Warsaw Concerto, page 18
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
An apparently amiable, patient bear of a man with a steely streak and sometimes, a temper that flashed just behind his eyes, Dobrynin had become a diplomat at the age of twenty-six in 1946 after a brief career working for the Yakolev Design Bureau. Posted to the Soviet Embassy in Washington from 1952 to 1955, he had been Dag Hammarskjöld's Under-Secretary for Political and Security Council Affairs at the United Nations, and after that Head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s America Department, attending the misbegotten Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna in 1961. Had anybody troubled to sound him out about the likely response of the Kennedy Administration to sending those missiles to Cuba, he would have almost certainly have replied, somewhat tersely: ‘Are you insane?’
Although Dobrynin had not said as much to Henry Kissinger since the first news of the ‘Tempelhof Demonstration’ began to filter into the US news cycle – nobody in Sverdlovsk had told him what the Hell was going on; he was only the Ambassador, after all! – privately, the sorely tried diplomat’s emotions, four years on from the debacle of October 1962, were broadly similar to those of the US National Security Advisor.
It was hard to think what single action by the Troika could possibly have more comprehensively soured the diplomatic atmosphere, than the ‘Tempelhof exercise’, given that its staging had coincided with a new mood in the White House, a subtle softening of attitudes, buoyed by the Republicans runaway triumph in the recent mid-term elections, to explore alternative ‘approaches to the Soviets’.
Henry Kissinger imagined he had seen his Russian counterpart flinch when he had told him about the film of Red Army troops driving through Checkpoint Charlie in salvaged American vehicles.
The third man in the Oval Office coughed.
If there was one man in Washington that the ‘Tempelhof Demonstration’ had not caught napping, it was fifty-three-year old Richard McGarrah Helms, since 1st November, the Director of Central Intelligence.
Helms had not been everybody on Capitol Hill’s first pick to replace John McCone, when JFK’s man at Langley had had to stand down because of his declining health, a decline generally assumed to have been hastened by the impossible pressures of the last year.
However, for Richard Nixon, there had only ever been one man to replace McCone and knowing this, the GOP-dominated House had anointed rather than merely rubber-stamped Helms appointment in less than thirty minutes.
“The Soviets want us to over-react, sir,” the handsome, suave spy master remarked. “The Berlin thing was designed to embarrass the Administration, granted,” he put down his coffee cup, ‘but mostly, I suspect, to dent Mrs Thatcher’s aura of invincibility. To, shall we say, remind people that the British are not the only ones who get to have a say in what happens in Western Europe in the next few years.”
The President sighed.
His British allies would be digesting exactly the same intelligence – the movies delivered via Swedish and Indian legations – to the State Department last night.
“Of course, the Brits are the ones who are out on a limb in France, Belgium and in Holland, and to all intents, the guarantors of Danish and Norwegian territorial integrity.” The CIA man pursed his lips. “The Swedes are back on their feet enough to look after themselves, leastways, the backbone of the Scandinavian League…”
“The Brits know we are behind them,” Richard Nixon murmured.
Henry Kissinger stirred.
“Intellectually, emotionally, economically and fiscally, that is true, Mister President,” he agreed. “But they are the ones with the boots on the ground in France and what happened in Berlin last week,” he hesitated, glancing askance to Helms, who nodded imperceptibly, “will inevitably, be unsettling.”
“We think it might have taken place as recently as last Monday,” the Director of Central Intelligence suggested, answering Henry Kissinger’s unspoken question.
Richard Helms had not always been a career ‘spook’.
The son of a wealthy family, schooled in Europe who was fluent in both French and German, in 1931 he had returned to New England to attend Williams College at Williamstown, majoring in history and literature. By 1935 he was working for United Press, for whom he covered the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and once, interviewed Adolf Hitler. Commissioned into the US Navy Reserve he was headhunted in 1943 by the wartime OSS – Office of Strategic Services – becoming a case officer in London and liberated Paris, and as the war came to an end had worked with Allen Dulles identifying German scientists on the Operation Paperclip lists.
Helms had been at the heart of the US post-Second War CIA ever since. In the 1950s he was Chief of Operations, the man behind a string of counter espionage actions including the ‘Berlin Tunnel’ episode, which had attracted a huge amount of controversy in 1954. In fact, Helms had had a finger in practically every major CIA ‘intervention’ in those years: the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954, and at the nexus of the Company’s catastrophic meddling in the Congo in 1960.
Ironically, it had only been because he had been passed over by Dulles for the post of Deputy Director (Planning), that Helms had contrived to walk away from the Bay of Pigs debacle with clean hands. A thing which was all the more remarkable given that right up until the October War, Helms had been working tirelessly to undermine Fidel Castro’s regime in Havana.
In many ways he was the perfect man to sit in the Director’s chair at Langley. He was a patriot with few qualms about getting his hands dirty, while at the same time, oddly, regarded by those closest to him to be a very moral man. He was also intently watchful, meticulous, a man whose facial expression was often at variance with the look in his eyes with, and as the years went by, less and less willing to tolerate fools gladly or otherwise.
Knowing that in former times it might have caused the Administration embarrassment, Helms had warned the President that his twenty-seven-year marriage, to sculptress Julia Bretzman Shields, had irretrievably broken down and that matters were in the hands of their lawyers. There had been some concern that perhaps, a Democrat in the Senate might elect to ‘raise the matter’ during Helms’s confirmation hearings but in the event, those hearings held shortly before the mid-term elections had come and gone without a whimper.
It was almost as if the Democrats had known their humiliation at the coming polls was nigh, and as a group, aware that the wilderness awaited them they had wearily determined to go, quietly into the night…
The President looked at his wristwatch.
It was still breakfast time in San Francisco where Secretary of State Henry Cabot Lodge was finessing – well, attempting to finesse - the arrangements for the forthcoming re-dedication of the United Nations with Edmund Gerald ‘Pat’ Brown who had, against all the odds, clung on by his finger nails to the Governorship of California a little over a month ago.
Nixon had confidently expected his former campaign manager – Robert Finch - from the abortive 1960 race against JFK to breeze home in California; instead Brown had squeaked in – 50.02% to 49.18%, aided and abetted by the four ‘nobodies’ whose names had also appeared on the ballot paper – for his third term.
The President had been tempted, sorely tempted, to set the Department of Justice to work on the California vote but even Attorney General John Mitchell, possibly the least well-respected member of his Administration, had balked at the prospect of attracting still more opprobrium from the still, bizarrely, Democrat-leaning East Coast press.
John Haldeman had been another unlikely voice of caution.
‘We’ve already got thirty-nine governors, Congress and the Senate in our pockets, Mister President,’ he had half-smiled in that Eagle Scout, straight-arrow way of his, ‘maybe, we should let the Democrats have a few crumbs. Besides, I’m sure we can find Bob Finch a job in DC to soften the pain.’
So, much as Pat Brown’s ‘victory’ had rankled, Nixon had let it go. That was not to concede that he was not convinced that the Democrats had somehow stolen the California gubernatorial race.
In the New Year he planned to offer Bob Finch a sub-cabinet post, there were vacancies in the Departments of the Interior, Justice and at State. Bob had always given him good advice in the past – it had been a mistake ignoring his warning not to run against Pat Brown back in 1962 – and it was good to have people around one who were not afraid to tell you ‘how it was’.
The last couple of weeks the whole United Nations farrago had started to worry him on any number of levels. The main worry in California was security, an issue complicated by the Secret Service’s preference to hold the re-dedication ceremonies and the full sessions of the new United Nations in either the state capitol, Sacramento, or Los Angeles although the assumption at the outset was that the venue would be the University of California at Berkeley, or possibly, in the grounds of the Presidio in the Bay Area.
Nobody seemed to remember why Berkeley had seemed such a good idea in the first place, and now he had had to send Cabot Lodge out to the West Coast to pick up the pieces. Fortunately, a final date for the re-dedication had not yet been agreed; late January or early February seemed the most likely options, so, there was still a chance to paper over the unseemly disagreements raging between DC and Pat Brown’s office in Sacramento.
The latest idea was to host the entire event in San Francisco Bay, on board the USS United States (AH-101), the former transatlantic liner SS United States, which had transferred into US service as a hospital ship in August of 1965. Post-Korea, the great ship had been reconverted to general use as a troopship and fast transport and was currently fitting out for its new mission – as a floating version of the badly damaged, derelict United Nations building in Manhattan, a process which had been under way for the last month although nobody seemed sure who had actually authorised it - at Philadelphia.
A lot of things at the Navy Department still happened without anybody later being prepared to take responsibility for it; unlike the Army and the Air Force it’s peripheral involvement in putting down the rebellion in the Midwest had allowed the Admirals to embark on several of their own pet projects in the last year. Allegedly, this was a thing the Congress was going to get a handle on in the coming months but nobody in the White House was holding their breath...
If it was determined that the USS Unites States was actually needed on the West Coast, Secretary of Defence Melvyn Laird had assured the President that it would take about a week for the great ship to sail south, transit the Panama Canal and berth in San Francisco Bay, or conceivably at the Port of Los Angeles, but obviously, not at Sacramento which was sixty miles inland…
There was a knock at the door to the Secretarial Rooms and the tall, erect crew-cut figure of the White House Chief of Staff, Harry Robbins ‘Bob’ Haldeman entered the Oval Office.
“Premier Thatcher is on the line, sir,” the newcomer reported. “I have informed her that Doctor Kissinger and Director Helms are in the room with you. She has asked that Lord Carington and Secretary of Defense, Viscount De L’Isle participate in your discussions.”
Richard Nixon nodded.
He had been aware that Margaret Thatcher had been in conference with her closest advisors over the weekend. If he had a lot on his mind as the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Air Force survey teams and literally tens of thousands of Federal law enforcement and other, civilian experts and aid workers continued to scour the devastated lands of the Midwest, making the roads and ports safe, restoring basic utilities and trying with heart-breaking diligence to make an accounting of the unimaginable atrocities committed by the Kingdom of the End of Days; then he well knew that his English ally had more than enough problems of her own.
Neither of them needed the Soviets choosing this particular moment to flex their muscles in Berlin!
It was not as if he did not know that sooner or later, he was going to have to commit US forces to stabilise things over there; regardless of the public lack of enthusiasm for any further overseas adventures.
Personally, Richard Nixon felt like a heel holding out on the British. Sure, there was a river of aide of all kinds flowing across the North Atlantic to England but weapons, food and dollars – even the latter – actually cost the Administration very little, certainly nothing the Unites States could not afford to give. Nobody on Main Street America was losing a cent and the bankers were making a mint buying up Government bonds to fund the relatively small sums involved in the modern ‘lend lease’ exercise. It was the least he, as President, owed his British ally after the shot in the arm Margaret Thatcher’s unequivocal, very loud support for him and the American people, from the very outset of the war in the Midwest.
Thus far, the Lady had refrained from asking for any more than he was prepared to give, unbidden. That could not go on forever, and he was aware that the British premier’s problems were of an entirely different, daunting order of magnitude to his present little ‘local difficulties’ over the latest revelations – or as Bob Haldeman called them, ‘non-revelations’ – in The Washington Post about the Warwick Hotel Scandal. Sooner or later he was going to have to give the press a sacrificial lamb, hopefully, Hoover would find a few likely candidates in his office, otherwise, the Oval Office remained, in strict legal terms, unimplicated and with luck, that was the way it was going to stay whatever that bastard Ben Bradlee at The Post thought…
Bradley and his Democrat stooges needed to wake up, look around them and for once, just once, see the big picture. Nothing had come out of the Grand Jury convened by Special Prosecutor Earl Berger before, during or since the war in the Midwest that pointed fingers at the White House. There was no smoking gun; heck, LBJ was still in office when the bugging took place. Accusations that members of Nixon’s transition team had incited the FBI to see that ‘the material from the Warwick Hotel’ got into the hands of ‘friends in the press’, were nebulous and ill-defined. The early days of any Administration are often times of exuberance, perhaps, a little hubris but that is not the same thing as proof that the White House was necessarily involved in those ‘leaks’ in New York. As for allegations that members of the Administration had attempted to obstruct Congressional and NY PD investigations into the affair, well, Nixon had never ordered anybody to lie to the investigators…
So, hopefully, the thing would fizzle out eventually. Several junior FBI men, and of course three or four of the named ‘plumbers’ – including, unfortunately, old buddies of Ronald Ziegler, the President’s youthful Press Secretary – would soon have their day in court. Otherwise, all The Post had was gossip, blatantly vicious politically-motivated tittle-tattle.
Nixon knew that Bob Haldeman had been working on Ben Bradlee’s boss, the paper’s publisher, Kathryn Graham; surely she did not honestly believe that the New York Times, or the Boston Globe or any of the other big circulation East Coast dailies were going to burn their boats with the Administration just to ‘big up’ what had always been, a complete non-story?
The President made a mental note to speak to his Chief of Staff later that day, to check-in. Nothing niggled at him so corrosively about the Warwick Hotel ‘situation’ as half-suspecting that it was one of those problems where no news, was not necessarily good news…
He turned his mind to weightier matters.
The Brits were trying to liberate France on a shoestring. Albeit a shoestring that represented all, everything they could afford in men and treasure without beggaring their own economic recovery and tentative attempts to commence the rebuilding of all their cities bar London. Without the uninterrupted flow of US arms – mainly infantry weapons and light artillery, ammunition, uniforms, transport vehicles and fuel, the Free French would still be fighting with ancient World War Two rifles, just a militia, not potentially at least, an army of liberation.
The trouble was that the British were fighting in France with only a small fraction of their might, such as it was. They had reassumed colonial-era commitments throughout the New Commonwealth and the Middle East which were, even in the medium term, wholly unsupportable. They simply did not have the ships, the aircraft or the men to carry on much longer this way and practically everywhere, they were already stretched far too thin on the ground, and upon the waves.
The President had already started to do what could be done but even those stop-gap measures which had been instituted as long as a year ago, like the transfer – Congress had mandated it be termed the ‘permanent loan’ - of warships, wide-ranging mutual technology exchanges, food and drug aid programs, were only now beginning to fully get up to speed. Nothing happened quickly, let alone immediately and in the wake of the Soviets’ Tempelhof stunt it would hardly be unnatural for the Brits to now be casting an anxious eye on the Rhine, the de facto demarcation line between modern NATO territory and the wreckage of what had been West Germany, and the rest of devastated Central Europe before the October War.
The Free French were probably doing their best; everybody knew the only real army in France at the moment was the twenty-eight thousand-strong British and Commonwealth Corps – still called the British Expeditionary Force - responsible for the western sector of the liberated lands…
And now the Russians had driven T-62s through Checkpoint Charlie!
Henry Kissinger had summed it up perfectly: ‘We’ve been looking for a sound foreign policy foundation for the re-deployment of US Forces in Western Europe for the last six months. Now the Soviets, with their Berlin demonstration and various other associated provocations around the structure of the old Warsaw Pact, have supplied us with an irrefutable argument for intervention!’
Of course, the manner and the timing of the ‘peacekeeping initiative’ the Joint Chiefs were working on – literally twenty-four hours a day – at the Pentagon was going to be a matter of fine judgement. Likewise, presenting it to the British in such a way as to not ruffle sensibilities when discussions turned to future command structures, and the precise objectives of the likely ‘intervention’ but that could be finessed nearer the time.
