The Intercom Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

not do was change their ways of thinking about giants.
    They had known the German giant, so omnipotent in his day, and had helped to bring him down. Now, they were able toobserve and appraise from peculiar vantage points the American and Russian giants.
    The appraisals they made were not flattering. What impressed them most about these giants, they ultimately decided, was not their strength, still less the loud and threatening noises they made, but their inherent clumsiness.
    As Brand remarked to Jost one night in Brussels, ‘They make one think wistfully of dark nights and trip wires.’
    Their friendship was seven years old when that remark was made and it more or less sums up their attitudes at that stage. They are anti-American as well as anti-Russian. Their talk is subversive, but still only talk. They are dissident, but able to relieve their feelings by indulging in fantasy.
    They were meeting officially quite often at that time. Regional intelligence committees had been established, and there were planning conferences in connection with NATO exercises to attend besides.
    They looked forward to these occasions, but they were discreet. Both had made other friends among their NATO colleagues and both took care to cultivate them; but with the other friends the professional views they expressed were always carefully orthodox. Their dissidence was a private joke which they had no intention of sharing, even with those who might have proved sympathetic. Their agreement on this point was unspoken, but neither of them ever questioned it. Even at that stage they must have known instinctively that a time would come when they would be glad of their discretion.
    From harbouring vague thoughts about the efficacy of trip wires to wondering what they could be made of and where they might be strung is a short step. Jost and Brand began to take that step in 1964.
    The meeting place was London and the circumstances were unusual. Tension between the United States and the Soviet Union had eased considerably; the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had been signed; the hot line between Washington and Moscow had beeninstalled; the reorganisation of NATO was being discussed; the position of France was in doubt; there was change in the air.
    Obliged now to examine a new future, Jost and Brand did not much like what they saw. Not that they feared for their posts; they were all too well entrenched in those and could expect to remain so until they reached retirement age; but it was becoming increasingly evident that their importance in the NATO scheme of things, already diminished, was likely soon to become little more than parochial. In a gloomy moment they saw themselves reduced to the role of passive onlookers, of village policemen stationed at minor crossroads on a secret war battlefield where the only effective forces engaged were the big battalions of the CIA and the KGB.
    This view of the situation was not altogether fanciful. The CIA and the KGB already operated clandestinely in both their countries. Jost and Brand knew this. They also knew that, beyond keeping themselves informed of their uninvited guests’ activities, there was little they could do but register displeasure. They found the CIA’s self-righteous assumption that it was not only a welcome guest but also a specially privileged one almost as annoying as the KGB
residenturas’
bland insistence that they did not exist, and just as insulting to the intelligence.
    Jost was an overseas member of a London club and it was in the coffee room there that the first of two critical conversations took place.
    There had been an unsuccessful attempt early that day to hijack a gold-bullion shipment at London airport, and the evening papers had made it a front-page story. Three of the robbers had already been captured, four others in a second getaway car were being sought, as was the driver of a power-lift truck found abandoned near the scene. Over their brandy, Jost and Brand began idly to discuss the