There are some things you learn which, when you first encounter them, make each day seem like a gift beyond value. Our first few sessions have this quality. The fact that what we’re learning must be kept secret adds a further, intoxicating aspect to our work, which is why the protocols for secrecy are drummed into us from the start.
The success of all our future work is founded on the twin arts of observation and clandestine communication – essential practices, the Baroness tells us, which have not changed since men first learned to spy on one another, and which require nothing of technology. We learn first to see and hear through a new version of our senses, as if an extra dimension has been added to their habitual function. Our task is to act at all times on the assumption that we are being observed, and to see ourselves through the eyes of our observers. We learn to watch and follow a human target, to note and then predict his actions. Then, by inverting the same skills, to evade a follower and to conceal our own telltale gestures of impatience, anxiety or relief. We must be able, the Baroness endlessly reminds us, to transmit the signals of whatever emotion we choose to whoever is watching, as well as to draw the attention of others in whatever direction we wish.
To sharpen our skills of observation, she invites us to assign a portion of our attention to something going on around us, and then points out when our attention has faltered. Our ordinary power of attention must acquire a second track, she reminds us. At meetings in restaurants she challenges us to describe the faces we have seen at the tables on our way in and to recall the numbers of buses or taxis we’ve used on the way. She explains how to use mental mnemonics to remember lists of things or names. We must learn these skills, she says, practise them in small ways every day, and live them until they become instinctively natural, betraying no trace of our ulterior agendas.
A large part of our time is devoted to arranging and conducting meetings. For secret information to pass between two parties, there must be a moment of contact, and this is the most perilous moment of all. A ‘chance’ meeting, which has in fact been arranged in advance, may be best when the exchange must be verbal. When information can be passed on without the need for a conversation, a brush contact may be best, involving a fleeting and wordless exchange of secret material. An innocent third party, or cut-out, may be another solution. Each has its advantages and corresponding risks. Brush contacts must be arranged carefully in advance and executed with precise timing; a cut-out may be unreliable and describe both parties if interrogated; and a chance meeting must stand up to intense scrutiny if suspected. But a meeting can also be arranged remotely, by an advertisement in a paper, a phone call with a disguised message, or take the form of a ‘dead letter box’ at an agreed location, visited by both parties at different times, perhaps days apart. The Baroness’s preferred method for transmitting short messages is an ‘innocent’ letter, in which an ordinary text disguises a broken-up message, previously enciphered by means of a key known only to the recipient. To this end we practise a variety of codes and ciphers that can be created in the field without potentially incriminating aids such as printed one-time pads or code books, and study the theories of fractionation and homophony, and the various ways to combine codes that will render them impenetrable in the short term.
We learn of famous historical double agents and illegals and of their successes and failures. We study the career of one of the CIA’s greatest spies, the Soviet GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky, and are invited to decide whether he was a triple agent or not. We learn too of the quiet English mother of three to whose children Penkovsky passed microfilm-stuffed sweets in public parks and on trains, trained by the SIS for the purpose but never caught. We are told of the reckless extravagance of Aldrich Ames, whose tailored suits, bought with KGB dollars, went unnoticed while he betrayed hundreds of CIA assets abroad. We consider the long successes of illegals with carefully constructed legends such as Rudolph Abel and Konon Molody. Abel lived in New York as a retired photofinisher; Molody in London as a bubblegum-machine salesman. Both masterminded spy rings, both were eventually caught and given long prison sentences, and both were later exchanged for Western spies captured in the Soviet Union.
We are on one occasion delivered a fascinating lecture analysing the daring escape from Moscow, organised by his SIS handlers, of the KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky. The lecture is given by a middle-aged man with a serious-looking face, straw-coloured hair and a distinct Slavic accent, on loan to us for the day with the approval of his agent resettlement officer from the Firm. Afterwards, I confess how impressed I’ve been by the speaker.
‘It is the lessons of tradecraft you are being asked to consider on such occasions,’ she says, ‘not the personalities involved.’ The Baroness lets this sink in. ‘Look more closely, and you will see the cold-hearted pride and ruthless vanity from which such people suffer.’
It becomes an axiom of our training that whatever the chosen means of communication and however it is passed, there must always be a credible cover story, as well as innocuous signals, agreed in advance, to indicate danger to one’s allies. The closer the cover story is to the truth, the better. But there must always, always be a cover story.
When Saddam Hussein is foolish enough to invade Kuwait, the Baroness summons us to discuss things. We are both preparing to deploy to the Gulf and awaiting our final orders. It won’t be real war, the Baroness tells us. She predicts confidently that Kuwait will be quickly liberated, but that the West will be blinded by its victory to the greater consequences of the conflict. America’s willingness to turn its back on the heroic and ruined nation of Afghanistan but to spend billions in defence of a corrupt oil-rich state will confirm the deepest cynicism of its opponents. The time, she says, is drawing near. She offers us a final chance to withdraw. The war in Kuwait will provide the context for our operational phase with the Network. She is fond of the term context. She advises us to await our orders and do nothing except what is expected of us. We will know the signal when it is given to us. ‘Like a passing bus,’ she says, ‘you will know when to jump on it.’ It is better, she explains, that neither of us sees it coming.
We do not, in the event. When hostilities begin, we are both assigned unusual extra-regimental roles with the same interrogation team in Kuwait. Our parent unit is the Joint Services Interrogation Wing, housed at Ashford and commanded by a I Corps lieutenant colonel, hence our ‘2’ designations, which indicate an intelligence role. The assignment is unusual because the forward interrogation team to which we’re assigned – me as operations officer and Manny as 2i/c – is formed primarily from reservists who are volunteer members of 22 Int Coy, the Naval Reserve unit HMS
Ferret
, and 7630 Flight. We have relevant backgrounds, having both been through DSL Beaconsfield, but we’re not regular senior NCOs or Reserve officers, and in time-honoured fashion we blame the mistake in tasking on the army. Most of the interrogation teams deploy forward to where enemy prisoners are being held, but we’re assigned to Category 1 prisoners, who are usually senior officers and intelligence personnel, and our team takes over a warehouse on the outskirts of the city and converts it into an interrogation centre. We’re barely up and running when the war screeches to a halt. Saddam Hussein’s great army has fled before the allied onslaught, and the Baroness’s prediction has proven uncannily accurate. The active combat phase of Desert Storm has lasted one hundred hours, Kuwait is liberated, and Saddam’s ‘mother of battles’ turns out to be a rout.
When the raid occurs, we’re not expecting it. Neither Manny nor I can have any notion of how deeply, and irreversibly, that ten-minute period of our lives will change things for us both. Manny has no idea that he will be seized by an Israeli commando team, beaten senseless and confined to a Mossad safe house in Kuwait City. But when the same Mossad officer – who has been beating Manny around his face so that the bruises will look much worse than they really are – slips him a narrow hacksaw blade and pats him on the back for good luck before throwing him into a cell with a suspected Arab terrorist, Manny knows that this is the bus he’s expected to jump on. When Manny cuts through both sets of handcuffs and then through the metal bar that secures their window, the Arab can’t believe his luck. He has no reason to suspect that his escape has been engineered. All he knows is that an enraged English soldier, vowing jihad against the Zionists, has freed him from his enemies, and he can’t believe his luck. He’s only too happy to introduce him to his superiors. Manny’s dangerous work has begun.
Not everything goes according to plan. I am not supposed to shoot and kill a man. But the Israelis are willing to overlook the accident, since they have been allowed to seize Gemayel in the process, and they have wanted him for years. Such is the deal that has been struck. Mossad gets its man, and Manny’s cover story – bruises and all – is brilliantly established from the start.
It’s nearly six months before our first contact arrives at a PO box in London. It takes the form of an ‘innocent’ letter sent from Jalalabad in southern Afghanistan. It’s what the Baroness calls a ‘sign of life’. Manny, to whom we’ve given the code name Orpheus, has made it to Afghanistan with a forged New Zealand passport, and requests an address in Kabul to which his reports can be sent. Thus begins the new phase of my work. The Baroness tells me a vacancy has come up with a British de-mining trust operating in Kabul which favours ex-servicemen, and it’s obvious she’s used her influence with the founder. The fact that the plans for me to move to Afghanistan coincide with the outbreak of civil war in the country is, in the Baroness’s words, ‘problematic but not insurmountable’.
There is no Internet, mobile or terrestrial phone network, nor even a reliable postal system in Afghanistan at the time, so the address to which Manny’s messages must be delivered is transmitted in a pre-recorded code by radio from England. Radio enthusiasts call such transmissions number stations, and rightly suppose they are the preferred method of communicating with agents in the field, though no government has ever officially acknowledged them. Orpheus needs only an ordinary short-wave radio to receive the signal, which is transmitted every day. But he has no other special equipment of his own, so his reports must be personally delivered by couriers who know nothing of their hidden content.
They begin to arrive at the trust’s office in Kabul a month later, addressed to a pseudonym. The first takes the form of a book of Afghan poetry. Into its spine he’s glued a sheet of paper, dense with handwritten numbers. I copy the numbers onto a grid called a straddling chequerboard, and transpose them using a keyword into letters that reveal the message.
Slowly, as the words take shape, I’m filled with a sense of awe that that our fragile link has successfully spanned so many hazards. The numbers we’ve agreed to use as a security device are correct and the message opens with characteristic humour:
bgns msg 0786 all well despite urgent need saqi
. I am filled with relief to learn that he’s well, despite a craving for wine. He’s living at the Jalalabad headquarters of an Afghan mujaheddin commander called Sayyaf, known for his extreme Islamicist outlook and strong links with fundamentalists in the Arab world. Orpheus’s knowledge of Arabic is allowing him to translate for his Afghan hosts and to serve as interpreter when Arab guests visit the headquarters. It’s not much news but it’s the sign of life we’ve been waiting for. The final line of the message alludes to the need for patience by reminding me that one of the Muslim names of God is the Patient One,
al-saboor
:
allahu saboor send greetings uk qsl msg ends
.
I fax news of the message to the Baroness using the satellite phone at the office, knowing that she will arrange for confirmation of its receipt to be sent by a one-way signal which Orpheus can hear on a short-wave radio. Our little portion of the Network, against the odds, is up and running.
Orpheus’s messages continue in the same manner for the next six months. They are, not surprisingly, irregular. Afghanistan is spiralling downward into ever more violent civil war, and on those days when the rockets rain into the south and west of the city I spend much of the time in the basement of my rented home. Because of the ongoing fighting, most of the trust’s work takes me north of Kabul to the once fertile and prosperous Shomali plain, which bears the scars of fifteen years of conflict. We survey minefields sown by the Soviets and gather unexploded ordnance from settlements where people are still living. In collaboration with the United Nations we develop a mine awareness course but the daily casualties from mines and UXOs are a constant reminder of the hugeness of our task. It is difficult at times not to be seized by depression.
The messages from Orpheus arrive with traders, drivers and refugees, who will occasionally accept a reward for their efforts and from whom I gain a picture of events in the south. Then the first of the computer diskettes arrives, hidden this time in the thick cover of a Qur’an. Orpheus now has access to a computer, which eliminates the long task of manual encryption and decryption and enables him to send messages of infinitely greater length.
It’s the beginning of a series of long disturbing reports that confirm the violent intentions of the broad spectrum of foreign militants gathering in the south of the country. They are financed from overseas and the Afghan government is too weak to touch them. The Afghans, in any case, don’t have the money to finance terrorists and can’t even pay the salaries of their own government ministers. The religious fervour of these new foreigners has no place in their culture.