The Big Breach (28 page)

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 problŠme?' 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.