The Intercom Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF

hostile factions within the establishments they serve. They acquire more authority than their responsibilities warrant. They are accountable virtually to no one; and the longer they remain in their posts the stronger they become. Inevitably they also tend to become arrogant. The arrogance will generally be concealed, of course, behind well-composed masks of professional objectivity and reserve, and the quality of it will vary; but it will be there. How it is expressed will depend on the character of the man concerned, on his hopes, conceits and circumstances, on the political environment in which he works, and on time and chance. There have been directors who have found it amusing to lend support to leaders they despise, as well as those who have followed their consciences when it would have been safer and more profitable to ignore them. There have been directors who became kingmakers, who have subverted the governments they were pledged to serve and helped plan the coups which brought them down. There have been those who have seized power for themselves, and those who have preferred to act as the
éminences grises
of puppet rulers. And there have been those whose arrogance has expressed itself in more eccentric, less familiar, ways.
    Jost and Brand came to power in the early nineteen-fifties and established themselves in the NATO intelligence community dining the bitter cold-war years of that decade.
    By the end of it they knew beyond doubt that they had made the mistake that so many other ambitious men have made, that of specialising too early. Posts that had seemed desirable when they were younger men had, now that they were entering middle age, become dead ends. In the modest hierarchies of the defence establishments to which they belonged they could rise no higher.
    It would be easy to see their disenchantment simply as a product of professional frustration and financial disappointment, to paint a picture of disgruntled colonels, barred from further promotion by their own undoubted abilities, underpaid anddenied redress, finally becoming sufficiently embittered to take their futures and their fates into their own hands. Such a picture, however, would be out of drawing.
    Grievances they certainly had. Their formal responsibilities – and, consequently, their informal powers – had increased substantially over the years without any commensurate advance in rank or pay. Most of their foreign colleagues – not all, but most – held the rank of major-general or its equivalent. Attempts by both to have the establishments of their directorates upgraded had invariably failed. These men had not endeared themselves to higher authority; and higher authority, ever wary, was not disposed to make them more influential than they already were. Understandably, they came to prefer civilian dress to their army uniforms. But to conclude that they were driven by their grievances alone and that what they eventually did was merely a bloodyminded expression of accumulated resentments would be to oversimplify their case. Their disenchantment, and the aberration that grew out of it, had deeper origins.
    Although Jost and Brand were both professional soldiers, their thinking about war and men had been conditioned not by active service in conventional armies but by what they had learned in resistance movements. The idea that great force can be successfully opposed only by equal or greater force had no meaning for them. To their way of thinking, the way to oppose great force was to find out how to destroy its cohesion and then, when it was fragmented, deal separately with the pieces. They thought, as they had always fought, as guerrillas. They could accept the necessity for the alliance to which their countries were committed. They could accept with resignation the knowledge that their countries meant no more to NATO than Romania or Bulgaria meant to the Warsaw Pact and that they were pygmies involved in a struggle between giants. What they could