Homage to Gaia (30 page)

Frank Pitson, then a senior scientist at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, AWRE, Hugh English, and another man, whose name I cannot recall, came to see me. Unlike the Americans, they believed me and liked my idea quite a bit. They told me they had a problem of intercepting arms smugglers who used Arab tribesmen to carry their weapons on camels in the Emirates. Did I think that labelled arms or ammunition would be detectable weeks later after crossing up to a thousand miles of hot desert? We then discussed how much tracer substance would be needed, what range of detection was possible, and worked out on sheets of paper, there in my office
overlooking
the Chalke Valley, that it could indeed be done. What a difference it was from the responses in Washington. To be fair, a distinguished person, Rothschild, had trickled me in, and we shared the same culture. Perhaps, most of all, I was on my own ground and they were visiting me. They asked some searching questions about the toxicity of the tracer substances I had proposed, and insisted that they must be harmless. This was very strange to me, for my fiction reading of clandestine operations suggested that the least thing of concern would be the health of the enemy. Nevertheless, they insisted. When they left, I realized, in the comfortable glow of a pleasant afternoon’s work, that I had probably started something.

Sure enough, Hugh English telephoned and asked me to go to Waterloo Station where someone would meet me. As I moved from the Salisbury train onto the crowded concourse at Waterloo, I
wondered
how I would be recognized. Then, from the crowd the familiar face of Hugh English appeared. He smiled and led me to the stairs that went down onto the road that led to the street market just alongside the station. We walked past the stalls selling everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to cheap clothing and used tin trays. We walked on until we encountered the high-rise and indecorous Century House. There was plenty of security there, but Hugh English vouched for me and signed me in. I took a pass and we went by lift to somewhere in the guts of the skyscraper and took a corridor to a large seminar room. It was full, to my surprise. Hugh introduced me and invited me to say my piece. I could have done with some slides or a blackboard but I did my best, and then the questions came. They were clearly fascinated. Here was a covert alternative to the radio beacon, a
way to mark a person or a car without their knowing it and it dawned on me that the casual story they told about camels was a cover story; the real interest was in the KGB and its agents in London and other cities. Again came the question, ‘Is it safe to use? Will the chemical harm the person labelled in any way?’ I was baffled. I imagined that few would care about the health hazards of a KGB agent in London. Not so: it was almost as if they regarded the opposition as merely rival civil servants and that they at least deserved the care needed to ensure a long and well-earned retirement at pension time. I now understood their reluctance to use radioactive markers.

A remarkable advantage of the electron capture tracers is their total lack of toxicity. It is hard to conceive anything less toxic than water, yet the perfluorocarbons are. If you fell into a deep pool of water with concrete tied to your legs, you would soon die; not so in a pool of perfluorocarbons. A lung full of these strange substances may not be pleasant but it is not lethal and they carry oxygen almost as well as air does and are so inert as to be unnoticed by the delicate cells lining the lungs. Some perfluorocarbons are used as blood substitutes, replacing as much as thirty per cent of the blood in the body, such is their remarkable lack of toxicity. I was able to answer all of their concerns over toxicity with as near to certainty as any scientist can ever achieve. One scientist present at the meeting asked such searching and pointed questions that at first I thought him hostile, even though his
questions
were deep and thoughtful. By the time the conference was nearly over, I had developed a respect for him. He had helped me to clear my own mind. It is always the way with good critics: they are the most valuable friends a scientist can have. I wished that I could get to know him better. I returned to Bowerchalke thoughtfully: ‘What have I let myself in for?’ I wondered. I had caught a glimpse of a real and serious world and one very different from the fictional stories.

Before I left Century House, Hugh took me aside and said, ‘I think it would be wise if sometime you did a demonstration of your
apparatus
, somewhere discreetly in the country in your part of the world. Would you mind if we sent down one of our people to observe?’ A week later, a young man, Colin Place, drove up to our Bowerchalke home laboratory in a small sports car. He was someone who looked more like the fictional characters that I had enjoyed. He said, though, that he was a chemist. I had built in my lab a simple portable apparatus for detecting the gas, sulphur hexafluoride, down to levels of less than a part per trillion. We arranged to take it into the New Forest, where
he would release a small quantity of this gas into a gentle westerly breeze at times of his choosing and I would sit 500 yards away, sampling the air. It was a successful trial and I was able to detect all but one of his releases. Honour was satisfied and Colin reported to London that it really did work.

Then came a long period, I’ve forgotten just how long, while they checked to see if I was a safe person to let know more about the potential uses of my inventions. In 1966 many of us were still deeply affected by the political theories of socialism and since this at times more or less merged into Marxism, which was of course the Soviet culture, there was a need for care. Many regarded the Cold War as bogus, even wrong. My mother was a highly intelligent woman and a Quaker, not a communist, but she was sure that all the accounts of the gulags in Russia and the cruelty of that truly evil man, Stalin, were capitalist propaganda and had no truth to them. Now, after the Thatcher years and the collapse of the Soviet State, it is difficult to imagine the moral certainty in the socialism of that time. I do not even now know whose opinions they sought about my character and history. I was glad that as a student I had rebelled by joining the Catholic Society at Manchester University and toyed with moral theology instead of Marxism. In any event, I was too much of a simple scientist to swallow the certainty of those with faith, whether Marxist or Christian. Their views on life, the universe, and human behaviour I always found unconvincing. Marxism and Catholic moral theology seemed to have more similarity than difference. One person I know they asked about my character was Chris Gulliver, the landlady of The Bell Inn at Bowerchalke. They told me she was an ideal character reference and one far more likely to know important details of my life than were the professionals of the village such as the vicar or the schoolmistress, who apparently most give as their preferred reference. Rothschild told me several months later that I had passed their tests well. From his smile, I suspect they discovered more about my private life as well as my security rating.

Then Hugh called, asking me to come to London again. This time my journey was to Leconsfield House in Curzon Street. The cab driver gave me an odd look when I gave him my destination. He knew at that time just what agency Leconsfield House housed, but in the peculiar secrecy of those days, I did not know and neither did the public generally. Here, after signing in again, I met Hugh, who took me to a small room in which sat, to my delight, the good critic of my
meeting at Century House. He was David Pengrew and, as the years went by, became a real friend. The discussion now was much more practical. We need, they said, a base for you to establish your work and it will have to be at one of the Ministry of Defence establishments. I immediately thought of the Chemical Defence Experimental
Establishment
(CDEE) at Porton, which is conveniently near to
Bowerchalke
, being on the other side of Salisbury and about the same distance away. ‘No,’ said Hugh, ‘You would not like it there. We think a better place would be the Admiralty Materials Research
Establishment
at Holton Heath in Dorset, and that is almost as close to you.’

Hugh and David came down and stayed the night with us at Bowerchalke. The next day we travelled to Holton Heath to see the director there and prepare a site to work on tracers. The establishment at Holton Heath was in the delightful heathland of Dorset. Here, the sandy soil favours conifers and heather, and it is where most of the United Kingdom’s reptiles are found, including the rare smooth snake. In the First World War it was a munitions factory and later it became a research station for the Navy. The Director, Dr Morris, took us to an area surrounded by a close-knit high steel fence and entered by a single guarded roadway with a small brick office for the guard. Inside were a series of brick buildings that were chemical laboratories. We met the senior chemist, Dr Lithgrove, and went on to a temporary wooden building, converted into a small laboratory. ‘This will do for a start,’ they said. Up until then they had paid my travel and subsistence costs and consulting fees by cheques drawn on Coutts Bank. When I started to work at the laboratory at Holton Heath there was a
generous
supply of funds available and they provided a graduate scientist, Tony Vizard, and a senior technician, John Brophy, to help me. They then paid what was, in effect, a salary. From the beginning, I sensed that the administration at Holton Heath regarded our laboratory as an abscess in the body of an otherwise healthy civil service establishment. Because of the high classification of our work, no one was allowed to know what we were doing and there was a wonderful freedom from paperwork, form-filling, and administrative meetings. It was an almost ideal way to do research. We soon built samplers that were more sensitive and synthesized or had made better tracer chemicals.

While work at Holton Heath was progressing, Lester Machta approached me. He was head of the NOAA air resources laboratory at Silver Springs in Maryland, just outside Washington, and he had a grand experiment in mind. He wanted to label the air mass over the
West Coast of the United States and follow its motion across the whole continent. His interest was meteorological. His sponsors were keen to know how toxic or radioactive products of a disaster spread across whole regions. He was anticipating the real disaster that came much later at Chernobyl. He knew of my electron capture detector and needed advice on how to use it for such an experiment.
Collaboration
with NOAA scientists on tracer technology would bring benefits for our work at Holton Heath. At the same time, it was potentially a conflict of interest and a breach of security. Here, David gave a decision that helped immensely—I do not know whether it was his decision or from the service itself. It was that uses by the security services of the tracer technology were wholly secret, but that the technology itself was open. Thus, collaboration with NOAA on a technological basis was fine and could do nothing but benefit us, so long as we kept them in ignorance about our uses of the technology. It was a wise decision and one that was inevitable, for Rothschild had been keen to use the technology in the interest of Shell. Shell went as far as labelling gases passing along pipelines and arranging systems that would automatically switch from one pipeline to another when the tracer material heralded the approach of a different product.

It was also an excellent technique for leak detection. This use was potentially hazardous and I was once able to stop what might have been a disaster of considerable magnitude. Hearing of my technique from Shell, the Gas Board, without telling me, decided to label one of their major gas pipes on the eastern side of England with sulphur hexafluoride to detect leaks along the pipeline. The technique would have worked well; unfortunately, they did not know that SF6, unlike the perfluorocarbons, is active chemically. If mixed with a flammable gas like methane or hydrogen, it will explode on a spark almost as violently as the same mixture of hydrocarbon and oxygen. And here they were, about to let in two whole cylinders of liquid SF6 into the natural gas pipeline to label it. A single spark at the point of introduction could have produced a disastrous explosion, but
fortunately
we were able to warn them in time. Leak detection, air mass, and water labelling proceeded scientifically alongside the more secure work that the security services were doing, and this parallel
development
has continued for over twenty years.

The potential for chemical tracing was considerable, and soon the security services decided to build a proper new laboratory at Holton
Heath specifically for this need. At that time Hugh Jones, a scientist working for the Admiralty and cleared to know about the work we were doing, was appointed to take charge of the laboratory. He and I spent some happy times planning the layout of a pleasant and efficient purpose-built laboratory in a comfortable setting. I was then able to drop back to my preferred role of adviser rather than active worker on the scene. In the new lab, work was much easier and soon the staff increased. I persuaded Peter Simmonds, who had been with me at Mill Hill, Houston, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to come back to England and work part time at Holton Heath whilst
continuing
his external connection with the JPL. The San Fernando Valley earthquake in 1971, I think, helped to disentangle him from his home in Tajunga near the Jet Propulsion Lab. He and his wife Tina had a tough time in that earthquake and were quite glad to come back to the more stable environment of England. In the same year, Brian Foulger took over the administration from Hugh Jones. With the increased staff, the Holton Heath lab began to prove itself.

Throughout history, we have regarded our custodians warily. We are wise to worry about their accountability: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’. Fiction, lurid journalism, the old Left, Soviet
disinformation
, and Irish republicans—I doubt if these conspire to denigrate the security services. But without conspiring, they certainly had left me, as part of the public, with a strong impression that these services were too powerful and unaccountable and could even commit arbitrarily violent deeds. We often ignore the extent of Soviet disinformation that once went on. I used to listen occasionally to the broadcasts on the short waves from Moscow. I well remember the frequent
insistence
during the 1980s that the AIDS virus was a deliberate product of United States laboratories. I knew that this was a scientific
impossibility
, but did the other listeners? It is so easy to sow rumour and I’m sure that many of our views of the security services come from the flood of disinformation that journalists, who were much too
uncritical
, all too readily spread. I do not know what goes on at the sharp end, but from meetings to discuss the deployment of surveillance devices I have been struck by their friendly humour. The kind of exchange I encountered is, ‘You don’t expect me to believe, do you Doc, that that thing you’re holding in your hand can detect which burrow the rabbit is in from a hundred yards?’ They were to me mostly like a refined version of the policeman on the beat I had so often encountered as a child in Brixton. It was not so surprising to
find that some of them were Labour supporters, some of them quite devoutly religious, and one was even a Quaker. They surely did not seem at all like their detractors would have us believe.