The Big Breach (49 page)

The first interrogation session lasted about an hour but Ratcliffe got nowhere. The heavies took me back to my cell and gave me a baguette, a piece of cheese and a cup of coffee. One sat down at the desk outside and switched on a soap opera on the portable TV. Once he was no longer paying me any attention, I pulled my boot off and slipped the Psion disk under the sole-lining. It was a tight fit around the toe but I could walk without showing a limp.

Ratcliffe and Whaley were not present at the second interrogation. `O— sont les anglais?' I asked politely.

`Pah,' Broisniard flicked his wrist dismissively. He explained that he was holding me `garde en vue', meaning he could hold me for up to 48 hours without pressing charges, without allowing me to make a phone call and without allowing me a lawyer. Only a police lawyer could visit me after 20 hours to explain my legal rights. He then continued the interview disinterestedly, running through a list of questons Ratcliffe had given him while Gruignard slowly tapped my banal responses into the laptop.

The increasingly bored Broisniard interviewed me once more that evening before putting me back in a cell at about 11 p.m. with another bottle of Evian and a greasy bacon sandwich. Sleep would be difficult enough in normal circumstances on a hard bench with no pillow, with the strip lights on and a guard watching, but as soon as I lay down, I realised that the police had cracked a rib during their assault. The pain prevented me lying on my left-hand side, and even lying on my back the rib hurt every time I inhaled. It would be a long, sleepless night, giving me plenty of time to reflect on the events of the day. The sheer stupidity of MI6! What did they hope to achieve by arresting me? They would get a whole load more bad publicity once the details got out. Even if GCHQ set one of their Cray computers churning and six months later cracked the PGP files on my laptop, what would that prove? The French would never extradite me for having encrypted files that were shown to nobody, whatever the contents. I consoled myself with the message they would find if they did crack the book-sized decoy file on my laptop; `MI6, you are a bunch of sad fraggles and are wasting your time and taxpayers' money,' repeated thousands of times. The real text was snuggled up under my big toe.

Broisniard came to my cell at about 9 a.m. with a plastic cup of instant coffee, syrupy with sugar. It was Saturday morning and he was probably not happy about having his weekend wasted on a pointless arrest. As I held out my wrists for the usual handcuffs, he shrugged dismissively. `No handcuffs this morning,' he replied in French. `But if you fuck around, we'll beat you up,' he added, waving a finger at me sternly. I had a sneaking admiration for the DST - they didn't pussyfoot around.

Fortunately, the mood in the interrogation room lightened. Broisniard was relaxed and even irreverent. He asked a few more of Ratcliffe's questions, but with me repeating the same rubbish as yesterday he soon got bored and his questioning took another direction, which at first left me unsure how to respond. `How many times did you come to France on operations?' he asked, with a sly grin. It was not a straightforward question. I had indeed been to France a few times on operations which were not declared to them. Was Broisniard really expecting me to cooperate, or was he leading me into a trap? Revealing details of MI6 operations against France would breach the very law for which the DST arrested me.

I decided to play it safe. `I'm sorry, I can't tell you about that.' `Why not?' asked Broisniard, slightly disappointed.

`The British might ask you to arrest me,' I replied gravely.

Broisniard gave up around lunchtime. Back in my cell, the guards bought me another sandwich and a bottle of water and then, as I had been in custody for more than 20 hours, a young police lawyer visited to explain my legal rights. `By lunchtime,' he explained, `you will have been in custody for 24 hours, and so a judge will decide whether to extend the
garde en vue
. You will probably be released as you have broken no French law.' I kept my fingers crossed.

Gruignard came to my cell an hour later to say that the judge had given them permission to hold me for a further 24 hours. My spirits had been reasonably high until then, but the news that they would not release me hit hard. Gruignard told me that they still had not been able to decrypt the files in my computer and they would not release me until they were cracked. `But it is impossible to crack PGP encryption,' I retorted in French. `Breaking it would take a Cray supercomputer at least six months!'

`Alors, donnez-nous le mot de passe,' replied Gruignard. They were blackmailing me: no password, no release.

Fortunately, Gruignard was bluffing. At about 2200, Broisniard and Gruignard had had enough and came to my cell with broad smiles. `You are free,' Broisniard announced. `You have broken no French law.'

`So if I broke no French law, why did you arrest me?' I asked furiously.

`The English asked,' shrugged Broisniard. `They said that you were a terrorist and dangerous. That is why we beat you up,' he continued, matter-of-factly.

`Can I see the warrant?' I demanded.

`You're free without charges, why do you want to see that?' he retorted.

`The English want your computers,' Gruignard said, changing the subject. He showed me my Psion and brand new laptop, smothered in red sealing wax and string, ready to be sent off to London for examination. (I did not see them again for five months, despite energetic recovery attempts by Anne-Sophie Levy, a young Parisian lawyer who volunteered to represent me. It wasn't until Christmas 1998 that she rang me to tell me that SB had finally agreed to return them. They did not find anything illegal on either computer and did not charge me with any offence. SB posted them back to me, but although my laptop came back unharmed, exasperatingly, my Psion, containing most of my important personal information, never arrived. SB claimed that it must have been `lost in the post'.)

`Je veux parler avec les anglais cons,' I demanded to Broisniard, intent on giving Ratcliffe and Whaley a piece of my mind.

`They've gone down the Pigalle,' he replied with a smirk. I considered going to the notorious red-light district with a camera to look for them, but settled for a good night's sleep. Broisniard and Groignard led me out to the car, at last without handcuffs, and drove me round to a nearby cheap hotel. They handed over my NZ passport with the explanation that the British had picked it up from the embassy for me and even shook hands as they left me in the lobby.

With little sleep the whole weekend, my instinct was to crash out but there was work to be done. Adverse publicity for MI6 would be the best weapon to dissuade them from trying the same tactic again and I got to work ringing London. Most of the British papers carried the story prominently the following morning, portraying MI6 adversely.

SB had been busy in London the same weekend. At 6 a.m. on the day of my arrest, they burst into the south London flat of Kathryn Bonella, pulled her out of bed and took her down to Charing Cross police station for questioning about her meetings with me. She was eventually released without charge, but not before SB threatened to cancel her UK work permit.

After a few hours sleep, I got up early the next morning, packed my bags and checked out. MI6 would be disappointed they had not been able to detain me and they would be working overtime on the computers. If they realised that the Psion disk was missing, there was no point in hanging around waiting for another chat with the DST. I took the Paris metro to the Gare du Nord, where there was a small independent travel agent who specialised in cheap tickets to Australasia. They sold me a ticket for a Nippon Airways flight which left from Charles De Gaulle airport late that evening to Tokyo, where I changed for the New Zealand leg.

`Are you Richard Tomlinson?' a spotty, callow young man in a cheap suit addressed me with a Kiwi accent.

`No,' I replied dismissively, thrusting my trolley through the airport crowd. He looked like he might be trouble, and having just stepped off the long flight from Paris I was not in a mood to do an interview.

`You are Richard Tomlinson, aren't you?' he persisted, impatiently strutting alongside my trolley.

`I most definitely am not,' I replied in a Pythonesque French accent, `I am Mr Napoleon Bonaparte. And who are you?'

But the stranger was undeterred. `You are Richard Tomlinson, and I hereby serve you with this injunction,' he announced pompously, thrusting a thick sheaf of official-looking papers on to my trolley, and scuttled off anonymously into the crowds.

Thumbing through the 85 pages of legal jargon intended to stop me speaking to the media in New Zealand, it mystified me what MI6 were so afraid of. I learnt nothing in MI6 that would be of interest to the New Zealand media. The gagging order, taken out at considerable expense to the British public, was intended only to stop me criticising the way MI6 had treated me. Sitting in the back of the cab on my way to the Copthorne hotel on the Auckland waterfront, the thought of all those civil servants slaving away over their weekend putting together the injunction against me made me smile.

MI6 could not have used a more stupid tactic, as everybody wanted to know why they had gagged me. The next few days were a hectic whirlwind of interviews with New Zealand television and newspapers. The news soon crossed the Tasman Sea to Australia, and the Australian media wanted interviews with me. Even
Time
magazine picked up the story and ran a full-page article covering my arrest in Paris, the injunction and the stupid obstinacy of MI6 in refusing to admit that the root cause of the whole problem was their own glaring management faults.

The injunction meant that NZSIS (New Zealand Security & Intelligence Service) would take an interest in me. Although New Zealand has some of the most liberal laws governing individual freedoms anywhere in the world, their actions in injuncting me had shown that they were prepared to drop all these laws without hesitation if asked by MI6. NZSIS maintains very close links to MI6, to the extent that every year one of their new-entry officers is sent to the UK to attend the IONEC and spend a few years working as a UK desk officer. Dual-nationality holders of New Zealand passports, such as myself, were not automatically barred from working in NZSIS, unlike dual-nationality citizens of other closely allied countries such as Australia or Canada, and there is at least one fully fledged New Zealander working full-time in MI6. It irked me that NZSIS would be intercepting my phone and following me, and made me feel unwelcome in the country of my birth.

Moreover, without my Psion all the job leads in New Zealand that I had researched back in the UK were lost. I decided to give up my thoughts of settling in New Zealand and try Australia instead. I had a good network of friends in Sydney and had a job offer there with a company whose name was still in my head.

With the New Zealand authorities watching my every move, it would require some subterfuge to get to Australia unobserved. I laid a false trail, telling journalists that I was going to spend the weekend up on the Coramandel peninsula, a well-known beauty spot on New Zealand's north island. The message would get back to the authorities one way or another, whether through the bugging of my hotel telephone or through word of mouth from one of the journalists.

Late on the afternoon of Friday 7 August, I packed my suitcase, checked out of the Copthorne and took a taxi to Auckland airport. The Qantas sales desk sold me a one way ticket to Sydney for a flight that would be leaving an hour later. From the moment I checked out of the hotel until the aircraft took off, there would be just over two hours. Even if NZSIS had seen me leaving the Copthorne, they would not have much time to react and stop me leaving New Zealand. Hopefully, it would allow me to sneak into Australia unnoticed. But I had greatly underestimated the determination of MI6 to cause me as much bother as they could.

`Mr Tomlinson?' I looked up from my seat, into which I had just settled on the packed Qantas MD-11, to see two of the stewards standing over me. `Would you mind stepping off the plane please, Mr Tomlinson,' continued the senior of the two men. `And bring your bag,' he added, to underline that I would not be going to Australia. At least there was no sign of the police, so I hoped that I wasn't about to be arrested.

The two stewards led me off the plane and escorted me back through customs to a Qantas administrative office. There a more senior official explained what had happened. `We have had a fax from our head office in Canberra saying that you have not been given an Australian visa,' he said apologetically. `We're holding the plane back while we get your suitcase out of the hold - I am really sorry about this.' He had seen me on the television and knew who I was.

`Can I see the fax?' I asked, suspecting that there was some foul play. The Australian authorites could only have learnt of my intention to go to Sydney a few hours earlier and the fax probably didn't really exist.

`Sorry, we're under strict instructions not to show it to you. If you phone Marien Smith at the Australian consulate in Auckland, she will explain everything.' The fax was probably just an invention to buy them more time to find an official reason to pull me off the plane. I rang Marien Smith immediately and my suspicions were confirmed when she admitted knowing nothing about the visa refusal. I felt really let down by the New Zealand and Australian authorities' attitude to me. They were joining in with MI6's bullying and harassment without examining the issues for themselves and making their own minds up based on their own laws. It was far easier for them just to bow to political pressure from MI6 than stand up for the rights of one individual.