by James Philip
The other man saw him coming, smiled a relieved smile, said something dismissive to whoever he was talking to and hung up.
The White House Chief of Staff’s face was florid and haggard at the same time; he was clearly at the end of his tether and the presence of a friend, any friend, right now was welcomed in the same spirit a drowning man would snatch at an upturned life raft.
“The President is in conference with Director Hoover, Director Rowley and Director Blake,” Kenny O’Donnell explained breathlessly. “Bobby’s in with them, so is Bob McNamara.”
Katzenbach had come looking for the White House Chief of Staff only after he had been refused entry to the Oval Office. At least he now knew why he had been turned away.
Fifty-five year old James Joseph Rowley was the fourteenth Director of the Secret Service. Lieutenant-General Gordon Aylesworth Blake was the fifty-three year old fourteenth Director of the National Security Agency. J. Edgar Hoover was, as everybody in DC knew, a son of a bitch throwback to a World that no longer existed. It seemed that the President really was going to launch a campaign against ‘the enemy within’.
Katzenbach did not know Rowley very well. The Director of the Secret Service was a Bronx-born New Yorker of Irish extraction who had started his career in the FBI and transferred to the Secret Service in 1938 when Franklin Roosevelt was President.
Gordon Blake was an Iowan who had won a Silver Star for gallantry in the face of the enemy when, on 7th December 1941, he had been base operations officer at Hickham Field, Pearl Harbour. As if to prove the old adage ‘what goes around comes around’, in 1945, the veteran of that ‘day of infamy’ in 1941 had been a member of the one hundred and fifty man advanced force sent to Japan to prepare for the initial airlift of the US army of occupation.
Both Rowley and Blake were viewed by Administration insiders as safe pairs of hands, and their presence at this evening’s conference on the Oval Office was presumably, a warning to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that if he thought he was going to have a free hand rifling through the Administration’s and the Pentagon’s dirty linen, he needed to go away and have a serious rethink. Bobby and McNamara would be the Administration’s point men on this thing threatening that if and when the FBI started leaking its side of the investigation, Federal Marshalls and Pentagon Special Investigators would be calling at the homes and offices of J. Edgar Hoover’s senior confederates. It seemed that the gloves were off in every way.
Inevitably, some agencies and organisations had stepped out of line but the main body of the press and most of the networks had held their fire thus far; the temporary truce with the media ended at midnight and after that, well, all Hell was likely to break loose.
“The Vice-President has been on the Hill all day,” Kenny O’Donnell told his friend. “Handing out ‘the treatment’ like it’s going out of fashion!”
Nicholas Katzenbach could picture that. Lyndon Baines Johnson had been the acknowledged master of Capitol Hill until he lost out to Jack Kennedy as the Democrats’ nomination for the 1960 Presidential election. It was still a mystery why he had accepted the Vice-Presidential slot on the Kennedy ticket. LBJ had been the most powerful man in the country after Eisenhower for several years; why accept a dead end sinecure? As for being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, well, that was no consolation given that Jack Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected – Theodore Roosevelt had been a few months younger when he became President, but that was only because the incumbent, William McKinley had been assassinated – to the Presidency. For most of the last three years LBJ had been a politely tolerated interloper, excluded from the inner circle of the Administration.
Kenny O’Donnell drew Katzenbach into a corner.
“LBJ is talking to Chief Justice Warren and House Leaders about a commission of some kind into the causes and the conduct of the Cuban Missiles War,” he confided in a hoarse whisper.
Katzenbach did a double take, suspecting he had misheard. He had believed his recommendation to the President to set up precisely this kind of commission had been quietly shelved. Suddenly, it had been the White House’s idea all along!
O’Donnell did not notice his friend’s momentary disorientation.
“We can’t just let things drift,” he went on. “We have to do something, announce something that says to the American people that we’re in command of events. The President has been thinking about this for a long time. He is prepared to be the first witness to the commission. Assuming Earl Warren runs with the ball and wants to play it that way, obviously?”
The United States Deputy Attorney General nodded silently, his mind racing. He was a little guilty that he was angry his idea had been sequestered by the President without so much as a by your leave. That was just politics, he reminded himself. Just politics. It happened all the time at every level of the game.
This was not the time to be standing on one’s dignity or pride.
Briefly, his weariness and disillusion lifted.
JFK might conceivably have rediscovered his vital spark.
Chapter 41
Sunday 8th December 1963
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Joanne Brenckmann was in a sunny mood. She and her two eldest ‘boys’ had been painting all day and an hour ago Dan had got off the phone after a long, and from what she had contrived to overhear, friendly conversation with Gretchen Betancourt. Gretchen, of course, had done most of the talking; that was a woman’s right. And anyway, Dan plainly liked the sound of Gretchen’s voice because after yesterday’s sulk he was back to his normal, affable, easy-going self.
Joanne had asked her if she wanted him to go with her to church that morning but nowadays she only attended services on high days and festivals. Tabatha’s passing had stripped away the last of her old faith, now when she went to church it was to socialise, or to enjoy the quiet rituals of Easter, Thanksgiving or Christmas, or simply to sing. Sometimes she loved to sing. She had not been able to face repainting her dead daughter’s bedroom, not alone. She planned to let out two of the kids’ old rooms to students at the nearby campus, becoming a ‘house mother’ under the auspices of a newly advertised MIT scheme. Many of the courses at the Institute were badly under-subscribed and colleges everywhere were struggling to fill places. A lot of kids no longer saw the point of a college education in a World that seemed to be falling apart.
“Gretchen is meeting Under Secretary Ball at the Main State Building tomorrow afternoon,” Dan explained, brightly. “She apologised for going back to Washington at such short notice.”
Joanne and her middle son were sitting in the lounge drinking coffee, resting on their laurels after the long day of painting in the upstairs bedrooms. Walter junior joined them, bringing his own coffee.
“Gretchen said you put her right on some things, Junior?” Dan asked rhetorically.
His older brother shrugged.
“I didn’t really put her right on anything,” he said defensively. “She’s a bright cookie. What with all the hullabaloo lately I think she just needed a little space to figure things out for herself.”
Out of politeness and good old-fashioned good manners Dan had asked Gretchen if she wanted to talk to Walter.
‘No, we’ve said everything we need to say to each other!’ She had reported, without apparent rancour.
“Gretchen says she is planning to come back to Boston once she finds out if ‘State’ is the thing for her.” Dan frowned, not unhappily. “She sounded weird, actually. As if she’d made up her mind about stuff.”
Joanne seized the moment.
“Tomorrow, boys,” she declared, “we shall paint Tabatha’s room.”
The men looked at each other.
“If you’re sure about it, Ma,” Walter murmured.
“There are two cans of lilac paint in the basement,” his mother continued before she faltered and the tears returned. It was hopeless, suddenly the pain and grief welled up in her and she was as distraught and helple
ss as she had been this time last year. “Tabatha’s gone...”
It was Dan who hurried after her into the kitchen and Walter who trailed in some time later.
Dan hugged his mother.
Chapter 42
Monday 9th December 1963
Headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency
Langley, Virginia
Sixty-one year old Californian John Alexander McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had not been an obvious choice to replace Allen Dulles – who had been sacked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 – but Jack Kennedy had not needed another adventurer like Dulles in the hot seat at Langley. To the contrary, he had brought in McCone precisely because he was completely unlike his predecessor.
McCone had graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, later working at the Llewellyn Iron Works. He was a former executive Vice-President of the Consolidated Steel Corporation; and had founded Bechtel-McCone. It had not mattered to Jack Kennedy that McCone was a wealthy industrialist whose natural political affiliations had always been with the Republican Party, or that he had a history not uncommon among great American entrepreneurs of the Second World War generation. As long ago as 1946, Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office had implied that McCone was a war profiteer; notwithstanding, he had been a key advisor to successive post-war Administrations, and in 1958 appointed Head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
John McCone’s credibility within the Administration had survived, and in some ways been enhanced by his attempt to talk Jack Kennedy out of launching the first strike against the Soviets the previous year.
That morning McCone walked with a heavy, despondent tread to his office door and called quietly to his secretary.
“Get them to bring my car around. We’ll head across to DC in fifteen minutes.”
It had taken two days but now at last, John McCone felt he had a handle on what had actually happened in the Mediterranean at the end of last week; and more worrying, what might still be going on in the North Atlantic in the stormy Western Approaches to the British Isles.
Each and every one of the Administration’s mistakes was coming home to roost that grey Virginia Monday morning. There was no good news; only news that was not quite as bad as all the other news. Basically, the CIA’s most senior analysts could not agree among themselves why the United Kingdom had not already launched attacks on American naval, air and ground forces in the Atlantic, Spain and Italy. Other than declaring a maritime and air exclusion zone around the British Isles, specifically warning the United States not to interfere with the free passage of shipping and declaring US diplomatic staff in England persona non grata, the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration under the premiership of Edward Heath, had made absolutely no overtly aggressive move against American forces or interests. Given the extraordinary level of the provocation suffered by the British, this was truly inexplicable...
It was a mess!
The Spanish fascists had thought – God alone knew why – that they were engaged in a full-scale, albeit proxy war, for and on behalf of the United States against the British. Over two hundred British sailors had been killed or wounded in the mining of the carrier HMS Albion and the sinking of the destroyer HMS Cassandra in Algeciras Bay, and Gibraltar was presently besieged, under intermittent artillery bombardment from the Spanish mainland.
Off Cape Finisterre two Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Talavera and HMS Devonshire had been attacked by US Air Force A-4s and left in a sinking condition in the middle of a North Atlantic winter storm. Again, casualties were assessed in the hundreds, if the ships sank – which they may already have done – another seven or eight hundred men might have died.
The British Fleet operating off the Straits of Gibraltar had lost more ships to attacks by the Spanish Air Force, with the Spanish claiming to have sunk several destroyers and supply ships and to have ‘crippled’ the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes. The consensus at Langley was that the Spanish were inflating their claims; but even so...
And as for what had been done to Malta!
Whoever was responsible for that had to have been insane!
The British Broadcasting Company – the BBC – and Malta Radio, as well as a number of independent news wire services and the correspondents of several international papers had confirmed the substance of the reports flooding into Langley from all over the Mediterranean.
While a force of Regia Aeronautica US-supplied A-4 Skyhawks went in at sea level, targeting ships, dockyard installations and strafing at will, four 100th Bomb Group B-52s had dropped several bunker busting precision munitions and at least one ‘experimental thermobaric’, or ‘fuel air’ bomb on key headquarters and command and control installations in and around the fortress port city of Valletta. As many as three to four thousand British service personnel and Maltese civilians had been killed or seriously wounded and the Archipelago’s medical and emergency services had been completely overwhelmed. It was possible that more people had been killed on Malta last Friday than in the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
Not the least chilling aspect of the affair was the ease with which the small number of aircraft defending the Maltese Archipelago had – despite being taken by surprise – shot down half the attacking A-4s and all four of the 100th Bomb group B-52s. Given that the Administration had spent the last year trying to dismantle large chunks of the US military machine, the Director of the CIA shuddered to think how a full blown war between America and its old, seemingly spurned and betrayed ally might unfold. The only reason he could think of that the British had not already retaliated was because they were still too astonished.
McCone collected his papers, stuffing them into an old attaché case.
Right now nothing was more important than getting his foot inside the White House door before the Kennedy boys turned the current disgraceful debacle into the next World War.
He had no idea how he was going to talk sense into the head of a President who was dead set on opening up the CIA and the Pentagon to a no holds barred investigation by the FBI, the NSA and the Secret Service. This would never have happened while FDR, Harry Truman, or Ike had been in the White House! How bad did this have to get before the Vice-President got involved? John McCone stopped what he was doing, forced himself to take a series of steadying, sobering deep breaths.
What terrified him most was that if he, as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency no longer knew who to trust in Washington, what did that say about the rest of the country?
Chapter 43
Monday 9th December 1963
USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609)
48°42'N 165°38'W
The nearest human settlement was over three hundred miles north-north-west of the USS Sam Houston as she steamed at sixteen knots at a depth of one hundred and eighty feet beneath the storm-tossed waters of the wintery North Pacific. The worst of the storm was lashing the handful of cabins on Umnak Island in the Aleutians, the home of a dozen or so families, while the submarine cruised serenely east. In another day Commander Troy Simms would order his vessel to run to the north to pass through the chain of islands separating the Bering Sea from the Pacific to take up his appointed ‘deterrent patrol’ station.
The USS Sam Houston was travelling through an eerily empty ocean, alone in the deep waters already over two thousand miles east of the American North-West, almost as far north of Hawaii, and fifteen hundred miles west of the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula. Troy Simms command could not possibly have been more independent, he could not have been operating farther from home, or any more out on a limb but then that was what being the skipper of a Polaris boat was all about and he loved it. Right now Troy Simms was living the dream and life would never be so good again, and because he was the man he was he enjoyed every single minute of the dream; having solemnly resolved not to regret its passing when as was inevitable, sooner or later, it ended and he moved on to his next dut
y post.
Skippers of Polaris missile submarines were a breed apart.
Normal mortal men would have quailed at the burden resting on Troy Simms’s broad shoulders. However, the commanding officer of the USS Sam Houston embraced those burdens like old trusted friends in whose company he could safely relax. Even when the going got tough, he effortlessly broadcast calm, unruffled authority.
The boat’s Gold crew had been onshore at the time of the October War; he had wondered a lot about what it had really been like for his Blue crew counterpart when the order to fly his birds was decoded?
Now he began to understand how he must have felt.
Two hours ago the raised alert level signal had been received.
DEFCON 2.
Troy Simms had retired to his cabin to open his sealed ‘war orders’.
Part of him did not want to believe what was happening; the other told him to do his duty. Wishing things to be otherwise was useless. It did not matter that the US Navy still deployed, at any one time, between three and five Polaris boats in the Eastern and Northern Pacific, in range of an enemy supposedly annihilated over a year ago.
The USS Sam Houston would not be in range of Soviet territory for some hours, although what was actually left to hit on the barren Kamchatka Peninsula was anybody’s guess. The signals officer and the missile officer were running the operations order through the decoder; maybe the targeting co-ordinates would enlighten him.
A little over half-an-hour later he was indeed enlightened.
He combined the decrypted signature of the missile officer section of the operations order with his own and then, patiently deciphered the rest of the sequence.
Even as the plain text decode unravelled before his eyes he was paraphrasing his orders.
