Power Play

Haley and Georgia were Fiona’s business partners in an interior-design consultancy they had set up after leaving Oxford, which owed at least some of its success to the idea that people could employ a company connected to the Prime Minister to renovate their homes.

‘Fine,’ I said, accepting the inevitable. ‘That’s fine.’

I headed to the airport alone, calling Andy Carnwath on the way for a further briefing about the Manila attack. It was the day we woke up to the possibility that every one of our nightmares might become true. All through the presidential election campaign, Carr and Black had consistently argued that the United States government and the President in particular were complacent about the terrorist threat. There had been no significant incident in the United States since 11 September 2001, and to many of us Carr and Black sounded like a pair of wackos: shrill, scaremongering, out of touch.

‘Who was the bomber?’

‘Name of Rashid Ali Fuad,’ Carnwath said, ‘from Yorkshire. Leeds.’

‘Acting alone?’

‘Our people doubt it, but that’s all we have.’

‘Definitely British?’

‘Oh yeah. Definitely one of ours. Lucky us.’

As we drove into Heathrow, I could see, all around the perimeter, armoured troop carriers and fully armed soldiers. There were groups of police officers with Heckler & Koch sub-machine-guns at the terminal building, long lines at the check-in desks and serious flight delays as every piece of electronic equipment was checked. I skipped through the priority channel and into the first-class lounge where I sat in front of the BBC’s 24-hour news channel. It said that Rashid Ali Fuad had climbed on board an American Boeing 747 aircraft at Manila, sat in a window seat and detonated a bomb in his laptop computer. It punched a hole in the plane and caused a crash on take-off followed by a catastrophic explosion. The aviation fuel caught fire and the blaze incinerated everyone on board.

It was like being on the hinge of history. Everything after that moment was changed. The Manila atrocity confirmed to tens of millions of American voters that the world was just as dangerous a place as Governor Theo Carr and Senator Bobby Black had always insisted it was, and that the dangers came not just from countries with a long record of hating America, but also from people like Fuad who were citizens of the country most Americans thought of as a friend and ally, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was as if a switch went off in the heads of tens of millions of voters and, in that one instant, the out-of-touch scaremongerers, Governor Theo Carr and Senator Bobby Black, suddenly seemed prescient and timely. Bobby Black cancelled the rest of his European trip. He skipped Paris and Berlin and flew instead to the Philippines. He stood on the tarmac in front of the charred hulk of the jumbo jet promising, ‘No More Manilas.’ It became the slogan that won the election. He pointed at the wreckage and at the body bags laid out on the tarmac, ready to be loaded on to a US Air Force C-5 transport plane with the ashes and dust of the American dead. With tears misting his glasses, Bobby Black promised that, ‘America is grieving now, but there will come a time for vengeance, and that vengeance will be swift, brutal and just.’ He stared straight at the cameras.

‘There will be No More Manilas,’ he repeated. ‘I want everyone round the world to hear me. No More Manilas.’

‘No More Manilas’, they chanted in Boston and Houston and Fresno and Tallahassee and Atlanta and Baton Rouge in the closing days of the presidential campaign. ‘No More Manilas’ tee shirts, buttons and bumper stickers became bestsellers for street vendors from New York City to San Diego. The funerals of the dead from the Manila atrocity began just before election day, and America went to the polls in mourning: resolute, defiant, wounded–and determined to secure justice. I admired, as I always do, the resilience and good sense of the American people, but I looked at the tracking polls with a degree of concern. The opinion polls measured a profound switch to Carr and Black, enough to win the presidency of the United States against all the predictions of the supposed experts. Bobby Black was about to become Vice-President of the United States.

On Inauguration Day the following January, I watched from the diplomatic stand on Capitol Hill as President Carr and Vice-President Black were sworn in at a sombre ceremony in a country that felt itself definitively at war. The crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue and around the Capitol carried American flags and thousands upon thousands of banners repeating the same slogan time after time.

‘NO MORE MANILAS. NO MORE MANILAS.’

President Theo Carr said as much in his Inauguration speech. He promised that his administration had ‘no higher ideal, no greater purpose, than to ensure the life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness of every American citizen by freeing our people from the shadow of the gunman, bomber, and terrorist. We will, as John F. Kennedy said on his Inauguration at this very spot, bear any burden, pay any price, to secure our great nation from those who would destroy us. They will not succeed. They will never succeed. They shall not pass.’

I stood to applaud when President Carr finished. After Manila, the whole world stood to applaud. We were, yet again, absolutely shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in their time of trouble; until, of course, the Carr administration settled into power with all the confidence of sleepwalkers, and the issue of Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship started to become part of the wedge between us, most especially in the mind of Vice-President Black. I could not believe how quickly relations deteriorated.

Just one day after the Inauguration, while the bleachers for the spectators watching the parade were still being dismantled all along Pennsylvania Avenue, the Washington Post published details of the argument between Prime Minister Fraser Davis and Vice-President Black at their Chequers meeting the day before the Manila bombing. The way the story was written made it look as if Fraser Davis and the British government were soft on terror, and that this weakness somehow contributed to the loss of all those innocent lives at the hands of what the paper kept calling ‘the British suicide bomber, Fuad.’ The reporter, James Byrne, claimed to have received a transcript of the Davis-Black row at Chequers from ‘reliable Carr administration sources.’ The report highlighted the section where Bobby Black said, ‘Fuck the United Nations.’

The Washington Post story caused uproar in Britain, across Europe and at the United Nations. Black and Carr’s popularity in the United States–which was very high in those first days–actually increased. Curiously, Fraser Davis’s popularity in Britain increased too. I suspected it was because, unlike Tony Blair, nobody reading the story could accuse Davis of being an American poodle. But how did Byrne get the story, based on secret transcripts of a private conversation more than three months earlier? I considered the options and then called the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside. I told him that it was very unhelpful to have this kind of leak.

‘Makes it sound like someone in the White House is anti-British.’

‘We didn’t leak it, Alex.’

‘But you benefited from it,’ I told him. ‘And it didn’t come from us. The Prime Minister is livid. Cui bono?’

‘C’mon, you guys did okay,’ Johnny Lee retorted. He was in good humour. There was not a problem between the two of us. ‘I read the British papers. Davis comes out of this just fine. Maybe you leaked it?’

‘Me? For goodness sake, Johnny Lee, I am not a leaker—’

‘Listen, Alex, lighten up. Who cares, all right? I mean, we both come out ahead. My man says fuck the UN, which plays to our home crowd. Your man says fuck the Americans, which plays to yours. So everybody wins.’

I didn’t think so. But I let it rest.

I could not escape the thought that maybe Johnny Lee had leaked the transcript himself. He clearly suspected the same about me because I knew the reporter James Byrne quite well. Welcome to the Washington House of Mirrors. What you see reflects only upon where you decide to look. After just one day of the Carr-Black administration, I was beginning to worry that the next four years were going to be difficult. In that judgement, at least, I was correct.

THREE

‘Fear’, Vice-President Bobby Black said to me, ‘works.’

It was now a week after the Inauguration and a week after the Washington Post had published the story about the row between Davis and Black. We were in the White House, and things were getting worse.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Fear … works,’ he repeated, separating the words in his whispering drawl.

The Vice-President of the United States shrugged and blinked behind his glasses, as if that were explanation enough. I had been invited to the White House–‘summoned’ might be a better word–for a bollocking. I had left early from the Ambassador’s living quarters at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. I’d said goodbye to Fiona, kissed her and told her that I would be late–a long day at the White House followed by planned meetings with the new people in Congress, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Betty Furedi, plus two sessions on Capitol Hill, and then finally, around 6 p.m., a cocktail party to welcome the new Turkish Ambassador.

‘Dinner? Eight?’ I said as I kissed her. ‘That’s what we scheduled?’

‘Yes,’ she said, without enthusiasm. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ears. ‘See you for dinner at eight.’

We entertained most evenings. That night I had planned a small dinner for a visiting delegation of representatives of British airlines to bring them together with two key members of a Congressional committee that was proving difficult about landing rights at JFK and O’Hare Airport in Chicago. There was no direct relationship between the problems we were having and the Manila attack, but Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship was mentioned repeatedly in the committee hearings, and constantly talked about on the US TV news networks.

‘Dinner at eight,’ Fiona repeated. ‘You know, sometimes I feel less like an Ambassador’s wife and more like a flight attendant. All I do is smile at strangers and serve them beverages.’

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ I said.

‘We always talk about it later.’

‘You want out?’ I snapped. ‘This isn’t much fun for me, either, being married to someone who treats me like I’m some kind of kidnapper.’

‘I just want my own life back, that’s all. Not just a part of yours. Is that too much to ask?’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘That’s not too much to ask. We will talk about it, I promise.’

I kissed her on the cheek but did not ask how she was going to spend her day. At that moment, on my way to the White House, I had enough to deal with.

‘Eight o’clock then.’

‘Yes.’

There is a peculiar excitement about going to the White House, no matter how many times it happens. You remember the details. Every sense is on overload. It is like drinking from the Enchanted Fountain of Power. That day it was a small meeting which filled the Vice-President’s tiny office–just Bobby Black, his Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside, the White House Deputy National Security Adviser, Dr Kristina Taft, plus me, and a note-taker. A vase of lilies left over from the Inauguration celebrations sat on the Vice-President’s desk, heavy with pollen. I still remember how the flowers gave off a pungent smell. Bobby Black had called me in to discuss the publicity given by British newspapers to the behind-the-scenes rows between the two governments, following the exposé in the Washington Post. It had become echo-chamber journalism, nothing more than the hollow sound of our worst prejudices as the British and American media had a go at each other. Johnny Lee Ironside had warned me that the Vice-President would bring up the related case of another British national who had been picked up by US special forces on the Pakistan-Afghan border. He was called Muhammad Asif Khan, and he had been arrested, detained, or kidnapped–you can choose your word–either inside Afghanistan, as the Americans claimed, or inside Pakistan, as his family and the Pakistan Government insisted. The American account said Khan was a British accomplice of the Manila bomber Rashid Ali Fuad, though we had no evidence of this and suspected the Americans didn’t either.

Khan’s family–from Keighley in Yorkshire–said he had disappeared while visiting relatives, and claimed he was being tortured by the CIA, or that he had been handed over to a ‘friendly’ country with a dubious human-rights record so that their intelligence agencies could torture him on behalf of the Americans. A number of British newspapers, politicians and human-rights groups, along with the Pakistan Government, protested that in its first week the Carr-Black administration was ‘already even worse than that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.’ The Guardian newspaper had called the Khan disappearance a ‘blight’ on ‘all the hopes’ for the new presidency. No one would confirm where Khan was being held, though some reports said it was in Egypt. Since the Manila atrocity, reports of this kind of treatment of suspected terrorists had grown. Johnny Lee told me to think of it as ‘outsourcing’.

‘Like putting a call centre in Bangalore,’ he said to me. ‘You employ some real experts, hungry for the work, and you get more bang for your buck.’

‘Is Khan in Egypt, Johnny Lee?’

‘No idea, Alex. God help the sonovabitch if he is. The Egyptians don’t do nice, from what I hear.’

The fact that Khan’s father and uncles were from Keighley, geographically just a short drive from Leeds, the home town of Fuad, the Manila bomber, was asserted in the American media as evidence of a connection. The Khan family angrily denied it. They were politically well connected, friends of a British Muslim Labour MP who made a fuss, organized a series of well-publicized protests and asked awkward questions in Parliament. Fraser Davis was in trouble at Prime Minister’s Questions, embarrassed by the Opposition, and also by some on his own side. Mostly he was embarrassed by being dropped in it by the Americans.

‘Can the Prime Minister confirm under what circumstances he believes it is legal for the CIA or the American Army to kidnap and torture British citizens?’ was just one of the unhelpful questions Fraser Davis faced in the Commons and on television.

‘Can the Prime Minister confirm the whereabouts of Mr Khan?’

‘Can the Prime Minister tell us how dispensing with due process of law and alienating the entire British Muslim community will help the Carr administration win their so-called War on Terror?’

And so on.

British newspapers showed pictures of Khan–clean shaven and smiling–helping a group of handicapped children on an Outward Bound course in the Lake District, a model citizen, apparently. The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek magazine showed a different Khan. This one was an Islamist fanatic, a Taleban supporter and wannabe suicide bomber who had been recruiting young British men of Pakistani origin to kill–Americans and Jews preferably–without compunction. Khan, they claimed, was planning some kind of unspecified attack in the United States or against American targets ‘along the lines of Manila.’

Where the truth lay in all this, I did not know. What I did know was that the row between London and Washington had now entered an even more aggressive phase. All the rest had been just foreplay. At least Johnny Lee Ironside and I had established a good relationship, I would almost say a friendship, in the months or so since the initial disagreement at Chequers. We met frequently and talked on the telephone almost every day.

‘Heads up,’ he said. ‘The Vice-President wants to see you about Khan and other matters, and it isn’t going to be pretty. Be prepared for Incoming.’

‘Thanks,’ I replied. I appreciated the warning.

‘He’s in need of a human sacrifice, Alex, and as the top Brit around here, you have been selected.’

I pretended to laugh.

‘Ritual slaughter is one of the perks of the job. I’m looking forward to it. Obviously.’

That day of my White House visit I heard the morning TV weather reports predicting an ice storm all around the Chesapeake Bay. Flat blue clouds rolled in from the northeast, bringing a chill which drilled the bones. After I kissed Fiona goodbye, I came out of the ambassador’s residence, around half past seven in the morning. I was swathed in a long black coat and I jumped into the embassy’s dark green Rolls-Royce with the heating turned up full blast. I felt bad about Fiona; bad about the way it was going. On the journey down Massachusetts Avenue I tried to see things from her point of view. Yes, I had taken her away from her friends and career in London, but she knew all the drawbacks when she married me. Yes, I had a hectic job, but being the wife of the British Ambassador was not such a bad deal, was it?

And yes, yes, I wanted children. I’m young for an ambassador but when you hit late forties you are getting old for fatherhood. I felt time passing and the ticking of the clock that women are supposed to possess but men are not. Because Fiona is twelve years younger than me, perhaps she did not feel it so intensely, but I was slowly waking up to the idea that I might need a bit of diplomacy in my private life.

I got to the White House shortly before eight o’clock. Dr Kristina Taft met me near the media stakeout position at the West Wing door. That day she was still the Deputy National Security Adviser, though not for long. The newspapers called Kristina a ‘Vulcan’, one of the hyper-rational academics full of brainy ideas and yet apparently devoid of human emotion whom Carr and Black had brought in to run American policy. I could not square the newspaper hype with the smiling face that greeted me, though I admit I was slightly intimidated. Kristina was about the same age as Fiona and we stood shaking hands for the photographers. We exchanged a few words as the Marine Guard saluted and the machine-gun fire of lenses and flashguns went off in our faces.

Nothing happens at the White House by accident. Everything in the Carr presidency is scheduled into fifteen-minute slots, and there are therefore ninety-six of these across the President’s twenty-four-hour day. Even ‘downtime’–relaxation–is scheduled in fifteen-minute bites, though a sensible president will make sure he gets at least thirty-two of these a night. I used to wonder if some presidents–especially Kennedy or Clinton–had a fifteen-or thirty-or forty-five-minute schedule for sex. Anyway, Kristina Taft could have chosen for me to arrive discreetly, away from the cameras. Instead she picked the entrance designed to give the American media a full photo-opportunity of the British Ambassador being called in for his bollocking by Bobby Black. It was to be, as Johnny Lee had told me, an act of ritual humiliation. My humiliation. I shook hands and beamed. The ‘special relationship’ between the United States and the United Kingdom deserves no less than the occasional warm smile of hypocrisy.

‘Welcome, Ambassador.’

‘Dr Taft. Nice to see you. A pleasure.’

‘I think the cameras have had enough,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth as she steered me inside. ‘You know, the Vice-President told me he is looking forward to meeting with you. He insisted we clear serious face-time.’

Serious face-time with Bobby Black? Diplomatic Warning Bell Number One went off in my head.

‘Vice-President Black is a very busy man,’ I replied carefully. In that first week he was more often on the newspaper front pages than the President himself, a pattern which was to continue for the next two years. ‘I am grateful for the meeting. He’s never out of the news.’

Kristina Taft smiled again, but her grey eyes didn’t. She was wearing a sober dark suit, no discernible make-up, no jewellery. This was an attractive woman deliberately making herself look as serious as possible. She led me inside.

‘We’re going to have to wait a few minutes,’ she said. ‘He is in for a one-on-one with the President. Coffee?’

I accepted and we sat in a hallway watched over by two Secret Service agents. Kristina poured the coffee. I had of course done my homework, reading the briefing papers about the new Carr people. Kristina’s said that her academic career had been stellar, and also that her supposed boss at the National Security Council was in trouble, accused of employing illegal aliens at his home in Virginia. It was just the first of the scandals that were to hit the Carr administration.

Kristina was from the start acting up, as National Security Adviser, with all the authority that implies, although in that first week the gossip was that she was too young for the job; someone else would be brought in. She was, however, born to high office, part of a political dynasty. Her father had been Governor of California and the Tafts are Republican royalty, with a former President, William Howard Taft, to their credit in the early twentieth century. His main claim to historical fame is that he was so fat–300 pounds–that he once got stuck in the White House bathtub. I looked over at Kristina and thought of a hummingbird: she was petite, hyperactive, with the figure of someone who exercises regularly. My briefing papers said Washingtonian magazine had voted her America’s ‘most eligible bachelorette’, under a glamorous picture of her in a full-length evening gown. The New York Times reported that, during the transition, before Theo Carr was actually sworn in, Kristina Taft had a row with Bobby Black and had stood up to him. She had suggested, the story claimed, a White House reading list, including novels to help National Security staff understand how Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, and other Muslims might think.

The New York Times congratulated Kristina on her fortitude in taking on Bobby Black and also on being a ‘civilizing influence’ in the White House. It was a compliment that would not necessarily help her career.

‘So,’ I said, trying to figure Kristina out, ‘what’s this reading list I hear so much about? And can I get a copy? Or are the novels you read Top Secret, US Eyes Only?’

She had the grace to laugh.

‘They are so secret you can get them from any bookstore, if you are open-minded enough to try.’

She explained about the row. During the transition, Theo Carr had held a brainstorming meeting of all his foreign policy advisers and challenged them to name the core failure in American policy in the past fifty years. Kristina stood up and said it was the ‘United States’ inability to understand the psychology of our enemies in the way we understood the psychology of the Russians during the Cold War.’

‘Explain what you mean, Dr Taft,’ Carr had asked, almost like a job interview. Perhaps it was a job interview. Kristina delivered a history lesson. She said that since the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, all America’s troubles originated in an ‘Arc of Instability’ stretching from Palestine and Israel through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

‘But we don’t understand what we are doing,’ Kristina insisted. ‘So we blunder about like dinosaurs with powerful bodies and very small brains. If we don’t change, we are going to be extinct.’

Theo Carr was clearly interested; Bobby Black less so.

‘Give us an example of this dinosaur tendency, Dr Taft,’ Black said. ‘I want some facts.’

‘Fact: Under George W. Bush the United States military destroyed Saddam Hussein in Two Thousand and three,’ Kristina replied. ‘Fact: the United States and its allies overthrew the Taleban in Afghanistan in Two Thousand and two.’

She paused.

‘So?’

‘So, what good did it do us? At great cost to ourselves in American lives, we took out Iran’s two most dangerous enemies, and the Iranians still hate us. Fact: Under Bill Clinton in Nineteen Ninety-eight we saved the Muslim people of Kosovo from slaughter and get no credit from Muslims anywhere. So how dumb are we? We think tactics and ignore strategy; we screw up because we don’t think through what the objective really is. No More Manilas means no more being dinosaurs.’