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TROUBLE WITH HENRY 279
Street, in the shape of Edward Heath. Britain's new Prime
Minister was not convinced of the value of the special relationship.
He tended to question the continual flow of American
requests for new base rights on British territory, and was more
inclined to seek friends in Europe. Over time, personal difficulties
between Nixon, Kissinger and Heath led to serious problems
in intelligence cooperation. These were only addressed in
March 1974, when Heath departed, following an infamous
winter of trade union unrest in Britain. Richard Nixon resigned
a few months later as a result of Watergate; however, Kissinger
stayed on to serve the new Gerald Ford administration as
Secretary of State until 1977.
Despite the potent mixture of personalities, the Anglo­
American relationship under Nixon and Kissinger began well.
One of Kissinger's many peculiarities was that he often trusted
senior British officials with confidences that he would not
extend to the US State Department. From the outset, the Nixon
presidency was dominated by efforts to resolve the Vietnam
conflict. On 20 July 1970, Kissinger met the outgoing British
Ambassador, John Freeman, to consider a sigint report about
Nikolay Firyubin, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, who
had been overheard discussing the possibility of a major summit
on Vietnam. Kissinger was sceptical, but the sigint report had
clearly intrigued him, since the Soviets were now Hanoi's principal
backers. The source was 'intercepts from internal communications'
secured during Firyubin's recent visit to Delhi, and
they seemed to show that the Soviets were keen on 'a negotiated
end to the war in the not very distant future'. Kissinger
extended further confidences to the British:
*
Firyubin ... had told the Indians that there had been two
occasions when Washington and Hanoi had been very near
agreement and had failed to achieve it mainly because of
the deep distrust on either side. Kissinger said that this was
in fact true, although the information was only known in
a very restricted circle in the White House. This piece of