The New Spymasters (15 page)

Some of the technical methods used to support spying have been mentioned already. Together with tips from agents, the British were forewarned about numerous ambushes and bombs, and, with advance knowledge, were able to defuse bombs and arrest perpetrators. But technical methods also played a major role in suppressing attacks for which the spies had given no warning: for example, the invention of electronic jamming devices played a significant part in reducing remote-controlled bombs.

Spying's impact became blunted because spying was a victim of its own success. ‘It was like a soup of spies. So many agencies, so many agents. They were tripping over each other constantly,' said one ex-FRU member.

Giving evidence in Parliament, Lord Stevens described how things had got out of hand: ‘When you talk about intelligence, of the 210 people we [the inquiry team] arrested, only three were not agents. Some of them were agents for all of those … particular organizations [the RUC, MI5 and the army], fighting against each other, doing things and making a large sum of money, which was all against the public interest and creating mayhem in Northern Ireland.'
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Many people used contacts with the British security services to their own advantage. In the case of men like Nelson, it was to collude in crime. But there were also positive purposes. The secret contact between the IRA leadership and SIS provided a channel that was ultimately used to hasten the peace process. But this was not spying. The IRA members involved – and the go-between, a businessman – were intelligence contacts, but they were not ‘agents' – those who betrayed any secrets.

There were many blurred relationships. Liam Clarke, a veteran journalist in Northern Ireland, explained how the term ‘agent' came to mean different things:

Martin McGartland, who infiltrated the IRA in west Belfast, was an agent in the purest sense. He joined the IRA at the request of his handlers and did exactly what he was told; it involved no switch of loyalties.

Several members of the IRA's internal security team, like Steak Knife, were double-agents. They were trusted by the IRA to frustrate Crown forces, but were ‘doubled' by the intelligence services to spy on the IRA, instead.

After that, it gets more complicated. It is clear now that many of those who passed information to the authorities believed they were in charge of the relationship and didn't tell all they knew. Many ‘worked their passage' with the police, passing on this and that in return for favours, to settle grudges or to save their life. They may not have thought of themselves as agents at all, especially the loyalists.
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A conflict, particularly a long-drawn-out civil war, is like an ecosystem: nothing can be seen in isolation and nothing is of itself decisive. Spying can help to suppress one group, but over time the group targeted by intelligence, whether consciously or subconsciously, evolves defence mechanisms. (For example, by a form of Darwinian ‘natural selection', the weakest and easily targeted PIRA members would tend to die or be arrested, while the most security-conscious and secretive PIRA operatives would tend to survive and rise in the organization.) Steak Knife – and even Brian Nelson – probably on balance saved many dozens of innocent lives, even if, as some argue, they also cost the lives of others. I am aware that there were other significant agents in Northern Ireland – people of equal importance to Steak Knife whose existence may never be revealed. They too saved lives. But their success also gradually modified the enemy's behaviour. Even with superb intelligence penetration at the highest level, the tight cell-based structure the IRA could develop meant that the detail of most attacks was not known in advance. And, as Clarke says, whether it was the money-motivated street source or the sophisticated leader seeking political options, few spies were pure agents delivering a simple one-way flow of intelligence.

*   *   *

I was discussing Margaret Thatcher's campaign of ambushing the IRA with a former FRU officer. It was called, rather misleadingly, a ‘shoot to kill' policy – misleading because soldiers usually shoot to kill. It was a euphemism for what was alleged to be an assassination programme.

I suggested that, viewed thirty years later, in a world in which terrorist leaders were routinely killed by robotic drones, the startling thing was that there really had been no ‘shoot to kill'. Few senior leaders of the IRA were targeted at all.

‘But you know why,' he said.

‘Rule of law. It would have been illegal,' I replied.

‘Yes. There's that. But something else too. You know it already.'

‘Our penetration of the leadership?'

‘You can't imagine it, how far it went.' Having implied that the level of penetration gave the leadership protection, he added, ‘But then the question was always: who was working for whom, which way round it was?'

We talked about names; some of them surprised me.

‘If we were so successful, why did the war go on so long?' I asked.

‘Like I said,' the old agent-runner retorted, and perhaps he was just in a particularly dark mood, ‘I cannot be entirely sure. The question was: who was working for whom?'

Spying then, even for those privy to its secrets, does not lend itself to a clear and unambiguous picture. There are many variables and those involved harbour many doubts. But, for all that, not everything is grey and uncertain. Looking through the mists of spying, it is possible to discern something of the shape of the thing.

While we have seen elsewhere that veteran intelligence officers have real doubts about what good spying achieves, Ulster showed that, against the threat of terrorism, spying is not only possible but vital. There were compromises and dangers, and they needed careful thought; some things were handled incorrectly, even criminally, but ultimately the overall effort had impact.

If it had not been for British intelligence and traitors among Irish Republicans, British rule in Ulster would have come to an earlier end, overwhelmed by the sheer ruthlessness and professionalism of what the Provisional IRA became. The underlying problems were political; spying did not solve anything. But it did suppress the revolt.

From the war in Ireland, we learned the kinds of lessons about spying often unlearned in much of the Cold War spy game. It was a master class in targeted recruitment and engineered betrayal. Success here was one of the reasons that, after the debacle of Philby's betrayal, British intelligence re-earned its reputation for high-quality HUMINT.

From Ireland, we also learned that money can buy spies. Some in Ulster swore by it. In fact, there are recruiters who insist everyone has a price. ‘It is amazing what people will do for cash,' said one ex-RUC operative. But we should also remember that handling the best of spies, using them in a meaningful way, almost always involves much more delicate things, including the art of friendship, which has to be patiently exploited. Throughout Steak Knife's career, his intelligence was brought to the attention of politicians at the top of the UK government. The key lesson for politicians was not to interfere. Any attempt to hasten his rise through IRA ranks or make him spy more aggressively could have been fatal.

*   *   *

As the Berlin Wall came down, ending the Cold War, and as peace came to Ulster, the lessons learned from spying against the Soviets and non-state groups like the IRA needed to be applied and adapted to a whole new set of threats and enemies.

As James Woolsey, in his confirmation hearing for the post of CIA director in 1993, warned, ‘We have slain a large dragon, but we now live in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.'
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In this new jungle, new spies needed to be recruited and old tactics adapted. But the lessons of the past remained as relevant as ever, even if they were sometimes ignored.

PART TWO

New Spies (1989–2008)

Chapter 4

Thunderbolt

‘The Cold War is over: the most dangerous threat to a nation's security comes from organized crime. What matters is using intelligence to crack the criminal at source'

– Raymond Kendall, secretary-general of Interpol, June 1996
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On 4 October 1955, in the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus, a young man crouched, limbs aching, on a treetop branch of a thick-limbed Turkish pine. He had been there two hours, his face covered with a mask. He was watching a path that led to a bungalow nestled up in the hills. Just before 6 p.m., he heard the cough and stutter of an ageing Land Rover. It wound up the zigzags to the hilltop. The boy reached for his rifle as the car crunched in the gravel.

In the driver's seat was Stanley Hollowday, the 52-year-old chief engineer of an open-cast asbestos mine on the terraces of the opposite hill. Sitting next to him was his wife, Zanina. They had married twenty-seven years earlier in the local village, Amiantos.

Hollowday had forgotten to buy the newspaper that day and the couple had driven down to collect one. Stepping out of the car, Zanina recalled, they ‘walked to the edge of our garden to admire just a few minutes of the glorious sunset, in front of us a sky aflame and its reflection gilding below us in the valleys and hills. So beautiful and so still!'
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Then she heard the outburst of the ‘horrid noise of gunfire, its echo surrounding us from all sides'. It was impossible to pinpoint where it came from. Their Alsatian dog, Ranny, was crouched at Zanina's feet. She called out, ‘Let us go in, Stan, we seem to have trouble again in the village.'

But Stan did not reply. Zanina called again and stretched out her arm to him. There was a bush between them and she was surprised not to see his head and shoulders. She heard him whisper, ‘I can't Yana. I have been hit.'

She saw him on the ground, two feet away. There was no blood. He said, ‘Phone, call the ambulance and police, open my collar and tie.'
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*   *   *

The youngster in the tree who pulled the trigger was a Greek Cypriot called Andrew (or Andreas) Antoniades. These were the early days of civil war between the British rulers of Cyprus and the rebel group called EOKA. The rebels believed that Hollowday was an undercover ‘chief of intelligence' who was helping to get their members arrested.
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According to the
Cyprus Mail,
he was the first civilian British victim of an EOKA attack.

At different times, the young Antoniades was a petty criminal, a terrorist, a man who shot at British soldiers and planted bombs. He also became a nightclub host, a gambler, a fixer of sports matches and a gangster. He was shot on a number of occasions, including in the head, and survived. He also became a spy. The one-time hit man who fired at Stanley Hollowday would go on to work undercover for decades as a secret agent for Her Majesty.

Antoniades came to exemplify the New Spy – the sort of person who became a top priority once the secret services turned their attentions away from their old Cold War adversaries and governments woke up to the dangers of a more open world where money, people and therefore crime could move more freely.

Although Antoniades worked briefly for the CIA, he was a very different spy from those the agency had employed to collect military and political information. He would spy on organized crime, and his case reveals both what can be achieved by using one gangster to catch another and also the pitfalls involved when the world of espionage comes up against the chaotic, violent and unfamiliar criminal mind. Finally, it also provides some clues as to the wider role that spies in the criminal world might play in reporting on those who have come to be seen as the biggest modern threat: terrorist groups.

To some in the British state, Antoniades was one of the best spies they ever had in the criminal underworld. To others, he was a simple rogue who hoodwinked them all and became one of the country's top drug importers.

From the beginning in Cyprus, he had an angry nickname: Keravnos, which means Black Lightning or Thunderbolt. When I met him, he was eighty-three years old and still as angry as ever. ‘I will kill them all,' he said of his enemies.

*   *   *

Snitch, snout, tout, informer, grass, sneak, stool pigeon, double-crosser, canary, nark, rat, squealer, turncoat, weasel: criminals use many words to describe those who betray them. The British police came to prefer civil service jargon. In their world, a spy was called a covert human intelligence source or CHIS.

Law enforcement – whether police or national agencies such as the customs or National Crime Agency – has always had its own sorts of spies. As the saying goes, there is no honour among thieves, and as criminal organizations struggle to control a larger share of territory and illicit earnings, tipping off the cops has always been part of the game. But those called informers by the police were usually a different breed of people from those defined as secret agents or spies by secret services.

Some of the difference was in the language. Policemen and spymasters used different terms. In ‘spy-speak', an informer was often a mere tipster, someone who sold titbits of information, as opposed to an agent, whose activities were more closely directed. A former senior French counterintelligence officer put it like this: ‘In our work an agent is at a much higher level than an informant. An informant gives you local information and points out targets. Then you can send in an agent and he'll make contacts and work his way up.' But in other secret services, the terms were not so tightly defined. One former head of CIA covert operations said that ‘source', ‘informer' and ‘agent' were used interchangeably. Some were just more reliable and more under control than others.

A bigger difference was that while the police in most countries both needed and had the legal authority to pay active criminals to be their sources, most secret services were barred or, as a matter of good practice, simply shunned contact with criminals. Working with criminals was seen as too risky because they were deemed unreliable and likely to reveal secrets. Such work could bring the agencies into disrepute or, when their agents got into trouble, draw them into revealing their hand in a courtroom. As part of its covert attempts to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the CIA made contact with several members of the US Mafia. This revelation dogged the agency for years, illustrating the cost of such relationships. In all, then, police informers were usually a different breed from the people recruited by secret services as agents.