by James Philip
She frowned angrily, her lips compressed into a hard white line.
“If I was the complete bastard you take me for,” the United States Deputy Attorney General went on, “which incidentally, I am not, I would up the ante and spread more malicious gossip. But,” again he held up an open hand to forestall interruption, “if I did that I’d have trouble looking myself in the eye in the mirror in the morning. So, that’s not on the cards. However, clearly you cannot continue in your internship at Justice. That would simply add fuel to the flames, as it were. Which means that what we need to be discussing are other options. Ideally, options which, should our paths in government, industry or the courtroom cross again, will not in any way embitter either you, or I, Miss Betancourt.”
Gretchen frowned.
Oh, I didn’t expect that!
“What did you have in mind?” She demanded.
Katzenbach risked a miniscule sigh of relief.
“Without knowing something of your career plans,” he knew that Claude Betancourt’s little girl would have had a career plan mapped out virtually from earliest adolescence, “you have me at a disadvantage. Are you set on a conventional legal path?”
Gretchen shook her head.
“No, I only opted for the law because it opens doors to other things.”
The man nodded.
That figures!
He contemplated this tersely volunteered insight for several seconds.
“How do you feel about foreign travel?” He inquired, with apparently sincere curiosity.
“Travel?”
“The State Department has a slew of assistant counsel vacancies? Australia is going to be a big sphere of interest in the coming years?”
“Australia?” Gretchen queried, knocked out of her stride and wondering what she had been so angry about in the first place. “Why Australia?”
“Because before the October War the Australian, and to a lesser extent, the New Zealand and Indonesian governments were on a trajectory out of the sphere of influence of the old European colonial powers, the United Kingdom in the case of Australasia, and into our camp. In fact, the whole Far East was pretty much up for grabs,” he hesitated, “although South East Asia was beginning to look problematic, of course...”
“And you are telling me this because?” Gretchen asked, needing to know if the man was selling her a line just to get her out of the office without causing a monumental scene or if he really wanted a lasting rapprochement.
“From your resume I gather you speak French?”
“Yes. Conversational Spanish and Portuguese, also.”
“Well, there you are. That already puts you two or three languages ahead of most of the competition at the State Department. Let me have a word with the people over at Foggy Bottom.”
Gretchen had heard numerous wise cracks about how admirably the metonym ‘Foggy Bottom’ suited the Main State Building located at 2201, C Street which accommodated the United States Department of State, responsible for the nation’s foreign relations. Understandably, those relations were somewhat fraught in the aftermath of a war in which tens of millions of foreigners, by no means all inimical to the interests of the United States, had been killed, injured, made homeless and were now struggling to survive in the post-apocalyptic purgatory of their own ruined countries.
“Yes,” she heard herself saying, “that sounds fair.”
Chapter 32
Saturday 7th December 1963
The Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia
General David Monroe Shoup, the sixty-two year old bespectacled warrior who had been appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps on the first day of 1960, was, officially only an ‘occasional member’ of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of the United States Armed Forces. In fact, he was only attending this meeting of the Chiefs of Staff because, coincidentally, he had been in Washington when the shit had hit the fan.
It worried him that not everybody in the room had yet got used to the idea that the ‘shit had hit the fan’ but he did not intend leaving the room until he was convinced that everybody was of the same mind. Very little that had happened since the October War – which he viewed as a wholly avoidable disaster that in any other country would have resulted in those responsible being lined up against a wall and shot – had surprised him. Basically, the country was being run by idiots who had failed to act decisively to maintain the civil cohesion and military integrity of the nation in the aftermath of the war. Subsequent events had taken a depressingly inevitable path towards the current state of continental disunity and concomitant fast-spreading lawlessness. Events in the North-West ought to have sounded the panic bell in Washington DC; it was a disgrace that nothing seemed to have changed. The memory of Bellingham’s fate would pall into insignificance if the ongoing insurgency spread out of Chicago and the other bombed cities and towns. The late Maxwell Taylor had understood what had to be done. Shoup still had not made up his mind about Taylor’s successor in the hot seat, General Earl Gilmore ‘Bus’ Wheeler.
David Shoup had come up the hard way and he did not have a lot of time for men who had not, until, or unless they proved that they were worthy of his trust. Trust was not a given between the Marine Corps and the other services; Marines got too used to cleaning up the mess the Army, the Navy and the Air Force left behind. As a young man Indiana born Shoup had joined the Marines because that was the only way to get three square meals a day. Rising through the ranks he had twice seen service on the despised, half-forgotten China Station in the 1930s. When America entered the Second World War he had found himself in a staff posting in Iceland before eventually contriving a transfer to the Pacific where, in 1943, out of the blue he was given command of the 2nd Marines charged with the capture of the Japanese island fortress of Tarawa. Aptly named ‘Bloody Tarawa’, the conquest of the atoll marked the true commencement of the savage ‘island hopping’ campaign that had concluded with the bloodbaths of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In true Marine Corps style Shoup had regularly collected decorations for valour and exceptional service as the Corps ‘hopped’ from island to island across the vastnesses of the Pacific. However, he owed his post-war rapid progress up the chain of command less to his reputation as a hard-driving leader of men in battle, than to his gifts as a trainer, and his achievements in ruthlessly overhauling the Corps’s budgetary and logistical eccentricities. Over the last year he had fought a dogged, frankly brutal rearguard action to preserve the fighting efficiency and combat readiness of the Marine Corps and consequently, his name had become ‘Mud’ in the Pentagon. If the bean counter running the Department of Defence or his master in the White House had had the guts they would have sacked him months ago. As it was the re-constituted 1st Marine Division was all that was securing American influence in the Far East, holding the line from Manila Bay to Tokyo and half a hundred other places in between all the way back to Hawaii; while on the North American continent the 2nd Marine Division was the only fully mobile, deployable war ready major ground force on the map. One month ago today he had been given a direct order by the Chief of Naval Operations, acting as the Secretary of Defence’s parrot, to stand down the 3rd Marine Division, which since the October War had functioned as the Corps’s training and replacement cadre. Thus far he had done no such thing; in fact he had placed the Division’s two operational regiments – the 31st and the 32nd – on seven days notice to deploy anywhere in the World and he had assumed his summons to DC was to account for his actions.
The Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, Bus Wheeler had wanted the 3rd to remain ‘in being’ but when the moment of decision arrived he had not been prepared to go to the wall for the Marine Corps. A Marine got used to the kind of enthusiastic support ‘in principle’ from the Army which hardly ever actually materialised when the going got tough.
Shoup looked around the table in the underground War Room.
Curtis LeMay was off someplace in New Mexico or Arizona racing sports cars, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the US Army, who had been scheduled to sp
eak at this meeting of the Chiefs was absent in Illinois, presumably explaining to the Governor why he was reluctant to put more troops that he no longer had – because of the ‘peace dividend’ - on the ground to reinforce the line on the central Chicago front!
The Secretary of Defence was represented by ‘Westy’ Westmoreland, with whom Shoup enjoyed decidedly prickly relations. The Commandant of the Marine Corps’s mistrust of ‘political generals’ like Westmoreland ran too deep, and in the case of the Secretary of Defence’s ‘special military advisor’ it was reinforced by the younger man’s recent meddling in the so-called ‘South East Asia Policy’; a farrago that Shoup regarded as an accident waiting to happen that unequivocally proved the fools in the Oval Office had learned nothing from the October War. Shoup regarded any attempt to maintain, let alone safeguard - whatever that meant - western interests in Vietnam as a waste of time; the country had tied down an enormous number of Japanese troops in the 1945 war that the Japs had badly needed elsewhere; sending more American ‘advisors’ to Saigon was madness at a time when the United States did not have anywhere near enough men under arms to defend the Philippines, South Korea, Japan or any place else in the Eastern Pacific theatre of operations.
The Air Force Chief of Staff’s place at the table was occupied by fifty-five year old Arkansan John Paul McConnell, the last Deputy Commander of the now defunct United States European Command. McConnell had been Stateside at a conference on the night of the October War, and therefore survived the obliteration of most of his command. The man had a sound reputation as a manager and an organiser. In his youth he had been a fighter pilot, and during the 1945 war he had flown combat missions with the Third Tactical Air Force against the Japanese in Burma. McConnell was in the room because he was one of Curtis LeMay’s closest lieutenants; a former Director of Plans and senior SAC commander, he was a shoe-in to replace LeMay when Old Iron Pants elected to retire.
Admiral Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations brooded impatiently.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs settled in his chair.
Bus Wheeler was an infantryman who, like the Commandant of the Marine Corps, had served in China before the Second World War. By the end of that war he was second-in-command of the 63rd Infantry Division in Germany. He had been Deputy Chief of Staff of the US Army since 1962 and the safest available pair of hands to attempt to fill Maxwell Taylor’s boots.
“What’s gone wrong now, Bus?” David Shoup demanded, trying, but not very hard, to keep an ‘I told you so’ inflexion out of his question.
“The Brits and the Spanish have declared war on each other,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retorted, his calm of the forced, grinding one’s teeth variety that warned the other men in the room – those who did not already know the dimensions of the gathering crisis – that there was worse, much worse to come.
This gave the Commandant of the Marine Corps pause for thought.
The Brits and the Spanish!
No, he hadn’t seen that coming!
“The Spanish Navy may have mined Algeciras Bay,” Admiral George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations growled. “A British light carrier, the HMS Albion was badly damaged and a destroyer sunk. Our Consul at Gibraltar reports the Royal Navy may have suffered over two hundred fatal casualties.”
It was Westmoreland who was the first to ask the blindingly obvious question.
“Why would the Spanish risk provoking the British? General Franco isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but he’d be insane to attack the British now. With the Operation Manna convoys currently transiting the North Atlantic off the coast of Western Europe the whole of the Royal Navy must be at sea just off the Spanish coast!”
Bus Wheeler’s tone was stony.
He ignored Westmoreland’s question.
“The British have already mounted retaliatory strikes against Spanish naval, coastal and inland targets. They bombarded the town and port of Santander in northern Spain and targeted shipping in Cadiz in southern Spain. They also mounted V-Bomber strikes against several air bases in the Spanish interior, including airfields where US Air Force assets are based.”
Shoup realised belatedly that he and Westmoreland were the only men in the room who had not had prior warning of the reason for the emergency convening of the Joint Chiefs. The heat rose in his face.
“The Brits attacked our bases?” He asked coldly.
“Yes. Initial reports indicate that they concentrated their bombing on cratering runways and taking out Spanish assets. We have no reports of American casualties to either men or materiel.”
General Westmoreland had decided that he was not going to let his comparatively junior rank – he was only a relatively newly minted three-star general – stop him demanding an answer to his earlier question.
“Why are the Spanish doing this, sir?” He directed at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“We don’t know yet.”
Westmoreland blanched. How could the United States not know why one of its last ‘loyal’ allies – undamaged by the October War – was making war on America’s oldest European ally?
“We don’t know?” He echoed.
“No.”
“Tell Shoup and Westy the other news, Bus,” suggested John McConnell, Curtis LeMay’s deputy.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs hesitated.
“The base of the British Mediterranean Fleet was heavily attacked at Malta last night,” he said with the reluctance of a man having to force out every word between clenched teeth. “Early indications are that the attack was mounted by the Italian Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica, using US-supplied Skyhawks, and,” he very nearly choked on what he was about to say, “several B-52s.”
It was some moments before either the Commandant of the Marine Corps or ‘Westy’ Westmoreland realised that their respective lower jaws were hanging slack beneath gaping mouths.
Shoup devoutly hoped he had just misheard what had been said.
He really, really hoped he had misheard because otherwise the consequences hardly bore thinking about.
“Did you just say SAC bombed the Brits’ main base in the Mediterranean, Bus?” The Marine checked, still doggedly unwilling to believe what he had just heard.
“Yes.”
There was a horrible silence around the table.
And then Westmoreland sighed.
“Oh, fuck!” He muttered.
Chapter 33
Saturday 7th December 1963
Newsweek Bureau Office
Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC
Ben Bradlee, the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek magazine was now regretting his earlier fit of pique when his assistant had refused to spontaneously divulge the contents of the ‘red hot stuff’ coming in over ‘the wires’ on the telephone that morning. Every serious journalist in DC assumed that the FBI routinely tapped their office and home phone lines, lived with the knowledge, and in most circumstances got on with their jobs without stopping to worry over much about how this, or that conversation would read – or look - when the transcript arrived on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk.
‘You need to be here, boss,’ had been the stoic put down that told him the word ‘scoop’ and the phrase ‘you have to see this to believe it’ were involved in the ‘red hot stuff’ coming over the ‘wires’ and he did not really want to be discussing it - any of it - over telephone lines that were routinely monitored by the Federal Government.
Within half-a-minute of his arrival at the Pennsylvania Avenue offices of Newsweek, the Bureau Chief was tingling with shock and, if he was being honest about it, was briefly at least, incapable of getting his head around the enormity of what was going on several thousand miles away across the other side of the wintery North Atlantic.
He was still trying to come to terms with the implications when he was informed that the White House Chief of Staff, Kenny O’Donnell wanted to talk to him.
NOW!
“When did we declare war on the British?
” Ben Bradlee asked the harassed mouthpiece of the Kennedy Administration. His tone was caustic because he was well on the way to feeling that he had been cynically used - betrayed basically - by men whom he had, until that moment, regarded as friends and whom he had believed, despite what most people said, genuinely had the best interests of the country and the American people at the root of everything they attempted to do.
It was now apparent that he had been sorely mistaken.
In fact, he had been taken for a ride.
Real friends did not do that sort of thing to their real friends; and he felt betrayed and well, let down...
Kenny O’Donnell was one of the men who had taken him for a patsy.
“That’s not what this is at all!” The other man protested angrily.
“The Italians and the Spanish have attacked Royal Navy ships with US-supplied A-4 Skyhawks, Kenny?”
“We’re trying to...”
“Oh, shit,” Ben Bradlee grunted in disbelief as new wires – burning with news of even more heinous atrocities and disasters - were pushed onto his desk by an increasingly white-faced junior stringer. “Jesus, that can’t be right... According to the BBC the Brits are saying the death toll on Malta will exceed a thousand. They say two of their ships, the HMS Agincourt and the HMS Torquay were destroyed in the raid...”
He had stopped reading aloud because he frankly did not, could not believe what was in front of him in stark black and white courier typeface, hot off the now relentlessly snarling teleprinters in the adjoining room.
“Reuters says that the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet was hit by a thermobaric bomb? What the fuck is a thermobaric bomb, Kenny? Is that some kind of top secret new nuke?”
“Er, I don’t know, Ben,” confessed the White House Appointments Secretary. “Look, there’s a whole heap of crazy rumours hitting us from every angle. We need the media to be responsible about this until we’ve got a proper handle on what’s actually going on over there...”
