The Big Breach (53 page)

In February 2000, Patrick, a friend from Geneva, invited me to his chalet in Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc, for a fortnight of skiing and snowboarding. Strictly, I was not allowed in France but I gambled that the DST would not realise I was on their patch. I'd not been there long when my landlord in Oberstdorf rang me. `What have you done?' he asked me accusingly, `the police are here.' He explained that at 6 a.m. he had been awoken by a sharp knock on the door. On opening it, he had been bowled over by four uniformed police and two civilians. The latter turned out to be my friends Herr Kugel and Fr„ulein Gajabski. They were searching the flat as we spoke with a warrant to confiscate my computer.

Presumably the BfV bowed to MI6's pressure and sided with them once they realised that I would not help them. Whether Kugel intended to arrest me or not, there was now no way that I could go back to Germany. MI6 had ratcheted down on me again, cutting me off from another potential opportunity to put the dispute behind me. Luckily I had my computer and other valuables with me.

I was in France illegally and could not stay there for long. I needed to find another home, and was running out of options. The only sensible choice was Italy, and an internet search found a language school in Rimini, a holiday resort on the Adriatic coast. On 2 March I packed up my car again, said goodbye to Patrick and moved out of Chamonix.

I found a little holiday apartment a block away from the beach in Rimini without problem - being the off-season still there was plenty of empty tourist accommodation. Having previously learnt French and Spanish, Italian was relatively straightforward and I made rapid progress in the classes. I found the lifestyle in Italy agreeable too, and started to think about building a long-term future in the country. But before I could make any firm commitments to an employer or a long-term rental contract, I needed to sort out my dispute with MI6. Despite everything that they had done to me, I still felt some perverse loyalty to them and wanted to find an amicable solution. I had more or less given up any hope of getting them to an employment tribunal - the only fair settlement - and I would have settled just for an assurance that they would lift their surveillance on me, let me travel freely and allow me to get on with my life. But all my letters to this effect to them were ignored and Warren Templeton's attempts to mediate were firmly dismissed. They seemed absolutely determined to break me both financially and mentally, and once again my only option was to pressure them to mediation. After I had been settled in Rimini for a couple of months, I wrote to MI6 to inform them that a Swiss literary agent was negotiating on my behalf with a publisher who was interested in publishing my story, and asked them how I could submit my manuscript for clearance. I hoped that MI6 would agree to mediate, in which case I was prepared to withdraw completely from the publication deal. But MI6 reacted a week later with their customary vindictive stupidity.

`Emergenza, Emergenza!' cried the overweight and sweating figure, perched on the tip of a ladder swaying just below the balcony of my apartment. `There's a gas leak!' he shouted urgently in Italian. `Gas leak, get out of your apartment immediately!'

The police had been knocking on the door of my third-floor apartment for the past two hours. They must have watched me arrive home on my bike from my Italian class shortly after 1 p.m., as they started knocking as soon as I put the kettle on. I wasn't expecting anybody and, peeping through the spyhole, I realised from the training videos in Belmarsh that they were plain clothes police - they all had large moustaches and bad haircuts. The door was heavy duty, so I let them exercise their knuckles. I realised that MI6 must have used my letter admitting that I had a book manuscript as an excuse to raid me yet again and confiscate my computers. Quickly, I encrypted everything important on my laptop, defragmented the hard disk for good measure and hid the tiny but crucial Psion memory disk inside the apartment's television set. With everything secure, I went out onto the balcony to escape the increasingly impatient banging, lay on my sun-lounger and opened up a book. They eventually admitted defeat to two-inches of dead-locked oak and called out the fire brigade. Now the police chief was peering up at me from his wobbly perch, sweating profusely in the midday sun, pretending that there was a gas leak in the hope that this would trick me into opening the door.

`You've got the wrong building,' I replied mockingly from my sun-lounger. `This building is electricity only! Try that building over there,' I pointed out the neighbouring block. `Yes, I can smell the gas from over there!' I said with an exaggerated gesticulation.

`Open the door,' he ordered back impatiently, pulling out from his top pocket a heavily chromed police ID badge and thrusting it at me, the gesticulation sending the ladder into a worrying sway. `Police, open the door.'

`OK,' I smiled, `but why didn't you just come up the stairs and knock on the door? It's a lot easier than coming up a ladder.' I ducked back into the apartment before I could see his reaction. It was Wednesday, 17 May, the same day that Mrs Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, announced that she intended to publish her memoirs about MI5, and was negotiating a huge advance with a British publisher. Unlike me, she had not been arrested or had her computer confiscated and the British authorities were happy to let her publish. As in the Patten case, it was one rule for the people at the top and another for the little guy like me. Britain's 24-hour news channel,
Sky News
, had booked me for a live telephone interview at 1530 to discuss this jaw-dropping hypocrisy. The phone started ringing as the Italian police burst into my flat.

`Up against the wall,' screamed the two heavies who led the charge, their pistols drawn and pointing at my chest.

`All right, calm down,' I urged them. It was my tenth police bust and I had my hands up against the wall and feet apart before they'd even recovered their breath. Five other officers entered the room and one put the lights on. `Hey, turn them off,' I ordered, remembering a tip given me by Onion-head. `You might have a warrant to search my room, but you haven't got one to steal my electricity.' The irritated officer flicked them off and went over to raise the blinds. The sweaty chief arrived a few minutes later, introduced himself as Inspector Verrando of Rimini DIGOS, the Italian special investigations police, and presented two British SB officers who had come along for a day's outing on the Italian seaside. Whereas Peters and Ratcliffe had some human decency and intelligence, these were a couple of jobsworths, selected to follow MI6 orders unquestioningly.

The search of my flat took about two hours. The jobsworths waved a vaguely worded warrant that empowered them under the Mutual Assistance Act to confiscate anything they wanted. My computer and Psion were first in the pile. Then my whole CD collection, both music and software. `I'm not competent to examine them for hidden files,' announced Jobsworth One.

`Are you competent to do anything?' I replied helpfully.

Next all my legal papers. Then my mobile phone. `So that we can see who you've been calling,' explained Jobsworth Two.

Then the television remote control. `So you can see what I've been watching on telly?' I asked.

Finally they helped themselves to one of my suitcases, loaded it up and announced they were ready to interview me at the Rimini police station. Glancing behind as they escorted me out, I realised they had cleared my room of everything of value. The only thing they couldn't get in my suitcase was the television containing the precious disk.

Verrando interviewed me for six hours before he realised that I had done nothing illegal and that the British police had abused the powers of the Mutual Assistance Act. But by then it was too late. The jobsworths were on their way back to London with all my belongings. They returned my suitcase a few days later when I faxed the head of SB in London with a description of their incompetence, but I never saw my computers, software, CDs, mobile phone or TV remote control again.

A few days later, Verrando wrote asking me to go back to the police station. I ignored his request, thinking it meant trouble. I had just applied for registration in Rimini, which I needed in order to legitimise my presence in Italy, and presumed that Verrando wanted to tell me that I couldn't have it and order me to leave Italy. If they wanted me urgently, they would come and get me, I reasoned. I heard nothing more until I bumped into an off-duty Verrando browsing the top shelf of a newsagent's in the town centre. `Why didn't you come to see us the other day?' he enquired politely, hurriedly grabbing a photography magazine from a lower shelf. `Your permit is ready. The British embassy in Rome rang us and asked us not to give you one, so we decided to give you it immediately so that they would not be able to take the decision up to the Interior Ministry.'

But I was underestimating their capacity for spite. MI6 might have lost the support of the Italian police, but that didn't deter them. Driving up the
autostrada
to Milan to see an Italian lawyer about the confiscations, I found that I was under surveillance. It started off discreetly just outside Rimini, but by Bologna I had made repeat sightings and noted the number plates of three cars - a white Fiat Punto, a silver Volkswagen Golf and a grey Fiat Bravo. The Golf got so close on several occasions that I could clearly make out the driver, a swarthy character dressed in a red vest. I rang the lawyer in Milan for advice, and he called the police. They told me to pull into the Stradale Nord service station, just outside Piacenza, and I watched in my rear-view mirror as the Punto and Golf followed me off the motorway and parked up behind the service station complex, partially shielded by some bushes. The Fiat Bravo continued up the motorway, no doubt to park up in a lay-by to watch for when I left the service station. The Italian police arrived 20 minutes later in a Fiat patrol car, and I explained the situation to them. They were sceptical at first and I had to stretch my Italian vocabulary to persuade them that I was not completely mad. They realised I was not a crank when they eventually approached the two vehicles. The four occupants promptly abandoned their cars, scattering into the nearby woods. `Go on, shoot, shoot!' I urged the police, pointing at the machine-guns hanging from their waists, but disappointingly they were not too enthused by the idea.

The police poked around the vehicles to see if the occupants had left any traces of their identity, but there was nothing except empty coke cans and hamburger wrappers. `They're not police surveillance,' they assured me. I had already guessed as much. The surveillance was far too amateurish to be from the Italian authorities, and the occupants would not have run away if they were officials. The only explanation was that MI6 had hired an amateur surveillance team to watch me once the Italians had refused to help them any more. When the patrol car left, I bought a Stanley knife in the service station and slashed their tyres. Back in my car, I faxed the British ambassador in Rome using my newly purchased replacement Psion and mobile phone and asked him to send me the bill. Not surprisingly, he didn't send me the bill - I would have sent it straight to my lawyer.

A few days later, my stay in Rimini was over. The landlady of my apartment did not like the embarrassment of the police visit and she told me that the apartment had been `booked by some Germans last year'. She asked me to leave with a week's notice. I was without a home and with the holiday season approaching fast it was impossible to find other accommodation in Rimini. But perhaps that was a blessing in disguise. I moved north and after a few weeks roughing it in various hostels I found an apartment in Riva del Garda, a far more pleasant town on the northern edge of Lake Garda. It was a sportsman's paradise, with fantastic cycling, windsurfing and walking opportunities for the summer, and with good skiing nearby in the winter. I decided to settle there for a while, MI6 permitting.

But my optimism was short-lived. A few days later, on a trip to Monte Carlo for a job interview, MI6 had me arrested again by the Monaco Special Investigations Unit, who threw me into the cells of their station, by the harbour front. Sitting on a hard bench for a few hours, I rued that I was becoming even more of a connoisseur of police cells than Ronnie from Belmarsh. MI6 asked the Monaco police to confiscate my new Psion and mobile phone, but fortunately they rang for advice from the DST, who advised them to let me go. After six hours of detention they released me on condition I went straight back to Italy.

Shortly after returning home to Riva del Garda, I found that MI6 had been busy again in my absence. The estate agency with whom I had found my flat rang me up and called me into their office on the pretext of requiring a copy of my passport. `Richard,' announced Betty, the elder of the two sisters who ran the agency, `while you were away, we had a visit from two men who said that they were from the police.' Anger welled up inside me at this latest intervention from MI6, but worse was to come as Betty explained. `But we realised straight away that they were not really from the police because they asked such unprofessional questions about you.'

`Like what?' I asked.

`They wanted to know how much you were paying in rent for your flat, and whether you had a telephone line - the real police would not be interested in that.'

`Did they say anything else?' I asked.