The Unsung Heroes - 22 March 2002

At the beginning of November, I believe, I sat here looking out on what was then the rolling foliage of Central Park - a scene which, for the moment, acted like a cool hand on the brow to calm the low fever of thinking about anthrax, the beginning of unemployment lines and other undreamed-of consequences of two awful hours.

True, once commercial aviation was restored we heard again the comforting of airplanes trundling into La Guardia airport.

But soon there was another sound. It was the sound of a bed sheet being ripped in one motion - not loud.

It was the sound of a fighter jet on patrol at the speed of 1100 miles an hour.

Since the week after doomsday the air force and the navy have flown more than 19,000 flights, 11,000 air force men have been involved.

And it strikes me, rather late in the day, that the pilots - who fly both day and night, sometimes 10-hour shifts - are the unsung heroes of this war.

A retired airline pilot, who had miraculously survived an overload of combat missions in Vietnam, shuddered when he heard the daily routine of the fighter jet pilots.

"In those planes, flying at that speed," he said, "you can't just fly on auto and come alert for the landing. Boy, what a schedule!"

In talking to friends and family throughout the past six months I find that although no doubt they'd heard about the fighter patrol service when it first went into action they'd forgotten about it since and I know nobody who had noticed the strange new noise ripping the sky.

But then I went a lifetime in total ignorance of the different noises given off by the transmission shift of different cars, automobiles, which was known to every neighbour's little boy from the age of six. I apologise.

How astounded we are in watching television game shows to discover that a wizard entrant who instantly knows all sorts of arcane and exotic things doesn't know the one thing we've known all our lives.

Well now the Bush administration has just announced that it's about to reduce the continuous 24-hour patrols to 12 hours.

And the immediate response? New Yorkers who'd never known about their comforting day and night protection are up in arms, shouting "monstrous" and "how dare they!"

With a tact that has become characteristic of this administration's practice of public relations it was simultaneously announced that the full day and night protection of Washington would continue and - oh yes, by the way - so would the radar detection screen that encircles the capital city.

The senior United States senator from New York sent a letter of protest to the director of the new agency, Domestic Security.

And the junior senator from New York - one Hillary Rodham Clinton - was more philosophically critical:

"It's logical that Washington, the seat of all three branches of the government, should have preferential protection - but," she said, "without more information, it's difficult to know what that logic is."

The White House and the air force have responded to these protests by saying that the work of domestic security over the past six months has greatly increased the protection of airplane passengers and the chances of intrusive enemy planes as a weapon of war.

They mentioned the reinforcing of cockpit doors, the required presence of federal marshals on flights and the far more stringent screening of people and their baggage.

They throw in, with pardonable pride, the effort to recruit and train practically every Alsatian - German shepherd - dog in sight. There are now 200 of them on duty at central airports and they want at least a hundred more.

And by the way, the administration adds, even the best dogs can sniff around effectively for no more than an hour, at the end of which time they're no better than we are.

The White House disposed of the subject by saying that the decision over New York's F-15s and 16s was not taken out of a sense that the country was now safe but safer because of "intelligence information and threat analysis".

That there is such a thing as an agency that does nothing but analyse possible threats - from letters, internet codes, abandoned war documents in Afghanistan, the interrogating of suspects, the search for likely suspects among the six to 12 million immigrants who are living here illegally - this will be news to most of us.

But so will the recent disclosure that the FBI's counter-terrorist squad has been in existence for 20 years.

And how about a sombre little obituary that came out only a week or so ago? About a particularly able and courageous FBI man who was singled out by President Clinton eight years ago to devote his time and travels to tracking down Bin Laden.

After eight years he gave up and he got a new job a year or less ago. He became head of security for the World Trade Center. He was blown up on 11 September.

I have remarked recently and regretfully about this administration's gift - which never seems to weaken - for diplomatic clangers, booboos or brick dropping.

Since October there'd been much admiration for the swift and successful conduct of a war which practically every European military expert, and the general who won the Vietnamese war, said would take as long as the Afghan wars that drove out the British in one century and in the next took - was it? - 12 years to bury the Russian empire.

This admiration was too often tempered by embarrassment at the administration's uncanny gift for making bold declarations of policy, which while being intended to comfort the allies, actually shocked or rebuffed them.

More recently two big declarations of policy would have seemed in any previous administration I can think of to be exactly the sort of information you don't publish for general consumption.

I'm referring now to the astonishing publication of the names of eight nations that may be considered possible nuclear threats to the United States. They included, among the usual Middle Eastern suspects, Russia and China.

Now during the past, let's say four months, the administration has been saying that a close and warm relationship with Russia - from now on to be considered almost as an American ally - was something not only devoutly to be wished but was already on its way to being accomplished.

It gave great cheer to us just, as I recall, around Christmas time, which is a good time to celebrate anywhere the arrival of goodwill.

And China? Mr Bush is about to visit China. In the interest, he assured us, of improving the American relationship, and not through trade only.

So, though that has always been more wished for than accomplished, never mind - bang, bang - Russia and China are, a decade after the Cold War ended, still potential enemies.

And if that wasn't enough to ruin the beginning of at least one beautiful friendship, next thing to hit the front pages was the disclosure of plans for countering a nuclear attack on Washington.

This and similar plans are already on paper in every nation with a nuclear capability.

The other night, or two, I went through the memoir of a retired British ambassador to the United States.

It is indeed explicitly a book about the continually sticking relations over 50 years between London and Washington - what used to be called "Anglo-American relations" and later still "the special relationship", a phrase which today elicits a groan among thoughtful people interested in knowing rather what happened and why and how it appeared at the time and in retrospect to the principal actors on both sides.

That is the actual written aim of the author. Sentimental pro-American Brits and Cotswold-loving Americans will find here little to delight them.

Sir Robin Renwick is not in the maudlin business of marvelling with a sob over the wonderful heritage of two nations that speak the same language, have the same Roman legacy of the law et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But from Churchill to George Bush I, there is hardly a chapter in which the prime minister and the president do not spend at least half the time of a conference - whatever the announced subject of their summit - half their time discussing, bargaining for, arguing over, specific nuclear weapons.

Words like Sidewinder, Trident, Skybolt, echo and re-echo through the conversations of Attlee, Carter, Thatcher, Kissinger - name your prime minister, president or foreign secretary.

What the author does not print are the revelation to each other of their separate contingency plans.

That is what the present Bush administration has just done. Every nation with an army and navy, since the Greeks, maybe the Persians, has had a contingency plan - which is a plan of battle against the worst possible thing that could happen.

The first time I heard of a contingency plan and knew what it was about I was scared stiff. My hairs stood on end, as my friend Wooster used to say, like quills on the fretful porcupine.

And that was - oh - 65 years ago.

So Mr Bush and his advisers thought, as they should and must, of a full-scale nuclear attack on Washington and made opposing plans accordingly.

It has done this for at least 57 years but no president and his accompanying three wise men - vice-president, secretary of state, secretary of defence - has ever before published them to satisfy that mad right, claimed by so many Americans, the right to know everything.

I suppose the memory of these two diplomatic howlers will fade in time. For the good of all of us it can't be too soon.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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