The Envoy (5 page)

A lot of Kit’s day-to-day work was dealing with documents that had been summarised for him by his junior staff. Kit underlined key sections and exclamation-pointed the margins next to
anything
that needed following up. Anything stupid or useless was crossed out or scribbled over with DRIVEL, DROSS or CACA COMPLETA. But he always made clear and perceptive notes on the wide margins that he demanded. Kit enjoyed the work –
especially
when his margin comments turned into memos and the memos finally wormed their way into US foreign policy. It was creative – like directing an epic film or designing a town.

At half past ten Kit had an appointment with the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Welsh Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State. Both men were his bosses – and, arguably, two of the most powerful men in the world. Who was more powerful? Khrushchev? Nehru? Mao? Certainly not Eisenhower – he only did what the Dulleses told him to do. Kit knocked on the big oak-panelled door of the Ambassador’s office and waited. He knew the Ambassador wouldn’t be there. He was meeting captains of industry in Birmingham. The
commercial
attaché had drafted a speech for him and the Ambassador had surreptitiously come to Kit asking him to ‘translate it into English’. Kit knocked again louder and John Foster bellowed, ‘Come in.’

The brothers were sitting at a big oak table,
American
oak, an antique bequeathed from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. There were no aides, no secretaries, no briefing folders – just a jug of ice water and glasses. No nonsense. At the Foreign and
Commonwealth
Office, you sink into plump armchairs while the Foreign Secretary fills your cup from an Echinus Demotter tea service and offers Fortnum and Mason shortbread from a Georgian silver salver. But this was the
US
foreign policy machine: hard polished oak and ice water.

‘Good morning, Secretary Dulles,’ Kit hesitated as he
considered
protocol, then turned to the CIA brother and said, ‘Good morning, Allen.’

Neither man rose for a handshake. Kit hadn’t expected them to: handshakes and bear hugs were for public occasions, like
airport
arrivals, when the cameras were clicking. Allen spoke first, ‘Nice to see you, Kit.’

Kit sat down and propped his briefing folder on the floor against a chair leg; he didn’t want to defile the empty expanse of gleaming table. He looked at Foster and was surprised by how much he had aged. He knew that he was the older brother by five or six years, but the age difference now seemed ten or
fifteen
. Allen was fiddling with his pipe: the pipe and his moustache made him look distinguished in a British academic sort of way. The press called him ‘the gentleman spy’ and he liked to live up to the persona. Allen knew he looked better in profile, and tended to pose that way for photos. But when he looked straight at you, with those cold eyes magnified by those frameless glasses, he looked exactly like the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. For an eerie moment, the resemblance was so stunning that Kit half thought that Foster was playing an elaborate practical joke and had substituted his Russian counterpart in his brother’s place. But as soon as Allen Dulles spoke, he turned American again. ‘We were just talking about your dad. He was the most solid of the Georgetown gang and we miss his counsel greatly.’

If you miss him so much, thought Kit, why didn’t you send a wreath? No body had been recovered, but there had been a big requiem mass at the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore. The truth, Kit knew, was that his father had become a
marginalised
figure, a wilderness voice spouting soft-hearted views about détente and disarmament. Kit felt a flush of paranoia. Was the reference to his dad an accusation? Did Allen Dulles think he was sprouting inherited dove feathers? Kit put on a smile that carrieda hint of irony, of betrayal. ‘We miss him too.’

‘How’s your mother getting on? Clover says she’s taken up painting again.’

‘She’s fine. She says she’d like to spend six months a year in France – she loves painting the rivers of Charente and she’s researching a book on Berthe Morisot.’ Kit immediately felt like an ass for mentioning his mother’s book: neither of the Dulleses would have heard of the female French impressionist. Kit feared he was coming across as a pantywaist.

The younger brother finally managed to light his pipe. ‘You know, Kit,’ said Allen, getting down to business, ‘we’re worried about Downing Street.’

Kit looked at Foster for confirmation. ‘You mean Eden?’

The Secretary of State nodded and the younger brother answered, ‘Not just him, but mostly him. Your latest reports highlight concerns about the Prime Minister’s health. Anything new?’

‘Yes, I finally managed to access Eden’s medical records.’ By ‘access’, Kit meant a break-in to photograph documents. Once again he had used Stanley, the same operative who did the Ministry of Supply job. Stanley, an artful South Londoner in his late fifties, was an unfathomable well of talent: electrician,
safe-cracker
, cat burglar, spotter of ringed gee-gees and loving
grandfather
. He also had the most trustworthy face Kit had ever seen. The private clinic, where the Prime Minister’s medical records were filed, was a Stanley masterpiece. He broke into the clinic the night before and faulted the electrical system. Before parting, he left a message on the receptionist’s desk in perfect handwriting titled ‘Re: Electrical fault’ and asking her to ring his own
telephone
number. The next morning the receptionist assumed the message was from a colleague and rang the number. By the end of the working day, Stanley hadn’t quite finished the ring main
circuit
, but was more than happy to stay on to get it done. They left him a set of keys to lock up. As soon as the staff had left, Stanley cracked the safe containing confidential patient information and started snapping away with the 8x11mm Minox camera.

‘Well,’ said Foster, ‘are you going to enlighten us?’

‘It seems,’ said Kit, ‘that the original 1953 operation was botched even worse than we had thought. Sure, a cholecystectomy isn’t the sort of thing you do for a merit badge in first aid, but a
competent
surgeon should have managed …’

Foster looked puzzled. ‘What is a cholecsyt …?’

‘Removal of the gall bladder,’ said Allen, winking at Kit.

‘It ought,’ said Kit, ‘to have been a fairly routine operation, but the knife slipped and Eden’s bile duct was severed. This is a big mistake. The duct drains bile and other waste material from the liver directly to the small intestine. If the bile duct isn’t connected up, it leaks poison into the system and eventually kills the patient. So a couple of weeks later, there was a second operation to ligate the duct and save Eden’s life. But this was just a temporary
solution
because it meant the poisons would backlog in the liver
causing
malignant jaundice, acute atrophy of the liver and death.’

‘So why,’ said Foster, ‘is Eden still counted among the living?’

‘I don’t know. You would have to ask the FBI.’

‘What do you mean?’ Foster was genuinely perplexed, but his brother kept winking at Kit.

‘There was a third operation that took place in June ’53 in Boston, the one in Massachusetts. The surgeon was Dr Richard Cattell, a world renowned repairer of biliary ducts. As you know, sir, the CIA are not authorised to carry out covert operations in the United States. If you want to know the outcome of Eden’s Boston op, you’ll need to ask the FBI to carry out a black bag job on Cattell’s clinic. I know the Feds can do this, but they need written permission from the Attorney General.’ Kit was teasing. Everyone knew that interagency rivalry between Hoover’s FBI and the CIA was so poisonous that such cooperation was unthinkable.

‘Calling on your impressive medical knowledge,’ said Allen, ‘what do you think happened?’

Kit smiled. ‘I suppose Cattell repaired Eden’s bile duct by
carrying
out an end-to-side hepaticojejunostomy using a 16-F
rubber
Y-tube as a stent.’

‘Did you just make that up?’

‘No, I telephoned my sister – she’s a medic and knows about Cattell’s work.’

Allen let out a sigh and turned to his brother. ‘Isn’t it typical, Foster? The Brits whinge about us, but when they make a botch of something it’s the American cousin who has to repair the
damage
, be it on the operating table or the battlefield.’

Kit looked out the window over the London skyline. There were still many empty gaps: demolished bomb sites waiting to be rebuilt. The words of Allen Dulles, and his pompous arrogance, made Kit want to scream abuse at his bosses.

‘What really concerns us,’ said Foster, ‘and the President has mentioned it too, is Prime Minister Eden’s state of mind. Is he mentally and emotionally fit for the job?’

‘That’s a good question. According to his medication records, the Prime Minister regularly takes dextroamphetamines. This is a stimulant that produces a feeling of energy and confidence. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to do his job. Cattell’s operation saved Eden’s life, but he never made a full recovery.’

Foster cut straight to the point. ‘Has the Prime Minister ever seen a psychiatrist?’

‘No, definitely not. But whether or not he
should
see a
psychiatrist
is a different question.’ Kit was immediately ashamed of his cheap wisecrack. Anthony Eden had lost two brothers in the First World War and a son in the Second. He himself had won the Military Cross in 1916 for saving the life of a wounded
sergeant
in no-man’s-land. Neither of the Dulles brothers had ever heard a shot fired in anger. As for Eisenhower, the President may have heard angry shots but only from a distance and from the safety of a rear-echelon headquarters. The Dulleses might have scorned Eden’s foreign policy, but neither brother spoke a
foreign
language. Sure, Allen could order a meal in French and a schnapps in German, but Eden was fluent in both languages as well as Persian. The Prime Minister could also tell stories and swap proverbs in Arabic – and was confident enough in Russian to converse over a dinner table.

‘If,’ said Foster, ‘the Prime Minister had to be replaced, whom would you recommend?’

Kit smiled wanly. The principle that diplomatic missions were to abstain from interfering in the internal affairs of the host nation was Geneva Convention bullshit. ‘Well, there are only two horses in the race: Butler and Macmillan. And Macmillan, I am sure, would be the one more conducive to US interests.’

Foster was nodding approval. ‘And,’ said Allen, ‘he has an American mother.’ And Kit was pleased too. The most important part of his job was telling his bosses what they wanted to hear.

‘Tell us more about Eden,’ said Foster, leaning forward. For the first time, Kit was rocked by a whiff of stench from the Secretary of State’s appalling bad breath. Was he a ghoul that ate corpses for breakfast?

‘Sometimes, he gets pretty weird in cabinet.’

‘Explicate.’

‘Tears, tantrums, paranoid outbursts about his ministers
ganging
up against him. He also has an annoying habit of making late night phone calls. Eden is an inveterate worrier.’

‘How do you know these things?’

Kit took a notebook out of his jacket pocket, wrote down the name of a minister he had compromised in a honey trap and passed it to the Secretary of State. The security situation was a sensitive one. But Kit wasn’t worried about a British or Russian bug. The FBI carried out anti-bugging security measures on a routine basis with the best expertise and technology in the world. The problem was the FBI itself: the Bureau almost certainly left behind their
own
listening devices. Therefore, it was perfectly all right to discuss secrets and sensitive issues you didn’t mind
sharing
with the FBI – but the identity of Kit’s horny minister with strange preferences was not one of them.

Allen smiled when he saw the name on the note, then said, ‘Can we move on to the press issue? There doesn’t seem to have been much progress.’

‘Well, sir …’

‘We’re not very happy, Kit.’ The Secretary of State pulled a newspaper cutting from his jacket pocket and pushed it across the table. ‘We don’t want any more of this.’

Kit looked at the clipping. It was a front-page editorial about nuclear policy from Britain’s best-selling tabloid. Each question was starkly highlighted:
ARE WE TO SIT PASSIVELY WHILE GRAVE DECISIONS ARE TAKEN IN WASHINGTON? ARE WE TO WAIT FOR OUR FOREIGN POLICY TO COME TO US FROM ACROSS THE ATLANTIC? WHOSE FINGER DO WE WANT GUARDING OUR TRIGGER? AT LEAST LET IT BE
B
RITAIN’S OWN FINGER
.

‘What are we going to do about it?’ The Secretary of State was still speaking. ‘We’re not asking you to subvert a British
newspaper
– we merely want the American point of view to be fairly represented.’

‘The British press,’ said Kit, ‘is not an easy culture to influence.’ He knew he couldn’t say more: he could see Foster had gone into high-minded Methodist preacher mode. It would be a waste of time telling him how you could pop down to the King and Keys and buy any hack for a double whisky, but two hours later they write the opposite of what you want. They don’t understand the principles of bribery. It was different in South America: you could buy a newspaper and the print works for the cost of a
second-hand
Ford.