by James Philip
Andrei havered a moment.
“If that impression was given, I might have been at fault. I was unaware that a political officer, or a nominated person representing the Party, was required to participate in all long-range flights…”
“Yes, well, they bloody well are! That’s what Chairman Shelepin told the Americans in Sverdlovsk the other month. The rule applies to all flights outside the airspace of the USSR. Make sure it is observed, to the letter, at Seryshevo in future, Kirov.”
“Yes, Comrade First Secretary.”
The younger man hesitated, recognising that this had been the older man’s opening salvo, just to soften him up.
“There was something else I wished to raise with you,” he explained, hoping he was not about to dig himself into a deep hole. “Unofficially, unless you instruct me to the contrary. I am aware that there may be unaccounted for special munitions still present at Seryshevo. For all I know, the Air Force may be waiting for the change of use of the base from a strategic bomber, to a tactical fighter establishment before putting their house in order…”
Kryuchkov was shaking his head.
“That’s Air Force business. If we got involved in that sort of thing Mikhail Sergeyevich’s people would be straight on the phone to Sverdlovsk. I came out here to repair relations with the Party in the Far East, not to throw a grenade into our dealings with Gorbachev’s Central Committee people here in Vladivostok. Personally, I’ve got no time for the bloody man’s ‘liberalising’ agenda, or for his ideas about the Party ‘standing back’ from the day to day lives of the people nonsense. I think it is a recipe for disaster but,” he shrugged, helplessly, “the message I’m hearing from Sverdlovsk is that ‘the experiment Comrade Mikhail Sergeyevich was sent out here to oversee, needs to be tried somewhere’ and out here, if it all goes wrong, hopefully, it won’t infect the rest of the Motherland.”
And, out here, it could be crushed, covered up in a blink of an eye if it all went wrong.
Kryuchkov was working down a list of notes.
The younger man tried to see what was coming next, to no avail.
“Oh, yes, Senior Lieutenant Olga Yurievna Petrovna,” the man sitting, half in silhouette framed in the window said, as if thinking out aloud. “Hero of the Soviet Union.”
Andrei Kirov froze.
It was never, ever good when a senior KGB officer mentioned the name of an underling’s mistress to him. Especially, not when he was alone in the room with the said senior man.
“Presumably, you know who I am talking about, Kirov?”
“Yes, Comrade First Secretary.”
“Good, good…”
The younger man could feel the heat in his face and the ice crawling down his spine.
“Good,” Kryuchkov sniffed, apparently oblivious to his subordinate’s roiling, barely contained angst. “General Zakharov is refusing to authorise her transfer to the Chelyabinsk Military District. Apparently, the Air Force want to publicise her adventures on the day of the Cuban War, again.”
“I did not know that,” Andrei Kirov lied.
With a sinking heart he realised the other man was watching him with the face of a man who was wrestling with some great existential dilemma.
“No…”
He left the word hanging in the air between the two men.
“According to Zakharov,” Kirov’s Chief went on, not looking up from his notes, “Comrade Senior Lieutenant Petrovna has declined to request the transfer required by the Air Force people in Chelyabinsk. He has complained about the involvement of ‘third parties’ attempting to intimidate his people.”
“Intimidate?”
“Quite…”
Kirov imagined he glimpsed an opportunity.
“I don’t understand why you’d be bothered by a thing like this, Comrade First Secretary?”
“No? Are you sure about that?”
“Er, yes.” Andrei would have made a pithy observation about not being a mind-reader gifted with telepathic powers but that was hardly going to help him now, because this conversation was only heading in one direction.
Kryuchkov just kept watching Kirov.
Neither man spoke for about a minute.
“What is going on here, Comrade First Secretary?” Kirov asked respectfully, hoping he sounded as dignified as he thought he did.
“I don’t know, Comrade Major,” the other man said coldly.
That makes two of us!
Again, Kirov refrained from actually saying it.
“It has been put to me that you put pressure on Lieutenant Petrovna to not acquiesce with – to actively resist, in fact - a transfer out of the active service cadre of the Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Branch, to be reassigned to the Headquarters Staff of the Public Information Bureau of the Red Air Force in Chelyabinsk. Further, it is alleged, that you had previously used your position as Political Officer at Seryshevo to seek sexual favours from Comrade Petrovna, and another woman…”
“That’s a lie!”
His boss ignored this.
“A Sergeant Zhukov?”
“That’s bollocks!”
“You deny that you have a ‘relationship’ with her?”
Andrei Kirov bit back his rage.
“I thought I just did, Comrade First Secretary!”
“With whom? Petrovna, or the other woman?”
Andrei paused just long enough to hurriedly take stock.
“I have had relations with Comrade Petrovna,” he confessed, as if this was meaningless. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been in Comrade Sergeant Zhukov’s presence other than in company with other member of the crew of her aircraft, Comrade First Secretary.”
The other man did not care, one way or the other.
“Yes, well,” Kryuchkov remarked, bloodlessly. “Let this be a lesson to you, Kirov. Men in your position, and mine, often get ‘played’ by people with something to hide, or who are seeking to influence important decisions. Before the war of October 1962, we were invulnerable, untouchable and to a degree, we still are. However, in this modern era, although we may shrug many things aside, we can still be embarrassed and that can be very inconvenient to our principals back in Sverdlovsk. They may turn a blind eye to these things but there will always be somebody who will remember the error of our, or in this case, your ways. You should not be surprised if your next posting, once you are finished at Seryshevo, may not be what you wished for. It certainly will not be, if you fail to clean up the mess you have left at that place, or if there is further fall out from it. Do I make myself clear?”
The older man had spoken slowly, coolly, without particular censure, his voice a soulless monotone which told Andrei Kirov that he had washed his hands of him. If he got into trouble again, he was on his own; and if he had ever dreamed of a brilliant career in the KGB, he needed to start forgetting about it.
Right now!
Andrei nodded dumbly.
A KGB officer could get away with virtually anything, murder included, except making his superiors look stupid. He stood accused of using the power and the prestige of the KGB to illicit sexual favours from a Hero of the Soviet Union.
He could hear the thin ice cracking beneath his feet.
He had just become expendable; the bastards could destroy him any time they wanted and now he was about to learn what the price of his survival, for a little longer, probably no more, was going to be.
“Major General Zakharov has enemies within his own service. They need dirt on him. Something grubby enough to bring him down when his term of duty at Seryshevo comes to an end later this year. You will dig something up, or failing that, invent evidence sufficient to end the man’s career, and send him to a labour battalion for the rest of his natural life.”
He waited for the younger man to absorb this.
Kryuchkov said nothing.
The silence became dangerous.
“When do you need a dossier on this, Comrade First Secretary?” Andrei Kirov asked, feeling numb.
“There’s no immediate rush,” the First Secretary of the KGB in the Primorsky Krai said, relaxing a fraction. “If you already had such information to hand, you would, as a good officer of the KGB, have submitted it to higher authority by now. There is no advantage, and little credibility of suddenly producing incriminating evidence, plucking it, as it were, as if from a magician’s hat. No, in my experience, such evidence, hastily produced, lacks the intrinsic verisimilitude of information collected over a period of time by less frantic investigative methods. You should report that you are suspicious of Zakharov later in the summer, and subsequently produce a provisional report with corroborative material in the autumn. For my eyes only, obviously.”
“For your eyes only, Comrade First Secretary,” the still shell-shocked man muttered.
“Good, that will be all,”
Andrei Kirov wanted to get up, to run out of the room.
He remained, for a moment, glued to his seat.
“You are dismissed!”
When Kirov was slow to move, Kryuchkov sighed.
“Get out of my sight!”
Chapter 30
Friday 7th June, 1968
SAM 26000, departing San Francisco for Washington DC
“That man is getting on the President’s nerves,” observed the balding, scholarly-looking man in the seat opposite Bob Haldeman as the Presidential jetliner began to roll forward.
The White House Chief of Staff was exhausted. He had got to the stage where, assuming he had not forgotten which leak needed to be plugged first, he had run out of fingers to stick in the dike and in any case, most of the holes through which damaging information and disclosures - leaks – were escaping were only fillable by bodies. And the Administration had run out of expendable bodies a long time ago.
Haldeman blinked, realising he had missed something the other man had said to him.
“What was that Howard?” He asked, yawning.
I need to get some shut eye on the flight back to DC: there will be a new heap of crap waiting for me back there…
“Ambassador Brenckmann,” the other man said thoughtfully as he gazed distractedly out of the nearest window as the modified long-range Boeing VC-135C climbed away from the Bay Area. “We thought he’d win California but when it actually happens, that’s worse.”
“Yeah, well, the Democrats do dumb things.”
“And the GOP doesn’t?”
Haldeman shrugged.
California had been a bust.
There was no other way to look at it. Right now, he did not know if the Democrats or his own party was the biggest problem. Hence, when the other man told him somebody was getting on the President’s nerves, he had had no idea if he was talking about somebody in the Democrat, or the Republican Party. These days, it was hard to tell who was a friend or a foe.
He had strongly advised the President to put his own name on the GOP primary ballot in California. Instead, his boss had followed the time-hallowed tradition and allowed a surrogate, in this case Senator George Lloyd Murphy, to run as his proxy. To nobody’s surprise, Murphy had been soundly trounced by fifty-seven-year-old former B movie actor Ronald Reagan, running on an infantile, naïve platform of slashing taxes, fighting corruption and supposedly ‘making America great again’. Given that the guy’s intellect seemed to be roughly on a par with that of one of the horses he had ridden in innumerable westerns, and away from the West Coast most people thought he was a joke, he was not going to steal the Republican Convention in Houston in early August but embarrassingly, he already had enough delegates to ensure that the race went at least to a first vote on the floor. And worse, in California, he and his Hollywood buddies had briefly had a nationwide stage to act upon.
“What’s your point, Howard?” He asked wearily. “About the Ambassador, I mean?”
Haldeman’s attention was still elsewhere.
The President’s doctor had given him something to help him sleep and a new kind of diuretic concoction to reduce his diagnosed problem with fluid retention. Phlebitis had been mentioned and when they got back to DC, Haldeman planned to take advice on that; unwilling to rely on the prognostications of the President’s Navy doctor, a new guy on the staff. Phlebitis… Apparently, it explained why the President had been looking so puffy-faced, and the bags under his eyes which needed so much make-up to conceal lately.
He blinked, almost dozing off again.
Rose Mary Woods, who had been the President’s Secretary ever since he was in Congress in 1951, had tried to bend his ear about something…which he had acknowledged, not got around to noting down back on the tarmac and now completely forgotten.
I have to check that out with Rose…
“What if it’s true what some of McGovern’s people are saying?” The other man asked, a little peeved that Haldeman was still not fully focused on the problem. “They’re saying the Democrats plan to go with the ‘lock them all up’ platform?”
“McGovern won’t do that.”
“What about Brenckmann?”
Haldeman raised an eyebrow.
“If we win big enough in November all that goes away, Howard?”
Forty-nine-year-old New Yorker, Everette Howard Hunt Jr. tried to stifle a groan but not very hard. Officially, the CIA man was a Personal Assistant to the Office of the President of the United States, on detachment from Langley, where, from 1962 to 1965, he had been Director of Domestic Operations. As with other supposedly former Company men in and around the White House, Hunt’s role had always been deliberately ill-defined, his work unacknowledged other than by allies, and by enemies on the Hill.
Haldeman had no idea if Hunt was still reporting to Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence, or loyal to the President. His appointment had been one of many ‘emergency staffing adjustments’ necessitated by the unmasking of Operation Chaos and the murky events surrounding the assassination of James Jesus Angleton, the discredited former Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI). Angleton’s death had opened up a still, thankfully mostly secret, even more dangerous can of worms.
Angleton, the man who had been in charge of CIA Counterintelligence since 1954, had died with so many off the books, black bag operations in being, playing out or just hanging in the air, that only long-term CIA insiders like Hunt stood any chance of defusing the political time bombs littering both North and Latin America.
It went without saying that, that was a problem too,
Hunt, like others around the President, was a man with a history that did not bear close inspection; and in an ideal world Haldeman would not have let him get anywhere near the White House.
The man had joined Central Intelligence via Brown University, a spell in the Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo (DD-422), Army Air Corps Intelligence and working with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in China, in 1949. Thereafter, he had had his finger in practically every dirty little plot the Agency had touched, and remarkably, found the time to write dozens of novels, mostly low-brow thrillers, pulp fiction. Oddly, he had never quite graduated to the Georgetown set which had incubated men like Richard Helms, Angleton or Allen Dulles, for whom he had worked as an Executive Assistant, until Dulles was fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, ever since the creation of the Second War OSS and its later CIA incarnation.
Hunt had worked in Mexico, been intimately involved in the coup against the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, and extraordinarily, subsequently behaved so badly as Head of Station in Montevideo – or unconventionally, according to whom one talked to - in Uruguay that when he got back stateside, he had immediately been set to work undermining Castro, which, as everybody now knew, had not worked out that well for anybody in the end…
“I said,” Hunt repeated, realising to his annoyance that Haldeman had not been listening the first time, “that winning big in November won’t count if the GOP loses either Congress or the Senate.”
“That’s not likely.”
> “No, not if McGovern is running,” the CIA man agreed impatiently. “But the President is right to be worried about Ambassador Brenckmann. Oh, and for the record, that was a cheap shot, by the way. Putting the guy’s son in a dead-end job in the Navy Department might come back to haunt you. Whoever was responsible, ought to be fired.”
Haldeman frowned.
How the fuck did Hunt know about that, and from his tone about the abortive second attempt to trash Ambassador Brenckmann’s son’s Navy career?
The one which the Chief of Naval Operations had personally quashed and demanded a one-on-one meeting with the President to ‘clear the air’. That was a meeting the Chief Executive had bravely ducked; asking Nelson Rockefeller to stand in for him. Which had been an even worse idea, because the Vice President had ended up being as angry as the CNO, and had had to talk Tom Hinman out of resigning then and there! It was a nightmare! Now, Rockefeller was starting to ask the sort of questions he should have been asking two years ago, and probably would have if he had he been paying attention…
Fuck it!
That was all strictly need to know!
The whole episode was a disaster waiting to happen; an exercise that had got out of hand almost immediately after the President had made a throwaway remark at late night crisis talks at the beginning of the year; when Ambassador Brenckmann was an out and out no-hoper. Unfortunately, as recent history demonstrated, once launched, a dirty tricks campaign was as hard as hell to put the lid on!
“Ehrlichman told me. The CNO isn’t one of our people. Now Tom Hinman is asking around again, won’t take no for an answer; trying to figure out what happened there. The Polaris Strike Force over there in Britain is a priority project for the Navy. If the President doesn’t support him over this Taiwan thing, Hinman and the other admirals are going to cut up rough, Bob…”
Haldeman waved this away.
It transpired that the Navy had not been crying chicken, it really did not want to get embroiled in a dog fight with the Chinese. It was fucking ridiculous: why had all that money been spent on those fucking ships it they were not up to actually fighting? Jesus, the Administration did not get this sort of sob story about ‘operational readiness’ from the Army or the Air Force. The sooner the President got rid of Hinman and brought in a fighting admiral the better!
