The Envoy by Edward Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

drawers trying to find the missing document. Kit always asked what was wrong and offered to help.
    He felt his breast pocket to check his ID. The outer embassy doors were locked until nine. The doormen were always ‘locally sourced’ Brits – indigenous personnel – because it cost too much to fly over Americans for such low-paid jobs. Most of the doormen were middle-aged ‘gorblimey’ types who wore blazers with British regimental badges as a sort of tribal defiance. They took their jobs very seriously and always scrutinised Kit’s ID as if it were an expert KGB forgery. The US Marine guards, on the other hand, who controlled access to inner sanctums, secure comm rooms and archive vaults, always called him ‘sir’ and waved him through. If the marines were ‘covered’, wearing their anchor-and-globe white peaked caps, they clicked heels and gave him snappy salutes. Kit liked the deference and thought that if, say he retired to a palacio in Mexico, he would keep dress-uniformed marines as servants and grooms: ‘Saddle the horses, Corporal Cracker, Doña Jennifer and I are riding to Mass and then on to the village to distribute dinner scraps to the poor.’ ‘Of course not, Cracker, not all the poor – only the deserving ones.’ But this was a grey London dawn and the marines weren’t there to tend his horses. Dream on, chico , dream on.
    Kit spent the first part of the morning being the POLCOUNS, Counselor for Political Affairs. It wasn’t just ‘diplomatic cover’. The post was a real job and his pay reflected the extra responsibility . If the officer was up to it, holding a genuine post as a senior diplomat as well as being CIA Chief of Station was extremely useful: you knew what both hands were doing and why. Kit supposed that, after the Ambassador and the DCM, he ranked third in the embassy hierarchy. And yet he kept a very low public profile : his photo never appeared in the press and he was never interviewed . If the BBC or a journalist wanted to talk to someone from POLCOUNS, Kit always sent his deputy. Nor did he attend Royal garden parties, Ascot or Henley. He only turned up at functions that were for working diplomats and policy makers. The sort of cosy events where everyone knew everyone else and what they were up to. In general, Kit preferred the shadows because that’s where you could get things done and influence policy.

     
    A lot of Kit’s day-to-day work was dealing with documents that had been summarised for him by his junior staff. Kit underlined key sections and exclamation-pointed the margins next to anything that needed following up. Anything stupid or useless was crossed out or scribbled over with DRIVEL, DROSS or CACA COMPLETA. But he always made clear and perceptive notes on the wide margins that he demanded. Kit enjoyed the work – especially when his margin comments turned into memos and the memos finally wormed their way into US foreign policy. It was creative – like directing an epic film or designing a town.
    At half past ten Kit had an appointment with the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Welsh Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State. Both men were his bosses – and, arguably, two of the most powerful men in the world. Who was more powerful? Khrushchev? Nehru? Mao? Certainly not Eisenhower – he only did what the Dulleses told him to do. Kit knocked on the big oak-panelled door of the Ambassador’s office and waited. He knew the Ambassador wouldn’t be there. He was meeting captains of industry in Birmingham. The commercial attaché had drafted a speech for him and the Ambassador had surreptitiously come to Kit asking him to ‘translate it into English’. Kit knocked again louder and John Foster bellowed, ‘Come in.’
    The brothers were sitting at a big oak table, American oak, an antique bequeathed from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. There were no aides, no secretaries, no briefing folders – just a jug of ice water and