by James Philip
It went without saying that most of the men in the bunker took the sketchy reports they read in the Washington press much more seriously than the detailed ones they received daily from the Headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in nearby Langley. Especially, those CIA reports purporting to be from sources located in the United Kingdom and or, ‘close to the Royal Navy’ because nobody in the room believed that the CIA had any contacts worth the candle either in the British Government, or within several hundred miles of being ‘close to the Royal Navy’.
The British had reached the stage where they were so infuriated with the ‘war games’ being played by the Enterprise Battle Group in the North Atlantic that Vice Admiral Julian Christopher, the man responsible for initiating, assembling and latterly, convoying the armada of merchantmen involved in Operation Manna to the British Isles had broadcast in plain text an unambiguous ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ set of standing orders to all his captains.
It was not the first time that Vice Admiral Christopher had presented himself as an unwelcome thorn in the side of the US Navy. Around Christmas last year the ships of the aforementioned Admiral’s British Pacific Fleet had steamed over the horizon and, in effect, at the behest of the Australian Government driven the US Navy away from Australasian waters as it had already done from around Singapore and Borneo. Elements of the British Pacific Fleet had been placed at the disposal of the Australian and the New Zealand Governments during the spring and summer months; and by the time most of his big ships were otherwise engaged shepherding the first Operation Manna convoys east towards the tip of South America on the first leg of the long trip back to England, the US Navy had been rushing into mothballs and the political impetus and will to restore a ‘proper naval balance’ in the South Pacific in DC had evaporated into thin air.
The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral George Whelan Anderson was fit to spit every time he heard the name of the British admiral. Today, even more than on other days, the Flag Plot Room Staff moved warily around their fulminating master.
Notified that he was in the building, a routine invitation had been extended to attend the daily briefing to Lieutenant-General William Westmoreland, the Chiefs of Staffs’ special advisor to the Secretary of Defence. Nobody actually wanted the Army man in the bunker but even with relations strained to breaking point between the Navy and Robert McNamara, it would have been crass and unforgivably rude not to have invited Westmoreland. As it was his presence was simply an additional symptom of the dysfunction at the heart of the rapidly contracting US military machine. Had he understood the Navy better Westmoreland would have known that the invitation was for the sake of form, and that nobody had actually expected or wanted him to turn up for the ‘Situation Table’.
Westmoreland was made of stern stuff, nevertheless the moment he entered the room he felt uncomfortable; an unwelcome interloper at somebody else’s party. To be treated with such exaggerated, punctilious courtesy by all and sundry was excruciating. Eventually, he could bear it no longer.
“May I ask a question, sir?” He inquired of the Chief of Naval Operations. The looks he got for his trouble put him in mind of those a certain fictitious Victorian urchin had got when he asked ‘for more’ food in a well known Dickensian fable.
A QUESTION!
“Fire away!” Admiral Anderson retorted irritably.
“Thank you, sir.” Westmoreland composed his thoughts. He genuinely sympathised with the invidious position Anderson found himself in. Anderson had ascended to his current position at the head of the United States Navy because he was one of, perhaps, the outstanding American naval officers of his generation. He had commanded the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt after the 1945 war, served as an assistant to Dwight Eisenhower at NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – Headquarters, before flying his flag in command of Task Force 77 off Taiwan, commanded Carrier Division 6 in the Mediterranean, and on promotion to Vice Admiral, commanded the Sixth Fleet at Naples. He had been the automatic shoe-in for Chief of Naval Operations in 1961 and had the Cuban Missiles Crisis not gone so horribly wrong, he would probably have been the universally feted and acclaimed hero of the Free World. Unfortunately, the Crisis had gone wrong and now his position was plainly very nearly intolerable to such an intrinsically decent and honourable patriot.
Admiral Robert L. Dennison, at the time of the October War Anderson’s direct subordinate as Commander in Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet – CINCLANT - had taken the fall for the disastrous consequences of the ‘Beale Incident’ only because Anderson’s own resignation had been rejected by the President. Having been persuaded to remain as CNO while his subordinate, Dennison, had been unceremoniously retired from the Navy with scant acknowledgement of his previously unblemished, frankly brilliant record, Anderson’s authority in the Navy and influence outside it had diminished with every passing day until now, a casual glance at the Flag Plot Room Table provided unequivocal evidence of how powerless he had been to preserve the fighting power of the service he loved. The nuclear submarine fleet might have survived, albeit with its wings clipped and its future expansion drastically curtailed; but the great surface fleet had been decimated. Seven of the ten big carriers, all their escorts and their fleet trains had been, or were on the way to the mothball fleet or the breakers, and tens of thousands of highly trained Navy men were on the beach. All that remained of the magnificent fleet – a fleet without parallel in the World only a year ago – was the Enterprise Battle Group in the North Atlantic, the Independence’s task force on its way home in the Indian Ocean, and the Kitty Hawk Battle Group in the Far East. The USS Independence was heading home for an overdue major refit, the Kitty Hawk was in dock at Kobe for the rest of the year; leaving only the new nuclear-powered Enterprise and her modern consorts at sea and remotely ready for combat. For the Naval officers gathered around the Flag Plot Room Table the sense of abject humiliation was palpable.
In practically any other country these men would have taken up arms against their Government by now. But not these men, not now or probably ever, because that was not the American way and each and every one of the men around Westmoreland took their oath of allegiance as an article of sacred faith. Even if the President of the United States of America was an idiot, he was still their Commander-in-Chief, his word was still law and it was their duty to obey him or to die in so doing. The really worrying thing was that none of the officers around Westmoreland seemed to be in any mood to ask the obvious question.
Westmoreland sighed.
“The waters through which the Operation Manna convoys are about to pass seem somewhat congested to my landsman’s eye, sir?”
“What is your point, Westy?” The Chief of Naval Operations grunted. The half-hearted attempt at familiarity singularly failed to lighten the mood.
“I fully understand that to maintain top level combat readiness the Enterprise Battle Group has to exercise under the most realistic conditions possible,” Westmoreland queried, feeling like he was pushing a car with square wheels up a steep hill. Asking the driver to release the hand brake was not going to help. “But the Brits are not party to our ‘exercise’ schedules, sir?”
“The Enterprise is operating in international waters,” Anderson replied, as if this was the last word on the subject.
Westmoreland did not follow up. Most of the warships on the ‘Plot’ seemed to be British, deployed the length of the Atlantic north to south to cover the Operation Manna ‘stream’ of vessels. The groups of merchant ships only closed up into convoys for mutual protection and assistance as they passed north of the Azores, each covered by a battle group of escorts based around a single, relatively small British carrier. The British flagship, the Ark Royal – the biggest of their carriers but still only half the size of the Enterprise – was currently operating in the Bay of Biscay.
The Army man was caught unawares when the Chief of Naval Operations unexpectedly elaborated on his previous remark.
“The British have been
aggressively reinforcing the approaching Operation Manna escort screen for the last week or so, General. There are also indications that the Enterprise has been targeted by the Brit’s nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought during this period. In addition, our aircraft are regularly painted by British gunnery and air defence radar systems. It is our judgement that the Brits fully understand that our ships and aircraft mean them no harm and have no intention whatsoever of obstruction the free navigation of their supply convoys.”
“Sorry, sir? Aggressively reinforced?” Westmoreland asked, desperately trying not to sound as nonplussed – pole-axed more like – as he actually was by the CNO’s unbelievably complacent observation.
“They’ve sent everything they’ve got to sea except their most modern diesel-electric submarines which presumably they are holding back as some kind of strategic reserve, or force of last resort.” Admiral Anderson forced a smile. “Obviously, they’re making some kind of political gesture for the sake of their own people.”
“I see, sir.”
The next time Westmoreland spoke to the Secretary of Defence he would urgently suggest that he had a word with his counterpart, Dean Rusk at the State Department. Somebody ought to be talking to the British Ambassador about this stuff. For a moment his frustration re-surfaced.
“So, when the Secretary asks me about the articles in the Post I should tell him it is all just a public relations stunt by the Brits?”
The Navy did not care what an Army man told the Secretary of Defence.
Glad to disentangle himself from a ‘briefing’ Westmoreland escaped to his room in Secretary McNamara’s complex of offices on the top floor of the Pentagon. At his desk he did not pause to enjoy the view of the Potomac, grey and cold beneath a clear, benign wintery sky. Instead, he picked up a phone. About a minute later he was speaking to Ben Bradlee, the Washington Bureau Chief for Newsweek. It stood to reason that if the Washington Post had hot news coming out of England then Bradlee would not be far behind.
Ben Bradlee was a committed Kennedy man, a personal friend of the President - a fellow Harvard graduate - whose first wife had been related to Jacqueline Bouvier by marriage. Bradlee had toured with both Kennedy and Nixon during the 1960 Presidential campaign and had since settled in DC. Bradlee was one of several opinion makers and ‘well informed’ outsiders whose acquaintance Westmoreland had cautiously courted in recent months; working on the principle that he could be of little service to the Secretary of Defence if he was operating outside the DC ‘bubble’ inhabited by men like Bradlee.
When he took the call Ben Bradlee clearly guessed what Westmoreland wanted to talk about; but so like any good newsman he took the conversation in another direction so that he could approach it from his preferred angle of attack rather than that of his caller. The rules of the game were straightforward; the Secretary of Defence’s ‘special military advisor’ was ringing him so he got to call the shots.
“I was expecting to hear from the admirals by now,” he observed wryly. “Not a three-star general.”
That was when Lieutenant-General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland realised that something bad was going to happen and that he did not begin to know how or why. He just knew something very, very bad was going to happen and that there was probably nothing he could do about it.
“What do you know that I don’t, Ben?”
“I know that there’s a news blackout on the Jackson Braithwaite shooting in Oakland. The last time the Pentagon clammed up this tight was when Maxwell Taylor’s plane went missing.”
Westmoreland thought carefully before he spoke next.
The murder of the man in command of half the Navy’s operational Polaris submarines was obviously very bad news; however, he had not been aware of a general news embargo on the incident. And why was Bradlee linking Braithwaite’s death with that of Maxwell Taylor?
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had been flying back from a routine tour of inspection in the Eastern Pacific when his plane had disappeared somewhere between Honolulu and the West Coast. The shock of his loss still seemed painfully fresh, immediate, even two months after the event. Curtis LeMay had his top security and technical people on the case but there was little that could be done without a crash site or wreckage to examine, other than to crawl over the maintenance logs of Maxwell’s Air Force Douglas DC-8, the service records, medical and psyche evaluations of the jetliner’s crew, the weather on the scheduled route and the myriad of crazy conspiracy theories the mystery had already spawned. In the mean time the whole affair left a queasy, uncomfortable sensation in the pit of the stomach of every right thinking American.
Maxwell Taylor had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with his immortal 101st Airborne Division, he had been the first post Second World War Superintendent of West Point, vigorously defended the Army against Eisenhower’s cutbacks – which in the light of recent experience seemed both modest and prudent - in the late 1950s and been the one military man who had enjoyed the unquestioning respect, friendship and close personal trust of both the Kennedy brothers. His death had come like a kick in the guts both to the Army and to the inner circle of the Kennedy White House. While Maxwell Taylor had been at the helm the cataclysm had seemed somehow manageable. If he could live with the ‘peace dividend’ then so could the rest of the Army. Moreover, as a quid pro quo for his acquiescence to the shrinking of the US military machine, the Administration had endorsed his plans to restore the Federal writ in the badlands around the blasted cities. First there would be blockades, methodical investments, and then there would be warning airstrikes, periods of negotiations and only as a last resort, full scale assaults like the one which had resulted in the bloodbath at Bellingham. With Maxwell Taylor gone there was nobody left with the personal authority or charisma to carry forward any kind of grand plan, nor with the necessary political will or chutzpah to reincarnate the ‘Taylor Plan’. While Maxwell Taylor had been at the Pentagon there had been purpose, now there was only drift...
“Hello, are you still there, Bill?”
“Sorry, I was thinking about General Taylor.”
“He was a great man,” the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek agreed. Ben Bradlee changed the subject without warning. “The admirals should actually be worrying about the Brits,” he declared. “If you think people in this country feel bad about the war, try thinking about it from the Brits’ perspective. The guys from their embassy tell me the first thing the RAF knew about the October War was when they saw the missiles heading their way. Everything that has happened since then has confirmed what they knew the day after the war. That we’d betrayed them.”
“That’s not true, Ben. You and I both know that’s not true. That’s just communist propaganda...”
“I thought Curtis LeMay killed all the communists?”
Westmoreland belatedly realised calling Ben Bradlee had been a bad idea. He said nothing.
“Apart from the one’s hiding in cupboards all over the USA,” the Newsweek Bureau Chief continued sarcastically, “according to J. Edgar Hoover!”
The Army man hung up.
Chapter 26
Tuesday 3rd December 1963
The Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood
Sam Brenckmann had not seen Johnny Seiffert since before the October War, and if he had never seen him again it would have been way too soon. This being the case suddenly finding the San Francisco based agent, fixer and sometime drug dealer barring his way into the Troubadour flanked by two very large, unshaven Neanderthals wearing scuffed leather jackets was, therefore, an extremely unwelcome surprise. He had learned to keep away from Hell’s Angels in particular and bikers in general in the last year. Hearing the throaty approach of Harley-Davidsons most sensible people headed for cover, especially out in the country where a lot of small communities and road stops had been taken over by the roaming black-clad gangs. Johnny Seiffert’s minders looked like knuckle-draggers, soldiers who had failed to find a home; the one thing the ga
ngs were not short of was muscle and some of the better organised chapters were picky about who they let in.
“I own you!” Johnny Seiffert declared, fearless with his gorillas at his back. He was a man of average height in his forties just beginning to go to seed who looked vaguely ridiculous in over-tight blue jeans, cowboy boots and a jacket that ought to have had sequins. He usually wore a hat to conceal his thinning hair; today he was sporting a neatly trimmed beard and wore a thick, heavy gold chain around his neck.
Even if he had never met Johnny before Sam would have realised that this encounter was not going to end well. The little shit would not have come all the way down to LA with two goons if all he wanted to do was talk. A less rational man than Sam Brenckmann would have tried to run away but he was not going to get far carrying his guitar. The instrument itself, a second hand Martin to replace the one he had had to leave behind in Bellingham, was light enough, but its case was not. Given the World in which they now lived he had acquired the most heavyweight, bomb proof case he could lay his hands on; it was seriously weighty and so bulky that not even an Olympic sprinter could have out run Johnny Seiffert’s Neanderthals with it swinging from one arm. The sensible thing to do would have been to have dropped the guitar and fled the scene - which was what he and Judy had done in Bellingham - but that was never going to happen again. Well, unless it was a straight choice between the guitar and Judy.
