Power Play

Before he did so he was filmed looking up to the sky and watching the long, slow descent of a passenger aircraft towards Heathrow Airport, a few miles away to the west. It was, he wrote in an email to Waheed, an extraordinary sight. Three hundred tons of metal, flying at 250 miles an hour, hanging as if suspended in the air. The possibilities, he decided, were incredible. Shawfiq left the ground and returned to his Subaru near The Stoop. The vehicle by that time had been fitted with listening devices and cameras, and so was the family home. The watchers at first used a white van that they moved near the house; later they rented a small apartment nearby for the months of surveillance that followed as the conspiracy unfolded.

As he drove away from The Stoop, Shawfiq called Hasina on her mobile phone. I suppose he must have been wondering how she had got on in her job interview, but Hasina’s mobile was switched off. Then he switched on the radio to the Five Live commentary which called the Wasps-Toulouse Twickenham game a ‘real thriller’. After a few minutes he turned the radio off and played a CD of a man singing verses–sura–from the Koran. When he arrived home in Hounslow half an hour later, Shawfiq Iqbal spent that evening sending JPEGs of the pictures he had taken to a number of email addresses in different parts of the United Kingdom, with a few annotations and a brief commentary. He prayed. He checked his maps of Heathrow and Twickenham, and then smoked half a dozen cigarettes, lost in thought. Some time later that night his mother told him that Hasina had indeed got the job. She would start work at Heathrow Terminal Five the following week.

That night Hasina took off her make-up and sat by the mirror in her bedroom, brushing her long black hair. In her later statements to police she said that she tried to read a book while lying on her bed, but could not settle. When police raided the house just over a year later they found the book still by her bedside. The novel, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a story about race relations in multicultural England, was still unfinished. Hasina said from the moment she got the job at Heathrow she could not concentrate on reading, and instead kept wondering why the manager in the shop where she was to work had asked her about her plans for the future and university. At that time, Hasina told the police, she did not know exactly what her brother was planning, but she knew enough to recognize that the future was like a foreign country, which she was not planning to visit. She too prayed before she went to bed.

SEVEN

Details of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ were not leaked, as Kristina and I had feared. They were publicly announced, boasted about by Bobby Black at a news conference two days before the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington. It was as if he had taken a brick and thrown it into a calm pond. I sat at my desk in the embassy watching the Spartacus news conference–as it came to be called–on television, open-mouthed. It began normally, as the regular daily White House press briefing, introduced by the Communications Director Sandy McAuley, who said the Vice-President had a short statement to make. There would be a press handout and the Vice-President would then take questions. An aide passed around a two-page document which turned out to be an executive summary of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ pamphlet that Bobby Black had given me in confidence at the start of the Carr administration.

The news conference led all the TV and radio bulletins, and would ensure that Bobby Black made the cover of Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, Der Spiegel, and the front pages of the main European and American newspapers. He delivered a short statement on the need to meet terror with ‘appropriate severity’, and then called for questions. The BBC’s White House correspondent asked whether–in the light of the Vice-President’s comments about Spartacus–it was pointless the Prime Minister raising the issue of the alleged torture of Muhammad Asif Khan on his visit to the American capital. Bobby Black offered a lopsided grin.

‘My good friend the Prime Minister of Great Britain is welcome to raise any issue with us,’ he said. ‘Any issue at all. That is what friends do. Doesn’t mean to say we are going to agree.’ Then he started to repeat the kind of things he had told Fraser Davis at that disastrous meeting at Chequers the previous year. He went through his ‘Neutrality Is Immoral’ speech, coupled with the instruction that America’s allies were all expected to help win the ‘War on Terror’.

‘Be clear: if you are in the business of harming American citizens, or of helping those who do, you will pay a price and the price could be your life.’

The declassified version of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ that was handed round to White House journalists argued that the United States could never completely defeat all its enemies in the War on Terror, but it did not have to. What America had to do, General Shultz argued in his essay, was to punish to the utmost those terrorists it could catch, without mercy, even at the risk of being thought cruel and imperialist.

The handout included what I thought was the essay’s most controversial conclusion, in full.

The Romans in the Roman Republic and later in the Empire knew they could never be sure to deter a slave rebellion. There was always the chance that somewhere, someone would rise up violently against his master. But when it happened on a grand scale under Spartacus, each of the captured rebellious slaves was crucified on the roads around Rome, their bodies left to rot and be feasted upon by vermin. In the twenty-first century, Roman methods are inappropriate, but Roman psychology is useful. There will always be rebellions, always troublemakers, always potential suicide bombers. The Spartacus Solution will ensure that terrorists are kept alive long enough to confess, to betray their comrades, and pay the full penalty. The United States in the twenty-first century must be a good friend. We must also be a ruthless and implacable enemy.

One other conclusion was also made public:

The more hostile media we receive for perceived human-rights abuses, the more discriminate our deterrence and the more potent the Spartacus Solution. Hostile media works for us. It is an effective communications tool. The Romans understood it best: Fear works.

‘But just talking of a Spartacus Solution, Mr Vice-President,’ one of the White House reporters asked, waving the extracts in her hand, ‘isn’t that inflammatory? Crucifying terrorists on the road to Rome? Is that seriously going to be American policy in the twenty-first century?’

‘You are, with respect, confusing a metaphor with a policy,’ Vice-President Black retorted. ‘What is inflammatory is blowing up American airliners on takeoff from Manila.’

Another British reporter, Jack Rothstein from The Times, stood up. I liked Rothstein and had in the past briefed him about our side of the rows over torture and Muhammad Asif Khan.

‘Mr Vice-President, diplomatic sources say this kind of talk is not in the best traditions of the United States. Abraham Lincoln …’

‘And I have explained to “diplomatic sources” that Abraham Lincoln did not have to deal with your British suicide bombers,’ Bobby Black interrupted scornfully.

‘We will not rest until all the people attacking us are in a place where they can no longer do any harm. We will do what it takes. Abraham Lincoln would understand that, even if a few diplomats in striped pants don’t get it.’

Black went on the offensive. He said that since 9/11 you were ‘either with the United States or you were against it. There just is no middle way. There is no split-the-difference between Right and Wrong.’

‘Aren’t things a bit more complicated in the real world than simply black or white?’ a woman from CBS suggested.

‘On the contrary: since Manila, there is no such colour as grey,’ Bobby Black shot back. ‘International leaders, diplomats, journalists who see the world in terms of grey are deluding themselves, or, worse, they are deluding the people who elected them–or, in the case of some TV news anchors, they are deluding the people who watch their news programmes.’

I listened to the interview with sinking heart. My job is a study in shades of grey. I sent Kristina a text message: ‘You watching this?’ She did not text back. A couple of hours later, FOX News quoted an unnamed ‘American official’ describing me personally as ‘a leading appeaser of terror’ for my intervention in the Khan case, and saying it was ‘not expected’ that Prime Minister Fraser Davis would ‘waste time during his upcoming Washington visit’ arguing on behalf of the rights of a terrorist, ‘unlike Ambassador Alex Price.’ We started to take hostile calls at the embassy. The people at FOX News gave out our number on the air, which meant that every right-wing wacko with access to a telephone dialled in to shout abuse at what one caller described as the ‘pansy-assed British faggots.’ Ironic, you might think, given that at that very point I was no longer pressing Khan’s case at all.

Late that night, Kristina called me on my mobile. ‘I guess you saw it?’ she said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What did you think?’

‘Any statement which pisses off your friends and encourages your enemies is not a good idea.’

‘That good, uh?’ Kristina said.

‘Are you coming to the dinner for the Prime Minister?’ I wondered. I was hosting the event at the ambassador’s residence.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be my partner for the evening?’

Kristina thought for a moment.

‘Of course.’

Then she rang off.

dThe day before the Prime Minister was due to arrive in Washington, I had yet another run-in with Bobby Black. It was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with him, even though I had managed to ensure–thanks to some deft footwork from Kristina–that Fraser Davis would indeed sit down with President Carr for his allotted fifteen minutes of ‘special relationship’ face-time. I had promised that Davis would not raise the Khan case. Johnny Lee Ironside called me.

‘I see you got your man in,’ he laughed. ‘Despite the best efforts of me and my man to keep him out.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied.

‘You and me need a serious talk, Alex,’ he said.

‘You coming to the dinner for the Prime Minister? It’s over at ten. Stay behind afterwards and have a few beers with me. We need to do something to make all this better before it turns into a festering sore.’

‘Talking ‘bout festering sores,’ he said, ‘the Vice-President wants to see you again. Wants to whup your English ass.’

This time it was about Britain’s reluctance to provide locations for part of the anti-ballistic missile shield the newspapers call ‘Star Wars’. Fraser Davis had been back-pedalling. The Poles and Czechs had been threatened with Russian nuclear obliteration for their part in playing host to the American radar network, and there were political problems too. As soon as the Spartacus Solution news conference ended, you could feel the wave of unpopularity towards Carr and Black hit Britain, Europe, and most American allies.

It was profoundly dispiriting. Carnwath told me it was starting to rival the way the United States was seen during the Bush/Cheney administration at their worst. Fraser Davis could read opinion polls. He did not like the new wave of anti-Americanism. None of us did. But he also knew he had to be careful. Carnwath told me that at all costs Fraser wanted to avoid what he called ‘the poodle factor’–being seen to jump to every American demand; being thought of as the new Tony Blair. On the way to the White House, I skimmed through my briefing papers on missile defence in the back of the Rolls. This time it was just Bobby Black, Johnny Lee, the British military attaché Lee Crieff, and me. No Kristina. As she feared, she had been sidelined in matters that she should have played a part in.

Bobby Black sat at his desk and scowled. He delivered a terse lecture on the ‘need for urgency in the creation of the missile shield, and the need to live up to commitments.’ When he finished talking, I prepared to argue back, saying that we accepted the urgency but the British people were not persuaded about the nature of the threat requiring a space-based antimissile system.

‘There is a clear danger to Britain,’ I said, ‘and no clear benefit.’

It would always be cheaper for the Russians to build more missiles than it ever would be for the Americans to keep increasing the power of the supposed missile shield–even assuming that it did work. Our scientists said that, so far, it didn’t.

Suddenly Bobby Black snapped: ‘Thanks, Ambassador.’

‘B-but …’

Then he said, ‘Goodbye.’

That was it. Vice had spoken. I was ushered out by Johnny Lee who said, ‘We’ll talk after the dinner.’ He said it in a whisper. Later that evening, I read on the wire services that the White House had briefed journalists that ‘the British have been consulted’ about Strategic Missile Defence and that the British had ‘agreed with the Carr administration that they would make radar early warning facilities fully available in the United Kingdom in a timely manner.’

It was nice that he told us.

Woof, woof.

By the time of Fraser Davis’s visit, Bobby Black was so obviously the driving force in the White House that late- night comedians were joking that it was Theo Carr who was ‘one heartbeat away’ from the presidency of the United States, and I decided I needed to try to get Black and Davis together again, under tight supervision. James Byrne, in one of his Washington Post columns, said Black had become ‘like one of the Dementors in a Harry Potter novel–he sucks the souls from those who meet him’, and that he represented the Carr administration’s ‘Dark Side’.

The day after our discussion about Star Wars, Prime Minister Fraser Davis arrived in Washington for his forty-eight-hour visit. He met President Carr without a hitch, and then on the last evening the Vice-President and his wife Susan were guests of honour at my dinner at the embassy. Much thought from Johnny Lee and me went into the choreography of the evening. Davis and Black were never to be allowed to meet each other without significant adult supervision. We brought them together at the cocktail party, where they stood awkwardly side by side and allowed a few photographs to be taken alongside one of the other guests, the comedian Mike Myers. They smiled at each other, shook hands, said nothing. Then, just as we moved into dinner, Bobby Black turned to Fraser Davis.

‘Now is the time,’ he said softly. There was such a hubbub of people moving into the dining room that I barely heard the words.

‘The time for what?’ the Prime Minister smiled affably.

‘Now is the time for you to crack down on that group of your citizens who are the seedbed for terrorism. These Pakistani people have to be dealt with.’

To his credit, Fraser Davis remained calm. ‘If you mean British citizens of Pakistani origin, then they are of course British and need to be treated with equal—’

Before he could finish, Bobby Black said, ‘We are actively considering making all of these Pakistani–British people apply in person to the US embassy in London should they ever wish to get on a plane to this country. And if you do not help us in this, Prime Minister, we may take the same steps with all British citizens.’

‘There is only one class of British citizen, Vice-President Black,’ Davis responded. ‘You must do what you need to do, but you must treat all of our citizens alike, whatever their background.’

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ Bobby Black scowled and walked in to dinner, shepherded by Johnny Lee Ironside. I led the Prime Minister to his seat and took a deep breath. At least they had not actively come to blows. At the end of the dinner I made a short speech about the importance of British-American friendship in a dangerous world, about the fact that our values and interests were so often the same. I ended by trying to tease the Vice-President in a sneighbourly way. As part of the bad publicity about me being supposedly a ‘friend of terrorists’, someone had leaked my fear of flying in helicopters to various news outlets. Presumably more evidence of my role as a pansy-assed Brit. The Washington Post printed a gossipy piece suggesting that the British diplomat who was not frightened to stand up to the wrath of Vice-President Bobby Black over Muhammad Asif Khan was nevertheless terrified of a heavier-than-air machine. Towards the end of my speech I joked about it.

‘If you read the papers last week, you will know that I have a thing about helicopters. I confess that they are my personal hell–especially the ones that bring my esteemed neighbour Vice-President Black to and from official engagements.’

There was an intake of breath around the table as people began to calculate whether the British Ambassador was about to have a go at Vice in the company of the British Prime Minister. I should explain that the Vice-President and I really were neighbours. The ambassador’s residence is next door to the US Naval Observatory, which is the official vice-presidential residence. This accident of geography did not mean we were the kind of neighbours who drop in for coffee or climb over the fence to borrow a lawnmower or a cup of sugar. If you go on to Google Earth and zoom in on Massachusetts Avenue on the satellite photographs, you will see that–uniquely for Washington–Bobby Black’s home in the Naval Observatory is blanked out, pixelated. The White House isn’t. You can see it clearly. You can even look at some major US military facilities around the world; but one of the few places where Google Earth cannot shine is Bobby Black’s official home, next door to my own home, which, of course, Google Earth does show in every last detail, almost down to the rose bushes and fireflies in the garden.

‘Even though our two nations do not agree on the Kyoto Treaty on carbon emissions, Mr Vice-President,’ I smiled, full of diplomatic good cheer, ‘may I respectfully suggest that the small sacrifice of switching off the helicopter engines when the Chinooks sit idling on your lawn would signal we are more in harmony on global warming than people think—’ I paused for effect–‘as well as being good neighbours and friends, of course, with the heli-phobe next door.’

There was much laughter and then applause. Susan Black threw her head back and hooted with amusement in that easy Montana way of hers. So did the Prime Minister. Mike Myers laughed too, and then said ‘Groovy, Baby,’ in his best Austin Powers accent, so everyone got the joke. I stared over at Bobby Black, who was sitting opposite Mike Myers. His lopsided grin was fixed on his face. He turned his spoon towards his tiramisu dessert, did not look at me, and said nothing. My own tiramisu tasted of sulphur. There was to be no change in the pattern of helicopter emissions over the next year.

When the guests left at ten o’clock, the hour that most Washington events finish, I said goodbye to the Vice-President and Prime Minister, and had a few words with Kristina. Then Johnny Lee Ironside and I headed outside for a beer on the porch. The night was still warm, though we were heading towards autumn. The last moths of the year danced around the garden lights.

‘Clusterfuck,’ he replied, using one of his favourite words.

‘Unbelievable. Does he mean it about making British citizens of Pakistani origin apply for special visas?’

‘First I heard of it,’ Johnny Lee said, sucking on a bottle of Sam Adams beer. ‘Doesn’t mean to say it won’t happen.’

We began talking about the eccentric ways of those we were paid to serve.

‘I mean, Davis and Black,’ Johnny Lee went on, ‘two men, great on their own, who just can’t stand each other. You know what the Vice-President said to me the other day?

He said the British are even more of a pain in the ass than the French. You hear me? How does anyone handle that?’

I swallowed a few mouthfuls of beer and asked Johnny Lee whether he thought the Vice-President of the United States and the British Prime Minister–men who spend their whole adult lives seeking the highest levels of power and then obtain it–were truly different from the rest of us.

‘You bet,’ Johnny Lee said, pulling the beer bottle from his mouth. ‘Different as spare ribs from a spare tyre.’

‘But how come?’ I persisted. ‘Do they start different or do they become that way because of the job?’

‘The rich are different from you and me,’ Johnny Lee suggested, ‘because they have more money. Presidents and Prime Ministers are different from you and me, because they have more—’

‘Juice,’ I said. ‘They have more juice.’

‘Hang-ups,’ Johnny Lee contradicted, with a laugh. He made a sign with his finger at the side of his head to suggest mental illness. ‘More psychoses. Frickin’ nut jobs. All of them.’

‘Okay, nut jobs,’ I agreed. ‘But does power attract nut jobs, or does it create them?’

‘Hmmm, we’re getting in deep here, brother,’ Johnny Lee nodded vigorously, grabbing yet another beer. ‘For my money, they start off fucking weird. They might get weirder, sure. But they always start off fucking weird. You never really know them, you know?’

I disagreed. After years of watching government ministers close up, members of Parliament, prime ministers, Congressmen and presidents, I had concluded that normal people do want to serve their country, but they became peculiar when they achieved power.

‘I have never met an evil politician,’ I said, ‘but I have met plenty who are delusional. The chief delusion is that they need to stay in power otherwise the country will go to hell.’

Johnny Lee laughed.

‘In this town,’ he gestured with the beer-bottle neck towards the lights of Washington DC, ‘politics attracts freaks just like your light here attracts bugs. Normal folks have lives. Abnormal folks have political ambitions. Normal folks go to bars. Abnormal folks go to political meetings. My mama always told me politics is just show business for ugly people.’

‘Then your mama was as cynical as you are,’ I scolded him. ‘Plenty of decent people enter public service, but it twists them inside out. It’s like living in a fishbowl or a cocoon.’

Now it definitely was the beer talking. It was near midnight and I was getting drunk. I poured us two fingers of Jack Daniels over ice.

‘Fishy-bowl? Co-coon? Ambassador Price, I do believe you are talking what we Washington Tribesmen call bullshit.’

‘No, no, hear me out,’ I protested, passing him the whisky. ‘Hear me out. A fishbowl because people in power have no privacy any more. None. Everything Vice-President Black or President Carr or Prime Minister Davis says or does, is written down, photographed, recorded, and dissected. They got blamed for the great food they ate at the IMF banquet, right? Because half the world is going hungry. But if Davis or Carr refused to eat the fancy food set in front of them, they’d get blamed for lousy gesture politics, a stunt that makes no difference to the poor. Politicians can’t win, Johnny Lee. The press asked President Reagan about a cancerous polyp in his colon, for God’s sake.’

Johnny Lee took a sip of the Jack Daniels. ‘United States media–finest in world,’ he responded, jabbing the whisky glass at me. ‘Our journalists have a goddamn constitutional right to peer up the president’s ass.’

A doctor or psychologist would say that Johnny Lee and I were engaged in ‘relief drinking’ as a way of dealing with stress. Like me, Johnny Lee was in theory married but in practice separated. The rumour was that his wife, Carly, had remained in Charleston to pursue her career as a lawyer, but mostly–or so I was told–to pursue her golf instructor, her tennis coach, her pool boy, and various other diversions. Johnny Lee and I never discussed this, or Fiona leaving me. Some things are best left unsaid.

When you are married to the younger sister of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you cannot afford a scandal. When you are the Chief of Staff to the Vice-President of the United States, you cannot get a divorce until it is politically acceptable to get one. The two of us argued in good-humoured drunkenness until Johnny Lee got up to leave. I walked him to where his car and driver were waiting. He burped.