The Kremlin's Confidant, page 7
He and Selfe found out that if they resigned their commissions, they could stop their training courses and start as pilots. They offered their resignations, but these were not accepted. Martin then opted for training as a naval aviator, completing the course at Portsmouth. In January 1953, he was confirmed as a full sub-lieutenant. His commanding officer, Captain Brewer, continued the unimpressed comments of Martin’s earlier commanders: ‘a very intelligent but insipid young man whose interest appears to be entirely on the Air side of the service. However, he has made good use of his time at R.N.C. and could develop into a useful officer.’
From the Arctic to the Mediterranean
Far from having his preferences accepted, his next posting was to HMS Pincher, a small Algerine-class minesweeper converted into an intelligence-collecting vessel. In February 1953, this was dispatched to the Arctic to collect samples of fallout from the Russian atomic tests taking place that winter. As he described the tour in 2014:
We were masquerading as a fishery protection vessel. It was one of the worst winters in Arctic history and we had a horrendous time. In the four months we were up north, there were 120 separate hurricanes. It was blowing 70–80 miles an hour, the average temperature was minus 50°F, and it was hazardous. HMS Pincher had an open bridge.
HMS Pincher had to go wherever the wind might blow the ash from the Soviet atomic tests. She was based in Tromsø, the Norwegian port 350km north of the Arctic Circle, which offered light relief in the form of Norwegians who came on board for the free drinks that the ship handed out to visitors. ‘The locals would say they had lost their way and come down to the pier to get on board and have a whisky. Sometimes they walked straight across the ship, falling into the freezing water on the other side.’
Martin shared his cabin with the ship’s doctor, Surgeon Lieutenant Dr Robert Dickie, an eccentric who proved a fervent Scottish nationalist. Later, when HMS Pincher was decommissioned, the navy found that none of the sick bay supplies were left on board. The ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Duncan Carson, who was to become a lifelong friend of Martin, asked him to contact the doctor. ‘Dickie told me that war between England and Scotland was imminent, so they were setting up caches of medical supplies in the Scottish highlands ready for the impending conflict.’
Carson used to insist that officers should dress formally for dinner, even though the storm conditions meant they could not sit at the table and had to wedge themselves under the beams. After returning to the UK, they were told that the new area for collecting Soviet fallout would be in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. The Admiralty was concerned that, after serving in such rugged conditions, the sailors might mutiny if they were embarked before having their promised two- or three-months’ leave. Several of the crew, appalled at the conditions, had tried to desert in Tromsø. Carson said all would be fine and HMS Pincher set course for the Aegean.
For Martin, this was ideal. He was being sent to Greece, a country for which he had imbued his father’s love. His first two nights there were to change the course of his life.
On arrival in Piraeus Harbour, HMS Pincher tied up alongside an American destroyer. Some of the American officers shouted across and said, ‘Hey, come, let’s go off to town and have a drink.’ As Martin describes the evening:
Not knowing any better, Dickie and I made off with these guys and we had a drink down at Turkolimani, the old port of Piraeus, and then we walked back from there to the dockyard in the commercial port. The Americans were boisterous, shouting and singing. Then one of them said, ‘Come on, we’re going to have a pee.’ And the other one said, ‘Don’t worry, just pee here,’ and another said, ‘Yeah, to hell with this bloody place. This is one bloody piss house anyway.’
British officers didn’t go ashore in uniform but all those American officers in uniform just whipped out their things and peed in the middle of the main square in Piraeus. This complete disregard by the Americans for where they were was a nightmare. It was a picture that stayed with me for a long time.
His unease at the US sailors’ derision of the Greeks was reinforced the next evening. He was invited to a party by a Greek lady who had been at university with his sister. The party was on a beautiful, vine-covered terrace in central Athens, with sophisticated people, speaking good English and talking of the world in the terms with which Martin was familiar. The first person he met was Aris Tsatsoulis, who proved to be a junior tennis champion and squash lover and with whom he would play squash over the years. The second was Aris’s sister, Kiki, with whom Martin was to fall in love and who would be part of his life for over sixty years, as wife, ex-wife and then in her final years as cared-for dependant.
For Martin, it was to be an idyllic summer. The Admiralty had told Carson that he should treat the sailors with caution and he developed a leisurely routine. HMS Pincher would cruise for a couple of days collecting fallout samples, then sail to one of the Greek islands and anchor. The ten officers and eighty men would be allowed to go ashore, take tents and do as they wanted. One weekend they would be on an Aegean island, the next they would be in Athens, and Martin would get together with Aris and Kiki.
Aris introduced Martin to the Athens Lawn Tennis Club. The club hosted the tennis events for the 1896 Summer Olympics and is on a beautiful site next to the Temple of Olympian Zeus – which took 638 years to build and was once the largest temple in Greece. The club had two single squash courts and later added a double one – one of the few in the world – for the future King Constantine, a squash enthusiast.
Martin was later to play squash with the king there and in Malta, but in the 1950s his main partner was Dimitrios Kontounis, the Greek squash champion, whom Constantine, then still prince, would berate when beaten by Martin. Kontounis was a radical lawyer. There was still great poverty in Greece and one day Kontounis took Martin to watch Americans climb to the roof of the US Embassy, throw buns on the road and then jeer as the Greeks scrambled for them. Kontounis told Martin that he supplemented his income by giving weekly reports to the CIA on the activities of other lawyers. ‘Everyone is doing this. I make up complete fabrications for them but they never seem to notice.’ Apart from being squash champion, he was also a rally champion, remembered for being temporarily disqualified in one Athens rally for finishing without his co-driver. Kontounis then opened his boot and showed his co-driver, unconscious after being knocked out for irritating Kontounis. The rally rules did not require the co-driver to be in the passenger seat and he was judged the winner. He died shortly after this, crashing his Maserati on the coastal road from Sounion to Athens.
These early years were critical for Martin:
First of all, there were my interactions with the American sailors and with radical people who resented the affront to their pride of the scenes outside the US Embassy. Then, by contrast, my increasing integration into an interesting Greek society, heirs to the liberal tradition of Eleftherios Venizelos, the pro-British Cretan republican. What I had seen of Korea showed me the savagery and dehumanisation of civil war, and the stories I learned about the Greek Civil War were the same. Years later, I was in Greece in 2001 when the 9/11 attacks occurred. On hearing the news, people thronged to the streets, cheering, waving flags and chanting. The 9/11 attacks were appalling but I could see the progression from the humiliations of the 1950s and the US support for the Colonels’ dictatorship of the 1960s, through the US role in the Cyprus disaster of the 1970s to the anger in the streets of 2001.
Martin’s increasing sense of external context was appreciated by Carson. His end-of-posting comments on Martin were that he had arrived as rather long-haired but was ‘developing into a most useful and efficient young officer of a type the Service needs’. As he wrote: ‘He has a spirit of elan. Highly intelligent and yet a dreamer of an idealistic kind with possible leanings to the Church.’ He found Martin ‘an interesting and promising young officer who I have been very glad to have serving in this ship’. He judged Martin to be ‘eminently suitable’ for his chosen specialisation of the Fleet Air Arm. Martin had begun to blossom.
From Flying to Cruising
Flying high
Pensacola and Kingsville air stations
On his return to Britain at the end of 1953, Martin was told he had been accepted by the Fleet Air Arm. The RAF, having given over many of its larger airbases to the US, was short of air fields so he was sent for training in the US. He crossed the Atlantic with a dozen co-trainees in a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation from Heathrow via Prestwick, Shannon and Gander to New York. There, they went to see the Pyjama Game on Broadway and then boarded the train for the two-day journey to Florida, the hostess adroitly concealing their drinks when they went through Prohibition states, returning them when they crossed into non-dry states.
The group had its primary training at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola in northern Florida, 160 miles east of New Orleans, and NAS Kingsville, south of Corpus Christi in southern Texas. They were there under an American aid programme. During the Second World War, NAS Pensacola had trained 35,000 pilots a year. With peace, that had been reduced to 3,000 and after the start of the Korean War increased to 5,000:
The training was an efficient, mass-production process. One ate a large breakfast at 5 a.m. and one’s final meal at 6 p.m., and, in the meantime, had a programme of ground studies and flights. There was virtually no social life, other than an occasional weekend visit to a $l-a-dish restaurant in Pensacola.
Martin found that each flight was required to adopt a name. The flights were of eight to ten pilots, split into three groups. He persuaded his group to call its flight the Wingtip Wobblies. He suggested the name with his tongue in his cheek, assuming that somebody would toss it out. The Wobblies was the name given to members of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. In the 1910s, they had been the voice of the unionised left in America. They were a much-diminished force in the 1950s, and nobody in the American naval system recognised who the Wobblies were. His time in the States was thus spent flying a group named in deference to those challengers of the system.
It was the era of Eisenhower and McCarthy. Most of the people he met were Democrats but he was constantly conscious that he had to be guarded about what he said. His views were typical of a European liberal of the time, and he found that expressing his opinions could be dangerous. This was brought home to him when lunching with Senator Stuart Symington.
Martin had been invited to his house as Symington’s nephew was in Martin’s flight. The senator had been secretary of the US Air Force at the time of the Berlin Air Lift, but was mistrustful of his environment:
At lunch one day, he suddenly held out his finger and, somewhat to my surprise, asked me to go out into the garden. I had been talking about the National Health Service and the commitment of the British socialists to national health systems. When we got down to the garden, he said, ‘I’m sorry that I have to say such a thing to you. I just don’t know at this time in the States who might be listening. There might be a device planted in my house and I would rather you didn’t use words like socialism when you’re talking to me. These are difficult times.’
Symington was in the McCarthyists’ sights. He had taking a lead role in censuring Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings which led to McCarthy’s eclipse. He was later the main rival of John F. Kennedy for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, making a stir by refusing to speak to segregated audiences. He was Kennedy’s initial choice for vice president and would have brought rare human qualities to that post and, on Kennedy’s murder, to the presidency. But Kennedy settled on Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.
At NAS Pensacola, Martin started his training on the North American Aviation T-6 Texan, commonly known as the Harvard, a small plane later notable for its service in the Biafran Air Force during the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970. He then moved on to the North American Aviation T-28 Trojan, a propeller trainer, used by the CIA in the 1960s in the Belgian Congo and the Secret War in Laos. He remembers a number of accidents, mainly due to equipment faults. On one occasion, after an arrestor wire broke, it was found the procurement officer had diverted money by purchasing sub-standard wire. His court martial was kept out of the press. Martin’s own worst moment there came when, on a solo flight over the Gulf of Mexico, he fell asleep. ‘I was woken by news on the radio that a plane was missing, and realised that the plane referred to was my own.’
Moving on to NAS Kingsville, he graduated to jet planes, first the Lockheed TV2 Shooting Star, a two-seater, and then the Grumman F9F Panther, a single-seater. The final phase of training involved a series of carrier landings on the USS Antietam. ‘Each of the two planes ahead of me had accidents, one going over the side and the other into the barrier, leaving me in an extended circuit watching the wreckage being cleared before I could make my own, rather bumpy, touchdown.’
Like his fellow trainees, Martin was disturbed at racial segregation. On three occasions, the British officers were arrested because, when they went on buses, they insisted on sitting in the back with the blacks. He was also embarrassed by his first Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans. NAS Pensacola had responsibility for one of the floats. This was towed by a tractor and represented all the countries training in America under American aid. ‘We stood on this float, each of us holding the flag of our countries. There were about twenty-four of us, and I was holding a Union Jack. Emblazoned along the side of the float was a slogan in huge letters: “I am a friendly flag training for Freedom”.’
Trainees were required to log a certain level of sporting activity every month:
As senior officer in our flight, I informed the authorities that it was unacceptable for British officers to participate in calisthenics with junior ranks, but that we would fulfil our norms through swimming, football and cricket. We then infuriated the Americans by booking their baseball diamond for informal cricket games.
The Pensacola cricket team was invited by Elizabeth Taylor and Charles Laughton to carry the British colours in Hollywood. They and their scorer – Peter Selfe, Martin’s friend from Korea days – were flown to Hollywood Airport and met by a man wearing the cap and blazer of the Middlesex Cricket Club and bouncing a cricket ball, a doctor who, after being struck off the register in Britain, had moved to the US and become an actor. They were installed at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and lionised, being introduced to budding film stars.
Martin remembers meeting a former American middle-weight boxing champion who claimed that he was the best mixer of cocktails in California and, through him, a waif-like trainee ballerina with whom he arranged a date for the final evening. That clashed with a party which the hostess, Elsa Maxwell, was giving for the British cricketers:
We all went along to that party. I assumed that after a reasonable period I could get away to my date. After an hour and half, I went politely to the hostess, and said, ‘Please excuse me. I have another appointment.’ She said, ‘No way. I invited you to my party. This is where you’re staying.’ I waited till she was looking the other way and made for the door but a big butler jumped in front of me and said, ‘You can’t go out this way.’ I ended up climbing out of an upstairs lavatory window and down a drainpipe.
In July 1955, the group passed out and a US general pinned wings to their uniform. They were due to return to Britain by Cunard liner, but a dock strike in the UK had disrupted the Queen Mary’s schedules, with the situation expected to last several months. Some of Martin’s group stayed on at Kingsville for follow-up training. Selfe and Martin went off to Philadelphia to visit Pete Martin, the leading light of The Saturday Evening Post.
Pete Martin was one of a band of aficionados and collectors of the works of G.A. Henty. Pete Martin used to correspond with Martin’s mother – as did J. Paul Getty, the oil magnate. As writer and editor, Pete Martin had helped the Post grow to a circulation of nearly 3 million by 1940 – and then watched as television put the future of the magazine in jeopardy. At this point, he started writing a column entitled, ‘I Call On …’ ‘His mode of operation was to turn up at stars’ homes, turn on a tape recorder and his Southern charm, and simply chat. He did so with, to name a few, Perry Como, Grace Kelly, Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Ed Sullivan, Mary Martin, Rock Hudson and Jimmy Stewart. The column became wildly popular, because people would learn things about their favourite stars and personalities that made them as human as they were.’1 Pete Martin also made ghost writing respectable, co-writing two autobiographies: Bob Hope’s Have Tux, Will Travel and Bing Crosby’s Call Me Lucky.
He and his wife, Birdie, proved generous hosts, introducing Martin to Charles Hires, the head of the Hires root beer company, who offered Martin the position of personal pilot and companion.2 ‘Pete also had plans for me. He took me to dinner at the Philadelphia Authors Club with Bob Hope and then announced that he wished to commission me to write the biography of G.A. Henty for which he had accumulated a mountain of data.’
Pete was disturbed at Martin’s interrupted romance with Kiki. He contacted one of his best friends, a troubleshooter for General Motors, saying, ‘This is a very romantic story. I’ve got this English man pining away because he needs to get back to his Greek sweetheart. We must get him there.’ Pete Martin described his friend as ‘the most powerful man in America, more powerful than the president’. He certainly proved effective. As Martin remembers:
