View of the World (30 page)

The ship possessed its own NAAFI, open for an hour daily, and selling a limited supply of such things as chocolates, sweets, cigarettes, stationery and depressing souvenirs stocked up in its call at Port Said. Despite their new status the prisoners were not allowed to visit this, perhaps because it was assumed that they had no money to spend.

Benjamin got his hands on a NAAFI price list, bought a sample of each article in stock and went in search of those with hidden gold. When he found one he pushed a square of chocolate into his mouth, and let him hold a toy camel, or work a lighter shaped like a sphinx. His offer was to supply one pound’s worth of NAAFI goods for every gold sovereign. This was sharp practice, for everyone but the intended victims of the swindle knew that sovereigns changed hands in the bazaar of any Middle-Eastern town at five pounds, five shillings apiece. Many of the prisoners were reluctant to pay up, and when one hung back, Benjamin brought into play a particularly disastrous form of salesmanship. His argument – as we learned too late – went, ‘You’ll be off this ship in a few days. After that what good will money be to you? Surely you know what’s going to happen?’ Sometimes at this moment, he went so far as to point a forefinger to his temple in a significant way.

In the end Benjamin succeeded in convincing most of the prisoners to discard hope in exchange for the pleasure of the moment, and they handed over the gold and went off chewing a Cadbury’s bar, and often clutching a ridiculous toy. In this way the seeds of despondency were effectively sown, and soon the men began to go down with it, one after one, like victims of an epidemic disease.

The storm broke with the Straits of Hormus sinking below the lip of
the sea behind us, and Khorramshahr waiting, like a frown on the face of destiny, only two days away. The prisoners had been allowed on deck and a slow swing of the pendulum of authority back to Golik had left the mullah isolated, as one by one his adherents again placed their neck under the yoke of military discipline. The Pilgrim of Truth had got rid of his uniform once more, and now wore a kaftan with voluminous sleeves and a large turban, both made from British army underwear. He still received the unctuous attention of a hardcore of followers, most of them, it was said, having some special reason to fear Soviet retribution.

The mullah had professed all along not to understand Russian, so, when the final confrontation took place, and Golik ordered him to go below and put on his uniform, the Battalion Commander took care to be seconded by Junior Lieutenant Ghenghis Khan, still sullen, but finally subdued, who repeated the order in the Uzbek language.

Golik had prepared himself for what followed. The mullah, an agile man, jumped to his feet, shrieking to his supporters to follow him, slipped through the ring of Golik’s guards, and jumped into the sea. Golik, close at his heels, went in after him. A number of men intent on suicide had been inspired to climb the rails, but their resolution was demolished by the general outcry of
akoola!
(shark). In fact, the twisting grey shapes of large fish were to be seen everywhere, swimming close beneath the surface. The mullah’s kaftan billowed in the water, he spread his arms feebly as if trying to fly; his eyes were closed and the sea washed the memory of fury from his face. Golik had reached him in a vigorous dog-paddle and kept him afloat, while the ship hove-to, and a boat was lowered.

For the mullah, when he was lifted aboard, this was the end of the road. The Uzbeks had gone dashing along the rail for a last gaze into eyes full of the rapture of paradise, but all they saw was a man fighting to fill his lungs with air and wincing and puking like a drowning kitten. He had not been permitted to die, and his survival was a matter for humiliation and sorrow. They watched the artificial respiration being given on the deck, saw the mullah’s limbs move and his eyes open; then they turned their backs, and went away.

The last day on board was spent in preparation for the handover, which
was to be elevated to a military occasion; the men of the escort fussed endlessly with their equipment and practised the arid drill movements with which they hoped to dazzle their Soviet opposite numbers.

I saw Golik as he readied himself for the fateful confrontation.

‘What do you feel about things now?’ I asked.

‘Optimism. As long as you people stand by us. At worst I’ll do ten years in a camp. I’m twenty-five now. I’ve still plenty of life left.’

We squeezed through the narrow waterway of Shatt El Arab, and tied up under a cold drizzle in Khorramshahr. In this threadbare city the Russians and the West were in daily mistrustful contact. It was the military show-window of nominal allies who hid their aversion between unbending correctness and skin-deep affability.

We looked down over a glum prospect of marshalling yards under the soft rain. All was greyness, befitting the occasion. In the middle-distance the strangest of trains came into sight, an endless succession of pygmy trucks, like those used in the West to transport cattle, but a quarter their size. It was drawn by three engines, the leader of which gave a sad and derisive whistle as it drew level with us. It stopped, and this was the signal for a grey cohort of Soviet infantry to come on stage and change formation before deploying to form a line between us and the train.

The escort party and the returning prisoners now disembarked, and there was more ceremonial shuffling of men, slapping of rifle stocks and stamping of boots. The OC Troops and the Soviet Commander then strutted towards each other, saluted, shook hands, exchanged documents formalising the completion of the handover, and the thing was at an end.

With the three interpreters, I had been quite left out of this. Our presence had always been an anomaly, a suffix to the OC Troops’ authority for which the Army had provided no rules. Excluded from the ceremony, and ignored by both sides, we went our own way. Sergeant Manahem had actually passed through the line of Soviet
machine-gunners
, cast like identical tin soldiers, to inspect the trucks they were guarding, in which our Russians were to be transported back to their Fatherland. He came back to say that they had been used to transport
pigs, and from the smell of them, he believed that they had recently served this purpose.

The British had about-turned and marched away back to their ship, but no objection was raised when we stayed on to watch the Soviet Commander and a following of goose-stepping subordinates inspect the front rank of the Russians, who were now prisoners once again. They came to Golik, standing, immensely stylish in ultimate defeat, at the head of his battalion. The Soviet commander circled him slowly in absolute silence. Both men were of the same height and build, and their
greatcoats
were identical in cut and length, but Golik’s was the better of the two. The Commander then turned in my direction and signalled to me, and I went over to him. He spoke good English, and his manner was pleasant. ‘Comrade liaison officer,’ he said. ‘Please do me a favour. I prefer to avoid speaking to these pigs. I ask you to give them the order to board the train.’

I refused to do this, but told him that one of the interpreters might oblige him, and in the end, Benjamin did.

There was a bar in the port just out of sight of what was happening, and I sat there and listened to the sound of the train shunting, the clash of bumpers, the pig-trucks rattling over the points, and the train’s whistle as it pulled out.

The three interpreters came in out of the rain.

‘Any trouble?’ I asked.

‘Not a peep out of anybody, not even the mullah,’ Benjamin said. ‘They’re going to be shot. Most of them anyway.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I had a chat with the Major. He turned out to be quite a character. Full of jokes. Took a great fancy to Golik’s coat. “Whatever happens,” he said, “I’ll see to it they don’t spoil
that
.” Russians have a funny sense of humour. It may have been one of his jokes, but I don’t think it was.’

I
MET IAN FLEMING
in 1957 at a party given by our mutual publisher, Jonathan Cape, which Fleming had attended with ill-grace. A shortage of space at the Cape headquarters in Bedford Square made it necessary to spread the occasion over successive days. We found ourselves immersed in this rump of the party, reserved, Ian suspected – though certainly without justification in his case – for Cape’s less prestigious authors, and he retired, disgruntled, to a corner, where I shortly joined him. He asked if I wrote poetry, and when I said I did not, he seemed disappointed.

Although already famous as the creator of James Bond, Fleming seemed to extract less pleasure than one would have expected from the writing of successful thrillers. He craved the society of what he thought of as ‘serious’ writers, above all poets, like William Plomer, who had
introduced
him to the firm of Jonathan Cape, and through whom all his business with Cape was done. Jonathan Cape himself much disliked Ian Fleming’s writing, and refused to meet him, and could only be persuaded to publish his books by a united front established in Fleming’s favour by the firm’s other directors, and by William Plomer, their reader. Michael Howard, the junior director, told me that the decision to publish
Casino Royale
gave him sleepless nights, and a bad conscience.

The acquaintance made at the party developed into friendship, and Fleming and I saw something of each other over several years. I found him genial and expansive, although many people did not. His habitual expression was one of contained fury, relieved occasionally by a stark smile. He seemed to wish to inspire fear in others, and on several occasions said of some person under discussion, ‘he is afraid of me,’ a
conclusion seeming to give him satisfaction. Another habit, which did not endear him to women, was frequently to explain in their presence that he had only taken up writing ‘to make me forget the horrors of marriage.’

For some reason I could not at first understand, Fleming showed much interest in the fact that I had travelled in Central America, more particularly in Cuba, which I had visited a number of times. At that time he was Foreign Manager of the
Sunday Times
, and one day he asked me to come to his office to discuss a potential article for the paper.

He wanted me to visit Cuba for him, to see as many people as I could, including some to be named by him, and investigate the possibility of the success of the Fidel Castro revolt, of which little at that time had been heard in this country. It seemed that Fleming’s desire for information was not only on behalf of the
Sunday Times
. It was generally known that he had been assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during the war, so I assumed that he was still involved in one or other of the intelligence organisations, probably in a department concerned with Latin American affairs. He said that he was unhappy with information about the progress of the revolt received through the Foreign Office, and also with the reports from his personal contact, Edward Scott, who lived in Havana. He showed me Scott’s most recent letter. The revolt, said Scott, was contained in a small mountainous area, the Sierra Maistra, near the
far-Eastern
tip of the island, and should give no cause for concern. He predicted that with the United States solidly behind the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the revolutionaries would shortly be rounded up, and massacred to a man in local style, while the world turned its back. Fleming said, ‘I simply don’t believe it.’

For some reason he was convinced that Ernest Hemingway, who had been living outside Havana for several years, was in close touch with the rebels, and he was most anxious to have Hemingway’s views on the prospects of their success. He made it clear that Hemingway was one of his heroes. Not only did he regard him as among the great writers of all times, but he had come to the conclusion through analysis of his writings, in particular his novel dealing with the Spanish Civil War,
For Whom the 
Bell Tolls
, that Hemingway had been in his day an extremely subtle and successful undercover agent, and probably still was one. He had written to Hemingway, but had received no reply, but, uncharacteristically, Fleming had forgiven him, and still hoped that contact could be made.

Hemingway’s oldest friend in England was Jonathan Cape himself, who had been successfully publishing his books for thirty years, and Fleming, unable to make a direct approach to Jonathan, suggested that I should do so and persuade him to write to Cuba and ask Hemingway to see me. Jonathan agreed, and a favourable reply was received. There was a personal interest for Jonathan in this introduction, because Cape and the literary world in general had been waiting some years for any signs of a new book from the Maestro, after the long pause in production following what had been hailed as his masterpiece,
The Old Man and the Sea
.

At the beginning of December, Fleming and I had a farewell lunch at the White Tower, after which we retired to his office for the briefing. Fleming said that it would be convenient for me to travel as a journalist, and the necessary accreditation was arranged with his paper. I was to take all the time I needed, and above all get out of Havana, and go into the country and see what was happening. He wanted to hear the viewpoints of Cubans of all kinds, from generals to waiters, and he still hoped that I might find some way of wheedling the fullest possible report out of the great Hemingway.

A few days later I flew to Havana, and, as suggested, took a room in the Seville Biltmore Hotel, in which Fleming’s contact Edward Scott occupied a penthouse flat. We met within minutes of my arrival in the dark and icy solitude of the hotel’s American bar. Scott was short, pink and rotund with a certain babyish innocence of expression that was wholly misleading. His manner, at first wary in the extreme, became congenial after he had read Fleming’s letter.

Scott was the editor of the English language newspaper, the
Havana Post
, but appeared to have other, somewhat mysterious irons in the fire. He was a man Fleming much admired. Ian liked to have his friends ask him if his character James Bond was based upon any living person, and although he almost certainly believed Bond largely reflected his own
personality, the standard reply was that he was a composite of a number of men of action he had known. When I asked the question that was expected of me, he agreed that Scott had contributed his share of the inspiration for his hero, while admitting that physical similarities were excluded in Scott’s case.

I mentioned to Scott that Fleming had asked me to see Hemingway and he seemed flabbergasted. The reason for his amazement was that of all persons, as he told me, he had just challenged Hemingway to a duel, following a fracas at a party given by the British Ambassador. Scott said that Hemingway had arrived in the company of the film actress Ava Gardner, who in a moment of high spirits had taken off her pants and waved them at the assembly. Scott, an ultra-patriotic New Zealander, had objected to what he saw as an insult to the Crown, and, following a bellicose scene with Hemingway, the challenge had gone forth.

Leaving the situation aside, Scott’s view was that Hemingway had withdrawn from the political scene, and no longer bothered himself with such uncomfortable things as wars and the rumours of wars and that, this being so, his views on the Castro revolt would have little value.
Nevertheless
, the briefing being what it was, I telephoned Hemingway’s home to be told that both Hemingway and his wife were ill with influenza, and were expected to be out of action for some days. I left my address and telephone number.

There seemed to be some uncertainty as to whether or not Hemingway would take up the challenge when he was on his feet again, and Scott, with whom I spent the first evenings in Havana, seeming to assume that any duel would be fought with pistols, always set aside a few minutes for target practice in a room fitted up like a range over his office. He used a pistol employing CO
₂
gas as the propellant for lead slugs. This fascinating and presumably lethal weapon was quite silent. We took turns to shoot at various small targets, but rarely hit anything.

Havana, most beautiful city of the Americas, had quite suddenly become a dangerous place. Until the middle fifties, life there – at least as a tourist saw it – had seemed like a permanent carnival, but, by the time of my visit in 1957, the spectacle of violence was commonplace. There was
a good view from the hotel window of the Presidential palace, and the garden-filled square in which it stood. The roads round the palace had been closed since March that year when twenty-one students had died in an attempt to shoot their way up to President Batista’s office on the second floor. Now there were armed men everywhere.

I was standing at the window on the second evening of my visit, studying this scene, when machine-guns in the square and on the palace roof opened fire, aiming it seemed in no particular direction, for a man standing on the balcony of a building across the street was hit, and fell, this being the first and last time in my life I had actually seen anyone struck by a bullet. Such nightly alarms had become part of the existence of Havana. That same evening I had just returned from a visit to the city morgue arranged by a reporter on the
Diario de la Marina
, where we saw the bodies of five murdered students recovered from the streets during the previous night. It was an only slightly grimmer harvest than average, the victims being members of one or other of the left-wing groups opposed to the dictatorship. Several had been savagely handled either before or after death, in one case the victim’s eyes having been gouged out. Batista’s police were held responsible for these outrages. Outside Havana, the situation was worse, and in the province of Oriente, a private army, led by Rolando Masferrer, was busily torturing and extirpating ‘Reds’ – in other words any members of the peasantry objecting to the feudal conditions in which they lived.

The Batista regime was in its death throes. This ex-army sergeant who had taken over power twenty-three years before, had shown himself the most capable, and in his social measures the most progressive president the country had ever known. The labour legislation he had enacted had established Cuba as one of the most advanced nations in Latin America. He had fought big business over his social security laws, and still had the support of the trade unions and the organised urban workers, whose wages were at this time the highest in Cuban history.

But now, old and tired, he governed by force rather than flair, and he was losing control. He had forfeited the affection of Cubans as a whole by his destruction of civil liberties, by press censorship, by the massive
corruption he closed his eyes to, and the ferocious repression of dissenters.

I was in Cuba to gather information, a task providing simple rules to be followed to obtain the best results. In all countries there are sections of the population who know more than most about what is going on, and are usually happy, and often eager to discuss their experiences and opinions with anyone showing interest in them. These include most of those in positions of responsibility and power, and on a lower level, members of the legal and medical professions, journalists, and above all priests – who know of everything that happens in their parish.

In Havana I had excellent contacts including Ruby Hart Phillips of the
New York Times
who had arranged Herbert Matthews’s visit to Castro in the Sierra, and who shared an office with Scott. Through Ruby, Scott, and others, I met bishops, disaffected senior officers, disgruntled politicians, student revolutionaries, a Batista torturer, the two legendary generals, Loynaz and Garcia Velez, both in their nineties who had led the last cavalry charges in the war against Spain, but above all those great capitalists, including Julio Lobo, Chief of the sugar barons, without whose favour Batista’s cause was lost.

From these encounters one certain fact emerged – that Castro’s revolt, so far from being a proletarian revolution, knew nothing of Marxism and took little interest in the industrial workers. This was the middle class in action, and the hundred or so sons of good families who had taken to the mountains were not only not Communists, but they were at daggers drawn with them. How was it possible to believe, as our American friends had succeeded in believing, that Castro, who was receiving financial support from half the sugar magnates of Cuba, could have been the advocate of world-revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat?

It was a moment when the United States was about to repeat its classic error in Latin America by renewing its assumption that any movement opposing a right-wing dictatorship must take its orders from Moscow. But in the case of Cuba this was not so. How was one to explain why the Cuban Communist Party should have sabotaged Castro’s 26th July Movement in every possible way?

The antipathy shown at this time by Communists for the Castro movement sometimes took extreme forms, and was returned in full measure. The chief concern of a Castro agent from the Sierra Maestra I met in Havana was that any of his former comrades who had become Party members might spot him and denounce him to the police. It was an attitude that provoked talk of reprisals among Castro’s men, including serious discussions as to whether or not the Communists should be granted legal existence after the Castro victory.

I found that three-fourths of the Cuban people were either openly or passively behind Castro, and it would have been logical for the United States to have thrown its weight behind him, too, in those days when every declaration from the Sierra was underlined by assurances of the wholly democratic intentions of the rebels, their respect for private property and for foreign investments, and of their determination to hold elections within weeks of taking over power. As it was, other decisions were taken, and the tottering figure of the dictator was supported by the Americans until the last. What little the majority of Castro’s followers knew of Communism in December 1957, they distrusted or disliked. Three years later, largely through the success of the economic boycott organised by the United States, they had been herded into the Communist fold.