The Big Breach (31 page)

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.