The Big Breach (24 page)

MI6 also set up two more shoe-box stations in the Balkans. One senior officer was sent to Kosovo for three months under cover as an OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observer, but this was not a great success as the ruthless and omnipresent Serbian secret police made it too dangerous to attempt any agent-running. To cover Bosnia, MI6 drew on experience gained during OPERATION SAFE HAVEN, the allied operation to protect the Kurds from Iraqi reprisals in the aftermath of the 1990 Gulf War. Clive Mansell, a mid-career officer and Kurdish speaker, was attached to the Royal Marines in Kurdistan as their mysteriously entitled `civil adviser', mingling with the refugee population to obtain intelligence on the nascent Kurdish nationalist movement. MI6 decided to try the same tactic in Bosnia and sent Mansell to Split with the British UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) contribution to set up a shoe-box station under the designation H/BAP.

By early 1993, all of these assets were in place and MI6's coverage of the Balkans was starting to meet some of the demands placed upon it. Meanwhile, String Vest assigned me to a role supporting Small in Skopje. Small's close liaison with the Macedonian secret police meant that he had no access to one of the main local intelligence requirements, the ethnic Albanian PRI party. The PRI, and the Albanian population in general, were deeply mistrusted by the Macedonian secret police. The intelligence on the PRI which they fed to Small was biased, so MI6 needed independent penetration. String Vest asked me to get together a cover to visit Skopje and cultivate the targets in the PRI leadership.

Now that Ben Presley had retired, CF issued a new alias name, Thomas Paine, and I got myself documented again as a freelance journalist. After my nerve-jangling Belgrade visit, SBO1 insisted I acquire better credentials: `Get yourself down to I/OPS section and see if they have got any contacts who can help.' I/OPS provided me with a letter of introduction from SMALLBROW, commissioning me to write an article for
The Spectator
on the effects of UN sanctions on Macedonia. `If anybody from the PRI rings to check you out, he'll vouch for you,' I/OPS/1 assured me. I was ready for my first trip to Skopje within a couple of days.

It was dusk as a tattered taxi with a single working headlight drove me the ten kilometres from Skopje airport to the capital, but I could still see the scars of the 1963 earthquake that destroyed most of the city. The clock on the central railway station was still stuck at ten to five, the time when the first tremors started, and even 30 years later there were swathes of open ground in the town centre where buildings had once stood. Though the war to the north had not directly touched Skopje, the signs of economic hardship were clear. Refuse lay uncollected in the streets, men hung around idle on corners and ragged Kosovo refugees kicked footballs outside the abandoned buildings they now occupied in the run-down Albanian quarter.

The relatively wealthy Macedonian-Bulgar quarter where Small lived was better, but I did not envy his lot. His flat was owned by the Macedonian secret police and lay in a grim concrete block a short distance from the Grand Hotel where I had a reservation. After checking in, I made my way over - Small had invited me for a drink to discuss the operational plan. Strictly I ought not to have been associating with him for security reasons. Skopje was not large and being seen together by officers of other intelligence services could conceivably compromise either or both of us. But String Vest and SBO1 had relented on this occasion. They decided that the risk was small and Small's posting was lonely and boring so an occasional visitor would be good for his morale. Besides, he had been
en poste
for nearly three months and his knowledge would be useful for me.

`Hi, come on up to the third floor,' Small greeted me enthusiastically on the intercom, which was still working. Stepping over the piles of human excrement which littered the floor, I made my way up the stairs. Small greeted me like a long-lost friend on his doorstep. `Welcome to sunny Skopje.' It didn't take him long to show me around the small, sparsely furnished flat and soon he cracked open a bottle of Scotch and we sat down and got to work. Small had a quick mind and was an excellent operational officer. His ability was wasted in the GS branch, but personnel department would not let him transfer to the IB. There was no point: keeping him in the GS meant that he could be posted to slots like Skopje which most of the IB did not want, and they could still pay him a GS salary. Small briefed me expertly on the various Albanian factions and personalities. Occasionally, when the conversation turned to more sensitive areas, he would sweep his hand through the air, reminding me that his hosts might have bugged his flat. As the evening drew to a satisfying close, he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and slipped it over to me. It was an invitation to accompany him the next day on a trip to the countryside to check out the station exfiltration plan.

`Sure, I'd love to come,' I answered, careful not to reveal more than was necessary to possible listeners.

The Skopje exfiltration plan differed from usual station plans in that its purpose was to not to smuggle out compromised agents, but to get Small out in case the Macedonian liaison turned against him. They were a brutish lot and the political situation was not stable enough to wholly trust them. If it suited their purpose to kidnap or imprison Small, he could not claim diplomatic immunity as officially he was not there. He would hope to get enough warning of the deterioration in the relationship to be able to get out of the country legally but, just in case, he had an escape route. Two members of the increment visited him earlier in the year to design and rehearse the plan. But then the winter snow lay thick on the ground, and Small wanted to check that he could still find the route now that spring had changed the landscape.

We left early the next morning in Small's Land Rover Discovery and drove out into the countryside. It was early May and the hedgerows were ablaze with the fierce yellow of wild forsythia. The exfiltration plan called for Small to hide out in the countryside until rescue arrived. In a small copse on a hillside a few miles south of Skopje, the location of which Small had carefully memorised, the increment had buried a cache which contained enough materials for Small to survive for a few days out in the open - food, water, clothing, a couple of torches with infra-red filters, materials to make a lightweight bivouac and sleeping bag, a set of false identification papers and passport, a moderate sum of Deutschmarks, a few gold sovereigns and a military EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon). We trudged a few hundred yards into the woods and, using a compass to get a bearing from a prominent tree stump, paced out a few yards and found the cache without too much problem. After carefully digging it up to check that it had not been tampered with, we reburied it making sure there was no sign of disturbance.

From the top of the hill behind the copse, Small pointed out a small disused airstrip. `That's where the plane will come in to pick me up,' he explained. `It used to be used by crop-spraying aircraft but they've all been grounded through lack of spares now.' We took the Discovery over to the runway to check that it was still serviceable. `It's just long enough for UKN to get their Piper Aztec on the ground,' Small explained. `They would come at night, wearing IR goggles, so I'd have to mark out the landing strip with the IR torches.' Flying below radar height, the plane would then make its way under cover of darkness across Albania and the southern Adriatic to the safety of Italy.

Small dropped me off outside the Grand Hotel after the enjoyable morning. It would be an unnecessary risk to spend much more time with him. Besides, later that evening I was to have my first meeting with the deputy leader of the PRI and the afternoon could be better spent preparing for the meeting. I went back up to my room, fished out my laptop computer from my briefcase and waited for it to graunch into life. The hard disk had been modified by TOS to carry invisible files which they guaranteed could not be detected by even the most capable expert. I typed in the password, the hard-disk graunched some more, and magically all my briefing notes were revealed on the screen. I read through them, reminding myself about the key CX requirements and shaping in my mind the sort of questions I would ask at the meeting.

The first meeting went smoothly and my contact in the PRI was delighted to find a western journalist so interested in him. He agreed to further meetings and over the next couple of months I made repeated trips to Skopje, building up the relationship, gaining his confidence and edging him closer to the CX threshold. It was slow work, made all the more irksome because air links to Skopje were few and far between, meaning that each trip required three or four days. The meetings yielded some intelligence but eventually it became obvious that my contact was holding back, afraid for his personal security. His concern was that the Macedonian secret police would make life difficult for him if they discovered that he was talking too regularly to a foreign journalist. Back in Century House, both Bidde and String Vest agreed that the only way forward was to drop my journalistic cover and make the relationship completely clandestine. On my next trip out to Skopje, I used the line that we had practised so diligently on exercise on the IONEC. `I expect that you've already guessed that I am not really a journalist, but an officer from British Intelligence.' To my relief, my contact did not get up and run. Instead, he accepted my assurance that as he was dealing with a professional intelligence officer rather than a flaky journalist, the Macedonian secret police would never discover his contact with me. He thus became my first recruited agent, and I won my spurs in the office. Thereafter, with the relationship on a more secure and stable footing, he became a productive CX producing agent.

Back in London, between trips to Skopke, Fish was keeping me busy with a series of small but interesting tasks related to the Bosnian War. His job was to coordinate targeting leads to possible informers from other stations or UK-based assets such as BEAVER, and he was an energetic worker. Under various covers, I made trips to Strasbourg, Hamburg, Lisbon and Brussels to meet Bosnian and Serb journalists, dissidents and politicians. Every time I put my head into Fish's office he would offer another interesting task. `How'd you like to run BEETROOT?' he asked one day.

`OK,' I replied. `But who is BEETROOT?'

`He's a right-wing vegetable,' replied Fish. `A Tory MP, but surprisingly he's OK,' he added. `Here's his file - go and read it.'

BEETROOT had tried to join MI5 after university, but had been rather unfairly turned down on security grounds. After his rejection he went into business, making frequent trips to the Soviet Union, and was soon picked up by MI6 as a provider of low-level economic CX. He then joined the Conservative Party, which proposed him as a candidate. To everybody's surprise, he was elected after a large swing in favour of the Tories. Normally, MI6 are not allowed to run MPs as informers but in this case Prime Minister John Major personally granted MI6 permission to continue running BEETROOT. He was making frequent trips to Bosnia as part of the parliamentary working group on the war, and String Vest and Fish had decided that his access to leading actors in the region made him a worthwhile agent.

My first meeting with him was at the Grapes pub on Shepherd Market which he chose as it was only a short walk from Parliament, and no other MPs went there because the prostitutes in Shepherd Market could potentially bring embarrassing publicity. After shaking hands we ordered a pint of Ruddles each and bags of pork scratchings. `I'm glad you've got in touch with me,' he said once we were seated at one of the large oak tables. `There's something that's been worrying me for a while, but I have not known what channel to report it on.'

`Please explain,' I asked, mystified.

He went on to tell me about a young prospective Tory parliamentary candidate. Although a British citizen, the subject was from a Serb family, spoke fluent Serbo-Croat and had changed his name by deed poll. He was a passionate supporter of the Bosnian-Serb cause and Karadzic appointed him as his unofficial spokesperson in London. Fish had a FLORIDA warrant to keep his telephone and fax machine under intercept, and this had produced some useful CX.

`Well, it seems that he has arranged for the Bosnian-Serbs to make a financial donation to the Conservative Party,' explained BEETROOT. `He's channelling the money through a Serb bank to make it look legitimate, but basically the money is coming straight from Karadzic. He boasted to me about it only yesterday - he's hoping that getting some funds for the party will help his chances of becoming an MP.'

The Tory Party was deeply in debt after emptying their coffers in the 1992 general election campaign. Accepting money from any foreign government would be controversial enough, but Britain had soldiers attached to UNPROFOR in Bosnia who were regularly shot at and sometimes killed by Karadzic's forces. If this news was leaked to the press, it would cause a huge scandal and it explained why BEETROOT had not known where to turn with this information - he could hardly report it to the Tory Party chairman, the normal chain of command, because the party chairman himself was accepting the money. I thanked him for his information and promised to be in touch, BEETROOT honourably insisting on paying for the beer and pork scratchings, concerned that otherwise he would have to register my hospitality in the Parliamentary Register of Members' Interests.