McGoverning

Need a second for Gary Hart as Best Character, if anyone's interested. Honestly it was really hard to choose! Colson gave me chills, but that's like when they gave Judi Dench an Oscar for ten minutes of screen time in Shakespeare in Love. Phil Hart's been great, and I've loved learning about Jane Briggs. Of course Dick and George are both amazingly evocatively written. But there's something about the Gary Hart and the cranky-Josh-Lyman-of-it-all...

I also reckon we can find a best quote in the best-written TL of the year, what do you say, fellow readers?

It's very kind of you to think any of them are Best Character material! I could see the case for Hart on the Josh Lyman level (although I like Josh better, Josh understands that he has neuroses where much of Hart Gary's public persona is an act of denying that fact) and it's very cool. If anyone has thoughts of other folk who also qualify feel free to share those too. Yeah, Jane Briggs Hart is one of my very favorites, a remarkable person and a magnificent soul, actually both of the Hart Phils are the bee's knees. George himself, too - the deeper I have dug in creating this little world, the more I've learned that George and I have apparently spent much of my life never quite meeting up but moving towards each other. A kindred spirit it turns out, in a number of ways. Yeah Tex Colson is always fun to write, with those big glasses on him he's kind of our Smeagol/Gollum for the proceedings. And my man-crush on S A R G E is well documented. We've just barely seen him some but as time goes on I expect we'll see more of Doug Coulter who's also a personal fave from my OTL historical research. Given how well you (@Expat) write mid-level operators, who are some of my favorite characters also, Hart Gary makes total sense.

“People died, George”
-Phillip Hart

From Chapter 3. Gives me goosebumps.

I will confess that one means a lot to me too. At that point I was writing a lot of material that I'd plotted out very neatly. Then I got into that scene where the X-File bomb has just gone off and everyone's trying to reckon with it. And - all y'all writers out there know these moments - Phil Hart just came to me and told me what was going on with him, what he was going to think and do and say. That didn't come from me mapping out and parsing and tooling around in people's behavior patterns to come up with an outcome. I had not beforehand been sure Phil Hart would say anything in that scene. Then he came to me, as your characters sometimes do, and revealed what he thought and said, and became the fulcrum of that whole scene. Some of the absolute best fun in the writing game is when your characters are real enough that they tell you what's next, rather than you (me) being all stagey about it.
 
It's very kind of you to think any of them are Best Character material! I could see the case for Hart on the Josh Lyman level (although I like Josh better, Josh understands that he has neuroses where much of Hart Gary's public persona is an act of denying that fact) and it's very cool. If anyone has thoughts of other folk who also qualify feel free to share those too. Yeah, Jane Briggs Hart is one of my very favorites, a remarkable person and a magnificent soul, actually both of the Hart Phils are the bee's knees. George himself, too - the deeper I have dug in creating this little world, the more I've learned that George and I have apparently spent much of my life never quite meeting up but moving towards each other. A kindred spirit it turns out, in a number of ways. Yeah Tex Colson is always fun to write, with those big glasses on him he's kind of our Smeagol/Gollum for the proceedings. And my man-crush on S A R G E is well documented. We've just barely seen him some but as time goes on I expect we'll see more of Doug Coulter who's also a personal fave from my OTL historical research. Given how well you (@Expat) write mid-level operators, who are some of my favorite characters also, Hart Gary makes total sense.



I will confess that one means a lot to me too. At that point I was writing a lot of material that I'd plotted out very neatly. Then I got into that scene where the X-File bomb has just gone off and everyone's trying to reckon with it. And - all y'all writers out there know these moments - Phil Hart just came to me and told me what was going on with him, what he was going to think and do and say. That didn't come from me mapping out and parsing and tooling around in people's behavior patterns to come up with an outcome. I had not beforehand been sure Phil Hart would say anything in that scene. Then he came to me, as your characters sometimes do, and revealed what he thought and said, and became the fulcrum of that whole scene. Some of the absolute best fun in the writing game is when your characters are real enough that they tell you what's next, rather than you (me) being all stagey about it.
I nominated it :) let’s hope it gets the ‘Dove!
 
My personal favorite line from this whole shebang is probably:

Three pages of onion paper and a National Security staffer’s haunted soul. Operation ACE.

But I suppose that's less a quote than just a descriptor. It still gives me some chills, though.
 
My personal favorite line from this whole shebang is probably:

Yes said:
Three pages of onion paper and a National Security staffer’s haunted soul. Operation ACE.

But I suppose that's less a quote than just a descriptor. It still gives me some chills, though.

Christ, no kidding. As I told him in PM, he and Macragge are the only two writers I've ever seen on here that can just write that stream of consciousness stuff with such facility that you have real, actual dread in your veins waiting to see if and how bad they drop the hammer. It's something else.
 

Bulldoggus

Banned
I assume from the House results and a lack of an Independent victory that darling Louise won up in Massachusetts? :p

Mizz Loueez does indeed make it for the moment unfortunately. All politics is local; in the three-way ruck of the presidential more latent Wallace voters come out to the polls in her district and that helps put her over, that and the fact McGovern skipped campaigning for the independent slate unlike, say, how he handled the Mineworkers ITTL.
2RtP2BO
 
[Shuffles in]

Hi.

[Fidgets]

So. I might have, um, sort of created a TV Tropes page for this timeline. Please feel free to add, alter, correct and do what thou will.

Where we're going, we don't need memes ... :cool:

But seriously: thank you very much. I'm rather fond of that place and there are some legendarily good entries for AH.com TLs over there. That's quite distinguished company and I'm grateful and actually, really kinda humbled by that level of hard work. Wow.
 
Where we're going, we don't need memes ... :cool:

You're telling me you built a timeline...out of a McGovern victory?!

But seriously: thank you very much. I'm rather fond of that place and there are some legendarily good entries for AH.com TLs over there. That's quite distinguished company and I'm grateful and actually, really kinda humbled by that level of hard work. Wow.

Happy to do it! TBH I'm kind of surprised no one got there before me.
 
You're telling me you built a timeline...out of a McGovern victory?!

"Well, I figured for a timeline, you oughta do it with some style..."

On a separate Trope, I'm half interested, half concerned whether there's a way to classify wheelchair-bound George Wallace as Draco in Leather Pants...
 
"Well, I figured for a timeline, you oughta do it with some style..."

On a separate Trope, I'm half interested, half concerned whether there's a way to classify wheelchair-bound George Wallace as Draco in Leather Pants...

Well he IS super dreamy...

Gary Sinise took a stab at this in the 90s but I somehow doubt it stands up today. No, more likely he's a Mr. Potter

Mrpotter.jpg
 

John Farson

Banned
It occurred to me that January 1974 is approaching in the TL, and I don't see why this event from OTL would be butterflied away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Paracel_Islands

But the foreign policy of the McGovern Administration TTL, differing from that of the Nixon Administration, may have wider effects re: this particular crisis. Also of note is that the North Vietnamese OTL did not congratulate their ally at all for their victory, and they ultimately inherited S. Vietnam's quarrel with the PRC over the islands.
 
It occurred to me that January 1974 is approaching in the TL, and I don't see why this event from OTL would be butterflied away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Paracel_Islands

But the foreign policy of the McGovern Administration TTL, differing from that of the Nixon Administration, may have wider effects re: this particular crisis. Also of note is that the North Vietnamese OTL did not congratulate their ally at all for their victory, and they ultimately inherited S. Vietnam's quarrel with the PRC over the islands.

Nice catch! We won't get to that sort of thing just yet but what I would say is: what you've identified? Watch this space.
 
Chapter 11
What Price Peace

There is an Arabic proverb which says that, “peace comes from
understanding, not agreement.”


- King Hussein

The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.

- Anwar Sadat

Put three Zionists in a room and they will form four political parties.

- Levi Eshkol
No one expected him. That had always been one of the secrets of his success. A sharecropper’s son, a GI Bill academic, a merit recruit to Harvard Business School who charmed the tendentious brahmin tolerance of its elders, a Fulbright scholar shipped off to collaborate with other brown-skinned folk (India, in his case) on the economics of the post-colonial developing world. A published academic, a business Ph.D. from the Louisiana parishes where far enough from the big towns his kindred still died by the rope, an ambitious bootstrapper, the Department of Commerce’s point man on desegregating interstate commerce under Kennedy. The dean of economic studies of black American enterprise, the stores and firms and banks and corporations that the children and grandchildren of slaves had built because to have anything they would need to take it themselves. The first Afro-American member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Neither his wits nor his drive, his eye for clarity nor his cool persistence, aware each moment that he could never be less than better, was ever foreseen.

Now here he stood. In a grand old hotel ballroom off the Avenida Abraham Lincoln in Caracas, at the lectern in front of the central bankers of the Americas. Andrew F. Brimmer, the United States’ newest Chairman of the Federal Reserve. When the axe fell on old Arthur Burns — Ken Galbraith had wanted him gone before the last votes were counted in Ohio, had fumed and planned and emphasized for a year every time he had President McGovern’s company alone in the Oval Office, calling Burns’ firehose of liquidity loosed on behalf of the Nixon presidency the most disastrous glut of easy money in half a century — it was the new, economically embattled administration’s opportunity to choose the path ahead and they neither blinked nor hesitated. When the two men’s paths crossed in Boston while the Levant still bled in October, Galbraith had asked Brimmer to an afternoon coffee. There the Treasury Secretary stretched out his fir-tree limbs and said, like a discussion about where to summer in Maine or Nova Scotia, that Burns would be gone by the end of the week and the President himself wanted Brimmer in the job. One of nature’s empirical thinkers, Brimmer listened calmly and asked politely whether Senator Sparkman would make any trouble in Senate Banking. Galbraith shook his head, insouciant: Bennett Johnston’s going to walk you through just to show how open-minded he is about all the proud sons of Louisiana. All right then, said Andrew Brimmer.

It had been all work from there. Everything he’d learned to do, his calm relentless practicality, every bit of his ethic that of course you worked it all the way through because a black man who’d shown he had brains could never do otherwise — all of it was needed. To his credit — not for moral but for policy reasons — Galbraith had made Brimmer a constant companion since the embargo struck. Along with the Treasury wise men, along with the foreign emissaries who were in and out of Galbraith’s Cambridge home, those masters of the public fiscs in Britain, France, West Germany, Japan, there too was the middling height and neat round-framed glasses of Andrew Brimmer. He never needed to stand out, beyond the evidence of the skin he’d put into this particular game. Getting it right outweighed impressions. And now he had been given the chance to express that, to nations that swam in oceans of oil and the money it conjured, and nations that feared not just oil but steel and cloth and bread were past their reach.

“Since last October, all of us have come to realize — in both our personal and official lives — the way in which a reliable and economical supply of petroleum has become vital to our well-being. The history of this period — the imposition of supply cutbacks and embargoes, the rationing of petroleum in the United States, the enormous escalation of prices, the organization of many ad hoc mechanisms first for comprehending and then for managing the fiscal and financial consequences of price escalation — is widely-known, I will not describe it again. Nor,” he paused a beat for effect, “do I wish to discuss the rights or wrongs of what has happened. Instead, I want to explore the economic and financial implications of the situation as we find it today, as it is likely to develop in the period ahead, and as we begin to take concrete steps to reckon with the forms and flows of change unleashed by these circumstances.

“As I do so, I want to outline for you the measures we will take to master those changes, and establish systematic, reliable new mechanisms to promote broad and balanced investments among the producing nations that have benefited in dramatic terms from these changes; to secure functional and productive foreign-exchange flows among the major Western consumers,;and provide to developing consumer nations the means to sustain imports at levels necessary for their well being and manage indebtedness driven both by the cost-push of energy prices and loans from central banking resources abroad.”

Brimmer shuffled his papers a moment to create another pause. This was why they’d shown up to hear him; time to give them the news. He carried on.

“I want then to discuss four new phenomena in international banking and currency markets that have arisen from the current crisis. The first is the work of the so-called Cambridge Group of the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and West Germany,” named, he thought to himself, for budging the relevant masters of their treasuries into the living room of Ken Galbraith’s Harvard-adjacent home. “Through some months of talks they have produced a coordinated regime of standards for taxation, pricing and wage controls, inflation targeting in specific lending markets, and supportive buying in the Euro-market currency exchanges. My second topic will be demand management between the Cambridge Group and related nations that have indicated a willingness to respond to market-signaling from the Group through its combination of national-level petroleum rationing and coordinated development of national petroleum reserves. The third topic is the new Petrodollar Clearing Exchange, to be coordinated between the International Monetary Fund and the banking systems of Cambridge Group nations, notably the United States, United Kingdom, and West Germany. The fourth, and most central to the concerns of many attendees of this conference, is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s new Petrodollar Sovereign Lending Facility, that will act to coordinate both supportive and commercial lending on a state to state basis between producers and at-risk developing countries, conducted in local currencies.”

Brimmer looked up from his notes and smiled politely at his audience. No one had expected him, but they would surely get to know him now.


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Everyone said they used to send the prisoners out here to count the trees, he reflected, but the only trees in these parts were faint suggestions far away. Mostly it was bog, peat, muddy tundra, rattletrap pipes, and sad dilapidated pump stations that looked like they’d seen better days when Stalin roamed the Kremlin. God alone or the pure Socialist Man otherwise knew what the real safety conditions were. The brutal blanket of frigid damp lay everywhere, even in the air you breathed. The sky had no character: grey only, the same grey, everywhere. No hope of difference unless Grandfather Winter smothered it all in a pelt of white and roughnecks on the pumps lost fingers to the stabbing, icy wetness. What a fucking mess.

And now, it was all his. His because the big men of the Politburo said so, after they sat down under the eaves of the United States Embassy with that bluff grey Texan Strauss, who looked like a good apparatchik himself when dressed up in a fur-lined camel hair coat. At first the leaders of state security — well, and Suslov, but Lenin’s vicar on earth had a suspicious nature — couldn’t decide if the American president was naive or if this were some long con, a position on the chessboard that would only manifest its purpose six or seven moves later. Leonid brushed that all aside, as he’d sloughed off “collective leadership” from his sheer political bulk. I know this McGovern, he said. On the terms of who he is, and what he means to do, I trust him. Where our interests align we might as well have a little peace, and make a little money, yes?

So it was the whole enterprise ended up in Comrade Kirilenko’s lap. Andrei Kirilenko, the doughty, slab-faced, bespectacled, not-quite-official boss of economic management and reform, was a practical man. A trained locksmith in his youth as the old empire of the Tsars bled its way into the people’s state, Kirilenko liked to tinker. He brimmed both with ideas and a tidy mind for bureaucratic supervision. Each quality irritated Brezhnev more than the Party’s boss could say although half a bottle in he surely tried, from time to time. Now, though, Brezhnev had been handed another golden opportunity by the Americans. It was first a chance to demonstrate again that he knew how to use the new and more vigorous detente since Nixon’s fall to personal and national advantage. Second, it would give that prim, agitated fucker Kirilenko something useful to do. So thought Brezhnev, a short-termist to his fingertips. Andrei Kirilenko on the other hand let the file land on his desk and held it close because it would be his shield, to fend off whatever hack commissars perched on Kirilenko’s shoulder to keep Kirilenko from dominating both the Russian Federation’s party machinery and the economic levers of state activity. Unlike the voluble, often pickled, boyar at the top of the system Kirilenko knew how not to waste a good crisis.

Which is why Comrade Kirilenko saw this place as a reward, he thought to himself. You had to start somewhere. The manager had shown up at last, feigning proletarian in overalls that had not a lick of grease on them, grey-cheeked from many chainsmoked decades, narrow of brow and ready to treat one word crosswise with this lazy, broken fiefdom as a heresy against Engels at the least, if not Marx himself. The overalls that didn’t fit quite right and in them the manager fidgeted; with a kulturny smile he sat in the manager’s own chair and steepled his fingers.

“It won’t do,” he said.

The manager let out a skeptical, upwards grunt. He went on. “It won’t. Do. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has mastery, under its own Siberian soil, of one of the greatest resources known to mankind. The life blood of proletarian industry. An invaluable source of foreign currency to stabilize the aggressive transition towards True Communism. The political leverage to put the feudalist regimes of Arabia and the Western capitalists addicted to their product in their place.” No mention here, of course, that the Americans wanted Soviet oil on the market now, rather badly, as one of the best ways to spook Riyadh into swinging the taps wide open again.

“What do we find instead, here in this wonderland of Marxist-Leninist plenty?” Now he was just showing off, but inside the system you always wanted to overbid your bona fides to keep the help in place. “We find industrial processes that are antique. Antique. Safety standards that were poor in Stalin’s day and left practically to rot now that we need more oil out of this ground than ever. Rusted machinery. Bogs of sloughed-off crude poisoning the peat and falsified production records passed on to the oblast. It won’t do.

“New things are coming. New physical plant. New staff.” Here he let his eyebrows shrug just a flutter, leaving the manager’s fate in the winds of chance. “New quotas. New demands. This rusted-out hulk of an industry has become Moscow’s greatest economic priority. More than that, it is the place where Comrade Kirilenko will cement his legacy as one of the greatest heroes of socialist labor. I’m as good a scientific atheist as the next man but you should, perhaps, think of Comrade Kirilenko after the fashion of God the Father. In which case I,” he loosed his fingers and held his hands up open to see, “am simply his devoted patriarch among mortal men. This is sacred work, then; soused roughnecks and thirty-year old seals on the nation’s pipelines and half the light crude in the muck is … blasphemous, in a way.”

Nikolai Ryzhkov stood up and smiled again. He’d made his point already; inside every Russian was a good muzhik who understood that God Himself would fuck you right into the ground if you crossed the local priest. Ryzhkov looked out the grimy office windows at little licks of flame here and there on the horizon.

“The flames out there — gas, yes?” The manager nodded. “Natural gas, in abundance. You burn it off, because not a man in Siberia has the wit to do something more useful with it.

“Has anyone thought of selling it?”


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Neither would do, said Yigal Allon. How so? asked the bosses, the scrum of newspaper owners and union bosses and bankers and elder kibbutzim who were the real powers of the Alignment coalition, latest incarnation of Israel’s social-democratic labor movement that had run the nation since independence. How so, they said again, and where does that leave us?

Allon, the craggy fireplug with a handsome boxer’s face, famed general of the War of Independence and one of Israel’s founding fathers, not just the bridesmaid of Cabinet politics but as deputy prime minister its maid of honor — despite nineteen sweet days ad interim after Levi Eshkol passed, Allon had been sandbagged with cruel vigor by Ben-Gurion himself, then handed the bitter herbs of the elder statesman by Golda Meir — hefted himself up in a sagging chair amid the close swelter of his Knesset office. Comfortable in their own sweat the bosses leaned in too. This was not the story they had told themselves for years, sure, but it was where they were. And what did Yigal propose to do about it? Sure he was a lion of Israel, a mensch, a better man in the Cabinet there wasn’t, but what business did he have complicating their lives?

They have finally done it, Allon said. We’ve let this go on for years, even expecting the outcome, and now, when we are at our weak ebb, they have the guns to each other’s heads and where does that leave us? Allon’s jet-dark eyes flashed, arms and hands gestured inwards like a respectable shopper rooked by a street vendor. He went on.

Years we’ve dealt with this, Allon said. On one hand Rabin the golden boy — my boy, I brought him up in the struggle, paved his path — the true heir of the Old Man, the one Paul Newman played in the movie version. On the other Peres the master diplomat, master of the Cabinet table too, father of Israel’s atom bomb that was Ben-Gurion’s true posterity. Both gifted, star-crossed, destined to lead, born and bred to hate each other. Not just hate: to distrust each other, most of all to envy each other. The bluff Rabin, clumsy with words and sentiment, felt keenly the lack of Peres’ francophile charm. Peres, the face of Israel to its military suppliers, midwife of the nukes, had never worn the uniform and craved Rabin’s rugged sabra credibility. Driven to compensate for their own weaknesses, they had built the great factions around themselves alone and waited for the fateful day.

Now it came. From the last shot of October’s war Golda knew her time was passing. Not just the cancer; Eema knew the nation that was her family, wounded and shaken with too many boys in the ground, needed her to lay down her government because it was her debt to the families she had failed. Never before so vulnerable the Alignment would have to see off Likud, that dangerous brew of greedy capitalists and Jabotinsky’s authoritarian heirs. When the Syrians signed on to a pause in place in February, Golda set the date. Dayan, who had for so long transcended politics as much as he bestrode the nation, was a far guiltier man than his prime minister, who had done at least as you were meant to when you buried your children. Frightened to their depths by the first week of the war just past, the nation wanted security, not change, so if a strong hand came forward to steer the Alignment they could carry on. Each of these signs and signals meant the way was clear now for Rabin and Peres to settle it.

But now it had gone south. Rabin and Peres had prepared for this like the deadly game it was. The end result, Allon went on, was that rather than grapple for the stewardship of Israel, they had formed a suicide pact. Peres’ boys had their hands on the biggest bombshell in Israeli politics apart from the sins of pride that had stoked last autumn’s disasters. They knew, in medical detail, that when faced with the potential Arab onslaught before Israel’s glorious triumph in ‘67, the nation’s beloved boy general Rabin, by then Minister of Defense, had crumbled into a nervous breakdown. In the wild fury of destiny diverted, Rabin’s people had gathered every scrap, every hint or whisper, they could clutch of Peres’… remunerative relationships with the defense industry and the foreign companies that had helped build the last, nuclear argument of the State of Israel. So now, point blank, the two great mobs inside the Alignment pointed those scandals at each other.

Allon had them now, hung on the edge of the story. With unmoved calm he marshaled names, habits, intentions, fears, and spun the story of how the rivals would wound each other fatally as they fought for Golda’s chair, how the factions would panic, the religious parties would slink off in retreat, and as Israel’s most respected Supreme Court justice carried on the public inquest into the grotesque failure of hubris the autumn before, great rival leaders would fall as they fought for Golda’s chair. The political movement that had governed Israel like they were one and the same thing would shatter, careers strewn across the Knesset floor like the last act of Hamlet, as that hawk-faced radical Menachem Begin stepped in to pick up the shards. This can’t be, he said. We can’t lose thirty years of work, the stability of the nation, to the dangerous vanity of two men.

The room rumbled with chatter like a cafe in the Old City. A couple of the bosses piped up: Yigal, you make it seem that we’ve fashioned our own doom backing these boys. What can we do instead?

No longer the bridesmaid, Yigal Allon smiled.


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It was better to think of Rifaat as a puzzle, he reflected. A puzzle, not a problem. For ‘Alawi in a nation that branded them heretics, family was community, economy, faith, survival. Hard-won control of the nation that damned you only raised the stakes. One did not abandon family in a world like that, and the faults of one’s relatives were not conflicts but… puzzles. The uncle, perhaps, responsible for caretaking the family accounts who gambles it away instead. The beautiful young sister, doted on, who whores herself with men who will brag to their fellows. These were not knots best split by a sword, they were delicate webs of marriages and obligations and resources and opportunities. They were also the only people who were truly yours in an infidel world, that you controlled only as long as you could keep a grip.

That it was the dams surprised him a little; it should not have, not once the warring with Israel faded. There was bad weather all over, the Americans with their floods, the Soviets with their lost crops, and in the hard high rocks where the rivers of ancient story, Tigris and Euphrates, came down out of Turkey not enough snowmelt slowed down the annual surge. It was changed as well by design, by the vast hydroelectric dams the Turkish Kemalists raised to fuel modernity. Hafez al-Assad had planned to do the same, even before the Corrective Revolution, and now it snapped like a foolish dog at its master’s hand. He had stood with Rifaat at Taqba in the press of Syrian and Soviet engineers where he, an ‘Alawite boy from the north with nothing but his wits, had changed the Euphrates’ course that was older than the very idea of Syria, where archaeologists on rescue digs uncovered the Stone Age before the waters shifted, before Lake Assad — named not for him but for the family, as was only right — rose behind Taqba’s concrete and its machine-tooled locks. The drought was… inconvenient. The annual flow of the Euphrates, slower and more generous to the land than the Tigris, had dropped in the drought by a third. But he had a nation to run, and Taqba would make not just electricity but grain, feeding the fields of whole provinces about the dam. When Baghdad fulminated, he turned his face away.

He could credit Saddam Hussein, the backstreet hit-man who had risen to Iraq’s vice presidency and the real power behind the ailing President al-Bakr, with ambition at least. Saddam understood that path, those calculations. Living in the world since Sadat had crossed the Canal, it made a certain sense that whether Saddam succeeded or not, it profited him either way to dare. When Iraqi tanks rolled up to Syria’s border around the great rivers Assad blocked their way quietly, without speeches or parades. Since he could read Baghdad’s mail thanks to a friendly Soviet interest in the data, he knew when the half-dozen Tu-22 fast bombers and quartet of MiG-21s flying escort would stream out of al-Anbar in western Iraq flying low towards Taqba to make good Saddam’s word, and also how to benefit from Soviet technical support in shifting a phalanx of high-explosive and steel to the east from Syria’s formidable western surface-to-air missile network. This was only reasoned, and sufficient.

When Baghdad, stung by the failure of their gamble, rounded on Kuwait because they believed that the Emir had subsidized Syria’s capture of the rivers’ water, then sent a squadron of great lumbering Tu-16s south to set the Mina al-Ahmadi refinery complex aflame, it only took a discreet call to the Shah in reply. From there those muscled and formidable new American F-14s that the Peacock Throne had coveted hung lazy arcs along their own border by the Shatt al-Ahrab waterway and, with the AIM-54 Phoenix long-range missiles supplied in return for the purchase of American treasury bills and structural reforms of Iranian commerce, tore Iraqi bombers out of the sky in twisted metal and fire from a hundred miles over the horizon. The Americans subsidized the Jews’ outlaw state, Assad reflected, but here he had given their arms industry quite an advertisement.

Now, as the Iraqis lobbed impotent shells over both borders and staged grand marches to celebrate their defeats, he could pause and reflect on more data from Baghdad that Moscow’s Ninth Directorate had passed on. He could recognize the family traits in it, the knack for a firm but indirect approach. Advocate for punitive action on the rivers, then lure Baghdad in with data on gaps in the eastern side of Syria’s missile defenses. With Taqba in rubble, the family’s lake that would make Syria a garden gone to ground, a new and firmer hand would have to lash out in retribution, at least and until such time as Ba’athists of both Damascus and Baghdad rediscovered the virtues of a unified party to make the bloodshed stop. To an untrained eye it was clever.

For himself, Hafez al-Assad reflected, it was a puzzle. How could one approach this puzzle that was Rifaat? What did you do with a charming and vigorous man who chafed in his brother’s shadow, so that the family — and the nation it led — emerged stronger from this kind of … indiscretion? He would think on it. For now, he would not draw his baby brother’s attention to these sources of useful information. Rifaat would go to Lebanon as planned. Hafez felt with his own instinct for the main chance that there, in Lebanon, a solution would present itself.


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He knew it would go south from the way she drew the gun, but after all he’d survived his ego sang a siren’s song.

No one set greater stock in the legend of Illich Ramirez Sanchez — “Carlos” to his handlers with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — than Illich Ramirez Sanchez. The po-faced son of a dashing Marxist lawyer from Venezuela, “Carlos” grew up abroad, schooled in Britain, France, and Moscow. On the last of these stops he was chucked out of Patrice Lumumba University and into the hazy, opportunistic, transactional nexus between KGB recruiters and leftist revolutionary movements around the developing world. Carlos landed in Jordan with the Palestinians, whose cause he professed with great piety the moment anyone brought up his current tally of murders.

Some of those deaths ranked greater, better, than others, some less. There was the clumsy guerrilla killing work in the Middle East through Black September and after, the rootlessness, the botched letter bombs, the times it seemed more convenient to make the mission work on his terms than his employers’. Then there were the feats that kept him in the game: striding up to Jewish businessmen in their homes or clubs to shoot them down, grenades tossed on Dutch streets in the Japanese Red Army’s name. Or the big one, that RPG round that popped lazily up on Galileo’s own parabola like a rugby ball at an English school until it slammed into the cockpit — the cockpit! It really was a hell of a shot — of an El Al 707 that blossomed in flame and wound ungainly down tearing a bloody, metal gash across the tarmac of Paris-Orly. Perhaps he should have waited on his slower compatriots, shot down by Paris cops in kepis, before he ducked into the sewers, but the Palestinian struggle needed experienced, and especially live, operatives. So, too, ranked car-bombing Palestinian capos who took their pay from Damascus, or shooting their French interlocutors when they were fool enough to walk up to you in a Lyon street with no eyes on the bulge in your sock. Fortunes of war, really.

It was the swift flight from Paris that made this — her, the op, this particular variegation on fate and circumstance — possible. In his haste out of France he had pled his case to earnest German tag-alongs to the global revolutionary movement, who knew friends who knew friends who knew the real thing, the hardy remnants of Baader and Meinhof’s gang. Now the Rote Armee Fraktion in full, those survivors sought to make their own mark on the Struggle. In that work the earlier generation of the outfit were objects more than subjects: poor rootless Ulrike had drifted away at the end of a knotted bedsheet, while Andreas and the others were shut away in Stammheim or dead themselves. What they needed, said the RAF’s new leaders, was a bold stroke. Something that told the world they were still central to the cause, that shook Bonn to its foundations, not just Bonn but the satellites and newspapers of the whole rotten capitalist world, that would make them heroes again and get the boys out of prison. Stockholm had gone south; other ops had been non-starters. They needed a new target, a new ingredient.

So it was paths interwove again between the RAF and Carlos. The peripatetic Latin set down in a quiet Budapest neighborhood, with minders from Hungary’s secret service and the chance to take the fruits of his exploits among the young women of the city’s discotheques. It gave him some space to contemplate, to marinate and then thicken in his own mytharc, until she showed up. Blonde with the businesslike German face of a hardened urban guerrilla, Mohnhaupt was one of the last soldiers of the old days in the RAF, who had busted herself out of jail who rose swiftly by shooting down bankers with bad war records while her elder comrades died on botched jobs. She swung into Budapest fast and personally, ahead of what she said were French-born spotters for Mossad setting the stage for a hit. Carlos had trusted the krauts before on his weaving way out of France and here he found… a kindred spirit? Something close at least, someone as stylishly nihilistic as he was self-important, with the same drive to live a life larger than themselves in the deeds of the Struggle.

Bedded down together in a hide site on a Bavarian farm, one of the movement’s couriers brought them news. A senior field officer of Iraq’s Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Ba’athists’ secret police loyal first of all the ambitious vice president of the country Saddam Hussein, had a plan on offer. They wanted a team — only the most committed, only the best — to walk straight into OPEC Headquarters during a policy meeting, take control, and hold the confab to ransom. The couple, as they now were, pulled in two more reliable men among the German revolutionaries, scouted and sited a drop spot for the transfer of cash, passports, and weapons from the Iraqi embassy in Vienna, and moved apace.

It was when they entered the conference room that Carlos discovered there was another plan. They had moved in like old pros, pretending at delivery service, when a snippish old building manager smelled something off with their High German and a woman in overalls; naturally they shot him. From there it was a matter of closing the distance before anyone understood the problem. A Saudi military officer in an Italian suit tried to bar their way as he saw them coming at a jog but a few more shots later they were in the room, their hired guns shouting for calm. Mohnhaupt was calm already, though: with ministers and policy aides frozen in their chairs she wound the gun around on the prince and fired. It was oddly beautiful, thought Carlos, the strength of this woman, by which time she had turned again on Jamshid Homuzegar of Iran, his long face paled at the death just before, and shot twice again. Now they owned the room.

The Iraqis knew their man. Carlos was bold, ruthless when it suited him, and a better self-publicist there was not in all the guerrilla movements that made the West bleed. But he was quite good at guarding his own skin, and Baghdad needed someone more … businesslike about the transaction on which they had entered. The Iranian and the Saudi, said the note the Mukhabarat case officer slipped into Mohnhaupt’s watchband when they shook hands. That for an extra million, each, in the bank in South Yemen the day after. Mohnhaupt had a lover and a job, both of which exhilarated, but more than that she had an organization, a fief in the Struggle that she meant to tend and raise above others. For that she could be less calculating than Carlos, more direct.

The sweat came off Carlos in sheets, his only tell as he flashed a ravenous smile, lectured and charmed and acted the businesslike captain of international terror. Brigitte let him hold court; it kept him where he could be watched. Her boys would take care of any other issues. European sirens gave their bitonal wail in the grand, fading city, Vienna cops outside offset steel-pot helmets with big black greatcoats like hotel doormen, still businesslike and polite in the expectation that, as the old Viennese saying had it, this situation was hopeless but not serious. Bruno Kreisky himself made phone calls, the Venezuelans offered to intercede with their estranged countryman, the Shah barracked to Paris-Match, the Saudis in cloths of mourning canvassed the banks and offered money.

After an uneasy day of it they had a resolution. Muammar Gaddafi, friend to revolutionaries the world over when it suited him, offered his own 727, his own pilot, as a third party to bear them hence, Carlos and the Germans plus a select dozen of the OPEC suits who would make the guiltiest men in the propaganda leaflets. There would be suitcases of cash — unmarked French francs well liked in many cities of North Africa and the Levant — supplied on the runway reserved for private traffic at Vienna-Schwecat. Once there, two or three staff officers of the Iraqi embassy would, together with an Austrian doctor, verify the health and well-being of the hostages, which was a bold touch so far as Carlos was concerned. From there? Algiers it looked like, though Brigitte preferred Tripoli with good reason and it was still being hashed out as the lumbering tour bus left the baroque grey streets around the OPEC offices for the winter-brown open plains at Schwecat. The Iraqis were businesslike and waiting for them, the doctor polite. Indeed after the scare of Brigitte’s first acts in the conference room, his ego had sung to him so well in philosophical conversation with men of affairs that he did not process that little glint down past the green taxi-lane marker on the tarmac until much too late.

Mohnhaupt, too much in charge, to keen to know the next step and secure the ransom money, to hear the code phrase that meant the Yemeni deposits were already made, failed to note that the Iraqi she spoke to had moved to her left and shifted his right shoulder over so that she naturally stepped back half a pace into an open line of sight. The Austrians, with Germanic thoroughness, had spent a day getting it right. Pacing out all the angles. Establishing distance, running a traffic of civil and ambulance and police vans and delivery vehicles back and forth so one olive-grey deuce-and-a-half of the Bundesheer could drive in unremarked upon. Getting the Jagdkommandos in grassy ghillie suits, heirs to the Tyrolean snipers of the Hapsburgs, into their places, precision-tooled Steyr long rifles sighted. In the glassy, calm sunlight the crackles sounded much too late for the heroes of the Struggle to note; with some irritation, the Iraqi diplomat closest to Mohnhaupt did not step back soon enough to avoid the ruby mist of heartsblood across the left side of his suit. One of the heavy boys was too much obscured for a clean shot though the corporal designated Station 3 shattered the terrorist's arm to bring him down. Cursing and fuming the RAF man tried to level his machine pistol in the haze of pain. At the same time a sharpshooter of the Bundesgendarmerie, perched inside the cabin door of the 727 with a slim Garand carbine, leaned out and fired three times, hitting the last German in the chest with two rounds that dropped him to the tarmac.

Sopping the spray on his jacket with a handkerchief, the lead Iraqi motioned to his compatriots to collect the metal suitcases where they had been dropped on the ground. The bagmen brought those forward to the Saudi assistant to the Deputy Minister for Petroleum. With a rough Baghdadi accent he said, “I believe these are yours.” Then he moved on his way.


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They’ll settle on the thalweg, Gary Hart said. Hm? said his executive secretary, used to hearing Hart’s energetic lectures on every subject (except which junior staffer he was “seeing” this month) as but a passing breeze. The thalweg, Hart went on. It’s a German term; German geographers and German water law shaped the international standard. Before Hart could really get warmed up the executive secretary noted with nothing less than relief the arrival of Doug Coulter, Hart’s matter-of-fact deputy, passing through on the way to a two-o’clock on the Consumer Affairs Commission with Vice President Phil Hart (your best Hart option in the building, really, thought the secretary, except maybe the Vice President’s wife — she was a pistol.)

Trench line, said Doug Coulter, skipping verbs and subjects to get to the object of the conversation. You survey the deep-water marks of the river, sight a line along them, that’s your border. Unless the drainage or geology is off in that area, hydrodynamics means it tends to be the middle of the stream anyway. If the Brits hadn’t ratfucked old Reza Shah back in ‘37 — the fresh young verb was all over D.C.’s water cooler conversations, what with the trials — we wouldn’t be having this conversation anyway. While Hart fished for papers on his tatterdemalion desk the executive secretary raised an eyebrow slightly, to indicate a mix of interest in, and approval of, Coulter’s contribution. Didn’t want to be too obvious about it, though. Some of the chaos Chief of Staff Hart created was to keep potential rivals off balance, some to cover his ass, and some to settle scores. Chaos was of course an executive secretary’s ancient, mortal foe.

Hart swung back around, his scarecrow frame poised like a TV lawyer to make a point. The real point of no return was the rise of the Ba’athists, Hart went on. They wanted to use nationalism to consolidate power and roll back commerce and tolls on the Shatt al-Ahrab to the ‘37 line. To be fair they’d been provoked by the Shah as well.

Doug Coulter paused in his journey, compact and self contained, his lean nose and balding forehead honed together to make the point. But there’s no ‘37 line without the Brits, nor a Shah so determined to show the days of being ordered around by Western powers are over. It’s been almost sixty years since Sykes-Picot and we’re still cleaning up the mess the old Great Powers made. Shaking his head a little he made a parade-ground turn back in the direction of the Vice President’s West Wing office.

A mess indeed; with his usual eye for a good line Frank Mankiewicz summed it up with a scribble in the margin of the memo Paul Warnke circulated on trilateral Syrian-Iraqi-Iranian talks. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when Mideast treaties we conceive,” said Mankiewicz. He was on to something.

The circumstances were this. Nose bloodied by its neighbors west and east, Iraq did not back down but instead pushed hard on its best points of leverage. A defensive crouch along the Shatt al-Ahrab and the Euphrates let Baghdad concentrate resources on pummeling the Kurds, whose doughty, relatively modern, relatively egalitarian, officially socialist enclaves were sentimental favorites both in Moscow and the West Wing. (The administration did not intervene directly, conscious of its own principles, but entertained Kurdish messengers as formal guests, made clear to Anatoly Dobrynin that Soviet aid for the Kurds would not ruffle feathers with the President, and restocked Iranian materiel diverted to the Kurdish cause.) In those same weeks Saddam Hussein waved from the balconies over Tienanmen, shaking hands with an ashen-faced Zhou Enlai as the Iraqi vice president sat down with Marshal Ye Jianying to discuss a commerce in Iraqi oil and Chinese weapons.

To simmer down or mend the trilateral conflicts over water took a baroque web of deals that spanned the globe. Far from chastened, Iraq wanted a prize to console its foreign policy. The one that mattered most to the Tikriti clan that really ran Iraq was a nuclear power reactor, more than that one gotten free and easy without formal safeguards laid down by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Feelers to Moscow came back empty: the Soviets had no desire to hand a regime they didn’t trust as far as Brezhnev’s palsied hands could throw them reprocessing capabilities plus an open tap on reactor fuel that could be diverted for dangerous ends. France, on the other hand, with the breezy bonhomie that greased Gaullist efforts to build close bonds with the Arab oil states, budged past the nervous Italians to offer an Osiris-class research reactor, not the big plutonium-based power plant Saddam really wanted but a tidy operation on easy terms. With that on the table it was hard to get Iraq to bargain.

There the horse-trading began. In the anterooms of arms-control talks underway outside Paris, Secretary of State Shriver and Treasury Secretary Galbraith sat down with the imperturable little mustache of Jean Sauvaugnargues, France’s foreign minister, to play good cop-bad cop. France could parley with Baghdad and end up with a much more stringent currency-dealing regime among the Cambridge Group that would put the franc in a vice, or they could have a historic new opening for French agriculture in American markets as the start of a coordinated alliance for marketing the two ancient allies’ abundance to the world, not to mention a quiet word with Conoco and Chevron to back off bidding against France’s Total S.A. in the newfound offshore fields of soon-independent Angola. Sauvaugnargues demurred; Galbraith, who rather liked bad cop, walked out. With the current French cabinet already in flux, Shriver blithely mentioned he might just have a word with his old friend Monsieur le President, sure to make it look like the foreign minister was not master in his own policy house. That afternoon the “Osiraq” bid was off the table.

After conversations between Frank Mankiewicz and the avuncular Antoly Dobrynin back in Washington, the Soviet legation in Baghdad crossed town to Hassan al-Bakr’s presidential palace with a bushel of carrots. A full-scale power reactor, light-water with highly enriched uranium dangling there in front of Saddam’s Mukhabarat and their pet scientists, but subject to IAEA safeguards, along with scheduled block purchases of Iraqi oil by COMECON nations over a three-year period and credits from Moscow for purchases of additional Tu-22s, tracked self-propelled artillery, and military machine parts. At the same time a mixed bag of senators led by Mike Mansfield and foreign-policy staff headed by Deputy Secretary George Ball and China hand Winston Lord touched down in Peking. There, amid good fellowship between the Great Helmsman and the wiry Montanan senator, the bluff Ball sat down with Zhou to propose a combination of commercial and military strictures on Taiwan and a full push under Mansfield’s direction for complete diplomatic normalization with the mainland.

In return, China would take their proposed sale of Dongfeng-2A missiles to Iraq — with which Iraq could hit targets as far as Cairo, Riyadh, or eastern Iran — off the table. Zhou pointed out politely that the missiles, pulled from duty along the nervous northern frontier with the Soviets in favor of newer equipment, had been made safe against their original use as nuclear weapons. Ball countered that the United States was prepared to crank down the taps on American purchase of Taiwanese treasury bills and supplies of fuel to Taiwan’s nuclear power plants until formal guarantees and inspections were set up against Taiwan’s own, nascent nuclear ambitions. Zhou believed the Chairman would find this pleasing.

As Paul Warnke said in a brisk note to President McGovern, “if only we could just bribe the Iraqis and be done.” Trucking with change in the Fertile Crescent was never that easy. Long before Iraq’s yearning for plutonium baubles to call their own the Shah had nuclear designs. As Sargent Shriver’s State Department pointed out, it made a kind of sense. With a strong domestic power-generation system — nuclear-driven just as the francophile Shah wanted — Iran could divert its full petroleum resources into a mix of exports and building up a domestic refined petrochemicals industry. And, in a world where several powers of the Global South chafed against the nuclear threshold, the Shah could flaunt his reactors like a close-cut Dior suit and let east and west alike bribe him into IAEA compliance with more resources for his dreams of Greater Iranian hegemony.

As before it was the Europeans you had to watch: here it was the undercurrent of diplomatic bags between Tehran and Bonn as the Shah shopped for a West German reactor design inspired by Brazil’s outreach in the same arena. Sargent Shriver shuttled off again, the bulldog Warnke in tow, to sit down with a world-weary Willy Brandt and haggle out linkage between concrete Ostpolitik and deescalation of tensions on the Inner German Border, along with German-American trade terms designed to encourage Bonn’s purchase of more British treasury bills to hold up the pound. Shriver charmed and wheedled with the brisk, burgerlich, overripe Hans-Dietrich Genscher about bilateral controls on fuel supply and reprocessing between Bonn and Tehran that Washington was willing to accept. Once there was a draft agreement, Warnke parted company and rode facing backwards on a grey Air Force C-141 to ARMISH-MAAG, the beehive of American military assistance in Tehran. There Warnke sugared the pill on bilateral controls with a proposal for more of the F-14s that the Shah loved so well, which would keep the Grumman lines on Long Island humming despite cuts in naval appropriations at home.

That left the Syrians. On one hand that was relatively straightforward: when he asked for something rather than arranging the game pieces to make it so, Hafez al-Assad had direct tastes. A daisy chain of Soviet and Syrian front companies and third-party banks confused the path by which rubles became French francs for Elias Sarkis’ presidential campaign in Lebanon (the presidential electorate was the National Assembly, which cut down on complications because you could simply pay your voters directly.) A trim Saudi princeling in a Saville Row suit walked to a drop site at a quiet bench behind the Al’Amahdiya Souq in Damascus where he wedged a thin manila envelope retrieved by one of Assad’s own bodyguards a quarter of an hour later. When it came to needs the Syrian president could satisfy on his own that would have been enough. But the rivers were long, and vast, and Syria was the fulcrum of their journey but not their source.

For that the superpowers turned to Turkey. When Cyprus burned in February of ‘74, and fell into a civil war of two-and-a-half sides (guerrilla bands from EDEK, the late Archbishop Makarios III’s ruling party, had a tacit cease-fire agreement with ethnic Turkish militias), the voices of the Turkish public rose in shock and terrible anger. Anti-Turkish pogroms burned and slaughtered villages; Cypriot National Guard blockades choked the roads that tethered the patchwork of ethnic Turkish communities, cutting off relief supplies and food. Against that Turkey’s barrel-chested, ward-heeling prime minister Suleyman Demirel only temporized. Determined not to risk the Turkish people’s position as victims in the rampage, nor a possible return of the Colonels in Athens, and so that he could test the constitutional reliability of Turkey’s officer corps, Demirel marshaled international relief but not the invasion longed for in the towns of Anatolia or Taksim Square.

Soon enough, then, Demirel was out, as for one moment in Turkey’s bloody political gang wars left and right alike called for his head. Enter the mustached little Kemalist dynamo Bulent Ecevit, who rallied both the nation and the military around the plight of their Cypriot kinfolk. Already, swinging wide to punitive action in an effort to prevent general war between Greece and Turkey, Athens’ new democrats had cut off Cypriot bank accounts and treasury paper. Soon enough Ken Galbraith and his opposite numbers in London and Bonn laid a discreet vice also on the peseta of the ashen and jaundiced Generalissimo Franco and his bullish premier Carrero Blanco: US and British intelligence knew where Ioannidis and the Cyprus Colonels kept their slush funds. With command of the air while Cyrus Vance dotted around Europe to conjure a NATO blockage of the island, Ecevit launched Operation Ergenekon: named for the mythic refuge of the ancient Turks, trundling transport planes disgorged supplies and paratroopers into the defensive zones around Turkish communities on Cyprus. Fighting flared up again briefly as Nikos Sampson brayed and shook his truncheon. Soon enough though the Colonels decided it would be better to consolidate their gains and shifted to collective leadership, the bluff newspaperman gone as if in a fit of absence of mind.

This was where the Americans won favors. Tired beyond measure of bloody crises and saber-rattling in the Eastern Med, the McGovern administration marshaled a trio of mediators for the Cypriot bloodshed: the lean, pernickety Austrian Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the United Nations; the craggy if careworn eminence of Averell Harriman, on his last mission for peace at the urging of Secretary of Defense Vance, who had worked with Harriman in Paris in ‘68; and Jeremy Thorpe, Britain’s recently minted Foreign Secretary, a knobbly and curious dynamo driven by ego alone through charisma. It was months in the doing, as Ecevit bit his tongue and let transport planes without air cover continue to resupply the Turkish towns and hamlets, but in time the international committee gained control of the road arteries and the north-coast port at Kyrenia for the UNIFCYP blue helmets, whose role shifted to keeping open the lifelines of these Turkish bantustans.

In return, Turkey loosened the taps. On the Keban Dam in particular: the massive hydroelectric facility near the mouth of the Euphrates began to give forth more of its temporarily scarce supply. In the interests of fellow Sunni Muslims the Saudis passed more funds into the Petrodollar Sovereign Lending Facility to help Turkey turn the Keban into a new wave of hydroelectric facilities. Suddenly it turned out the dams on the swifter Tigris could ease a little too. That stilled the Iraqi guns. With means and ends aligned, Secretary of State Shriver took a trip to see his fast new friend King Hussein of Jordan, to whom fell the role of interlocutor for Assad and al-Bakr and the Shah, a job Shriver referred to as “getting the cats into the same bag.”

See? said Frank Mankiewicz when Paul Warnke made it the centerpiece of President McGovern’s daily briefing six days thereafter. Only a simple thing really. Just a bagatelle, added the smiling Clark Clifford back from Paris with arms-control news to deliver. Assad’s the one I can’t entirely figure, said the president shifting the subject a bit. He does seem to have a knack, though for what we had better figure out if we ever want things to calm down over there. With a former historian’s energetic curiosity McGovern added: these ‘Alawites seem to be quite a bunch. Running a modern police state with an old-boy network of a few families from a sect frowned on by their own country. It’s like having a Jewish family as Tsars of all the Russias.

Mankiewicz shrugged with his smile as only he could do. We wouldn’t want it anyway, he said. We’d trade for Wilshire Boulevard as soon as it came available; a lot more sunshine and less Cossacks.


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As they walked inside the terminal at Ben-Gurion international, Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance and Israel’s prime minister Yigal Allon kept a cool distance from the clatter of flashbulbs. Vance wore the sardonic turn towards a smile with which he often greeted the media, looking like the probate lawyer who told you your favorite grandmother was dead but you’d do very well out of the estate. Allon was all robust sabra politesse. Behind them trailed aides, bodyguards, and functionaries, out through the VIP concourse to the limos and on over a dusty hour or more to the toney Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia and Allon’s new official residence at the quiet villa of Beit Aghion. In the cool Jerusalem stone of the sitting room they sat down together: Allon and the men he had at once balanced out and shot past to the big chair, both Defense and Interior Minister Shimon Peres, and Foreign Minister and deputy premier Yitzakh Rabin; Benny Peled of the Israeli Air Force plus the deputy chief of Mossad; Cy Vance’s brahmin calm; the State Department’s Undersecretary for International Security Affairs, David Aaron, sharp faced under a big tousle of hair and glasses; and the note-takers along with a U.S. Air Force major general in undress blues.

They had come here by a twisty road, through bloody campaigns of memos and a dozen meetings that spawned twenty or thirty more just to interpret them. The end product was this trip, this day, and this agenda: a hell of a quid and what a quo. It had begun at the end of ‘73 in the wake of the war as both nations haggled over McGovern’s security guarantee, over what it would take for Israel to be secure, and what it would take to create a stable Arab-Israeli peace that would meet some basic Israeli needs but also American geopolitical imperatives. The result was this particular exchange and the binding mutuality expected to flow from it. The United States would supply Israel with a fixed-number shipment of Pershing II medium-range ballistic missiles. In return, Israel would agree to negotiate with any or all of its immediate neighbors — the logistics would be settled by Washington and Moscow — on the basis of Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied since 1967, the stabilization of Israel’s borders, and thereafter a second phase of talks conducted directly with representatives of the Palestinians.

For the Americans it had been quite a journey. All things considered Cy Vance had been more skeptical than not, though he came on board fully on the basis of a three-step process: missiles, then state-on-state diplomacy, then Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. David Aaron, on the other hand, had been one of the architects of this initial trade, which President McGovern came to accept for its nimble logic. The United States wanted more, not less, leverage over Israel’s young and unpredictable nuclear capability. The proponents of the deal had thought it up in response to an early administration proposal to back Israeli retention of secure high ground in the territories it took in 1967 in return for nuclear disarmament. That, said Sarge Shriver, a little crestfallen, was a non-starter. This plan was the replacement.

The Pershing II, in design testing for its unique new rocket casing, would on deployment be perhaps the most sophisticated theater ballistic missile in the world. It was already on a very short, very rarefied list of high-tech weapons acquisition projects of which the administration actually approved. With two-and-a-half times the range of first-generation Pershings, a lightweight missile body made of spun kevlar synthetics, far greater accuracy with its constantly updated, radar guided maneuvering body for the warhead, and (in American service) a lower-yield explosion than the sledgehammer of the old Pershing 1s, the system far surpassed anything the Israelis could design and build for themselves in the next decade or more. Purchase of the missiles and their road-mobile quick reaction firing systems (Transporter Erector Launchers in the jargon) would make the missiles hard for an enemy to find and hit, give Israel much greater strategic reach, and save untold money plus at least five to seven extra years’ development time for an Israeli-only system. The Israelis would design their own warhead compatible with the reentry vehicle while the US built and tested the first missiles. When Israel’s shipment was delivered it would become, without doubt, the essential weapon system for the Israeli deterrent.

In return, Aaron and his fellow proponents argued, the US would gain several things. First was much greater knowledge of the state and capabilities of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. It still operated on a limited basis: building warheads for the Pershing IIs would consume its resources and research scientists for a good five to six years, during which time the US would seek to introduce ceilings on the size and capabilities of the Israeli arsenal. With a complete knowledge of the missiles’ capabilities and a good reckoning on what sort of warhead Israel could mount on the system, American intelligence could reverse-engineer likely Israeli operational doctrine and targeting priorities. They would also buy a great deal of goodwill as a concrete expression of the McGovern security guarantee. At the same time it would start to walk Israel’s nuclear forces out from under the “opacity” favored since Ben-Gurion — neither side would say just what the missiles were for, after this meeting, but no one would have any real doubts — and most of all Washington would want some rather large things in return.

That ask in recompense was where Vance and Shriver came aboard, joining national security adviser Paul Warnke, Clark Clifford now much-consumed with arms control measures, and Frank Mankiewicz. The Americans liked their chances after Allon’s neat maneuver to the top. While Allon had famously approved maps of Israel for school textbooks that did not delineate the Occupied Territories as separate from sovereign Israeli soil, Allon had also offered in 1969 the most comprehensive and detailed Israeli plan to pull back from those territories, secure its borders, and hand government of the lands taken to a complex set of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Druze governing bodies. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch; at the time King Hussein had rejected it, as the monarch reminded Sarge Shriver over tea and stimulating conversation. But it or something like it was a place to start, and Allon’s sense that Israel would have to trade some measure of both land and government for security was the driving logic to which Washington could hitch its fortunes. Here again the missile order came into play: it would take four to five years before the Pershing IIs were operational and ready to deliver. Even in the event of changes of government, or at least changes in Cabinet, here in Israel the United States would expect zealous advocacy for negotiated settlement or that order could be changed.

The talks went on just over two hours, as the parties briefed one another and spelled out in mutual detail what sort of measures, overtures, and compliance Israel would be held to. This was Vance at his most diplomatic and Allon walked his ministers through the possibilities with blithe but steady energy. In the end Israel’s prime minister rested his elbows on his knees, clapped hands together, and said to the assembled men of both nations, We should eat. My Ruth has made something, he went on. No cooks, no banquets, but we should break some bread. A meal together ratifies our common purpose.

The other meeting passed like a breeze unheard, which is how the two of them wanted it: their countries felt the same. They shared a small round table out front along the sidewalk side of the cafe. There their words would haze into the air because Shin Bet had been told to back off minding the guest: just let them sit down at talk it out, that’s best for everyone. It was a breezy little place, close enough to the beachfront at Haifa that you could catch the soft salt tang in the air when the traffic eased off and the tide came in. The proprietor was a bustling little man, a round Vienna Jew of the old school who’d run this place since Mandate days; his coffee was thick as syrup — “Best Turkish!” he told everyone who sat down — sopped up nicely by the sweet, crumbling richness of gugelhupf in a light winter chill.

Dr. Ernst David Bergmann did most of the talking. A crisp, genteel Jewish German, a rebbe’s boy, and a famed academic chemist before the horrors began, Bergmann had run to Britain, disappointed Chaim Weizmann’s desire to keep science at a wary distance from the work of war, and taken up thick as thieves with Ben-Gurion himself. For more than twenty years thereafter Bergmann had moved in the lean fraternity of Israel’s nuclear program, not only an influential administrator on the path to the Bomb but an evangelist too, who traveled to more than one fellow traveler among those nations who twisted in the wind between Western reticence and well-armed Soviet clients. That kind of face to face work, building networks of skilled and like-minded scientists who criss-crossed among the liminal states of the Cold War, was the real talent and driving mission of the autumn of Bergmann’s years. This conversation, alone? Six years in the making, he chuffed himself. Six years and Peres’ own hand laid on it.

Bergmann sat neatly, back to the flow of rambling tourists enjoying their off-peak packages on the cheap side of the Mediterranean. Across from Bergmann, dragging slow on his creamed coffee, sat Hannes Steyn, one of Bergmann’s favorite foreign contacts, trusted emissary of his nation, and chief of research and development for Armscor, South Africa’s principal arms-maker that was, like so much of South Africa’s sanctions-strapped corporate structure, all but nationalized in the shadowlands of the Afrikaner old-boy network. Steyn liked the weather and the company — he relished these informal networks of talented men strewn around the world, where a smile and a ready mind could still get South African scientists into cutting-edge technical conversations around the West. But he had a particular fondness for Bergmann. The Israeli was a zealous smithy of a binding tie between their nations. So Steyn enjoyed the atmosphere, and the coffee, and let Bergmann talk.

“They have done it,” said Bergmann. Steyn let his eyebrows drift into the shape of a question and took another sip. Bergmann went on. “It’s why the Americans came. Vance has made the offer. We’ll have, I think, a five year window here. The window of development to initial capability. If Shimon was right — “ Israel was a neighborhood, no surprise then Bergmann was on a first-name basis with one of its three most powerful politicians “ — then we’ll receive shipment in the first tranche of production. What we’ve talked about, from there, should go ahead naturally.”

“And you still think the direct approach?” asked Steyn. “Through Suez to get them down our way and out to Overberg?” The trim Afrikaner referenced South Africa’s vast aerospace and missile test range, the envy of land-strapped Israel.

“Yes. Everyone says it’s a new world,” Bergmann went on, a lazy hand tracing skepticism in the sea breeze like a thousand other conversations on Israel’s coast. “Sadat walks the streets of Tel Aviv and shakes hands, and if he doesn’t get himself shot for it in the next five years we take the missile body through Suez in component parts with lead-lined containers. There are, I believe, facilities I’ve seen down at Overberg where much of this can be done interior to the buildings, yes?”

Steyn nodded. “For this, we’ll build more.” A smile over the edge of his cup.

“Indeed.” Bergmann flashed a trim little smile back. “This can be the, the fulcrum of the whole enterprise. Of the entire bilateral relationship. And there are so many elements to draw different teams of experts together. Rocketry, telemetry, the new, lightweight synthetic body of the missile stages, the radar targeting system, reciprocal warhead design work … it really is rather exciting.”

“It’s a whole new horizon.” Steyn sipped again.

“Indeed. I think both our countries do nothing but benefit.” A lean finger wagged and pegged the significance of the moment. “I see good things ahead here. Mark me on that.”


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The sanitary pad was the master stroke. It was not just a signing of the Tripartite Agreement after all but an OPEC summit as well and, well, after Vienna … the Algerians would not want anyone’s foot put wrong. That meant security would be acute but there were always weak spots. Their entire craft, after all, was to find and exploit those. So the suggestion of the pad came as an almost artistic inspiration. With the help of an industrial worker committed to supporting the Struggle there would be even more: he would cut them a fine layer of lead, one thirty-second of an inch thick, which they could insert into the adhesive lining of the pad. With the bulk shaped in the pad’s circumference and the lead facing most of the angles, the x-rays would do no good. But more than that, as the old hands who had trained in the camps of the Mideast knew, there was the haram of it. Sure the Algerians and the Ba’athists claimed to follow secular socialism and the Shah’s SAVAK thugs liked their French suits and Scottish whisky, but they all shared a gut aversion to a woman’s cycle common across the Islamic world. It wasn’t like Western men were really any better, she pointed out to her colleagues. But the added element by which it was unholy as well certainly helped.

The rest was nothing they hadn’t managed before. The forged journalist’s paperwork was easy enough, much as the passport. The muddle-and switch moving past the metal detector was old tradecraft. When she came on the x-ray machines her flustered standoffishness told the gendarmes, sweating in their Western plainclothes, enough that they waved her through, body language separating from her as far as they could while keeping their stations. After that it was just shoving your way to the front of the press scrum and she hadn’t risen so far in the Struggle by a lack of drive.

After Boumedienne passed through, all waves and that flashing smile arm in arm with the Emir of Kuwait, they brought the three of them in together. Hafez Al-Assad, trim and reserved and looking like nothing so much as the accountant of the other two; the Shah of Iran, long face known instantly in the journalists’ world, carrying himself like a general but somehow wan; and in the usual double-breasted suit that barely contained his gangster’s build Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi vice president and real power of Baghdad’s Ba’athists, architect of the whole mess. With a loose orbit of goons and advance men around them they moved forward into the klieg lighting and babel of questions as the press surged up and spread across the reception hall where the signers of the Tripartite Agreement would tease the press a little before Boumedienne staged the signature ceremony just as he wanted it. She let herself be buffeted by a cameraman, her right hand coming to rest against her waist. A woman’s sheltering movement in this hurly-bury wouldn’t raise eyebrows with the chauvinists with guns. And just as she had expected — had told the planning team because she knew these kinds of men — he walked forward, wanting to be the center of attention at this ceremony imposed on him.

When Saddam Hussein flashed his hollow predator’s smile and gleaned a question from the wave of hands and tape recorders, she had the Remington out already. As she fired the derringer once, twice, she shouted it out. “Brigitte! Brigitte!” The slug-like .41 rimfire bullets slammed first into his forehead just a little over his eye, then into the space between nose and cheekbone. For a moment, as though dazed, he did not fall, then slumped at once as the screams started. Gabrielle Krocher-Tiedemann still shouted Brigitte Kuhlmann’s name, even as a SAVAK man who happened to be close enough twisted her wrist past breaking to loose the derringer, both its barrels fired already. Reporters and cameramen ducked and swung and sought both cover and the story. The Shah’s lip curled as though his soup had gone cold as SAVAK men shielded him and shoved him away; Hafez Al-Assad had hardly moved and watched calmly as the German girl shouted and a Mukhabarat agent surged in close to her and pumped three rounds from his Tokarev into her torso, quick and lethal retribution. But that was a small thing now. The propaganda of the Rote Armee Fraktion’s deed — that you didn’t just pass the Saudis millions to spike your own op, not even when you’d gotten what you came for, leaving warriors of the Struggle in the wind — already had lit the world.

There was a signing, in time. For Baghdad, preventing a two-front war outweighed the shock and fury at the assassination. Hardly two days after the agreement was inked, a Syrian envoy passed a sealed letter from his president to Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, clansman of the late Saddam now elevated to the late vice-president’s job, as the Tikritis closed ranks around their claim to maintain President al-Bakr as their puppet. In one of the palaces of Baghdad al-Douri unsealed the message personally, then read it, then took his cigarette and lit it afire.

“To the men of Tikrit,

“I offer sorrow at your loss. May the Vice President’s death only renew the bonds that once were close among the Ba’ath so that our nations may greet one another in friendship.

“Know also, from this, that I can come for each of you at my choosing. Think on that with some care, and let us instead see to each other’s welfare. It will give me no joy to do otherwise. Do not, however, doubt in that outcome.”


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The old man bit into an apricot. It was cool, and soft with fuzz, and sweet, and he disliked himself for the indulgence. The struggle for the community of the faithful, the great contest with modern things — like Yacoub wrestling the angel — to keep God’s children on the straight path, to judge them firmly but not harshly, to rally and bind them against the temptations and depredations of an apostate Shah and the nest of Western vipers around him … it was a constant thing. At this time of his life, he told himself, there should be no diversions. No excuse for acts other than contemplating the intricate designs of the Most Merciful and reasoning how they could be applied to raise up a guardianship over faithful people — not philosopher kings but true judges of the Holy Word — and wipe away the whore’s makeup that professors and newspaper men called “Westernization.”

His deputies, his listeners, his family, none of them judged him harshly for any failure to meet the measure of each moment. His students were in awe — a proper awe, maybe — while his listeners simply thrilled to hear the truth spoken about the greed and spiritual emptiness and injustice of the Shah’s regime. As for his family they all, except perhaps Zahra who like Fatima herself had her father’s strength, were a little too indulgent. But that was a fault born out of love and the Forgiver of Sins would gladly wash them clean. He, on the other hand, had the words of Musa al-Kazim to live out:

“A man will come out from Qom and he will summon people to the right path. There will rally to him people resembling pieces of iron, not to be shaken by violent winds, unsparing and relying on God.”

Iron. That was what the Remover of Obstacles demanded. People made iron by a man of iron. Any flaw could bend the blade. If his legendary punctuality suffered, if they had to stop the tape reels and rewind because in the dusty summer heat of Najaf with the noises of the city beyond his modest home he somehow misspoke. That already was too much. He had slipped and fallen just the other day: he kept this even from beloved Khadijeh, who would only fret, and from his sons still daunted by the scale of what God asked of them. They needed to find their strength, not worry about their father’s. He drew into his robes, the long grey beard touching the front of them, his long face that otherwise would have been praised as handsome in its permanent scowl like the rolling dark of an ancient, coming storm.

The headache helped that not at all. It had vexed him all day and the apricots helped a little: fresh with their sugar, reminders of fond if lax indulgences in time with family. On the Lord’s behalf he commanded himself to focus, because there was work to be done later in the day. First a rejoinder to that charming waterer-down of the sublime Truth Shariati who seemed to think the Prophet could manage a suit and tie and still remain in the grace of submission to God’s will, then another broadcast, a fresh tape to sow the bazaars and the shantytowns with food of the spirit and condemnation of American Food for Peace workers who brought bread in one hand and apostasy in the other. Much to do. He still ached from the fall but the wearing away of the body revealed the strength of the spirit. He meant to stay on time and carry on.

It was a buzz at first and he thought in a moment of anger of the listening devices of Al-Bakr’s regime, of the corruptions of modern science. But as it carried on it seemed less like electronics and more like something natural revealed to him. He had not noticed the weightlessness of his limbs until the buzz shifted, and then he did. Then everything was light, not the sun’s glare but a vast light, a light in entirety, and a muffling of his senses like a blanket laid over him. Whether that was the descent of the nūr Allah on him at last so he could speak God’s whole truth with a pure tongue, or the manifestation of Jibril come to call the blessed name of Al-Qa’im, or the wings of Azril who lit down on earth to claim him, he never did know.

They found the body thirty-four minutes later. Spread in his long-limbed vastness, stern as ever, still. Mostafa cried out in a great tenor of grief; Ahmad knelt quietly in place, composed as if for salat, then held his father’s hand and wept quietly as his mind spun to find that vast presence and came on only empty space. When she was told Khadijeh sat too, no mourning wail, and with half her world torn away used the strength she had to think on God’s mercy. With the help of trusted friends the boys composed the Ayatollah’s body with strict words to tell no one. Then they had work to do.

They sat together: Mostafa the oldest, Ahmad, round-cheeked and bespectacled Morteza Motahhari, and Mohammad Hussein Behesti, like the Four Deputies in miniature. Mostafa burned and shook, still sure this was the work of the Shah or at the very least Baghdad’s Mukhabarat who watched them daily at a lazy distance, suppressing their brothers in faith here in the heartland of Iraq’s Shi’a community, keen to use their father cynically — their father! Their father now dead — to stir up trouble for the Shah and at the same time prove Iraq’s fair dealing by keeping the great man cooped up here in a tastful Najaf side street. Smite Al-Bakr, Mostafa said. Smite the whole rotten system. Take the respect and grief and rage and self-mortification that would come with their father’s funeral to raise up the Party of ‘Ali here in Iraq and ride that wave to the Peacock Throne.

Motahhari wanted a more indirect approach. The Learned Judge’s central goal had been to deliver his own people, Iran, the great nation of the Shi’a, from sin and misrule. If they failed to amplify his voice in death, a babel of other preachers and thinkers would crowd the air with noise and drown out the truth that ordinary Iranians must hear. They needed to build a movement from his memory, yes, but with care, with the great man’s wise verdicts, and back home. Let the Ba’athists and the Shah underestimate us, he said. We can build a new, faithful Iran, submissive to God and receptive of his Word, out of truths spoken between people. If we’re distracted settling scores in Iraq it will hand the souls of our countrymen to modernizers or Marxists.

In that moment it was Behesti who had the bright idea. The followers of ‘Ali wait in many places for the Occultation to end, he said. They’re beset with sinful change, disparaged or repressed by followers of the Sunnah, corrupted by America and Moscow both. The Ayatollah had a vision for all of them, of a true and pious community that would heed the signs and the call when the Mahdi returns. Perhaps we should work on two fronts. Perhaps we should make that community manifest wherever people profess their part in the Shi’a ‘Ali, and perhaps we should help our people see that this troubled world reveals many signs of the Mahdi’s coming, even now.

Ahmad, usually bright with energy but also soft and thoughtful, now instead asked directly what Behesti meant. It seemed his older brother and Motahhari might be reconciled by this approach. Beheshti went on. Mostafa’s eyes were keen, a hint of the forge-fires of his father’s. As they drew together around a vision it seemed to them the last fruits of the old man’s wisdom, and his last command as well. There would be days yet for grief, at the proper time. For now the old man would lie in repose for the next day. The living had work to do.
 
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