Yours,
Tim
16 March
Dear Charles,
Many thanks for your cheering news. Loyalty has always been our great strength, and I am glad to hear that in this instance it has prevailed over the understandable desire to find a scapegoat. The whole affair is of course now stale news, but just for the record you may nevertheless be interested to learn the reason for our discomfiture, the more so in that it fully validates your spirited defence of the way the operation was handled.
I was beginning to despair of discovering the truth before we shut up shop here, when I was quite suddenly summoned yesterday to meet a senior official at the Air Ministry. My anonymous informant revealed that the subject of our extradition order had been detained by a unit of Air Force Intelligence concerned with internal security. The activities of these units, whose existence is officially denied, was of course one of the more embarrassing episodes in the television documentary we managed to suppress. Unofficially, they are estimated to have been responsible for the disappearance of over 5,000 people since the present regime seized power two years ago. An operation this size is bound to leave a few rough edges, of course, and the Amnesty mob have been circulating the usual horror stories, but all in all the Generals seem to have run a pretty clean campaign.
During the long and discursive statement he made to the court, the accused mentioned in passing his friendship with a certain Carlos Ventura, whom he knew during his earlier stay here. It was now explained to me that this Ventura, a labour lawyer with suspected guerrilla sympathies, had been one of the most dangerous opponents of the present regime, and that all his former friends and contacts are regarded as valid targets for the counter-insurgency operation already referred to. Air Force Intelligence therefore moved to block the extradition in order to allow them to pursue their own investigation, which they are no doubt even now doing with their customary vigour and thoroughness.
Despite the embarrassment which this affair has caused us, I feel that the economic reprisals which HMG is reportedly considering would be both inopportune and undeserved. I recall Bernard once remarking apropos of the Charter 88 people that you couldn’t make a revolution without smashing a few eggheads. If the Generalissimo and his colleagues have taken him at his word, who are we to criticize them for displaying a degree of realism about which we can only joke?
It will take me a few more days to wrap up things this end so as to leave no loose ends, but I hope to be back in London by the end of next week. I am looking forward eagerly to hearing more about the Dublin assignment. It sounds extremely daring, even by the standards of the house! Do please try and soften up the embassy in advance this time, though. A few discreet hints in advance of my arrival about the possibility of alternative postings in say Baghdad or Beirut might not go amiss.
Yours,
Tim
