Power Play

‘So what we gonna do, Alex? We can’t go on trying to keep your man and mine apart. And we can’t get them together without worrying about it coming to a fistfight. So what we going to do?’

Suddenly, standing unsteadily in the embassy driveway, I explained an idea I had been turning over in some dull recess of my brain. Johnny Lee listened and said it sounded like a ‘neat idea’. He burped again and told me we should sleep on it and talk in the morning. We said goodbye and I sat on the porch for another half-hour, having one more beer and one more whisky, thinking through the idea. Early the following day, when I still had a pounding head and a bad stomach, Johnny Lee Ironside called and said he had been thinking over my idea, and we should try to make it work. I had suggested–though it would take months to organize–that we should invite Vice-President Bobby Black to Scotland for a private visit, to shoot grouse in the Highlands with members of the British royal family. He could explore his roots, and along the way meet the Queen and key members of the British government, including the Prime Minister. He and Fraser Davis would be told that mutual self-interest meant they had to kiss and make up. Had to. Imperative. They would be instructed to joke about their rough words at Chequers and to insist that, despite the occasional differences, they were truly the best of friends.

‘Let’s do it,’ Johnny Lee said. And so we did.

EIGHT

Plans involving heads of state, kings, queens, presidents, vicepresidents and prime ministers are like plans involving oil tankers. They take a long time to execute. The idea of bringing Bobby Black over for a kiss-and-make-up trip to the Scottish Highlands took a while to ferment, and then required agreement from everyone you can think of: the Office of the Vice-President, the White House, the State Department, Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and Buckingham Palace.

The date was eventually set for the October of the Carr administration’s second year, two weeks before the mid-term elections when most of Congress is up for re-election. It seemed a long way in the future, but just the fact of the acceptance by Bobby Black helped improve relations between London and Washington. The Vice-President was interested. Enthusiastic. He asked Johnny Lee to get him books on grouse shooting. He knew that the birds fly at speeds of up to eighty miles an hour and he wanted to prepare himself as best he could. He commissioned family research from a genealogy company and instructed Johnny Lee that he needed to visit churches in the Aberdeenshire area to find graves of his ancestors. Perhaps most importantly, the plan to require British citizens of Pakistani origin to apply for special visas if they wanted to travel to the United States was quietly dropped.

‘At least for now,’ Johnny Lee Ironside told me. For me, ‘for now’ was good enough.

Susan Fein Black’s desire for the trip also helped. She quickly realized that the Queen was genuinely interested in horses and called me one evening to ask if Her Majesty would like to know about Mrs Black’s own rare-breeds programme for horses on her ranch in Montana. I said I would find out. It is one of the curiosities of the world that the more republican the country, the more fascinated the citizens are about the British royal family. After all their exertions to get rid of the monarchy, you might have thought Americans would be different, but they are not. Susan Black sounded unbelievably girlish on the phone.

The plans for the trip to Scotland started to develop. The Blacks were to go shooting, they were to have tea with the Queen–informal–and then come to a dinner–formal–with Her Majesty, other members of the royal family, and the Prime Minister. Then Davis and Black were to spend a whole day together trying to work through all their differences. Well, as I say, that was the plan.

The biggest thaw in US–UK relations came when I heard from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Hamish Martin, that the Queen would be delighted–(‘absolutely delighted, Alex,’)–to hear about the Montana rare-breeds programme, and Her Majesty wondered if, instead of joining her husband on the shoot, Mrs Black would care to visit a horse-breeding bloodstock facility near Balmoral in the company of the Queen herself.

(‘Very, very informal,’ Sir Hamish whispered to me.)

When I phoned the Naval Observatory to relay this request, a secretary passed me over to Susan Black in person, and I could again feel the excitement in her voice. I imagined her turning cartwheels across the floor. A little royal stardust had been sprinkled on the visit. Even the dark heart of the Vice-President began to melt under its influence.

Over the next months, as I spent more and more time organizing these few days in Scotland, things with Kristina changed completely. From the moment Fiona had left me I had been busy and lonely, although the busy part usually helped me forget about the lonely part. I soon realized that, at every stage, seeing Kristina seemed to help. Perhaps it was that my friends and family were all in London, hers all in California. Whatever the reason, we became closer and closer. She confided in me how she continually felt sidelined. She had been specifically forbidden by Bobby Black from playing any part in his National Energy Security Taskforce, even though it dealt with areas–the Arab world and Iran, mostly–in which Kristina spoke the main language and had special experience.

‘It’s like I’m the National Security Wife,’ she told me bitterly, biting energetically at a bagel with cream cheese at one of our regular breakfasts. ‘I get allowed to dress up and look good, but when it comes to anything important, the men go talk somewhere else. I need to find a way around this.’

We both knew there was no way, not unless Kristina was prepared to take on Bobby Black directly. But that would be a battle she was destined to lose.

‘Can’t the President…?’ I wondered.

‘He doesn’t want to lose his impeachment insurance,’ Kristina joked. She was helping herself to scrambled eggs. I said I didn’t understand. She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation.

‘We have a Democratic Congress, Alex,’ she explained, her eyebrow arching skyward, ‘you with me so far? The Democrats are hoping to pick up seats in the mid-terms, big time.’

I nodded. The American political process, to outsiders at least, seems like a series of permanent elections. Presidents are elected every four years, but Congressional elections take place every two years, and in the ‘mid-terms’ all of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election.

‘Arlo Luntz says the polls look bad and that Bobby Black is to blame. Vice is very unpopular, Arlo says. A vote-loser. And the Democrats are claiming he was at the heart of the corruption in the Iraq contracts. They say there were kickbacks from Goldcrest and Warburton to the Carr campaign. But even under a flaky liberal like Speaker Betty Furedi, no Democrat will ever impeach President Carr, no matter what he does wrong, if they know he will be succeeded by President Black.’

I must have looked stunned at this impeachment talk. ‘Theo Carr hasn’t done something really bad, has he?’

‘It’s a joke, Alex,’ Kristina laughed, and I felt her hand gently on my arm. She paused for a moment and scowled. ‘Kind of.’

I laughed too, as much at my own inadequacies as at her humour. She poured me a fresh black coffee. I always had gossip to trade, and Kristina usually listened more than she spoke, but that morning it was like some kind of therapy for her to get it all out.

‘Luntz told me he advised the President to make sure Bobby Black goes to Scotland on your shooting trip in the run-up to the mid-terms,’ Kristina told me. ‘Says the further Vice is away from the campaign, the better. I even think Arlo wants the President to drop Bobby Black from his own re-election ticket, but that’s real tricky.’

For me this was all heady stuff. Knowing who was up and who was down at the White House was a key part of my job. I had some gossip of my own to trade.

‘Vice enjoys being thought of as the President’s Dark Side,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’ Kristina looked at me, stunned. ‘What do you mean, enjoys?’

‘Johnny Lee Ironside told me. We have a few beers from time to time. We talk.’

I had mentioned the Congressional hearings into the Iraq contracts to Johnny Lee. The Vice-President had been described in all kinds of ways, usually beginning with the prefix ‘Un-’–uncooperative, unforthcoming, unreliable, unwilling to appear before the Joint House and Senate Investigative Committee, and then–when he was subpoenaed and had no choice but to appear, he pleaded executive privilege, refusing to say on what basis the contracts had been awarded to Warburton, except that it was a ‘national security matter’. He was declared uncommunicative and unhelpful.

‘That shit makes his goddamn day,’ Johnny Lee laughed. He told me the Vice-President routinely asked his staff to search out any negative comments in newspapers that suggested he represented President Carr’s ‘Dark Side’, so he could have the best ones framed for his Ego Wall. An ‘Ego Wall’ is the wall in the private office of any Washington politician dedicated to the qualifications and citations that mean the most to the Big Political Beast–military honours, photographs showing the Big Beast shaking hands with a past president, a world leader or Hollywood movie star, plus university degrees and military citations.

‘You want to put the Boss in a good mood,’ Johnny Lee Ironside had told me, ‘tell him some pinko Democrat bedwetter like Hurd or Furedi called him a mean SOB: that’ll do it. The sun comes out all over Planet Black.’ Johnny Lee giggled like a schoolboy. ‘Ma-aaan, he Baaa-aaaad!’

Kristina looked at me, fascinated, as if I was reporting on a new species of ape from the African jungle or an alien civilization discovered on a distant planet.

‘Un-fucking-believable,’ was all she said. Then she traded one further important piece of insider gossip. She handed me a draft speech that Vice-President Black was about to deliver at the US Naval College at Annapolis, Maryland, to a class of midshipmen. I pushed my scrambled egg to one side and started to read.

‘The next stage in Spartacus,’ Kristina suggested.

‘All options remain open’, the Vice-President was scheduled to say, ‘when dealing with Iran.’ In case journalists were too stupid to get the point, he added, ‘Including military options. Neutrality on Iran’s nuclear programme is immoral. The programme itself is immoral. It has to be stopped. It is a threat to Israel, to other countries in the region, and to world peace. An Iranian regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons is a nightmare for the entire world. The administration of President Theo Carr will end the nightmare. We will do so by all necessary means.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. ‘All necessary means’ is the phrase diplomats use when they want to threaten a war. ‘We need to tone this down.’

Kristina nodded.

‘He’s getting ahead of where the President is,’ she said. ‘Vice says that unless we are prepared to at least threaten an attack, the Iranians will not take us seriously, and the Israelis will go ahead anyway, with extreme prejudice.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘The Israelis would need to fly through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace. If you didn’t want them to do so, they couldn’t.’

Kristina shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s not my point. Once Vice makes public any kind of threat against Iran, we will end up going to war. I know how he operates. He will argue that our credibility is at stake and we have to follow through. It’s like World War One–you have train timetables and you start mobilizing your soldiers and in the end you can’t stop the war even if you want to. But that’s not the worst. The Israelis are letting it be known that the bunker-busters that we supplied them cannot get the job done.’

Bunker-busters are bombs or missiles capable of causing an explosion a long way underground.

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘which is why negotiations are the only way …’

She interrupted again, very impatiently. ‘Which is why there are those within the Israeli government who are talking about Canned Sunshine.’ My jaw dropped. ‘Canned Sunshine’ is a military expression for a nuclear bomb. ‘They are calling for nuclear pre-emption.’

‘Nuclear pre-emption?’ I blurted out. ‘That’s … that’s like committing suicide because you fear dying. They couldn’t possibly drop a nuke …’ She waved me quiet.

‘Vice says Spartacus applies to states as well as to individuals, and if ever a regime needed to be crucified, it’s the Iranians. He wants to hit them after the mid-terms. Or to get the Israelis to do it.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said.

‘And if we do go in, we will call on all possible support from all our allies. Which means you, Alex.’

I didn’t feel like eating breakfast any more. I drank my coffee and left to return to the embassy, where I called Downing Street immediately on the secure line.

‘How do we feel about being sucked into war with Iran?’ I said to Andy Carnwath.

‘What the fuck do you mean, Alex?’

I explained about Canned Sunshine. For once Andy Carnwath could not think of any expletives appropriate to the information.

Later that night, around midnight, I was lying on my bed reading a book, sipping whisky and water and listening to a CD of Charlie Parker. Kristina called me on my private cellphone.

‘You’re up late,’ I said.

‘You got time to talk?’

‘Of course.’

I pushed the book I was reading to one side. It was called Sleepwalking to Hell, a recently published history of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, written by Kristina’s former lover, the University of California history professor Stephen Haddon. A liberal, I guessed, with a strong libertarian streak. Haddon argued that the transition from a sophisticated and prosperous Weimar democracy to a Nazi dictatorship was not one catastrophic leap. It was a series of little steps.

Any one of these steps might seem sensible by itself because the German people wanted to escape Bolshevism, anarchy, and economic collapse, but taken together they led decent people inexorably towards the Nazis. Haddon wrote in his preface that it could happen again. Terror produced terrified people, and terrified people made bad decisions.

‘Is that jazz?’ Kristina said.

I turned it down.

‘Charlie Parker.’

‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Just perfect.’

Kristina was on her way home. President Carr and the First Lady, Rosa Carr, had invited her to the private White House movie theatre to watch a film with the Carr family, Bobby Black and his wife Susan, Arlo Luntz, and a couple of Democratic senators that Theo Carr had decided he should get to know better. The senators were on the Armed Services Committee, and Carr was still after more money for the Pentagon budget. It was a huge mark of confidence in Kristina to be invited to share private time with the President, and she was bubbling with enthusiasm. I wasn’t really listening. I had something I had been meaning to say, and that night I said it.

‘Instead of going home, Kristina, why not come here right now. Spend the night with me.’

She giggled. Then the line went quiet.

‘You mean it, Alex?’

‘Yes, I mean it,’ I said. ‘I have meant it for months.’

NINE

The visit of Bobby Black to Scotland took so long to organize I sometimes thought it would never happen. But it did happen, almost exactly two years after he and Prime Minister Davis had their first row at Chequers and just two weeks before the US mid-term elections which, yet again, all the experts, polls, and pundits claimed were going to offer a very sharp rebuke to the Carr administration. In preparation for the shooting trip, Vice-President Black insisted that the visit be kept as private as possible, and that his entourage be as small as possible. I spent hours on the telephone with Andy Carnwath in Downing Street and Sir Hamish Martin at Buckingham Palace fixing exactly who would meet Bobby Black at which point, who would shoot grouse, when he would meet Her Majesty the Queen, when Susan Black would go off to see the horses, and when Fraser Davis would turn up. I also talked repeatedly with Lord Anstruther, who was a Junior Defence Minister in Fraser Davis’s government and whose estate was right next to the royal estate at Balmoral.

Anstruther had agreed to host the visit, though if he had realized exactly what he was in for, he would have told me to get lost. I tried to explain that when the President or Vice-President of the United States moves anywhere, it is rather like a medieval pope moving around Christendom–up to a thousand staff, journalists, hangers-on, advisers of all kinds–but, until Anstruther experienced it, I don’t think he quite understood how big a ‘small entourage’ really was going to be. In the week before the visit I had called the Prime Minister to warn him, yet again, that it must not fail.

‘We cannot afford a repeat of the row at Chequers,’ I said. ‘You and Bobby Black are fated to like one another, whether you want to or not.’

Fraser Davis was very positive. He asked me to go over the arguments he should use with Bobby Black to deflect him from a confrontation with Iran without causing a row, and the kinds of things he should say if the question of special visas for British citizens of Pakistani origin were to be raised.

‘We say it is unfair, unworkable, discriminatory and the twenty-first century equivalent of the Jim Crow laws,’ I said. Then I reminded the PM that the policy details were not significant. What was significant was the tone. The policy would come right as long as he was nice. Very nice.

‘But I’m always nice, Alex,’ Fraser Davis replied, sounding rather hurt. I could imagine his wet, pouty lip. ‘As you well know.’

‘It has taken us months to bring this off.’ I refused to be deflected. ‘We mustn’t blow it. You mustn’t blow it.’

‘Well, it is different now,’ Fraser Davis responded, brushing aside the possibility of failure. ‘It’s not as if he is just some obscure senator. He is representing the American people. I promise you, Ambassador Price, that I will represent the interests of the British people, with every courtesy. Is that good enough for you?’

It was good enough. And so one day in late October it finally happened. Bobby Black’s White House motorcade swept into Lord Anstruther’s great house of Castle Dubh in the Scottish Highlands shortly before eight in the morning for the start of the grouse shoot. Castle Dubh is a massive Victorian pile with false battlements built over Jacobean foundations. From the faux-ramparts you can easily see twenty miles over the Scottish mountains, up into the hills and down to Loch Rowallan and Rowallan village, and even across to the royal estate at Balmoral. As the cars swept into the driveway, the leaves were turning autumnal reds and golds. The air was clear and cool, the skies that morning empty of cloud and full of the sounds of songbirds. The Americans arrived to the roar of a dozen police motorbikes, nine saloon cars, two stretched limousines, plus communications vehicles, and two identical four-by-fours scrunching up on Anstruther’s gravel drive, like a gigantic metal snake uncoiling in front of us.

‘You told me a small entourage,’ Anstruther whispered to me as we stood in front of the house and watched the cars arrive.

‘This is a small entourage,’ I replied. ‘You don’t want to see the full works, believe me.’

Anstruther blinked. I think it began to dawn on him what lay ahead. The Vice-President stepped out, not from one of the limousines as you might expect but, for security reasons, from one of the bulletproof four-by-fours. Anstruther greeted him warmly and invited Bobby Black and Johnny Lee inside for a quick breakfast, while the servants fussed around the Secret Service and other members of the vice-presidential party.

‘I can’t wait to get out on the mountains,’ Bobby Black said, clapping his pudgy hands together and looking genuinely happy.

‘Me too,’ Anstruther agreed with a nod of recognition. ‘Just a quick coffee then.’

The rest of us tried to look pleased. Diplomacy, like politics, requires acting ability. Blair knew it. Clinton knew it. So did Ronald Reagan, obviously. Reagan once said that politics was just like being on the stage–you have a helluva opening, you coast a little, and then you have a helluva close. You meet people you do not like, but you act in whatever way is necessary to win them over. You meet people who despise you, and you bear their hostility with fortitude.

On that day of Bobby Black’s hunting trip, we joked and laughed as we dressed in the shooting gear handed to us by Lord Anstruther: jaggy brown and green tweeds which abraded the skin and chafed the knees. We brought our own walking boots. We looked the part as we sipped coffee and watched the American communications teams set up in one of the large Castle Dubh outhouses, Bolfracks Bothy. Our mood was upbeat. We were doing the best for our countries and we were having fun doing it.

‘My daddy used to say that a man should avoid any enterprise that requires the purchase of new clothes,’ Johnny Lee quipped as he struggled to pull on his tweeds. ‘The old man had a point.’

‘You should pass it on to Arlo Luntz,’ I said. ‘Sounds like one of his pieces of wisdom.’

‘Arlo came out with a knockout phrase the other day,’ Johnny Lee smiled. ‘He said, “Sincerity in public life is the most important political virtue. Fake that, and you got it made.” Guy’s a freaking genius, you ask me.’

In a good mood of banter and fun we shouldered our day-hike rucksacks filled with food, water, and small metal flasks of whisky, then we strode out to the front of Castle Dubh and climbed into a fleet of freshly washed Land Rovers arranged by Anstruther. Secret Service and British police teams had spent the previous forty-eight hours checking the grounds, the neighbouring glens, and the mountainside as best they could. The presence of armed protection officers was to be kept to a discreet minimum and only on the perimeter of the shoot, for fear of scaring away the whole point of the trip, the grouse themselves. In our mood of jollity we behaved as if it were a Boys’ Own adventure, on which nothing could possibly go wrong. Anstruther had winked when he handed the whisky flask to me.

‘Salvation from Speyside,’ he said.

We parked the Land Rovers at the side of a muddy track and started hiking up the mountain as the sun split through a clear blue Highland sky. It was cold, with the edge of the moon visible over the hills, like a poster from the Scottish Tourist Board, and I was nervous. The Queen, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, at least two other government ministers, staff from Number Ten, the Foreign Office, and the Office of the Vice-President were all being brought together over the next forty-eight hours in the Scottish wilderness, thanks to what Downing Street was calling Alex Price’s ‘great idea’. I wasn’t sure what would come of it, but I hoped for a footnote in the history books, if I was lucky, and a few headlines for my own Ego Wall. The Balmoral Understanding. The Aberdeenshire Entente. The Scottish Special Relationship. Something had come of it already.

In the thaw leading up to the trip, the Americans had announced that Muhammad Asif Khan, the British detainee we had all made so much of a fuss about, was to be released. The release of Khan was privately regarded as very useful by the British security service, MI5. They wanted him out of jail so they could watch him. They needed to know if he was indeed connected to what they were now convinced was a major conspiracy that included his cousins, a plot that was leading towards what Andy Carnwath told me was an imminent attack involving Heathrow Airport.

‘Imminent?’

‘Within the next month or so,’ he responded. ‘That’s what I’m told. That’s all I know.’