Francis Barrington was reading his mind.
“I think a repeat of yesterday’s excitement is the least of our worries, Michael.”
Chapter 38
“My second doomsday scenario,” Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson explained, professorially, “concerns Mesopotamia, specifically, Iran and Iraq,” he half-smiled, “and of course, their oil fields and the largest oil refinery in the World on Abadan Island.”
Margaret Thatcher’s expression had turned thoughtful. Lack of sleep and the corrosive effect of her grief left her feeling alone and threatened as she sensed the fractures forming within the circle of her closest ministers and advisors. An enemy fleet had contrived to sail undetected to Malta and bombarded the archipelago for the best part of an hour unmolested by a garrison denuded of men, equipment, aircraft and ships currently involved — over a thousand miles away — in the biggest combined operation mounted by British forces since Suez to retake the island of Cyprus. But for the suicidal gallantry of the captains and the men of two small Royal Navy warships and the belated arrival of three powerful United States Navy vessels, an airborne assault on Malta might have overwhelmed the available local defence forces and achieved defensive lodgements on the main island. It was not inconceivable that Malta might even, briefly, have fallen into enemy hands.
All of which palled into nothing compared to the dreadful empty pit of loss and despair that threatened her capacity to lead her country at this time of crisis. Admiral Sir Julian Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations was dead, as were a long list of other senior officers and prominent Maltese political and civic leaders apparently pre-targeted by fifth columnists and Red Dawn assassins at the height of the airborne invasion. There was as yet no reliable count for either civilian or military casualties; but both counts were expected to be very high. Worse, as the bombardment from the sea had progressed the shelling, at first concentrated on the airfields of Luqa, Ta’Qali and Hal Far, and the Admiralty Dockyards in the creeks around the Grand Harbour, had become indiscriminate, wreaking dreadful carnage and destruction across great swaths of Valletta, Sliema, Floriana, Birgu-Vittoriosa, Cospicua, Senglea and Paola. Malta’s main power station had been hit by several shells, island-wide telephone communications were down and several hospitals had been attacked, in some cases by squads of parachutists. ‘Hit squads’ had burst into the main civilian hospital and gunned down doctors, nurses and patients alike… It was unspeakable… If a small detachment of the Welsh Guards had not intervened there would have been a massacre.
What sort of people were they fighting?
It was as if her enemies were goading her to retaliate with nuclear weapons…
Margaret Thatcher squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to think rationally. She could not afford to let her personal emotions intrude on the decisions she had to take in the coming hours and days. Although the ships of Vice-Admiral Bernard Clarey’s newly constituted United States Sixth Fleet had thrown an impenetrable protective cordon of aircraft and warships around the Maltese Archipelago, and were offering all possible assistance to the authorities on land, Malta’s agony was very nearly complete.
Julian Christopher was dead…
And now her Foreign Secretary was about to give the War Cabinet an impromptu history lesson which presumably had a wickedly apposite sting in its tail!
The bastards had murdered Julian Christopher!
Tom Harding-Grayson opened his mouth to continue but before he could speak again there was a sharp knock at the door and a flinty-eyed woman stalked into the room. The men around the table made to rise to their feet but the newcomer waved jerkily for them to sit down.
“I did not join the Government to be relegated to the sidelines the first time there was a crisis, Prime Minister!” The newcomer complained angrily.
Margaret Thatcher positively bristled.
“Nobody has relegated anybody to the sidelines, Mrs Castle,” she retorted tartly. “Yesterday’s events compelled me to call an emergency War Cabinet consisting of all those Cabinet Ministers in Oxford. I was given to understand that you were spending the weekend in your constituency in Blackburn?”
Fifty-three year old Barbara Anne Castle was a sparsely made, not over-large woman with auburn to ginger hair with a habit of leaning towards an opponent in debate as if she was leaning into a storm.
“Oh…”
“Pray take a sea,” the Prime Minister said icily. She did not like and never would like Barbara Castle. “The Foreign Secretary was about to conduct a tutorial.”
Tom Harding-Grayson took this barb in his stride.
“I don’t know how much colleagues know about the murky histories of Iran and Iraq?”
“Assume we know nothing, Tom,” Margaret Thatcher growled sweetly.
“Iran first,” her friend prefaced. “I shall begin with a confession. You should all know that I was greatly involved in the dirty business that put the Shah back into power during the Abadan Crisis of the early years of the last decade. You will recollect that at the time we were so bankrupt that our economy depended almost entirely on oil from Abadan purchased, in effect, with Government guarantees to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; so when in 1951 the Iranians turned off the tap we were in something of a pickle. Other potential oil producers actually wanted us to pay for oil up front and frankly, we were in no position to do business with anybody on those terms in those days. We very nearly ran out of oil; remember the great smogs of London caused by everybody having to burn coal to keep warm during the winter? Remember how many people that killed off and how impossible it was to carry on any kind of normal life in the city? Similar things happened in Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham last winter because oil shortages forced us to fall back on burning coal to keep warm. Practically all our oil supply problems last year were caused by the dislocation to world shipping by the October War; there was never any shortage of oil. In fact Abadan virtually closed down for four months last year at a time when we were — and of course — still are stringently rationing fuel. In the last three months tankers brought back under our control during the Operation Manna period have been reallocated to the Abadan run and week by week, month by month the fuel supply situation is easing and we are finally in a position to begin to build up a strategic reserve again. If we learned anything last year it was that we cannot rely on American largesse and the future availability of the American registered tankers. I would also point out that the ‘generous’ fuel supplies thus far delivered to these isles from the Gulf of Mexico roughly equates to a tad less than fifteen percent of our target requirements. Without Abadan we are in dire straits, and because of the war situation in the Mediterranean and the fact the Suez Canal remains blocked at Ismailia, in the foreseeable future all our oil must reach us via the long route around the Cape of Good Hope, a route which might potentially be threatened in the event of naval hostilities between ourselves and the Argentine.”
“We know all this, Tom,” Iain MacLeod complained testily.
“Yes,” the other man replied blankly, “but we forget it at our peril, Iain. The point I am trying to make is that Iran matters to us more than we like to admit; which is why I insist on harking back to the Abadan Crisis which was not finally resolved until 1954. We and the Americans hardly covered ourselves with glory in that episode. Nevertheless, we — the British and the Americans — successfully prised the oil of Iran out of the hands of the then legitimate, democratically elected Government of Iran, then under the leadership of Mohammad Mosaddegh, assuaged our wounded national pride and all in all, the whole dreadful business was subsequently viewed as a great success. As a result British and Commonwealth forces still hold Abadan Island, the one jewel, actually, the last jewel left in the crown of the Empire. Nevertheless, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away. The important thing to remember about Iran is that one day it will be a regional superpower. Probably, the regional superpower. Not while the Shah is in charge, obviously. The man is a devious and mendacious fraud and an intellectual lightweight only kept in power by the CIA, his secret police and a coterie of corrupt and largely inept generals most of whom are even less cerebrally gifted than him. While the Pahlavi dynasty rules in Iran, the country will never escape its past, never modernise and sooner or later it will be torn apart by ethnic and sectarian strife. If the Shah was to be deposed and a strong government with the backing of the people of Iran not formed immediately, revolution would probably be inevitable. Because of the Pahlavi dynasty’s reign of terror there is currently no viable secular ‘opposition’ in Iran; only Mullahs and other Islamists who are by inclination inimical to our interests in their country and to our very way of life. What price our continued tenure of Abadan Island and our command of the Persian Gulf in the eventuality that the Shah falls?”