The Steering Group

by M. J. Laurence

  The Steering Group didn’t see the need to worry the politicians – do it and get the praise if it all went well or seek forgiveness and plead ignorance if it all went south. Myself and the team played down Anatoly’s defection as a light operation but with a few risks. We simply needed to be covert, go in, pick up Anatoly and get out, avoiding any detection. No planned engagements. But we all knew that as simple as it all sounded, we needed to, as they say, plan for very different scenarios – if you want peace, plan for war. Adaptation to unfolding unknowns was the team’s bread and butter and so Baz and Pierre calmed the whole meeting down from a brass band to a gentle harp. Besides, no matter how well we planned shit it always looks different on the ground, and therefore it’s all just a game of improvisation after the plan starts to fall away to real-time events. This was what we were all good at so it all felt a bit ridiculous to be planning things too tightly. Someone’s arse was puckered up too tight higher up the food chain was our final assessment of the situation.

  Eventually the elephant in the room was finally mentioned – my attachment to Anatoly. It wasn’t an unknown, there was no secret about my relationship with Anatoly, that it was a very close one. There were feelings of serious risks here to some of the team, especially Paul Seely. My loyalties were brought into question – hard questions to face but I guess necessary. I didn’t deny my closeness, what was the point? I knew all my mail had been read, private mail and email monitored and intercepted, dissected and analysed and even changed by the group before anything went outside the circle into Russia. For some reason and from out of nowhere there became a distinct atmosphere and pressure to count me out of this operation. Without doubt this became a serious conversation and consideration for the group but conversely there was no way Anatoly would ever leave Sarov and come to the UK without me. I stressed this point. I had his trust and it was my fucking operation and had been for years. It was I who had introduced the family to the world of UK intelligence and I who had betrayed the family that had looked after me. It was I who had eliminated Evengy, my third wolf, my Russian brother I had betrayed callously and deliberately – a cold killer deep within the enemy’s council without which the ‘list’ and all the intel would never have been delivered to the Steering Group.

  I resented the accusations and it showed, raising a smile from Cdr Brown. When I promised I always delivered. There was no lie in my eye when I stood at the head of that oval table and delivered my speech regarding my involvement with the family, and Anatoly. But above all I was bold enough to be honest and admit I wanted my friend to come to the UK and remain alive. I had no issue pulling the trigger on any member of the family but Anatoly could offer more if we brought him over. Perhaps there were some underlying suspicions about my loyalty or commitment that needed to be laid to rest. My commitment to see Anatoly move over and then for me to be free for the completion of the list was my goal. My support team was watching intensely. The guys hadn’t been involved in the Moscow years, that was all my own work. But the question that was sewn into their minds was: would I give up Anatoly for one of them should the situation demand it, and when shit goes south who will I protect first and more importantly last? The guys from Poole don’t operate like that. They’re tight and you don’t get to work with them if you don’t follow suit.

  It was a test, an internal and deliberate test of my loyalty and integrity. I guessed that maybe silent whispers had taken place behind closed doors, a whisper of a doubt uttered quietly in the halls outside this very room or in the labyrinth of the doughnut at GCHQ. An administrator, an overthoughtful fucking analyst or non-operational member of the support team perhaps, making a comment to a member of the Steering Group, who allowed the whisper to grow into a tiny suspicion after half reading some papers in a file. Or perhaps a single misplaced comment in one of my letters taken out of context or misinterpreted by some poorly informed nerd of an interpreter who couldn’t understand written Russian slang or humour. This tragedy of suspicion was now arising out of the dark against all my best efforts to hide my desire to keep Anatoly safe but ultimately for him to defect. Was the Steering Group looking for a mole or a double agent? To be frank, at this point in my time with the Steering Group I hadn’t the energy to play both sides. It would be too much. The mission, the family and the list were suffocating enough. It didn’t matter in the mists of being an N1 operative; it is utterly allowed to have suspicion enter every part of your life and I should have expected this sooner after RIAR and Segment, but my loyalty was intact and my nerve had been tested beyond question in the company of the team and the group in the worst situations. Besides, I was the one who always pulled the trigger on the main target and the team knew this. I think it had been engineered in such a way.

  I think everyone needed to see my reactions, to see if they were rehearsed or paperclipped, or genuine. I knew the core members of the Steering Group were decoding me in every way. I looked into the eyes of the team, into Cheesy’s eyes, Baz and Pierre, Hugh and Smudge, telepathically transmitting my commitment to them. Besides, if shit went south and loyalties were not solid then the team could easily eliminate the bridge, hang me out to dry to the other side. It wasn’t hard for the group to know they had the upper hand and I was on their leash should there be any unplanned actions on my part in the execution of this most sensitive transfer of Anatoly to the UK. Cheesy let out a loud laugh and threw a napkin at me, breaking the tension. Cigarettes were lit and coffee poured. Everyone knew this operation was fucking massive, no matter how much we tried to compartmentalise it all into a simple op. We knew its true significance and it wasn’t just us and Anatoly who would reap the repercussions from behind the curtain in the Lubyanka if we were caught. The other side would hunt us like dogs, and we would all carry a high reward if captured or if we found ourselves in an unplanned firefight on their turf.

  Cheesy took the floor, calmly approved my involvement and recollected my actions to eliminate Evgeny, how calculated, focused and fucking ruthless I had been, not to mention the absolute deception I had employed with the family to see the job done. The room was in silence as Cheesy gave his testimony of my ability to complete a mission; he spared no detail and gained table-banging approvals from the team, mustering to a well-supported accord. Cigarette smoke lay heavily across the room at head height waiting to be dispersed by a change in direction. It was clear my bond with the team had been forged in the fires of war in Bosnia and could not be undone by such a misplaced whisper by any desk-driving paper shuffler. The doors opened and Spud stood in the doorway. He casually walked in, took a place at the table and simply nodded at Cdr Brown. The elephant had been slain by a silent witness, but fear was now sown in my mind for this next mission.

  My support team was invited to leave as the Steering Group moved the meeting on to known KGB activity. All the guys got up and wished us well, and offered some banter and words to the effect of offering the Steering Group the advice not to fuck this one up. Cheesy came over and patted me on the head like a pet dog and play punched me as he left the room. Smudge just said it was all getting boring anyway, to which there was a communal laugh as the guys left in high spirits, shouting back that they would meet me in The Red Lion on Parliament Street for a few wets once I’d done talking shit with the grown-ups. The doors closed behind them and there was an uncomfortable silence that swallowed up the diminishing joy of laughter and banter that disappeared down the corridor with the team headed for a beer in less uncomfortable surroundings.

  Intel showed that the KGB had mirrors who had been following all the family, and I was in their portfolio of interested parties. It was a sure by-product of spending so much time with the family, plus no doubt a reaction to RIAR and Segment. There were photographs of me with Anatoly in Moscow, at cafés and at university. Innocent or not, the intel suggested it was Natalia who had leaked my name to the Lubyanka after that first chance encounter with Rashid Mohamed Asadi on the Metro. These were older photographs. I had known it must have looked
too good to be true to the family, but I thought it had all gone unnoticed. There was no intel to suggest anything other than a friendship with Anatoly but the suspicion and fear had been planted in everyone’s minds. There had been Russian operatives following Rashid, and me. Yes, we had mirror operatives to consider now, but they had been there for years – this was old intel to my mind. I was unflustered by it. Time was getting short and the walls were closing in, and the Steering Group wanted a conclusion to the Russian chapter a little more urgently than we had first understood. The list needed completing and Anatoly needed to be extracted. I found it of little importance or any significance that we had mirrors back in the Moscow days; I was fucking living with a KGB family. for fuck’s sake! I would have been more concerned if there had been photos in Dubai from other lesser-known sources, or more recent photos of me with Evgeny in Romania or other shitholes.

  Spud calmly released that things in the US hadn’t been too watertight either. Joint teams had uncovered a possible leak through FBI Special Agent Guy Mitchell. Because of his position in the FBI Foreign Counterintelligence Unit and his use of computer technologies, Guy Mitchell was able to pass extensive and highly damaging information to the Soviet authorities on all things linked to operations behind the curtain. An intercept had managed to stop information regarding Anatoly. Ben Martin interrupted and stated that our friend Guy had been left in play deliberately until such time as the Steering group had used him to relay the right amount of false information to create a sufficient diversion to allow a confrontation between the Arabs and the KGB whilst we executed a left-field approach to the removal of Anatoly.

  It was Spud and Ben who now suggested that rather than extract Anatoly as a defection, the team should fake his death to avoid all the other issues aggravating the politicians. A pregnant pause, a silence for just a few deafening moments, then huge conversation, ideas flying back and forth, opinions and strategies, an all-new electric atmosphere was unleashed into the room. Then silence before a new barrage of conversational engagements. A new direction, directives would follow, and the team was simply to be put on immediate standby in readiness to execute any new approved order. It was a no-brainer: avoiding a full defection scenario would remove the shadow issues, and a terrible accident for Anatoly would remove all the inevitable defection fallout on both sides of the fence. No engagements and no witnesses.

  It was Spud who stood up and let the bad news drop like a sledgehammer into a glass bath, and all the plans and aspirations simply spilled out like lifeblood from a patient on the table in an operating theatre.

  “There is a double mirror in our group,” he calmly stated.

  The room flatlined. We had a sleeper agent, a spy, a fucking two-headed coin! Spud had been assigned as cover agent to the group and team for some time. He had my back. He had been working very closely with Ben and found communications between their man in the US and a contact in the UK, completing an intelligence circle. Spud and Ben were our anti-virus, deployed to keep the back doors sealed and await any trojans or worms looking to get in amongst British operations. They had uncovered a sleeper cell in the UK linked to the Arabs assisting the family business in Drobeta during Operation RIAR. There were photographs of Hugh and me in the hotel room and with the trucks we had loaded with the local hired hands. The entire operational plans of the Steering Group seemed to be looping back to this cell in the UK from the US mole in an attempt to obtain a backdoor entry to Russian operations linked to the Middle East and Anatoly. We were clearly a target now for these terrorists right here in the UK.

  To betray us and pass the list to the terrorists, take payoffs and accept a false offer of an exit was what we concluded for the US mole. Our job to complete the list would be near impossible now with the Middle Eastern terrorism groups possibly knowing not only the identities of UKSF and intelligence operators but the entire portfolio of Russian ops led from the UK. Of immediate concern was the fact the Arabs would seek to steal Anatoly during our defection attempt for the benefit of the Iranian nuclear programme and more than likely use his knowledge to build a fully operational ICBM. Fuck! It wasn’t about the chemical weapons or the passage of arms to the Middle East, or any of the sordid underhand deals between governments and terrorists, all this was small fry by comparison. This was about getting to the source of the intelligence the family was selling on the side from Anatoly in Sarov. The family had never intended for Anatoly to become the sole goods for sale. No longer did anyone want the crumbs from the tables at Sarov, we all wanted the main course. My friend had become the main target and his safety would be very hard to ensure.

  There would be no further negotiations between the family and the Arabs in nice cosy apartments in Dubai, they were going to kidnap Anatoly and make the whole thing hang on the UK by exposing the team and the Steering Group on Russian soil. The Arabs were planning on using our plan to cover up their plans and bypass all the issues we had been discussing. Guy Mitchell was going to allow the Arabs to know where the defection (and accident, if we now leaked it) was going to take place and have Anatoly probably held up in captivity in some hellhole in the Middle East, and at the same time open up an international crisis between the CCCP, the UK and USA. Bastards.

  Spud laid it all out on the table: photographs of Hugh and me in Dubai with the same Arabs photographed in London with the sleeper cell; photographs in the shopping mall, and our meeting with the Arabs in the desert before our extraction after the deal had been sealed in Dubai before we executed Segment; more photographs of Hugh with the Arabs in Drobeta. It was all fitting together now; no wonder there were no issues with the Arabs in Drobeta, Mitchell had worked it all out ahead of us and arranged for the Arabs to drug Evgeny in that hotel room, set up the meeting with the Arabs, taken his payment and sealed his fate to chance, falling deep within the embryonic machine of a terrorist organisation and setting up a backdoor with the FBI into MI5 and the Steering Group. Ben assured the Steering Group that the US had Guy Mitchell on a very short string and that operational control was with the group and supported by the head of the CIA in Langley.

  What was eating away and tearing my mind apart was what did the Arabs actually know of me, the family and our connections, and my connection to UK intelligence? Or was their undivided attention simply on Anatoly? Perhaps they believed I was KGB as I had spent so much time with the family in Moscow. Unanswerable questions. But without doubt was the fact that they had me as a close associate of Anatoly. Perhaps that was it, but equally they could be seeing my relationship with him as a threat to their plans, especially after seeing me at work for the family both in Dubai and in Eastern Europe.

  I remember sitting and reflecting that Evgeny had actually been against the entire plan to betray his brother and me but had been defenceless, a lamb to the slaughter. No wonder he had been in such a mess, drunk, lazy and incomprehensible, it had all been the work of an FBI mole in league with the Arabs, whoever they really were. Evgeny had been used and compromised by all sides whilst remaining loyal to his brothers. How many more WOMD (weapons of mass destruction) and chemical weapons had left in earlier shipments to destinations he had no control over? Where did they go? The removal of Evgeny may have been unnecessary or at least somewhat premature reflecting on the fact that the whereabouts of those shipments would later become a prelude to war. We had reached the point of utter compromise, a state of complexity that had everything we had planned completely undone from the inside. A re-think had to be undertaken to analyse the mess, plan on a double hit when we got to Anatoly and make a new pathway for his entry into the UK. But before that we would need to fully identify and eliminate the Arab/Middle Eastern components then turn the whole thing upside down and engineer their demise in Russia.

  I understood it completely, why it was so easy to become a player on both sides. Guy Mitchell had seen an out that would furnish his future beyond anything the FBI or the Steering Group could ever put on the table. To escape and hide in some sunny hideaway in the Car
ibbean perhaps, or disappear into South America. But now with a price on his head so high from three organisations, let alone any mercenaries who may now have his number, this would ensure his ultimate demise. I think it’s the secrecy and the wanting to be caught feeling that all spies openly deny, but secretly, like serial killers, we want to be caught, to be captured in order to show the world our masterpiece of undercover work, how far we could go and remain unnoticed. It’s against everything we are trained to do but when you become good in the espionage world it’s never possible to tell your opposition, or anyone else for that matter, how fucking good you really are without revealing your identity. A paradox.

  Guy Mitchell would be wanted by the entire circle: us, the Arabs, the Americans and very soon the Russians. The Steering Group had to leak this information. We needed to leak the right amount of information at the appropriate time in order to facilitate a clean departure for Anatoly. Thank fuck for Guy Mitchell; he was now the key to the entire puzzle, a way for us to clean up. We spent 12 long hours in that room with the Steering Group coming up with a way forward. By early morning I left Whitehall with a thick fog in my brain and walked the streets of London for a further four hours, drinking a few lonely beers amongst the crowds, before getting on a train to Plymouth with new orders in my hand. I was beginning to think it was all a fuck-up.