Warsaw Concerto, page 24
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
“I have a full-time job to do here in Australia until at least the autumn of 1968,” Peter explained. “I wouldn’t have accepted the post unless I was ready to give it everything I’ve got.” He shrugged. “Then I hope to go back to sea, to resume my real career.”
“I’m a patient man,” he was assured. Eric Stanton went on: “Aysha II will go up against the Yanks in two years’ time. I just don’t think we’ll beat them without a fellow like you at the helm. A captain like you. All I ask is that you go away from here today and remember the unconditional offer that I’m about to make you.”
There was a lengthening silence filled by the sluicing of the water down the Columbia Challenger’s flanks, the breeze through her rigging and the soft, quiet groaning and working of the yacht in the tideway.
Marija decided she had been silent long enough.
“I think you’ve got our attention, Eric,” she observed wryly, prompting smiles on both men’s lips.
“Good,” the magnet smiled. “I plan to keep on trying for the Americas Cup,” he declared. “I hope to win it with Aysha II but if not, there will be an Aysha III or IV. So, when you decide you are ready to captain an Americas Cup yacht, to be the figurehead on land and the skipper on the water, the man calling all the shots no matter how much it costs me,” Eric Stanton grinned, “you just let me know, Peter.”
Chapter 21
Sunday 11th December 1966
Kharitonov Palace, Sverdlovsk
The morning session had not gone well. Had there been such a personage as a neutral observer at the increasingly bad-tempered exchanges – notably on Sergey Gorshkov’s part, he was an admiral so he had never learned to cultivate a diplomat’s poker face or measured tone – he or she, might have concluded that the interlocutors were the warring parties, not nominal allies seeking to confound their mutual enemies.
Zhou Enlai had told his hosts that his government believed that the ‘Tempelhof Demonstration’ was ill-advised, and ought to have been staged only after long and careful consultation with his principals in Chongqing.
Moreover, he had been moved to specifically inform his hosts that ‘open-ended escalation was not the agreed policy of the Sino-Soviet entente’ initialled at Bersk the previous year.
This was not the view of Alexander Shelepin or of his two Troika co-members, who took the view that Zhou Enlai was back-sliding on commitments made and accepted in good faith at Bersk; commitments which had supposedly under-pinned the Soviet assistance provided to the People’s Liberation Army and by proxy, to the leadership of the People’s Republic of Korea which had assisted in the expulsion of the American interlopers from the Korean Peninsula.
Further, Zhou had been reminded that the ‘experimental’ combined operations mounted against Chiang Kai-Shek’s island fortress of Formosa at the conclusion of the Korean ‘affair’ would not, and could not have been undertaken without the support of the Red Air Force and the Red Navy, would not be treated as a template for future co-operation in the North Western Pacific. Moreover, if the Chongqing regime was unwilling or unable to co-ordinate its ‘initiatives to exert pressure on the British and the Americans in the Far East, and India in the Himalayas’, then current Soviet aid shipments, and technical assistance, would be ‘adjusted accordingly’.
Zhou, in turn had been distinctly unimpressed by the assumptions underlying this premise.
In fact, it was apparent to him that his hosts were clearly labouring under a misapprehension. Worse, he was a little disappointed: the one thing he had not expected was muddled thinking.
There was no denying that the ‘Taiwan adventure’ had not gone as well as hoped, and phase two and three of that operation had been abandoned when the Americans had made known that whatever Chongqing had believed, it absolutely guaranteed Formosan territorial integrity. China had just fought and won one proxy war with the United States – in Korea – but in the meantime supporting Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists on Taiwan had obviously become an imperative American strategic red line: cross it and it was likely that Chinese cities would be obliterated.
Besides, with Korea united and solidly under Chongqing’s wing, with the Hong Kong situation peacefully resolved and with most of South East Asia quietly slipping out of the enfeebled hands of its former imperialist masters into the Chinese camp, now was the time for consolidation and for beginning the rebuilding of the cities of the north of China destroyed – by the Soviet Red Air Force - in the October War. This was not the time to be embarking upon new, dangerous provocations.
In fact, Zhou was more than a little irritated that his hosts had not worked all this out for themselves.
Prior to the Cuban Missiles disaster Moscow had treated the People’s Republic like a tiresome junior party, actively discouraged its atomic bomb program – which had been ruthlessly targeted on the night of the October War - and periodically, cold-shouldered Mao Zedong on the World stage. Back in those ‘old days’, Zhou himself had had to put up with being lectured by vodka-soaked Soviet Foreign Ministry apparatchiks, who were a great deal keener to communicate to him that he ought not to be getting above his station; than they were in promoting genuine fraternal Sino-Soviet brotherhood.
Zhou Enlai was at pains to tactfully point out to his hosts that far from regarding Soviet assistance in the war in Korea as ‘charity’, the quid pro quo for that aid had been Chongqing’s willingness to permit, unimpeded, the re-establishment of the Red Army, Air Force and Navy presence in the Russian Far East. Specifically, the restoration of their base at Vladivostok, the re-opening of ports and the reconnection of the industries of the Amur Region to the rest of the USSR – all things which could not have happened had not the People’s Liberation Army stood back and watched. He also observed that the recent deployment of medium range ballistic missiles - SS-4s - in the Vladivostok Military District and in the Amur Oblast, had not been carried out without ‘prior consultation’ as required under the protocols agreed at the Bersk summit.
“Those missiles are aimed at the Yankees!” Gorshkov had thundered.
“Four years ago,” Zhou had reminded the Soviet Defence Minister, “similar missiles aimed at the Americans killed many millions of my countrymen and women and destroyed Beijing and a score of other cities in the People’s Republic.”
Far from showing contrition Zhou’s hosts had shrugged this off. China had been attacked in the confusion and the people responsible were all dead…
Given that Zhou Enlai had never thought that there was anything remotely accidental about the Soviet missile and bomber strikes which had ravaged much of the northern half of China, he was less than impressed with this argument.
The Red Air Force had hit the Lop Nor atomic research and testing grounds so hard that nobody could even find those facilities on the map anymore!
Consequently, it would be years before the People’s Republic would be in a position to test its own bomb.
It was Gorshkov, the Troika’s attack dog, who set the tone for the afternoon’s conversations.
“It was clearly understood that the PLA would renew offensive operations in the Ladakh against the Indians? Why do you think we have been supplying advanced weaponry to the regime in Pakistan?”
“It was suggested,” Zhou agreed blandly. “That is an option which is still under consideration at this time.”
A lie, a small white lie; the People’s Republic had no interest and little to gain by antagonising either the Indians, or their New Commonwealth allies, when the Hong Kong situation had already been resolved so satisfactorily. Likewise, what profit was there for the People’s Republic in risking alienating the British when the Chongqing regime so badly needed friends in its crusade to gain recognition in the international arena. While Zhou had no feel for how the Soviets planned to approach the coming rebirth of the United Nations, he had no intention of subordinating his country’s long-term objectives, or room for manoeuvre to the whims of an ‘ally’ who, for reasons beyond his comprehension, regarded Warsaw Concerto as a good investment for the future!
Admiral Gorshkov had taken Zhou’s pause for thought for an opening, now he jumped in.
“We agreed that Korea and Formosa would be the opening blows of a campaign to disrupt the Yankees and the British…”
The veteran Chinese envoy tried very hard to conceal his impatience.
“That scheme of things became too dangerous while the United States was preoccupied with its little ‘civil war’,” Zhou retorted, almost but not quite between clenched teeth. “If you recollect,” he reminded his hosts, “our discussions weighed a variety of options in which a rational opponent, the United States – or the British - might be kept off balance while we consolidated the initial recovery of our territories and began to re-established our military-industrial complexes in the post-October 1962 era. We also discussed wars by proxy; at no time did we contemplate risking direct confrontation with adversaries capable of obliterating us at a time of their choosing, comrades. For example, renewing the war in the Himalayas which, I agree, might induce the Pakistanis to launch fresh military adventures in Kashmir achieves nothing in the long run except bringing forward the day when India, the globe’s second most populous country asserts its nascent power. That is not in the interests of the People’s Republic at this time. Likewise, whether the Red Army seeks to employ a large proportion of its front line strength enforcing Sverdlovsk’s will upon all the peoples of the Balkans or embarks upon new adventures in Central Europe, or in West Germany,” he added, suspecting his hosts had been supremely economical with the truth about the true status of Warsaw Concerto, “has no bearing on the People’s Republic’s core geopolitical interests within our own existing geopolitical sphere of influence.”
There was a tense silence.
Vladimir Semichastny stirred, raised a hand to Shelepin.
“May I make an observation, Comrade Chairman?”
“Yes, yes.”
Prior to his recent formal elevation to Head the KGB and winning his seat on the Troika, which in the post-Cuban Missiles War sat above and treated the Politburo of the Communist Party as its subservient executive committee, Vladimir Semichastny had been responsible for overseeing the creation of client regimes in each of the former Soviet Bloc countries of Central Europe.
Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin had talked about ‘taking back control’ of the old Warsaw Pact territories, now variously destroyed, dislocated and in many areas uninhabited and uninhabitable but they had done nothing more than ‘talk’, and then, inexcusably, criminally frittered away two-thirds of the surviving fighting units of the Red Army on that ill-starred adventure in Iraq and Iran, seduced by the mirage of securing the Tsarist dream of an ice-free port in the Indian Ocean and presumably, destroying British and American hegemony over the Middle East for a generation, in a single winner takes all strategic gamble.
Which, as they all knew, had failed.
In fact, Operation Nakazyvat had been an unmitigated disaster which still clouded every aspect of internal and external policy.
“Four years ago, our countries lost the war,” Semichastny reminded his listeners sombrely. “Since then, only in Turkey and the Balkans, and by proxy, in Korea have we succeeded in salving our pride.” He looked the Zhou, shrugged. “Please, do not think that we do not respect your analysis of our history, and of our situation. The Motherland attacked you, our fraternal brothers, in error during the war because the weight of the attack on us was so severe that our command and control system completely broke down. The nature of that terrible ‘error’ is a thing we may dispute; there is nothing we can do to undo that injury to your country; and those who ordered it, those who allowed it to happen – both the war itself, and the attacks by the Red Air Force and the Red Army on you in the confusion of battle – are dead now, the last traitors were liquidated in July 1964. There is no profit in dwelling on the sins of the past; we face too many dangers in the present.”
Zhou Enlai neither agreed nor disagreed with this proposition. He listened, his expression politely attentive although personally, he saw no logic whatsoever behind re-inventing, let alone threatening the West with a new version of the Warsaw Pact.
Such things were far too easily misunderstood by one’s enemies. The object of diplomacy was to exert control over a mutual understanding of the best interest of all the parties, not to unnecessarily blur the picture.
The original Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, promulgated in Warsaw – hence the name ‘Warsaw Pact’ on 14th May 1955 had been the Soviet Bloc’s belated, rather ad hoc, response to West German re-armament, based on an earlier pact between Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland in the late 1940s. Initially, the West had not taken the ‘Warsaw Pact’ very seriously, correctly viewing it as a ‘rush job’ reflecting Soviet insecurity rather than strength, taking it for granted that the seven non-Russian signatories – Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary Poland and Romania - had been corralled, unprepared, into ‘the deal’.
Indeed, the fact that back in March 1954, everybody had conveniently forgotten that the official position of the USSR had been that the best antidote to German re-armament was its own request to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, amply illustrates how caught ‘on the hop’ the Kremlin had been by that self-same prospect of German re-armament!
Not that this ‘request’ had been taken very seriously in the West. One British general had compared the Soviet ‘request’ to the actions of ‘an unrepentant burglar requesting to join the police force.’
Later, the brutal manner in which the Red Army had ruthlessly crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 had set alarm bells ringing in western capitals. Many analysts had concluded that the very violence of the Soviet response proved that the vaunted ‘Warsaw Pact’ was no more than a ‘paper tiger’, a superfluous Treaty lacking substance, mocking the bilateral treaties already in place between the USSR and its – Soviet-occupied - European satellites penned at the point of a gun in the aftermath of the Second War. In other words, in the beginning, the Warsaw Pact had had more to do with international posturing than strategy, and even in this it had singularly failed because within weeks of its establishment West Germany had actually joined NATO.
Not to put too fine a point on it the only thing the Warsaw Pact had achieved in the war of October 1962 was to ensure that East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and large parts of Hungary and Bulgaria had been obliterated by thermonuclear carpet-bombing and fallout.
“It is said,” Semichastny continued gravely, “that a man may walk from the ruins of Moscow to Berlin without meeting another human being; that he might walk all that way – sixteen hundred kilometres, over a thousand miles – across ground scorched by the thermal shock wave of bombs or sterilised by the heat of the firestorms which consumed every building and forest in the days after the war. Berlin is alone among the great cities of Central Europe not polluted for hundreds of years by multiple ground bursts. Warsaw is just three big holes in the ground, Kiev, Minsk, and Leningrad suffered the same fate. In the north the Yankees bracketed the Kola Inlet, Archangel and Murmansk are no longer there. As for Moscow,” he sighed, “we all know that the Kremlin was, as the Yankees say, ‘ground zero’. They neglected to ground blast Gorky, no matter they attacked the city with five big bombs on that night. Saratov is mostly gone, so is Volgograd-Stalingrad, the place from whence the march to victory in the Great Patriotic War truly began. Here,” he gestured at their surroundings, “and Chelyabinsk only survived by some unknown quirk of fate. In the Crimea the whole Black Sea Fleet might have been destroyed had not Admiral Gorshkov sent it to sea in time…”
Sergey Gorshkov guffawed.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference if LeMay’s bombers hadn’t bombed Balaklava Bay instead of the city of Sevastopol!”
“Ah,” Zhou grimaced sympathetically, “the fortunes of war.” He knew what his hosts were saying to him. They wanted to rebuild, to restore their national pride and at another level, to give their mutual enemies a nasty surprise.
It smacked of wanting one’s cake and eating it, too!
“Revenge comes in many flavours, comrades,” he remarked gently.
“Revenge,” Alexander Shelepin purred like a threat. “This is not about revenge. Let us not beat about the bush. It is the policy of the Soviet Union to wage an unrelenting struggle against the West…”
Zhou shook his head.
“The West?”
“Much of Scandinavia escaped direct damage in the war. Likewise, parts of France. Spain and Portugal were untouched, Italy is politically fragmented but physically whole. We were attacked without warning on that night in October 1962 and we shall have lands in the West in compensation for our lost cities and farmlands, Ambassador Zhou.”
The veteran Chinese diplomat absorbed this unhurriedly.
“Surely that is an argument to carry to the new United Nations in California, Comrade Chairman?”
“It is a policy which the USSR will pursue in every possible way.”
“Ah,” Zhou thought he understood now. The ‘Berlin Demonstration’ would dominate the first plenary session of the UN in California. It was a sledge hammer to crack a nut, as the Americans might say.
Sometimes, the Russians became so obsessed with their ‘smoke and mirrors’ tricks that they forgot what they had been trying to accomplish at the start!
Problematically, now that his hosts suspected that the People’s Republic had decided it was strong enough to pursue its own – different – policy towards the West, or rather, conduct its own, independent foreign policy towards the outside world, they were unlikely to let Zhou in on their secrets or the thinking behind them.
Not that he could not guess what the Russians had in mind.
A provocation here, a probe there might cloak their real intentions for a period. Sooner or later they would strike at the vital interests of the weaker of the two re-united Allied superpowers, the United Kingdom to test just how seriously the United States took is latest ‘alliance’ with the old country, and whether the ‘democracies’ of the New Commonwealth were as keen as they said they were about re-vamping the United Nations.
