The Ghost

riots. It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise if the CIA had decided to recruit a few bright young things and had encouraged them to make their careers in useful places—the civil service, the media, politics. It’s what they do everywhere else, after all.”
    “But not in Britain, surely,” I said. “We’re an ally.”
    Rycart looked at me with contempt. “The CIA was spying on American students back then. Do you really think they’d have been squeamish about spying on ours? Of course they were active in Britain! They still are. They have a head of station in London and a huge staff. I could name you half a dozen MPs right now who are in regular contact with the CIA. In fact—” He stopped pacing and clicked his fingers. “That’s a thought!” He whirled round to look at me. “Does the name Reg Giffen mean anything to you?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “Reg Giffen—Sir Reginald Giffen, later Lord Giffen, now dead Giffen, thank God—spent so long making speeches in the House of Commons on behalf of the Americans, we used to call him the member for Michigan. He announced his resignation as an MP in the first week of the nineteen eighty-three election general campaign, and it caught everyone by surprise, apart from one very enterprising and photogenic young party member, who just happened to have moved into his constituency six months earlier.”
    “And who then got the nomination to become the party’s candidate, with Giffen’s support,” I said, “and who then won one of the safest seats in the country when he was still only thirty.” The story was legendary. It was the start of Lang’s rise to national prominence. “But you can’t really think that the CIA asked Giffen to help fix it so that Lang could get into parliament? That sounds very far-fetched.”
    “Oh, come on! Use your imagination! Imagine you’re Professor Emmett, now back in Harvard, writing unreadable bilge about the alliance of the English-speaking peoples and the need to combat the Communist menace. Haven’t you got potentially the most amazing agent in history on your hands? A man who’s already starting to be talked about as a future party leader? A possible prime minister? Aren’t you going to persuade the powers that be at the Agency to do everything they can to further this man’s career? I was already in parliament myself when Lang arrived. I watched him come from nowhere and streak past all of us.” He scowled at the memory. “Of course he had help . He had no real connection with the party at all. We couldn’t begin to understand what made him tick.”
    “Surely that’s the point of him,” I said. “He didn’t have an ideology.”
    “He may not have had an ideology, but he sure as hell had an agenda.” Rycart sat down again. He leaned toward me. “Okay. Here’s a quiz for you. Name me one decision that Adam Lang took as prime minister that wasn’t in the interests of the United States of America.”
    I was silent.
    “Come on,” he said. “It’s not a trick question. Just name me one thing he did that Washington wouldn’t have approved of. Let’s think.” He held up his thumb. “One: deployment of British troops to the Middle East, against the advice of just about every senior commander in our armed forces and all of our ambassadors who know the region. Two”—up went his right index finger—“complete failure to demand any kind of quid pro quo from the White House in terms of reconstruction contracts for British firms, or anything else. Three: unwavering support for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, even when it’s patently crazy for us to set ourselves against the entire Arab world. Four: the stationing of an American missile defense system on British soil that does absolutely nothing for our security—in fact, the complete opposite: it makes us a more obvious target for a first strike and can provide protection only for the U.S. Five: the purchase, for fifty billion dollars, of an American nuclear missile system that we call ‘independent’ but that we wouldn’t be able to fire without U.S. approval, thus binding his successors to another twenty years of subservience to Washington over defense policy. Six: a treaty that allows the U.S. to extradite our citizens to stand trial in America but doesn’t allow us to do the same to theirs. Seven: collusion in the illegal kidnapping, torture, imprisonment, and even murder of our own citizens. Eight: a consistent record of sacking of any