A Very Private Celebrity (31 page)

This was a difficult time for the Freemans, and it did not get better.
When they holidayed with Joanna and Dan Rose at the exclusive summer colony of the Hamptons, Joanna noticed there was tension in the air. After Wes Pruden had taken Catherine and Corinna Metcalf down to Arkansas to show them his family roots, he tried to describe the trip to John at the next Redskins football game. ‘I said “We had a really good trip” and he said “I'm sure you did” and then he started to talk about the tactics of the game we were at. Wasn't interested.' Freeman had become so cold that Catherine was drawn to ask if he was having an affair? ‘You have the mind of a housemaid to ask such a question,' he replied. This, of course, was not an answer but it had the desired result of silencing her. That summer he went on his own to a dinner party given by the outspoken socialite Barbara Howar. She raised her voice down the table and asked him, ‘What's all this about Edna O'Brien?' Freeman froze her out: ‘I've no idea.' He must have realised he was treading on thin ice.

The more Freeman distanced himself from Catherine, the closer Judith moved to her. She became a kind of confidante. She was skilled at hairdressing and would put Catherine's hair up most evenings before parties, and in turn Catherine lent her evening dresses when she needed them. All this irritated the ambassador. Then, completely out of the blue during that summer of 1970, Judith handed in her notice. Catherine was stricken and begged her not to go. Judith seemed equally upset but insisted that family duties in South Africa came first. The ‘3100 REPORT', edited by Matthew Freeman age nine, noted the departure of Miss Mitchell. ‘We had a great party with a cookout and champagne. Lots of people cried. Mum made a good movie so we have something to remind us. Dad added:

The atmosphere in Massachusetts Avenue was now bleak. Freeman seemed hostile and Catherine reacted badly. There were scenes, sometimes witnessed by others. Robert Cassen, now working for the World Bank in Washington, was invited to several embassy dinner parties because, he said, he had the advantage of the single male:

On one occasion he asked the ambassador for career advice:

In 1970 the Freemans had been together for thirteen years.

When the Conservative Party surprisingly won the general election in June 1970, Freeman did not expect he would be retained as United States ambassador. Nor did he want to be. He had already written to Michael Stewart implying that he wanted to leave Washington even if Labour were returned to office. In fact, Edward Heath invited him to stay on but Freeman had made his mind up and, as usual, that was
that. He turned down the offer of a peerage, saying to Catherine that ‘if it could be proved that an Honour would help me do my job better, then I might consider it. Until then, I don't want one.' Despite his success, it was time to start a new life. About this time he was sounded out to be the next editor of
The Times
, an appointment he said he would have accepted, but it came to nothing. In public he gave his usual reason for leaving as the need to earn good money. In private he said that he was bored. In fact, in 1967 he had given an ‘indeterminate promise' to David Frost that he would join London Weekend Television as possible chairman when he left the diplomatic service and since then he had been written in, confidentially, as deputy chairman. Once again, if this career change worked out in practice, he would have been offered a job rather than having sought it.

The following week Freeman called on Prime Minister Edward Heath at 10 Downing Street with a
tour d'horizon
of the American scene. He gave him the President Nixon view that, with the withdrawal of American troops from Cambodia at the end of June, he had ‘weathered the worst of domestic reaction'. There would be ‘an honourable settlement in due course', probably after peace negotiations in the spring of 1971. The President was now turning his attention to the Middle East.

The Henry Kissinger/John Freeman hot line had one further revelation, this time for the new HMG. In a meeting on 17 July Kissinger told Freeman that there had been two recent occasions when Washington and Hanoi had held highly secret peace talks. They had failed because of deep mistrust on either side. This information was of ‘peculiar delicacy' Kissinger told Freeman, because probably even the state department did not know about it, or ‘if they did then there was no one there who would understand the significance. The information was known only in the most restricted circles of the White House.'
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There can be no stronger evidence of Freeman's success as United States ambassador than this. He was able to pass on to a foreign government such hugely important information pertaining to the end of the Vietnam War that even the US state department possibly did not know about it.

In September 1970 a political crisis blew up that diplomats must dread; it blew in from nowhere and could have spiralled out of control. Freeman was involved not only as go-between but also as advice giver. On 6 September, terrorists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three jetliners shortly after they took off from European airports towards the United States. Hijackers on the El Al. flight from Amsterdam were subdued in mid-air and the plane landed safely in London, so the PFLP retaliated by hijacking a fourth jet, diverting it to Cairo and blowing it up. The remaining two hijacked planes landed on a desert strip in Jordan called Dawson Field, where they were joined by a fourth hijacked plane three days later. Nearly 500 passengers from these TWA, Swissair and BOAC planes were marooned in the desert, now renamed Revolution Field. The aim of the hijackers was to trade these hostages for imprisoned Palestinian terrorists in Israel, Germany and Switzerland, from where these planes had flown, and from Britain too because a PFLP terrorist, Leila Khaled, had tried to hijack the El Al. flight from Amsterdam and was now under guard in London.

Edward Heath's new British government was in a quandary. Sixty-five of the hostages were British. Should it ‘give in to fedayeen blackmail and save lives, or take a very stiff stand and run the risk of losing lives?' It's task was made more difficult because it needed to act in unison with the governments of the United States, Germany and Switzerland (the so-called ‘Berne Group') and Israel too; and ‘any response needed to be concerted in Washington'. That is why
Freeman was heavily involved. In essence, Israel refused to negotiate, the Berne Group was ready to trade hostages in Jordan for terrorists in their countries, organised through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), but the United States refused to put any pressure on Israel. And Israel's cooperation, obviously, was crucial.

By 11 September, 375 of the passengers had been released and the planes blown up, but fifty-six hostages remained in the desert, Jews and Americans. Now tempers between Washington and London became frayed. Freeman was required, sometimes during the night, to convey messages between a rattled Alec Douglas-Home (British Foreign Secretary) and a nettled William Rogers (American Secretary of State). On 13 September, Prime Minister Heath announced that the British would negotiate come what may, and feelings boiled over in this transatlantic phone call between Joseph Sisco, a top White House aide, and Denis Greenhill:

Freeman's attitude, as usual, was to warn against any split with the United States. And with his usual ability for lateral thinking he proposed a way of keeping a united front but still securing the release of the remaining hostages. He suggested to William Rogers that the
Israelis should ‘acquiesce through silence' for the ICRC to negotiate with the PFLP, if only to find out exactly what its terms were for the release of fedayeen in Israel. This would, at least, gain time.

And so it happened. Soon the hostage issue was subsumed into a larger crisis. This was the ‘Black September' civil war between King Hussein and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for the control of Jordan, into which Iraq and Syria could easily have been drawn. By the end of September, the Berne Group countries and Israel had all released fedayeen prisoners (including Leila Khaled) and the remaining passenger hostages were released.

Freeman's decision to resign as ambassador was not unexpected but no successor had been approached so there was no hurry for him to leave. Catherine wanted the boys to finish their summer term at Sidwell Friends, a progressive Quaker school in Washington, while she took a temporary job offered her by Ben Bradlee, editor of the
Washington Post
, as TV correspondent. But Freeman was keen to go. On 5 January 1971 he said goodbye to the President and three days later he presented his ‘valedictory despatch'. He had three main points to make that most concerned Great Britain:

His signing-off was formal and courteous, without the tongue-in-cheek eighteenth-century parody he had adopted in New Delhi:

In
The Washington Embassy: British Ambassadors to the United States 1939 –1977
, John W. Young summed up Freeman's six years as a diplomat:

Lord Renwick is specific:

As for Dr Kissinger, he wasted no time contacting former Foreign Secretary George Brown to correct the statement in his autobiography
In My Way
that his appointment of Freeman to Washington was ‘a mistake':

In 2015 I asked Dr Kissinger if he had been surprised and disappointed when Freeman decided to leave Washington – after only twenty months into his years of a successful ambassadorship? His answer was revealing. He said he had always assumed that Freeman left because of the change of government from Wilson to Heath. This shows how little Freeman discussed his life even with those few who considered themselves friends. Nor did Dr Kissinger realise how ‘compartmentalised' Freeman's life was, to use his own word. ‘I guess I never really knew him. He never talked about himself.'