The Big Breach (11 page)

The solution came one day in the mid-1980s, when a TS/SW technician was developing a conventional SW message sent by an agent in Russia. The secret message had been written on the back of an envelope with an innocuous `cover' letter inside and posted from Moscow. As the technician swabbed the back of the envelope with developing fluid, as expected the secret message began to emerge. But to his surprise, other writing - in a different hand and mirror-written - also started to develop. Close inspection of the writing showed that it was an address in Kiev. But who was the addressee and how had it appeared over the top of the message?

There was only one logical explanation for the mysterious writing. When the agent posted his letter, the back of the envelope must have fallen to rest in the postbox on top of another envelope. That envelope must have been addressed with an ink which possessed the property of transferring an invisible chemical to paper in contact with it. The technician realised that the Kiev address must have been written with a commercially available pen. If that pen could be identified, it would be a superbly elegant, simple and deniable SW implement. MI6 mounted a systematic worldwide search for the magic pen and every MI6 station was asked to send a secretary to the local stationery store to buy every make available. TS/SW were soon at work testing them. Each was used to write a few characters, a piece of paper was pressed over the top, then swabbed with developer. It took many weeks to identify the magic pen - the Pentel rollerball. The `offset' technique has the dual advantages that the agent or officer can see what he is writing before taking the offset copy and because the pen is commercially available it is deniable and uncompromising. Offset is now used routinely by MI6 officers in the field for writing up intelligence notes after debriefing agents. It is also issued to a few highly trusted agents, but is considered too secret to be shared even with liaison services such as the CIA.

Many other technical means are used for clandestine communication between agents, officers and Head Office. Development and issue of these systems was the responsibility of the section known as TOS/AC (Technical and Operations Support, Agent Comms). One morning they brought along their latest gadgets to demonstrate to us.

The essential feature of these gadgets is that they are non-compromising, that is, they are identical or virtually indistinguishable from commercially available equipment. PETTLE recorders were particularly ingenious. Any normal audio cassette has two tracks running parallel to each other, one for each `side' of the cassette. PETTLE recorders exploited the unused part of the magnetic tape which lies between the two strips. TOS/AC demonstrated an ordinary personal stereo which played and recorded on both sides of the tape like a standard machine. But turning it upside down tripped a microswitch so that pressing the `stop' and `record' buttons together made the machine record over the central track. Pressing `stop' and `play' together played back the recording. They also demonstrated modified laptop computers. The removable floppy discs used in ordinary computers have a hidden space which is just big enough to hide a simple word processing system and file retrieval system. Typing in a simple command at the DOS prompt started up the special word processor system, allowing notes to be secretly recorded. Exiting the software, the computer reverted to normal mode, leaving the secret files invisible even to an accomplished computer specialist.

We also learned how to use SRAC (Short Range Agent Communication). This system is only issued to long-established and highly trusted agents in countries such as Russia and South Africa. The agent writes a message on a laptop computer, then downloads it into the SRAC transmitter, a small box the size of a cigarette packet. The receiver is usually mounted in the British embassy and continually sends out a low-power interrogation signal. When the agent is close enough, in his car or on foot, his transmitter is triggered and transmits the message in a high-speed burst of VHF. The transmitter is disguised as an innocuous object and for many years `Garfield Cat' stuffed animals were popular as their sucker feet allowed the agent to stick the transmitter on the side window of his car, giving an extra clear signal as he drove past the embassy.

Photography is another important skill for an intelligence officer, whether to snap a surveillance shot of a target or to photograph secret documents. We were taught photography by an instructor from the service's technical support division, TOS/PH. He showed us how to take long-range snaps of targets using huge telephoto lenses and how to take clear close-ups of documents. MI6 uses commercially available photographic equipment where possible because anything specially made could be compromising. We did, however, practise with gadgets such as midget cameras and specially made collapsible document-copying cameras. Best fun, though, were the lessons on covert photography during which we secretly photographed members of the public with a variety of still and video cameras mounted in briefcases or shoulder bags. Back in an underground cellar below the Fort we were taught how to develop our shots as every overseas MI6 station has a darkroom which we were expected to know how to use.

Twice a week, we were given instruction in self-defence in the Fort's small gymnasium. Our instructor, Bill, was a former sergeant in the Royal Marines Special Boat Service who had also worked for a few years for the Las Vegas police force. Although only a little over five feet tall and dwarfed by all of us, he could put any of us on the floor or in an agonising thumb-lock within seconds. Over the weeks, we were taught how to judo-throw would-be attackers, fend off knife attacks, escape from headlocks and armlocks, and disarm a gunman. Self-defence is taught more for fun and morale building than for any real purpose - a traffic warden has more need of it than an MI6 officer and physical violence is never deliberately used. Bill could only recall one incident when a former student put the teaching into practice. A female officer was receiving unwanted attention from a drunken lout on a train during her evening commute. While the yob pestered her, the other male passengers buried their noses deeper into their newspapers. Eventually she could take no more and, just as Bill had taught her, she tightly rolled up her copy of
The Economist
and jabbed it into her assailant's eye, quickly silencing him.

We were also taught weapons-handling but, like self-defence, it was more for fun and fostering of team spirit than for any practical purpose. It was virtually unknown for MI6 officers to carry a weapon and no officer has ever used one in anger. Our instructor, Tom Nixon, a former sergeant in the Special Air Service, participated in the May 1980 Iranian Embassy siege at Prince's Gate. Under his expert supervision, we practised twice weekly at the outdoor range at the western edge of the Fort and in the small indoor range, modelled on the famous `killing house' range at the SAS barracks in Hereford. We mostly used the Browning 9mm pistol, standard issue to the British armed forces, but also trained on foreign weapons like the Israeli Uzi and German Heckler & Koch sub-machine guns.

The DS and lecturers taught us how to plan and mount bugging operations, even though this is not the job of the IB. TOS has about a hundred officers trained in the specialist skills to carry out these tasks: locksmiths, clandestine entry specialists, sound engineers, electricians. We just required an understanding of their skills and abilities. Ball gave us an exercise, PERFECT NEIGHBOUR, in which we had to plan such an operation. Briefing us on the scenario, Ball said to imagine that the IRA had acquired a `safe house' in Gosport, near the Fort, and that intelligence showed that the house was to be used to plan a bombing campaign. Over the next two weeks, we had to draw up a detailed portfolio of the house, its layout, its occupants and their movements, then make recommendations on how and when the house should be entered to place covert listening devices. All of us were given a different house to recce. These belonged to innocent members of the public. `Are there any restrictions on what we can do?' asked Hare at the end of the briefing.

`No - you can do whatever you want,' replied Ball. `Just don't get caught.'

That evening I borrowed a covert shoulder-bag mounted camera from the photographic laboratories and strolled round to my target, a medium-sized family home set in a small garden and fronting on Gomer Lane. To the rear was a small garden, backing on to the grounds of Stanley Park and Bay House School. Squeezing the bag to activate the Pentax SLR inside, I covertly photographed the house, shooting a roll of film which I developed that evening. The following morning, a visit to Gosport Town Hall on Walpole Road yielded a copy of the electoral roll, giving the names and occupations of the occupants. Posing as an architectural student, I borrowed the plans of their house from the building regulations department on the fourth floor on the pretext that it was for a design project at the polytechnic. The clerk would not release photocopies but allowed me to study them in the waiting-room. As soon as he was out of sight, an SLR with close-up lenses was used to photographed them. Just as I finished, Castle walked in. He too had thought of the same ruse. He got away with it but Spencer, who turned up an hour or so later, was not so lucky. The clerk was by now wary of the rush of odd requests for plans of Fareham town houses. He called his superior, who refused to believe Spencer's protests that he was a builder's jobber.

Thereafter every spare half-hour from the classroom was spent observing the house to build up a detailed picture of the daily movements of the occupants. The best place for the listening device would be in the kitchen, where the family socialised. But more detailed information was needed. One evening I jogged round to the house and found that it was empty. This was my chance. After checking that nobody was watching, I climbed the fence bordering Stanley Park, scrambled through the shrubbery and up to the hedge at the back of the house. Nobody was at home next door either, so I scuttled the few metres of open ground into the cover of the lean-to at the back of the house, sending a startled cat shooting through my feet and under the windsurfer lying nearby. Crouching in the shadows for a few minutes, I listened for any sign of compromise. There was silence, so I stood up and peered through the kitchen window. After my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I sketched the kitchen layout in a notebook. Just as I turned to make my exit I noticed that the key had been left in the door. Recalling Ball's words - `just don't get caught' - I turned it and pushed the door open. My intrusion into a stranger's house was amoral and illegal but in the euphoria of the IONEC it seemed totally justified. Ball rewarded my efforts with full marks on the exercise.

We worked long hours down at the Fort. Training started at 9 a.m. and a typical day would involve several lectures, small-arms drill or self-defence classes, an exercise in the afternoon, more lectures, then dinner, perhaps another evening exercise and then we had to write up the exercises going into the middle of the evening. Socialising in the bar afterwards was obligatory, so often we would not get to bed until the early hours. To compensate for the long weekday hours, we finished just after lunch on Friday afternoons and were not expected back at the Fort until mid-morning the following Monday. All of us lived in central London, so we normally shared lifts back into town. For the first few weeks of the IONEC I rented a room from an old Cambridge friend, but realising early in the course that MI6 would be a lifetime career, getting on the property ladder became imperative. I found a one-bedroom garden flat on Richborne Terrace in the pleasant but slightly dilapidated Victorian suburb of Kennington. It was in poor decorative order and the garden was sorely neglected, but it was as much as I could afford and I was very proud of it. Every weekend was spent digging, planting, painting and sawing.

I was enjoying the social life in London too. One day Julian, an English friend I met in Argentina, invited me to an evening of indoor go-kart racing in London to celebrate his birthday. Having spent so many hours tearing up my mother's garden in my home-made go-kart, I fancied my chances in a race and so was looking forward to the event.

The track was built in an old bus depot in Clapham. Julian had invited 30 or so other friends and amongst them were some very pretty girls. One in particular I noticed imediately. As we milled around sorting out helmets and awaiting our heats, I could hardly keep my eyes off her. She was tall, almost five foot ten inches, and had blue eyes and long shiny dark hair which she often caressed and pushed back from her face whenever she laughed. She had cinched-in the waist of the baggy overalls issued to us with an old school tie, accentuating her slender waist. I watched her race in one of her heats. She drove like an old granny popping down to the supermarket for a tin of Whiskas and soon the leaders were bearing down on her to lap her and the race marshalls pulled out the blue flag to show that she should give way. But it was to no avail. Lap after lap, the leaders sat on her bumper, trying to get past. Being lighter than the men behind her, she could accelerate more quickly on the straights, but tiptoed around the corners. The marshalls waved their flags more vigorously, but it was in vain. She just took one hand off the steering wheel and waved back at them. I found out from Julian that she was called Sarah.

After the karting we went for dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant. In the mˆl‚e as we waited to be seated, to my surprise I found that she seemed to be trying to get a seat near me. We chatted all evening and ended up going out to dinner again two days later.

Although the core activity of MI6 is agent-running, its charter, known as the `Order Book', requires it to maintain a capability to plan and mount `Special Operations' of a quasi-military nature. MI6 officers do not have the necessary military skills to carry out such operations themselves. Their role is to set the objectives of the operation and obtain political clearance for it from the Foreign Secretary. Thereafter the operation is executed by specially trained officers and men from the three branches of the armed forces.