Dirty Tricks, page 9
As Winifred could have predicted Albert Henderson was carrying dispatch boxes, one red, one yellow, as he entered the room.
‘There’s just no end to the bumf,’ he said, as he deposited the boxes on a table. ‘And there’s no way I can avoid dealing with that lot after I get back from Jane Jansen’s dinner. What a life! I tell my ministers to avoid taking decisions when they are tired, but how can I do that myself when I’m working an eighty-hour week? In this job it’s so important to be able to pace yourself.’
‘In any job, Prime Minister,’ King-Lander agreed.
‘Well, how are you, Alan?’ Henderson asked as he finally flopped into a chair.
‘I’m fine, but Winifred still insists that you aren’t’.
Henderson made a gesture of despair. He certainly looked trim enough, as he leaned over to pour himself a neat Scotch and replenish King-Lander’s glass, and younger than his years with his slim figure, craggily handsome features and abundant wavy hair, which remained brown through judicious tinting, a deception common enough among politicians anxious to avoid an ageing image on television, especially since its introduction into the House of Commons. This had not gone unrecorded by the Press, although he was still commonly referred to as ‘the best-looking Prime Minister since Anthony Eden, Margaret Thatcher excepted.’
‘Now you know you are sleeping very badly, Bert,’ his wife said. ‘And working far too long into the night. You used to be able to eat the work and sleep like a top. It’s all this extra worry … ’
King-Lander, who had been a widower for many years, had never been able to understand how Henderson, who was so forceful in politics and so tough in keeping his ministers in line, could be so patient with his wife.
‘I’m sorry, Bert,’ Winifred said, seeing the looks passing between the two men. ‘It’s just that I care about you and I don’t want to be a widow.’
That selfish admission in the final phrase was typical of Winifred Henderson and had been so for as long as he had known her, King-Lander told himself. The Prime Minister’s psychogenic pains could well be due to her consistently unhelpful attitude.
She hated the bustle of London and he had listened to her banging on about the joys of ‘a little cottage in the country’ ever since Henderson had been elected Labour MP for a South London constituency. Her dream had been to return to Norfolk, but at least Henderson had summoned up the courage to scotch that. ‘Whatever happens I’m not going to Norfolk,’ he had heard Henderson declare. ‘That bloody wind! Straight off the Russian steppes! If anything would be likely to see me off it wouldn’t be my heart, it would be that wind.’ Since then she had focused her imagination on Cornwall, though Henderson had done his best to kill that by pointing out that the historical romancers had scoured the county, and that London was a far richer seam.
While some successful men had been pushed by their wives, often beyond their capabilities, Henderson had achieved eminence in spite of his. Perhaps, to spite his, King-Lander thought as he admitted, ‘I’m afraid I’ve promised Winifred that we’ll go through the motions again, Prime Minister. Tomorrow morning would suit if you could manage half an hour at my consulting rooms … ’
‘OK, Alan,’ Henderson sighed. ‘Anything for a quiet life. Now let’s talk about something else. Anything except politics and my health. Have you got a good story? We can do with a laugh. And you can tell it to the Ambassador.’
King-Lander, whose prowess as an after-dinner speaker was exceptional, never seemed to go anywhere without some story, usually with a medical flavour.
‘This is a true story which I heard only this morning about a patient of one of my colleagues at the London Clinic. For years he had done the pools without winning a penny. Then last week, in an inspired moment, he selected eight draws by picking out the towns where he had been unfaithful to his wife. He scooped the pool! Half a million pounds tax-free! Who says that virtue is its own reward?’
‘I still think it is,’ said Winifred who, in spite of her loneliness, had never dreamed of being unfaithful, even if only because, as she had once put it to King-Lander, who had long wondered how she had managed to produce two children, ‘Sex leaves me stone-cold’.
‘You can’t tell that one at Jane Jansen’s table,’ Henderson warned. ‘She’s far too straight-laced. You’ll have to think of another one, Alan.’
That was no problem for King-Lander. ‘This one’s about a doctor who was staying with a country parson, whose claim to fame was that he could immediately produce a Biblical text for any subject suggested to him and then preach a sermon on it. Over Saturday evening dinner the doctor bet the parson that he could think of a subject which would defeat him and such was the cleric’s confidence that he accepted a situation in which the doctor would give him a folded paper revealing the subject as he ascended the pulpit.
‘As the cleric faced his congregation and read the paper it bore the single word “Constipation”! Without hesitation the parson announced, “The text today is taken from Exodus, Chapter 24 Verse 15. And Moses took the two tablets and went up into the mountain.” ’
Henderson always laughed at his physician’s jokes, this time so heartily that he had to wipe a tear from his eyes.
‘It’s not just your stories, Alan, it’s the way you tell them. But I don’t think you’ll get away with that one at Jane’s table either. She and her husband are real Puritans, Bible-punchers. She’d probably think it was blasphemous.’
‘And probably correct me into the bargain,’ King-Lander suggested. ‘The accuracy of the story depends on which version of the Bible you read.’
‘Oh, I think she’d take that all right,’ Winifred said. ‘She’s very human and very sweet.’
‘Sweet!’ Henderson scoffed. ‘That’s not the word I’d use for her. Can you be sweet and be as tough as she is?’
‘Well, she’s sweet to me,’ Winifred persisted. ‘And I suspect she’s sweet on Alan.’
At that moment the red telephone on the sideboard rang and Henderson answered it. The caller was the Cabinet Secretary with the unwelcome news that Sir Mark Quinn was insisting on an urgent meeting.
‘Oh no!’ Henderson reacted. ‘This is the first free minute I’ve had all day. Tell him I’m with the doctor … tell him anything … I don’t doubt it’s urgent. Everything’s bloody urgent … ’
There was a pause while the Cabinet Secretary explained that, though he did not know exactly what Quinn had on his mind, it could only be important new information about the international crisis.
‘Oh all right then … Tell him to come round in half an hour. I’ll see him in the Cabinet Room.’
‘I’ll make it as formal as possible,’ he muttered as he replaced the receiver with a bang. ‘Blasted Chief Spook! Insisting on his rights! Says he has something he must tell me. Everybody has something they must tell me. And most of it I don’t need to know. Least of all from that mad Irishman.’
‘I take it you don’t like him,’ King-Lander observed.
‘I can’t stand him. I’d sack him if I could find a good excuse. He and his like live in a demi-monde in which they are so deceived by their fantasies that half their reports are sheer fiction. MI is supposed to stand for Military Intelligence: for me it means Mischief Incorporated! You know what a mess they caused for Anthony Eden by sending a frogman to spy on the bottom of the cruiser that brought Bulganin and Kruschev to Britain?’
‘Yes. The frogman was called Crabb.’
‘Well, they contemplated something even dafter. They seriously considered hiring a pickpocket who’d turned his talents into a cabaret act to pick the Russian leaders’ pockets in the hope of finding documents during an after-dinner entertainment here in Number Ten!’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘I can believe anything about the Spooks,’ Henderson insisted. ‘I’m told that Quinn once ordered a miniature microphone to be inserted in the bell round the neck of a pet cat belonging to somebody he was snooping on!’
‘He sounds ingenious,’ King-Lander said.
‘It’s a pity he can’t channel his ingenuity into more constructive channels. He has nothing but contempt for ordinary people. He thinks the world is largely populated by idiots. Supercilious sod … ’
‘Calm yourself, Bert,’ Winifred remonstrated. ‘You see now what I mean, Alan. He never used to be as irritable as this. I’m sure it’s bad for his blood pressure. That’s something you should check thoroughly tomorrow.’
‘Oh God!’ Henderson murmured, holding his head in his hands.
‘Have you got a headache, dear,’ Winifred asked solicitously.
‘No, I haven’t got a headache, but you could easily nag me into one.’
‘Nag? Me, nag? I’m only interested in your own good!’
‘That has been the cry of the nagger down the ages,’ Henderson responded, looking at King-Lander for support.
The physician’s reaction was to refill his glass while Winifred sighed and reached for another chocolate.
‘You’ll spoil your dinner if you eat any more of those,’ King-Lander remarked.
She resisted the temptation by closing the lid firmly, and suppressed her desire to tell the doctor that he risked more than a spoiled dinner by drinking so much Scotch. ‘I suppose I shall have to go to the Ambassador’s on my own,’ she said petulantly. ‘We can’t both be late and Alan’s got his own car.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Henderson replied. ‘Send the car back for me right away. I should be finished with the Chief Spook by the time it returns. That is if what he has to tell me doesn’t set the Thames on fire.’
He rose wearily, picked up his dispatch boxes and prepared to move down to the Cabinet Room which, like some previous Prime Ministers, he used as an office. It might not have occurred to him consciously but any man looked impressive sitting alone at the long Cabinet table as a visitor entered.
‘Make my apologies to Jane,’ he called. ‘See you later Alan.’
Never being one to waste a minute, Henderson took his usual central seat with his back to the marble fireplace and opened the oblong yellow box which contained the latest Intelligence intercepts from GCHQ. He hoped that its contents might afford some advance clue to the information which Quinn was coming to impart, but there was nothing more than what he had come to call ‘the usual crap’ – details of Soviet troop movements, which he considered to be alarmist.
Everyone knew that the Soviets carried out major exercises at this time of the year to make maximum use of good weather before ‘General Winter’ took command, he assured himself. Why, they were even inviting NATO observers under the usual détente arrangements to which one of his Labour predecessors, Sir Harold Wilson, had rightly been a signatory. The trouble was that far too many people saw the Russian leaders as villains, endlessly plotting the enslavement of the world. And by violent means. As King-Lander, a fellow Socialist, had put it, ‘In the average British mind an anarchist had a bomb in one hand while a Bolshevik had one in both hands.’ And in his experience it wasn’t like that at all.
He knew most of the Russian leaders, particularly Anatoli Borisenko, the Party Secretary and President, who had entertained him at his dacha, and Konstantin Volkhov, the Premier. Most of their time was spent, just as his was, with domestic issues. And with the promotion of trade, which was so important both to the USSR and to Britain.
All they were doing with their military exercises was what their predecessors had done for years with such success – rattling their sabres to fool the West into running themselves into bankruptcy by spending too much on defence. Well he’d never fallen for that, at least no more than he had been forced to do to satisfy pressures from Washington. In Henderson’s belief, the Secret Service, and Quinn in particular, was mainly to blame for promoting the Red scare in Whitehall, whence it reached the Press and the people. And in this respect he shared the view which Jane Jansen held about the CIA. Both might be essential but they did more harm than good. Half the reports they circulated ‘from sources with excellent access’ turned out to be inaccurate and some were concoctions.
‘Ah, Sir Mark,’ Henderson said somewhat testily as the Secret Service chief was shown into the long, impressive room with its chandeliers and Corinthian columns. ‘I hope this really is important. Or perhaps, on second thoughts, I don’t. I don’t think I could stand any more shattering news at the moment.’
Quinn stood uneasily gazing at this possibly traitorous figure sitting, by democratic election, below the portrait of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister, which hung above the fireplace. Then, invited by a gesture, he sat in the chair opposite.
‘It is important, Prime Minister. And I am afraid that you are going to find it shattering.’
Henderson sighed. ‘All right. Let’s have it.’
‘We have a source with excellent access to the deliberations of the National Security Council in Washington … ’
‘Meaning, in terms which I would understand, that you have planted a spy on the most secret deliberations of our chief ally?’ the Prime Minister remarked scathingly as he filled a rather small pipe.
‘No, Prime Minister,’ Quinn replied briskly. ‘It so happens that this source volunteered his services – and let us be thankful that he did so in view of what I am about to tell you. It concerns a major new decision in the nuclear weapons field … ’
‘But Sir Mark, I have the President’s assurance that we are told all we need to know in that respect.’
‘All the President and his advisers decide we need to know, Prime Minister.’
What the hell was going on behind those grey-blue eyes? Quinn wondered. Why was he stopping him from getting straight to the point? Was it to give the impression that the secret was of no special interest to him? That, of course, was precisely how Philby would have played it.
‘This source reported today on a decision of the greatest moment to us taken by the National Security Council only yesterday. It was decided that if the Russians attack in Central Europe, the Americans and other NATO forces will retaliate immediately with neutron bombs which are already in position. The President has concurred.’
As Quinn paused he thought he could detect a sligh trembling of Henderson’s fingers as he lit his pipe. ‘I’ve put the whole situation down for you as an aide-memoire, Prime Minister. It’s quite short.’
As Henderson read the document his face became increasingly haggard. ‘But this is terrible. Just what the Americans said they wouldn’t do. We’ve all agreed to do everything we could to hold an attack without recourse to nuclear weapons of any kind to force a pause for reflection of the dreadful consequences … So far as these appalling neutron bombs are concerned the Americans are not supposed to have made them at all. They gave a solemn promise … Are you satisfied that this is accurate?’
‘Absolutely sure, Prime Minister. I’m afraid, as usual, I cannot reveal the source, but you can be assured it is impeccable.’
The Prime Minister thought he had heard that before but refrained from saying so. He placed the distasteful document in his yellow box along with the other secret Intelligence papers and locked it.
‘Thank you, Sir Mark. As you know, I do not think the Russians are going to attack anybody. I think you Intelligence chaps misinterpret their motives. So your report may be rather academic – if it is true.’
He looked at the silent Quinn quizzically and then smiled. ‘You know the Russians are highly political animals, and you need to be a politician to understand them. They’ll bluster, of course, if they think it will advance them politically. But risk nuclear war after all they have achieved without it? No! It’s just not on. It’s not in their nature.’
Is Henderson really blind to what’s happening at this moment behind the Iron Curtain? Quinn asked himself. Or did it suit his long-term purpose to pretend to be? What were his true intentions? Ah, intentions! They were always the unknown factor in the Intelligence equation. Information was easy to come by. But intentions …
‘I’m afraid I have to support the Chiefs of Staff as regards the likely intentions of the Warsaw Pact Forces,’ Quinn said. ‘They believe that the signs point to an attack within days. They can even say where. I know that you disagree with them, but I felt that you had to be informed of this latest development without delay.’
‘You were right, of course, Sir Mark, and I am grateful to you. But tell me now that I have this information, what use is it?’
‘Frankly none, for the moment, Prime Minister. To protect the source it is imperative that none of your Cabinet colleagues and none of the Chiefs of Staff are told about it.’
Henderson smiled. ‘You don’t think they are secure, do you? But then I suspect you think that none of us are.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Quinn lied. ‘But it is an axiom of my life that the more who know a secret the surer it is to leak. The most productive source of KGB Intelligence is still the wagging tongue. And you can imagine what use the Kremlin could make of this information.’
‘You know, Sir Mark, when I decided to go into politics, in the hope of creating history in preference to teaching it, I thought statesmanship was about ideals and ideas, not about who had this or that wretched bomb. I despise the hardware approach to international politics. Missiles, bombs, counterstrikes, credibility gaps, brinkmanship, the balance of terror – the jargon nauseates me. What have these dreadful things to do with creating a better life for ordinary people?’
In no mood for philosophy, Quinn kept his conversation to the point. ‘It is possible that the President may tell you what I have told you on his own initiative, though I doubt that he will. If he does confirm it I would be grateful if you would let me know.’
‘Hot-line conversations with the President are on a strictly private basis, Sir Mark. I too must protect my sources.’
‘I do appreciate that, Prime Minister,’ Quinn said refraining from mentioning that the hot-line between Washington and Moscow hardly seemed to be working. ‘But the immediate circumstances are very special.’
