Sweet Tooth (31 page)

18

A
t Leconfield House the thermostats were turned down to 60°F, two degrees lower than other government departments, in order to set a good example. We worked in our overcoats and finger gloves, and some of the better-off girls wore knitted woolly hats with pompoms from their skiing holidays. We were issued with squares of felt to put under our feet against the cold coming up through the floor. The best way to warm your hands was to keep typing. Now that the train drivers were on an overtime ban in support of the miners, it was reckoned that power stations could run out of coal by the end of January, just as the nation ran out of money. In Uganda Idi Amin was arranging a whip-round and offering a lorryload of vegetables to the stricken former colonial masters, if only the RAF would care to come and collect it.

There was a letter from Tom waiting for me when I got back to Camden from my parents. He was going to borrow his father’s car to drive Laura back to Bristol. It wasn’t going to be easy. She was telling the family that she wanted to take the children with her. There had been shouting scenes around the Christmas turkey. But the hostel only took adults and Laura, as usual, was in no shape to care for her kids.

His plan was to come to London so that we could see in the New Year together. But on the 30th he sent a telegram from
Bristol. He couldn’t leave Laura yet. He’d have to stay and try to settle her in. So I saw in 1974 with my three housemates at a party in Mornington Crescent. I was the only one in the teeming squalid flat who wasn’t a solicitor. I was at some kind of trestle table pouring tepid white wine into a used paper cup when someone actually pinched my bottom, really hard. I whirled round and was furious, possibly with the wrong person. I came away early and was home in bed by one, lying on my back in the freezing dark, feeling sorry for myself. Before I fell asleep I remembered Tom telling me how superb the support people were at Laura’s hostel. If so, how strange it was that he needed to stay in Bristol for two whole days. But it didn’t seem important and I slept deeply, barely troubled by my legal friends coming in drunk at four.

The year turned and the three-day week began, but we were officially defined as a vital service and worked the full five. On 2 January, I was called to a meeting in Harry Tapp’s office on the second floor. There was no advance warning, no indication of the subject. It was ten o’clock when I got there, and Benjamin Trescott was on the door, checking names off a list. I was surprised to find more than twenty people in the room, among them two from my intake, all of us too junior to presume to take one of the moulded plastic chairs set out in a constricted horseshoe around Tapp’s desk. Peter Nutting came in, scanned the room and went out again. Harry Tapp got up from his desk and followed him out. I assumed therefore that this was a Sweet Tooth affair. Everyone was smoking, murmuring, waiting. I squeezed into an eighteen-inch gap between a filing cabinet and the safe. It didn’t bother me, as it once would have, to have no one to talk to. I smiled across at Hilary and Belinda. They shrugged and rolled their eyes to show me that they thought it was all a great wheeze. They obviously had Sweet Tooth writers of their own, academics or hacks who couldn’t resist the Foundation’s shilling. But surely, no one with the lustre of T.H. Haley.

Ten minutes passed and the plastic chairs filled up. Max
came in and took one in a middle row. I was behind him, so he didn’t see me at first. Then he turned and glanced round the room, looking for me, I was certain. Our eyes met only briefly and he turned to face forwards again and took out a pen. My sight line wasn’t good but I thought his hand was shaking. There were a couple of figures I recognised from the fifth floor. But no Director General – Sweet Tooth was nowhere near important enough. Then Tapp and Nutting came back in with a short muscular man in horn-rim glasses, with closely cropped grey hair and a well-cut blue suit and silk tie of darker blue polka dots. Tapp went to his desk while the other two stood before us patiently, waiting for the room to settle.

Nutting said, ‘Pierre’s based in London and has kindly agreed to say a few words about the way his work may have some bearing on our own.’

From the brevity of this introduction and Pierre’s accent, we assumed he was CIA. He was certainly no Frenchman. His voice was a see-saw tenor, pleasantly tentative. He gave the impression that if any utterance of his were to be disproved, he would change his view in line with the facts. Behind the owlish near-apologetic manner, I began to realise, was limitless confidence. He was my first encounter with an American of the patrician class, a man from an established Vermont family, as I learned later, and the author of a book on the Spartan Hegemony and another on Agesilaus the Second and the beheading of Tissaphernes in Persia.

I warmed to Pierre. He began by saying that he was going to tell us something about ‘the softest, sweetest part of the Cold War, the only truly interesting part, the war of ideas’. He wanted to give us three verbal snapshots. For the first, he asked us to think of pre-war Manhattan, and quoted the opening lines of a famous Auden poem that Tony had read to me once, and I knew that Tom loved. It wasn’t famous to me and it hadn’t meant much up until this point, but hearing an Englishman’s lines quoted back to us by an American was touching.
I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid
 … and that was Pierre in 1940, nineteen years old, visiting an uncle in midtown, bored by the prospect of college, getting drunk in a bar. Except he wasn’t quite so uncertain as Auden. He longed for his country to join the war in Europe and assign him a role. He wanted to be a soldier.

Then Pierre evoked for us the year 1950, when mainland Europe and Japan and China were in ruins or enfeebled, Britain was impoverished by a long heroic war, Soviet Russia was counting its dead in the many millions – and America, its economy fattened and enlivened by the fight, was waking to the awesome nature of its new responsibilities as prime guardian of human liberty on the planet. Even as he said this he spread his hands and appeared to regret it or apologise. It could have been otherwise.

The third snapshot was also of 1950. Here is Pierre, the Moroccan and Tunisian campaigns, Normandy and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and the liberation of Dachau behind him, and he’s an associate professor of Greek at Brown university, walking towards the entrance of the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Park Avenue, passing a crowd of assorted demonstrators, American patriots, Catholic nuns and right-wing nutters.

‘Inside,’ Pierre said dramatically, holding up an open hand, ‘I witnessed a contest that would change my life.’

It was a gathering with the unexceptional title of Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, nominally organised by an American professional council but in fact an initiative of the Soviet Cominform. The thousand delegates from all over the world were those whose faith in the communist ideal had not yet been shattered, or not completely shattered, by show trials, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, repression, purges, torture, murder and labour camps. The great Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, was there against his will, under orders from Stalin. Among the delegates from the American side were Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein and Clifford Odets. These and other luminaries were critical or distrustful of an American government that was asking its citizens to treat a
former invaluable ally as a dangerous enemy. Many believed that the Marxist analysis still held, however messy events were turning out to be. And those events were much distorted by an American press owned by greedy corporate interests. If Soviet policy seemed surly or aggressive, if it leaned a little on its internal critics, it was in a defensive spirit, for it had faced Western hostility and sabotage from its inception.

In short, Pierre told us, the whole event was a propaganda coup for the Kremlin. It had prepared in capitalism’s capital a world stage for itself on which it would appear as the voice of peace and reason, if not freedom, and it had scores of eminent Americans on its side.

‘But!’ Pierre raised an arm and pointed upwards with a rigid forefinger, trapping us all for several seconds in his theatrical pause. Then he told us that way up on the tenth floor of the hotel, in a suite of luxury rooms, was a volunteer army of subversion, a band of intellectuals gathered together by an academic philosopher called Sidney Hook, a group of mostly non-communist leftists, the democratic ex-communist or ex-Trotskyist left, determined to challenge the conference and, crucially, not to permit criticism of the Soviet Union to be the monopoly of the lunatic right. Bowed over typewriters, mimeograph machines and recently installed multiple phone lines, they had worked through the night, sustained by generous room-service snacks and booze. They intended to disrupt proceedings downstairs by asking awkward questions in the sessions, particularly about artistic freedom, and by issuing a stream of press releases. They too could claim heavyweight support, even more impressive than the other side’s. Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and international support at a distance from T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky and Bertrand Russell, among many others.

The counter conference campaign was a success because it seized the media narrative and became the headline. All the right questions were insinuated into the conference sessions. Shostakovich was asked if he agreed with a
Pravda
denunciation of Stravinsky, Hindemith and Schoenberg as ‘decadent bourgeois formalists’. The great Russian composer got slowly to his feet and mumbled his agreement with the article and was shown to be miserably trapped between his conscience and his fear of displeasing his KGB handlers, and of what Stalin would do to him when he got home.

Between the sessions, in the upstairs suite, Pierre, with a telephone and a typewriter of his own in a corner near a bathroom, met the contacts who would transform his life, eventually prompting him to leave his teaching job and devote his life to the CIA and the war of ideas. For of course, the Agency was paying the bills of the conference opposition and it was learning in the process how effectively this war could be waged at one remove by writers, artists, intellectuals, many of them on the left, who had their own powerful ideas drawn from bitter experience of the seduction and false promises of communism. What they needed, even if they did not know it, was what the CIA could provide – organisation, structure and, above all, funding. This was important when operations moved to London, Paris and Berlin. ‘What helped us back in the early fifties was that no one in Europe had a cent.’

And so, in Pierre’s description, he became a different kind of soldier, drawn again into many new campaigns in liberated but threatened Europe. He was for a while an assistant to Michael Josselson, and later a friend of Melvin Lasky’s until a rift opened up between them. Pierre was involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, wrote articles in German for the prestigious periodical,
Der Monat
, which was CIA funded, and did back-room work with the setting up of
Encounter
. He learned the delicate art of stroking the egos of intellectual prima donnas, helped organise tours by an American ballet company, and orchestras, modern art shows and more than a dozen conferences that occupied what he called the ‘hazardous terrain where politics and literature meet’. He said he was surprised by the fuss and naivety that followed on from
Ramparts
magazine’s 1967 exposure of the CIA funding of
Encounter
. Wasn’t the case against totalitarianism a rational and decent one for governments to adopt? Here in Britain no one was ever troubled by the Foreign Office paying for the BBC World Service, which was highly regarded. And so was
Encounter
still, despite the hullaballoo and pretended surprise and nose-holding. And mentioning the FO reminded him to commend the work of IRD. He particularly admired what it had done in promoting Orwell’s work and he liked its arm’s-length funding of publishing lists like Ampersand and Bellman Books.

After almost twenty-three years on the job, what conclusions would he draw? He would make two points. The first was the most important. The Cold War was not over, whatever people said, and therefore the cause of cultural freedom remained vital and would always be noble. Although there weren’t many left who held a torch for the Soviet Union, there were still the vast frozen intellectual hinterlands where people lazily adopted neutralist positions – the Soviet Union was no worse than the United States. Such people needed to be confronted. As for the second point, he quoted a remark by his old CIA friend turned broadcaster, Tom Braden, to the effect that the United States was the only country on the planet that didn’t understand that some things work better when they’re small.

This earned an appreciative murmur in the crowded room from our cash-strapped Service.

‘Our own projects have gotten too big, too numerous, too diverse and ambitious and over-funded. We’ve lost discretion, and our message lost its freshness along the way. We’re everywhere and we’ve become the heavy hand, and we’ve created resentment. I know you have your own new thing going here. I wish it luck, but seriously, gentlemen, keep it small.’

Pierre, if that was his name, was not taking questions and as soon as he finished he nodded curtly to the applause
and let himself be guided by Peter Nutting towards the door.

As the room emptied, with the less senior automatically holding back, I was dreading the moment when Max turned and caught my eye and came over to tell me we needed to meet. For office reasons, of course. But when I saw his back and large ears among the crowd edging out of the door, I felt a mix of bewilderment and familiar guilt. I had hurt him so badly he couldn’t bear to speak to me. The idea horrified me. As usual, I tried to summon up protective indignation. He was the one who had told me once that women couldn’t keep their personal lives out of their work. Was it my fault that he now preferred me to his fiancée? I pleaded my own case all the way down the concrete stairs – I took them to avoid having to talk to colleagues in the lift – and my case intruded all day around my desk. Did I make a fuss, was I pleading and tearful when Max turned away from me? No. So why shouldn’t I be with Tom? Didn’t I deserve my happiness?