Warsaw Concerto, page 12
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
At a time like this the last thing any responsible government ought to be doing when the civic, commercial and industrial life of the nation was finally re-adjusting to the realities of the new epoch, was to start robbing ‘civil society’ and the expanding military-industrial complex it was being asked to support, of key workers, or risking disrupting the generation of new apprentices her government had specifically required every employer to take on as part of the new post-cataclysm politico-economic national settlement.
Of course, this was a concept that was far too complicated for many of the backwoodsmen to comprehend, let alone take to heart!
Margaret Thatcher caught her husband’s eye, and half-smiled; she did not have to remind him that the threat posed by the socialist horde masquerading as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the House of Commons, was triflingly negligible in comparison with the dead hand of the rump of the old Tory Party – that part of the Party which had complacently allowed Macmillan and his acolytes to sleep walk into World War III – which still survived in Parliament, irony of ironies, courtesy of her landslide victory in March 1965 which had saved, when nothing else could have, their miserable anti-diluvian bacon!
“Walter and Joanne are sorry to be leaving England,” she went on, “Frank and I will very much miss them both.”
Peter Carington and Philip De L’Isle murmured quiet assent. The latter had only met the US Ambassador and his wife once, a week ago at a reception in Christ Church College. However, even on the evidence of that single encounter, Ambassador Brenckmann and his wife, a charming, slim, grey-haired lady had radiated decency and common sense, and in no time at all the three of them had been exchanging notes about the good and the bad things inherent in representing one’s country far from home.
Earlier that evening, Tom Harding-Grayson had been in a reflective mood, unusually quiet during the meal as had his oldest living friend, that most impeccably discreet of men, Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Head of the Home Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet.
“My sources tell me that Walter is under no little pressure to throw his name into the hat to run for the Presidency in 1968,” the Foreign Secretary remarked, ruminating upon his half-full wine glass.
“Joanne is adamant that she and Walter should travel a little. They plan to spend some time out in California with their grandchildren,” the Prime Minister confided.
“Walter told me he’s ‘through with lawyering’,” Frank Waters, the lady’s roguishly moustachioed consort added with a chuckle.
Margaret Thatcher and the repeatedly decorated – among other things her husband was a holder of the Victoria Cross, won for gallantry of, according to his own account, ‘far too nefarious to relate in polite company’ in the Western Desert and the Balkans in 1942 and 1943 - former SAS-man eight years her senior, had married with huge ceremony and general approbation that spring, and contrary to the fears of most observers, they had continued to be a marvellous public, and everybody now assumed, private double act.
They had married in Christ Church Cathedral and to put an end to further debate promptly issued a joint statement to the press that: ‘Henceforth in public life the Prime Minister will continue to be known as The Honourable Mrs Margaret Hilda Thatcher, MP., whereas, in private life she wished to be known as Mrs Margaret Hilda Waters.’
One or two brave men had asked her husband what he thought about the arrangement.
‘I am my wife’s servant! Her word is law!’
Always, with Frank Waters, ‘the Colonel’, there was that utterly disarming, winning gap-toothed smile that so reminded everybody of the late sadly missed Terry Thomas, the fondly remembered inimitably lovable rascal of countless Ealing comedies of the pre-October War years whom, like so many other national treasures had gone missing on the night of the October War.
In the early days of the old soldier’s engagement to Margaret Thatcher there had been a gentlemanly element of competition between Frank Waters and Steuart Pringle; on one notable occasion the former SAS-man had succeeded in placing his body between his future wife’s person and an assassin’s bullet a split second before Pringle and half-a-dozen AWPs had protectively buried their charge beneath a heap of muscular bodies. Nowadays, they worked as a team; in public the Prime Minister’s husband always carried a loaded gun – a Beretta – and, given that nobody was ever closer to their joint charge than he a lot of the time, he had, pragmatically, assumed the role of the Lady’s defender of last resort. If anybody got past the AWPs, he would take enormous pleasure in settling their hash for them!
Keeping the Lady safe was the thing!
“Walter confirmed,” the Prime Minister continued, her tone that of a woman making polite conversation, “that given both the Ark Royal and the Eagle are badly in need of lengthy spells in dry dock that two vessels, the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt and the USS Randolph will be loaned to the Royal Navy while they are out of action. American training crews will remain on board both vessels while the men from the Ark Royal and the Eagle transfer directly onto the new ships. That ought to obviate the delays we’ve experienced thus far bringing so many of the other transferred ships into service.”
Only two of the four cruisers and eleven of the twenty plus destroyers reactivated and handed over to the Royal Navy from the US Navy Reserve had thus far joined the Fleet. Nobody on the British side of the Atlantic blamed their allies for this; the Americans had had quite enough on their plate the last year, and every day it seemed, more terrible news emerged about the cost of the civil war with the Kingdom of the End of Days.
As Tom Harding-Grayson had sombrely reported to Cabinet earlier that autumn: ‘When the Nazi Einsatzgruppen went into Poland and western Russia – often with the active support of local Fascists and anti-Semites - they cut a swath through the population but they specifically targeted Jews, Gypsies, so-called commissars and anybody so foolish as to inconvenience their work; but not even those foul monsters actually set out to kill everybody…’
The war in the Midwest would have torn the heart out of any other country on earth and yet throughout, the US administration had laboured might and main to keep food, oil and medicines coming to the United Kingdom. Even as US tanks were crashing through the defence works of the legions defending the borders of the evil empire, essential military logistics were still being diverted to arm and to sustain the expanding Free French Army across the English Channel. That British households were now, to all intents, well and truly ‘off the ration’ – for the first time since October 1962 - was due in no small measure to the good faith of the US President and his Administration in the worst of all possible times.
“I know there was some talk of Walter’s nomination as the US’s representative at the United Nations when that august, er,” Tom Harding-Grayson smiled wanly, “body eventually re-convenes, possibly in San Francisco?”
Margaret Thatcher knew her friend was being mischievous.
“You know full well that’s just smoke and mirrors, Tom,” she admonished him without rancour.
“He’d do a damned good job, I should imagine,” Peter Carington offered.
“Tom still hasn’t confided in me who he wants to be our representative,” the Prime Minister retorted, feigning vexation.
Sir Henry Tomlinson put down his glass.
“I suspect that is because he doesn’t want to spoil your dessert, Prime Minister.”
“It’s apple pie, by the way,” Frank Waters chortled.
His wife looked from her Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary to her Cabinet Secretary; knowing the two old scoundrels were hatching some kind of plot.
Again…
“All right. Who exactly do you have in mind, Tom?” She inquired, the dazzling smile on her lips belying the cool calculation in her steely blue eyes.
“Roy,” her friend sighed.
“Roy Jenkins?” Margaret Thatcher blinked, genuinely surprised. “I thought he was,” knowing she was about to say something a lot unkinder than she really intended, she hesitated, and then, as was always going to happen, she was as scornful as she was always going to be on this, particular topic, “too busy throwing mud pies at his communist opponents in the Labour Party, to consider a diplomatic vacancy?”
“Officially, he still feels he ‘has a realistic shot’ at the leadership of whatever manifestation of the Labour Party emerges from its present…”
“Cat fight,” the Lady remarked, tartly.
“Leadership battles after a disastrous general election are unpleasant things in all parties, Margaret,” her Foreign Secretary observed sanguinely.
His friend held up a hand in an unconvincing gesture of surrender and she shook her head at her husband who grimaced theatrically and for a moment, completely distracted her.
Her Foreign Secretary took the opportunity to continue: “Unofficially, Roy has given up the fight for his Party’s leadership as a bad deal. Anybody who was in government with us in the Unity Administration is tainted by the same brush regardless of how competently they performed their duties. Roy Jenkins was a great success under very trying circumstances at the Home Office, I recollect… Anyway, to the Labour rank and file, and especially to the most powerful union leaders, he is a class traitor, and all that rot. That’s quite apart from the fact a lot of people in the Labour Party have always rather resented that Roy is so, obviously, much cleverer than they are – it is not a thing he is very good at hiding, unfortunately - and that when he talks about British history, he actually knows what he’s talking about. Presently, I should think he feels the same way about the Labour Party as I used to feel about the Foreign Office back in the ‘good old days’ when according to dear old Harold, we’d ‘never had it so good’!”
Peter Carington decided that they were all forgetting something important.
“I was under the impression that Hugh Foot was the man slated for the position at the reconstituted United Nations?” He reminded his colleagues urbanely.
Sir Hugh Foot had held the onerous post of United Kingdom Delegate to the Manhattan Peace Process ‘talks’, commenced after the calamities of 1964 during Lyndon Johnson’s short tenure in the White House. Those ‘conversations’ had continued, in a desultory fashion, in Philadelphia and Washington DC after the UN Building in New York had been rendered unusable by the Empire State bombing a few seconds into the New Year; and had now been wholly superseded by the discussions ongoing to re-convene – more likely, substantially re-create the machinery of the United Nations Organisation so wantonly, and in retrospect, foolishly discarded by the Kennedy Administration in 1963, in the aftermath of the October War.
Fifty-nine-year-old Hugh Mackintosh Foot was a vastly experienced diplomat and colonial administrator. A former President of the Cambridge Union, in the years before the fall he had been Governor of Jamaica, and then Cyprus. The eldest of four remarkable brothers, all embedded in the British political mainstream, his youngest sibling was none other than the firebrand Labour politician Michael Foot. That said, Sir Hugh, was a lifelong man of the centre ground of British politics, a liberal of the kind that was as easily accommodated within the ‘national liberal’ wing of the pre-war Tory ‘family’, as he would probably have been in any social democrat Labour government, had the Macmillan era finally come to an end sometime in the mid-1960s. At the time of the October War he was British Ambassador to the United Nations and the general assumption had been that with talk of resuscitating the UN, he was still the only man for the job.
Tom Harding-Grayson nodded sagely.
“We had something of a heart to heart the other week,” he explained. “Hugh’s not been in the best of health lately. His work in America has rather worn him down. To cut a long story short, he would not be entirely opposed to accepting a senior Foreign Office or diplomatic posting a little closer to home.”
Sensing yet another fait accompli, Margaret Thatcher rolled her eyes in a demonstration of impatience which would have had the majority of her junior, and many of her other senior ministers scurrying for cover.
The Foreign Secretary smiled apologetically.
“I thought Hugh would be an ideal Chairman for the new apparatus of the Council of Europe,” he confessed.
Nascent mutual military and economic assistance pacts had been agreed between the Scandinavian League – Norway, Sweden and Denmark – and the British government as long ago as the autumn of 1963. Later that same year Portugal and the then United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had, with no little fanfare, formally renewed ancient treaties of alliance and mutual defence. Since then Northern France and parts of Belgium and the Netherlands had been ‘liberated’ and incorporated into a loosely defined ‘European Council’ which, in recent months, Tom Harding-Grayson had been working to cement into a watertight political entity sharing common democratic and humanitarian ideals, and military-economic-goals. Undoubtedly, more would have been achieved had not the sudden thawing of the Anglo-US relations already resulted in the re-establishment of a modified version of the old North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – NATO - which all of the ‘European parties’ including previously neutral Sweden, had elected to re-join that summer.
“Hugh’s a very good man,” Peter Carington murmured. The First Secretary of State looked apologetically to his Prime Minister whom he knew hated to be ‘ambushed’ by her ministers.
“Yes, he is,” the Lady agreed sternly. She studied her Foreign Secretary for a moment. There were times when she was a little afraid that her friend was indeed Machiavelli incarnate, just like his detractors claimed, consoling herself with the thought that at least he was on ‘our side’…most of the time.
Even Tom’s worst enemies grudgingly admitted that he had pulled off a string of remarkable coups in his three years at the helm at the FCO; four years if one included the period that he was the late Sir Alec Douglas Home’s Permanent Secretary, when everybody agreed he had been the one actually pulling all the strings and attempting to hold together what became, during the organisation of Operation Manna, the New Commonwealth.
Not that Tom was invariably infallible.
For example, in 1964, ostensibly to keep Egypt out of the Gulf War he had brokered a deal which maintained – by completely alienating the Israelis – a fraught peace between Egypt and Israel; but only at the price of guaranteeing Egyptian security with a mutual defence pact. This had eventually given Abdul Gamal Nasser free licence to move west, rolling up the old Italian colonies along the North African shore all the way to the Tunisian border, albeit not before the offending ‘treaty’ had sparked a bloody coup against his regime because he had made peace with the former perfidious, infidel colonial overlord, Britain.
Elsewhere in the Middle East Tom had talked the princes of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into long-term military and trade alliances, settled the fate of Abadan – its great refineries wrecked in the Gulf War but now rising again from the ashes – and made a twenty-five-year pact of friendship with the regime of President Hasan Al-Marmaleki in Iran under which Royal Navy ships guarded the Persian Gulf and Commonwealth and Iranian troops jointly occupied Abadan Island.
If there were men on the government back benches who regarded ‘the Nasser Pact’ as a compact with the Devil; there were a lot more malcontents who viewed Tom Harding-Grayson as a traitor for ‘surrendering Hong Kong thirty years too early’ to the Chinese communists. Other lamenters for the lost jewels of empire also blamed Tom for the failure of the New Commonwealth to come to the United States’ aid in Korea.
Unsurprisingly, many of these dissident voices belonged to the ‘same suspects’ who had always held him wholly culpable for the ‘humiliation in the South Atlantic’ in April 1964, and for the abject shortcomings of GCHQ – which was worse than unfair because although GCHQ had been a Foreign Office agency prior to the October War, it had never been one since - which had allowed, without warning, the Soviets to very nearly seize Malta while at the same time the Falkland Islands and South Georgia were being invaded by the Argentine.
‘I had a complete blind spot about the whole of South America,’ Tom had later admitted to the Prime Minister.
In fact, they had all had a blind spot about that part of the globe, truth be known.
As for Malta: but for a heroic battle against impossible odds by two out-gunned Royal Navy ships, the frigate HMS Yarmouth and the immortal HMS Talavera, Malta, as would Margaret Thatcher’s Government, would have fallen in April 1964, and she would have spent the last two-and-a-half years contemplating the ignominious end of her career in politics…
As it was, Margaret Thatcher planned to fly out to Canberra in February to attend the scheduled meeting of Commonwealth Heads of State – rescheduled to follow the re-dedication of the United Nations in California - where of course, Sir Peter Christopher, in his role as Governor-General of Australia would stand-in for Her Majesty. The Queen planned to visit Australasia later next year, a proper regal progress in the old-fashioned style travelling on board the Royal Yacht Britannia, which at this time was refitting at Rosyth for her first cruise since before the October War.
The Prime Minister relented.
“Presumably, now that you’ve told me this; that Sir Hugh and Mr Jenkins will be expecting a call to visit me at Hertford College at the conclusion of our conference here in Kent, Tom?”
Her friend smiled, avoided her eye.
“Yes. I’m sure that could be arranged, Prime Minister.”
Chapter 11
Thursday 8th December 1966
FBI Office of Special Operations, Quantico, Virginia
On Monday 5th December the teller at the Memorial Bank of Pennsylvania on Broad Street South in Philadelphia – a nineteen-year-old brunette with a toothy, winning smile had looked up and greeted the neatly moustachioed, middle-aged man in a dark two-piece suit. He had matched her smile as he peered at her through the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. Often, there was a queue outside the bank before it opened on the first morning of the working week but she had not seen this man in the line, so she guessed he must have arrived just after the doors were unlocked.
