Eight Miles High Read online

  James Philip

  ________

  EIGHT MILES HIGH

  ____

  Timeline 10/27/62 – BOOK FOURTEEN

  Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2019. All rights reserved.

  Cover concept by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  The Timeline 10/27/62 Series

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  Main Series

  Book 1: Operation Anadyr

  Book 2: Love is Strange

  Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules

  Book 4: Red Dawn

  Book 5: The Burning Time

  Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses

  Book 7: A Line in the Sand

  Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon

  Book 9: All Along the Watchtower

  Book 10: Crow on the Cradle

  Book 11: 1966 & All That

  Book 12: Only in America

  Book 13: Warsaw Concerto

  Book 14: Eight Miles High

  A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novel

  Football in the Ruins – The World Cup of 1966

  A Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novella

  The House on Haight Street

  Coming in 2020

  Book 15: Won’t Get Fooled Again (2020)

  Book 16: Armadas (2020)

  USA Series

  Book 1: Aftermath

  Book 2: California Dreaming

  Book 3: The Great Society

  Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country

  Book 5: The American Dream

  Australia Series

  Book 1: Cricket on the Beach

  Book 2: Operation Manna

  For the latest news and author blogs about the

  Timeline 10/27/62 Series check out

  www.thetimelinesaga.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Epilogue

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Author’s End Note

  Other Books by James Philip

  EIGHT MILES HIGH

  [Book Fourteen of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series]

  In a wilderness of mirrors.

  What will the spider do?

  Suspend its operations,

  will the weevil delay?

  T.S. Eliot (Extract from Gerontion, 1920).

  Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

  Winston S. Churchill (A note of caution: although this aphorism is commonly attributed to the great man, others have legitimate claims to having first coined it!)

  Chapter 1

  Friday 27th January 1967

  The White House, Washington DC

  Forty-nine-year-old James Jesus Angleton, the prematurely aged, one-time student poet who had founded a literary magazine called Furioso while he was at Yale, publishing the work of Ezra Pound, had been Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence (ADDOCI) at the CIA since 1954. Even after the cataclysm of the Cuban Missiles War, which he – a man whose paranoia about and hatred of all things Soviet and Communistic was legendary – had regarded as a price worth paying for holding back the evil tide of global Marxist-Leninism, he had nurtured a deep, very nearly visceral affection for the so-called ‘special relationship’ with the British. Granted, his personal love affair with ‘the Old Country’, dating from his time in England in the Second War and succoured by his long association with officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), had become more than a little strained post-July 1964 when the two countries had very nearly gone to war but nevertheless, he remained among the least ‘lapsed’ of any former Anglophile who remained in the upper echelons of the US Intelligence community. However, that morning the implications of the briefing he had belatedly received, only late last night, about the outcome of the seemingly fractious Camp David Summit, were burrowing, canker-like, in his head.

  Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence, had been unusually terse. Worse, he had, in so many words although he had not spelled it out – because that was not the way he operated – that Operation Maelstrom, ramped up to such a degree that during and since the war in the Midwest it had become the Agency’s primary global focus, had now ‘served its purpose’ and ‘needed to be reined in.’ Maddeningly, Angleton’s vehement protests that there were still ‘thousands of dissidents out there’, and remark to the effect that they were ‘laughing at us’ had fallen on courteously deaf ears.

  ‘It is not against the law in this country to express peaceful opposition to the executive,’ Helms had observed, a little tartly, at one juncture.

  Angleton had angrily railed against the pernicious influence of ‘that commie stooge Harding-Grayson’ and his ‘poodle’, Airey Neave but the Director of Central Intelligence had steadfastly refused to rise to the bait.

  Other, that was, than to observe that the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Thomas Harding-Grayson, and the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for National Security, Sir Airey Neave, MP – their NATO ally’s chief spymaster – ‘obviously still enjoyed’ the absolute ‘confidence’ of the ‘Angry Widow’.

  In other words; anything anybody else thought about those two, particular ‘operators’ was entirely academic. More than one American commentator had speculated that probably no other woman in British history, including Queen Elizabeth I of Spanish Armada defying fame, had ever enjoyed such unrivalled power in her kingdom as the Right Honourable Margaret Hilda Thatcher, MP, First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

  Notwithstanding his irritation with Richard Helms, nothing that morning had remotely prepared James Angleton, for the unmitigated hostility implicit in the first que
stion put to him by the White House Chief of Staff, forty-year-old Harry Robbins ‘Bob’" Haldeman, within seconds of the younger man’s West Wing office door, shutting firmly at his back.

  Haldeman was crew cut, showing very little of the inevitable weariness he must have been experiencing after several gruelling days of apparently, fruitless bickering with the British in the Catoctin Mountains sixty miles north of DC. After hands had been cursorily shaken, Richard Nixon’s pathologically loyal Chief of Staff had waved the CIA man to a chair in front of his desk, sat down and viewed Angleton thoughtfully for a moment.

  “Director Hoover claims that somebody at Langley blabbed about Billy the Kid and the Angel of Death,” Haldeman stated quietly. “And now the word is out that ‘the resistance’ plans to assassinate the President in San Francisco.” He paused, sucked his teeth. “Did you or your people have anything to do with that, Mister Director?”

  Angleton sighed, offended as much by the clumsiness of the interrogative as anything else it might imply, and took off his horn-rimmed spectacles. A rake-thin man with a prematurely lined and aged face that belied his forty-nine years, he unhurriedly re-positioned his glasses on the bridge of his nose and returned Haldeman’s gaze with contemplative, customarily esoteric intensity.

  He had no intention, interest or inclination of addressing Haldeman’s crudely framed question

  “You know that woman is,” he posed, a flickering scowl threatening to settle in his eyes if not his face, “is, and always was, a Soviet plant. An agent provocateur…”

  Haldeman grunted his impatience.

  He sat forward, resting his elbows on the table.

  There were times when he asked himself who was the real enemy within: the KGB, the CIA or the FBI?

  “Lady Rachel French,” he groaned. Why the fuck am I the one having to explain this to the Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence? “Is the wife of a key man in the British establishment. If her ‘status’ was ever any kind of issue; it is not now. Do I make myself clear?”

  Haldeman had seen the files proving that – depending on how one read them – the legendary spymaster had either been in league with, or, more likely, he was assured, been completely duped by, and stubbornly remained a close personal friend of the notorious British traitor Kim Philby, long after the man’s own people had exposed him as the ‘Third Man’ in the Cambridge Spy Ring responsible for the deaths of countless – hundreds perhaps – British, American and many other of their allies’ agents. But for Philby’s unmasking had been interrupted by the October War, Angleton might have been fired when the truth came out.

  Or possibly, not.

  Trying to get a CIA-man to take responsibility for his actions, misdeeds and blunders was a classic Intelligence community oxymoron, insofar as it hardly ever happened. Heck, Allen Dulles had gone rogue a decade before the Bay of Pigs fiasco finally gave JFK licence to fire his arse! And even now, there was still a hard-core gang of malcontents at Langley more interested in taking its revenge on the Kennedys, than it was in combating foreign counter intelligence operations in the United States!

  “Is that clear?” Haldeman asked again.

  Angleton shrugged.

  He did not particularly care what this, or that, political place man thought about…anything, really. Besides, he knew enough about Haldeman, and several of his closest associates at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, to know that neither he, nor many of his cronies were likely to last much longer in their current posts than the next general election, whoever sat in the Oval Office when the electoral hullabaloo was over in November next year.

  Bob Haldeman had to bite back on his ire.

  “Premier Thatcher informed the President that her Administration,” he went on, battling a growing sense of unreality, “was now aware that the surveillance, eavesdropping and other illegal operations mounted against the British Embassy in Philadelphia during Sir Peter Christopher’s ambassadorship, and to a lesser extent against the embassy and its accredited officials since its removal to DC last year, were not wholly undertaken by the FBI. In fact, the Brits now – they refused to specify how they knew – know that your people were heavily involved at all times…”

  James Angleton stirred in his chair.

  Haldeman held up a hand.

  “The only reason they have not, yet, lodged a formal complaint under the terms of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, is because Premier Thatcher does not want to cause further ‘substantial embarrassment’ to the Administration. Just so there is no misunderstanding about this, Mister Director, British Secretary of National Security, Sir Airey Neave, passed a file to us - personally, to the President - graphically detailing ‘examples’ of the aforementioned malfeasances.”

  Angleton had already taken as read that Richard Helm’s earlier terseness, was not unrelated to the interview he and the President must have had shortly after the conclusion of the Camp David Summit.

  The ADDOCI would have been worried; except he did not think he had anything to be worried about. He had meticulously documented his interactions with the latter Eisenhower, the Kennedy, Johnson and now the Nixon White Houses. Like his predecessors, Haldeman and the others had been like kids who honestly believed Christmas had come early when they were briefed about Operation Maelstrom: the domestic counter-intelligence campaign – initially launched under the auspices of Operation CHAOS back in the fifties, re-invigorated after the Battle of Washington, and supercharged during the first rebellion in Wisconsin, which had subsequently sucked in all the resources now not required in Western Europe, the Mediterranean and the old Warsaw Pact countries including the Soviet Union, until now it dwarfed the FBI’s ongoing domestic surveillance and counter-intelligence programs directed against the agents of the Kingdom of the End of Days, leftist and socialistic groups, the African American Civil Rights Movement and its fellow travellers in the NAACP, the ACLU and lately, un-American elements within the Democratic Party and its ‘stooges’ on Capitol Hill.

  Angleton was frequently astonished by the moral venality, and the crass naivety of the political classes in general, and by the inability of the Nixon Administration in particular, to understand the mechanics of wielding power.

  If all that had stood between the Administration and the disclosure of the true facts behind the cover-up of the involvement, of the Nixon for President Campaign, in the whole sorry Warwick Hotel episode, had been a few bungling FBI apparatchiks under the heavy-handed supervision of that idiot Hoover, Haldeman, his UCLA buddy John Ehrlichman, the crooked bond lawyer cum-Attorney General John Mitchell, and that kid Ron Ziegler’s denials from the lectern as the White House Press Secretary, to name but a few, every second staffer at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW would already be under indictment.

  Richard Helms, the man who had walked into the Director of Intelligence’s seat at Langley, practically on the nod, despite the potential for scandal surrounding the break-up of his marriage, had told Angleton that Richard Nixon was a man who understood that debts needed to be repaid, in full.

  The order to ramp up Operation Maelstrom into overdrive at the beginning of the war in the Midwest had never been rescinded. So, the big question was: ‘Why the fuck am I being given the third degree by a fucking eagle scout?’

  Haldeman might have been reading his mind.

  “Vice President Rockefeller had a call from Kay Graham,” he explained, his frown deepening. He only relaxed his facial muscles with a deliberate effort of will.

  The normally suave, positively debonair Vice President, a living, walking, talking scion of old-world grace and dignity, who placed a premium on politeness and decency in all his personal public dealings, had been so angry that he had toyed with intemperateness, outrage almost, in his briefing of the President and his closest men at the close of the Camp David farrago.

  Kay Graham, the owner and publisher of The Washington Post, a family friend of the Rockefellers; and still, it seemed, of the Kennedy’s and these day
s, if James Angleton’s sources were to be believed – they usually were – of the developing Betancourt faction on the Democratic National Committee, had been bright, breezy, pleasantly chatty as befitted one member of the American aristocracy conversing with another.

  Problematically, what she had had to say to him, had left Nelson Rockefeller reeling; but then, inevitably, any man who was Richard Nixon’s VP was hardly likely to be in the loop when it came to the issues which most concerned the Administration. And in any event, Rockefeller and his people had never shown the slightest interest in getting to the bottom of, or in any way soiling their hands, with the Warwick Hotel Scandal.

  After confessing that she, Kay Graham, felt that her call was ‘highly unusual’ and that in any other circumstances she might have agreed with Rockefeller, or any ‘unimplicated’ third party, that it might be, on National Security grounds, borderline ‘inappropriate’, she had got down to business. That sounded exactly like Kay; underneath she was all business, eyes on the ball, a frustrated newshound and as brave as a lion.

  ‘The Post has obtained a tranche of documents concerning a massive, covert domestic – which must be illegal because it falls outside the CIA’s Charter, doesn’t it? Although, obviously, I’m no lawyer so I’m just passing on what Ben Bradlee said The Post’s lawyers say – intelligence operation aimed at infiltrating universities, the legislatures of several US states, the widespread phone tapping of US citizens, routine mail intercepts, and the systematic, dare one say, automatic surveillance of the political opponents of the President?’

  Nelson Rockefeller had been struck dumb.

  This Haldeman knew because the call had been recorded and he had listened to it…several times because he had not believed what he was hearing the first three or four…

  ‘Nelson, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes… These documents?’