The Big Breach (21 page)

Struggling back into the Metropol, briefcase in one hand, the heavy box containing the precious notebooks under the other arm, it was sorely tempting to dump the excess baggage. There had been a fierce debate in Head Office about the merits of bringing back SOU's belongings. P5 had been vehemently against it, arguing that they were an incumbrance and a hostage to fortune. But SBO/1 had argued that they gave me cover for visiting SOU's mother-in-law. If apprehended on my way back to the hotel, I could feign innocence, claim that SOU was a friend in England who had asked me to bring back some of his clothes and deny any knowledge of the significance of the notebooks. In the end, SBO/1's wisdom won out, so I was lumbered with the heavy load back to the Metropol.

The following morning, after a leisurely breakfast in the Metropol's Boyarsky dining-room, I rang the British embassy and made an appointment to visit the commercial section's library, ostensibly to obtain information for East European Investment. The MI6 secretary who answered the phone asked, as arranged, if I would like to make an appointment with the commercial secretary. I accepted a meeting for 11.30 a.m. and started on the short walk from the Metropol through Red Square then over the Moskva river to the British embassy, directly opposite the Kremlin. P5 and SBO/1 concurred that I needed to get rid of the notebooks as soon as possible, hence they had to be dropped off at the embassy from where they could be returned to London in the diplomatic bag. Even that option was not entirely straightforward. The station staff worked under the assumption that every room in the embassy was bugged, except the station's secure safe-speech room that was electronically swept on a regular basis. Like most foreign embassies, the embassy also employed a small number of locally engaged staff such as clerks, drivers and cleaners, and these were also all assumed to be reporting back to the FSB. My telephone conversation to the MI6 secretary would have been intercepted and the watchers in the clandestine FSB observation post opposite the embassy would have already been briefed to expect a businessman to call in at 11.30 a.m.

I proferred my Huntley passport to the receptionist behind the desk in the entrance lobby and she showed me through to the commercial section. To my satisfaction, Wheeler was at his desk, just as he had promised. `Ah, Mr Huntley, I presume?' he stood to greet me. We shook hands, pretending never to have met. `Take a seat, Mr Huntley.'

`Sorry?' I replied.

Wheeler repeated the instruction more audibly and courteously indicated me to sit down. `What can I do for you?'

Ten minutes later, I was on my way back to the hotel, my briefcase stuffed with leaflets produced by the embassy and the Department of Trade and Industry about business opportunities in Russia. More importantly, SOU's notebooks were now off my hands. As planned, my copy of the
Financial Times
had been accidentally left on Wheeler's desk with the notebooks inside. They would now be in the hands of the station secretary who would be preparing them for the next diplomatic bag. It left for London that night, so they would be back in Century House before me. I flew back to London the next day along with many of the other delegates, including the colonel who was still checking over his shoulder for his surveillance as we boarded the British Airways 757.

After the debrief from the successful Moscow trip, Russel asked me to become the UKA representative on MI6's natural cover committee. This think-tank committee had been set up so that all the UK natural cover stations - UKA (Eastern Europe), UKB (Western Europe), UKC (Africa, primarily Republic of South Africa), UKD (Middle East, excluding Iran), UKJ (Japan), UKO (India and Pakistan) and UKP (Iran) could share their ideas and expertise on natural cover operation. It consisted of representatives from each of the stations, plus most of the SBO officers and representatives from CF. Different stations were always coming up with innovative covers, and attending the meetings gave fascinating insights into imaginative operations. For example Kenneth Roberts, a former officer of the Black Watch regiment and a
Times
journalist, now working in UKO, had persuaded a prominent Tory Lord to allow him to be his personal emissary in India where he had extensive business contacts. This gave Roberts unparalleled access to the upper echelons of Indian society and he had amassed some worthwhile CX on the Indian nuclear weapons programme. Nick Long, TD7 on the IONEC, was now working in UKC and was travelling around South Africa as a Zimbabwean chicken-feed salesman, which gave him cover to meet ANC and Inkatha agents in remote rural locations. Another officer, who had qualified as a veterinary surgeon before joining MI6, had just returned from an ODA (Overseas Development Administration) sponsored tour of Iran to teach Iranian vets how to immunise their cattle and sheep against various illnesses. As the tour passed through most of the veterinary research sites which were suspected to hide biological weapon production plants, MI6 had slipped a suitably qualified officer into the training team.

At one meeting, conversation turned to the feasibility of inserting `illegals' into hostile countries. Illegals are officers so carefully trained in natural cover that they can live in the target country for extended periods without arousing suspicion. The Soviet Union used them widely against the West until about 1970. Indeed, three Russian illegals were caught actively spying in Britain during this period. The first, a KGB officer called Konan Trofimovich Molodi, assumed the identity of a long-dead Finnish Canadian named Gordon Lonsdale and ran a juke-box hire business in London as cover for his spying activities from 1955 until his discovery and arrest in 1960. The other two, Morris and Lona Cohen, were actually American citizens, but had been recruited by the KGB and given false New Zealand identities and spied in London under cover as second-hand book-dealers Peter and Helen Kruger.

But MI6's recent KGB defectors NORTHSTAR and OVATION told us that the practice of running illegals had been stopped. Even the KGB realised that the investment in training is rarely paid back by the intelligence yield. The natural cover committee quickly reached the same conclusion. It would only be worthwhile training an officer up to the required level, they argued, to run one or perhaps two very productive agents whose public position was so prominent that it would be too risky for members of the local station to run them. Russia was the only country where the intelligence requirements were high enough - and the counter-intelligence services formidable enough - to make the investment worthwhile, though UKC also made a case for South Africa. Even post-apartheid, Britain's interests in the southern cone of Africa were such that MI6 was very active there. Also, they had been very successful in recruiting a network of informers under the apartheid regime and a lot of these agents were now high up in the ANC. As Nick Long explained to me with a touch of sarcasm, `It's amazing how many of them, having spied for years for `ideological reasons', are now happy to carry on pocketing their agent salaries post-apartheid.'

Back at my desk a few days later, thinking over the question of illegals, it occurred to me that we had been looking at the problem the wrong way round. Instead of labouriously building a false identity and cover legend for an existing MI6 officer, why not find somebody outside the service with the right professional and personal qualities, secretly put him through the IONEC under a false name and identity, then post him under his real name to work in his former occupation in the target country?

Russel liked the idea and encouraged me to draft a paper outlining the plan in detail. I did so, and was even able to suggest a suitable candidate. Leslie Milton, a friend since we'd studied engineering together at Cambridge, had drifted from job to job in the city, got an MBA and was now working as an independent investment consultant in London. He was not married, so it would be easy for him to move overseas and set up some form of business. Moreover, he was born in New York and so held an American passport in addition to his British one, allowing him further to distance himself from MI6.

My ideas were accepted and Milton was recruited into MI6 and started the IONEC in March 1993. His real identity and destiny were kept secret from most of the office, including his IONEC colleagues. He was given the alias Charles Derry and was entered in the diplomatic list, the official record of FCO officials, under this name. A few months after he completed the course, word was spread around the office that his father had fallen seriously ill, forcing him to leave MI6 to take over the family business. `Derry' bade a sad goodbye to his new colleagues, and disappeared.

A month or so later he re-emerged in Johannesburg under his real name, working as an American investment consultant. He rented a small two-bedroom detached house with swimming pool in the affluent suburb of Parkview and set himself up as a consultant in investment opportunities in the emerging economy of post-apartheid South Africa. His house was conveniently close to the homes of MI6's two most important agents in South Africa, a senior army officer and a senior government official. Both had been recruited early in their careers but had risen to such prominence that no member of the MI6 station in Pretoria could safely contact them. Milton met these two agents twice a month at his home or sometimes overtly in bars and restaurants in the plusher parts of Johannesburg. Their meetings would most probably pass unnoticed but if anybody asked they would have been told perfectly plausibly that Milton was merely offering investment advice. Indeed, Milton genuinely invested their considerable agent salaries for them, so that their added wealth would not be noticed by colleagues or even their wives and family. The CX Milton gathered from the meetings was encrypted using highly secure but commercially available PGP encryption software, then sent to London over the internet.

The system was simple, cheap and completely secure. Even had the South African security services become suspicious of Milton, they would never have found a shred of evidence to prosecute him or his agents.

As well as Russia, UKA was responsible for mounting natural cover operations into the rest of Eastern Europe. From the end of the Cold War until early 1992, Russia had been the only country of any substantial interest. But a new concern was rising rapidly in prominence. Yugoslavia was breaking up and Croatia and Slovenia had already been recognised by the European Community as independent states. MI6's coverage of the region was increasingly stretched because each newly independent state needed a station.

Apart from the two officers already in the Belgrade station, MI6 had only one other competent Serbo-Croat speaker, but he had just finished a lengthy Finnish course in preparation for a three-year posting to Helsinki. Personnel department were reluctant to waste this investment by reassigning him to the Balkans, so several other officers were thrown into intensive Serbo-Croat courses, but it would take at least nine months before they would be competent enough to take up overseas postings. In the meantime, the efforts of the stretched Belgrade station would have to be augmented by UKA. Since none of us spoke any Serbo-Croat, there was a limit to what we could do. At best, we could perhaps take over some of the English-speaking agents of the station. Russel sent me down to the floor below to see P4, the desk officer in charge of Balkan operations.

P4 took up the post when it had been a quiet backwater job before the problems in Yugoslavia had started in earnest. Prior to that, he had worked for a spell in Northern Ireland before MI5 took over responsibility for the province, then served without distinction in various quiet European liaison posts and briefly as `Mr Halliday' - where I had first come across him. P4 had made a mark in the office only with his dress sense, which would have made a Bulgarian taxi-driver wince. He was known ubiquitously in the office as `String Vest', though `Flapping Flannels' or `Woolly Tie' would have suited him equally. The spotlight that had now fallen on the P4 job was his chance to make a more positive mark on the office hierarchy and he attacked the job with scattergun enthusiasm.

`Sure, I've just the job for you,' he said, peering from behind his mountainous in-tray and disorganised desk. `We've got a lead that a Serbian journalist, Zoran Obradovich, might be worth an approach.' String Vest dug around on his desk and pulled out the relevant file. `He's in his mid-30s, war correspondent for the independent newspaper
Vreme
and regular contributor to the anti-government B-92 radio station,' String Vest continued. `He's made several liberal and anti-war remarks both publicly and to BEAVER.' BEAVER was a trusted British defence journalist run by I/OPS and he had given the office several useful leads in the past. String Vest passed me Obradovich's file, taking care to remove and sign the tag, meaning that the safekeeping of the file was now my responsibility. `Get yourself a new alias, a cover story and get yourself out to Belgrade. You'll have to make your way overland from a neighbouring country - there are no direct flights because of the UN sanctions.'

8. WELL TRAINED

WEDNESDAY, 2 JUNE 1993

DANUBE CAFE, BELGRADE

`
Y
ou know, Ben, I've had you checked out,' Obradovich dropped his eye contact and continued in a softer voice, `with some friends . . . contacts . . . of mine in the police.' He reached for his packet of Marlboro Lights, lost in the debris of a long and drunken lunch scattered over the stiff tablecloth, and lit one ceremoniously. He exhaled slowly, took another drag, exhaled melodramatically, then fixed me in the eye again. `It took a while, but your credentials, your press accreditation . . . well, they check out OK.' Obradovich drew again on his cigarette, studying my reaction. I reached for a glass of water as calmly as I could, realising that he was definitely playing games with me. I needed to get out of the hotel dining-room fast - if Obradovich had really checked me out with the Serbian secret police, he would have found that my credentials as a freelance journalist didn't add up at all.