Power Play. Gavin Esler
story was written made it look as if Fraser Davis and the British government were soft on terror, and that this weakness somehow contributed to the loss of all those innocent lives at the hands of what the paper kept calling ‘the British suicide bomber, Fuad.’ The reporter, James Byrne, claimed to have received a transcript of the Davis-Black row at Chequers from ‘reliable Carr administration sources.’ The report highlighted the section where Bobby Black said, ‘Fuck the United Nations.’
The Washington Post story caused uproar in Britain, across Europe and at the United Nations. Black and Carr’s popularity in the United States–which was very high in those first days–actually increased. Curiously, Fraser Davis’s popularity in Britain increased too. I suspected it was because, unlike Tony Blair, nobody reading the story could accuse Davis of being an American poodle. But how did Byrne get the story, based on secret transcripts of a private conversation more than three months earlier? I considered the options and then called the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff, Johnny Lee Ironside. I told him that it was very unhelpful to have this kind of leak.
‘Makes it sound like someone in the White House is anti-British.’
‘We didn’t leak it, Alex.’
‘But you benefited from it,’ I told him. ‘And it didn’t come from us. The Prime Minister is livid. Cui bono?’
‘C’mon, you guys did okay,’ Johnny Lee retorted. He was in good humour. There was not a problem between the two of us. ‘I read the British papers. Davis comes out of this just fine. Maybe you leaked it?’
‘Me? For goodness sake, Johnny Lee, I am not a leaker—’
‘Listen, Alex, lighten up. Who cares, all right? I mean, we both come out ahead. My man says fuck the UN, which plays to our home crowd. Your man says fuck the Americans, which plays to yours. So everybody wins.’
I didn’t think so. But I let it rest.
I could not escape the thought that maybe Johnny Lee had leaked the transcript himself. He clearly suspected the same about me because I knew the reporter James Byrne quite well. Welcome to the Washington House of Mirrors. What you see reflects only upon where you decide to look. After just one day of the Carr-Black administration, I was beginning to worry that the next four years were going to be difficult. In that judgement, at least, I was correct.
‘Fear’, Vice-President Bobby Black said to me, ‘works.’
It was now a week after the Inauguration and a week after the Washington Post had published the story about the row between Davis and Black. We were in the White House, and things were getting worse.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Fear … works,’ he repeated, separating the words in his whispering drawl.
The Vice-President of the United States shrugged and blinked behind his glasses, as if that were explanation enough. I had been invited to the White House–‘summoned’ might be a better word–for a bollocking. I had left early from the Ambassador’s living quarters at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. I’d said goodbye to Fiona, kissed her and told her that I would be late–a long day at the White House followed by planned meetings with the new people in Congress, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Betty Furedi, plus two sessions on Capitol Hill, and then finally, around 6 p.m., a cocktail party to welcome the new Turkish Ambassador.
‘Dinner? Eight?’ I said as I kissed her. ‘That’s what we scheduled?’
‘Yes,’ she said, without enthusiasm. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ears. ‘See you for dinner at eight.’
We entertained most evenings. That night I had planned a small dinner for a visiting delegation of representatives of British airlines to bring them together with two key members of a Congressional committee that was proving difficult about landing rights at JFK and O’Hare Airport in Chicago. There was no direct relationship between the problems we were having and the Manila attack, but Rashid Ali Fuad’s British citizenship was mentioned repeatedly in the committee hearings, and constantly talked about on the US TV news networks.
‘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.