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Hostage: London
Diary of Julian Despard
Geoffrey Household
June 2nd
I have never been so moved by the beauty of our earth. Excitement of course sharpens the senses. Man is still enough of an animal to be far more keenly observant when he is in danger or engaged in illegalities; but I know that at any time I should have responded to the stillness and colours of the inlet and the strangely decisive shape of the cliff which faced me across the water.
I lay among the terraces of olive on the steep northern slope of the cove with nothing to do till after sundown and probably nothing then. In an emergency I could reach the edge of the water by following a precipitous goat track which cut down through the crumbling stone walls. My orders were to delay or distract any interference on this, the only accessible side. It was unlikely that there would be any, for the water was out of sight from the scattered village behind and above me, and two cottages at the head of the inlet were safely tucked away up a winding valley. It may be that some money had passed to ensure that the fishermen and their families stayed indoors or visited the cinema. At any rate I was told that I need not worry about them.
The sheer face of yellowish rock opposite to me started at a height of perhaps two hundred feet and slanted downwards across the south side of the cove until it turned the corner and plunged into the open sea. The crest was a straight diagonal line separated from the sky by a narrow band of olive; at its foot was the brilliance of blue water sparkling in the evening sun. It may have been the diagonal which created the multiformity of beauty as if one were to paint a three-sided landscape, the bottom horizontal, the frame then running up from the lower right hand corner at an angle of thirty degrees. It was an uncompromising frame and its regularity, enhancing the richness and detail of living earth by a sort of cosmic horizon, was at a guess what moved me to rejoice in the unknowable purpose it served. I haven’t anything which could fairly be called religion beyond a vague reluctance to ascribe too much to accident.
In the short dusk I moved lower down the slope so that I would be within reach of the boat when it arrived. There I commanded the path to the water and an even rougher one which followed the lowest tiers of olive to the head of the cove. The only sounds were from the distant village: a final cock-crow and the bleating of goats. There was no wind. Even if a norther had suddenly sprung up, the cove was sheltered. That small indentation in the savage north-west coast of Paxos had been well chosen. I was told that shipping rarely came close in apart from tourist caiques doing the round of the island in fine weather and the occasional boat of a lobster fisherman.
An hour before the moon rose the motor cruiser was lying under the cliff. She had cut her engines and put out lights, and I would not have known she was there if not for muffled sounds of wood on wood and wood on metal as her cargo was manhandled for easier transhipment. The coaster was bang on time quarter of an hour later. The black bulk of her, darker than the night, could be distinguished and the throb of the diesels heard, but there was no risk that she would be identified since the operation was carried out too swiftly for anyone to stumble down through the olive groves and interrupt it. In any case I doubt if police or coastguards kept an eye on the north-western cliffs where approachable beaches were few and small, and only two could be reached from inland.
I heard the coaster’s derrick swing out and lift a load from the cruiser. In five minutes more both craft had left the cove. When the coaster was a few miles out with no other shipping in sight she put on her lights and would have seemed to any observer to be on course from Preveza to Brindisi. I saw no more of the cruiser.
For a while I stayed on in the silver peace and silence after the moon had risen – partly because I felt I ought to make certain that no one else showed any interest in the cove and partly that I was reluctant to leave that little, secluded meadow of the sea, the memory of which will haunt me for ever. A mixture of motives so curious that one must probably be untrue. I cannot say which.
Following my orders I returned to my sleeping bag on the other side of the island without meeting a soul. Early in the morning I took the daily packet to Corfu with my bedroll on my back, inconspicuous among other holiday makers. It was a rough passage against a norther and I wondered whether the cruiser had put in for shelter and where. In the evening I was back in London, apparently after a weekend in the sun.
My knowledge of the reasons for it is very limited. I know the motor cruiser came from Libya, taking some thirty-six hours. I can guess that the cargo transhipped was a crate of arms or explosives, but whether for us or for Ulster or Italy is not my business as a cell leader. I am trained to obey, to ask no questions and to care for the safety of my partisans.
June 10th
That last entry was originally just a casual, personal note: an undated aid to recollection. Now that I have decided to keep a record of events I have put a date on it. The night of June 2nd is where this diary should start.
Why a diary? Because I am uneasy; because I cannot make sense of the operation, and weekly or daily details of which I do not yet see the importance may take on a definite meaning when I refer to them later. Such a diary is, I admit, a menace to the security of Magma, but I am confident it will never be read. I have treated every tenth page and inserted into the padded cover of a luxurious yearbook – designed with conspicuous vulgarity for the desk of some producer of superfluous rubbish – a small incendiary device which will infallibly destroy it if opened by anyone but myself.
Four days after my return to London the press carried a story of the hijacking of a consignment of arms from a beach in Libya on the night of May 31st. Surprisingly, responsible papers, as well as the more sensational rags, made it front page news, giving a small theft as much publicity as if we had robbed the Bank of France. France I mention because the security conferences which so excite the media seem to be taking place in Paris. Interpol has been called in. The papers always report this to impress us with the enormity of the crime, though Interpol is hardly more than a centre of hot lines connecting one set of peaked caps with another.
After allowing for speculative additions and the usual omission of solid facts, here is the approximate picture:
A motor cruiser, the Chaharazad, was discreetly taking delivery of the arms on a deserted beach not far from Benghazi – as likely as not, all that remained of a long vanished port. When she arrived a truck was already waiting. The Lebanese owner and his deck hand went ashore, approaching the truck without any special caution, and were quickly nobbled by three masked men. The hijackers then went aboard the cruiser, held up the master and engineer and locked all four in the small forward cabin.
The prisoners heard the crate being loaded and the engines starting up just before dawn. For a day, a night and most of the next day the Chaharazad proceeded at her cruising speed of about fourteen knots – so far as they could tell – and in the evening began to idle along. They were then blindfolded and tied up. The master, apparently a temperamental and indignant Greek, dared to resist, was immediately shot dead and thrown overboard. After that the remaining three gave no trouble at all.
Soon after dark they heard the cargo transhipped to some other vessel. A few hours later, still tied up and blindfolded, they were set ashore in the cruiser’s dinghy, and it was not until late next day that they were spotted by fishermen on a remote and inaccessible pebble bank below the western cliffs of the tiny island of Antipaxos.
At first these three surviving Lebanese stated merely that the Chaharazad had been hijacked and that at leas
t one of the hijackers was British. They didn’t say a word about arms until that side of the story was publicised by the Libyan Government. Now, since the Libyans are known to be supplying arms to the Palestinians, to Ulster and to any revolutionary organisation which has the money, why on earth set the cat among the pigeons by admitting what the cruiser was up to and inviting investigation? They could have allowed the Lebanese story to stand.
I have no doubt that this was the transhipment I witnessed and that Magma is responsible. We can be proud of an operation brilliantly plotted and carried out on the strength of first-class inside information. The death of the master is regrettable but could not be helped. Yet I would dearly like to know what sense there can be in so much planning and expense to acquire a crate of arms. As yet we do not need more than the small quantity available for emergencies, and there is no shortage of explosives.
So my curiosity is natural, but again I ask myself: why a diary? Even assuming that the story carried by all the media is true – and it tallies closely with the little I know of the truth – I am in no danger. I obeyed orders and have no reason to question them.
Do I then have reason to question myself? That may be the answer. Accident has thrown me between two mysteries. If I had supervised this transhipment in, say, London docks, I should have downed a few triumphant drinks with my partisans and thought no more of it. If I had been a casual traveller in Paxos, I should never have forgotten sea and cliff and the silent passing of colour into night, but disassociated it completely from my life of revolutionary violence. It could be the combination of the two which provokes a need for confession, separating myself into both sinner and priest.
The obscenities of the society I seek to destroy are definite, while the beauty which I may destroy with them is unknown and unlimited. A statement of the obvious. Preserve the blossom and your insecticide destroys the bees. Control the flooding and you pollute the estuary. We can never foresee the appalling damage done by long-range good intentions and I suspect that the Cosmic Purpose cannot foresee it either, that it is in fact a Cosmic Experimenter.
Well, here is the successor to the dinosaurs – a running ape which can question its motives and use paw and pencil to resolve them. I will assume for the moment that all I wish to record for future reference is the marked element of risk in this operation which seems unwise and out of character.
The daylight voyage of June 1st was safe enough assuming there were no witnesses to the hijacking, but the day of June 2nd must have been anxious if the real arms dealers turned up on the beach shortly after Chaharazad had sailed and found an inexplicable empty truck. I suppose we counted on delay in discovering what had actually happened and the time it takes to search the emptiness of the sea.
According to the papers the cruiser has vanished, though she was bound to call somewhere to refuel. Obviously the hijackers sank her the same night after landing their prisoners, themselves going secretly ashore in the dinghy and sinking that too – not difficult if they opened the bilge cock, lashed the tiller and gave her a push with the engine running.
From the police point of view the coaster is the weakest link in the chain. It’s not all that hard to find a captain with a carefully selected crew who will take on clandestine cargo so long as he is convinced that foolproof arrangements have been made for smuggling it into its destination; but the convincing is easier than the organisation on shore. I hope we expected all this excitement and are one imaginative jump ahead of port security officers. Fortunately the blindfolded Lebanese can give no information about the size of the ship.
The destination cannot be Italy or farther along the coast of North Africa, for the Chaharazad could reach either as easily as Paxos. Then Spain, France or Germany? In all three countries the national committees would have undertaken the job themselves, claiming to be more experienced. So England seems the most likely. All merchant shipping sailing from the eastern Mediterranean at the right time will be under suspicion, with the closest watch on the coast of Northern Ireland. In fact Magma has only a very limited interest in those religious fanatics.
Clotilde visits me tomorrow, but there is little hope of getting any hint from her. She sometimes carries security too far, not realising that it is unwise for a Group Commander to arouse too much curiosity in the cell leaders. I think that as a woman she feels she should show herself a more severe disciplinarian than any man. But God knows I’ve no complaint of her efficiency! When she sent me to Paxos her orders were detailed and precise. I knew exactly what I was to do and nothing of why I was doing it. A fault on the right side. I couldn’t even have invented a reasonable story under torture.
Her procedures are never unnecessarily complicated. Because she visits me openly, the cell believes she is my girl friend and I am sure none of them suspect that she is in fact the Group Commander. In their eyes she is a natural and romantic mate for their leader – a tall, handsome creature who would manage to look desirable even in uniform. Actually I find her too overpowering. I would not have been tempted even before my prison sentence. Since then I have been celibate as a priest, merciless to myself, compassionate towards all believers.
June 12th
Clotilde instructed me to call a meeting of my cell and explain to them a change of policy. There would be no more attempts to release prisoners by the taking of hostages or other threats.
It has always seemed to me that there is a logical flaw in the taking of hostages. Kill your hostage and that’s the end of you by gunfire or life imprisonment. Don’t kill your hostage, and what the hell is the good of him?
There is also the difficulty of finding any sure home for a rescued partisan. We have been too successful. The communists now are as frightened of us as the rest, all vaguely suspecting a unity behind the diversity of terrorists. Undoubtedly we are about to reach deadlock when no state will accept prisoners released by blackmail and no aircraft carrying such passengers will be allowed to land.
Given a threat sufficiently impressive, it might be possible to insist that the prisoner should live freely wherever he or she wished without leaving the country. I asked Clotilde if she thought that point worth discussion.
‘Live as a pariah? Avoided by the public and watched by the police?’
‘We could do what was done for me – change of appearance and identity.’
‘It was new and difficult. You were a specially important case. The ideal solution is to become so powerful that we never have to release prisoners because none is arrested.’
‘We are bound to lose some.’
She made no comment, would not be drawn and refused to argue. I avoided any awkwardness by asking whether the shipment had arrived safely.
She looked through me, still on her guard, as if my question had not been a mere change of subject but had some connection with this business of avoiding arrest.
‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘Your cell should be ready for orders at any time.’
The fundamental rule is to limit the knowledge of any operation to a single cell whenever possible; so I expected we might be engaged in the landing of the crate and was glad to hear that we should be. I admit that action is a drug. All the same I enjoy it. I must have been wholly misplaced as a lecturer in sociology, always a little bored by my own influence. If ten years ago I had accepted without question the obscenities of capitalist mass democracy instead of loathing them, I might now be a young major in the Army. What a devastating thought!
Clotilde often accuses me of being battle-happy. She herself is detached as any general sending hundreds to death; but the general wouldn’t have much success unless a satisfying number of them were battle-happy. However, her reading of me may be right. It is to be expected after guerrilla courses in Jordan and North Korea – which really taught me no more than basic tactics – and the more valuable short spell in Uruguay to learn how those tactics could be applied to urban conditions.
‘Before Paxos I did not know that we were strong at sea,’ I said.
‘We are strong in Glasgow, Liverpool and Hamburg.’
All of them hotbeds of communism. I asked her if they had much success in infiltrating our cells.
‘Not since two were found drowned,’ she replied.
It is not very difficult to spot a communist. He or she has it all pat but is inclined to pretend enthusiasm for urban guerrilla activity in Russia or Eastern Europe. The time for that will come when their police states show signs of breaking down under their own weight. Only then can Magma launch the New Revolution and see that the mad economy of the west does not take the place of state capitalism.
Clotilde left soon afterwards. I would have liked to ask her what on earth the Libyans thought they were up to with all that unnecessary publicity but I may already have given the impression of wanting to know too much. I hope to God I shall be told enough if my cell is to be responsible for landing or concealing the arms. The ingenuity of the Action Committee and their exact working out of every detail command my fascinated admiration although they do occasionally overlook the human element, cheerfully assuming that a devoted partisan is superhuman. And sometimes he is. Well, it’s my job as a leader, I suppose, to lay out the pieces for the chess masters and see that the legs under the table do not give way.
June 15th
A successful operation, though I am appalled by the expense of it. I know that we are in funds and I suspect that we, not the Ulster Defence Association, pulled off the Midland Bank job in Dublin; but how the Action Committee work out what is value for money and what is not defeats me.
Hostage Page 1
