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8. WELL TRAINED

WEDNESDAY, 2 JUNE 1993
DANUBE CAFE, BELGRADE

`You know, Ben, I've had you checked out,' Obradovich dropped his eye contact and continued in a softer voice, `with some friends . . . contacts . . . of mine in the police.' He reached for his packet of Marlboro Lights, lost in the debris of a long and drunken lunch scattered over the stiff tablecloth, and lit one ceremoniously. He exhaled slowly, took another drag, exhaled melodramatically, then fixed me in the eye again. `It took a while, but your credentials, your press accreditation . . . well, they check out OK.' Obradovich drew again on his cigarette, studying my reaction. I reached for a glass of water as calmly as I could, realising that he was definitely playing games with me. I needed to get out of the hotel dining-room fast - if Obradovich had really checked me out with the Serbian secret police, he would have found that my credentials as a freelance journalist didn't add up at all.

It was my second meeting with Zoran Obradovich. Two weeks earlier I had made the trip from London to meet him in the same downtown Belgrade caf. UN sanctions against Serbia, imposed on 1 June 1992, were in full swing and there were no direct flights to Belgrade. The only route was to fly to Budapest and then travel the 370 kilometres to Belgrade by overnight bus. At our first meeting, Obradovich seemed promising agent material. A freelancer in his 30s, of mixed Serbian and Croatian parentage, he professed to have neutral views on the civil war and stubbornly proclaimed his nationality to be `Yugoslav'. His views were anti-war but he had access to senior military officers and politicians in both Serbia and Croatia. He took my `consultancy fee', some 500 Deutschmarks, with scarcely disguised alacrity. His podgy features betrayed a taste for imported wine, good food and western cigarettes, all of which were prohibitively expensive under the sanctions, but which I could easily provide. All the characteristics were there - access, suitability, motivation - suggesting he might make a good agent.

Back in Century House after the first trip, String Vest enthusiastically recommended that I return as soon as possible to continue the cultivation. Obradovich looked like he could fill a few gaps in the intelligence from the Belgrade station.

The second trip started uneventfully. I flew to Budapest as Ben Presley, a freelance journalist. In my wallet was a forged NUJ (National Union of Journalists) identity card and a Royal Bank of Scotland chequebook and credit card, but not much else to substantiate my cover. The coach journey - packed with Serbs carrying huge suitcases bulging with sanction-busting supplies - was quiet and gave me the opportunity to grab a few hours' sleep.

The juddering of the bus as the engine was cut brought me gently out of my slumber. A glance at my watch showed that it was 4 a.m. I rubbed the steam from the window. Dim fluorescent lights barely penetrated the mist and darkness, but I could see that we were at the Hungarian-Yugoslav border. Every available parking space was filled with tiny but overladen Zastava cars or flatbed lorries loaded high with goods bought in Hungary, and despite the late hour there were long queues of Serbs waiting their turn to have their passports stamped. The coach-driver stood up and made a surly announcement, then handed round a sheet of paper on a clipboard, presumably for the border police. When my turn came, a glance showed that my name and passport number were required on the manifesto. Still only half-awake, I almost signed in my real name. Hastily scribbling over the error, I re-signed in my alias. Nobody noticed and no harm was done, but it jolted me awake.

A few minutes later, a Serbian border guard clambered on to the coach, sub-machine gun strapped across the chest of his heavy, dark-blue great-coat, and inspected the manifesto. He grunted an order, presumably to produce our passports, and started working his way down the bus. Sitting near the front, my turn soon came. He glanced quickly at my passport, saw that it was British and unapologetically put it in his coat pocket. Having worked his way to the end of the aisle, he disembarked, taking my document. I wanted to protest, but having not a word of the language there was not much option but to remain silent and patient. The bus-driver glared at me and said something in Serbian that sounded caustic, so presumably he'd been told to wait until my passport was returned. The other passengers grumbled impatiently while the minutes ticked away, but eventually the border guard returned and gave back my passport. A quick inspection revealed that it had not been stamped, but my details would certainly be logged in the police computer.

The remainder of the trip to Belgrade went without hitch and after checking into the Intercontinental Hotel there was time for a shower and breakfast before ringing Obradovich. He wanted to meet for lunch at 2 p.m., so my free morning was a good time to check for surveillance. String Vest told me that the station officers in Belgrade rarely came under surveillance, but it was not a reason to be lazy. Sarah had asked me to buy her a handbag, so a shopping trip would provide good cover for my anti-surveillance drills - I could traipse slowly around the leather goods stalls, idly stare at the displays, flit in and out of the shops, back-track and use the usual tradecraft tricks without looking suspicious.

Despite the sanctions, the shopping centres in Belgrade were thronging. Imported high-tech goods were unavailable or hugely expensive, but domestic production of consumer goods - particularly leather goods and clothing - was booming. There was no shortage of shops displaying a wide selection of handbags.

Standing on a busy street, studying a shop window display, I cursed gently to myself that I had agreed to buy Sarah a handbag - she could be so fickle and it was difficult to know which to choose. Turning away in exasperation, I noticed a young man a couple of shopfronts away also move off. He was of medium height, moonfaced, clean-shaven and with his head covered with a grey cap. He was a grey man - perhaps a bit too grey.

An hour later, drinking a coffee at a pavement caf, I noticed the grey cap reading a book at a caf opposite. It was by no means conclusive proof of surveillance. For that, I would need multiple confirmed sightings or two sightings of different watchers. The double sighting of one person could just be coincidence. Nonetheless, I decided to be very careful.

There was no question of aborting the meeting with Obradovich after just one dubious surveillance sighting. But it would be prudent to change my plans slightly. I had planned to leave for Budapest by bus the following morning, giving me the whole day for the meeting. But given the real possibility of surveillance and the ease of penetrating the thin crust of cover protecting my identity, it would be tempting fate to risk an overnight stay. I decided to leave by the train that departed Belgrade's central station at 1625. It would not leave much time for my lunch meeting, but that was now a lesser concern. I jumped into a taxi - a few were running despite the fuel shortage - and returned to the hotel to pack.

My concern mounted when Obradovich pulled up to the meeting an hour late in a new red Fiat Bravo with diplomatic plates, parking it ostentatiously on the pavement. `That's a smart little car,' I commented as soon as we had shaken hands. `You must have some powerful contacts to get that.'

`How else do you think I get petrol here, and am able to travel all over Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia?' he replied a little boastfully. Only those with diplomatic plates were excused petrol rationing and the lengthy queues, and only with neutral CD plates could he travel to Croatia. But how had he obtained such privileges? He had to be very well connected - too well connected.

At our lengthy, expensive lunch, Obradovich spoke animatedly and knowledgeably about the war and the situation in Bosnia but nowhere did he breach the CX threshold and give me anything that was not already in the public domain. Nor did he give any more indications of recruitability. My optimism that he could become a good agent was now starting to look ill-founded and my priority shifted to ending the meeting and getting safely back to the UK. It was 1605 before he moved on to cognac and I could get the bill. A few minutes later, as I anxiously checked my watch again, he casually dropped the bombshell that he had `checked me out'.

We shook hands outside the restaurant, next to his car which had miraculously escaped parking fines. `Thank you for the meal, Ben,' Obradovich said without much sincerity.

`I'll be in touch soon,' I replied, with equal insincerity.

Obradovich half-turned to his car, then called over his shoulder, `Good luck.' He sounded as sincere as a bishop in a brothel. I smiled, clenched my bag and ducked out of sight around the corner.

With only nine minutes before the train was due to depart, I threw my shoulder bag on to the back seat of a dirty black Fiat and leapt in after it. `Station,' I yelled at the taxi-driver. He looked at me blankly through the rearview mirror. I cursed myself for not having learnt the correct Serbo-Croat word before leaving. `Bahnhoff,' I shouted, hoping that like most Serbs he would understand some German. There was no sign of comprehension. I cursed again, struggling but failing to remember the Russian word which I had once learnt - Serbian was a close linguistic relative. `Chuff, Chuff, Chuff,' I pumped my arm, pulling an imaginary whistle, Casey Jones style. The taxi-driver broke into a smile, clunked down the arm of the mechanical meter, and engaged gear. Seven minutes to go - I should just make it.

The driver jerked the hand-brake back on the moment he released it, as a tram, four carriages bursting with shoppers and commuters, clanked in from behind. We were cut off. We couldn't move forward because the lead carriage and a half of the tram were blocking us. To the rear, passengers were embarking and disembarking from the rear carriages, flooding across the gap to the pavement. I cursed again, aloud this time, as valuable minutes slipped away. The wait for the passengers to sort themselves out seemed interminable. The last was an old lady, weighed down with hessian shopping bags. A couple of guys disembarked from the carriage to let her on, then squeezed back on to the last step themselves. At last the tram drew away, its brakes hissing as the compressed air was released.

The taxi-driver sensed my urgency and put his foot down as we weaved between the thankfully sparse traffic, but even so it was 1625 as we drew up alongside the station. I shoved a fistful of Deutschmarks into his grateful hands, grabbed my bag and sprinted into the station. There was no time to buy a ticket. A quick glance at the departures board - thankfully the destinations were still written in Latin script rather than the now obligatory Cyrillic - showed that my train left from platform eight. Like a character in a poorly scripted film, I sprinted down the platform and jumped on to the footstep of the nearest carriage as the train lazily pulled away.

For the next 45 minutes I stood by the open window of the door, watching the grim suburbs of Belgrade gradually give way to featureless agricultural land, letting the breeze cool my face. Despite Obradovich's ominous words and the problem of crossing the border ahead, my thoughts were with Sarah. I had not bought her a present - not through lack of trying, but because I couldn't find anything that she would like. I knew she wouldn't be angry. At the worst, she would pull a funny face and make a jestful, mocking comment, but she would be disappointed. Resolving to find her something in Budapest, I set off down the rocking corridor to find a seat.

Four hours remained until the train reached the Hungarian border and my fate was out of my hands. Would Obradovich have reported me to the Serbian authorities? Probably. But having told him that I was leaving Belgrade by bus the following morning, he might not have rushed to report me, meaning that the Serb border police would not yet be notified. There was a slight possibility that surveillance might have followed me throughout my trip and that my rush to the station may have been seen. But even if my cover was blown, would the Serbs order an arrest? That would depend if it would serve any political purpose. They were under UN sanctions and catching a British spy would give them some leverage in the UN HQ in New York, but on the other hand they might not want to antagonise the West any further. The risk of arrest was slight, but that did not stop me carefully rehearsing every detail of my cover story as we approached the border. What was my date of birth? Where was I born? Address? What was my profession? Where did I work? I chastised myself for not having worked harder on my cover. Having rattled off natural cover trips to Madrid, Geneva, Paris and Brussels since Moscow, I was becoming blas. It had become as routine to me as jumping on a bus, and I vowed then never to take the responsibility so lightly again.

The train slowed to a crawl as we clanked into Subotica station just before 9 p.m. The Serbian border police had checked my passport here on my first uneventful trip, so presumably they would do so again. I left snoring Serbs in the compartment and stood in the corridor, pulling down the window to let the damp summer air spill into the musty corridor. Outside, only a few lights twinkled in the deserted-looking town.

The train lurched to a halt, its brakes squealing unpleasantly. Doors slammed as a couple of passengers disembarked. Most, like me, were continuing. A child ran up to my window, thrusting a tray of unappetising, sweating pastries. Her brown eyes met mine for a second or two before she registered my disinterest and ran to another window. Two border guards, sweating under the weight of thick coats and sub-machine guns, climbed into the front carriage and began methodically working their way through the train, examining each passenger. Were they looking for me, or was this just their usual nightly routine?

For a fleeting moment, I considered jumping and legging it across the sidings and junctions into town and onwards to the unpatrolled border. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear and it would be easy to navigate by the stars the ten kilometres to Kelebia, the nearest Hungarian village. A hike like that would have been regarded as a stroll when I was in the TA.

But such ideas were frivolous. This was an MI6 operation, not a military exercise, and I should stick to my training and bluff it out. I went back to the compartment. A few minutes later, the guards arrived. The elder of the two, barrel-chested and sweating in his heavy coat, examined another passenger's Yugoslav passport while the younger guard, pale and baby-faced with a downy moustache, prodded his voluminous baggage on the rails above us with a stick, as if he were checking for people illegally hidden in the cases. The elder then turned to me and with a snap of his fingers demanded my documents. He flicked open the back page of the new-style EEC passport, checked the photograph, then examined my face against it, his eyes staring blankly at me as if he were reading a train timetable. He pocketed it and left the compartment with no word of explanation, his young colleague trailing behind like a faithful dog.

There was nothing to do except await my fate. The guards hadn't confiscated my documents on the way out on my first trip, so it was an anxious moment. I went back out into the corridor and stuck my head out of the open slide-down window. Outside on the platform, at the far extremity of the long train, another two guards were patrolling towards me. They walked side by side, inspecting the passengers carefully in each compartment through the windows, as if they were looking for somebody. When they were three carriages away, looking back the other way up the inside of the train, I saw the first two guards walking back towards me from the other direction. I was caught between the two sets of soldiers and there was no chance of making a dash.

The connecting door slammed as the first pair re-entered my carriage. I waited until they were a few paces from me, then turned to face them. The corridor was too narrow for them to walk alongside each other, and the elder lead. He flicked the stub of an acrid Serbian cigarette out the window as he approached. The younger, a step behind him, was chewing gum urgently. The sickly smell of the sweet gum, mingling unpleasantly with their body odour, wafted towards me on the heavy evening air. They stopped menacingly in front of me and the elder reached into the breast pocket of his heavy tunic, exposing his sweat-speckled shirt underneath, and pulled out my passport. His dark eyes flickered as he held it out in front of me, growling something unintelligible in Serbian. I shrugged, my pulse racing. He growled something again, then realising it meant nothing to me, switched to German. `Fahrkarte,' he snapped. The meaning swam from some recess of my mind where it had lain dormant since my TA German course years earlier, and a smile of relief flickered across my face. Reaching into my breastpocket, I pulled out a fistful of Deutschmarks to pay for the ticket that I had omitted to buy at Belgrade station. The guard handed me my passport and the pair strutted off.

The train rolled into Budapest station in the early hours of dawn, and after a night in a cheap hotel by the station I flew back to London. It took a day or so to finish all the paperwork and debriefings at Century House. Afterwards Bidde called me up to his office. Looking over his bifocal glasses, he gently admonished me. `You won't be using the Presley alias again, I trust.'
 

The work in MI6 was endlessly fascinating. It was not just the natural cover trips abroad: almost everyday some snippet of information came my way from friends in sections that, if it were in the public domain, would be on the front pages of the newspapers. One day Forton invited me for lunch in the restaurant on the top floor of Century House. He was still in his job as R/AF/C, the junior requirements officer for the Africa controllerate, and had just come back from a three-week trip to Ethiopia and Eritrea. Over the surprisingly good MI6 canteen food he enthusiastically described bush-wacking by Land Rover around Eritrea and Ethiopia on reconnaissance with his increment guide, an ex-SBS sergeant, and a UKN photographer, whose other `normal' job was as a paparazzo photographer of the Royal family. In addition to the Horn, Forton's other important area of responsibility was South Africa. He had been processing South African intelligence that morning, and the conversation soon turned to the politics of the region. `Yeah, I got a great CX report today,' Forton casually boasted. `Apparently the AWB (Afrikaaner Weerstandsbeweging) are planning to assassinate Mandela next month. They're gonna blow him up at an open-air rally or a boxing match or something. They've just acquired a pile of PE from the South African army for the job.'

`Are you sure?' I asked sceptically. `What's the source on that?'

Forton sniffed and casually chewed on his salad. `It's good CX all right. UKC have an agent in the AWB who has reported reliably in the past. H/PRETORIA is going to give the report directly to Mandela - it would be too risky just to give it to South African liaison. Too many of those bastards would like to see Mandela dead themselves and the message might never reach him.'

The assassination plot was averted and MI6's stock with President Nelson Mandela no doubt rose.
 

Shortly after returning from my Belgrade trip, Nick Fish, P4/OPS/A, the targeting officer for P4 section and assistant to String Vest, called me into his office. `How'd you like to work on my plan to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic then?' he asked casually, as if seeking my views on the weekend cricket scores.

`Oh come off it, I'm not falling for your little games,' I replied dismissively, believing that Fish was just trying to wind me up.

`Why not?' continued Fish, indignantly. `We colluded with the Yanks to knock off Saddam in the Gulf War, and the SOE tried to take out Hitler in the Second World War.'

`Yes, but they were legitimate military targets in wartime,' I replied. `We are not at war with Serbia, and Milosevic is a civilian leader. You can't top him.'

Fish was undaunted. `Yes we can, and we've done it before. I checked with Santa Claus upstairs,' he said, flicking his head disparagingly towards Bidde's office on the tenth floor. Fish was perpetually at war with everybody, even the jovial, silver-haired SBO1. `He told me that we tried to slot Lenin back in 1911, but some pinko coughed at the last minute and the Prime Minister, it was Asquith then, binned the plan.' Fish's disappointment was plain. `Santa Claus has got the papers in his locker, but he wouldn't show them to me. They're still more secret than the Pope's Y-fronts, apparently.'

Has MI6 ever assassinated a peacetime target? It was a question that a few of us sometimes discussed on the IONEC but nobody quite dared to ask one of the DS in class. It was a taboo subject, left unsaid by the DS and unasked by the students. One evening down at the Fort bar, when nobody else was listening and after several pints of beer, I asked Ball about it. `Absolutely not, never,' he replied, his face puckered with sincerity. I was not very sure, however, as he had already proved himself a convincing liar. In any case, if an assassination were plotted, only a tiny handful of officers would know about it and even if Ball were one he would not make a lowly IONEC student privy to such sensitive information.

I did not take Fish's proposal too seriously but a few days later, in his office again to sort out expenses from the Belgrade trip, he casually threw over a couple of sheets of A4. `Here, take a butcher's at this.' It was a two-page minute entitled `A proposal to assassinate Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic'. A yellow minute card was attached to the back, showing that it was a formal document rather than just a draft, and the right margin showed a distribution list of String Vest, C/CEE, MODA/SO (an SAS Major, seconded to MI6 as a liaison officer with the increment) and H/SECT, the assistant to the Chief himself. I checked the date on the top-left corner, established that it was not 1 April, then sat down at the visitor's chair beside his cluttered desk to read it. Fish's first page was a justification for the assassination, citing Milosevic's destabilising plans for a Greater Serbia, his illegal covert support for Radovan Karadzic and his genocidal plans for the Albanian population of Kosovo. The second page outlined the execution of the assassination.

Fish proposed three alternative plans for the attempt and gave advantages and disadvantages for each. His first proposal was to use the increment to train and equip a dissident Serbian paramilitary faction to assassinate Milosevic in Serbia. Fish argued that the advantage of this plan was its deniability, the disadvantage that it would be difficult to control. His second plan was to use an increment team to infiltrate Serbia and kill Milosevic with a bomb or sniper ambush. He argued that this plan would have a high chance of success but would not be deniable if it went wrong. The third proposal was to arrange a car `accident' to kill Milosevic, possibly while attending the ICFY (International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia) peace talks in Geneva. Fish proposed using a bright flashing strobe gun to disorientate Milosevic's chauffeur while the cavalcade passed through a tunnel. The advantage of a tunnel crash was that there would be fewer incidental witnesses and a greater chance that the ensuing accident would be fatal.

`You're off your trolley,' I muttered and passed it back to him. The audacity and ruthlessness of the plan was astonishing. Fish was serious about his career in MI6 and he would not send a suggestion like this up to senior officers out of frivolity. `This will never get accepted,' I added.

`What do you know?' Fish retorted, looking at me disparagingly as if I was an innocent schoolboy learning for the first time the facts of life.

I never heard anything more about the plan, but then I would not have expected to. An indoctrination list would have been formed, probably consisting only of the Chief, C/CEE, P4 and MODA/SO. Even Fish himself would probably have been excluded from detailed planning at an early stage. A submission would have been put up to the Foreign Secretary to seek political clearance, then MODA/SO and the increment would have taken over the detail of the operational planning. If the plan was developed further, it clearly did not come to fruition, as Milosevic remained very much alive and in power for many years.
 

As the war in Bosnia intensified and threatened to destabilise southeastern Europe, urgent demands were placed on MI6 for more intelligence. In mid-1992, the only officers in the FRY (Former Republic of Yugoslavia) were a one-man station in Zagreb, and two officers in Belgrade. A few other stations, notably Athens and Geneva, were producing some reasonable CX on the region from refugees and visitors, but there were still gaping holes in the intelligence coverage. MI6 urgently needed many more officers on the ground, but was hampered by lack of financial and personnel resources and by cover considerations. The FCO had no embassies in Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, so officers could not be inserted there under diplomatic cover. A more flexible approach was needed.

Colin McColl came up with an imaginative solution to fill quickly the holes in intelligence coverage, that was at first met sniffily by most senior officers. He proposed setting up, in each newly independent region of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, `shoe-box' stations of one officer armed with a laptop computer, encryption software and a briefcase-sized portable satellite facsimile machine. The shoe-box officer would be declared to the local secret police and would rely on this liaison for protection rather than the physical security of an embassy and diplomatic immunity. The shoe-box officers would not have the usual benefits of comfortable, free housing, car allowance or home leave of normal postings, so they would serve only for six months and be paid a generous hardship allowance.

The first shoe-box officer was sent to Tirana, the Albanian capital, in September 1992. Rupert Boxton was an ageing former parachute regiment officer who had just returned from a three-year posting in the backwater of Namibia. He was regarded as `a bit thick' and wasn't suited to administrative Head Office jobs. His task in Tirana was neither easy nor pleasant. Though the Albanian leader, President Berisha, was keen to improve relations with MI6, his secret police were stuck in the closed mind-set of the days of Albanian communist isolationism. They did not trust Boxton, did not want him in Tirana and refused to give him any worthwhile intelligence or targeting leads. In any case, the German BND (Bundesnachtrichtdienst) had got in first and built a strong relationship with the Albanians. MI6's attempts to belatedly muscle in went nowhere. Boxton was withdrawn after just a few months and forced into early retirement by personnel department.

The Tirana fiasco convinced the service that a shoe-box would only survive and prosper if the local liaison service were dependent on MI6 for money, training help and intelligence. Prospects for a shoe-box station in Skopje, the capital of the newly formed republic of Macedonia, seemed more promising. The Macedonian economy was in tatters. Trade with Serbia on its northern border had been stopped by the UN sanctions. To the south the Greeks had closed the border and access to the port of Thessaloniki over fears that the reemergence of the Macedonian nation would cause unrest in their own province of Macedonia; and communications with Albania to the west were poor because of the mountainous terrain. Relations with Bulgaria to the east were better, but even they were tempered by mistrust for the expansionist ideas of some Bulgarian factions. Macedonia was thus all but cut off from the outside world and urgently needed powerful allies.

The Macedonian secret police were underfunded, and so were vulnerable to financial inducement. MI6 saw the opportunity and stepped in before the BND or the CIA. After some paper shuffling in Whitehall, an emergency aid package was negotiated by FCO and ODA officials. Britain would supply urgently needed medical equipment and drugs; in return Macedonia would harbour an MI6 officer. The Macedonian secret police were further sweetened by a week-long training course at the Fort. All stops were pulled out to impress them. They were very taken by a demonstration of some advanced surveillance communication equipment, and MI6 reluctantly acceded to their requests for the system, even though they had no possible need for it.

Jonathan Small, an energetic and competent GS officer, was sent to Skopje to open the Macedonia shoe-box in December 1992. He had previous experience in one-man stations such as Valletta in Malta, so was well qualified for the job. He was declared to the Macedonian secret police, so there was no need for any cover story for them, but to stave off the curiosity of casual acquaintances he set himself up as a charity worker with credentials supplied by CF contacts. With his satellite dish on the balcony of his one-bedroom flat in central Skopje, Small was soon sending back a stream of reports, mostly on President Gligorov's dealings with Milosevic.

MI6 also set up two more shoe-box stations in the Balkans. One senior officer was sent to Kosovo for three months under cover as an OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observer, but this was not a great success as the ruthless and omnipresent Serbian secret police made it too dangerous to attempt any agent-running. To cover Bosnia, MI6 drew on experience gained during OPERATION SAFE HAVEN, the allied operation to protect the Kurds from Iraqi reprisals in the aftermath of the 1990 Gulf War. Clive Mansell, a mid-career officer and Kurdish speaker, was attached to the Royal Marines in Kurdistan as their mysteriously entitled `civil adviser', mingling with the refugee population to obtain intelligence on the nascent Kurdish nationalist movement. MI6 decided to try the same tactic in Bosnia and sent Mansell to Split with the British UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) contribution to set up a shoe-box station under the designation H/BAP.

By early 1993, all of these assets were in place and MI6's coverage of the Balkans was starting to meet some of the demands placed upon it. Meanwhile, String Vest assigned me to a role supporting Small in Skopje. Small's close liaison with the Macedonian secret police meant that he had no access to one of the main local intelligence requirements, the ethnic Albanian PRI party. The PRI, and the Albanian population in general, were deeply mistrusted by the Macedonian secret police. The intelligence on the PRI which they fed to Small was biased, so MI6 needed independent penetration. String Vest asked me to get together a cover to visit Skopje and cultivate the targets in the PRI leadership.

Now that Ben Presley had retired, CF issued a new alias name, Thomas Paine, and I got myself documented again as a freelance journalist. After my nerve-jangling Belgrade visit, SBO1 insisted I acquire better credentials: `Get yourself down to I/OPS section and see if they have got any contacts who can help.' I/OPS provided me with a letter of introduction from SMALLBROW, commissioning me to write an article for  The Spectator on the effects of UN sanctions on Macedonia. `If anybody from the PRI rings to check you out, he'll vouch for you,' I/OPS/1 assured me. I was ready for my first trip to Skopje within a couple of days.
 

It was dusk as a tattered taxi with a single working headlight drove me the ten kilometres from Skopje airport to the capital, but I could still see the scars of the 1963 earthquake that destroyed most of the city. The clock on the central railway station was still stuck at ten to five, the time when the first tremors started, and even 30 years later there were swathes of open ground in the town centre where buildings had once stood. Though the war to the north had not directly touched Skopje, the signs of economic hardship were clear. Refuse lay uncollected in the streets, men hung around idle on corners and ragged Kosovo refugees kicked footballs outside the abandoned buildings they now occupied in the run-down Albanian quarter.

The relatively wealthy Macedonian-Bulgar quarter where Small lived was better, but I did not envy his lot. His flat was owned by the Macedonian secret police and lay in a grim concrete block a short distance from the Grand Hotel where I had a reservation. After checking in, I made my way over - Small had invited me for a drink to discuss the operational plan. Strictly I ought not to have been associating with him for security reasons. Skopje was not large and being seen together by officers of other intelligence services could conceivably compromise either or both of us. But String Vest and SBO1 had relented on this occasion. They decided that the risk was small and Small's posting was lonely and boring so an occasional visitor would be good for his morale. Besides, he had been en poste for nearly three months and his knowledge would be useful for me.

`Hi, come on up to the third floor,' Small greeted me enthusiastically on the intercom, which was still working. Stepping over the piles of human excrement which littered the floor, I made my way up the stairs. Small greeted me like a long-lost friend on his doorstep. `Welcome to sunny Skopje.' It didn't take him long to show me around the small, sparsely furnished flat and soon he cracked open a bottle of Scotch and we sat down and got to work. Small had a quick mind and was an excellent operational officer. His ability was wasted in the GS branch, but personnel department would not let him transfer to the IB. There was no point: keeping him in the GS meant that he could be posted to slots like Skopje which most of the IB did not want, and they could still pay him a GS salary. Small briefed me expertly on the various Albanian factions and personalities. Occasionally, when the conversation turned to more sensitive areas, he would sweep his hand through the air, reminding me that his hosts might have bugged his flat. As the evening drew to a satisfying close, he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and slipped it over to me. It was an invitation to accompany him the next day on a trip to the countryside to check out the station exfiltration plan.

`Sure, I'd love to come,' I answered, careful not to reveal more than was necessary to possible listeners.

The Skopje exfiltration plan differed from usual station plans in that its purpose was to not to smuggle out compromised agents, but to get Small out in case the Macedonian liaison turned against him. They were a brutish lot and the political situation was not stable enough to wholly trust them. If it suited their purpose to kidnap or imprison Small, he could not claim diplomatic immunity as officially he was not there. He would hope to get enough warning of the deterioration in the relationship to be able to get out of the country legally but, just in case, he had an escape route. Two members of the increment visited him earlier in the year to design and rehearse the plan. But then the winter snow lay thick on the ground, and Small wanted to check that he could still find the route now that spring had changed the landscape.

We left early the next morning in Small's Land Rover Discovery and drove out into the countryside. It was early May and the hedgerows were ablaze with the fierce yellow of wild forsythia. The exfiltration plan called for Small to hide out in the countryside until rescue arrived. In a small copse on a hillside a few miles south of Skopje, the location of which Small had carefully memorised, the increment had buried a cache which contained enough materials for Small to survive for a few days out in the open - food, water, clothing, a couple of torches with infra-red filters, materials to make a lightweight bivouac and sleeping bag, a set of false identification papers and passport, a moderate sum of Deutschmarks, a few gold sovereigns and a military EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon). We trudged a few hundred yards into the woods and, using a compass to get a bearing from a prominent tree stump, paced out a few yards and found the cache without too much problem. After carefully digging it up to check that it had not been tampered with, we reburied it making sure there was no sign of disturbance.

From the top of the hill behind the copse, Small pointed out a small disused airstrip. `That's where the plane will come in to pick me up,' he explained. `It used to be used by crop-spraying aircraft but they've all been grounded through lack of spares now.' We took the Discovery over to the runway to check that it was still serviceable. `It's just long enough for UKN to get their Piper Aztec on the ground,' Small explained. `They would come at night, wearing IR goggles, so I'd have to mark out the landing strip with the IR torches.' Flying below radar height, the plane would then make its way under cover of darkness across Albania and the southern Adriatic to the safety of Italy.

Small dropped me off outside the Grand Hotel after the enjoyable morning. It would be an unnecessary risk to spend much more time with him. Besides, later that evening I was to have my first meeting with the deputy leader of the PRI and the afternoon could be better spent preparing for the meeting. I went back up to my room, fished out my laptop computer from my briefcase and waited for it to graunch into life. The hard disk had been modified by TOS to carry invisible files which they guaranteed could not be detected by even the most capable expert. I typed in the password, the hard-disk graunched some more, and magically all my briefing notes were revealed on the screen. I read through them, reminding myself about the key CX requirements and shaping in my mind the sort of questions I would ask at the meeting.

The first meeting went smoothly and my contact in the PRI was delighted to find a western journalist so interested in him. He agreed to further meetings and over the next couple of months I made repeated trips to Skopje, building up the relationship, gaining his confidence and edging him closer to the CX threshold. It was slow work, made all the more irksome because air links to Skopje were few and far between, meaning that each trip required three or four days. The meetings yielded some intelligence but eventually it became obvious that my contact was holding back, afraid for his personal security. His concern was that the Macedonian secret police would make life difficult for him if they discovered that he was talking too regularly to a foreign journalist. Back in Century House, both Bidde and String Vest agreed that the only way forward was to drop my journalistic cover and make the relationship completely clandestine. On my next trip out to Skopje, I used the line that we had practised so diligently on exercise on the IONEC. `I expect that you've already guessed that I am not really a journalist, but an officer from British Intelligence.' To my relief, my contact did not get up and run. Instead, he accepted my assurance that as he was dealing with a professional intelligence officer rather than a flaky journalist, the Macedonian secret police would never discover his contact with me. He thus became my first recruited agent, and I won my spurs in the office. Thereafter, with the relationship on a more secure and stable footing, he became a productive CX producing agent.
 

Back in London, between trips to Skopke, Fish was keeping me busy with a series of small but interesting tasks related to the Bosnian War. His job was to coordinate targeting leads to possible informers from other stations or UK-based assets such as BEAVER, and he was an energetic worker. Under various covers, I made trips to Strasbourg, Hamburg, Lisbon and Brussels to meet Bosnian and Serb journalists, dissidents and politicians. Every time I put my head into Fish's office he would offer another interesting task. `How'd you like to run BEETROOT?' he asked one day.

`OK,' I replied. `But who is BEETROOT?'

`He's a right-wing vegetable,' replied Fish. `A Tory MP, but surprisingly he's OK,' he added. `Here's his file - go and read it.'

BEETROOT had tried to join MI5 after university, but had been rather unfairly turned down on security grounds. After his rejection he went into business, making frequent trips to the Soviet Union, and was soon picked up by MI6 as a provider of low-level economic CX. He then joined the Conservative Party, which proposed him as a candidate. To everybody's surprise, he was elected after a large swing in favour of the Tories. Normally, MI6 are not allowed to run MPs as informers but in this case Prime Minister John Major personally granted MI6 permission to continue running BEETROOT. He was making frequent trips to Bosnia as part of the parliamentary working group on the war, and String Vest and Fish had decided that his access to leading actors in the region made him a worthwhile agent.

My first meeting with him was at the Grapes pub on Shepherd Market which he chose as it was only a short walk from Parliament, and no other MPs went there because the prostitutes in Shepherd Market could potentially bring embarrassing publicity. After shaking hands we ordered a pint of Ruddles each and bags of pork scratchings. `I'm glad you've got in touch with me,' he said once we were seated at one of the large oak tables. `There's something that's been worrying me for a while, but I have not known what channel to report it on.'

`Please explain,' I asked, mystified.

He went on to tell me about a young prospective Tory parliamentary candidate. Although a British citizen, the subject was from a Serb family, spoke fluent Serbo-Croat and had changed his name by deed poll. He was a passionate supporter of the Bosnian-Serb cause and Karadzic appointed him as his unofficial spokesperson in London. Fish had a FLORIDA warrant to keep his telephone and fax machine under intercept, and this had produced some useful CX.

`Well, it seems that he has arranged for the Bosnian-Serbs to make a financial donation to the Conservative Party,' explained BEETROOT. `He's channelling the money through a Serb bank to make it look legitimate, but basically the money is coming straight from Karadzic. He boasted to me about it only yesterday - he's hoping that getting some funds for the party will help his chances of becoming an MP.'

The Tory Party was deeply in debt after emptying their coffers in the 1992 general election campaign. Accepting money from any foreign government would be controversial enough, but Britain had soldiers attached to UNPROFOR in Bosnia who were regularly shot at and sometimes killed by Karadzic's forces. If this news was leaked to the press, it would cause a huge scandal and it explained why BEETROOT had not known where to turn with this information - he could hardly report it to the Tory Party chairman, the normal chain of command, because the party chairman himself was accepting the money. I thanked him for his information and promised to be in touch, BEETROOT honourably insisting on paying for the beer and pork scratchings, concerned that otherwise he would have to register my hospitality in the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests.

`Christ, you could sell that story to the Mirror for 15 grand!' exclaimed Fish when I told him the news back in Century House. `And it makes sense, too. I saw on the FLORIDA that there was discussion of some form of money transfer with Karadzic, but I couldn't make out what for,' Fish added. `Now it is all clear. You'd better write that up as CX fast.'

I scurried upstairs to my office, clutching the FLORIDA transcripts, already putting the report together in my head. Half an hour later, the finished CX report was on its way to R/CEE and would be on the desks of Whitehall customers the next morning. Thereafter, there would be a hell of a storm. The Tory Party were already reeling from a series of funding scandals, fuelled by a vitriolic press campaign, and there was no doubt that this report would be leaked by a Whitehall official. It might even bring the government down, forcing another general election. But half an hour later such thoughts were interrupted by the PAX (internal phone system) ringing on my desk. `Hello, Richard, R/CEE here. I'm afraid that CX of yours has been spiked. And H/SECT wants to see you about it - go up and see him right now.' I dropped the phone and urgently made for the lift to take me up to the 18th floor. H/SECT was the personal secretary to the Chief, and if he wanted to see me it must be about something very important indeed.

Alan Judd carried a lot of clout in the office hierarchy. He had been largely responsible for drafting the new `avowal' legislation that was due to come into effect the next year and which would allow the government formally to acknowledge the existence of MI6 for the first time. He was also well known in the office for the series of lighthearted novels that he had written about spying, his powerful contacts in Whitehall allowing him to side-step the normally strict rules that prevent MI6 officers from writing books about their experiences. He even had the nerve to put in a flyleaf dedication to Nick Long, the inspiration for Tango, a spy-caper set in Latin America.

`Take a seat, UKA/7.' Judd addressed me formally by my job designation rather than first name, perhaps to underline his status. `That CX report you wrote about Tory Party funding' - Judd nodded to my report lying on his desk - `I'm afraid we can't possibly issue it. If it leaked out, it could bring down the government.'

`So?' I replied. `It's not MI6's job to interfere with the governance of the country, is it?'

`Well,' replied Judd lugubriously, `there are other channels to report this sort of information.'

`Such as?' I asked. We'd never had any other channel explained to us on the IONEC.

`The Chief has decided to issue it as a ``hot potato'', meaning that it will go only to the Prime Minister. I want that CX report destroyed.' Judd handed over the paperwork that I was required to sign in order to have the report officially struck off the records. There was no choice but to sign, though I knew it was wrong. `And you're to talk to nobody about this report or this incident,' Judd threatened ominously as I was getting up to leave.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that I got a phone call from the head of personnel department's secretary a few days later, informing me that they were removing me from UKA. `We've got an interesting overseas posting for you,' the secretary said. `PD/1 will give you the details at the meeting.' The good news of my first overseas posting was exciting, but it was tempered by the fact that I would have to deal again with Fowlecrooke, who had been appointed PD/1 after finishing as my line manager in SOV/OPS.

`We've decided to post you to Bosnia, as H/BAP,' announced Fowlecrooke at the meeting. `We think that you have the ideal blend of experience for the job - your time in the Territorial Army will be useful experience in a war zone, and you have worked enthusiastically on the conflict for the past six months. You'll be taking over from Kenneth Roberts in two weeks. It's not a lot of time to prepare for the post, but I am sure that you will cope.'


************************


9. DEEP WATER

FRIDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 1993
CENTRAL SARAJEVO

I heard the screaming shriek of the shell cutting through the air a split second before the shock wave of the detonation crushed me to the ground, so I knew I was going to live. Harris, a 12-year-old street urchin, petty crook and veteran of the three-year Serbian siege of Sarajevo, gave me the tip only a few days earlier. He made a living hanging around the Sarajevo Holiday Inn and `guarding' the vehicles of the journalists and aid workers - if they chose not to acquire his services, windscreen wipers, aerials and anything else removable would disappear overnight. Clapping his grubby hands and whistling through broken teeth to provide the sound effects, he cheerfully explained in his pidgin English that if an incoming shell whistled, then it would land far enough away to be harmless. His words of wisdom were the first cogent thoughts that entered my mind as my senses returned and the awareness of where I was drifted back into my consciousness.

Angus, the dour, moustached NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) of the British army detachment in Sarajevo, had dropped me off on a quiet street corner in central Sarjevo just a few minutes before the shellburst, promising to return to the RV in three hours time, then again the following hour if I failed to show up for the first. Gruffly, he had wished me luck, then drove off into the mist of an early winter's evening.

As the red tail-lights of the kevlar-armoured UNPROFOR Land Rover disappeared into the murk, I slipped into a shadowy doorway to let my eyes adjust to the falling light before beginning the ten-minute walk to the home of DONNE, MI6's most important agent in Sarajevo. Unshaven, shabbily dressed and with a woollen hat pulled low over my head, I looked like any of the other Sarajevans employed by UNPROFOR being dropped off by a friendly soldier after a day's work. To further the disguise, in my left hand I lugged a half-full 25-litre polythene jerry can of the sort carried ubiquitously by Sarajevans in their daily toil to fetch water from the public spigots. Over my right shoulder was slung a canvas bag containing a notebook and pencil, a PETTLE recorder and presents for DONNE - a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky and 400 Marlboro cigarettes.

Despite my innocuous appearance, there was a risk of a routine ID check by one of the Bosnian police officers who lurked on street corners. I felt nervously in my breast pocket for my G/REP forged ID card and the grubby, cellophane-wrapped card bearing the words `Ja sam gluh i nijem' - `I am deaf and dumb' in the local language. It was a worn and clichd ruse, but perhaps it would be enough to deflect further interest from a bored and tired policeman. My cover would not withstand further scrutiny - stuffed into a holster in my trouser band was a loaded 9mm Browning and in the poacher's pocket of my grubby overcoat a vial of morphine and two Joint Services standard issue shell dressings. All were hostages to fortune, but the benefits of carrying them outweighed the risks of their discovery. The pistol would also counter the threat from the armed muggers (usually hungry and drunken off-duty Bosnian soldiers) who lurked in the unlit alleys. The morphine and shell dressings were to counter the biggest threat in central Sarajevo - the deadly, calculated sniper's bullet or the indiscriminate and random shelling which killed everyday and blanketed every Sarajevan with the constant fear of imminent death.

Stepping from the shadowy, stinking doorway I reflected that at least I would only face these hazards for a few hours until Angus returned with the sanctuary of the armoured Land Rover. Sarajevans, like the woman scurrying home half a block in front of me, had to put up with it day in, day out. I wondered what sort of a life she led. It was impossible to gauge her age. Head down, shuffling wearily but urgently with a heavy bundle of firewood, wrapped in heavy clothes against the damp cold, she could have been a teenager, a mother or a grandmother. For sure, she would have lost at least one member of her family or a close friend to the shelling and sniping siege. No one had escaped that grief.

I must have blacked out for a second when the shell exploded, and regained consciousness gasping to refill my lungs, emptied by the crushing blast. My heart was racing so fast I could feel its every beat in the throb of my head and my ears howled with white noise. An excruciating pain shot through me from my right leg, stabbing into me as my chest moved to suck in air. Gingerly, as my breathing stabilised, I opened my eyes and it took a moment to work out what had happened. Whether it was the shock wave from the exploding shell or my instinctive leap for cover, I had been thrown back into the doorway and was lying in a contorted, twisted heap, wedged head uppermost into the corner. Still too shocked to move, I looked down at my right leg, the source of my agony. There was nothing from the knee down. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard, trying not to throw up. Shifting my weight eased the pain slightly and slowly, with my right hand, I explored my lower body, dreading the worst. My hand brushed against leather, perhaps my boot. Glancing down, alarmed and apprehensive, it was indeed my Timberland, with my lower right leg still inside it. Still scarcely able to breathe, head throbbing, I felt along its length and realised with ecstatic relief that it was still attached to my upper leg. I hadn't lost it, it was just twisted at an excruciating angle underneath my crumpled body. Gingerly, I rolled further to my left. The pain eased a bit more. A bit further and there was an excruciating twang as the ligaments at the back of the twisted knee uncrossed themselves. Groaning and panting for breath, I straightened my leg, relieved that I was in one piece. Little Harris was right - I'd heard the shell coming in and it had landed far enough from me not to cause serious injury.

Lying still for a few minutes, I calmed my breathing. White noise still rang in my ears, though it was subsiding. Suspecting that my eardrums must have been blown out, I put my hands to my ears to check for blood. There was none. I checked for the Browning. It would be difficult and embarrassing to explain losing that to the office, whatever the circumstances. It was still there. I sat upright, then struggled to my feet, trying not to put weight my right leg. My body had now started shaking and shivering involuntarily. Shock was setting in and I needed fluids. My jerry can was lying on the pavement, split, and leaking slightly. I limped over, picked it up, and squeezed it, drinking eagerly from the crack. My shakes were uncontrollable and the cold water spilt down the front of my shirt, sending spasmodic shivers down me. I desperately wanted to lie down somewhere warm and be anywhere but where I was.

I heard the plaintive wailing for a few seconds before realising from what, or from where, it was coming. It sounded inhuman, high-pitched and tremulous, like a mortally injured dog that knows it is about to die. I looked up the street to where the swaddled woman had been scurrying only minutes earlier. Darkness was falling, but at the limit of vision lay the dark silhouette of a prone body. I dropped the jerry can and semi-hopped, semi-limped towards her.

She must have taken virtually the full blast of the explosion. There was a fresh detonation scar in the pavement just a few feet in front of her, and a smell of cordite lingered. The blast had blown away all her clothes except part of the heavy woollen overcoat which still clung to her upper body, exposing all that was left of her below. Her stomach was split with a vicious gash and her groin and thighs were shredded by shrapnel. Her lower right leg was almost unmarked, but her left leg was blown off just below the knee. The shattered bone was exposed and blood pulsed from the torn artery, squirting into the pool on the pavement. At that rate of blood loss, she would not live long. My hands were on autopilot, driven by the first-aid training I had received in the TA. ABC - airways, breathing, circulation. There was no need for the AB - she was wailing piercingly and her chest was moving. The priority was C - to stop blood loss and to keep her circulation going. Kneeling beside her, I scrabbled in my overcoat for the shell dressings. Hastily pulling them out, I dropped the morphine vial into the pool of blood. Hands still shaking, I tore off the brown waterproof outer layer of the dressing, ripped off the sterile inner layer, unfolded the thick pad of absorbent lint and rammed it up against the stub of her leg. Jamming it in place with my knee, I fumbled to open the second dressing. Despite binding the two dressings in place tightly using the attached bandages, it barely stemmed the bleeding.

She was still wailing weakly, more in fear than in pain, and presumably she was losing consciousness. I scrabbled for the morphine vial and cleaned it off, intending to give her a shot. Grabbing her right arm, I twisted the palm towards me, exposing her lower inner arm to find a vein. She had already lost so much blood that even after squeezing and massaging none stood out. I was about to jab in the syringe, thinking that it was better than nothing, when from my TA training came a distant recollection - check for head wounds before administering morphine. I fumbled for the minimaglite torch in my jacket pocket and shifted to see her face. Grabbing a handful of her long, dark hair to hold her head steady, I shone the beam into her eyes. The pupils were pinpricks. As I pushed back her hair to expose her ears, a trickle of straw-yellow fluid ran from her left ear. It would be dangerous to give her morphine. Apart from vainly attempting to stem the blood flow, there was nothing more I could do. I had exhausted the limits of my medical training and the equipment with me and resignedly slipped the vial back into my pocket.

As I bowed my head, questioning the fate that brought me here to watch this girl die, I became aware of other people around me. An old man knelt beside me, mumbling something incomprehensible in Bosanski. A Bosnian soldier stood overlooking us, his back pressed against the wall, wary of another salvo of shells. It was time for me to go. Standing up, my twisted knee reminded me about itself and I winced. The old man grabbed me by the arm and murmured something but I twisted free and stepped back into the shadows. I still had a job to do.

I limped back to the cover of my doorway. Looking back up the road to where the girl still lay, I saw that a car had pulled up - a few still ran in Sarajevo despite the siege, fuelled by black-market petrol. The bystanders were loading her limp corpse into the back seat, arguing incomprehensibly. Another shell whistled overhead, sending them and me ducking for cover. It landed perhaps a few streets away, perhaps harmlessly, perhaps not. The car carrying the dying girl pulled away and sped past, a white Volkswagen Golf splattered with rusting shrapnel pockmarks and with an improvised windscreen from another make. I hoped they were on their way to the Kosovo Hospital rather than straight to the morgue.

Sheltering in the corner of the doorway to take stock, I glanced at my watch showed that only ten minutes had passed since Angus had dropped me off. There remained two hours and fifty minutes before he would return. I was in shock from the incident, I felt cold, and my hands and trousers were stained in the girl's blood. This was no fit state for a meeting with DONNE. I removed my boots and took off my trousers. The water that remained in my split water-carrier was sufficient to rinse out the worst of the blood. After being wrung out, the damp trousers were a bit uncomfortable, but the modern lightweight material would dry quickly. Nevertheless, I hoped that DONNE's flat would be warm.

The route to DONNE's took me past the spot where the girl had been hit. As I limped by, a mongrel bitch, probably an abandoned pet, trotted out of the shadows, her long teats swinging, and cautiously sniffed the congealing blood on the pavement. She whimpered approvingly and a puppy scampered out of the shadows to join her. Eagerly, they started lapping up the blood and scraps of flesh. It was a repulsive, hellish vision, but I did not chase them off. They were only doing what came naturally. At least a couple of starving dogs would benefit from the tragedy.
 

Normally when an IB officer is posted overseas, he or she spends up to two years in pre-posting preparation. The most time-consuming element is the language training. Even if an agent speaks good English, it is preferable to speak to him in his mother tongue - that way his real character is more exposed. For a difficult language such as Chinese or Arabic, it takes two years to reach the required level of fluency, even if the officer is a talented linguist. For an easy language like Spanish or French the training is shorter, usually about six months. The other important element of pre-posting training is to build a thorough understanding of the political issues, intelligence requirements and agent assets of the host country. An officer therefore usually spends a few months on attachment to the relevant P desk and might even do the job full-time for a year or so. He will read in detail the files of all the station agents - CX agents, OCP keepers, liaison officers, facilities agents - and will learn the administrative background of the station - its budget, its targets for the year ahead, the CX requirements. He will meet the relevant desk officers in the FCO to get up to speed with the political situation in the country and usually takes advanced FCO courses in politics and economics. The result is that he is already thoroughly familiar with the station's work and the host country before he even packs his bags.

Shortly before leaving for the station, the officer also undertakes `refresher' training down at the Fort. The course consists of further tradecraft instruction, especially in anti-surveillance; more instruction in photography; and a brush-up in small-arms and self-defence training. There is also a course in defensive driving techniques given by Royal Military Police instructors on the runway of the HMS Daedalus naval airfield near the Fort, encompassing fast-driving techniques such as hand-brake turns and J-turns. (Hire cars, rather than the Fort's pool cars are used, because it is not unheard of for over-enthusiastic novices to rip tyres off them or even overturn them.) Officer's spouses are also invited to attend a week-long course at the Fort, as it is useful to have a trained second pair of eyes during anti-surveillance runs. The course also allows partners to understand the profession better - the divorce rate in MI6 is high because of the demanding and secretive work.

For some postings, even more specialised training is required. For example, Andrew Markham, my IONEC colleague, was selected for the ORCADA slot in Bonn. This was a deep cover job, running MI6's most important agent in Germany, a high-ranking official in the ministry of finance. In return for a substantial salary, ORCADA provided five-star CX on the German economy and interest rate movements, enabling the Chanceller of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England to adjust Britain's interest rates and economy to best advantage. The ORCADA posting was so sensitive that only the ambassador in Bonn and H/BON were briefed and no one else in the embassy was even aware that Markham was from the `friends' (FCO-speak for MI6). Markham thus had to learn to become a thoroughly convincing diplomat to fool his FCO colleagues, so he attended the FCO pre-posting training courses in addition to all his MI6 courses, and in order to debrief ORCADA effectively he also attended advanced lectures at the London School of Economics and did an extended attachment with the Treasury.

It was thus highly unusual when Fowlecrooke told me that he would give me only two weeks to prepare for the posting in Bosnia. There would be no time for any language instruction or any of the normal courses. It was just enough time to read the station files, have a couple of meetings with String Vest and take a one-day refresher course on the Browning down at the Fort.

String Vest explained that my cover was not in the usual diplomatic slot in an embassy, the scenario for which we trained on the IONEC, but as the mysteriously entitled `civil adviser' to Brigadier John Reith, the commander of the British UNPROFOR contribution in Split on the Dalmatian coast. It was a flimsy, ill-considered cover-story which fooled nobody. As I was to find out, every one of my contacts in Bosnia assumed immediately that I was from British intelligence and even the greenest of army privates in the Divulje barracks was smart enough to guess. The only people nave enough to be duped by the fig-leaf were, it seemed, back in Head Office.

The files revealed that Clive Mansell, profiting from his experience on SAFE HAVEN, set up the BAP station. He equipped a small office in the Divulje barracks with a computer and satellite dish and found a suitable flat in a fishing village a few kilometres from the barracks. But Mansell left after a few months on promotion to an administrative job in Century House and Kenneth Roberts, the former Black Watch officer who had been in UKO, took his place. Roberts was in post for eight months, and changed the scope of the job. Not content to restrict himself to networking in the Divulje barracks and the safety of the Dalmatian coast, he travelled extensively around central and northern Bosnia. Roberts's efforts paid dividends: he successfully recruited two useful agents and had the cultivation of three more well advanced. STEENBOX was an official in the northern town of Tuzla who provided CX on the activities and intentions of the Bosnian militia unit based there, which stubbornly refused to fall wholly under the control of Sarajevo. DONNE, his most important recruit, was an official in the Bosnian government in Sarajevo and provided key information on the tactics of the Bosnian delegation in the ICFY peace talks in Geneva.

Roberts also brought in a four-man detachment of soldiers from 602 Troop to beef up his communications and provide physical protection on forays into central Bosnia - 602 Troop are an 80-strong detachment from the Royal Signals Regiment whose permanent home is in Banbury, Oxfordshire. In peacetime, they man MI6's overseas high-frequency radio relay stations and rotate between postings in Kowandi, northern Australia (until it was closed in March 1993), Ascension Island, Northern Ireland and the Falklands where they support the chain of listening stations in Chile. In wartime, they are responsible for providing field communications for MI6 operations, such as during SAFE HAVEN, the Gulf War, and now in Bosnia. The four-man BAP detachment installed HF radio sets, known as KALEX, which were faster and easier to use than the satellite communications used by Mansell. One was set up in the top floor of the Divulje barracks in Roberts's office, the other mounted in the back of a long-wheelbase Land Rover to provide mobile communications.

As if the flimsiness of my cover was not enough of a handicap, the H/BAP job would be a challenging enough post for an experienced officer to take on at such short notice. The unusual cover, complexity of the communication arrangements, logistical difficulties and physical risks all made it a daunting prospect for an inexperienced probationer like me. There was a lot to cram in during the fortnight before flying out to Split.
 

The scheduled British Airways flight touched down at Split airport on the morning of the 8 November 1993. The apron of the small provincial airport was heaving with Hercules C-130s and Ilyushin 72 transport aircraft that were flying supplies to the besieged city of Sarajevo, and the terminal was teeming with transiting soldiers from the multinational UNPROFOR force, journalists, TV crews and refugees. It was not easy for Roberts to identify me in the arrivals hall. `Sorry old boy,' Roberts announced in his slightly plummy public school accent as we threaded our way through the soldiers' bergens and weapons that littered the arrivals hall, `but I've had to cut the handover down to four days. I'm desperate for some leave and personnel want me on a course in London on the twenty-second.' The station handover was scheduled for two weeks, but by now I was used to being shortchanged. It was not Roberts's fault. He was quite reasonably in dire need of a break and was expected to report in ten days for pre-posting training for his new job in the British mission to the UNHQ in New York. Personnel department screwing up again, I thought.

In the few days available for the handover, our priority was to meet DONNE, so Sarajevo was to be our first port of call. `I've booked ourselves on an Arizona Air National Guard C-130 that's flying some beans up to Sarajevo this afternoon,' Roberts told me cheerfully. There's just time to dump your stuff in the flat and then we'll pop into Divulje and meet the lads from 602 Troop.' The small flat Roberts had rented for me, a ten-minute drive in the station's Land Rover Discovery, was comfortable enough and it had views over the Adriatic. `You'll need your woolies when the snow comes, though,' Roberts grinned. `There's no heating.'

After dropping off my baggage we rushed back to the Divulje barracks for a whistlestop tour. The office, tucked away on the top floor of the main HQ building, contained a metal desk, filing cabinet, hefty safe for classified material and large wall maps of Bosnia and Sarajevo. `Here, have a look at my souvenirs,' Roberts grinned, opening the bottom drawer of the desk. Inside were a Yugoslav-made pistol, several clips of 7.65mm ammunition for it and a hand-grenade. `I got them off a stiff I found near Tuzla,' Roberts laughed gleefully. `Here, take a look at this, one of Karadzic's bodyguards gave it to me.' Roberts handed me a small implement that had been disguised as a fountain pen, but which contained a 7.65mm bullet. `Turn the cap and it fires. Real James Bond stuff, huh?' Roberts laughed.

`Are you taking this stuff back with you?' I asked, not too happy about having a small armoury in my desk.

`Sorry old boy, I was hoping to send it back in the dip bag and donate it to the museum at the Fort, but I never got around to it.' Roberts slammed the drawer shut and we continued the tour.

Alongside the office was another small room housing the KALEX communications gear. The detachment lived in a small dormitory opposite that they had fitted out with satellite television and a few sofas. Roberts introduced me briefly to the troops. Jon, a bright and efficient young sergeant, was the detachment's leader. Baz, a caustic Geordie corporal, was dedicated and hard-working, but liked to affect a devil-may-care attitude. Jim, a cheerful lance-corporal, was full of initiative and drive, and was overdue for promotion. Finally Tosh, a Londoner, was a bit of a jack-the-lad, forever ready with a cheeky quip. `They're a good bunch,' Roberts later told me `They work hard and you won't have any trouble with them.'

Ominous grey clouds were gathering outside as we squeezed into the C-130 alongside the dusty pallets of flour and beans and strapped ourselves, bloated by our obligatory flak-jackets and helmets, into the webbing seats which stretched down the sides of the aircraft. A cheerful National Guard loadie handed us flight rations, a small, white cardboard box filled with crisps, an apple and a cheese sandwich. `Here, have some gum, it'll save your ears popping,' the grinning loadie shouted against the throbbing roar of the turboprop engines as he thrust a small box at us. I reached in and put the yellow tabs where they were supposed to be, in my ears. The loadie smiled ruefully, perhaps hoping he'd be able to catch out his next civilian passenger.

Ten bumpy minutes into the hour-long flight, the dark hold was suddenly illuminated with a blinding flash that raced the length of the fuselage and a whip-like crack audible even above the engine roar. `Fuck, we've been hit!' shouted Roberts. The Hercules lurched into a steep nosedive, forcing me to grip the webbing seating to stop myself falling into Roberts's lap and making my ears pop ferociously. The dive lasted a few heart-pumping seconds before the pilot pulled some g's to level out. `What was that?' shouted Roberts to the loadie when we were straight and level. `Was that a sniper bullet?' A few C-130s had taken sniper shots, but normally only on the approach to Sarajevo airport. We were a long way from the risky zone and so it was unlikely.

`I'll go find out,' shouted back the loadie, unstrapping himself to make his way forward to the cockpit. He returned a minute later. `Lightning strike,' he announced. `Pilot says it hit the tail, came down the fuselage, and punched a fist-sized hole out the nose, smashing up some avionics. We've got to divert to Frankfurt.' Roberts and I looked at each other in resignation. It would take another day out of our already tight schedule.

The USAF put us up in their comfortable officer's quarters in their sprawling Ramstein base and we took the first available flight to Sarajevo the next morning. This time we got within ten minutes of Sarajevo and the C-130 had just started its anti-sniper dive towards the runway when the flight was again aborted. A burst of Serbian artillery on the runway shut the airport and we had to retreat again, this time to Zagreb in Croatia.

We finally made it into Sarajevo the next day on board a Russian Ilyushin 72, their pilots taking a more robust view of bombs and bullets than the Americans, and touched down on the heavily guarded Sarajevo runway on a fine autumnal day. We were met on the apron by the affable commander of the four-man British detachment in Sarajevo, Major Ken Lindsay, with his armoured Land Rover. `You've picked a fine day for a visit,' he greeted us. `The sun's shining, we're flush with Fosters and the Serbs have only lobbed five shells at us today.' Originally a truckie in the Australian army, he married the daughter of a senior British cavalry officer, who arranged for his new son-in-law to transfer to the smart King's Royal Hussars cavalry regiment. Lindsay's official job was to ensure that the UNHCR relief deliveries were fairly shared amongst the various distribution stations in Sarajevo. But unofficially he and his team provided transport and lodging for us while in town. `Chuck your kit in the back of the wagon. We'll go for a tour of Sarajevo, then have a few tinnies in the PTT building,' Lindsay ordered cheerfully.

As we drove through the Serb-Muslim front lines into town, past the burnt-out shell of an old T-55 tank, Lindsay pointed out the Sarajevo landmarks. The pock-marked PTT building, the former telecommunications centre which had been commandeered by the UN, was where he and his contingent were based in two cramped rooms. `Ken normally lets me sleep on the floor of his room if I'm staying in Sarajevo,' explained Roberts. `He'll do the same for you as long as you don't snore.'

`And as long as you bring a slab,' added Ken.

`That's the Holiday Inn on the left,' Roberts pointed out a heavily bombed 15-storey building. `I stay there sometimes, but CNN have commandeered all the best rooms, and most of the time there is no water, so it's better to stay in the PTT.' We drove down sniper-alley, the long dual-carriageway linking the airport and PTT building to downtown Sarajevo, and took a whistlestop tour of the main Bosnian government building, the impressive but sadly bombed-out library and the Kosovo hospital.

There was little point in gratuitously risking Serbian snipers' bullets and shells so once Roberts had orientated me, we returned to the safety of the sturdy PTT building. But once dusk had fallen, Angus, Lindsay's NCO, drove us back the three kilometres into town for the handover with DONNE. There was only time for a half-hour meeting, but it was enough for Roberts to introduce me as his successor, extract a CX report and hand over a large carton of Marlboros that DONNE could trade on the burgeoning Sarajevo black market.

`Right, let's get back to the PTT building for some beers with Ken,' Roberts urged eagerly as soon as the debrief was over. `That'll be Angus there.' Sure enough, two headlights were coming towards us and Angus pulled up at the RV bang on time. Roberts climbed into the passenger seat, leaving me to clamber into the back of the vehicle over assorted flak-jackets, helmets and tools. Before pulling the heavy door shut, I had a last glance round; my next trip would be alone and I hoped I would remember the route.

We spent the evening drinking heavily with Lindsay and his detachment, and arose early the next morning, hungover, to take the first flight back to Split. Roberts was due to fly home to London the next afternoon, leaving me in charge. `No time to meet STEENBOX, I'm afraid,' grinned Roberts as we shivered in the dark airport waiting room, `but I'll explain how you get to Tuzla and where to find her.' Roberts was understandably demob happy and I would have to pick up the pieces from scratch after the heavily curtailed handover.
 

Peering through the rain-spattered windscreen into the darkness, I tried to pick out physical features weakly illuminated by the Discovery headlights and relate them to the map spread on my knee. Silently, I cursed Fowlecrooke for leaving so little time for the handover. Meeting STEENBOX required navigating to Tuzla, 360 km north-east of Split along forest tracks and through two war fronts. It would not have been a straightforward task in daylight, but we had been badly held up by an aid convoy earlier on the route and now darkness and rain were both falling. The narrow, potholed lane traversed a steep valley side. The hillside to the right, densely packed with trees, rose to the clouded skyline. Down to the left, I could just pick out through the trees the glint of the stream on the valley bottom. It could have been any one of hundreds of similar valleys in rugged central Bosnia, but there was something not quite right about it. The road was narrower and the valley contours steeper than those on the map. `Jim, are you sure this is the right road?'

`Yeah,' Jim replied casually from behind the wheel. `Know it like me own bell-end.' Jim was grinning like a kid on a bouncy castle. Nothing ever bothered him. He was a big chunky guy, but serious about his fitness. Down at Divulje he was out running and lifting weights every day. But I wasn't too sure he knew his body parts as well as he thought he did.

Jim lifted on the throttle and changed down a gear, the V8 engine growling as it slowed the heavily laden vehicle. The headlights had picked up a tree trunk, the size of a telegraph pole, which had fallen across the narrow road and we drew to a stop in front of it. `Must have been the storm last night,' Jim announced cheerfully. Without further ado he hopped down from the vehicle and, as if he was trying out for a `world's strongest man' competition, picked up the trunk, staggered with it in his arms for a few yards up the road and threw it in the ditch.

I glanced in the mirror to see the familiar lights of Jon and Baz's underpowered Land Rover crawling up the hill behind us. Reaching down to the stereo I flicked off Jim's tape and grabbed the Motorola from behind the instrument binnacle. `Baz, do you reckon this is the right road?' I asked.

There was a pause while he consulted Jon, before the Motorola hissed back. `Keep yer keks on. Just round the next corner we should come to that burnt-out Scroat village.' Baz sounded confident and as he had done the trip three times with Roberts I trusted his judgement. I put the Motorola down just as Jim clambered back into the vehicle, slapping his hands together to brush away the bark and leaves adhering to them. He clunked the vehicle into first gear and pulled away.

Round the next corner there was no burnt-out Croatian village, just another fallen tree, much bigger than the first. Beyond that, I could see another, then another. Undaunted, Jim prepared to jump out of the vehicle to move them, but I grabbed his arm. `No, this isn't right,' I said. This was not the work of a storm. The trees had been laid across the road for a purpose. `Baz, Jon, turn round immediately, we've taken a wrong turn,' I ordered down the Motorola.

Jim detected the urgency in my voice, and had already launched the Discovery into a three point turn. He'd just got it pointing the other way when Baz squawked on the Motorola `Hey Rich, we've got trouble.'

The comms-wagon was about 100 metres down the road, halfway through the three-point turn. With no power steering Jon must have been cursing trying to get the heavy vehicle turned round, and he'd been too slow to get away from the militiamen. Two were standing over the bonnet, pointing their AK47s directly through the windscreen at Baz. Two more were at the driver's door, perhaps talking to Jon or, worse, trying to force it open. More were at the rear door, peering in through the window at the computers and communication equipment and pulling at the handle. Other shadowy figures were emerging from the woods, making purposefully towards the vehicle, weapons held out menacingly.

There was no time to reply to Baz before our vehicle was also surrounded. The barrels of two AK47s loomed at me through the windscreen, their owners just dark shadows. There was a sharp tap on my side window and, looking round, a pistol gesticulated for me to open up. Trying not to make a sudden movement, I slipped my hand round to feel for the button on the top edge of the door - Jim would have tripped out the central locking when he got out to move the tree. I pushed it down, praying that the unreliable system would work. There was a satisfying clunk as all five doors locked up. The pistol crashed threateningly against the window in response.

The situation was awkward rather than desperate. Thankfully most of the soldiers were clean shaven, so they were not from the Afghan Mujahideen group that was known to be operating in the area and who would not hesitate to execute infidels. Our lives were probably not in danger - even the worst Bosnian militia groups were unlikely to murder UNPROFOR soldiers as it would lead to severe retribution. But I was worried about the vehicles and equipment. Only a few weeks earlier a group of French journalists had been ambushed a few kilometres from this spot, ordered out of their Land Cruiser at gunpoint and left at the side of the road as their ambushers drove away in the new vehicle. It would be a disaster if the same thing happened to us. Losing the Discovery and comms-wagon would be bad enough but the KALEX HF comms equipment, though outdated, was still classified `TOP SECRET'. Still, I thought to myself with a weak smile, they would be in for a nasty surprise if they tried opening my briefcase. The metal box that contained the encryption OTPs and other classified material had an inbuilt incendiary device that would destroy the contents with a satisfying bang if it were opened incorrectly. I hoped that they would not get that far.

Grabbing the Motorola I got on to Baz. `Don't get out of the vehicle at all costs,' I shouted.

`Gotcha,' Baz replied, not as cockily as before.

The pistol banged against the side window again and an order was barked in Bosanski. Stooping slightly so that the pistol owner's blackened face was visible, I shrugged and held up my hands. `I don't understand. Ich verstehe nicht. Je ne comprends pas,' I replied, cursing for the umpteenth time how ridiculous it was for personnel to send me on a posting of this nature lacking even rudimentary language training. The voice barked out again and a rifle butt smashed into the right headlight, breaking the lens. I got the message and reached for the steering column stalk to flick out the remaining light.

The voice barked out again, so I dropped the window a crack, hoping that it would be taken as a gesture of conciliation. `How can I help?' I asked feebly in English. The voice screamed again, more aggressively this time, and the vehicle rocked as he pulled hard on the door handle. Other soldiers tried to force open the rear door too. Winding down the window another half-inch, I tried to identify myself. `UNPROFOR, UNPROFOR. British soldiers,' I said, holding my United Nations ID card up against the window.

Meanwhile, I could hear that Jim was also getting an interview, though his inquisitor spoke a few words of English, and I glanced across. `Manchester United,' the face uttered proudly, grinning into Jim's window. `Bryan Robson,' the face beamed even more broadly, giving a thumbs up.

Jim, a fan of Liverpool, swallowed his pride. `Yeah. Man United. Very good, best team in the world.' He gave a thumbs-up sign and the face grinned with appreciation.

But the voice in my window, which I took to be the commander's, snapped out another order and I turned away from Jim as the soldiers milling around the front of the vehicle sprung forward, the windscreen bristling menacingly with AK47s. My eyes were getting accustomed to the dark now that the headlights were out and I could make out the faces peering down the barrels at us. They looked tired and pissed off. The commander barked another order and the sound of 7.62mm rounds slotting into the AK47's breaches sent my stomach churning. The young soldier in front of me slipped the safety catch down on to the first notch - automatic fire on the AK47. His face was no longer pissed off, but tense and frightened. I resigned myself to losing the vehicles and turned to Jim to give the signal to get out.

But Jim had other ideas. Smiling like a teddy bear on a grand day out, he reached down the side of the transmission tunnel and pulled his Browning from its holster. Like John Wayne in the OK Corral preparing for a final showdown, he pointed it skywards, paused for a second, then with his left hand pulled back the slider, driving a round into the barrel. `What the fuck are you doing? Put that down!' I gasped.

`Nah, they're just bluffing,' Jim replied. `Watch . . .' The Manchester United supporter's weary face cracked into a smile, then a smirk, then an infectious giggle, as Jim waved the pistol at him. `See, they're more scared than we are.' One by one, the tension in the other faces ranged against us lifted and the barrels drooped as the laughter spread at Jim's grossly disproportionate response. The commander alongside me shouted something in Bosanski as he sensed the mirth on the other side of the vehicle, but nobody paid any attention. A moment later he realised that he'd lost face amongst his undisciplined rabble and, turning away angrily from me, skulked off back up the road.

I watched for a second through the rear-view mirror. `You are a crazy bastard,' I said to Jim, as soon as I was sure that he was gone. `What the fuck possessed you to do that?' I said, trying to hide my admiration for his coolness.

`That Man U supporter told me not to worry,' Jim replied. `Apparently that O/C's a right cunt and his bark's worse than his bite.' Jim tucked the pistol back into the holster as most of the soldiers drifted away, leaving just a couple hung around our vehicle, now relaxed and friendly. The Manchester United supporter grinned at the window and Jim lowered it.

`You go now,' the Bosnian smiled. `You lucky. You nearly cross front line. Serbs . . .' He gesticulated to the next corner, his English failing him. `That captain . . .' He gestured up the road, made an O with thumb and forefinger, and pumped it up and down in an internationally recognised sign - `Fuck him, nobody like him.' I reached over with a pack of Marlboros - we always carried them for such occasions though none of us smoked. He took one and lit it up and I thrust the rest of the packet at him as soon as he had put away his lighter. `Follow me,' he urged. `Mines, that's why trees.' He set off the way we had come, occasionally indicating us to keep well away from one verge or the other. Only then did we realise that we had had more than one lucky escape. After our guide had tapped the window to signify the all-clear, we continued down the road in silence, reflecting on our good fortune.

Thereafter, we ensured that we made no further navigational mistakes by avoiding driving on unfamiliar roads after dusk. Others who made similar mistakes in Bosnia were not as lucky. A few weeks later, a British captain took the same wrong turn as us but ran over one of the anti-tank mines and was killed instantly. In March, a group of ODA workers were ambushed by a Mujahideen group just outside the town of Zenica in central Bosnia. They were driven to woodlands a few miles away, forced from their vehicles and made to kneel at the side of the road. Their captors shot one victim dead with a bullet to the back of the head. The others ran for their lives, diving into a freezing river to avoid a hail of lead, and were lucky to escape with only minor wounds.

We were able to establish contact with STEENBOX in Tuzla later on that first trip and thereafter we made the three-day trip to see her every two weeks. The logistics of each trip were in the capable hands of Jon, who loaded up our two vehicles with the comms equipment, supplies, a small armory of an SA-80 rifle and Browning 9mm pistol for each of us, flak-jackets, helmets and spare parts for the vehicles. We took camping gear in case we had to rough it, but slept whenever we could in the mess halls of the various UNPROFOR bases that dotted Bosnia, or in the few hotels that remained open, catering to aid workers and journalists. Jon plus two others accompanied me on every trip, the fourth member taking it in turn to stay at Divulje barracks to operate the fixed KALEX. They always looked forward enthusiastically to the trips up country, the highlight being the traverse of the front line between the Bosnian-Croat forces and the Bosnian-Muslim militia at Gornji Vakuf. Both sides liked to snipe at UNPROFOR vehicles passing through the bombed out town, then to milk the propoganda points by blaming the other. Soft-skinned vehicles such as ours were obliged to travel through the town in convoy under the protection of two Warrior APCs, which returned fire enthusiastically and spectacularly at any suspected sniper position. In the dozen or so traverses of Gornji Vakuf that we made, we were lucky that neither of our vehicles were hit, though we regularly came under fire.

STEENBOX proved a problematic agent to debrief. The information she gave about the intentions of the local militia was not CX but merely the official propaganda of the Bosnian VIth army in Tuzla. At one meeting, just after dusk in a small caf in Tuzla, a group of senior Bosnian militiamen walked in and ordered coffee at the bar. As they had not yet noticed us at a small table in the corner, I whispered to STEENBOX `I'd better get out of here - it'll be dangerous if they see us together. I'll meet you in 20 minutes in the caf opposite the town hall.'

`No, no, it's OK,' STEENBOX casually replied. `They're friends of mine and they already know that you are Kenneth's successor.'

There was clearly no point in pretending to Whitehall officials that information from STEENBOX was CX, as it was being passed to me with the blessing of the VIth army command. They were just using her and me as a direct route to disseminate their propaganda into Whitehall. I sent a series of telegrams to String Vest arguing my case, but he would have none of it.

`We are convinced that STEENBOX is reporting without the knowledge and approval of her superiors,' String Vest wrote in one telegram, without substantiating his position with evidence, `and her information is valuable CX.' String Vest's intransigence was due to new obligations he was under as the P officer for the Balkans. A year earlier, under pressure from the Treasury, MI6 had admitted a team of specially vetted management consultants to look at productivity. They treated CX and agents as widgets and introduced an `internal market' system. P4 was given targets for how much CX his section had to produce per month and how many agents it had to cultivate and recruit per quarter. In the last six months of 1993, he had to have CX-producing agents in the Serb, Croat and Muslim factions of Bosnia, and one under cultivation in each. If STEENBOX was written off through my argument, then he would be behind on this target. Rather than do that, he preferred to distribute her propaganda as CX.

String Vest was equally adamant that I should attempt to recruit John Vucic, a young Australian-Croat who was working in the headquarters of the Bosnian-Croat faction in the town of Posusje. Vucic was a 26-year-old second-generation Croat accountant from Sydney, who worked as a clerk in the headquarters. Vucic had good access and would be a useful source if he could be recruited. String Vest was adamant that I should try. `As an Australian national, you should play on his Anglophilian interest in cricket to pursue a recruitment,' he wrote in one telegram. String Vest ignored my protests that Vucic was more extreme than Attila the Hun, resolutely defending human rights abuses by his beloved Croatian people. String Vest was blatantly ignoring my judgement as the officer on the ground so as to satisfy targets imposed by faceless management consultants.
 

`Slow down a bit, Tosh,' I urged. `Baz'll be effin' and blindin' at you, trying to keep up on these roads.' Tosh lifted off slightly, but I knew that I'd have to remind him again ten minutes later. The heavily laden comms-wagon with its underpowered diesel engine struggled at the best of times to keep up with the powerful V8 Discovery, but with the impetuous Tosh at the wheel Baz and Jon's job would be harder. We were hurrying into Sarajevo with a busy few days ahead of us. I'd been unable to get into the city for the past ten days through a combination of circumstances. The Serb besiegers had shut down completely the sporadically open land route into the city after a tizz with the French UNPROFOR contingent; then the airfield had been shut through heavy fog, and when that lifted, the Hercules that I was about to board at Split went unserviceable on the runway.

DONNE was long overdue for a debrief and String Vest had been sending increasingly irate telegrams of complaint. Also, two senior FCO diplomats from the Balkans desk wanted a meeting with Karadzic in his headquarters in the village of Pale just outside Sarajevo to understand better his negotiating position in the ongoing ICFY talks. As there was no other British diplomatic representation nearby, String Vest asked me to organise the trip. Getting permission to travel from Sarajevo to Pale was not easy, as it meant negotiating a safe passage through the Bosnian-Muslim and Bosnian-Serb front lines, not to mention clearing the trip with the obstreperous French UNPROFOR contingent in Sarajevo. I'd arranged a meeting with them at 1800 that evening, but we'd been held up when a Spanish UNPROFOR APC crashed in front of us, blocking the road.

`We'll never get there unless we leg it,' Tosh answered back.

`Listen, Tosh, this is your last warning, if you don't lift off a bit, I'll have to drive,' I slapped down the sun visor against the low winter sun which was reflecting from the day-old snow that covered the abandoned fields and returned to my briefing notes.

`Shit, Jon's lost it!' shouted Tosh urgently, slamming on the brakes of the Discovery.

I spun round in the seat to see the comms-wagon completing a somersault on to its roof, 50 metres behind us. Tosh brought the Discovery to a juddering halt on the ABS and gunned it into a three-point turn to get back to the accident scene. As we skidded to a halt alongside, Jon and Baz were crawling out of the wreckage, dazed and shaken, but thankfully not hurt. `Yer bastard,' muttered Baz as he got to his feet and surveyed the remains of the comms-wagon. `We'd better call the AA.' The vehicle had rolled twice before ending on its roof in a ditch, and even if it could be repaired it would be off the road for several weeks.

`Black ice, there was nothing Baz could do,' Jon apologised to me.

We now had to replan the next few days. `Tosh, set the HF up,' ordered Jon, `We'll have to get Jim to fly the spare comms-wagon up from Split.' There was no way that the French would give us permission to travel from Sarajevo to Pale for the Karadzic meeting in a single vehicle, so it was imperative that Jim acted fast. I left Jon and Baz to guard the crippled vehicle against scavengers until the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) recovery unit arrived, and set off with Tosh in the Discovery for the meeting with the French.

The 48 hours were a whirlwind of meetings to debrief DONNE and sort out the Pale trip. The recalcitrant French commander eventually agreed to allow the diplomatic visit, but not until his decision was eased by two bottles of Scotch. Multiple meetings with the Bosnian-Muslim militia and several cartons of cigarettes eventually secured a safe passage through their lines, though they were deeply opposed to British diplomatic contact with the Serbs. Finally, Major Indic, the temperamental Bosnian-Serb liaison officer in the PTT building, agreed to give us permission to travel onwards through Serbian-held territory to Pale, though, to show who was boss, he made me wait in his office for six hours before he would agree.

602 troop were working just as hard. Jim managed to get the spare comms-wagon on to a Hercules arriving in Sarajevo the evening before the arrival of the two VIPs, a considerable accomplishment because all the incoming flights were supposedly only for humanitarian aid. Baz and Tosh got the Discovery gleaming clean for the visitors, no mean feat given the sparsity of running water at the airfield and its filthy state from the overland journey up from Split. They'd also got their uniforms cleaned up and boots polished and I too had changed into a clean shirt and jacket and tie. I was in the French operations centre at the airfield, checking with the ops officer that there were no last minute hitches on the route up to Pale, when Jon called me up on the Motorola. `Rich, if you've got a spare moment, could you come down to the loading bay and give us a hand dealing with the Frogs? I want to get the damaged comms-wagon on the flight back to Split, but I can't understand what they are saying.'

Down at the loading bay, our sad-looking vehicle was waiting to be loaded on the next Hercules, and was in the custody of a French loadmaster sergeant. `C'est quoi le problme?' I asked. The sergeant explained that only vehicles that could move under their own power were allowed on to the runway, to minimise the time that the aircraft were stationary and thus vulnerable to sniper fire.

`OK, I'll see if the REME can get it running again,' Jon replied as soon as I had translated.

Although the vehicle's bodywork was badly damaged, the running gear was mostly untouched and, with some attention, it might be got moving again. `It's piston locked,' announced the grubby REME mechanic after a cursory inspection. `When she went over on her back, oil from the sump leaked past the rings into the combustion chambers. I'll have to blow the oil out.' He removed the gloplugs from each cylinder, then asked Jon to crank the engine on the starter motor. But more oil had leaked past than even the mechanic had imagined and as the starter-motor engaged an angry geyser of black oil shot out of the cylinder head, catching him square in the face. I was not quick enough to duck either and my jacket, tie and shirt were splattered. `Sorry about that, sir,' grinned the REME grease-monkey, wiping his face on an old rag. No doubt he would have a laugh with his mates over a beer that evening.

There was only an hour and a half until the visitors arrived, and I was far from presentable. Baz dashed back to the PTT building in the Discovery to try to find me a change of clothing, but a frantic search yielded nothing. The worst of the oil scrubbed out of my shirt with swarfega and tissue paper, but my silk tie was beyond redemption. Later that morning I was forced to meet the VIPs with my shirt open at the neck. It was not appropriate dress for a diplomatic meeting but the more important objective was to get the two VIPs to Pale safely and back for their return flight that evening.

The meeting with Karadzic and his henchmen went smoothly enough, and that evening with the VIPs dispatched back to Zagreb, I typed out a telegram to P4 on the portable PC. The KALEX HF radio had not yet been swapped from the damaged comms-wagon into the replacement vehicle, so John manually encrypted the telegram and beamed it back to MI6's Poundon communication centre using the satellite transmitter. An hour later, String Vest, who must have been working at his desk late that evening, sent me a return telegram. `Congratulations on setting up a difficult meeting under what must have been very trying circumstances,' he wrote.

In February 1994 an uneasy ceasefire was brokered by UNPROFOR between the warring factions and the Bosnian Serbs paused their indiscriminate shelling and sniping of the city. Sarajevo was temporarily more or less safe and, coincidentally, I had a rush of requests to visit me, amongst them String Vest. `I'd love to have come out earlier, and accompanied you on one of your up-country trips,' he told me over dinner in a comfortable Split restaurant, `but I was just far too busy.'

Shortly after String Vest had returned to London, Head Office took the decision to close BAP. Now that Bosnia had been recognised as an independent state and Sarajevo was returning to some semblance of normality, the FCO opened an embassy, incongruously over a mafia- run casino, and had established diplomatic relations. It was the right time to run MI6 operations out of the embassy under diplomatic cover and end the charade of my `civil adviser' fig-leaf. Personnel had already selected a suitable H/SAR, and she was nearing the end of her language training.

I was relieved when the telegram arrived in mid-April 1994 announcing that the new H/SAR would be flying out to Sarajevo in early May. SBO/1 recommended that her diplomatic cover not be tainted through direct contact with me, as he rightly suspected that I was well-blown to the Bosnian secret police, so I was not required to show her around her new patch.

My only task therefore was to oversee with Jon the closure of the station in the Divulje barracks in the first week of May. String Vest suggested that I drive the Discovery and small station items back to London overland rather than incur the expense of sending out the S&D C-130 to pick it up; 602 troop stayed behind for a few more days to pack up the two remaining vehicles, the original comms-wagon now repaired, and they followed with the KALEX's and other gear.

Although I enjoyed aspects of the posting, particularly working with 602 troop, the lack of guidance from a more experienced hand made it frustrating. I needed a break from the constant proximity of bombs, bullets and blood, and I was looking forward to a holiday with Sarah. She had had a cancer scare a few months earlier, though fortunately she was by now out of hospital.

Driving up the spectacular cliff-top road that runs up the Dalmation coast from Split to Trieste on the first leg of my return home, I stopped off at the top of one of the highest cliffs just as the sun was spectacularly setting over the sea. There was still one more task remaining to complete the station closure; reaching into the back of the Discovery, I pulled out Roberts's gun collection and hand-grenade and threw them as far as possible into the deep water of the Adriatic.


************************


10. CHEMICAL THERAPY

MONDAY, 6 JUNE 1994
85 ALBERT EMBANKMENT, LONDON

On my return the office had moved from the dim and anonymous Century House to spectacular new premises on the Albert Embankment. The state-of-the-art Terry Farrell-designed office block occupied a prime site in central London on the south bank of the Thames, facing Westminster Palace and Whitehall, and its siting and architecture presented a radically revamped image for the service. Gigantic shoulders towering over a glowering head in the form of its central gazebo, it was like a Terminator, belligerently daring anybody to challenge its authority. It was supposedly built to an official budget of 85 million, but everybody in the office knew that in reality it had cost nearly three times as much. We were warned in the weekly newsletter that discussion of the cost over-run would be considered a serious breach of the OSA and would be dealt with accordingly.

The aggressive facade was appropriate, for MI6 was facing the most serious threats to its hitherto unchallenged autonomy since its inception. It had recently been `avowed', or publicly acknowledged to exist, by the Queen at her speech opening the new session of Parliament in October 1993. New legislation came into effect in December 1994 bringing a modicum of accountability to the service. A select group of MPs won limited powers to scrutinise the budget and objectives of the service, but were not allowed to investigate MI6 operations, examine paperwork or cross-examine officers. The changes yielded a token of public accountability to the reluctant service, but nothing like the oversight exercised by the US Congress over American intelligence agenices, or even by the Russian parliament over their services. The Treasury was also for the first time allowed to make basic investigations into the service's efficiency and had wielded its knife, forcing the service to make hitherto unheard-of redundancies.

Many familiar faces departed the service during my absence. Even the Chief, Sir Colin McColl was ejected, along with the clubbable but lethargic old-guard directors. They had been jostling for the top job and the office rumour was that one had burst into tears when he learned that he would not inherit the post. Instead, a new, younger breed of managers was appointed, headed by David Spedding as Chief. A pushy Middle East specialist, at 49 he was the youngest-ever officer to reach the top. He forged his reputation during the Gulf War which broke out when he was deputy head of the Middle East controllerate. The controller refused to return from holiday when the war started, and Spedding siezed the opportunity to grab the reins of power, leaving an indelible impression on Whitehall. He promoted an equally thrusting bunch to senior management positions.

The new leadership reflected the new building - younger, meaner, more aggressive. Perhaps it was a necessary change to combat the financial challenges and intensified public scrutiny of the new service, but would it be wise in the people-business of spying? It was with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation that I walked the mile from my home to Vauxhall Cross to start my first day in the new building on a drizzly June morning.

Personnel department gave me ten days off after returning from Bosnia, happily spent sorting out my garden which had fallen into bedraggled despair during my absence. The experience in Bosnia left me feeling remote from the egotistical and brazen hurly-burly of London and I had not felt inclined to socialise much except with Sarah. My solitude was disturbed only by a brief visit from Fowlecrooke to inform me of my next job. He offered me an undercover slot with the UN weapon inspection teams in Iraq, but I wanted my next overseas post to be a normal one, so until something came up he offered me a Head Office slot in the PTCP (Production-Targeting Counter-Proliferation) department. The section gathered intelligence on and disrupted the attempts of pariah nations - mainly Iran, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan - to obtain biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. I wanted to go to the department immediately after the IONEC, but the job had gone to Bart. It was pleasing to now get an opportunity there, and to get out of the East European controllerate.

There was no friendly guard waiting in the entry lobby to greet staff and check photo IDs as in Century House. Security checking was done electronically and to enter the main building, we had to pass through a row of six perspex, time-locked security doors, stacked like the eggs of a giant insect. A small queue stretched behind them. When my turn came, a swipe of my card through the slot and the entry of my personal code, six-nine-two-one, illuminated a small green light by the slot, and the perspex door slid open with a Star Trek - like swish. I stepped into the narrow capsule, my shoulders brushing the sides. A pressure pad on the floor established that there was only one occupant, the door swished shut behind me, then the door in front opened, releasing me into the inner lobby.

Like Century House, the interior of the new building felt like a hotel but the shabby Intourist style had been discarded in favour of flashy American Marriott decor. Soft fluorescent light from recessed port-holes in the high ceiling illuminated a hard-wearing ivory marble floor, set off by the matt grey slate of the walls. Two giant columns dominated the hall, containing banks of rapid modern lifts. There would be no more impatient, muttering queues waiting for under-sized lifts in this building. Around the edge of the columns were inset comfortable black leather bench seats. To the right, natural light filtered from a small atrium that opened, by a tall light well, to the sky above. It was filled with large and garish plastic imitations of sub-tropical trees. Several marbled hallways led off from the sides of the central atrium. I was 20 minutes early for the appointment with my new line manager, so I set off to explore.

A few steps down the first hallway revealed the new library. The Century House library was a dismal affair, consisting of metal racks filled with ancient books and ragged filing boxes full of magazines. The new version was much smarter and brighter, with expensive-looking reading tables and swish sliding book racks. Jenny, the cheerful librarian, smiled a welcome from behind her desk. `How are you?' she greeted me enthusiastically. `How was Bosnia?' She explained that she had been promoted to chief librarian at the time of the move but Sandra, her older and therefore more expensive superior, was made redundant. `I felt so sorry for her,' murmured Jenny. `Twenty years in Century House, and personnel department wouldn't even give her a visitor's pass so that she could see inside the new building. She was dreadfully upset.'

Jenny stamped the distribution list on the morning's newspapers. `And have you seen what they did to the cleaners?' Jenny asked. She showed me a recent article in the Mirror. In a cynical attempt to save money, personnel sacked the 47 cleaning staff employed in Century House, then re-employed them on a lower-paid contract basis at Vauxhall Cross. In an unprecedented move, the justifiably furious cleaners took MI6 to an employment tribunal with the help of their local MP, Labour back-bencher Kate Hoey. MI6 used every trick in the book to deny them this basic human right, claiming that even the identities of cleaning staff were too secret to be made public in a court hearing. Eventually, after a long and expensive legal battle, they were granted access to a tribunal, and the Mirror showed a comical photograph of the cleaning ladies taking their stand, only a row of sensible shoes visible beneath the screen which they were forced to stand behind. They quickly won the case, compensation and their jobs back. It was an embarrassing setback for the new directors of MI6, not only publicly but also in terms of their standing within the service. They embarked on a damage-limitation exercise, complaining in the internal weekly newsletter and in public comments that the Treasury had forced the cuts `upon them'. It never crossed their minds to admit that they had simply ignored basic employment law and used the OSA to cover up their mismanagement.

Walking back across the lobby to the lifts, I spied my old IONEC colleague Bart entering the building, carrying a squash racket in one hand and using the other to push the remnants of a bun into his mouth. `'Allo, mate,' he grinned, flicking away with the back of his hand a currant which had adhered to the side of his mouth. `You've been in Bosnia,' he continued, unabashed.

I pointed to his squash racket. `This exercise business, is this some cover job?'

`Nah, I've really taken up some sport - have you seen the squash court?' Bart showed me through a steel door next to the library exit and through to a small grey-carpeted gymnasium with rowing machines and weights. A portable CD player was thumping out dance music and a large, plump-thighed woman dressed in a too-small, polka-dot leotard was sweating away in time to it on an exercise bike, the seat of which was set several notches too low. `Phwoar,' murmured Bart, without a trace of sarcasm, `not bad eh?'

Bart showed me around the rest of the sports complex. The building's architect originally envisaged using the space for a swimming pool, but the directors decided that the extravagance would attract adverse publicity. Some ex-military officers lobbied hard for an indoor pistol range, but eventually commonsense prevailed and the space was used for an indoor five-a-side soccer and badminton sports hall.

I had already spent too long looking around the new facilities and it was time to be getting upstairs to meet my new section. `So what's PTCP like?' I asked Bart, knowing that he had just departed the section to start pre-posting training for an assignment to Hungary.

`You'll be working for Badger. He likes a few beers.' Bart patted his stomach knowledgeably, his erudite praise reassuring me that I would be joining a happy section. I left Bart to get on with his squash match and made my way over to the lifts.

The refreshingly fast lift sped me up to the fourth floor and the doors opened on to a small lobby with corporate grey carpet tiles and bare white walls, like a 1980s merchant bank. For a second or two I studied the small coloured floor plan conveniently placed by the lift exit, then set off down the labyrinth of corridors to my designated room.

The open-plan PTCP office overlooked the building's spacious open-air terrace and the Thames, and accommodated half a dozen officers and secretaries. A few looked up inquisitively at the newcomer, while others kept their heads down in their files or computer screens. The officer nearest the door stood up and stretched out his hand. `Hello, you must be Richard Tomlinson,' he said. His tightly curling grey-blond hair was thinning savagely at the temples but still grew thickly on the forehead and at the sides, creating three broad stripes of fur-like hair. I presumed that he must be Badger. `Sit yourself down. I'll explain what you'll be doing.'

Badger had entered the service later in his career than usual. He obtained a PhD in genetics at Imperial College, worked as a research scientist, then as a management consultant, before joining the service in his mid-30s. He was posted first to to Nigeria, then Costa Rica. Badger's enthusiasm and well-rounded work experience made him an effective officer but he was not destined to be a high-flyer in the office - he was not enough of a back-stabber. `I want you to take over the running of BELLHOP, the biggest operation in the section,' Badger told me enthusiastically.

After the 1985-89 Iran-Iraq war when Iraqi chemical weapons killed many thousands of Iranian soldiers, the Iranians wanted to build their own arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, but did not have the indigenous capability. They needed to acquire the technology, equipment and precursor chemicals from technically more advanced countries. Prohibitions on the export of such materials under international convention did not deter the Iranians from attempting to acquire the equipment clandestinely. Any Iranian national blatantly attempting to buy banned equipment would instantly attract attention from western intelligence agencies, so they ruled out that option. Instead, they set about recruiting a network of western traders and engineers who would do their dirty work for them, either unaware of what they were getting themselves into or turning a blind eye to its illegality. `Your task,' Badger explained, `is to inveigle your way into this network under cover then meet and cultivate the Iranian ringmasters.' From then on, I could take the operation where opportunity led. Badger's hope was to use the infiltration to gather intelligence, perhaps recruiting one of the Iranians if the opportunity arose, then disrupt and delay their programme. He tossed me a hefty pink dossier, labelled P/54248. `Read that and come back to me when you've got a plan.'

This was going to be fun, I thought to myself. Loads of freedom to design my own operation, a really worthwhile objective and a good boss to work under. I set about reading the file on BELLHOP enthusiastically.

Reading an MI6 file can be a slow and laborious job. The papers are arranged in chronological order but that is the extent of their organisation. They contain a vast jumble of information from many sources. Telegrams, letters, police SB reports, copies of military and DSS records of individuals mentioned in the file, titbits from GCHQ, contact reports, surveillance photographs. Many papers cross-reference to other files, so making sense of them means a trog down to the central registry to pull the file. One document in the file might be only peripherally relevant to the case, the next might be crucially important. It is easy to miss a vital titbit and so lose track of the big picture if not concentrating hard. It took me a week before I had ploughed through the six volumes of files and felt confident to design a plan.

The file opened with the detention at Heathrow airport in the late 1980s of Nahoum Manbar, a Nice-based Israeli businessman whom MI6 suspected had close but thorny links with Mossad. Customs and Excise, in a routine search of his briefcase, found papers and plans that appeared to describe a process to produce mustard gas. Manbar was handed over to police custody,. He claimed in his interview that he was an agricultural engineer and that the formulas related to the production of a new insecticide. Although these protestations of innocence were scarcely credible, there was not enough evidence of wrong-doing to charge him with any crime. He was denied entry to Britain, put on the first plane back to Nice and MI6 asked the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French internal intelligence service) to keep an eye on him.

Through telephone intercepts on Manbar's home and information from other sources, the DST established that in 1988 Manbar obtained the plans for a mustard gas plant which he sold at handsome profit to Dr Tehrani Fahd, a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat, who was in reality a senior Iranian intelligence officer and the ringmaster entrusted with the task of building up Iran's chemical weapons programme. These plans, however, were just the start. Fahd now wanted the bits of specialist equipment and chemicals needed actually to build the plant. He tasked Manbar to help.

Although Manbar was eager for the millions of dollars that completion of the deal would bring, he was initially reluctant to get further involved as he knew that he was getting into murkier and deeper legal waters. While he was considering his options, Mossad discovered Manbar's contacts with Fahd and, according to the DST's telephone transcripts, ordered him to a meeting at the Israeli embassy in Paris. There was no intelligence on what was said at the meeting but the upshot of it was that Manbar embarked on the project with Fahd with mysteriously renewed enthusiasm. He set about finding a cut-out, somebody he could rely upon to carry out unwittingly the possibly illegal work necessary to acquire the equipment requested by the Iranians.

Through one of his business contacts Manbar met Mrs Joyce Kiddie, a British businesswoman who lived in the village of Girton, just outside Cambridge. Kiddie had worked for most of her life as a secretary at a local stationery and office supplies company; but when the managing director, by coincidence a former MI6 agent, retired, he put the small company up for sale. Kiddie, by then in her 40s, twice married with a couple of daughters, daringly used her life savings and a bank loan to buy the company. She proved a natural businesswoman and within a few years started diversifying the business. Kiddie developed contacts in China, initially in the stationery business, but then in chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Manbar was impressed by her versatility and diligence, and set about cultivating her to become his cut-out. The DST picked up Manbar's increasingly frequent telephone conversations with Kiddie and tipped off MI6. PTCP obtained a FLORIDA warrant to intercept her telephone and an ACANTHA warrant to intercept her mail, and the Cambridgeshire SB were asked to keep an eye on her. Manbar started trusting her with increasingly bizarre jobs. Once he asked her to find and buy a suitable American-Jewish NBA basketball player who would be prepared to emigrate to Israel to bolster the Israeli national team. She passed this and other tests with flying colours. By the middle of 1993 Manbar was confident that she was reliable and trustworthy and was the right person to introduce to Fahd.

Kiddie was delighted with the introduction to a new and lucrative trading partner and flew to meet Fahd in Austria. In the Vienna Hilton, Fahd asked her to buy a couple of tonnes of thionyl chloride, a `building-block' chemical used in the manufacture of many legitimate products but also an essential basic ingredient for the manufacture of mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin. There was nothing illegal about the purchase - as long as it did not end up in the wrong hands it was not breaking any international laws.

After six months of research, phone calls and two trips to remote parts of China, Kiddie completed the thionyl chloride shipment to Iran. Fahd was delighted and decided to trust her with a bit more responsibility. Now that he had the plans and a proven source of the main ingredients, he asked her to procure some of the equipment for the plant. This, however, was not as easy as the relatively straightforward acquisition of the chemicals.

Chemical weapons plants are not complicated and need not be particularly large. A nerve gas plant can be built into a space the size of a living-room, or even into the back of a truck. A mustard gas plant requires a bit more space, but a facility the size of a small house could provide a militarily significant production capability. The liquid chemicals used in the recipe are very corrosive and must be contained entirely in glass-lined apparatus - similar to larger versions of the equipment used in school chemistry lessons. Just like in school chemistry apparatus, the glass components - stopcocks, tubes and flasks - clip together, then are physically supported by a scaffold framework. Because of the danger of leaks, the building in which the apparatus is contained must be sealed and force-ventilated with high-volume extractor fans. The extracted air is driven up scrubbers - basically polypropylene chimneys filled with glass marbles down which sodium hydroxide trickles. The gases are absorbed by the sodium hydroxide on the surface of the marbles and form a harmless liquid that can be disposed of safely. The sale of all equipment of this sort is subject to international controls and it is difficult for certain countries, especially Iran, Iraq and Libya, to openly purchase any of it, even if destined for entirely innocent purposes. Fahd gave Kiddie the blueprints for some of the simpler pieces of equipment and asked her to see what she could do.

Kiddie accepted the new assignment with relish but found that she was out of her depth. She had no technical training and was unable to understand the specifications and drawings of the equipment. She needed help from somebody with an engineering background, so she recruited Albert Constantine, a 60-year-old former merchant seaman and engineer and an old friend of her first husband. Constantine was one of life's unfortunate souls whose career seemed to disintegrate around him whichever way he turned. He had started work in the Durham coalmines at 16 but was made redundant when the mining industry started to falter. He obtained an apprenticeship in the Tyneside shipyards, but he'd picked another doomed industry and shortly after he was qualified he was made redundant again. He went to sea with the merchant navy and had just qualified as a First Mate when he was seriously injured in a car crash. As a result of his injuries, Constantine lost his merchant navy medical certificate and that career too. He drifted around doing simple engineering work for many years and then, in his late 50s, washed up as a commodity trader with a import-export trading company in London.

When Kiddie asked Constantine to help, he was delighted. He was struggling to make ends meet from his low-paid job, and the extra cash would come in handy. A few months later, in April 1994, Kiddie and Constantine met up in South Mimms motorway service station, just north of London. Unbeknown to them, their meeting was under surveillance. Two PTCP officers, posing as travelling salesmen, sat at an adjacent table, recording their conversation with a sophisticated directional microphone mounted in a briefcase. From that surveillance and the telephone intercepts of Constantine, it became apparent that he too was unable to understand the technical specifications provided by Fahd. But there was no way that he was going to let on to Kiddie just yet - he badly wanted to be in on the deal.

Normally if MI6 wanted to worm its way into a piece of quasi-criminal activity such as Kiddie's dealings with Fahd, they would try to cultivate and then recruit one of the key individuals, such as Constantine or Kiddie. But Badger was adamant that Kiddie would panic if approached by MI6 and pull out of the deal, denying us the opportunity of disrupting the Iranian operation. He ruled out cultivating Constantine, too. He was more level-headed, but was loyal to his friends and he would probably tell Kiddie. Badger was adamant that the only means to get into the operation was for me to approach Kiddie or Constantine under cover, win their confidence and trust, and hope that they would recommend me to Manbar and Fahd.

It would be difficult to get alongside Kiddie directly. First, she worked alone at home, so was not easily accessible via intermediaries. Secondly, telephone intercepts showed that she was wary of strangers and only trusted them if strongly recommended by somebody she knew. I would have to get alongside Constantine first, then hope that he would introduce me to Kiddie.

Delving into the files turned up Constantine's home address in Southampton on the south coast of England. A quick recce trip on my motorbike revealed that the house next door to his terraced cottage was vacant. `Why don't you rent it and get to know him as a neighbour?' Badger suggested. Returning to Southampton to visit the estate agent the next week, I found it was already too late; a young couple had just moved in. I had to find another plan.

Tracing Constantine's employer through the CCI computer fortunately threw up a positive lead - there was already a file on Bari Trading, a trading company in the posh London area of Mayfair. The managing director was being run by H/UKP, the head of the Iranian natural cover section. A quick call on the PAX and at their next debrief the managing director agreed to take me on temporarily in Bari Trading. He would be the only person in the company conscious to the operation, so I would have to get together a cover story which would deceive the other employees.

SBO5, the operational security officer for the PTCP section, agreed to let me use the Huntley alias that was developed for my trip to Russia. Strictly, a fresh alias should be used for every operation but this rule was relaxed to save time and money. SBO5 thought the Huntley alias was unlikely to have been compromised in Russia and the operations were geographically unrelated. Besides, Huntley already had a national insurance card, simplifying the paperwork for Bari Trading. SBO5 insisted that I put up a submission to the new Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, as the operation could be embarrassing if uncovered. Submissions were supposed to ensure that potentially sensitive operations were legally accountable, but there was no independent scrutiny and so the only check on the judgement and honesty of the drafting officer was the diligence of the Foreign Secretary. Writing submissions for Douglas Hurd was a time-consuming task, requiring flawless reasoning and perfect prose, but Rifkind was already renowned for looking favourably on whatever MI6 put in front of him.

Even back in my familiar Huntley skin, there was still a lot of preparatory work needed. From study of the telephone transcripts, we knew that Kiddie and Constantine needed a qualified chemical engineer, somebody who could easily interpret the technical drawings they had in their possession, and who would know where to source the components. Two weeks later, after a lot of study in Imperial University's chemical engineering library, I was working alongside Constantine in Bari Trading, just a stone's throw from the Hyde Park Hilton Hotel, with the cover that I was an Anglo-Argentine chemical engineer who wished to start a new career in chemical commodity dealing. My fictional father was allegedly the manager of a Bauer plant in Buenos Aires and friend of the Bari managing director, who had agreed to give me a six-week secondment so that I could learn the business of import-export trading. The story seemed to satisfy Constantine and the other occupants of the dingy, cluttered second-floor office: Patricia, a pretty young Guyanese-born Anglo-Indian and Fazad, a chain-smoking Iranian in his 60s. Constantine, a friendly and helpful character, loaded me down with books and papers on `Bills of Lading' and `Import Export Duties'. The work was tedious but I was not there for fun. My objective was to befriend Constantine and so, without going suspiciously over the top, whenever an opportunity arose for a chat, a tea break or an evening pint of beer with him, I would take it up.

Meanwhile Badger and his crew were continuing to work on other aspects of the case. One morning Debbie, a buxom transcriber, rushed into the office carrying a pink FLORIDA report. Normally she would put transcripts into the internal mail system so they would arrive on our desks a day or so later. But this transcript needed Badger's urgent attention. It was Kiddie ringing from her home in Girton to Fahd in Vienna to arrange an urgent meeting to discuss details of the contract. They arranged to meet two days later in the lobby of the Hilton in central Amsterdam. The transcript showed that Fahd intended to give her some more documentation concerning the components for the plant.

Badger leaped at the opportunity. If we could eavesdrop on the conversation, we could learn about Fahd's intentions and the state of the Iranian chemical weapons programme. More important, though, were the documents. A detailed look at the plans for the plant would be invaluable. Badger ordered the whole PTCP section to drop whatever else they were doing and get cracking on this urgent task.

Kiddie planned to fly in and out of Stansted airport, near her home in Cambridgeshire, to Schipol airport. Badger got on to Customs and Excise at Stansted and arranged for her to be searched on her return to the UK. To avoid arousing her suspicion, Customs suggested searching all the other passengers and placing an undercover officer in the queue to plant a rumour that they were looking for drugs.

Listening into the meeting in the hotel lobby would be more difficult and would require the cooperation of the Dutch secret service. Fortunately, the BVD (Binnenlands Villigheidsdienst) is one of MI6's closest allies overseas. They are regarded as reliable and efficient, and will usually drop everything to help MI6 on an urgent job. MI6 is still a powerful player in the hierarchy of world intelligence services, so smaller services scurry to help out where they can, knowing that it will give them leverage to request a returned favour at a later date. Badger sent a FLASH high-priority telegram to the MI6 station in The Hague and got the wheels turning immediately.

The junior MI6 officer in The Hague station, HAG/2, drove over to Amsterdam with the BVD liaison officer to check out the possibilities of bugging the meeting. Walking into the Hilton lobby, they found a large fountain in the centre of a number of tables, chairs and sofas and HAG/2 realised that it would be difficult to get a good-quality audible `take' of the meeting. There was no way to predict which table Kiddie and Fahd would sit at, bugging every table would be expensive and time-consuming, and the sound from the fountain was just the sort of gentle white noise which is excellent for swamping microphones tuned to pick up distant conversations. These problems did not daunt the energetic BVD, however. They pulled out all the stops to put into place a complicated and labour-intensive operational plan.

Any guest of the Amsterdam Hilton hoping to enjoy a nice lunch in the lobby on Tuesday, 7 February 1995 was in for a disappointment. The attractive fountain was turned off, a prominent sign announcing that it was shut down `for maintenance', and most of the lobby was closed down with rope barriers for `essential cleaning'. As with most Hiltons worldwide, the hotel security manager was an agent of the local secret service. The BVD asked him to temporarily rearrange the lobby, where a single vacant table was wired for sound. A couple of `businessmen' occupied it to stop it being taken by incidental passers-by and all the remaining tables were filled with other businessmen, all BVD and MI6 officers, amongst them Badger, HAG/2 and a couple of other members of the PTCP section. Everything was in place as Kiddie touched down. She was tailed as she took the shuttle bus into central Amsterdam.

The meticulously orchestrated plan started to go wrong as soon as Kiddie arrived at the hotel. She failed to notice the two businessmen finish their meeting and leave, vacating the wired table. Instead, Kiddie took one look at the busy coffee-room, decided that she didn't like what she saw and, calm as you like, walked over to the roped off area, unclipped the rope and sat down in the area which had been `closed for cleaning'. There must have been a lot of Dutch expletives discreetly spat into a large number of coffee cups that morning. It was an embarassing cock-up for them in front of their MI6 guests. The BVD did their best to remedy the situation. An officer with a briefcase fitted with a directional microphone made his way to a table not too far from Kiddie in the roped-off area. When Fahd arrived and joined her ten minutes later, he managed to get some take, but despite computer enhancement the tape proved inaudible. All we got from the meeting was a couple of surveillance photographs, taken by the briefcase camera of one of the businessmen, of Fahd handing over a thick sheaf of papers.

Fortunately, Badger's frantic couple of days of planning were not entirely unrewarded as the other part of the plan worked far more smoothly. As planned, all the disembarking passengers at Stansted were held up and searched. Kiddie was near the back of the queue, so all the preceding passengers were inconvenienced. Eventually, it was her turn. While one officer diligently searched her carry-on luggage, distracting her by paying particular attention to personal and intimate items, another went through her briefcase. As soon as the officer found Fahd's documents, he slipped them through a photocopier discreetly mounted under the search bench, then quickly replaced the originals in her briefcase. As we'd hoped, they were excellent intelligence and an aid to my efforts to bait Constantine into introducing me directly to Kiddie.

I was at my desk at Vauxhall Cross a couple of days later, studying the documents and trying to understand the technical specifications of the equipment, when my personal line rang. It was Sarah. `Hello darling, how's Moneypenny?' she laughed. But I knew straightaway that something was wrong. Her voice was weak and strained and she was putting up a brave front.

`Something's the matter, isn't it?' I asked quietly.

`Yes . . .' she replied. `It's back.'

Sarah had been in for a further check-up that morning. The doctors had found that the cancer had spread into her lymph system and she had been readmitted to hospital immediately for an urgent course of chemotherapy. She didn't say so, but I knew from her voice that the prognosis was very poor. She died two months later.

I put the phone down and held my head in my hands. I felt a numbing sickness and wanted to cry. My work seemed irrelevant and I discarded the papers on my desk with contempt. I needed to get out into some fresh air. It was nearly 12.30 and the office bar would be open any moment. I never normally drank at lunchtime but today would be an exception.

I took a pint of Fosters on to the terrace outside the bar and sat down in the corner on one of the wooden benches overlooking the Thames and the Houses of Parliament. It was a spring day, the sun was out and a freshening breeze was coming in off the river. But thinking of Sarah in hospital, then about the girl blown to bits in Bosnia, it was difficult to stop myself crying and I had to put my head in my hands before I could compose myself. I knew there was no point in staying at my desk that afternoon. Badger was on the balcony with some colleagues and I made my way over to ask permission for the afternoon off. `Is it anything you can tell me about?' he asked.

`Not at the moment' I replied.

Back at my desk the following morning, I was doing my best to concentrate on the job and was making headway with understanding the plans of the chemical plant. The phone rang. It was personnel department wanting to see me as soon as possible. With a heavy heart, I arranged an appointment for the next day. I didn't know what they wanted but it was never a pleasure seeing them.

Ostensibly, personnel department were responsible for staffing decisions in MI6 and it was they who took the decision to post me to Bosnia. But their manoeuvres, reasons for decisions and policies were always shrouded in intrigue and secrecy, buried in a network of unofficial soundings from line-managers and secret deals over boozy lunches. Because they were career spies with no training in personnel management they operated like a mini secret service within the secret service and could not resist applying their tradecraft to do their temporary job. They treated us like agents, subjecting us to the shallow bluff and false flattery which they were accustomed to use with Nigerian generals and Brazilian governors. Personnel did not even allow us to read or countersign the minutes of our own interviews with them, yet these notes formed an important part of our personal records, upon which key posting decisions were taken. This secrecy gave carte blanche for a personnel officer to make or break a fellow officer's career as there was no check against glaring personality clashes, favouritism or cronyism. The general mistrust of personnel department was exacerbated by the rapid turnover of staff in the job; they could post themselves to the best overseas jobs as soon as they became available.

It was therefore with trepidation that I took the lift up to the eighth floor to meet my new personnel officer. Because of his small stature and aggressive self-promotion, his previous department had nicknamed him `Poison Dwarf', after a character in a popular computer game.

`What were you doing out on the terrace the other day?' PD/2's voice was accusatory, belligerent. He skipped through the normal pleasantries without any conviction and obviously he had carefully planned the ambush. `You were seen out there, drinking a beer on your own, ignoring everybody. Are you interested in your job? Do you want to work here?' After such a gratuitously unpleasant attack, I could not bring myself to talk to Poison Dwarf about Sarah. Even if he did feign sympathy and understanding, it would not be welcome. `Is there anything you wish to discuss with me?'

`No, not at all,' I replied disinterestedly.

`Well, I've just got your SAF covering your time in Bosnia. P4 has given you a Box 4, and frankly I am not surprised. Your performance was dismal.' Poison Dwarf tossed the brown manilla staff appraisal form down on to the coffee-table between us. `Read it, and explain yourself,' he ordered.

Reading the report left me sickened and let down by String Vest. When he visited me in Bosnia, he made no adverse comment about my performance, and his report reeked of a set-up. He went out of his way to find criticisms of my performance and ignored all the good work that I had done, making a great issue about my failure to wear a necktie during the VIP meeting with Karadzic.

`I find it incredible that you didn't wear a tie,' grumbled Poison Dwarf in the background.

I chose to ignore him and pressed on with String Vest's vitriol. He heavily criticised me for failing to visit and debrief DONNE in Sarajevo after a crucial meeting of the Bosnian-Muslim leadership. Undoubtedly DONNE would probably have provided some useful CX on the meeting, but String Vest conveniently ignored the closure of Sarajevo airport and the impossibility of reaching the city overland. I'd had a rough deal by comparison with my IONEC colleagues who were still preparing for their first posts. Spencer was on German language training for assignment to a four-man station in Vienna. Castle, as ever with an eye on his bank balance and living standards, was lined up for a posting to Geneva where even the junior officer received a substantial house with swimming pool and a generous living allowance, and was on a year-long French course. Barking had elected to become an Arab specialist and was on a two-year Arabic course in Cairo. Forton was also learning French in preparation for a post to Brussels, Bart was learning Hungarian and Hare was learning Spanish in preparation for the number two job in Chile. None of them were yet in post, and even when they arrived, they would not be expected to do much more during their first six months than learn the ropes of the local community. The contrast with my own posting was stark but String Vest had not made the slightest concession.

The report reeked of a stitch-up by personnel and had probably been orchestrated by the devious Fowlecrooke, but I could never prove anything. My best response was just to put the incident behind me and work hard in my new job in PTCP section. Badger was an honest and ethical boss and Fowlecrooke would never dare pressure him to mark me down.

I got up and left Poison Dwarf's office, hoping that he would soon thrust his way into a good overseas posting so that I wouldn't have to deal with him again.
 

On joining PTCP section, I found the number of telephone intercepts they ran eye-opening. Usually there would be two or three FLORIDA reports landing in my in-tray every day and that was just for the projects I worked on. Other officers in the section, working on different projects, received many reports which I did not see. The number of telephone warrants MI6 had could be gauged from the size of UKZ, the section responsible for transcribing the intercepts. Based in an office at 60 Vauxhall Bridge Road, abbreviated to VBR in the service, UKZ numbered around 20 officers in total, of which the buxom Debbie was one. They worked closely with OND, a detachment of vetted British Telecom engineers seconded to MI6 to set up the intercepts. Each UKZ officer was a talented linguist, often the master of five or six difficult languages, and worked at state-of-the-art computers much admired by visiting liaison services. On a good day, they could process 20 or so conversations, though less if the language was difficult or the take quality poor.

Under the terms of the 1975 IOCA (Interception of Communications Act) a warrant should be given only if the target is breaking UK law or if the interception yields intelligence. Under these terms, I felt no compunction about reading the transcripts of an Iranian terrorist or a Russian intelligence officer. But we had many intercepts running which did not fall into either category. Even our intercepts on Kiddie and Constantine were not within its spirit - they would break UK law only if they exported proliferation material from the country, and never once did we issue a CX report as a result of one of their telephone transcriptions. Perhaps what they were doing was slightly amoral but it was not our job to pass judgement on that. Unlike every other country in the western world, warrants for telephone intercepts in Britain are signed not by a judge but by the Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary, explaining why the intelligence services could obtain so many warrants.

MI6 abused the privilege of the IOCA in other ways too. The transcribers in VBR were supposed to ignore personal chit-chat and condense only relevant operational intelligence into the pink FLORIDA reports for distribution to Vauxhall Cross. This obligation enabled MI6 successfully to persuade the Treasury that it was necessary to keep the transcribers isolated in VBR, rather than incorporating them into the new building. Nevertheless, one day a colleague threw a pink FLORIDA report on my desk, chuckling, `Have a good laugh at this!' The target was a transvestite in his spare time and the FLORIDA reported his intimate conversation, line by line, with his boyfriend. Admittedly, it was an amusing document but it added nothing to our understanding of the operation and was a clear breach of the act.

Meanwhile BELLHOP had just taken a new and interesting twist. Badger, as overall head of the operation, was responsible for its coordination with foreign liaison services. The extent to which information on the operation was shared depended on the perceived trustworthiness of the other intelligence service and the extent to which they could bring to the table useful intelligence of their own. MI6 were always warm and cordial with CIA liaison because the Americans had such fabulous resources. Badger's relationship with the DST on BELLHOP was also good and they cooperated energetically if they were asked to help out. But Badger could never establish the same level of easy cooperation with Mossad. It was always a puzzle why they were so uncooperative, for we expected them to be keenly interested in penetrating the attempts of Iran, their most feared enemy, to obtain chemical weapons. But meetings with them were tense affairs, with little given away by either side. The section suspected that Mossad had another hidden agenda that we were not privy to. This suspicion was reinforced when Badger showed them copies of the weapons plant that we had obtained from the search of Kiddie at Stansted. They feigned interest, but it was not convincing and Badger came away suspicious that the Israelis already had their own copies.

Further clues came from the Warsaw station. Examination of the plans by MOD experts established that the plant was an old Polish design, a relic from their Cold War chemical weapons programme. Badger asked H/WAR to find out how the plans could have fallen into Manbar's hands. The Polish intelligence service was restructuring from a KGB-like secret police into a western-leaning European-style intelligence service, but the rebuilding was not complete. Many old-guard officers were too steeped in the Cold War to trust western intelligence officers and H/WAR had a rocky relationship with them at best. They would not even admit that the plans were of Polish origin, despite H/WAR's assurances that acknowledgement of a defunct chemical weapons programme would not be used as political ammunition by the West.

Polish intelligence did, however, provide an important clue. They made available their surveillance reports on a Polish-Jewish businessman, known to have Mossad links, who had cultivated a close relationship with the senior civil servant in charge of Poland's `chemical defence programme', double-speak for their chemical weapons programme. Reading between the lines, the implication was that the plans for the plant had been passed from the official to the Jewish businessman, and then to Mossad, with the tacit compliance of Polish intelligence. Now the reason for Mossad's less-than-enthusiastic reception of our copies of the plans was clear. As Badger had suspected, they already had them.

Other interesting parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle were starting to fall into place. We had never been sure where Manbar had obtained the equipment list for the plant - it might have come from Fahd, but transcripts of Manbar's conversations with Fahd suggested that Manbar had them before Fahd. As they used veiled conversation, codewords, and spoke in Farsi, we couldn't be completely sure. At around the same time, Manbar had several discreet meetings with Mossad officers in the Israeli embassy in Paris. The only theory that stitched all the pieces together was that Mossad were, for motives not yet clear to us, using Manbar to deal indirectly with the Iranians. The key to pinning down what was going on was Manbar and we needed to find out a lot more about his movements and activities than we could get from the transcripts provided by the DST.

Badger decided to target Andrea, Manbar's personal secretary. She was an attractive 40-year-old German divorcee who had worked for Manbar for four or five years, and Badger asked the DST to try to recruit her. She was on their territory, so it would be rude not to let them have first crack. MI6 avoids honey-trap approaches, recognising that sexual attraction is too complex to predict or control, but the DST were not so subtle. Andrea had lunch every day in the same bistro, so they sent down a male officer to try to pick her up. That night's telephone transcripts were of her complaining to her mother in Germany about an over-perfumed Frenchman who seemed to think that he was god's gift to women pestering her over lunch. The embarrassed DST gigolo claimed lamely in his contact report that she must be a lesbian.

Meanwhile, I was labouring in my cover job as a clerical worker in the offices of Bari Trading. The work was stifling but my cultivation of Constantine was progressing. Over cups of tea in the office, a lunch or two at the nearby Hilton and the occasional pint, he accepted and trusted me. Nibbling at the bait, at each meeting he asked more and more questions about the extent of my knowledge of chemicals equipment.

We knew from telephone transcripts that Constantine kept a copy of the plans in the locked top drawer of his desk. Once I saw him take them out and refer to them in a conversation with Kiddie. Later that evening, back in the office, I read the transcript and learned that they were trying to figure out the specifications of a glass valve, whose number was obscured on the plans. MOD experts in chemical weapons helped me work out the exact specifications of the part and tracked down the companies - one in Germany and two in Switzerland - that could supply it.

A few days later, doing my best to appear interested in a thick sheaf of bills of lading, I was straining to listen in to a Constantine phone conversation with Kiddie. She was doing most of the talking and when Constantine could get in a word edgeways it was to apologise for the slow progress. Eventually, Constantine blurted out `Listen Joyce, I've really done my best on the project but I'm stuck. I know somebody who can help us though, and he's sitting right here in this office.' They conferred for a while longer and after he hung up Constantine called me across. `Hey, Alex, I've a problem you could perhaps help me with.'

`Really?' I replied, trying to sound laconic, and ambled over to his desk where he had laid out the plans.

`What do you make of this?' Constantine asked, eying me hopefully.

They were intimately familiar to me, so I had to feign puzzlement, studying them for a few minutes. `Seems like they're the plans for some kind of chemicals plant. Something corrosive, because of all the glassware. I'd guess it's for something like an aspirin plant,' I proferred.

Constantine looked delighted. `Spot on, but do you know what that part is?' he asked, pointing to the mystery valve. I rattled back its specifications and where it could be sourcd. `You really do know your stuff, don't you?' replied Constantine. `Listen, I've got a friend who needs some help with this project. Would you like to give her a hand?'

`Sure,' I replied, trying my best to hide my glee.

Within minutes Constantine had rung Kiddie back and introduced me over the phone. After a brief chat she invited me to go up to visit her in Girton.

Walking back into the office later that evening, Badger gave me the thumbs up, having already seen the transcript. `Good stuff,' he grinned. `We need to plan the next phase - let's pop out for a breath of fresh air.' This was Badger's euphemism for a cigarette. Smoking was banned in the new office, so smokers were limited to the bar or the fire stairwells.

`If you must,' I sighed with mock exasperation, contemplating the cold, drafty stairwell.

As Badger lit up, we went over the progress made so far. We already had a good idea of what to expect in meeting Kiddie, as we'd been reading her telephone conversations for the past three months and Cambridgeshire SB, one of whose officers was a close friend of her second husband Len Ingles, had provided a helpful report. `Kiddie really depends on Len,' Badger said. `She never does anything without first discussing it with him. If you want to win her trust, you'll also have to win his. Build something into your cover story that will pull him in.'

`I'll go up on a motorbike then,' I suggested. `Len's passionate about bikes: if I turn up on one he'll immediately take an interest.'

My own motorbike: a battered high-mileage Honda Africa Twin, was ruled out by SBO5 as it was registered in my own name, so a few days later I hired a powerful Honda Fireblade from Metropolitan Motorcycles, a dealer opposite Vauxhall Cross in one of the railway viaduct arches that lie under the main south-west line. It was a clear, brisk but sunny February day, and perfect for motorcycling. Speeding up the M11 to Girton, I thought to myself how lucky I was to have such a great job. BELLHOP was going well, Badger was a good boss and the atmosphere in the section was cheerful and friendly, unlike the mistrusting environment of the secretive East European controllerate. The problems in Bosnia were forgotten and I was enjoying socialising more.

Kiddie's personal file was stuffed with SB photographs of her house, so it was easy to find in the pretty village of Girton. She heard my powerful motorbike pull up on her gravel drive and came out of the house to greet me with a friendly handshake. A slightly plump, middle-aged woman, dressed in tight leggings that did not do much for her, she was not a likely person to be the centre of a complicated secret service operation. `I am so glad you've come up, Alex,' she exhorted jollily, `Albert has told me all about you! We've been struggling for months on this project.' Her appearance and voice were so familiar from the file and telephone intercepts that it felt strange to meet her personally, like meeting a famous film star. She ushered me into her study and, over a mug of Nesquick, explained her project. The details were intimately familiar, so I had to fake curiosity and surprise as the story unfolded.

Kiddie moved on to her meeting earlier in the year with Fahd in Amsterdam. `It was so funny, I arrived at the hotel and it was all closed down for cleaning!' she giggled. `I had to go into the closed off area to wait for Mr Fahd!' She even remembered the inconvenient hold up at Stansted airport on her return. `They went through all my knickers, the little perverts. But apparently they were only looking for drugs,' she added obliviously. She was completely unsuspicious of me; as we had hoped, Constantine's recommendation was sufficient for her to trust me. And as we suspected from the telephone transcripts, she was unaware that she was being manipulated by Fahd and Manbar into illegal dealings.

Only half an hour or so into the meeting, Kiddie suggested that I should meet Fahd. `I've been struggling for months with this project, getting nowhere,' she continued. `I'm also really busy with my charity work and I've had enough of travelling. It would be great if you could help out.'

`Sure,' I replied, trying to sound cautiously enthusiastic. `How should we proceed?'

`If you like,' Kiddie replied, `I'll ring him right now and you can talk to him - he told me he would be in Tehran this week.' She reached up to a bookshelf above her desk, pulled out the project file, found Fahd's Tehran number and dialled him up. Unbeknown to her, she was dialling not into Fahd's purported company in Tehran but straight into the headquarters of the Iranian intelligence service, and I couldn't wait to get on the line. Disappointingly, he was not at the office and she just got his ansaphone. `Never mind, we'll call him next time you're up.'

Kiddie talked enthusiastically about her charitable work. She ran a thrift shop in Cambridge and some of the proceeds went to a project to provide schoolbooks to impoverished children in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. I had been planning a trip to Brazil for some time because PTCP section had an Argentine nuclear scientist on the books, codenamed GELATO, who was overdue for his annual debriefing. Her charity work there presented an opportunity to ingratiate myself further with Kiddie: `I'm going out to Rio in a couple weeks on business. Is there anything I could do for your project while I am out there?'

`Sure,' she replied, `there are always things to do.' She described the project enthusiastically and detailed how I could be of assistance. The conversation was interrupted by a popping splutter as an old motorbike pull up outside. `Ah, that must be my husband, Len. Would you like to meet him?'

We went outside to find Len parking up his leaky Triumph and looking admiringly at my Fireblade. `They're fearsome machines,' he grinned, holding out his gloved hand in greeting. `Careful you don't kill yourself.' We chatted for a few minutes about motorcycles while Kiddie busied herself in the kitchen getting a snack together.

We spoke for several more hours in the study over tea and sandwiches, about Fahd, the charity project and motorcycles. By mid-afternoon, Badger's objectives for the first meeting had been met and exceeded. Kiddie and Ingles were taken in by my cover and were keen for me to meet Fahd as soon as possible. We were winding up the meeting when the doorbell rang. Len went out to the hall to answer it and by the hearty greetings the visitors were male. Len poked his head around the door of the living-room where Kiddie and I were sitting. `It's Paul and Roger,' he hissed.

Kiddie stood up urgently. `Quick, follow me,' she whispered conspiratorially, ushering me into the kitchen to leave the sitting-room free for Ingles and his guests. `They're business friends of Len - best you avoid them,' she explained as we bade goodbye at the back door. Unbeknown to her, I knew more about Paul and Roger than she did. They were the SB officers who had been tasked to keep an eye on the family.

Back in London, Badger was delighted that the meeting had gone so well. `Excellent work. I heard Kiddie trying to ring Fahd, shame she couldn't get hold of him,' Badger chuckled. A few days later he chucked another report on my desk. Paul and Roger described me as a `suspicious visitor on a motorbike who Kiddie was obviously keen to hide'.

Because the objective of meeting Kiddie had been accomplished, there was no further need for me to cultivate Constantine. One last visit to Bari Trading was enough to say goodbye to Constantine, Patricia and Fazad, with the excuse that for family reasons I had to return urgently to South America.
 

GELATO was a nuclear scientist who had worked during the 1970s and '80s on Argentina's nascent nuclear weapon's programme. He was recruited in the mid-'80s by one of the station officers in Buenos Aires and was subsequently run by VCOs. Argentina was regarded as having fairly efficient counter-espionage capabilities, so the debriefing meetings took place in Rio de Janeiro and GELATO was paid a couple of thousand pounds per meeting into a secret account in Luxembourg. He provided some good CX over the years but his usefulness dwindled after Argentina abandoned its nuclear weapons programme at the end of the '80s. My task would be to see him one more time and, assuming he had nothing more useful to offer us, discontinue him. I sent a telegram to Buenos Aires asking the station to notify him via the agreed method - a note slipped into his locker at his country club - that he should ring `David Lindsey', an alias of my predecessor. A couple of days later he rang, the number was patched through to me by the MI6 switchboard and we arranged to meet on the evening of the 12 April 1995 at the Hotel President on Copacabana beach.

The second objective of the trip was to build my credential with Kiddie by visiting the small orphan school in a Rio favela that her charity supported. After several phone calls to Kiddie and to Brazil, I had an appointment for Friday, 21 April, nine days after my meeting with GELATO. `It's hardly worth coming back, between the meetings, is it?' I asked Badger, hopefully.

He laughed, `All right, you can stay out there - just don't get yourself into any trouble. You deserve a break as you've done some good work in the section. Here's your SAF.' Badger tossed over the staff appraisal form that he had just completed for submission to personnel department. I read it with satisfaction. It was glowing with praise for the success of BELLHOP and would be a solid basis to request an overseas posting, though this time a normal posting like the rest of my IONEC colleagues.

The meeting with GELATO in Brazil went smoothly. He wasn't upset to be discontinued, and telephone intercepts showed that the head of the favela orphanage reported my visit positively to Kiddie. The time between the meetings provided an opportunity to explore Rio de Janeiro and the surrounding hills, and to lunch with H/RIO, who told me that there was a vacancy in the station. The job sounded interesting, the location agreeable, so I decided to put in a request on my return to Vauxhall Cross.

Monday, 24 April dawned with spring rain. Waiting their turn at the security doors, there was already an impatient and bedraggled queue of people, folding away umbrellas and overcoats. When my turn came, I slipped my swipe-card down the groove, typed in my PIN code, six-nine-two-one, and awaited the familiar green light. But it flashed an angry red. Presuming that I'd mistyped the PIN, I tried again. Same result. The third attempt, and the intruder alarm went off, lights and sirens bleeping in the guards' watch-room. A couple of guards hurried over, glaring at me suspiciously. I showed my pass through the perspex and they manually unlocked the VIP's side-entrance. A queue of muttering colleagues had built up behind me, awaiting their turn to enter the building, and it was a relief to be admitted. `Are you a member of staff, sir?' asked one of the guards.

`Yes, of course. I'm PTCP/7, staff number 813317.'

The guards led me into their watch-room, tapped my staff number into the computer and studied briefly the resulting message on the screen. `We're sorry, sir, but your pass has been cancelled. We've been told we have to take you up to personnel department.'

The two security guards escorted me across the lobby in front of a crowd of onlookers. Wheeler, back from Moscow, was waiting to go up the lift and studied his shoelaces rather than greet me. Something must be seriously wrong to get dragged up to personnel department in this way, but I had no idea what it could be. My mind raced desperately. Presumably there must be a mistake and soon all the problems would be cleared up, I reassured myself.

The guards escorted me up to the eighth floor where Poison Dwarf was waiting. He led me into his room and bade me to sit down. He didn't mince his words with any pleasantries. `As you know, last time we met I gave you a warning that unless your performance improved, you would not be able to stay in the office. It has not improved, so you are fired.'

The words took a moment to sink in. `How can you make such an absurd claim?' I blurted out when the shock had subsided. `H/PTCP has just given me a glowing SAF.'

Poison Dwarf talked over me, assuring me that the office would find me alternative employment `in the City' but I was too dumbstruck, incredulous and devastated to pay much attention. Poison Dwarf's assured manner made it plain that he was acting with the support of officers above him. There was no point in arguing and the atmosphere rapidly became unpleasant. `My secretary will show you out of the building. Go home and don't come back until we contact you,' Poison Dwarf dismissed me.

Back home, I lay down on my sofa deeply upset and confused. Poison Dwarf had given me no plausible reasons for dismissal and his claim that he had given me a warning was a brazen lie. Badger had just given me a good report, so that could not be the reason. I suspected the devious hand of Fowlecrooke but there was nothing more to do except to wait until personnel department contacted me.

A couple of desperate days later, one of the secretaries from personnel rang up and told me to come in for an interview with the head of the department, Julian Dimmock. I had never previously met HPD, but knew that he was an ex-marine with no work experience outside MI6, and that he still carried a lot of military baggage. He was fond of the city uniform of loud pin-stripe suit and clicky shoes and the office rumour was that he was after a job as personnel manager with one of the banks that employed ex-MI6 officers in return for titbits of economic intelligence. He wasn't an ideal person to be in charge of personnel department, but MI6 often appointed ex-military officers to the post, mistakenly believing that a few years in the army was all the training needed for the job. Still, I supposed that he couldn't be worse than Poison Dwarf and Fowlecrooke.

`So what are your reasons for sacking me?' I asked belligerently as soon as we had shaken hands.

`Why on earth do you want any reasons?' Dimmock replied smoothly as he settled into the low seat behind the coffee-table. `It won't do you any good, and in any case somebody like you won't have any problems finding a good job in the City.'

`Under UK law, you have to give reasons for a dismissal,' I replied, firmly sticking to my ground. The afternoon spent in Kensington library looking up employment law was not wasted.

`Your personnel officer, PD/2, gave you the reasons for your dismissal at your last meeting,' Dimmock huffed.

`No he didn't, he gave me none at all,' I replied with conviction. Dimmock was cornered, and shifted uncomfortably. `Give me the reasons, right now,' I pressed home my advantage.

Dimmock thought for a moment. `You are motivated by challenge.'

I ridiculed his meaningless excuse. `What does that mean, and why is that bad?'

He couldn't reply. `You lack commitment,' he claimed.

`Oh yeah, sure,' I replied sarcastically. `So that's why you posted me to Bosnia.'

Once again he couldn't substantiate it with any evidence or explain why it should be a reason to sack me. He dreamed up another. `You are not a team player,' he claimed.

`So how come P4 gave me glowing praise for the relationship I built with 602 troop in Bosnia, then?' I replied angrily.

Dimmock squirmed as he dreamed up more excuses, but like the others they were vague, meaningless, easily overturned by me and completely unsubstantiated by any of my line managers' reports. Dimmock's bluster was based on some hearsay from Poison Dwarf or Fowlecrooke and he had not thought through the issues for himself.

`I want these reasons committed to writing, which is my right under employment law,' I demanded.

`You know we can't possibly give you anything on paper, it would break the Official Secrets Act,' Dimmock replied weakly.

But I stood my ground. `I want them tomorrow.'

`All right, I'll see what I can do,' Dimmock meekly agreed.

But I was not finished. `And I suggest you do it properly, because you've dismissed me illegally and I intend to take MI6 to an employment tribunal.'

Dimmock looked really appalled. After a moment for the implications to sink in, he replied, `We really hope you won't do that. It would cause a lot of bad publicity for us. In any case, what would be the point? Even if you won, we wouldn't give you your job back. Nobody can tell the Chief of MI6 what to do.'

This last sentence of Dimmock's was perceptive, though he didn't realise it himself. It was this belief, which he held in common with many other senior officers in MI6, that was the reason behind the patently unfair dismissal and the cause of the long disagreement between me and MI6 that was to follow. Dimmock genuinely believed that MI6 was above the laws of the land. There were mechanisms such as the submissions process that conferred token accountability to the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, but to the likes of Dimmock, these were just minor bureaucratic formalities that needed to be completed in order to carry out important operations. Democratic oversight did not apply to something as trivial as employment law. In his eyes, MI6 had no obligation to give any warning that my job was in jeopardy, or to provide any reasons justifying my dismissal. He expected me to take the sacking on the chin, not complain, not demand any explanation, and meekly accept their offer of help with a stiff upper lip. `We'll get you a job in the City,' blustered Dimmock feebly as I stood up angrily.

`Keep your feeble ambitions to yourself,' I shouted, storming out.

Dimmock picked the wrong person to impose his arbitrary authority on. There was no way that I would let MI6 get away with such a casual abuse of power and I resolved then and there to fight them to the end. It was not just because I liked my job and had no interest in working in the City. It was also a matter of principle. I knew that if I did not fight them, they would do the same thing to somebody else, then somebody else.

A few days later, personnel department allowed me back into the office for an hour to make a final appeal to the Chief himself, David Spedding. Dimmock assured me that it would be an impartial appeal and that Spedding had not been briefed about the background to my case. But it was clear from the first words of the meeting that this was a lie. Spedding was already fully briefed, the decision was firmly cut and dried, and I had no chance at all of getting it overturned. Spedding dismissed me with a wave of the hand, adding, `I understand personnel department have already found you some interesting possibilities in the City.'

My perfunctory firing was a classic example of the type of behind-closed-doors MI6 decision that happens regularly in the service due to the ultimate lack of accountability of the Chief. As Dimmock had pompously pointed out, the Chief answers to nobody. He never has to justify a decision, no matter how crass or stupid, to a parliamentary select committee or to the Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister, and so has no incentive to scrutinise recommendations that are passed up to him. His non-existent upwards accountability means he needs only to cultivate the support of power-brokers below him. It is expedient to accept recommendations where they are politically easy, such as the dismissal of a junior officer, so that he has a stronger power base for more difficult internal decisions. Just as in a dictatorship, this shoddy decision-making cascades down the power structure, and explains how the decision to dismiss me had been taken. Poison Dwarf decided he wanted me out, wrote a recommendation to Fowlecrooke, who signed it off and passed it up the chain to Dimmock. He in turn signed it off without bothering to form his own opinion by interviewing me and passed the decision up to the highest levels of the service. Like many ex-military people, Dimmock did not know the difference between `leadership' and `rigidity' and by the time he actually met me for himself, he dared not reverse his decision.

I left Spedding's office frustrated and angry, realising that this last chance was just a sham. I waited in the corridor outside his office for the guards who were supposed to escort me out of the building, but after a few minutes I realised they had forgotten. My first instinct was to do my duty and make my way directly home. But rebellion was brewing inside me. `Bastards,' I thought. They hadn't even let me clear out my desk and say goodbye to Badger. `Sod 'em, I'll go and see him whatever.' Brazenly walking through the centre of the building to Badger's office was too risky - somebody might collar me. It was nearly 11 a.m., so Badger would be having his morning `breath of fresh air' on the fire escape. Down on the ground floor by the gym, I dodged into the fire-escape stairwells and made my way through the clammy connecting tunnel to the PTCP fire-escape.

Badger was there having a cigarette and, unusually, was alone. `Hey, how are you doing?' he greeted me enthusiastically. `I'm really sorry about what they did to you. As soon as I heard, I rushed up to personnel to persuade Dimmock he was making a mistake, but he wouldn't listen,' Badger explained angrily. `They've ruined BELLHOP,' Badger continued. `Without you, we've no choice but to abandon it. And we just had a big breakthrough. Kiddie phoned Fahd yesterday. He wanted you to go to Vienna to meet him.' Badger threw down his cigarette stub with annoyance. `And Dimmock said something very strange to me,' he added, `he said that they were very worried about having a potential Aldridge Ames in the service.'

`What?' I asked incredulously. `What the hell has Ames got to do with me?'

`I really don't know,' replied Badger sympathetically `he wouldn't elaborate.'

We spoke for a few more minutes, but I was struggling to hold back tears so I bade goodbye to Badger and checked out of the office for the last time.

Ames was a CIA officer who had recently been arrested in America and sentenced to life imprisonment for systematically betraying secrets to Russian intelligence over many years in return for millions of dollars. To this day I don't know whether Dimmock's comment was supposed to imply that I was some form of potential security risk, but it was a deeply unpleasant and unprofessional comment to make, and for which he had absolutely no justification.
 

Personnel department gave me three months' pay after the sacking. In that time they expected me to come to terms with my dismissal, identify a new career and find a suitable job. I had a mortgage to pay and other financial commitments, and no idea what to do for an alternative career. Even if I were to lamely accept their advice and work in the City, a prospect that appalled me, it would mean starting at the bottom of an unfamiliar and considerably less interesting career, with a much reduced salary. I would accept such misfortune without complaint if my dismissal was merited, but it wasn't.

I went to see Dimmock and made my feelings clear but, secure in the knowledge that his decision was unquestionable, Dimmock had little time for my complaints. `PD/PROSPECT has already lined up some interviews for you in the City,' he urged, `but if you really must insist on complaining, here's the Staff Counseller's details.' He handed over me the business card of Sir Christopher France with undisguised exasperation.

The Staff Counsellor was a vetted senior civil servant, supposedly independent, to whom members of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ could take complaints or concerns about the conduct of the services, which he was then empowered to `investigate'. The mechanism was supposed to allow members of the services to let off steam internally, thus removing the need to go to the courts. In reality, it was little more than window-dressing to fend off criticisms from legislators. Dimmock showed his exasperation because he knew that my complaint could not change the decision but would cause him extra paperwork. Nevertheless, I made an appointment to see France in his Whitehall office the next day, and he listened to my complaint patiently, concernedly noting details. I felt that at least I had a sympathetic ally.

France invited me back to his office a month later to give me the result of his investigation. `I went to see the Chief,' he announced loftily, `and Sir David Spedding assured me that his personnel department had done everything they possibly could for you.'

`But didn't you ask to see the papers I told you about? Personnel department's own minutes directly contradict that claim,' I replied with barely contained exasperation.

`Oh, I could not possibly ask to see the papers of the Secret Intelligence Service!' France replied with horrified surprise. `And in any case, to do so would be to doubt the word of Sir David,' he added loftily.

I left the meeting close to tears and with anger welling up inside me. It was not that the procedure had proved ineffective: that I had expected. It was just that France, who at the first meeting had appeared genuinely concerned at my mistreatment, had then dismissed my version of events after no more than a quick gin and tonic with the Chief, and had effectively branded me a liar. Unwittingly, France drove the wedge between me and MI6 deeper.

The only way now to seek an independent judgement of the legality of their actions was to go outside the service, and that meant going to an employment tribunal. A quick search of the telephone directory turned up a small law firm in north London, Bahsi and Partners, that specialised in employment disputes and advertised themselves with the banner `NO WIN, NO FEE'. This pledge was attractive because my small savings were not sufficient to pay lawyers. Satisfyingly, the partners all had Farsi names and I smiled at the thought of Dimmock receiving a disclosure demand from an Iranian lawyer. A quick phone call and we'd arranged a meeting. Two days later they had sent MI6 a preliminary notification letter, requesting copies of all my personnel papers.

My hunch was correct. Dimmock rang me at home. `We can't possibly have you taking us to court, we'd have the whole of Fleet Street outside the court building,' he whined. `Why don't you come in to see the outplacement officer, PD/PROSPECT? He's got you a really well-paid possibility in the City.'

`I've told you already I'm not the slightest bit interested in working in the bloody City, so please stop imposing your own career regrets on me,' I replied angrily. `You bastards sacked me illegally and it is my right to take you to an employment tribunal.' Dimmock rang off impatiently.

Dimmock wrote to me a few days later, now addressing me as `Mr Tomlinson' instead of `Richard'. They'd probably already started tapping my phone too, I thought to myself. Dimmock wanted me to change my law firm to something `more established' and offered to pay my legal fees. On the face of it, it was quite a generous offer but inevitably there was a hidden agenda behind personnel department's uncharacteristic platitude. Another search of the phone book, this time looking for expensive-looking companies with big adverts, turned up the prestigious city firm of Herbert Smiths. The efficient receptionist put me in touch with John Farr, their partner specialising in employment law. Over the next few weeks, we put together a detailed application to an employment tribunal and submitted it to the tribunal centre in Norwich. My last paycheque from the office, for the month of August, arrived a few days later. It would take three or four months for the application to come to courts, so my limited savings would have to support me in the interim. I was not too concerned - my case for unfair dismissal was straightforward and when I inevitably won MI6 would be forced to reinstate me with full back-pay.

My optimism was nave and I underestimated the deviousness of personnel. Farr called me up at home and asked me to go into his offices near Liverpool Street station to see him.

`There's been an interesting development,' he said, from the other side of his designer desk. `They've used a Public Interest Immunity certificate to stop your application.'

`What?' I cried angrily. `How the hell can they justify that?' PII certificates are a legal mechanism - a sort of `get out of jail free' card - that MI6 occasionally use to get them out of difficult legal situations. They had last used one to cover up their failings in the Matrix Churchill and Astra scandals. The certificates, obtained from the Foreign Secretary via a submission, allow them to block the release to the courts of any documents that they assert could `damage national security'. Farr explained that he had been visited the previous day by three legal officers from SIS, who had served the PII certificate on him, gravely explaining that any discussion of my case in court, even in closed session with no access to the public gallery, would be `gravely prejudicial to national security' and that they had been `reluctantly forced to ask the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, to sign the PII certificate'.

This was a disgraceful and cowardly lie. My personnel papers contained no more secrets than the papers of an employee of the gas board. Discussion of the circumstances of my dismissal by responsible lawyers in a closed court with no journalists or members of the public present could not endanger national security in any way. The real reason MI6 had obtained the PII certificate was that they knew that they would lose their case. The ludicrous reasons that Dimmock had dreamt up for dismissing me, and which I had ambushed him into committing to paper, would have been roundly ridiculed in a court. Poison Dwarf would have been obliged to admit the dishonesty of his claim to have warned me that my job was under threat and MI6 would have been forced into an embarrassing climb down.

I left the meeting with Farr completely disgusted with MI6, my resolve to fight them undiminished but now tinged with growing anger. Moreover, MI6 told Farr that they would no longer pay his fees after he had presented a first interim bill for 19,000, so I would have to find another lawyer.

On the IONEC, a guest-speaker from MI5's counter-subversives branch had lectured us sneeringly about the activities of `Liberty', a civil rights lobby group based in south-east London. Amongst other issues, they campaigned against excessive state secrecy, lack of accountability of the intelligence services and the misuse of PII certificates to cover up government cock-ups. Their principal lawyer, John Wadham, agreed to see me after a nervous call from a public phonebox. It was with some trepidation that I knocked on the door of their slightly dilapidated premises at 21 Tabard Street.

`There is no legal remedy available to you now except to appeal to the IST (Intelligence Services Tribunal),' Wadham explained over a cup of tea. `This is a panel of three senior judges who've got the power to examine the legality of actions by MI6.' The tribunal was set up shortly after the avowal process in 1992 in order to give MI6 token public accountability. In theory, any member of the public could make a complaint about illegal activities of MI6 and the tribunal was obliged to investigate. But there were many restrictions on its powers and loopholes that MI6 could exploit, and it was little more than a fig-leaf to give token respectability to the accountability supposedly conferred by avowal. `They might agree to investigate a case of unfair dismissal,' Wadham advised sceptically, `but your chances of winning would be nil whatever the merits of your case. They've never once found in favour of a plaintiff.'

It was my only remedy, so I gave it a go depsite Wadham's pessimism. Unusually, the IST requested to interview me personally and appointed a meeting in a committee-room at the Old Bailey towards the end of October. The panel, consisting of appeal court judge Lord Justice Simon Brown, a Scottish Sheriff and a senior solicitor, were seated imposingly at a heavy raised table, with thick dossiers in front of them, presumably the documents that MI6 had submitted to them about me. The court clerk bade me sit down at a desk a dignified distance from the panel. Lord Justice Brown, the chairman, spoke first, explaining their powers of investigation and outlining their understanding of my case. It was several minutes before I was invited to speak. `Can I be assured that you will take the decision only on papers that I have seen myself?' I asked, aware of Wadham's warning.

Lord Justice Simon Brown paused for reflection before replying. `There are indeed papers here that you have not seen and will not see,' he gravely admitted, indicating the thick pile of papers on which they were taking their decision. He was clearly uncomfortable with this basic betrayal of a fundamental legal principle. `I am sorry to say that we cannot be more transparent. We can only work within the terms of the Act.' The huge pile of papers that they were examining, far more than personnel department had ever shown to me, was not encouraging. Personnel had probably rewritten most it, knowing I could not contest its veracity. My prospects of success were non-existent.

In November, I took a short holiday in South Africa to visit my uncle and aunt and to follow some of the England cricket tour of the country. I could scarcely afford the trip but I'd made the commitment before my dismissal. Later I learned that my trip had cost MI6 far more. Concerned that in my disaffected state I might be vulnerable to recruitment by South African counter-intelligence, they pulled my friend Milton out of the country and cancelled the whole undercover operation. In fact, the South Africans made no approach and I wouldn't have cooperated if they had done. But rather than just interviewing me on my return, MI6 wrote off many thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money.

The tribunal were unable to give a date or even a time-frame for their decision. Over the coming months Dimmock wrote several letters urging me to accept help from PD/PROSPECT, but they went straight in the bin. Conceding to their help would be like accepting a set of false teeth from somebody who had just kicked my face in. Besides, even if they dragged me kicking and screaming into one of their tame companies in the City, my previous experience in management consultancy had been so disastrous and unpleasant that I would not last a week.

I had a lot of spare time on my hands and little cash. The little outstanding DIY tasks in my flat and garden were soon completed. Having no money curtailed my enjoyment of London's nightlife, my sacking cut me off from mixing with colleagues in the office, and unemployment left me feeling ostracised from outside friends. I needed to find a new activity to keep myself occupied. By chance, walking down King's Road one afternoon I bumped into a former girlfriend and together we spontaneously bought a set of rollerblades and tried them out in Hyde Park. After an hour of cuts and bruises, she gave up and never used them again. But the sport hooked me and thereafter every waking hour was spent blading around the myriad paths of Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and Regent's Park. I soon fell in with a gang of hardcore bladers who were also rarely employed, amongst them Shaggy and Winston, two dread-locked black guys who had been blading together since childhood. They were an eclectic bunch, but good fun and a refreshing change from MI6 staff. However, my money could not last forever.


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11. THE AGREEMENT

MONDAY, 25 MARCH 1996
LAVENDER CAFE, KENNINGTON ROAD, LONDON

I wasn't surprised that PD/PROSPECT was late. Mike Timpson asked me to meet him at two p.m. in the Lavender Cafe off the Kennington Road, a stone's throw from my flat in Richborne Terrace. It was Monday, 25 March 1996; the clocks had been put back one hour over the weekend to British Summer Time, and it normally took the office a day or so to change all the wall-clocks. I supposed that Timpson would appear about three, so ordered another coffee and reflected again on the events of the past four months.

It took the IST until 12 March to uphold MI6's dismissal. Although the verdict was not unexpected, nevertheless it was a crushing blow seeing my final chance for legal redress disappear. Until that day, I abstained from accepting MI6's help in finding alternative employment. It was a matter of principle. Accepting their offer would be a concession in the battle against unfair dismissal. I'd had a few interviews. Patrick Jephson, Private Secretary to the Princess of Wales interviewed me to work in her office, but no offer materialised. I went along to some private-sector interviews but my lack of enthusiasm for that sort of career must have been plain. The lack of a regular salary for eight months decimated my savings and even cut-backs on expenditure and some casual work as a motorcycle dispatch rider left me with a big overdraft. Eventually there was no choice except to swallow my pride and accept help from Vauxhall Cross.

Timpson walked into the wine bar at ten to three, imagining himself to be in good time for the meeting. I had met him a couple of times and liked him. He had joined late in his career, after working as an aid worker in Africa. He remained an Africa specialist - unusual in MI6 where specialism is frowned upon - rising eventually to head the Africa controllerate. His career stalled there, perhaps due to his lack of experience outside the dark continent, but probably also because he was no thruster.

`Thank you for agreeing to meet me,' he said cautiously as we sat down with our coffees, careful not to sound sanctimonious that I had not contacted the office sooner or triumphant that I had finally been forced to accept their help. `I've just finished reading a book which made me think of you. It was about a young chap called Christian Jennings who was in a desperate state like you - broke, no job, lost his home. He went off and joined the French Foreign Legion, then wrote a book about his experience called A Mouth Full of Rocks. Anyway, things turned out right for him in the end.'

`What, are you suggesting I join the Foreign Legion?' I asked.

`No, no,' spluttered Timpson. `I was merely trying to say that things could turn out for you OK in the end.' We spoke for an hour about the outplacement help MI6 could offer but Timpson was as barren of ideas as I was. At least he did not suggest the City. `I've never had to give career advice to somebody like you who obviously does not want to leave - most people whom personnel department fire are happy to go,' he said.

`That's the first sensible comment I've heard from personnel,' I replied. `But listen, I need to get some sort of employment urgently. I've been unemployed for months, I'm heavily in debt and can't pay my mortgage next month. If you can't help me find something, even temporarily, can the office help me out with a loan?' Dimmock had implied to Badger that he thought I was a potential security risk: if that's what he thought when I had a regular salary and an interesting job, then surely he would help me stay in my home so I would have a stable base from which to job-search?

`I understand your financial difficulty,' Timpson replied sympathetically, `but it's out of the question. Julian Dimmock specifically told me that it was not an option to give you a loan. But I will write up your concerns when I get back to the office. Personnel department have obviously made some serious errors of judgement here,' he said cautiously. `But I have to be frank, I very much doubt they will do anything. They've taken their decision now and it would be too embarrassing to reverse it and admit their mistakes.' All Timpson could do for me was to put me in touch with an external careers adviser who had been vetted by the office.

Walking back to my flat, I reflected on Timpson's advice. Joining the French Foreign Legion was not an option, but the second idea started to grow on me. How about writing a book? It would be totally illegal - even disclosing the colour of the carpets in MI6's headquarters would be a breach of the OSA. But a cloak of secrecy effectively shielded the service from accountability, creating a climate in which arrogant disregard for my rights, as well as those of countless other employees, came naturally. I was coming to believe that these traits tainted MI6's interactions with society at large. What else could I do? If I just forgot the incident, MI6 would carry on mismanaging their people in exactly the same way as they had mismanaged me. There had been victims before me and there would be victims in the future.

The urge to tell my side of the story publicly welled up more firmly in the following weeks. The news of my dispute with MI6 had diffused through Whitehall, and MI6 had covertly used their influence to blacken me and justify their decision. Some friends in Vauxhall Cross had remained in surreptitious contact and they told me that personnel was putting about rumours that they had `done everything they could' for me. Also, after some of the broadsheets had reported the use of a PII certificate to block my tribunal, the internal weekly newsletter claimed that newspapers had mis-reported the story and that they had been forced to obtain the PII certificate because I was a `publicity seeker who would use the opportunity of an employment tribunal to blacken the service'. Prior to my dismissal, the idea of breaking ranks with the service and seeking publicity was anathema, but now their actions were driving me into a corner, mentally and financially, and writing a book was looking like my only way out.

Robin Ludlow, the vetted external career counseller, explained how he had spent most of his career in the army, then worked as a personnel officer before becoming an outplacement adviser. His antecedents were not that different from Dimmock and Fowlecrooke, and he seemed to have been briefed by them too. `You need to think about a career in the City more positively. With your talents you'd soon be earning a fortune.'

`They wouldn't have to pay me a fortune, they'd have to nail my hands to the bloody desk,' I replied. `I liked my job in MI6 because of the mental stimulation of working on complex team projects with stimulating, intelligent colleagues, because of the opportunity to live and work abroad, learning the languages and immersing myself in the culture of the host country, because of the fascinating and varied people that I would meet, because of the unpredicatbility and variety in the career and because of the fulfilment of working in public service to my country. Now tell me where I'd find any of that in the bloody City?' Ludlow looked baffled. These criteria were out of his scope. `Listen,' I said, `this isn't going to be easy for you, but at the very least can you help get me something temporary and urgently? I am really up the wall financially and am about to default on my mortgage.'

Ludlow thought for a moment. `How about driving minicabs?' he suggested. `Sign on the dole and get your mortgage paid by the social security, then work as a minicab driver to pay your groceries.' I got up and left. Ludlow's recommendation was illegal; I would end up in prison if caught fiddling social security benefits.

There was one last recourse against MI6. Strictly it would be a breach of the OSA to tell my MP that I was a former MI6 employee, let alone explain the dispute and ask for help to find a resolution. In practice it would be very difficult for MI6 to press charges. A quick phone call from a public callbox to the constituency office of Labour backbencher Kate Hoey established the times and dates of her surgery.

Hoey's offices were just a few streets away from my home but I took my motorbike as Shaggy and Winston wanted me to go rollerblading on Trafalgar Square later that evening. Drawing up outside her surgery, I saw that she was scurrying down the steps towards her car. `Miss Hoey?' I called, dismounting my motorbike to pursue her on foot. She stopped and turned to face me. `Could I have a word?' I asked politely and keeping my distance, aware that she might feel intimidated by a six-foot-four man in black motorcycle gear on a dark evening in a dodgy part of London.

`I am terribly sorry, but I am in a real rush to get to an official function - could you see one of my assistants in the surgery?' she replied helpfully.

`I would really rather talk to you directly - it concerns the Official Secrets Act and I'm not sure that I'm allowed to speak legally to one of your assistants.'

`It's OK, go and see one of my assistants,' she insisted. She was pressed, and it would be rude to push.

`OK, I'm sorry to bother you,' I replied with a smile.

Back in her surgery there was a lengthy queue awaiting attention, so I sat down in one of the plastic seats to wait. When my turn came up, the young assistant invited me into an interview cubicle and asked me to explain my problem. `I have a dispute that I would like Miss Hoey's assistance to resolve. But it would be a breach of the Official Secrets Act if I were to tell you anything more. Would it be possible to make an appointment to see Miss Hoey herself?' I asked.

`Well, this is very unusual,' the assistant replied sceptically, probably wondering why he got all the nutters. `I think it best that you write to her,' he continued. `Here's her address.' He gave me a business card with the constituency address and telephone numbers, smiled and indicated that I should leave.

Hoey replied commendably quickly with the news that she had written to the Chief, David Spedding, and that he had invited her out to lunch to discuss the problem. Vauxhall Cross was in her parliamentary constituency, as was Century House, so she had often met the various Chiefs. Spedding even had his London flat just a few houses away from me on Richborne Terrace, so he perhaps he was also a constituent. But my optimism that Hoey might mediate successfully was short-lived. A few days later, she wrote to me again and told me that over lunch Spedding had assured her that I had `been fairly treated' and that personnel department had `done everything they could'.

A few weeks later, my ever-expanding overdraft forced me to pack up and vacate my flat. The rental income would be enough to pay the monthly mortgage arrears. After a brief visit to my parents, I loaded up my trusty Honda with as many of my possessions as it could carry and set off for the channel ports. I had no specific destination in mind, I just wanted to go somewhere warm and cheap.

As far as Customs and Excise were concerned, Richard Tomlinson was nowhere in sight as I entered the docks at Portsmouth, glared over the pier at the Fort and handed them the well-worn passport bearing my picture and Alex Huntley's name. I'd been sacked so abruptly after arriving from Rio that there had been no opportunity to return the alias passport, driving licence and other documents to CF. If their absence hadn't been noted yet, it probably never would.

Living under alias would give me the opportunity to write with less possibility of intervention by MI6. Although I'd left the UK countless times using fake identification, this time was different. I hadn't yet violated the OSA since leaving the service but handing over Huntley's passport was crossing the line. Living on fraudulent documentation could be problematic, so as a safeguard before leaving Cumbria I curled up my real passport, driving licence and some money, stuck them in an empty shampoo bottle, weighted it with some old fishing-line weights and slipped it through the filling aperture of the Africa Twin's petrol tank. Even if the Customs officers searched my bike on entry to the ferry, they would be unlikely to find it.

The next two weeks were spent meandering down the back roads of France, camping in coppices and by mountain streams with my bivvy-bag and poncho. Every few days, when I felt the need for a shower and a comfortable bed or had received a soaking from the spring showers, I stopped in a cheap hostel. There was no fixed destination - my turns took me down country roads that looked interesting and avoided those leading to ominous clouds. The random route took me from Calais to the industrial city of Le Mans, down to Poitiers, across the Massif Central to Marseilles, through the Languedoc, then over the Pyrennees into Spain. There the language was easier and it rained less. After drifting down the Mediterranean coast, my journey was brought to a halt in the Andalucian coastal town of Fuengirola when the drive chain jumped the sprocket. The local Honda dealer said it would take several days for a replacement to arrive.

I was as worn out by the long ride as the motorcycle, so when a time-share hustler on the town promenade said he knew of somebody with a flat to rent until the tourist season started, it seemed the right place to stop. On 15 April I moved into the small bedsit, unpacked my few belongings and settled in. The money hidden in the petrol tank was enough to live on frugally for about four months and, if it became necessary, selling the Honda could extend my sojourn. This should be long enough to draft a book. I set up my old laptop and started typing. The injustice of being forced out of my home, and the loss of my steady income and comfortable lifestyle rankled hard: it felt good to start putting the story on paper at last.

Within a week of my disappearance, MI6 started looking for me, alerted by the silence on my telephone. Unaware that I was now Alex Huntley, they looked fruitlessly for Richard Tomlinson. My bank account in the UK was examined by Cumbria SB but yielded no clues because I had paid cash throughout the journey. Tapping my parents' telephone yielded nothing because I rang home using a GSM mobile phone with disposable SIM card, making it impossible to pin me down. Soon friends in London received a phone call from a `Mr Sturton' of the FCO, MI6 having obtained their names and telephone numbers from intercepts of my home phone. Feigning compassion, `Sturton' claimed the FCO wished to assure itself of my wellbeing, fearing that I was suicidal. They were nave to imagine that my friends would fall for the despicable pretence. Without exception, they phoned me to report the approach. Even Shaggy told me he'd been rung up by a `toff'; he just offered to sell him some dope.

One afternoon, without the courtesy of making an appointment, two female MI6 officers arrived in Cumbria, having travelled from London that morning. My parents were too polite to turn them away after their journey and invited them in for tea. They stayed for over two hours, pretending to be concerned for my safety and trying to trick my parents into revealing my whereabouts. It was a futile exercise. My parents were completely behind me, and the officers left empty-handed.

Joining MI6 was rather like joining a religious cult. The IONEC was the initiation process. We went in wide-eyed and innocent, a blank sheet on which training department imprinted their ideas. The impression that the work was wholesome and justified was reinforced by the carefully nurtured culture within the service. We were reminded constantly and subtly that we carried special responsibilities and the brainwashing process instilled a deep-grained loyalty. Even after the shoddy treatment from personnel, I felt fealty to MI6. It wasn't the same unquestioning loyalty of before, but the embers were still glowing and could easily have been fully rekindled. If, by some amazing twist of fate, they had rung me up, apologised and offered me my job back, I would have gone.

This sense of loyalty was strong enough to make me feel uncomfortable about my writing. Some mornings I woke in my bedist burning with anger and the words flew forth. But more often I felt guilty about violating my lingering loyalty to the service and dreaded the confrontation that publishing would provoke. If there were another solution to resolve the dispute, I would embrace it openly. All I wanted was the chance to take them to an employment tribunal and prove to myself, my friends and family, and to the likes of Kate Hoey and Malcolm Rifkind, that my dismissal was unjustified. There was no possibility of getting my job back but at least I would be able to hold my head high at an interview with a future employer and explain that the dismissal had been proven illegal.

MI6 had the upper hand and felt no pressure to negotiate. They had listened and watched impassively as my personal situation disintegrated in London, so they would not negotiate now. The only way to get them to the table was to switch to terrorist tactics; some juicy titbits in the newspapers would wake them up.

On 12 May, the Sunday Times published a small piece about MI6's spying operations against the French. Terry Forton had told me one day over lunch in Vauxhall Cross that he was working under cover as a defence journalist to run a French engineer on the Brest naval base. Forton was paying the witless informer to provide information on a secret French technology to track submarines using satellites to spot the tiny surface wake they left, even when submerged. The information I gave the Sunday Times was unsubstantiated and vague, because it had come to me second-hand from Forton, so the newspaper used a bit of journalistic imagination to pad the story. It made a small splash on the back page but no doubt caused a few more ripples in Vauxhall Cross.

Later that week I rode down the coast to Gibraltar and faxed my mobile phone number to the office, asking them to contact me. MI6 would already know my number from intercepting calls to my parents, but they would not dare ring me on it until they had it `officially' from me.

MI6 did not contact me over the next two weeks, so I rang the Sunday Times again. They were very interested in the `hot potato' story of possible Bosnian-Serb donations to the Tories. This time they ran the story on the front page, with follow up articles inside. It caused a big rumpus in Fleet Street, with the broadsheets running second-day stories on Monday and follow-ups for most of the week. It must have been embarrassing for the Conservatives and I hoped that angry Tory ministers would force MI6 to take action.

A few days later, when the media storm had subsided, a grave-sounding message was left on my mobile phone, asking me to ring a London number. My call was answered by Geoff Morrison, a personnel officer I had met briefly. He was on the verge of retirement and presumably was asked to take on this one last job because there was too much animosity between myself and other members of the department. `Would you be prepared to meet me?' Morrison asked.

`Of course, that is why I got in touch,' I replied, `But I first want your word of honour that you will not arrest me and that you will not use surveillance to establish my whereabouts.' Once my base was known, MI6 might ask the Spanish police either to arrest me for talking to the Sunday Times, or, worse, to frame me for another crime.

`We will not call the Guardia Civil during the negotiations,' promised Morrison, `but there is no point in entering discussions if there is not good faith on both sides.' I reluctantly accepted Morrison's vague promises - I had striven hard to get this far.

Morrison insisted that neither John Wadham nor any other lawyer could represent me. `You know we can't possibly let you have a representative,' he said. `It would be gravely prejudicial to national security.' It was utter baloney, but there was little option other than to go along with them. Morrison demanded that the meeting take place in Madrid, to enable him to use the embassy as a base to work from, and offered to pay my expenses from Fuengirola.

We met for the first time on Thursday, 14 November 1996, in the Hotel Ambassador, a short walk from the embassy. Waiting for them in the lobby with my hand-luggage, I was surprised when Morrison turned up accompanied by a younger officer whose face was familiar. `Hello, Richard,' Morrison greeted me cordially. `This is Andy Watts. I understand you've met briefly before. I've brought him along as we thought it would be better for you to have another two minds to bounce ideas off.' Round two to MI6 - not content with denying me a lawyer, they had stacked the negotiations further in their favour by bringing a two-man team.

Right from the outset my only request, to be allowed to go to an employment tribunal, was stubbornly rejected by Morrison and Watts. `You know how prejudicial that would be to national security,' Morrison lectured.

`OK,' I ventured, `You choose the judge at the tribunal, one that you approve of and have vetted. You choose not only your own lawyer but also mine, so that you can pick one you approve of and have positively vetted. We hold the tribunal in camera, at a secret location, and I sign a confidentiality agreement binding me not to talk to the press about the result.'

Morrison shook his head gravely. `You know perfectly well, Richard, that even in those circumstances it would not be secure.' I held my head in disbelief. How could these people be so obtuse and unreasonable to assert that a hearing held in these circumstances would be less secure than having a highly disaffected former officer on the loose?

As I feared, MI6 tailed me on my return journey. I didn't pick up foot surveillance at Madrid airport or on the plane, but leaving Malaga airport, two cars and possibly a third followed me along the autopista to Fuengirola. There was no point in trying to shake them off on the motorway, so I carried on past Fuengirola and pulled off into Marbella. The historic centre of Marbella is a maze of narrow, cobbled passageways and it was easy to use the speed and manoeuvrability of the bike to lose them. I then returned eastwards, along the spectacular winding mountain roads to Fuengirola. They would have to try harder if they wanted to find my hideout.

A few days later they succeeded. They must have passed the number plate and description of my motorbike to the Guardia Civil. A large silver Honda Africa Twin with a distinctive bright yellow British number plate must have been fairly easy to find. Riding home one evening after a day trip to the mountain village of Ronda, two Guardia Civil motorcyclists stopped me a few kilometres outside Fuengirola on the pretext of a routine check of my driving licence. `Donde vive usted?' the senior officer asked. Guessing that I might be tempted to invent an address, they warned me that they would follow me home. The choice was to abandon my belongings, including the laptop, and ride off to a new address, or tell the truth. Chosing the latter, I led the officers to my bedsit.

A week later, Morrison and Watts invited me to another meeting in Madrid. This time they were armed with several thick dossiers, labelled `D/813317', my old staff number, which they laid out on the table in front of me. `We've decided to make a special exception for you,' proudly announced Morrison, peering through his thick glasses. `We're going to let you look at your own personal files.' It was unprecedented for the secretive personnel department to let their charges see their own papers, though such transparency should have been normal practice. Certainly the mistrust and animosity that had bottled up between the department and me would have been avoided had there been an open reporting system in place.

Morrison hoped that the reasons for my dismissal would become clearer to me once I had read the files and that it would help assuage my anger. His motives were sound but his judgement was flawed. The notes of meetings between myself and the various members of personnel department during my four years in the service were a shoddily inaccurate blend of bias, fantasy, venom and plain incompetence. None of the excellent work that my line-managers had praised was even mentioned, but there were scathing criticisms for the tiniest omission or most trivial error. My failure to wear a tie to meet Karadzic earned pages of abuse. Basic communication failings were repeated throughout. Successive personnel officers had read the reports of their predecessors and, rather than interviewng me to seek their own opinion, found it easier to go with the flow and add more layers of garbage.

The files also explained personnel's obsession that I would find fulfilment in the City. During the recruitment process, `Mr Halliday' noted that I would be taking a hefty salary cut from Booz Allen & Hamilton. On my IONEC report a few months later, Ball advised personnel department to give me an interesting and challenging post because it would be a shame if such an outstanding candidate were to become bored and leave for more highly paid work. A few years later, these casual comments had snowballed into a firm opinion that I was about to abandon the office for a life in stripy shirt and braces.

At my last meeting with Poison Dwarf, I accused him of failing to give any warning that my job was at risk, as required by law. Poison Dwarf insisted pompously that he personally had given the formal warning. But careful scrutiny of all of his contact reports revealed no mention of even a verbal warning, let alone written notice. `Do you mind showing me PD/2's warning?' I asked Morrison.

`Oh, you don't want to see that,' obfuscated Morrison.

`Yes, I bloody well do,' I replied angrily, `Show it to me right now. PD/2 insisted that he had given me one, and I want to see his proof.' Morrison shuffled through the pile of papers reluctanty, eventually pulling out a one-page document to which he had attached a small post-it note. It took just seconds to read the two short paragraphs. `But this is not even written by PD/2,' I exclaimed. Morrison was admitting implicitly that Poison Dwarf's claim to have given me a warning was a brazen lie. It was written by PD/1, Fowlecrooke, and referred to his brief visit to Richborne Terrace on my return from Bosnia. `And how does this constitute a warning?' I asked. `Fowlecrooke makes no mention of warning me, he just refers to my next posting in PTCP section.'

`I've spoken to Rick,' replied Morrison, `and he says that he warned you verbally.'

`But he didn't!' I spat. `I remember the meeting clearly. It concerned entirely my next posting. And if Fowlecrooke warned me, why didn't he record something as fundamental as that?'

`Rick told me that he didn't think it important enough to record in the minute,' Morrison replied, staring awkwardly over his pebbleglasses. Morrison knew that I had been unfairly and illegally sacked, but he would not admit it.

After our third Madrid meeting, in January 1997, it became clear the negotiations weren't progressing. My resolute position was that the only way to settle the dispute satisfactorily was to go to an employment tribunal. Morrison and Watts insisted that this basic human right would `prejudice national security' and that all that they would offer was help finding another job and a small loan to pay off my debts. With no previous experience at complicated negotiation and without the help of an experienced lawyer, I was at considerable disadvantage.

Our fourth meeting, in February 1997, took place in the British embassy in Madrid. Morrison and Watts had twisted my arm into agreeing to it at the previous meeting, arguing that it was more comfortable and cheaper than hotel suites. Technically the embassy was British soil and so there was a risk that the British police could arrest and hold me there, but I agreed in order to show my trust and faith in them.

Morrison and Watts met me outside the embassy gates and ushered me into a grey-carpeted meeting-room dominated by an ugly modern boardroom table. Once again they were prepared with various papers. `We've written up our agreement,' Morrison announced proudly, and pushed across a two-page document.

I looked at it bewildered for a second. `But we haven't even agreed anything yet,' I protested.

`Read it. I am confident that you will be happy with the agreement,' continued Morrison, firmly. The `agreement' promised assistance to find another job and offered a loan of 15,000, which would have to be repaid in ten years. In return, MI6 would not seek to prosecute me on my return to the UK for the small breaches of the OSA that I had committed by speaking to the Sunday Times; I had to drop my demands for an employment tribunal, hand over my laptop computer for formatting of the hard drive containing the text of the book, and sign over copyright on anything that I subsequently wrote about MI6. It was an absurdly one-sided proposal.

`There is no way you're getting my signature on that,' I protested. `It does not address my right to an employment tribunal.'

`Oh, but we've got you a fantastic alternative job,' countered Morrison, undeterred. `It's a great opportunity, in industry.' He emphasised the last word proudly, and paused for a moment as if to let the magnitude of this breakthrough sink in. Personnel were still assuming that they could decide what sort of career would suit me and `industry' was about as appealing as the City, except with the added pleasure of living in somewhere like Coventry. `You will be much better paid than you were in the service,' Morrison promised, pushing back the bridge of his spectacles.

There was no way that I would sign the agreement without a concession to an employment tribunal. Even if I did sign, it would be impossible to keep to its terms. `No, I will not sign,' I insisted. `We need to negotiate something sensible - it is pointless just coming up with something like this.'

The atmosphere in the meeting grew heated and hostile. Instead of negotiating with my objections, Morrison started to cajole and threaten. `This is all we'll offer,' he announced. `There is nothing more to negotiate. If you don't sign today, this agreement will be withdrawn and we will cut off all further negotiation.'

`But that is ridiculous,' I pleaded, `You haven't even paid lip service to my right to a hearing - this will not work.' My and their patience grew thinner. `What will you do to me if I don't sign?' I mocked them. `You could never persuade the Guardia Civil to arrest me just for talking to a newspaper - unlike Britain, Spain has signed up to the European convention on human rights, guaranteeing freedom of expression.'

`I wouldn't be so sure of yourself,' spat Morrison menacingly. Watts joined in the bullying. `Richard, you know that MI6 is a very powerful organisation, with influence around the world. If you don't sign up, we'll use this influence to harass you for the rest of your life wherever you go. We'll make sure you never get a decent job again and can never settle in any country with friendly relations with Britain.' I could scarcely believe Watts. He had seemed a decent person until this morning.

Morrison stood up impatiently, paced across the room and spun on his heel to face me. `If you don't sign this agreement NOW,' he shouted, `we cannot guarantee your safety.' Morrison looked momentarily embarrassed at his burst of anger before recovering his composure by removing his glasses and polishing the lenses. Slipping them back on, he glared through the thick lenses at me as his words sunk in and I tried to imagine what he meant.

`But you can't arrest me, you promised in writing that you wouldn't,' I retorted feebly.

`That promise stood only for as long as negotiations were in progress,' snapped Morrison. `If you don't sign, we will end the negotiations . . .'

There was no choice but to sign. Morrison had cornered me: first denying me a lawyer, then bringing Watts as a wingman, then using a soft, concerned approach to build my confidence and trust, and finally, once I had taken the bait, luring me into the safe ground of the embassy. They would not have made empty threats, and no doubt SB officers would be waiting with handcuffs outside, ready to arrest me. Even if they decided that repatriation from the embassy would be legally tricky, they would set me up for an arrest by the Guardia Civil, perhaps with false evidence on trumped-up charges. It didn't take much imagination to think how it could be done - planting drugs in my room or on the Honda wouldn't be difficult.

Grabbing a biro that lay amongst the jumble of papers on the desk, I signed angrily, my normal signature distorted by my fear.


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