One of the constant issues in my life has been the relationship between the individual and the state closely followed by such concerns as the role of the independent organisation and the individual and the balance between democratic states and organisations. Running through all of these considerations is the challenge which every individual experiences of maintaining consistency in their relations with others, their integrity and commitment to the truth whether as parent or between government and the people. There are those who have attempted some successfully, to construct all embracing systems of thoughts and behaviours through religious, political and social systems to achieve this although I suspect as the core of everything is the need for personal survival and the survival of those one cares about. In recent weeks I have listened to account of mothers who have left their husbands, extended families and all that they know to walk in horrendous conditions without or with little food and water great distances in attempt to bring their children to where they have been told help is available.
Human being are said not be able to bear too much reality of this nature and indeed as I get older and questions about my own future survival loom larger I find the distress of empathy, albeit at a distance, is sometimes more than I can bear which is why I frequently bury myself in the dramatic fictions of experience although I continue to demand integrity even when the ending satisfies the need for a meaningful sense of justice, continuing survival, resolutions of mysteries and uncertainties, the belief in life everlasting, in the possibilities of heaven on earth as well as in some form of afterlife and in my instance to die at peaces with everyone and myself.
I like the character of Salvo, Bruno Salvador sufficiently to hope that his experience over one weekend bringing about a peaceful settlement and better future for the people of his childhood ends well although as I read Le Carré’s Mission song for first time against my outline knowledge of recent events in central Africa especially the Rwandan massacres and the ongoing civil wars of the Congo, I doubted if there would be any such outcome, especially given my knowledge of previous writings of Monsieur Le Carré. It also seemed unlikely that the finding his emotional and sexual soul mate in Hannah, the nurse finishing her training in the UK from the homeland would end in their happiness, for he appeared to be his father’s son and any break down of his existing marriage unless it was from the initiative of his wife was destined to have repercussions given their respective backgrounds and her father‘s occupation. I had already wrestled with how the British Consul in Kampala had fixed for him to enter orphanage in the Sussex downs as a UK citizen when the more likely destination would have been Eire.
As with the small state of Malta Eire and not Northern Ireland is famed for producing Catholic priests who serve Rome and the rest of the world although in the most recent decades Poland and some Africa countries have enriched the churches of the UK and elsewhere as much a sin their homelands.
But I am in advance of myself again as when I left the adventure of Salvo for this is how he regarded his $5000 weekend assignment to an island in the North Sea where a small group of representatives from the warring factions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were to hold talks to bring peace, at least in the Kivu part of the country rich is various minerals especially coltan needed by the mobile phone industry. I broke off my narrative as he had reached the island with his immediate guide explaining that in order to bring about an agreed and signed contract between the parties it was necessary for him to spy on the parties by pretending he was limited in the languages and dialects available to him and that in translating one language to another he should remember the diplomatic nature of the exchanges and which meant in practice toning down threats and insults.
The island of their destination remained unknown although with a flying time of two hours from Luton he was able to calculate he was in the North of Scotland or some Danish or Nordic outpost but seemed less likely given the requirement to by pass the usual posting of flight plans and passenger list although it is possible for one to have been posted with false identities although the transfer of extensive listening and communicating technology would have required a custom’s check or some official sanctioning otherwise the passage of terrorist firearms and explosives within Europe would be easier than I have feared.
Their small craft landed in a field close to the sea where they were a short distance minibus ride to a country house crossing cattle grid and with a Great Hall entrance and from here was shown to his bed with the promise of a long hard day on the morrow and the comforting thought that if he screwed up they all would. On waking he attempted to identify his location from the window of his well appointed en suite all mod cons room without success but he puzzled over men at work on an outside building when had he been less innocent he should have immediately grasped was the establishment of listening and communication technology and a clue that had the location been UK such arrangements would have been made prior to their arrival.
It is at this point that he sees someone from the plane that he already knew. The voluble Welsh Spider who had taken the role of catering organiser but he knew from the listening centre in the bowels of the MOD known as the Chat Room. The significance of this added to the view that although the leader was no an employee of Her Majesty’s government, the operation was however clandestine. He also noticed three “bulked out anoraks” outside the property although he does not disclose if they are evidently armed. He hoped his investigation of the house would yield a clue to his location and the large library room offered one opportunity except from the spine lettering the books appeared to have been printed in the various languages of their authors and the glass fronts of the book cases were locked, A sense of the proportions of the property could be gauged from a separate snooker billiards table room albeit three quarter size.
In is on the next stop of his unguided tour that he encountered a man from Beasacon who explained that he was skilled in International jurisprudence and employed as a lawyer by their host syndicate and which Salvo assumed had a cover story similar to his own. The man did explain that his every day skill was to create a holding company in Martinique for example which was registered in Switzerland and owned by an anonymous Liechtenstein foundation which is owned by you and all for the purpose of avoiding all together or paying as little tax as legally possible. He had forgotten to bring his lap top (which struck me as the reality on which most clandestine operations flounder) and therefore had borrowed one with Anglo Saxon keyboard and therefore he was at a loss without knowing how to locate the keys with accents to create the draft contract for the participants in French.
Now this is where I express surprise because via the Internet it is possible to obtain keyboard language switching programmes which remedy this problem as long as you know the appropriate form in which to type in one language and convert to another so that it makes sense to the eventual reader. The Internet front page should also have been a clue to the language of the location.
The man appeared as voluble as the Welshman offering the additional information that the contract would be between three parties but would have no name and cover hypothetical eventualities. Further questioning revealed that it would centre on an unspecified event and be written as an agricultural contract which fitted into the requirements that Salvo if pressed would say that his employers (Channel Islands based) provided agricultural technology to the Third and Four worlds.
It was at this point that that the Frenchman yielded information for the observant Salvo which he was able to connect to the Lord Brinkley of Sands because in order to illustrate the nature of his craft Salvo was told that the man had previously negotiated a timeshare contract for an offshore property company that went into liquidation and which therefore no longer existed and the directors did not exist because the company never had a name, Salvo remembered a story in the newspaper of his wife which linked Lord Brinkley with the headline: Peer’s Eldorado was Pie in the Sky.
The Frenchman also revealed that in contrast to Salvo’s payment he was getting two hundred thousand Swiss Francs in cash and in small denominations. This highlights he differences in experience but also perspectives and between the amateur and the professional in such affairs between the representatives of nations and peoples.
Summoned together he found an English breakfast of sausage, bacon and scrambled eggs that had few takers and he had barely started to eat a portion of smoked salmon when Maxie announced that the panic, whatever it had been, was over and everything was no on schedule according to plan. Philip and the gang of three will touch down in two hours and ten minutes. He then announced that the Royal Party would arrive 20 mins later. Conference starts at eleven thirty, lunch two fifteen subject to progress with a five thirty latest closure. He then called for Brian Sinclair and the second part of his sealed orders.
He was shown into the makeshift operations room in which some twenty four locations in the house and grounds were identified as being bugged and automatically recorded on the banks of recorders. He was shown his chair and explained that he would told via the controller Sam who to listen to live and to translate fast. In off time he would be told what tapes to skim through and what to report to the “people who can use it.” It was the job of the Welshman to keep the system working and of Anton to ensure the whereabouts the subject are located each identifiable through a system of coloured lights on a master location board.
Salvo having tried a number of times to find out more about Philip for the umpteenth time and was rewarded after a fashion, told that he was freelance, a consultant whose speciality was Africa and English but different from the others who had ties but were para. There was further enlightenment that elsewhere there was a conference officially taking place on the future of the Eastern Congo ahead of the forthcoming elections were it was anticipated there would be much ranting and no outcome, that is at the conference, but alas I suspect at the elections! Three of delegates said they would prefer to rest than take the tour of fish smokeries and sculpture parks but were on their way to this second unofficial get together where through previous contacts and hard work by Philip they were in the process of forming an alliance which it was hoped to seal over the course of the day.
The key was the Mwangaza at whose mention a bright light came across the face of Salvo because this was name he had been told of by Hannah in adoration for he was presented as cross between Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, who she had heard address a crowd of supporters in Birmingham. He had followed in the footsteps of Lumumba after his assassination by the CIA in 1961 and in great rebellion of 1964 he had been wounded. Now he spoke of lasting peace and reconciliation and the departure back over the border to Rwanda of the surrogate armies and genocidal militias. On being told this Salvo had remembered the words of father: One Kivu at peace and free of the pet of foreign exploitation but willing to embrace those who will to help the use of the natural resources for the betterment of the people. Now I used to talk like that in my youth but in the late age of worldly experience, I ask you what dangerous stuff to inflict on a child anywhere let alone under the African sun. But then of course we continue to do to our children in fairy stories of various kinds.
The purpose of Maxie’s enlightenment of Salvo was that he should know in advance the languages used by the participants and this led to him explaining that the Muslim Hammas former fanatical whose Arabic tone Salvo had identified at the home of Lord Brinkley was the Lebanese Christian covert middle man that had brokered the proposed alliance on behalf of the great man. It was then that dear Salvo once more posed the question: what was to be the successful outcome of the conference that he was told a little more of the truth of the Big Lie..... Which in addition to giving the country back to its people Maxie added was to “make money and get a fucking life”
Human being are said not be able to bear too much reality of this nature and indeed as I get older and questions about my own future survival loom larger I find the distress of empathy, albeit at a distance, is sometimes more than I can bear which is why I frequently bury myself in the dramatic fictions of experience although I continue to demand integrity even when the ending satisfies the need for a meaningful sense of justice, continuing survival, resolutions of mysteries and uncertainties, the belief in life everlasting, in the possibilities of heaven on earth as well as in some form of afterlife and in my instance to die at peaces with everyone and myself.
I like the character of Salvo, Bruno Salvador sufficiently to hope that his experience over one weekend bringing about a peaceful settlement and better future for the people of his childhood ends well although as I read Le Carré’s Mission song for first time against my outline knowledge of recent events in central Africa especially the Rwandan massacres and the ongoing civil wars of the Congo, I doubted if there would be any such outcome, especially given my knowledge of previous writings of Monsieur Le Carré. It also seemed unlikely that the finding his emotional and sexual soul mate in Hannah, the nurse finishing her training in the UK from the homeland would end in their happiness, for he appeared to be his father’s son and any break down of his existing marriage unless it was from the initiative of his wife was destined to have repercussions given their respective backgrounds and her father‘s occupation. I had already wrestled with how the British Consul in Kampala had fixed for him to enter orphanage in the Sussex downs as a UK citizen when the more likely destination would have been Eire.
As with the small state of Malta Eire and not Northern Ireland is famed for producing Catholic priests who serve Rome and the rest of the world although in the most recent decades Poland and some Africa countries have enriched the churches of the UK and elsewhere as much a sin their homelands.
But I am in advance of myself again as when I left the adventure of Salvo for this is how he regarded his $5000 weekend assignment to an island in the North Sea where a small group of representatives from the warring factions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were to hold talks to bring peace, at least in the Kivu part of the country rich is various minerals especially coltan needed by the mobile phone industry. I broke off my narrative as he had reached the island with his immediate guide explaining that in order to bring about an agreed and signed contract between the parties it was necessary for him to spy on the parties by pretending he was limited in the languages and dialects available to him and that in translating one language to another he should remember the diplomatic nature of the exchanges and which meant in practice toning down threats and insults.
The island of their destination remained unknown although with a flying time of two hours from Luton he was able to calculate he was in the North of Scotland or some Danish or Nordic outpost but seemed less likely given the requirement to by pass the usual posting of flight plans and passenger list although it is possible for one to have been posted with false identities although the transfer of extensive listening and communicating technology would have required a custom’s check or some official sanctioning otherwise the passage of terrorist firearms and explosives within Europe would be easier than I have feared.
Their small craft landed in a field close to the sea where they were a short distance minibus ride to a country house crossing cattle grid and with a Great Hall entrance and from here was shown to his bed with the promise of a long hard day on the morrow and the comforting thought that if he screwed up they all would. On waking he attempted to identify his location from the window of his well appointed en suite all mod cons room without success but he puzzled over men at work on an outside building when had he been less innocent he should have immediately grasped was the establishment of listening and communication technology and a clue that had the location been UK such arrangements would have been made prior to their arrival.
It is at this point that he sees someone from the plane that he already knew. The voluble Welsh Spider who had taken the role of catering organiser but he knew from the listening centre in the bowels of the MOD known as the Chat Room. The significance of this added to the view that although the leader was no an employee of Her Majesty’s government, the operation was however clandestine. He also noticed three “bulked out anoraks” outside the property although he does not disclose if they are evidently armed. He hoped his investigation of the house would yield a clue to his location and the large library room offered one opportunity except from the spine lettering the books appeared to have been printed in the various languages of their authors and the glass fronts of the book cases were locked, A sense of the proportions of the property could be gauged from a separate snooker billiards table room albeit three quarter size.
In is on the next stop of his unguided tour that he encountered a man from Beasacon who explained that he was skilled in International jurisprudence and employed as a lawyer by their host syndicate and which Salvo assumed had a cover story similar to his own. The man did explain that his every day skill was to create a holding company in Martinique for example which was registered in Switzerland and owned by an anonymous Liechtenstein foundation which is owned by you and all for the purpose of avoiding all together or paying as little tax as legally possible. He had forgotten to bring his lap top (which struck me as the reality on which most clandestine operations flounder) and therefore had borrowed one with Anglo Saxon keyboard and therefore he was at a loss without knowing how to locate the keys with accents to create the draft contract for the participants in French.
Now this is where I express surprise because via the Internet it is possible to obtain keyboard language switching programmes which remedy this problem as long as you know the appropriate form in which to type in one language and convert to another so that it makes sense to the eventual reader. The Internet front page should also have been a clue to the language of the location.
The man appeared as voluble as the Welshman offering the additional information that the contract would be between three parties but would have no name and cover hypothetical eventualities. Further questioning revealed that it would centre on an unspecified event and be written as an agricultural contract which fitted into the requirements that Salvo if pressed would say that his employers (Channel Islands based) provided agricultural technology to the Third and Four worlds.
It was at this point that that the Frenchman yielded information for the observant Salvo which he was able to connect to the Lord Brinkley of Sands because in order to illustrate the nature of his craft Salvo was told that the man had previously negotiated a timeshare contract for an offshore property company that went into liquidation and which therefore no longer existed and the directors did not exist because the company never had a name, Salvo remembered a story in the newspaper of his wife which linked Lord Brinkley with the headline: Peer’s Eldorado was Pie in the Sky.
The Frenchman also revealed that in contrast to Salvo’s payment he was getting two hundred thousand Swiss Francs in cash and in small denominations. This highlights he differences in experience but also perspectives and between the amateur and the professional in such affairs between the representatives of nations and peoples.
Summoned together he found an English breakfast of sausage, bacon and scrambled eggs that had few takers and he had barely started to eat a portion of smoked salmon when Maxie announced that the panic, whatever it had been, was over and everything was no on schedule according to plan. Philip and the gang of three will touch down in two hours and ten minutes. He then announced that the Royal Party would arrive 20 mins later. Conference starts at eleven thirty, lunch two fifteen subject to progress with a five thirty latest closure. He then called for Brian Sinclair and the second part of his sealed orders.
He was shown into the makeshift operations room in which some twenty four locations in the house and grounds were identified as being bugged and automatically recorded on the banks of recorders. He was shown his chair and explained that he would told via the controller Sam who to listen to live and to translate fast. In off time he would be told what tapes to skim through and what to report to the “people who can use it.” It was the job of the Welshman to keep the system working and of Anton to ensure the whereabouts the subject are located each identifiable through a system of coloured lights on a master location board.
Salvo having tried a number of times to find out more about Philip for the umpteenth time and was rewarded after a fashion, told that he was freelance, a consultant whose speciality was Africa and English but different from the others who had ties but were para. There was further enlightenment that elsewhere there was a conference officially taking place on the future of the Eastern Congo ahead of the forthcoming elections were it was anticipated there would be much ranting and no outcome, that is at the conference, but alas I suspect at the elections! Three of delegates said they would prefer to rest than take the tour of fish smokeries and sculpture parks but were on their way to this second unofficial get together where through previous contacts and hard work by Philip they were in the process of forming an alliance which it was hoped to seal over the course of the day.
The key was the Mwangaza at whose mention a bright light came across the face of Salvo because this was name he had been told of by Hannah in adoration for he was presented as cross between Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, who she had heard address a crowd of supporters in Birmingham. He had followed in the footsteps of Lumumba after his assassination by the CIA in 1961 and in great rebellion of 1964 he had been wounded. Now he spoke of lasting peace and reconciliation and the departure back over the border to Rwanda of the surrogate armies and genocidal militias. On being told this Salvo had remembered the words of father: One Kivu at peace and free of the pet of foreign exploitation but willing to embrace those who will to help the use of the natural resources for the betterment of the people. Now I used to talk like that in my youth but in the late age of worldly experience, I ask you what dangerous stuff to inflict on a child anywhere let alone under the African sun. But then of course we continue to do to our children in fairy stories of various kinds.
The purpose of Maxie’s enlightenment of Salvo was that he should know in advance the languages used by the participants and this led to him explaining that the Muslim Hammas former fanatical whose Arabic tone Salvo had identified at the home of Lord Brinkley was the Lebanese Christian covert middle man that had brokered the proposed alliance on behalf of the great man. It was then that dear Salvo once more posed the question: what was to be the successful outcome of the conference that he was told a little more of the truth of the Big Lie..... Which in addition to giving the country back to its people Maxie added was to “make money and get a fucking life”
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