern shore of the Persian Gulf sent
an icy shiver down Thomas Barger’s spine. Even if the Soviets did not immediately invade the oil rich north east of the Arabian Peninsula – the biggest oilfields were within only a few hours’ drive from the Iraqi border and less than twenty minutes flight time for a Red Air Force bomber – the Saudi regime, and almost certainly those of the sheikdoms and emirates along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf, not to mention Oman which commanded the approaches to the Gulf, would most likely fall.
And then what?
What would remain after the bloodletting was over?
Whereas, nobody in Philadelphia seemed to have thought about any of this; it was clear that the British had thought about it a lot. The trouble was that they needed men, bullets and the co-operation of the sons of the people they had betrayed at Versailles all those years ago, and in Arabia forty or fifty years was just a blink of the eye when it came to remembering old slights and the honour of settling blood feuds.
Today’s ‘conference’ was only possible because Thomas Barger – whom his Saudi ‘stakeholders’ and contacts regarded as part-Arab in exactly the way people back home suspected he was part-native – trusted him. Or rather, they trusted him to do whatever was best for Aramco, which was serendipitous because they recognised that what was good for Aramco was good for the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia was nothing, an arid impoverished wasteland without its oil.
The Kennedy Administration’s talk of ‘guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Arabia’ was meaningless. The United States had access to oilfields in South America and Indonesia, there was oil in Canada and Alaska as yet untapped and with the post-October War collapse in the price of crude oil, American industry and consumers alike were content to enjoy their ‘cheap gas’ for as long as the party lasted. America did not need Saudi oil at the moment and that fact trumped every other consideration.
