The Big Breach (18 page)

The bones of my false life were in place, but they needed fleshing out. Regularly using my Huntley credit card built up a realistic spending pattern on the bills, and consultancy `payments' from East European Investment into my bank account ensured that it would appear realistic to inspection. My alias documentation was beefed up with miscellaneous `wallet litter', forged
… la carte
by G/REP. I chose membership cards to Tramps and Annabel's nighclubs, and Sarah and I spent some enjoyable evenings ensuring that Alex Huntley was familiar to the doormen.

My file on Huntley was now bulging with plausible information, but some genuine Argentine documents would be useful. MI6 often obtains and uses genuine documentation from friendly liaison services such as the Danes and Austrians for `false flag operations'. The station in Buenos Aires had just entered into a tetchy liaison relationship with the Argentine security service, so I fired off an ATHS telegram asking whether SIDE might provide Huntley with documentation. I expected a swift and curt response ridiculing my idea, but H/BUE, an enthusiastic officer, asked at the next liaison meeting. SIDE agreed and sent a genuine Argentine passport, driving licence and identity card in the name Huntley. The documents arrived on my desk a fortnight later and I promptly lent them to G/REP so that they could examine and photograph them for their files in case it became necessary in the future to forge similar documents.

It took just over two months to make the Huntley cover strong enough to satisfy the scrutiny of Russel and Bidde, and I submitted the dossier for examination by C/CEE. He wrote at the bottom of the report, `An excellent piece of work. This will be a solid foundation for future VCO operations into Russia.' It was glowing praise and I was pleased with my contribution.

Meanwhile, Spencer was back from his own natural cover trip to Estonia. `MASTERWORK's a nutter!' he announced as he chucked his hand-luggage on to his desk. `Completely off his rocker! So much for that crap that Ball taught us on the IONEC about only recruiting agents who are mentally stable,' he chuckled. Spencer explained how MASTERWORK had turned up at the meeting wearing a Mickey Mouse hat, clutching the manuscript of a manic and twisted book he was writing. `The guy should be getting pyschiatric help, there's no way we should be running him as an agent,' Spencer concluded. But his judgement was over-ruled by P5 because MASTERWORK helped meet the controllerate CX targets, and Spencer was ordered to continue the bi-monthly meetings in Tallinn. The relationship was later taken over by the Moscow station and they ran MASTERWORK until one clandestine meeting in a Moscow restaurant in April 1996 was rudely interrupted by FSB. They arrested MASTERWORK, charging him with `broadcasting classified information of a political and strategic defence nature to a foreign intelligence service'. The female case officer at the meeting and three other officers from the Moscow station were expelled from Russia. In July 2000, after four years in a pyschiatric detention hospital, MASTERWORK was sentenced to 11 years in a top security prison. The Russians were alerted to MASTERWORK by his rambling boastings that he was a spy, but the real fault lay with MI6 who should never have continued to run an agent so manifestly unstable.

As a probationer, I was expected to take every opportunity to learn from the work of senior colleagues. An objective of UKA was to acquire advanced Russian weaponry, and one operation had been very successful. Russel told me to read the file, adding, `It's a classic operation, you'll learn a lot from studying it.'

BATTLE was one of the arms dealers that MI6 had on its books. Arms dealers are useful sources of intelligence on international arms deals and can be influential in swinging the deals to British companies. BATTLE, a multi-millionaire Anglo-Iranian, earned a salary of around œ100,000 per year from MI6. In late 1991, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) asked BATTLE to buy them a consignment of new BMP-3 armoured personnel carriers. The BMP-3, then the most advanced APC in the Russian armoury, was a heavily armed tracked amphibious vehicle, capable of carrying seven infantry and its three-man crew. The MOD heard rumours that its performance was better than western equivalents and asked MI6 for intelligence.

BATTLE set to work on the deal, flying regularly between the BMP design bureau in Kurgan and Abu Dhabi, and he eventually sealed a deal for the Russians to sell a batch of the lower-specification export variant BMP-3s to the Gulf state. He did not omit to see his MI6 handler every time he passed through London, however, and on one visit mentioned that he had been shown around the advanced variant of the BMP-3 on his last trip to Kurgan. MI6 persuaded him to try to acquire one. On his next trip, with a œ500,000 backhander and forged end-user certificate provided by MI6, BATTLE persuaded his Russian contact to hide one of the advanced specification BMP-3s amongst the first batch of 20 export variants which were shipped to the UAE.

The consignment of BMP-3s went by train from Kurgan to the Polish port of Gdansk. There the 20 UAE vehicles were offloaded into a container ship and sent on their way to Abu Dhabi. The remaining vehicle, under the cover of darkness and with the assistance of Polish liaison, was loaded into a specially chartered tramp steamer and shipped to the army port of Marchwood in Southampton. From there it was transferred to the RARDE (Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment) for detailed examination and field trials.

The RARDE technicians were highly impressed by their new toy and established that the BMP-3's firepower was substantially higher than anything in the UK's armory. Field trials on army ranges in Scotland - with the vehicle disguised under a fibreglass shell to prevent being spotted by Russian satellites - revealed that its manoeuvrability, cross-country ability and speed were also better than western equivalents. The complicated and expensive operation was a great success and they invited most of the East European controllerate to their establishment near Camberley to thank us for the operation.

While reading BATTLE's file, I came across something that, though just mildly interesting at the time, became significant five years later. Some of the meetings that were described took place at the Ritz hotel in Paris, and intelligence on the whos, whats and wheres of these meetings was provided by an informant in the hotel. The informant did not have a codename and was just addressed by a P-number, referring to the number of his personal file. The P-number was mentioned several times in BATTLE's file so, curious to get a better fix of his access, I called up central registry and asked for the file. Flicking through, it was no surprise to learn that he was a security manager at the Ritz and was being paid cash by his MI6 handler for his reporting. Hotel security managers are useful informers for intelligence services because they have access to the hotel guestlist and can be helpful in bugging operations. What was a surprise was that the informer's nationality was French, for we had been told on the IONEC how difficult it was to recruit Frenchmen to work for MI6 and for this reason he stuck in my mind. Although he was only a small cog in the operation and his name was unimportant to me at the time, I have no doubt with the benefit of hindsight that this was Henri Paul, who was killed five years later on 30 August 1997 in the same car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed.

Most breakthroughs in espionage come after a lot of methodical research and tedious sifting of leads and contacts, but occasionally a worthwhile lead came out of the blue. Such was the case when one morning in June 1992 a former colleague in the TA called me asking for some advice. The sergeant, a keen long-distance runner, had recently gone to Moscow to run in the city marathon. A spectator who spoke English approached him at the finish line and it emerged that he was a colonel in the Russian strategic rocket forces. The two men became friendly and the sergeant invited the colonel to visit him if ever he were in England, not really expecting that it would be taken up. But the colonel did take him up and he was due to arrive at Gatwick airport the following week. `Would we be interested in meeting him?' my former colleague asked. Russel agreed that the story was worth checking out. The following day I took the train out to Clacton-on-Sea, a couple of hours east of London, to visit the sergeant in his home.

Terry Ryman greeted me at the front door and ushered me into the pin-clean front-room of a small terraced house where his wife served tea. Ryman was in his 40s, greying with milk-bottle glasses, but took pride in his fitness. He worked as a black cab-driver in London to earn his living.

Ryman verified the story that I'd heard over the telephone. When a friend suggested that they enter the Moscow marathon together, Ryman didn't hesitate. He had spent many years training for war against the Soviets, learning to recognise their tanks and armoured cars, studying their fighting tactics and shooting snarling images of them on the rifle range, and he wanted to experience the country and its people first-hand. When a real-life Russian introduced himself at the end of the race, speaking good English, Ryman was thrilled.

Colonel Alexander Simakov had invited Ryman around to his flat in a distant northern suburb of Moscow which he shared with his wife, daughter and mother-in-law. Ryman was fascinated and appalled at the cramped living conditions of such a relatively senior officer. Simakov moaned about his pay and conditions and said how much he envied the English lifestyle. `He says he wants to come to England just to see Stratford, Oxford and Cambridge,' Ryman explained. `But,' he added, lowering his voice conspiratorially, `I think he wants to, you know what I mean, defect, to Britain.'

`OK, when he comes next week, we'll find out if he knows anything useful,' I replied.

Simakov would have to offer some spectacular CX to be accepted as a defector. As their world crumbled with the Berlin wall, several Sovblock intelligence officers offered their services to MI6, and most were turned away. MI6 only had the budget to accept high-level defectors such as OVATION and NORTHSTAR, and even they had to work for several years
en poste
before being allowed into Britain. Even the likes of Viktor Oshchenko, a KGB officer specialising in science and technology who offered his services in July 1992, did not have an easy time persuading MI6 that he was worth a resettlement package. His revelation that, while serving in London in the mid-'80s, he had recruited a GEC-Marconi sales engineer was regarded as only mildly important and I saw an MI5 report which concluded that the engineer, Michael John Smith, did not pass damaging secrets. (This did not stop MI5 having Smith arrested in an entrapment operation, and this paper was not made available to Smith's defence at his trial. He was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, the judge summing up with the outlandish claim that Smith had done incalculable damage to Britain's national security.)

Given Oshchenko's difficulty in winning defector status, I would most likely have to persuade Simakov to return to his job in Russia and then earn defector status by providing regular intelligence to the Moscow station. If his intelligence was valuable then he might earn a reasonable salary, paid into a UK account so that his new found wealth would not attract suspicion. Perhaps on his retirement he could be allowed to come to the UK to enjoy his money, but even then MI6 would probably try to persuade him that retirement in his homeland would be more enjoyable. My task on meeting Simakov would be to assess his access and motivation, recruit him if suitable, then persuade him that this was his best option.

Ryman looked grim when he answered the door the following week. He took me through to the living-room, dark because the curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun. A bulky, pallid and unshaven man, dressed in tight polyester T-shirt and jeans, struggled to his bare feet from the sofa. Ryman icily introduced me to his guest, jerked open the curtains and made an excuse to leave. Simakov glared after him as the door slammed shut. Next to the sofa were two large red plastic suitcases, straining against the string which held them together. Beside them was a battered cardboard box, filled with books and journals. He had been reading some of them and they lay opened, scattered on the low coffee-table along with several unwashed mugs and biscuit wrappers.

`I have defected,' he announced triumphantly in a thick Russian accent. He paused for a moment, then realising that I was not about to give him an ecstatic bearhug, he adjusted the cushions and sat back down on the sofa.

`Tell me a bit about yourself, first,' I asked, putting off discussion of defection until later. In good English, Simakov related his life story. He had been born into a poor family in a village north of Kiev in the Ukraine. His father was killed in a mining accident when he was five and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven, so he and his two younger sisters were bought up by his maternal grandmother. The young Simakov would probably have followed his father into the mines but from an early age showed a talent for mathematics. He got the best grades of his class in every term except one, when he had broken his leg and couldn't walk the three miles to school. Simakov was still proud of this achievement and rummaged in the cardboard box to dig out the certificates to prove it. His mathematical prowess was his only hope of getting out of a life of poverty.

Simakov won a scholarship for secondary education at a military school in Kiev. Finishing there with high grades, he was selected to join the Soviet Strategic Rocket Force as a research scientist. After basic military training, he studied for a degree and a doctorate in Leningrad. Compulsory English lessons there fuelled a lifelong interest in England and particularly its literature - he knew far more about Shakespeare's plays than I would ever be likely to know. On completion of his studies he was posted to the Soviet ballistic missile test ranges in the far eastern peninsula of Kamchatka and spent his entire career working there as a flight-test engineer. After compulsory retirement from the military in his mid-40s, he had been unable to get another job and he, his wife and eight-year-old daughter were forced to move into the one-bedroomed Moscow flat of his ageing mother-in-law. Life soon became intolerable; his military pension was decimated by inflation, his daughter started to suffer from asthma and his wife was desperately unhappy.