“What of it, Home Secretary?”
“And,” Roy Jenkins continued, “employed the powers vested in my person by the War Emergency Act (1962), to detain indefinitely without charge four highly qualified men engaged on work of vital national importance.”
“Oh, the Cheltenham four…”
“Yes, the Cheltenham Four!”
“So that’s what this is all about!”
Although the Home Secretary had discounted the whispering campaign against Hollis, on a night like this when the man seemed almost totally indifferent to the evidence that his officers were more interested in covering up deficiencies in the operation of an institution that was key to the defence of the realm, than they were in the actual defence of the realm, that he wondered for the first time is there might be an element of truth in the rumours that Hollis was the ‘sixth man’ after the three acknowledged Cambridge traitors Burgess, MacLean and Philby, and their publicly unacknowledged co-conspirators John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt.
“I have ordered their immediate unconditional release from prison, Sir Roger. Moreover, I have passed their letter and the relevant MI5 case file to the Prime Minister’s Private Office. Further, I have asked to be present if and when the Prime Minister calls you before her to account for your personal conduct, and that of the officers under you command in this disgraceful business.”
Sir Roger Hollis rose to his feet.
He said nothing because he had nothing further to say to the man he worked for. MI5, acting on solid intelligence received from the Secret Intelligence Service in the last forty-eight hours had rounded up over a hundred suspected former Soviet, Red Dawn and other violently inclined malcontents, including several probable IRA men caught red-handed with bomb making equipment and industrial grade plastic explosives. It was MI5’s greatest coup since the October War; over the next few days his interrogators would uncover exactly how many networks had been disrupted and rolled up. The operation was still ongoing. He would have given the Home Secretary forewarning of the operation if he had trusted him, or any of his senior officials but he had decided not to risk the security of the operation by ‘unnecessary disclosures’ to a ‘bunch of amateurs’.
The Home Secretary could go to Hell!
Nothing suited him better than to deal directly with the Prime Minister.
He looked forward to ‘explaining himself to that lady’ whenever she summoned him.
Chapter 19
Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson had made her way across Oxford as the first news of the scale of the disaster in the Mediterranean had reached her. Leaving her charges, the Prime Minister’s eleven year old twins, Mark and Carol, in the care of friends and a large detachment of Royal Marine bodyguards, she had hurried to be with her younger friend at Corpus Christi College.
“Margaret is in a dreadful state!” Her husband explained, taking his wife by the arm and leading her into an alcove in the corridor leading to the Prime Minister’s room. “Willie’s being and absolute brick and Walter Brenckmann is doing his best to get hold of every available scrap of information but…”
Lady Patricia — a lifelong socialist with genteel libertarian leanings she hated the ‘Lady’ appellation, a by-product of her husband’s advancement to Foreign Secretary after the murder of his predecessor, Lord Hume, at Balmoral in November — had divorced her husband in the fifties and remarried him the instant she discovered that he too had survived the night of the October War. Before the war her unabashed left-wing political affiliations and sympathies and her successful career as a novelist had once been embarrassing encumbrances to her spouse, whose once brilliant career had been in freefall during the Macmillan years leading up to October 1962. All of which was well behind them both. These days they were a team, intimates and confidantes within Margaret Thatcher’s inner circle.
Willie was forty-five year old William Stephen Ian Whitelaw, the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border and since January the imperturbable Secretary of State for Defence in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
Walter Brenckmann was Captain Walter Brenckmann, United States Navy (Retired), the American Ambassador to the newly re-located court of Blenheim Palace. Walter Brenckmann was that rare thing; a man whose voice was listened to and respected on both sides of the North Atlantic. A veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic in Hitler’s War and the commander of a Fletcher class fleet destroyer during the Korean conflict, after the October War he had been plucked from the obscurity of his Boston law practice and sent to England as a naval liaison officer. Back in November and December he had been a lone voice warning of the dangerous dissonances developing between the World’s last two remaining nuclear superpowers. Within the higher echelons of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom he was regarded very nearly as an ex-officio insider, much in the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Ambassador to London, John Gilbert Winant, had become between 1941 and 1945. Like Winant, Walter Brenckmann had no political ties to the Kennedy Administration and had quickly become a trusted honest broker between his chief, Secretary of State J. William Fulbright and the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
However, inside the Prime Minister’s rooms at that moment Walter Brenckmann wanted to tear his hair out.
No matter how hard he tried to communicate with the people around him nobody really got it. The malicious rumour that the British had secretly unilaterally appointed Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord as the new Supreme Commander of all Anglo-American Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations — allegedly imperiously over-riding the Kennedy Administration’s recommendation of an American officer not to the liking of the British Ministry of Defence — had stirred up a vitriolic firestorm of outrage and recrimination in Philadelphia. It was only a matter of time before a long and vociferous phalanx of isolationist America First members of the House of Representatives began to fan the flames of that firestorm.
“Walter,” Margaret Thatcher decided, testily signalling that in her opinion there were more important things on the agenda. “Walter, thank you for your concern and for your advice but I am sure this whole thing is a storm in a tea cup. The Ministry of Information is in the process of issuing a firm rebuttal of the stories which have apparently emerged overnight in New York and Philadelphia. What we need to be worrying about presently is the situation of Malta.”
Outside the Prime Minister’s room Tom Harding-Grayson had also put the workings of the American newspaper rumour mill to one side in favour of other, seemingly more pressing imperatives.
The latest news from Malta could hardly be worse.
The Foreign Secretary had forced himself to move past his initial disbelief, shock and despondency upon hearing the news from the Mediterranean; it was always a mistake to become so preoccupied with the travails of the present that one neglected to look to the future. No matter that there had been an unexpected seismic shift in the geopolitical realities of the region; it was his job as Foreign Secretary to provide his Prime Minister with realistic policy options in the new, radically altered situation. But not right now. Right now the problem was wholly in the hands of the military men because it was obvious that what had just happened in Malta was — the October War excepted — the most disastrous day for British arms since the fall of Singapore in 1942. It was precious little comfort to reflect that but for the heroism and sacrifice of the Royal Navy and the fortuitous belated intervention of the USS Iowa and her consorts, things might have been even worse. Around lunchtime the previous day he had been in a funk about Argentina invading a few small islands eight thousand miles away; islands of minimal strategic importance to and of no material political significance to the UAUK. Since then he had been blaming himself for being completely surprised by the events in the Mediterranean. In the fullness of time the inevitable inquests would ineluctably prove beyond any reasonable doubt that had he and many others in government, the intelligence community and the military had not been ‘on the ball’ because whatever the circumstances, Malta should not have been left so criminally undefended.