Levi Eshkol was a fascinatingly pugnacious and dignified man who had been born in Russia and emigrated aged nineteen to Palestine in 1914 at a time when the Holy Land was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. By 1948 he was a member of the high command of the Haganah, now he was the leader of Mapai, the Workers’ Party of Israel, something which would have played badly in sections of both the Republican and Democratic caucus, as would Mapai’s party’s red hammer symbol, but for the weight of recent living history. The Holocaust was still very raw in human memory and not even the genocidal carnage of the October War could wipe away the stain it had left on the psyche of civilization. Fulbright might be cerebrally pro-arabist; but that was irrelevant because the sanctity of the State of Israel was a given. What was not a given was the wisdom of America acting as the unilateral guarantor of that sanctity.
“Are we really the guarantors of the State of Israel?” Fulbright queried provocatively. “That’s an easy thing to say but is it helpful? In what meaningful way are we the guarantors of the State of Israel, Mac?”
McGeorge Bundy turned the argument around.
“Before the war we were looking at a situation where, sometime in the next decade, Western industries and societies were going to become totally dependent on oil from the Middle East, mainly Saudi oil but increasingly that of the various, at that time, pro-Western despotic emirates and sheikdoms around the Arabian Gulf, and in Iraq and Persia. Because of the October War the West no longer needs all that oil, Senator. Let’s be honest about this, Europe won’t be burning any appreciable globally significant tonnage of oil for the foreseeable future. The British will need our help to get by but to all intents, the United States will be broadly self-sufficient in terms of our domestic energy needs for the next twenty or thirty years. Moreover, because the previously rebuilding and re-industrialising post-World War II economies of Western European are no longer competing on the global oil market the price of oil will remain low — dirt cheap, frankly — for years to come. In this scenario there is no reason whatever for us to carry on compromising our principles sucking up to the Arabs. Several of the regimes in the Middle East are medieval, Bill! Hell, we ought to be telling the Saudis to stop meddling in the affairs of their neighbours!”
Fulbright was too wise an operator to rise to the bait.
It was not as if the Saudi Arabians were the only guilty party when it came to ‘meddling in the affairs of their neighbours’, or for that matter, in clinging to medievalist traditions. Many of the countries in the region were hardly countries at all in the modern sense. Syria and Iraq were creations of the Versailles Treaty, nations whose borders were created because hard-pressed colonial civil servants were under pressure to draw lines on maps — any lines would do — so that the leaders of the victorious Great War powers could return home claiming they had solved the problems of the World, not just sown the seeds for future wars. Syria and Iraq were jigsaws of ethnically and religiously incompatible territories and factions, and Iran, under the rule of the Shah, the son of a usurper who had seized power in a coup d’état in the 1920s, yearned to behave as if it had somehow inherited the mantle of the ancient Persian Emperors.
Although McGeorge Bundy was right in one way, he wrong in another that was much more important. If the recent past had taught any lesson it was that the American people were best served by a foreign policy which employed the power and prestige — what remained of it — of the United States to maintain the peace of the World. If that meant focusing on damping down the potential for conflict across a whole region, then allowing policy to be dictated and distorted by a single — albeit an island of fiercely democratic ideals, the State of Israel — country was simply not pragmatic.
“We should be the guarantors of the security of our friends and allies throughout the World, Mac.”
The President had been watching the two men fencing.
“Bucharest?” He asked, changing the subject.
The latest over flight and intercept analysis had been put under Bundy’s and Fulbright’s doors that morning. A high-flying RAF photo-reconnaissance Canberra had been chased out of Romanian air space by two MiG-21s as it approached the ruined city at fifty-two thousand feet. However, not before its ultra high-resolution side-scanning cameras had catalogued the utter destruction of the southern suburbs of the former Romanian capital.
“A random terroristic type attack,” McGeorge Bundy suggested. “Red Dawn must have a stock of recovered ICBMs. Every time they get one or two operational they shoot them off…”
The Secretary of State quashed this instantly.
“Romania was most likely being used as the jumping off point for Red Dawn military operations in the surrounding territories. Bucharest might have been Red Dawn’s western capital for all we know. Why would Red Dawn nuke its own capital, Mac?”
Bundy shrugged.
“We’re dealing with crazy people, Bill,” he conceded. He moved on. “The British think Red Dawn has ‘shot its bolt’.”
It was the President who shook his head.
“That’s just what’s in their newspapers and they’ve told the BBC. Red Dawn may have ‘shot its bolt’, or it may have achieved its initial objectives and called a halt. Nobody knows for sure. The reality of the situation is that the whole north-eastern quadrant of the Mediterranean is either in Red Dawn’s hands or threatened by it. Moreover, apart from on Cyprus we have no viable forward operating bases and no boots on the ground anywhere in the region.”
His Secretary of State nodded his agreement, and expanded on his underlying concerns.
“The problem is that in the Arab World the Lebanese, the Syrians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Persians and the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia, with the notable exception of Egypt, are perfectly happy going with the ‘Red Dawn have shot their bolt’ scenario. The presence of British, and Commonwealth forces — mainly Australian — at places like Abadan, in Aden and the main airfields in the Arabian Peninsula, is promoting an unwarranted complacency.”
“Most of those countries are a long way from the nearest Red Dawn lodgement?” Bundy put to Fulbright, who did not reply. “Look, without wanting to sound parochial, we have problems we must confront closer to home. The Administration has more trouble than it needs attempting to fulfil our treaty obligations to the United Kingdom. The last thing we need is to start accruing new overseas obligations.”
The Secretary of State scowled. Ivy League academics like Bundy probably had their place, it was just not in the real world of international relations. The younger man had been ill-advised to return to the Administration. Fulbright could live with Mac’s meddling if that was all it was. The Warren Commission would have ripped off Dean Rusk’s head if he had still been alive; if it came to it he would not hesitate to offer them McGeorge Bundy’s head as a substitute.
Chapter 20
Nicolae Ceaușescu’s fever-wracked body lay a little apart from his Securitate bodyguards and the surviving crew members of the Mil Mi6 former Red Air Force helicopter. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong after he had been driven away through the streets of Bucharest in a convoy of armoured cars. Elena and the children had not been in the park where they had agreed she would wait to be picked up; but AK47-wielding plain clothed KGB men had been. Two of his people had been killed and the constant stabbing, fiery tendrils of pain in his right calf reminded him of the fragmentation round which had torn away a fist’s width of flesh and muscle. He was sitting in a puddle of his and the other dead and wounded Securitates’ blood by the time they got to Otopeni. They had patched him up in the helicopter; but there was only so much the flight crew medic could do with a standard emergency dressing kit other than dose him up with morphine. An injured Securitate had bled out on the flight south, during which the helicopter seemed to have been a magnet for small arms fire.