The China Card Read online

  Boson Books by Donald Freed

  The China Card

  The Spymaster

  __________________________

  THE CHINA CARD

  by

  Donald Freed

  _______________________

  BOSON BOOKS

  Raleigh

  Published by Boson Books

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  ISBN 0-917990-20-X

  An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.

  Copyright 2000 Donald Freed

  All rights reserved

  For information contact

  C&M Online Media Inc.

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  Tel: (919) 233-8164

  e-mail:[email protected]

  URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com/

  Cover art by Joel Barr

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For helping me imagine one version of 1984 I am indebted to a number of scholars and researchers: Franz Schurmann, Sandy Close and Pacific News Service, Irving Sarnoff and the Alliance for Survival, Victor Marchetti, Peter Dale Scott, Fred S. Landis, Robert C. Cohen, that superb critic Halina Charwat, Harold Lieberman, James Cookson and Kirk Vinson and the Citizens Research and Investigating Committee, and Jackie Stehr. And then there is my companion and editor P.R.F., who gave me the key.

  For M and K and H—with love.

  "Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving ... no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave… yet despite ultimate extinction we must live constantly in the vision of the good…

  Lord Bertrand Russell

  January 12, 1984

  CRISIS ATMOSPHERE

  SENATE COMMITTEE CHALLENGES ADMINISTRATION

  SENATOR DELLUMS CHARGES SECRET U.S.-CHINA NUCLEAR DEAL

  BY

  BETSY JONES-RUSSELL

  (SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT TO THE LONDON TIMES)

  WASHINGTON—Amidst an aura of alarm not felt in this capital since the Cuban missile crisis, the United States Senate acted today to exercise its constitutional rights concerning the power to make war.

  The Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate demanded that Wolfgang H. Manheim, the President's powerful adviser on National Security Affairs, appear before the prestigious Senate unit in executive session. Senator Glenn Bower (R-Tex.), speaking for the minority members, stated that, “There is the smell of Pearl Harbor in the air,” referring to the Japanese attack on the naval base in World War II.

  In a related development Senator R. K. Dellums (D-Cal.) announced today that he would “go to the country” to tell the public the truth about “the impending and terrifying possibility of thermonuclear war breaking out between the United States and China on the one side and the Soviet Union on the other.” Senator Dellums stated that he “had evidence” but “not proof” that the U.S. and China had reached “a secret and unconstitutional agreement” concerning the use of nuclear weapons against the USSR.

  (Please turn to page 13, column 2)

  1

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—JANUARY 13, 1984

  (FRIDAY)

  BETSY JONES-RUSSELL: Tape one, side one… testing, testing… January 13, the year of our Lord 1984. At the Watergate Apartments, first interview with the Honorable W. H. Manheim. Dr. Manheim, there is a wire service story that the center ruling party of Japan may be brought down over its support for the U.S. policy of Japanese rearmament, which critics are calling the real China Card, and—these goddamn helicopters are impossible. They are spying on us, aren't they? Really, Dr. Manheim, as National Security Adviser, couldn't you call the White House about these dreadful green machines? I think…

  She depressed the REWIND button. The big khaki-colored military helicopter hovered in a holding position outside the double windows while a Secret Service agent, inside, pressed a walkie-talkie against his mouth. The concussion from the rotors shook the entire suite. Inside her head, to herself, she shouted over the terrific chopping sound—”Watch out, don't fly into a rage—this mother ain't no piece of cake like little Henry Kissinger”—in what she fancied was an American dialect.

  Four aides stood behind his chair, hanging over the high-muscled shoulders of the President of the United States' National Security Adviser. Each held out a memo for the man to speed-read. From the kitchen, she thought she heard the sound of Secret Service agents breaking dishes or something. The helicopter had started to withdraw, but it was still impossible to talk, so she gave her nervous gaze rein to rove about the “power environment”—she would need a more exact phrase—and to make mental notes while Manheim gave his attention to the memos.

  The suite was unlike any other, she was sure, in the entire Watergate Complex. More than six hundred square feet, she guessed, besides the small kitchen and the den or bedroom off of the foyer. No, he couldn't actually live in this laboratory setting, where wide windows seemed to have been designed to allow the surcharged official helicopters constant visual access to the meetings and machinations taking place here. Some GSA designer had captured the big square main room in gray and blue, she decided, so that the inhabitants would be like insects set in wax in a K Box—open at one end so that the flying metallic organisms could scrutinize them at will.

  She studied the heads bobbing around the long, almost tragic mask of a face of W.H. (Wolfgang Helmut) Manheim. She was accustomed to earning the enmity of the palace guard of whichever great man she happened to be bearding for one of her celebrated London Times “portraits,” but this Manheim National Security staff was particularly grim, worse than the Kissinger groupies (how he had hated that phrase). No, this little cabal, she decided, would be dubbed “a gang of 1984 epigoni.”

  She watched Manheim's lucid and intelligent face frown and focus on memo after memo in almost lightning succession. This is a man, she told herself, who might appreciate the word “epigoni” and some of the other arcane vocabulary she liked to use in her prize-winning portraits of the great of the world.

  The helicopter began its final pivot out of the Watergate Complex so she took the plunge and punched the ON button.

  BETSY JONES-RUSSELL:… I think a bit louder… Uh, Dr. Manheim, the ground rules we discussed are, I believe, a series of, let's say, half a dozen short interviews—no photographs—and a copy of all tapes to your office within one week of completion. I believe that Mr. Kott has all this plus—

  WOLFGANG MANHEIM: Plus the actual manuscript and the original of the tapes.

  B. J-R: I'm not quite clear on why fair copies of the tapes won't do.

  W.M.: You, the great girl reporter, you ask this question about interviews taking place in the Watergate?

  B. J-R: Ah, I think I see what you mean… “Girl Reporter” I'll let pass. Now, perhaps we should—

  W.M.: I hope the presence of the Secret Service people won't bother you. Let's see, you have met Peter Wick, my assistant, who will be keeping track of the time for us. And Andy Kott, and his aides Katy Brown and Ray Anderson, and then there are their aides—

  B. J-R: But we're almost out of time already. Ah, Mr. Wick, you will, I take it, deduct any telephone call interruptions from the allotted time? Right. Well, sir, since that day when Mr. Nixon described the United States as a “pitiful giant,” your country has suffered the most serious losses in southern and western Africa, at least three humiliations in Iran, reverses across the Middle East—

  “Dr. Manheim, the President is on the line.”

  She watched him rise and stride, the aides scrabbling in his wake, toward the study or situation room or whatever it was. She dug in her tote bag for some notes, and as she looked up she caught one of the Secret Service me
n staring at her. She glared him down and back into the kitchen. “Horny young Arrow collar killer type,” she thought, knowing how she looked in the tailored Ann Klein suit and shirt; how the gray weave set off her steel-blue eyes and honey hair caught in a chignon.

  She stood and stretched, smiling as she read, upside down, several exposed clips from the official folder nearest to her on the large glass coffee table.

  January 12, 1984

  U.S., CHINA ASSAIL VIETNAM

  FOR THAILAND BORDER ATTACK

  BEIJING WARNS OF

  THREAT TO REGION

  BEIJING—China condemned the Vietnamese invasion of Thailand and apparently put its troops along the Sino-Vietnamese border on alert Wednesday, a sign that Beijing may be preparing to go to the aid of the Thais.

  Diplomatic and military sources here predict massive Chinese retaliation against Soviet-sponsored Vietnam, for they

  (Please turn to page 8, column I)

  MANHEIM REAFFIRMS

  PLEDGE TO BANGKOK

  BY

  BETSY JONES-RUSSELL

  WASHINGTON—National Security Adviser Wolf Manheim on Wednesday condemned Vietnamese military attacks across the Cambodian border into Thailand and called on the Soviet Union to restrain its Vietnamese ally.

  Manheim's statement pledged that the United States will “stand by its commitments” to Thailand under a 1954 agreement that has been periodically reaffirmed.

  That agreement provides that in case of “aggression by armed attack,” which endangers peace and security, “each party will act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.”

  Meanwhile, it was disclosed that the United States will sell Thailand 35 M-48 tanks and associated equipment, worth $23 million. The sale was re-

  (Please turn to page 9, column I)

  MANHEIM PROFILE—B. J. RUSSELL

  continued from page 3

  A specialist in Soviet-American affairs, Manheim urges us to reflect carefully on the unimaginable destructiveness of military, political and economic forces building up around the world. These forces, he submits, are too much like those that created Auschwitz; for example, a combination of high technology and low regard for human life was necessary to unleash the Holocaust. Today's nuclear arms race involves those factors, too. Weakness only tempts aggressors, and thus Manheim finds no remedy in unilateral disarmament. Instead, he bets on “the expansion of economic ties and human contacts between East and West” as an indispensable first step toward world peace.

  In 1945, the President's chief adviser was liberated by a black American soldier. Now his vision of blood and hope prods the United States to do its part to rescue the world. Success in that task depends, Manheim says, on the same traits that helped him to live through the Holocaust: clarity of mind; capacity to endure and to invent; conviction that “the struggle for survival in freedom must begin with oneself.”

  Who is Wolf Manheim?

  “Who's Wolf Manheim, indeed,” she repeated to herself. She looked up and away as the other Secret Service man crossed the room toward the bathroom.

  “There will be no fraternizing with the bodyguards,” she commanded herself, recalling an episode in Uganda, then she began to muse about Andrew Kott, the one of all the aides she would call human. He was the overweight, balding, nail-biting whiz kid in his early thirties who represented the “left wing” of the National Security Adviser's staff (and that was a stretch, since Dr. Kott was a Polish Kremlinologist particularly despised by the Soviets). Yet Andy, as she decided she would call him, did throw off the ineluctable scent of a young man with a formidable brain, “and no woman can completely resist that organ,” she soliloquized, drumming her slim, unringed hands on her flat belly as she leaned back into the couch, waiting. Then there was Peter Wick. “Danger,” she thought, and passed to Ms. Brown, who was black and striking. “Which one or ones is she sleeping with?” Musing, “Certainly the great man, and possibly the runt, Andy Kott.” No, Kott wore a wedding ring—if that meant anything. The other aide, Anderson, didn't count, “California type,” she yawned out loud and flopped her long body on the divan again as the man of the hour reentered with his staff, laughing. “Newspapers speculating about World War III and they're laughing. I suppose that's good,” she thought. Out loud, she merely cleared her throat and jabbed at the RECORD button again.

  B.J-R.: You said, Dr. Manheim—Wolf—Oh, does smoking bother you?

  W.M.: No, but it drives the SS boys, the Secret Service, into a panic.… No, go ahead, maybe they'll leave us alone.

  B.J-R.: No, I'm trying to stop. Do you actually call the Secret Service “SS”?—You do? Well, that's good to know… Ah, you said that you're not certain whether we can meet again tomorrow, or Sunday. This is no problem for me. I'm staying next door at the Watergate Hotel, and I'll just stand by until I hear from you. I know that with what's happening you'll be pressed—

  W.M.: I'm pressed for time, yes. The President wants me to leave for China within the week.

  B.J-R.: Yes, of course. Can you respond to European press charges that China and the U.S.—I'm referring to your upcoming Beijing trip—are drawing up contingency war plans? ... I beg your pardon? Umm, you are not responding to that charge?… Well, then let me erase this small talk and we can get started…

  Peter Wick emerged from the other room to signal that someone of importance wanted to speak to the National Security Adviser. Manheim rose with a sigh and stalked out. In the charcoal Brooks Brothers suit he appeared even taller and leaner than his photograph. Everything about him looked to her to be lean, abstracted, as if he were come to life from a fifteenth-century German woodcut. A medieval knight, she decided, that was what he put her in mind of. His eyes were deep, dark-“haunted,” she would later write, his shoulders hunched as if the hand of the God of the Middle Ages were gripping them. The bony face was pale and hard, and, to her, compelling, almost beautiful in a distinctly unmodern way. His hair was light brown and fine, cropped close to the long elegant skull. She kept trying to recall whom he reminded her of.

  Peter Wick interrupted her fugue by bumping the table as he passed on his way to the kitchen, so she turned her much written about critical faculty on the lean and hungry Dr. Wick. “All Poles and no Jews,” her smoky eyes narrowed, “or maybe Andy Kott was, half.” Hmm, that might explain the minor interest that his skinny, poorly tailored figure had caused her. “Stop identifying with the victim,” she lectured herself, breaking a cigarette in half, “there's a world crisis unfolding and there won't be time for sex this trip, much less with the entire staff… think about something else, something not sexual—like Peter Wick's green skin.

  Wick and Kott were Poles left over from Zbig Brzezinski's shock troops. Why were they now attached to the most celebrated American dove since Adlai Stevenson? Wolf Manheim—the “civilized soldier,” Time had called him in the “Man of the Year” cover story. American politics had become, since Vietnam, “like the House of Atreus,” she had written in the introduction to her verbal portrait of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had gone down, and the dove Vance had risen, only to be torn apart by the hawk Brzezinski. Then, the Ayatollah and Billy Carter, between them, had destroyed Zbig, and Wolf Manheim had risen from the ashes. Now both the Chinese and the Soviets were insisting on negotiating only with Manheim, and the hawkish Secretary of State, Clare Higgins III, was letting it leak that he would quit as soon as the crisis had peaked. With Higgins would go the ultra-Right—leashed in for four long years, starting to call hoarsely for Manheim's blood…

  She knew that the dangerous contradiction all across the American power circle was fueled by much more than thunder on the Right. Since the days of Dean Rusk and Walt Whitman Rostow, the balance of diplomatic power had shifted away from the State Department to the National Security Council. A strong president could manipulate and play off State and the NSC against the Pentagon, or against each other. But there had not been a strong president since… “And they killed him,”
she reflected, staring without looking through the wall of windows, waiting for the helicopter to return.

  Higgins's appointment had been a political payoff and Manheim had been ordered into the cabinet by the “Bank,” as the Establishment was referred to in the 1983 Betsy Jones-Russell/Gore Vidal correspondence featured in Esquire. The great center forces of American capital, the Rockefeller circle, had always feared the Right more than the Left—”…and what does that say about your liberals and your Left?” she had written, questioning Vidal.

  Now, as she broke another cigarette in half and stared out over the stone Watergate vista, she realized how prophetic her published exchange with Vidal had been. For that matter, power had been an out of control centrifuge in America for many years. What did anyone expect?