“Your Prime Minister virtually threatened to nuke the Soviets if things went badly in Iraq,” Fulbright stated unhappily.
“Yes,” Lord Franks agreed. “That is what Mrs Thatcher said.”
“That’s madness!”
“What? Threatening nuclear war?” The Ambassador posed the questions rhetorically, wearily. “Or waging it without warning anybody first, Mr Secretary?”
Peter Christopher winced.
Then to his astonishment J. William Fulbright, the man who had inherited the poisoned chalice of America’s disastrous post-October War foreign policy after the Battle of Washington in December last year, smiled. He actually smiled.
“That’s below the belt, Oliver.”
“I apologise,” Lord Franks returned graciously. “I’m not sure President Kennedy took the Prime Minister seriously when she spoke about drawing lines in the sand. When she flies over in a few days time she plans to re-iterate exactly what she means…”
“This is the wrong time for Mrs Thatcher to come over…”
“Fine,” the Ambassador retorted. “The Prime Minister will make a personal visit. Perhaps, she’ll bring over the twins. For a short holiday, as it were. Obviously, while she is over here it would be rude if she didn’t make herself available to talk to the networks…”
“Dammit, Oliver! A head of state can’t come to another country and start playing politics behind a President’s back. You wouldn’t countenance the idea of the President meeting the Irish Government delegation in Oxford last month…”
“That was because their surrogates keep trying to murder the Queen, Bill,” Lord Franks reminded his guest. His tone was briefly that of a man who really did not believe that he was actually having to tell the US Secretary of State any of this. “In any event Mrs Thatcher will come to America. Unless you shoot down her aircraft, that is.”
Fulbright sighed.
“Your Prime Minister told the Russians that there would be ‘consequences’ if they failed to prove — God knows how they are going to do that — that they aren’t about to go nuclear again in Iran or Iraq?”
Lord Franks did not respond to this because he did not think he had been asked a serious question. It seemed to him that the Secretary of State had simply restated Margaret Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons of the previous day. He remained silent.
“What consequences?” Fulbright pressed.
“Oh, consequences,” the Ambassador murmured. “Well, I think at the last count we had thirty or forty operational V-Bombers left. In the event of the use of nuclear weapons against our forces or our allies in the Middle East I should imagine we would drop every bomb we could lay our hands on,” he went on resignedly, “on the, er, rump of what is left of the Soviet Union.”
Chapter 35
The Prime Minister and her Secretaries of State for Defence, Foreign Affairs and Supply and Transportation had walked over from Christ Church Cathedral where they had attended the morning service. Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, the Chief of the Defence Staff had been driven straight to the meeting on the first floor of Corpus Christie College from Brize Norton, having flown back from Abadan in the small hours.
Upon the arrival of the Prime Minister the earlier attendees fell silent and rose to their feet. Margaret Thatcher acknowledged her Minister for National Security, the Director General of Security and the woman at his side with a terse nod.
“Let’s get down to business,” she demanded, settling at the head of the table which dominated the modestly proportioned former lecture room. To her front some twenty feet away a curtain had been drawn across the blackboard. Four days ago she had come within a dozen votes of being ousted from the premiership; had that happened the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom might have fallen, and an election of some kind would have had to have been called. Not for the first time in the last few weeks she suspected she understood something of what must have gone through Winston Churchill’s mind in the darkest days of the Second World War; after Dunkirk, the fall of Singapore or Tobruk, or the news of yet another Atlantic convoy decimated by U-boats. However, like her he too had been reading the innermost conversations of the enemy High Command, he too had known of his enemy’s weaknesses, that he was not alone in confronting seemingly impossible dilemmas and that all was not yet lost. Like her he had known that to speak of such things publicly, specifically in his own defence was impossible, and that some things were so secret that they could never, ever be confessed.
Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister several months before her people had trusted her with Churchill’s secrets; and only then had she learned the unwritten, real history of Winston Churchill’s eventually triumphant crusade against the Nazis. Thus, on Wednesday afternoon she had been forced to sit and take her medicine, compelled to be the object of the House of Commons’ anger and mistrust, contempt and in some cases, undiluted scorn, totally unable to state in her own defence the one thing that would have instantly silenced nine-tenths of her detractors.
Jericho was still in play.
While the Red Navy had changed its codes at the end of April the Red Army, Air Force and the Political Bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Defence, which was now known to operate out of a bunker complex several miles east of Chelyabinsk, were still using the ‘J416 Variant 03’ code which had come into use as long ago as 16th January. This and the fact that an increasingly large number — literally scores — of formations in Iraq and Iran were routinely transmitting, and expecting to receive in return only plain text communications, meant that on some days the code breakers at the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham were sometimes reading messages before, or at around the same time as Soviet commanders in the field.
The only real problem with Jericho was that there was so much of it. The code breakers were overwhelmed by the sheer volume, unable to prioritise what was gold dust and what was housekeeping as literally thousands of encrypted intercepts piled up waiting to be ‘looked at’. GCHQ at Cheltenham had been drowned in paperwork, neglected and run down after the October War, and it had been in no condition to suddenly up its game. Maddeningly, even though they were criminally short-staffed and incapable of managing the deluge of intercepts — thus far GCHQ had decoded significantly less than one percent of the traffic intercepted by listening stations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean — the code breakers were serving up a daily stream of critical intelligence jewels.
Notwithstanding the difficulties, on the basis of traffic analysis alone Cheltenham had built up a comprehensive table of organisation for, established the dispositions of, and calculated the approximate fighting strength of Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s Army Group South. Each day as Red Army spearheads penetrated deeper into Iraq the picture was updated, often down to the level of how many serviceable T-62 main battle tanks a given unit had and whether it had sufficient fuel in hand to continue motoring the next day.
The leading echelons of the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army and the 3rd Caucasus Tank Army had left half their tanks and sixty percent of their supporting vehicles in the mountains of Iran or parked, broken down alongside the roads west, east and south of Sulaymaniyah. The Red Army’s logistics system had broken down to such an extent that the entire Soviet invasion had briefly stalled with the 10th Guards Tank Division sitting, completely isolated and cut off from the rest of the invasion force, in the ruins of Jalawla a hundred miles north-north-east of Baghdad, and 3rd Siberian Mechanised Division investing the city of Kirkuk. Given that there were known to be Iraqi forces present in brigade, possibly divisional strength on the right flank of the chaotic Soviet line of advance around Erbil, Army Group South’s position ought to have been if not untenable, then precarious. That the Red Army could get away with, as the Chief of the Defence Staff guffawed ‘such a dog’s breakfast of an advance’ in spite of its ‘comical logistical situation’ was solely down to the ‘disgraceful’ inability of the Iraqi Army to ‘get its act together’.