George Christopher cut to the chase.
“What do you want me to do?”
Miranda eyed the file she had given the Mayor.
“It occurred to me that Terry Francois would know how best to use the information in that file, sir.”
The Mayor of San Francisco smiled thinly.
“I imagine he will,” the man agreed.
Chapter 25
In retrospect the oddest aspect of that afternoon’s ‘Situation Table’ was not the presence in person of the Chief of Naval Operations and his Deputy, nor the presence of a three-star Army General, but that nobody mentioned by name the Washington Post. On the day when that paper still carried a front page by line about the affair that United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was allegedly having with the winsome twenty-four year old daughter of Democratic Party eminence grise Claude Otto de Chateau-Betancourt — the Post made a big thing about always using the family’s long-discarded French baronial title — the minds of all of those gathered around the Flag Plot Room ‘Situation Table’ had been concentrated, not altogether wonderfully, by stories actually buried respectively on the seventh and eighth pages of the Post.
It went without saying that most of the men in the bunker took the sketchy reports they read in the Washington press much more seriously than the detailed ones they received daily from the Headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in nearby Langley. Especially, those CIA reports purporting to be from sources located in the United Kingdom and or, ‘close to the Royal Navy’ because nobody in the room believed that the CIA had any contacts worth the candle either in the British Government, or within several hundred miles of being ‘close to the Royal Navy’.
The British had reached the stage where they were so infuriated with the ‘war games’ being played by the Enterprise Battle Group in the North Atlantic that Vice Admiral Julian Christopher, the man responsible for initiating, assembling and latterly, convoying the armada of merchantmen involved in Operation Manna to the British Isles had broadcast in plain text an unambiguous ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ set of standing orders to all his captains.
It was not the first time that Vice Admiral Christopher had presented himself as an unwelcome thorn in the side of the US Navy. Around Christmas last year the ships of the aforementioned Admiral’s British Pacific Fleet had steamed over the horizon and, in effect, at the behest of the Australian Government driven the US Navy away from Australasian waters as it had already done from around Singapore and Borneo. Elements of the British Pacific Fleet had been placed at the disposal of the Australian and the New Zealand Governments during the spring and summer months; and by the time most of his big ships were otherwise engaged shepherding the first Operation Manna convoys east towards the tip of South America on the first leg of the long trip back to England, the US Navy had been rushing into mothballs and the political impetus and will to restore a ‘proper naval balance’ in the South Pacific in DC had evaporated into thin air.
The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral George Whelan Anderson was fit to spit every time he heard the name of the British admiral. Today, even more than on other days, the Flag Plot Room Staff moved warily around their fulminating master.
Notified that he was in the building, a routine invitation had been extended to attend the daily briefing to Lieutenant-General William Westmoreland, the Chiefs of Staffs’ special advisor to the Secretary of Defence. Nobody actually wanted the Army man in the bunker but even with relations strained to breaking point between the Navy and Robert McNamara, it would have been crass and unforgivably rude not to have invited Westmoreland. As it was his presence was simply an additional symptom of the dysfunction at the heart of the rapidly contracting US military machine. Had he understood the Navy better Westmoreland would have known that the invitation was for the sake of form, and that nobody had actually expected or wanted him to turn up for the ‘Situation Table’.
Westmoreland was made of stern stuff, nevertheless the moment he entered the room he felt uncomfortable; an unwelcome interloper at somebody else’s party. To be treated with such exaggerated, punctilious courtesy by all and sundry was excruciating. Eventually, he could bear it no longer.
“May I ask a question, sir?” He inquired of the Chief of Naval Operations. The looks he got for his trouble put him in mind of those a certain fictitious Victorian urchin had got when he asked ‘for more’ food in a well known Dickensian fable.
A QUESTION!
“Fire away!” Admiral Anderson retorted irritably.
“Thank you, sir.” Westmoreland composed his thoughts. He genuinely sympathised with the invidious position Anderson found himself in. Anderson had ascended to his current position at the head of the United States Navy because he was one of, perhaps, the outstanding American naval officers of his generation. He had commanded the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt after the 1945 war, served as an assistant to Dwight Eisenhower at NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation — Headquarters, before flying his flag in command of Task Force 77 off Taiwan, commanded Carrier Division 6 in the Mediterranean, and on promotion to Vice Admiral, commanded the Sixth Fleet at Naples. He had been the automatic shoe-in for Chief of Naval Operations in 1961 and had the Cuban Missiles Crisis not gone so horribly wrong, he would probably have been the universally feted and acclaimed hero of the Free World. Unfortunately, the Crisis had gone wrong and now his position was plainly very nearly intolerable to such an intrinsically decent and honourable patriot.
Admiral Robert L. Dennison, at the time of the October War Anderson’s direct subordinate as Commander in Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet — CINCLANT — had taken the fall for the disastrous consequences of the ‘Beale Incident’ only because Anderson’s own resignation had been rejected by the President. Having been persuaded to remain as CNO while his subordinate, Dennison, had been unceremoniously retired from the Navy with scant acknowledgement of his previously unblemished, frankly brilliant record, Anderson’s authority in the Navy and influence outside it had diminished with every passing day until now, a casual glance at the Flag Plot Room Table provided unequivocal evidence of how powerless he had been to preserve the fighting power of the service he loved. The nuclear submarine fleet might have survived, albeit with its wings clipped and its future expansion drastically curtailed; but the great surface fleet had been decimated. Seven of the ten big carriers, all their escorts and their fleet trains had been, or were on the way to the mothball fleet or the breakers, and tens of thousands of highly trained Navy men were on the beach. All that remained of the magnificent fleet — a fleet without parallel in the World only a year ago — was the Enterprise Battle Group in the North Atlantic, the Independence’s task force on its way home in the Indian Ocean, and the Kitty Hawk Battle Group in the Far East. The USS Independence was heading home for an overdue major refit, the Kitty Hawk was in dock at Kobe for the rest of the year; leaving only the new nuclear-powered Enterprise and her modern consorts at sea and remotely ready for combat. For the Naval officers gathered around the Flag Plot Room Table the sense of abject humiliation was palpable.