The Attorney General and the Head of the Central Intelligence Agency rose to their feet when the two men swept into the brightly lit, steel-lined bunker. General Curtis LeMay, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral David McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations were already standing, deep in conversation by a whiteboard at the opposite end of the pristine new situation room. They straightened respectfully.
Jack Kennedy wasted no time. Drawing up a chair he waved for the others to sit down around the familiar table LBJ had had brought to Philadelphia from the warehouse storing the furniture removed from the White House while repairs were in progress.
“John,” the President demanded, fixing John Alexander McCone, the Republican industrialist he had brought in to the Administration to clean up the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, “tell me about this second U-2 we’ve lost?”
The question was asked flatly, without censure. The men in this room were beyond scoring points or assigning blame, leastways, not within their own circle. They had too many enemies in common for them not to be grimly united in their work.
“As you know, Mr President, setting up at Dhahran was always problematic,” the older man prefaced. The United States had pulled out of the base the year before the October War but the Saudi Government had permitted the hurried reactivation of the airfield after the nuclear strikes on its neighbour, Egypt. The hasty deployment of two U-2s to Dhahran had now ended, comprehensively, in disaster. “We badly needed aerial surveillance assets to cover the region and the runway at RAF Luqa was too short.” He shrugged. “I signed off on the transfer to Dhahran when it became clear that the Israelis weren’t going to give us unconditional access to the facilities we needed. Given that the security situation in Egypt post-Ismailia is uncertain and that President Nasser was unable to guarantee the safety of our people and equipment, Dhahran was the only realistic option.”
“Nobody’s blaming you, John,” Jack Kennedy assured him.
The Director of the CIA scowled.
John McCone was perfectly capable of blaming himself when he thought he had made a mistake and he was in no mood to dissemble.
“There may have been issues with the integrity of the fuel or some other maintenance issue with the U-2 we lost on Monday. U-2s are complicated pieces of equipment and I ordered the aircraft to commence operations before the full ground crews were in theatre.” John McCone sighed. “The aircraft we lost last night managed to get off a message that it was under attack. According to the mission profile the aircraft had completed a pass over Tbilisi and was heading up north over the Caucasus Mountains to give us coverage of the Chelyabinsk-Sverdlovsk region. The aircraft had already completed the main part of the mission, to overfly the Armenian border with Turkey. The northern leg was simply a post-action damage assessment exercise. There are big areas of the former USSR’s southern and eastern republics where we have either no post-war coverage, or very spotty coverage.”
Jack Kennedy had not known that until recently.
I ought to have known that! Shouldn’t I?
Curtis LeMay cleared his throat. Having heard the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency abase himself before his Commander-in-Chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not to be outdone.
“We commenced a program of after-action reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union ten days after the October War,” he reported. “U-2 serviceability was low at that time so most of the work over the Western USSR was done by Martin B-57s. I suspended these flights around this time last year due to climatic conditions then prevailing over the central and eastern areas of the Soviet Union. My boys were coming back with pictures of clouds most missions and,” he shrugged, “I postponed further flights until the summer. By then the Air Force was busy delivering its part of the ‘Peace Dividend’. Post-action battle assessment is still on my ‘to do’ list, Mr President. I take full responsibility for the failure to get the job done sooner.”
Jack Kennedy waved this away. The American Government would have been decapitated, he would be dead by now, and the nation would be in an unimaginably parlous state if Curtis LeMay had not ridden to the rescue at the height of the Battle of Washington. Old Iron Pants had a vault full of credit banked with his President.
“Don’t beat yourself up over it, General.” He looked back to the Director of the CIA. “Okay, John. The Russians may have rediscovered the capability to shoot down our spy planes. What does that tell us?”
With a sidelong glance the CIA man batted the question back to Curtis LeMay.
“It means they’ve got a state of the art functioning integrated air defence system up and running somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains,” Curtis LeMay stated with grudging respect. If he had had one of his famous cigars in his mouth he would have chewed it to shreds and spat out the pieces.
“We recognised all along that elements of the Soviet war machine,” John McCone said, unconcerned that the airman had stolen a little of his thunder, “possibly significant elements, might have survived the war. However, to find a sophisticated air defence element operational so close to the northern borders of Persia and Iraq, and very nearly adjacent to the Armenian frontier with Turkey where we know there has been recent heavy fighting — we assume between Red Dawn and Turkish forces — is hardly likely to be coincidental. On the other hand, if Baku and the Caucasian oil fields are intact then it makes a kind of sense to position, or to leave in place, any air defence systems that might have survived the war.”
The Vice-President frowned with concentration, raising a hand to indicate he wanted to speak. Something was troubling the Texan. Oil was dirty, smelly stuff that was best left in the ground unless you had something to do with it; so if somebody had plans for it that would be a thing worth fighting over.
“If the oil fields are still there?” Lyndon Johnson drawled. “What’s happening to the oil?” He looked around the table. “What does Bill Fulbright think about all this?”
Bobby Kennedy had been in a thoughtful reverie.
“Fulbright’s due in England about now.” The President’s younger brother was suddenly conscious of the changing mood of the room. The Secretary of State had been shuttling around the Mediterranean and the Middle East desperately trying to recruit allies, stitch back together old alliances and to repair relationships soured by neglect and mistrust since the October War. Fulbright’s schedule was insane. After returning to Virginia for a brief interlude at Camp David and a whistle stop round of arm-twisting in Philadelphia he had flown straight back to Europe to visit Malta, and was currently stopping over in England to consult with the British Foreign Secretary and to brief the Angry Widow.
The Angry Widow.
By tomorrow Margaret Thatcher might not be the British Prime Minister.
“What’s Bill going to be telling the British, Jack?” Bobby Kennedy asked his brother.
The President’s smile was not sanguine. The finest intelligence analysts in the country were unable to settle upon a coherent story. Nobody really knew what was happening in the territories so recently conquered by Red Dawn; or why the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean had suddenly fallen quiet in recent weeks. A unilateral unspoken ceasefire was in place from Cyprus to Belgrade, Bucharest had been nuked off the face of the Earth and Red Dawn seemed to have turned inward upon itself, except very little of that made sense. In the last few days the RAF had flown a number of Canberra spy missions over the Balkans, Greece and the northern Aegean and into the Sea of Marmara; tantalisingly, the images these flights had brought back were still being analysed in Malta.