Power Play

‘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.