Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

“Iraq is of course an artificial construct cobbled together at Versailles in 1919 out of several disparate provinces of the former Ottoman Empire. There is no such country as Iraq. The present ‘country’ is a mix of competing, largely anti-pathetic ethnic, religious, political communities and factions. Frankly, we, the British, have a lot to answer for in Iraq. During the period of our Mandate, which ended in 1932, we suppressed the Kurds in the north, mistakenly propped up despotic tribal Sunni chieftains at the expense of the essentially pro-nationalist growing urban - partly secular but most Shī’atu ’Alī, or as we in the West say, ‘Shia’ - polity in Baghdad and many of the other big cities, and went on treating Basra Province in the south as our own sovereign territory. In 1941 we and the Soviets invaded and occupied the whole country when we took a dislike to the ruling regime. The upshot of this was that after 1945 when Iraq joined the United Nations and became a founding member of the Arab League the ruling elite was pro-British. Why wouldn’t it be? We had after all installed a friendly branch of the Hashemite dynasty on the Iraqi throne without troubling to ascertain the feelings of its various ‘peoples’.”

  The Foreign Secretary’s deprecatory irony was not lost on his colleagues.

  “In any event, shortly after the end of the Second World War the Kurds of Northern Iraq – which is where the huge Kirkuk oilfields are – rose in rebellion against the government in Baghdad. When, eventually, the uprising had been crushed the rebels, led by a chap called Mustafa Barzani fled to Russia. In Iraq, the wheel invariably turns full circle and in retrospect it was astonishing that the misrule of the Hashemite dynasty – re-installed by us, the British in the 1940s – lasted as long as it did. Until as recently as 1958, if fact. Looking back it sounds odd to say it, but Anthony Eden was correct in believing that there was only one ‘strong man’ in the Middle East, although he was grievously mistaken in thinking that particular ‘strong man’ was a latter day analogue of Hitler or Mussolini. Gamal Abdul Nasser Egypt is neither, in my humble opinion. But I digress. Egypt and Iran, the former the kingdom of the Pharaohs and the latter the heir to the Persians of old, are and always will be the great powers of the Middle and the Near East. Iran has the Shah, a straw man with delusions of grandeur; Egypt has Gamal Abdul Nasser, a man of vision and imagination who entertains, probably over-optimistically, dreams of a pan-Arabic union. Before the October War we and the Americans wasted a great deal of time, money and political capital that we could ill-afford courting the Shah of Iran at precisely the same time we were driving, through parsimony and ideological pedantry, Nasser into the Soviet camp.”

  “Tom, old man,” Airey Neave, the Minister of Supply, interjected amiably, “this is all very interesting but do we really need to rehash ancient history?”

  “Yes. I think we do,” the Foreign Secretary replied, leaning towards his interlocutor, suddenly with an edge in his voice. “The point I am trying to make is that Iraq has been a fundamentally unstable entity since it was artificially created by drawing arbitrary lines on a map at Versailles in 1919. This has led to the current situation in which last year’s coup – which none of us paid any attention to because we had other, more pressing matters on our hands - placed in power a fundamentally anti-Western regime intent on seizing back control of its oil wells. Fortuitously, it is currently too weak and too disunited to either defend itself from internal or external enemies, including Iran; but it is only the new regime’s weakness has stopped Baghdad acting thus far against our small garrisons in Basra Province and Kuwait. If either Iran or Iraq acted against our oil interests in the region, the other would surely follow suit and shortly thereafter, well, I’m not entirely sure what we would do...”

  The Chief of the Defence Staff cleared his throat.

  “We have maintained a garrison of about a thousand men in Kuwait since 1961, Prime Minister,” Admiral Sir David Luce reported. “Our garrisons in Basra province are token presences. As for our forces in and around Abadan, these have recently been reinforced by an Australian infantry battalion. A consignment of twenty armoured vehicles – Centurion tanks - was landed at Abadan shortly before the October War initially intended for the Iranian Army is currently being activated by a cadre sent out from England. At the time of the war another, smaller batch of Conqueror tanks, originally destined for the Indian Army I think, was diverted to Aden. These units bring our total strength in the region, dispersed between about a dozen bases, to the equivalent of a somewhat under strength mechanized division.”

  “Iraq,” Tom Harding-Grayson went on, “has never recognised the sovereignty of Kuwait and most of the Iraqi Army and virtually all of its tanks are based in Basra Province. Half of those troops and tanks are positioned close to the border with Iran threatening Abadan Island and Khorramshahr; the rest are positioned within easy reach of the Kuwaiti border.”

  Impatience was mounting around the Cabinet table.

  “What are you trying to tell us, Sir Thomas?” Barbara Castle inquired caustically.

  The Foreign Secretary half-smiled.

  “Given the paucity of our resources in the region, and the impossibility of substantially reinforcing those forces by sea in the near future due to the naval situation in the Mediterranean and the obstruction of the Suez Canal at Ismailia by vessels sunk by the Krasnaya Zarya nuclear strike on that unfortunate city,” he explained slowly, taking care to annunciate clearly every word, “it seems to me that if either Iran or Iraq fall into revolution or civil war, or if Iraq elected to seize Kuwait, or Abadan in a bid to unite its disparate factions in a common cause against a hated foreign enemy, that we would be able to do very little to preserve our present strategic posture in the Persian Gulf, or to safeguard the oil fields and refineries in the region that are crucial to our economic and military viability and to our fast-diminishing long-term pretensions to be a major nation on the World stage.”

  Tom Harding-Grayson paused to let this grim thought sink in.

  “However, that was not actually the doomsday scenario that so infuriated my elders and betters at the Foreign Office in the period before the October War that they unanimously condemned me to indefinite internal exile. Prior to the October War both Iraq and Iran were no less unstable and unreliable than they are now; whereas post-war our resources and more importantly, those of the United States which might readily have been deployed to counter or at least ameliorate the worst effects of the case I have just outlined, were immeasurably greater.” He half-smiled a very bleak smile. “Albeit probably not equal to meeting and defeating a major, concerted Soviet attack on either or both of the two countries under discussion.”

  Margaret Thatcher glanced to Sir David Luce.

  The First Sea Lord pursed his lips, shrugged.

  “Scenarios in which massive Soviet forces attack Iran, and or negotiate free passage of its forces through Iraq to the northern shores of the Persian Gulf were frequently considered by planners before the October War, Prime Minister. It was a common war game scenario played out at staff colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. I think the general consensus in the 1950s was that Soviets probably realised such actions would risk a nuclear response.”

  Airey Neave had sat back in his chair, made a pyramid of his fingers before him.

  “Correct me if I am wrong, Tom,” he invited the Foreign Secretary, ‘but wasn’t it the dream of the Tsars to conquer the Near East so as to open up a corridor to a warm water port in the Indian Ocean?”

  The other man nodded.

  “In the nineteenth century our concerns centred around a Russian invasion south through what is now Pakistan. Or possibly via northern Afghanistan. That was one of the reasons – almost lost among the plethora of stupid reasons - why we kept on fighting and losing all those dreadful Afghan Wars.”

  “The Soviets can’t possibly have any massive armies left?” Barbara Castle objected.

  “That,” Tom Harding-Grayson sighed, ‘is the thing, Mrs Castle. Given the state of Iran and Iraq at this time and our own thinly spread
‘defences’ in the region, a relatively modest invasion force might easily drive across Northern Iran down onto the floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates and thrust, virtually unopposed all the way to the Persian Gulf.”

  Chapter 39

  15:25 Hours

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  Fort Rinella, Malta

  Samuel Calleja attempted to turn his head away from the blinding white light as his captors tore the black sack off his head. He was desperately thirsty, hungry, enfeebled and terrified and his broken left hand hurt abominably. He had vomited into the sack twice on the journey but nobody was about to clean him up. His captors forced him to sit on a metal chair; he was too weak to resist as they manacled his wrists behind his back.

  “We meet at last,” Major Denzil Williams said glumly, his words were slurred because his shattered lower jaw was still slowly knitting back together after his encounter with Samuel Calleja’s KGB puppet master in January. He would carry the scars and feel the deep pains of that day to his grave, and as he looked at the frightened Red Dawn terrorist in the chair he ached to be able to inflict harm and disfigurement on him before he killed him. Greatly to his infuriated consternation his superiors had explicitly forbidden him to ‘mistreat Samuel Calleja’.

  It would not do for the little princess’s big brother to get roughed up!

  “You don’t know me,” the newly re-instated MI6 head of Station in Malta went on, his stare boring into the prisoner’s face. “But if you don’t tell me everything I want to know, well,” he grinned a crookedly unfunny grin, “you won’t like what happens next.” He could not stop himself adding: “Particularly the part where my friends,” he glanced to the big men ringing the man chained to the chair in the middle of the dungeon squirming in the dazzling arc lamp’s beam, “get out the hammers and the drills.”

  If Samuel Calleja had not already voided his bowels he would have then.

  Down in the caverns beneath the old Victorian fort which – boasting a single huge 100-hundred ton muzzle loading Vickers Armstrong gun - had covered the south eastern approaches to the Grand Harbour until around 1905, and had been the home of a anti-aircraft battery during and just after the 1945 war, the air was always cool. During the Second World War these old cells and caves had been filled from floor to ceiling with ammunition. Now in the dank air condensation dripped coldly onto the floor.

  “Cut off his clothes,” Denzil Williams decided matter of factly. “I’ll be back down later after I’ve had a cup of tea.” He had already given orders that nobody was to speak to the prisoner except him. A couple of hours sitting naked in the cold with big ugly Redcaps giving him the silent treatment ought to ensure the traitor was in a more talkative mood. In the meantime the senior Secret Intelligence Service Officer on the Maltese Archipelago wanted to know why that bitch Clara Pullman had not yet arrived at Fort Rinella.

  After Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had very nearly beaten him to death at Mdina he had been sent back to Gibraltar to recuperate and basically, left twiddling his thumbs waiting to discover if he had a future in the Service. He had been a little surprised when nobody came out from England to debrief him. Actually, after a few weeks he had begun to wonder if the Service had forgotten he existed.

  Each morning he had gone for a walk out to Europa Point, where on a clear day he could stare at the faint outline of the North African coast some sixteen miles away across the Straits of Gibraltar. In his darker moods he would wonder what was happening in the former French and Spanish colonies across the water; what dark threats lurked beyond the hazy horizon. With France half bomb-ravaged with rumours of regional provisional governments vying for power in Normandy, Gascony and Marseilles sporadically skirmishing around the frayed edges of their self-proclaimed territories, with Corsica in the hands of a military junta and members of former French administrations holed up in the Caribbean with disaffected surviving admirals and generals plotting a return to the old country, what price renewal, reconstruction and rebirth? It was all so sad.

  Denzil Williams had learned his trade in the intelligence game working with the Special Operations Executive in occupied France in 1944. His first wife had been a Parisienne émigré who had dumped him for an insurance salesman in 1953; and his second wife the widow of a French diplomat assassinated in Algeria. Juliette had loved living in London much more than she had ever loved him; their cramped little penthouse flat in Mayfair had become her nest and they would have remained happily married for ever and a day if the fucking World had not gone mad at the end of October 1962. On the night of the war he had been in Lebanon talking to the sort of people the bigwigs back in London tried not to have any dealings with lest they got their hands dirty. He had been in Beirut and Juliette had been, most likely, sleeping in her bed in Mayfair when the bombs went off over London. Like hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of other Britons she had, he hoped, died without ever knowing a thing.

  A little over a week ago a car had drawn up alongside him as he took his daily constitutional down to Europa Point. In years gone by he would never have fallen into such a regular, predictable routine because in years gone by he would have cared if he lived or died; but after two months on the beach in Gibraltar pondering the mistakes of his life and yearning once again to be with Juliette, whom he had adored and worshipped at first sight, if somebody had put a bullet in his brain at that moment he would not have complained.

  ‘You’re looking more your old self, Denzil,’ Sir Richard ‘Dick’ Goldsmith White had declared. The tall, elegantly suited fifty-seven year old Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had looked drawn and tired which was not at all like him. The spymaster had been one of MI5’s golden boys in Hitler’s War. By 1953 he had been appointed Director General of the Security Service, the pinnacle of a stellar career. However, when in 1956 he became the first man to have been made Director General of successively MI5 and then MI6, his transfer was greeted with little enthusiasm by either organisation. MI5 and MI6 - the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service – were two competing clubs with entirely different memberships, traditions and practices and neither ‘club’ had much time for, or respect for the other.

  ‘It must be serious if the DG himself is delivering the message,’ Denzil Williams had observed sourly. Like many old SOE and MI6 hands he had never had much time for the MI5 ‘golden boy’ who thought he knew their business better than they did. His recent painful experiences on Malta had done nothing to disabuse him of this belief.

  Dick White’s car had keep pace with the two men as they walked towards the lighthouse at the end of the point. It had been a fresh, overcast day with spits of rain in the damp, ozone-rich air. Out in the straits white horses had danced all the way between Europe and Africa. Algeciras Bay had seemed empty that morning, the big American carrier the USS Independence and her task force having departed harbour the previous day.

  ‘Rykov has disappeared,’ the spymaster had said.

  ‘You lost him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was careless.’

  Dick White had hesitated before he defended his actions.

  ‘I told you not to interfere with my operation. Your goons almost killed Rykov before I had a chance to play him. I regret what happened to you in Malta but frankly, you are in no position to claim the high moral ground, Denzil.’

  ‘Presumably, you want me to go back to Malta to clean up the mess you’ve left behind,’ Denzil Williams had suggested, ‘sir?’

  ‘I want you to find Rykov, yes.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Kill him. Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ he had echoed, instantly feeling more cheerful and less suicidal.

  ‘What about his tart?’

  Dick White had given him a very odd look.

  ‘She works for me,’ he had said flatly as if he was disappointed that the other man had not worked that out for himself.

  ‘Oh.’ Denzil Williams had been very nearly struck dum
b by this revelation. He prided himself that he had recovered fast from his initial astonishment. ‘In that case why don’t you get her to do your dirty work?’

  Dick White had not masked his irritation.

  ‘Because I learned a long time ago that only a fool gives an order he suspects might not be obeyed.’

  Chapter 40

  16:45 Hours

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  Royal Naval Hospital, Bighi, Malta

  Joe Calleja slowly returned to the land of the living and was a little confused to be greeted by the wry grin on the bruised, scratched and here and there, the handsomely mottled face of his English brother-in-law.

  “I have it on good authority that you are a copper-bottomed out-and-out hero, Joe,” Peter Christopher said.

  The words reached the Maltese dockyard electrician through a post operative anaesthetic fog.

  Joe looked at his right arm, now buried under a heavy plaster cast.

  “I don’t feel much like a hero,” he confessed.

  In the background there was a bronchial laugh.

  “While we were waiting for you to wake up Petty Officer Griffin informs me that you were the brave fellow who actually pressed the buttons that put Talavera’s fish in the water yesterday?”

  “Oh, that,” Joe muttered, wanting to go back to sleep. The bed he was lying in was seductively comfortable and all the pain of before was gone. “Marija was here this morning. She went off to Mdina, I think...”

  “They told me,” Peter Christopher assured him. Before he had left the emergency command centre at Marsa Creek the medics had wanted to fuss over him but he had shrugged off their attentions. He had a sore leg, the lingering discomfiture of miscellaneous bumps, knocks and abrasions. Where he had been nicked by shell fragments he had already been stitched up; and he needed to get back to his people in Kalkara. Returning to RNH Bighi he had found apparent bedlam; the hospital was overwhelmed by the arrival of new wounded and injured. Every available space in the complex was occupied, local people from Kalkara and the families of the victims of the bombardment were running several wards and constantly moving between patients on mattresses in corridors and offices. However, beneath the outward appearance of bedlam everywhere there was a calm, conscientious method. Canvass awnings had been erected outside to shelter the incoming stream of sick and the injured, and the traumatised lost souls who had been found walking in the rubble. If a man let the sights and sounds around him penetrate his defences he could easily be as heart-broken and hopeless as so many of the innocent victims of yesterday’s atrocity. “Apparently, Marija has gone off to St Catherine’s Hospital,” he explained.