by James Philip
This was a thing that became a little less opaque when he discovered the identity of the two men the Collective Leadership had sent to conduct ‘exploratory’ talks ahead of the ‘plenary session’ scheduled for the next morning.
Sixty-four year old Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov was one of four First Deputy Foreign Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He worked for Alexei Kosygin, the member of the Troika whose responsibilities included the administration of the post-Cuban Missiles War Five-year Plan and Foreign Policy. Kuznetsov ‘managed’ the Western European Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry.
Born in Sofilovka in the Kostroma Governate of Tsarist Russia north east of Nizhny Novgorod, Kuznetsov had joined the Party in 1927. By profession an engineer he had been permitted to travel to the United States between 1931 and 1933 to study at Carnegie Mellon University. His two years studying and living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania might have made a less careful, less assiduously ‘reliable’ man than Kuznetsov horribly vulnerable in the years of Stalin’s purges and Laverentiy Beria’s witch hunts but in hindsight, he had survived relatively easily. Like many men in the middle echelons of the Party apparatus he had remained anonymous, safe, going about his work unmolested by the famine in the Ukraine, the butchery of the Red Army’s officer corps, and the constant NKVD trawls for fresh gulag fodder. Perhaps, he had just been lucky; he preferred to think he had simply been too ‘useful’ to be culled in those far away times. Besides, he had always honestly believed that people exaggerated how bad things were under Stalin. Those were hard times and any leader worth his salt would have been a hard task master.
His good fortune probably had a lot to do with the fact he had not achieved a ‘visible’ position in the Soviet Government, or the Party until he was in his late thirties in 1940. By that age a man understood when to keep his mouth shut, who to talk to, and which subjects were safe to discuss. He had risen through the ranks unspectacularly, eventually being entrusted with the chairmanship of the Soviet of Nationalities succeeding Nikolay Mikhailovich Shvernik and had been appointed First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1955, where he had anonymously worked in the long shadow of Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko.
Now and then he reflected that had Gromyko survived the Cuban Missiles War the Motherland might not have marched back down the road to a new, never-ending war with such enthusiasm. But that was his heart talking; his head said that the war faction – even after it had broken the back of Krasnaya Zarya inside the Soviet Union – would have won out whatever Gromyko had done.
Kuznetsov and Thompson had enjoyed coolly cordial relations before the October War. The Foreign Ministry man was accompanied by Major General Sergey Fyodorovich Akhromeyev. In the same way that Kuznetsov was representing Alexei Kosygin, Akhromeyev was Marshal of the Soviet Union Chuikov’s man.
Thompson knew nothing of Akhromeyev; which was probably exactly why the Minister of Defence had sent him to this ‘exploratory’ meeting.
The opening pleasantries were soon concluded and the men settled around a large teak table in a bare-walled former bedroom. Nobody had touched up the paintwork where the cots had rubbed against the wall and the air was vaguely musty, a desultory setting for an opening exchange hedged around with dangerous pitfalls.
“Your British allies have threatened the Motherland with nuclear war,” Kuznetsov said without preamble, his voice level and his tone collegiate. “They are clearly set upon the destruction of my country.”
Thompson listened.
After a moment of contemplation he decided not to respond.
Kuznetsov understood and respected his counterpart’s silence.
“I am instructed by the Supreme Soviet,” he continued “that the general conditions specified by the American side are, subject to detailed negotiation, a satisfactory basis for proceeding with these discussions. In the spirit of mutual co-operation and the interests of global peace I am therefore authorised to communicate to you draft terms for an armistice of not less than five years between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States.”
Chapter 27
Friday 19th June 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull the Chief of the Defence Staff was the last to arrive at the early evening conference. The afternoon had turned showery with periodic dark clouds scudding across the Oxfordshire countryside threatening sudden thunderclaps and short, vicious downpours. One such was looming over the city as the weary old soldier trudged up the stairs to the appointed meeting place with the Secretary of Defence.
“It never rains but it pours,” William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw the jowly, hang dog-faced Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Borders observed cheerfully as he shook Hull’s hand. Although Whitelaw was only forty-five – his forty-sixth birthday was at the end of the month – he had the look of a much older man. It was not just the bad diet, the privations of the last two winters, or the stresses of the terrible decisions which had to be taken day after day that wore a man down. It was living with the grief of having lost so many family members and friends, the knowledge that nobody yet understood how permanently poisoned the World had become, and the sense of despair that sometimes afflicted any parent when they contemplated what the future held for their children and grandchildren that slowly, insidiously, inevitably corroded the soul. Not everybody was afflicted with the general mal de mere, many of the young simply wanted to pick up the traces and get on with living; it seemed to be the older people, the generation who had lived through the Second World War who were the worst hit, aging faster, and weary before their time.
The Chief of the Defence Staff was relieved to find that there was to be only one other participant at the meeting. Sometimes, things were best kept to the smallest possible circle until somebody had made a decision what to do next, and in his judgement this was precisely one such time.
“Good to see you looking so well, Peter,” the soldier said, nodding to the bespectacled, grey-haired, distinguished man standing at the Defence Secretary’s side. Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, 6th Baron Carington, had the look of a cancer patient. The skin hung off his once trim frame, his pallor was waxen; he might have been sixty-five, not forty-five years old like his friend Willie Whitelaw. Carrington had been First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the October War, escaped the bombs but not the vagaries of the subsequent fall out clouds which had claimed the lives of his wife and two eldest children. In the recent post-confidence vote reshuffling of the pack of junior government ministers conducted to lock the Labour Party into the UAUK, Carrington had been one of a handful of Tory ‘minor grandees’ brought in from the cold. Officially, he was ‘Navy Minister’; although everybody knew he was actually Willie Whitelaw’s deputy.
Eton and Sandhurst educated Carrington had been commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in the 1945 war, winning a Military Cross for valour. He had stayed in the Army until 1949, thereafter entering politics, serving in Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden’s administrations as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and in the latter 1950s as High Commissioner to Australia. Returning from Australia Harold MacMillan had brought him straight into the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. Like Whitelaw, had he emerged from the cataclysm of October 1962 unscathed he might as easily have found himself contending with Edward Heath, Ian Macleod and Peter Thorneycroft, Margaret Thatcher’s current Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the leadership of the immediate post-war United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration.
A flash of lightning momentarily illuminated the humid, airless first floor annexe in which the three men stood. A water jug and several glasses had been placed on a table in the corner of the room, otherwise the only other furniture in the ancient, wood-beamed former Don’s study were four battered Queen Ann style chairs.
Willie Whitelaw gestured at the chairs.
Whitelaw and Carrington were in morning suits, perspiring in the lingering sultry humidity of the
day. Sir Richard Hull was similarly sweltering in his uniform. Distant rumbles of thunder rattled the leaded panes of the windows, another flash of lightning flickered in the eyes of the men confronting the latest disaster to befall British arms.
“The First Sea Lord is down at Plymouth at present,” the Chief of the Defence Staff reiterated, “conferring with Flag Officer Submarines and Rear Admiral Collingwood.”
“Presumably Admiral Collingwood has been brought in to advise if and when HMS Dreadnought might be available for operations in the South Atlantic?” Lord Carington inquired rhetorically.
“Yes, Minister,” Sir Richard Hull acknowledged. Earlier that day HMS Oberon; listed as missing forty-eight hours before, had been re-classified as ‘lost in action’. The submarine’s last known position approximately accorded with Argentine Navy boasts that it had depth charged and destroyed a British submarine south east of the Falklands Archipelago four days ago. “As you will be aware HMS Grampus is being withdrawn from operations in the Western Mediterranean with a view to redeployment to the South Atlantic, and Orpheus and Sealion are in mid-passage to relieve boats which have been on station since the commencement of hostilities. Theoretically, HMS Dreadnought could be in the war zone within sixteen to twenty days if she sailed now.”
“What does Admiral Collingwood have to say about that, Sir Richard?”
“He reports that although Dreadnought can be made ready for sea in a matter of days that she will not be ‘operational’ for several months. Damage and machinery faults incurred in the boat’s two war patrols have thus far been ‘patched’ not ‘repaired’.”
Rear-Admiral Simon Collingwood was the man who had taken command of HMS Dreadnought – then still fitting out in a graving dock at Barrow-in-Furness – on the night of the October War and commanded her on her first two patrols. In response to the Prime Minister’s demand to build a nuclear undersea fleet, the then First Sea Lord the late Sir David Luce had promoted him two ranks and installed him in Barrow as the Navy’s ‘nuclear boat supremo’; a task which by all accounts, Collingwood had thrown himself into with the same one-eyed professional determination with which he had commanded Dreadnought in action in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
The Defence Secretary coughed.
“Basra?” He asked pointedly. “Is it true that all the bridges are down including the pontoon crossing of the Arvand River?”
“The Iraqi forces in the city appear to have blown them up,” the Chief of the Defence Staff explained, oddly sanguine about the news. “It might mean that they plan to make a stand at Basra.”
“What does General Carver make of it?”
Sir Richard Hull hesitated. It was far from a straightforward matter to know what was in Michael Carver’s mind at the best of times.
“He views the development with equanimity, sir.”
“What does that mean?”
The soldier grimaced. Once one got into the business of second guessing the man who was actually ‘on the spot’ that was a very bad road to travel.
Lord Carington pressed him.
“It was my understanding the Jericho intercepts indicated that the Red Army planned to throw its whole weight south down the floodplains of the Euphrates and the Tigris towards Basra before crossing the Tigris at Al Qurnah and at Basra – by pontoon bridge if necessary – prior to mounting a strike south of Basra into the Faw Peninsula and east to envelope Abadan? Without any way to get across the Arvand River at Basra the Red Army might elect to consolidate before it mounts further operations. In that event it would be too well-entrenched, possibly within weeks, for us to ever dislodge or challenge it and Abadan would become a liability?”
“Jericho is almost three weeks out of date,” Sir Richard Hull reminded his political masters. “Other than fragmentary evidence from traffic analysis and the Soviets’ helpful propensity to broadcast their presence in various locations as if nobody was listening, we are in the dark as to their actual progress towards Basra. We have surmised their most likely lines of advance; but we know very little and can know very little more, until such time as the Red Army draws closer to Basra.” He mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Operations in the South Atlantic are the purview of Flag Officer Submarines in Plymouth. Likewise, operations in the Persian Gulf are in the capable hands of the C-in-C Middle East.”
The Defence Secretary reluctantly accepted this; and even more reluctantly moved on to the real reason for this unscheduled conclave. The announcement of the relaxation of sanctions against the Irish Government in Dublin had been quickly followed by an inflammatory, quasi triumphal speech by Sean Lemass, the Taoiseach – Prime Minister – of the Republic and had led to a weekend of rioting in Londonderry and Belfast, and a rash of sectarian killings and attacks on property across the six counties of Northern Ireland. Buoyed by virulently partisan statements from its supporters in America, the Irish Government was giving every impression that it had won some kind of great moral victory. While it was unclear whether Lemass, a veteran of the 1916 Rising, had intended to set Ulster on fire from end to end but his blatant pandering to his own Fianna Fáil party faithful on the steps of the Irish Parliament building, might just have lit the blue touch paper to ignite a second Irish Civil War.
“Ulster,” Willie Whitelaw groaned. “You will be aware that one of the options on the table is the suspension of the Northern Ireland Government at Stormont and the institution of direct rule from Oxford,” he prefaced glumly. There were already twenty-four thousand British troops stationed in the six counties, troops which would have been invaluable to Michael Carver in the Persian Gulf. “Another option is a complete withdrawal of our forces, their dependents and members of the civil administration and their families, whose lives would obviously be in danger if they remained behind in the aftermath of such a withdrawal.”
The Chief of the Defence Staff blanched at either ‘option’.
To his mind a civil war restricted to the six counties of the north was one thing; acting in such a way as to make that civil war general throughout all thirty-two counties of the island of Ireland was unthinkable.
“Um...” He looked his Ministers in the eye. “A total pull as opposed to a planned withdrawal carried out over a period of years with the consent of all the major parties would tend to exacerbate, rather than relieve out current military over-stretch,” he said diplomatically. “In the case of the imposition of direct rule you must realise that nothing short of martial law will suffice at the outset. There are no more troops that can be safely sent to Ulster. The barrel is empty, gentlemen.”
Sir Richard Hull prided himself that he was ‘above politics’ and that his loyalty was to the Crown in the person of Her Majesty the Queen. That the politicians in England and Ireland had let the situation in Northern Ireland reach this pass after all that they had been through since the October War beggared belief.
The country was now fighting what amounted to a World War, alone thanks to the ‘politics’ of its transatlantic ‘friends’. Throughout the twentieth century successive British governments had pandered to the sectarian whims of the so-called ‘loyalist’ and ‘unionist’ majority in Ulster; it was inevitable that one day there would be a reckoning. Unless something was done to regain order on the streets of Northern Ireland the sectarian unrest and violence could easily spread to Glasgow. What was to stop other cities on the mainland, their populations beset with hunger, austerity without end, living in squalor in the detritus of a war which had killed millions, forced to watch helplessly as disease took away the elderly and the young while their ‘leaders’, few of whom had any real legitimacy in this post-cataclysm brave new world prattled and politicked as if the sufferings of the nation were as nothing, rising in revolt? The Chief of the Defence Staff was amazed it had not happened already!
The soldier shook his head.
“Sir,” he replied, “You have asked the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to fight wars on oceans and continents thousands of
miles apart. Every day service men are dying in foreign wars while in this city,” he waved dismissively with his right arm, “their leaders are behaving as if they have no understanding whatsoever of their privations, or of those of their families at home. You talk to me about ‘options’ to keep the lid on Ulster. Frankly, we are beyond that, sir.”
Whitelaw and Carrington exchanged thoughtful looks in the way politicians will when they have the courage to admit to themselves that actually, they have very little control over events.
“Other than elements of the 1st and 5th Royal Tanks based in Wiltshire, in combination amounting to a brigade strength armoured battle group,” the Chief of the Defence Staff explained, “the British Army has no strategic reserve. Moreover, even this ‘reserve’, would be unsustainable in the field for want of spare parts, ammunition and the skilled men required to support it. It was for this reason that I advised early in the Middle Eastern crisis against attempting to deploy it in the Gulf. Otherwise, the Army is fully engaged on police-keeping duties the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, and in managing ongoing salvage and recovery operations in the bombed areas. There are no more troops to be sent to Northern Ireland or to ‘manage’ the fallout from any kind of precipitate withdrawal from that province. Let us speak plainly,” the soldier counselled gravely, “if there is a political resolution to the current strife in Ulster it is self-evidently not within the wit or the gift of the current administration in Stormont Castle. We have lost control of civil order in Northern Ireland, how long will it be before we lose control of the situation In Glasgow, or in the countryside around the Mersey Estuary, or around London as refugees return to the less damaged suburbs, and bands of brigands group together to attempt to ‘mine’ the vaults of the City of London? Damn it! The Navy has had to take over policing the country around the submarine base at Barrow!”
