The best security systems always worked that way.
“I have already received representations on behalf of Sir Roger Hollis and others,” he went on, not troubling to hide precisely how unimpressed he was by such ‘representations’. “None of which I am prepared to entertain. The message needs to get out to fellow Honourable Members of Parliament that we are in the middle of a war and that I don’t give a fig what bloody school or club a fellow once went to or belonged to!”
“Here! Here!” Margaret Thatcher said irritably. She met the eye of the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Hull. “CDS,” she smiled, tight-lipped, using the title never formally adopted by the Army Chief’s predecessor, Sir David Luce. He had preferred simply to be acknowledged as ‘First Sea Lord’. “CDS, would you brief colleagues on the latest news from the Mediterranean and the Middle East please?”
“Recovery and policing operations continue on Malta, Prime Minister.” Sir Richard flicked a thoughtful glance towards the Foreign Secretary, who indicated for him to continue. “Air operations in the theatre have been disrupted by what appears to be a unilateral declaration of a ‘no fly zone’ over much of what was pre-war, French sovereign territory. The declaration was issued by a body calling itself the Provisional Peoples’ Republic of the French. That said, there also appears to be Provisional Government of South France, which is also making similar declarations. This latter body is responsible for a declaration warning that any ‘ships of war’ entering a two hundred miles ‘exclusion zone’ from the French Mediterranean coast will be liable to attack. Frankly, we don’t know how seriously to take this but as colleagues will know we began routing all flights to and from Portugal and Malta so as to avoid contentious air space in the days before the Battle of Malta, thus adding over an hour to transit times. The French naval base at Toulon was pretty hard hit during the war so apart from a small squadron based in Corsica, which may or may not owe allegiance to one or both of the ‘Provisional Governments’ on the mainland we have only the most sketchy of feels for the naval, or for that matter, the aerial capabilities of those regimes.”
Tom Harding-Grayson waved for him to go on.
“I’ll pick up on this later, Sir Richard,” he grimaced.
The soldier nodded.
“As I say, recovery and policing operations continue across the Maltese Archipelago. After aircraft from the USS Independence attacked two presumed enemy submarine contacts, one sixty nautical miles east and the other, seventy miles south of the Archipelago on Thursday last week the Central Mediterranean ‘threat board’ has been blank. Despite adverse political developments in Philadelphia, the US Sixth Fleet remains, effectively, at the operational disposal of the C-in-C Malta, Air Vice-Marshal French. That said, thus far none of the promised transport aircraft from the USA have materialised. Given that the US Air Force has not filed flight plans or requested clearances in this connection we are proceeding on the assumption that the onus to reinforce our garrisons in the Middle East will fall upon us. In any event, forces deployed during the Cyprus Operation have been warned for transfer to depots we hope to be permitted to set up in Southern Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia. My staff is in conversation with the Saudi Arabian authorities about exploring the possibility of utilising war and other stores positioned in that country by the US Armed Forces prior to their withdrawal last year. I apologise it this sounds a tad woolly but I know Cabinet does not want to get bogged down in detail at this stage. I have sent a personal representative to the theatre to assess the situation on the ground and to report back to me at the earliest time.”
Margaret Thatcher raised an eyebrow.
“Major General Carver,” the Chief of the Defence Staff reported. “A damned fine officer, Prime Minister.”
“He was in command of the 3rd Division in Germany at the time of the recent war,” Willie Whitelaw added. “He was out in Cyprus planning the move of his Division to that island when the, er, balloon went up.”
The Prime Minister nodded for Sir Richard Hull to carry on.
“It happens,” he announced, presaging a surprise morsel of news that was not uniformly grim, “that as a result of the minor rapprochement with the regime of the late Shah in the last few months — at least at a staff level — that we have men, and therefore potent intelligence ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground in Iran.”
“Really,” Margaret Thatcher said in surprise.
“Yes, Prime Minister. Our fellows were specifically instructed to keep away from Tehran so as to avoid inflaming sensibilities. Most of our people are in the south, in liaison and training roles with the Iranian Army. Their presence was what enabled us to co-ordinate the operations of the Abadan garrison with local Iranian armoured formations to repel the illegal incursion of the Iraqi 2nd Armoured Division.”
“Yes,” the Prime Minister breathed unhappily. She had only been informed afterwards that a large force of Iraqi tanks had manoeuvred so as to threaten Khorramshahr and the northern refineries of the Abadan Island complex. She had stiffly informed the CDS that in future she wanted to be informed before rather than after British forces engaged in offensive operations against the forces of a country that was, nominally, still an ally. “But you are saying that we have other forces in Iran?”
“Yes. A mixed detachment of SAS and SBS men under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Waters; its mission was schooling Imperial Iranian Army counterparts in north-western Iran. They were using the city of Rezaiyeh as their base.”
Margaret Thatcher looked to her Foreign Secretary for help.
“Old sweats from the days when our fathers campaigned in Mesopotamia,” Tom Harding-Grayson smiled whimsically, “would have call Rezaiyeh by its pre-Pahlavi Dynasty name of Urmia. It is situated close to the conjunction of the borders of the south eastern corner of the Anatolian littoral of Turkey and the north-east of Kurdish Iran. That places it pretty much right in the middle of where in olden days the ‘Great Game’ was played out between ourselves, the French and the Russians.” He looked to Sir Richard Hull. “Presumably, our boys were keeping an eye on things while they were playing soldiers with the locals?”
The Chief of the Defence Staff laughed grimly.
“Our boys,” he guffawed, “are always keeping an eye on things wherever they are, Tom!”
“Quite so,” the other man concurred.
The Chief of the Defence Staff sighed.
“Colonel Waters has made contact with Abadan and reported the city of Rezaiyeh as being in the hands of Soviet airborne troops. His scouts also report columns of tanks and mechanised infantry on the road between Qoshachay, which is also known as Miandoab, to Mahabad, which would be entirely consistent with other intelligence to hand, that the Soviets plan to decamp onto the ground around the headwaters of the great rivers of Mesopotamia in north eastern Iraq via the passes through the Zagros Mountains in the vicinity of Piranshahr and Sardasht. Enemy combatants who have fallen into Colonel Waters’s hands talk about ‘driving on’ to Erbil and Mosul. We don’t know if the northern oilfields are the objective just of the first phase of the invasion, or just some ruse to draw the Iraqi Army and anybody stupid enough to follow suit, to the north of Baghdad.”
“Why would it be bad to fight the invaders north of Baghdad, General?” Margaret Thatcher inquired.