The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth Page A

Minister, the newcomer would have carte blanche, backed by the Hard Left-dominated National Executive Committee of the Party, to reform his Cabinet wholly in his own image and to embark upon the intended legislative program forthwith. In short, the populace would have voted for an apparently Soft Left traditionalist or at least reformist government, but a full Hard Left regime would have taken office without the irksome necessity of an intervening election.
    As for the legislative program, it constitutes at this stage a plan for twenty desired measures that have not yet, for obvious reasons, been put to paper. All of those measures have long been the sought-after program of the Hard Left, though only a few are included in the official Labour Party manifesto, and then in watered-down form.
    The twenty-point plan is known as the Manifesto for the British Revolution—or MBR for short. The first fifteen points concern mass nationalization of private enterprise, property, and wealth; abolition of all private landholding, medical care, and education; subordination of the teaching professions, police force, information media, and law courts to state control; and abolition of the House of Lords, which has the power to veto an act of self-perpetuation by an elected government. (Evidently, the British revolution could not be stopped or put into reverse at the whim of the electorate.)
    But the final five points of the MBR vitally concern us here in the Soviet Union, so I will list them.
    1. Britain’s immediate withdrawal, regardless of any treaty obligations, from the European Economic Community.
    2. The downscaling without delay of all Britain’s conventional armed forces to one fifth of their present size.
    3. The immediate abolition and destruction of all Britain’s nuclear weapons and weapon-delivery systems.
    4. The expulsion from Britain without delay of all United States forces, nuclear and conventional, along with all their personnel and matériel.
    5. Britain’s immediate withdrawal from, and repudiation of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
    I need hardly underline, Comrade General Secretary, that these last five proposals would wreck the defenses of the Western Alliance beyond any possible hope of repair in our lifetimes, if indeed ever. With Britain gone, the smaller NATO nations would probably follow suit, and NATO would wither on the vine, isolating the United States firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.
    Obviously, everything I have outlined and described within this memorandum depends for its full implementation on a Labour Party victory, and for this the next election, expected in the spring of 1988, may well be the last opportunity.
    All the above was, in fact, what I meant by my remark at General Kryuchkov’s dinner that the political stability of Britain is constantly overestimated in Moscow “and never more so than at the present time.”
     
    Yours sincerely,
    Harold Adrian Russell Philby
     
    The General Secretary’s response to the memorandum was surprisingly and gratifyingly prompt. Barely more than a day after Philby had consigned the memorandum into the hands of Major Pavlov, the inscrutable and cold-eyed young officer from the Ninth Directorate was back. He bore in his hands a single manila envelope, which he handed to Philby without a word before turning away.
    It was another handwritten letter from the General Secretary, brief and to the point as usual.
    In it the Soviet leader thanked his friend Philby for his efforts. He himself had been able to confirm the contents of the memorandum as perfectly accurate. In consequence of this, he considered the victory of the British Labour Party at the next general election to have become a matter of top priority for the USSR. He was calling into being a small, restricted advisory committee, responsible and answerable only to himself, to counsel him upon possible future courses. He required and requested Harold Philby to act as adviser to that