by Tom Marcus
The course chief instructor stormed over to me, in his stereotypical SAS no-nonsense walk, while the course medics clambered to get to the screaming mess next to me. I took the pistol from his hand and exited the car, removing the magazine and pulling the top slide back, checked it wasn’t loaded.
The chief instructor was the same SAS corporal who did all my firearms training in Hereford and knew me from my days on the training team for the Military Special Operations Unit. ‘TC, what the fuck have you done?’
‘He pulled a gun, I reacted.’
‘You broke his arm, you twat!’
Technically I knew I hadn’t broken his arm, but arguing that point would have made me look like a right prick. As he walked past me, barging my shoulder hard enough to let me know he was pissed but not enough to knock me over, he starting talking to the medic while phoning for an ambulance.
The rest of the operators and role players started to gather around me, knowing they had to give the medics space to ease the crying fit coming from the car. One candidate on the course, a former professor who looked a dead ringer for Jesus, strolled up to me, glancing over at the car. ‘What happened, TC?’
‘Mate, fat fucker jumps in, all going well until he jabs the Glock into my head. Not my fault he’s too weak to stop me reacting. These SB guys haven’t seen a gym in years!’
Looking at the faces around me, I could see I didn’t have their approval. By rights, there was no way I should have been able to do so much damage to an undercover copper. Walking back to the makeshift canteen, which was basically a metal shipping container with a kettle and white patio furniture from the eighties, I wondered if I had gone too far.
No, this was all about testing our natural reactions to real situations. If this happened in real life I would do the same, probably more.
The SAS instructor followed up behind me, quietly growling my name to stop me in my tracks. As I turned he explained what was happening. ‘Right, ambulance just coming through the gates now. He’s being taken away to hospital – suspected dislocation of his right elbow and severe concussion. What the fuck?!’
‘He’s clearly out of shape, and he got too excited when he hit me with the Glock, I didn’t even move that fast. He should have been strong enough to resist that!’
Moving closer to me, he became more authoritative. A dressing-down was heading my way.
‘Firstly, it’s role play. We’re not killing people. Secondly, and listen to this carefully, there’s a reason he is weak. He’s lost twelve stone this year. That’s why he has so much excess skin. He’s had bowel cancer. It very nearly killed him. It’s his first week back.’
I didn’t even see the chief instructor walk off. I felt sick. Fuck me, what a prick. As the ambulance drove past me and out of the gates, I knew I had to brush this off. It was shit that I’d done this to someone who’d been through so much already, and coming back to work on what should have been an easy week helping out ‘spooks’ turned out to be a nightmare for him. But, if I kept dwelling on this it’d blunt my skill set. Fuck him, he got excited and I made sure he paid the price for that. The team will laugh about this in a few months, I’m sure. I hoped.
As I left the gym I felt more at peace but had to clean myself up, I was pouring with sweat, and my elbows looked like I’d just lost a fight with a cheese grater. I’d gone to the basement gym to try to work this aggression out, but if any of my team saw me now I’d look like the thug they thought I was.
CHAPTER SIX
This world was all I knew for the vast majority of my adult life. I call it ‘my world’ because it’s completely different to what everyone else sees. Normal people go about their lives knowing terrorists and mass murderers exist, and now thanks to today’s media coverage they are fairly educated in where those threats might come from in the future. Does it stop them living their lives in the modern world? No, does it fuck. The day after the London bombings on July 7th 2005, most people were using public transport again. Yes, everyone spreads the videos the extremists make on Facebook, but the general public never really know how dangerous the situation is. They work on the unconscious assumption that there are people and large agencies out there protecting them.
Over the past decade the focus on spies and the intelligence services has shifted from the James Bond/MI6 sole operators in a distant land to the ones fighting on our streets. No longer is the emphasis on finding the terrorists in foreign countries, because the terrorists are here. They are your neighbours, your colleagues, people you pass on the street. Mohammed Sidique Khan was a teaching assistant. He blew himself up on the 7/7 Tube and bus bombings in London. The fight is already on our streets.
That’s why people like me exist. To hunt these fuckers down and destroy them. We notice everything. All it takes is a brief handshake or a subtle nod passing one of our existing targets in the street to put that unknown on our ‘grid’. Every individual we are interested in ends up on the grid with a code name. It’s at that point that the intelligence officers rip the target’s life apart. It’s like splitting an atom, I imagine; I’m no fucking scientist.
One thread leads to ten more. So you start with the basics. Who was the person our Tier 1 high-profile target shook hands with on that street, or who did our target drop call, or send a Facebook request to? Anything that leaves a digital footprint linking our target to an unknown is flagged for analysis, but usually the best new targets come from ground operations. Physically seeing our target in some way associate with an unknown male or female can lead to an intelligence goldmine. What usually happens in this situation is we notice something out of the ordinary or a new face and we ‘take them on’, which essentially means the team splits and we keep surveillance on our existing target and also follow the new unknown individual, and crucially try to ‘house’ them.
By finding out an address for an unknown person we can do two things. The Operations Centre carries out all their background checks on that address: names associated officially, mobile and internet IP addresses linked to it, whether work or domestic. From that we can associate emails, calls, text messages, social media accounts, known associates, vehicle documents, travel visits through ports. Absolutely everything that is done electronically and that leaves a digital fingerprint. The second thing, and slightly more important for operators like me, is it gives us a starting point to wait for this unknown if they don’t carry mobile phones with them or they are a relatively ‘clean skin’. Even if they don’t leave much electronic sign, we have a physical place we know they have been before. Housing targets is vital to our operations.
In Bradford, Yorkshire, before the London Olympics, my team was deployed on a four-man-strong terrorist cell. Their intent was to blow up multiple targets around the country; you couldn’t call them London-centric. We had the working assumption that it was going to be the Olympic venues but had no intelligence to suggest that. The group was only highlighted to us because the main ringleader, a black Muslim convert who worked in a post office, made an unusual mistake after we’d watched him for nearly a year. This young male converted to Islam while he was in prison briefly, for theft. Prior to that we had absolutely no interest in him, and he didn’t even make it on to our grid when he converted to his religion – why would it?
The day he got his target name was when a British IP address showed up on an extremist website promoting jihad. That was the day we tore his life apart.
Once we have a location we use our telecommunications liaison to go to all the mobile phone providers and request the relevant comms data. It’s an important relationship between the British intelligence agencies and the telecoms providers; they have to give us the information by law, but it’s always asked for politely in true British style.
Most people around the modern world are traceable. Your mobile phone is one massive data logger, but perhaps not in the way the general public thinks. The perception that you just have to turn off your phone’s ability to use its built-in location applications to stay ‘off the radar’
is wrong. Every time you move from one area to another with your mobile phone, it gets its signal from the cell towers for that particular area, whether you are walking from your home to the shops and back, or travelling the length of the country. Cell phone towers are everywhere and easily recognizable. The higher-populated areas have more cell phone towers or mobile phone masts to cope with greater usage demand. Each time your phone latches on to a tower, it registers a unique identification number, which is time-stamped. This means nearly everyone in the UK can be tracked if they have their phone on them. Most of the time the phone will ping off more than one tower at one time, thus enabling us to more precisely locate where the target has been.
This particular male was given the code name GLASS WINDOW, and he was, by current extremist standards, very good at keeping his operational security tight. Truth is, you can’t hide from us for long, but he never used the internet in his own house to send messages or view martyrdom videos; his home was clean, he thought. For months we watched him, monitored his calls, emails, text messages – absolutely everything about his life we knew, apart from the other three members of his terrorist cell.
We finally caught a break when he slipped up, and it gifted us the entire terrorist group, their methodology and attack planning. GLASS WINDOW was usually exceptionally careful, but even the best can drop the ball. And GLASS WINDOW handed out his team’s prison sentence when he threw his old SIM card into a high street bin, which our team saw.
His mistake allowed us to find another thirty-two targets just from that four-man group. It’s then down to the Operations Centre and the intelligence officers who work in Thames House to try to prioritize who we take on and find on the ground, which isn’t an easy task when you have thousands of people to watch.
I couldn’t do all that office shit, I knew my place was on the streets. Operators are completely different from the staff working in Thames House. You won’t catch one of the office people starting their car the way we do, leaving the driver’s door open as you start it in case your vehicle is rigged with an improvised explosive device (IED) designed to blow you up. The idea being that you marginally increase your odds of staying alive if the explosion has a route of escape out of the open door and will likely throw you out of the car rather than trapping you in a metal exploding coffin when you turn the ignition key.
I’d like to say that when I walked into the briefing room or the garages at the Operations Centre I would switch into full MI5 mode, leave all my personal shit at the door and become the ultimate professional; equally it would be fantastic to say when I left an operation to go home I’d switch back into loving family man. Truth is, I was like this all the time, always switched on, assessing absolutely everything around me.
I hated the phrase ‘sleeping with one eye open’ – it’s bollocks. I’ve never met anyone who can physically sleep with one eye open and manage to take in their surroundings while asleep, but thanks to Hollywood the general public assume we have some sort of magic powers. I have always been a light sleeper though, probably born out of my childhood, always being ready to run at a moment’s notice from someone coming to evict us out of our beds. Luckily I don’t need a lot of sleep and manage on four to five hours a night or day, depending on when I’m working.
Using a really simple system, and with experience, you can instantly get a feel for the situation in front of you. It’s not black magic or some secret fucking ninja skill taught to spies, it comes from surviving on the streets. In fact a lot of career criminals do it without knowing, particularly those from Eastern European countries. We have a saying in the surveillance teams: it’s not the target that will kill you, it’s the third party. Because we work almost entirely in the most deprived areas in the UK, the level of crime and assaults is obviously a lot higher.
Everything I see is assessed, whether I’m walking into a backstreet internet café or passing through arrivals at an airport; everything is questioned. What’s missing from this picture? What’s not here that should be? What’s here that shouldn’t be? Is everyone moving naturally? Why is that vehicle parked facing the opposite way from everything else? Why has that male got his hand in his pocket? Should that old couple be sitting there? Is it the right weather for someone to be wearing a large heavy coat? Is this person communicating with anyone else here? Why is that car wing mirror pointing at the wrong angle for a driver’s natural position? Why has someone got two mobile phones? Why would someone be dressing down like that yet have a £150 Military G Shock watch on and a wedding ring? Why is that person sitting bolt upright in a parked car on a residential street?
The list of questions you ask yourself is endless and constant, and it isn’t focused around terrorism, it’s figuring out if everything you see and feel in the area is right or not. The problem with being like this is that it spills into your personal life. I remember being in the local supermarket with my family when I noticed a man and a woman walking up the escalator approximately twenty metres in front, talking to each other, nice and relaxed. As they got off at the top of the escalator, they split purposely without talking, the male breaking left and doubling back on himself so I could see his face. He was of Somali descent, in his early twenties, with a short patchy wispy beard and wearing a heavy large coat. The female walked away and diagonally right, straight into the supermarket towards the clothes area. Having only glanced at her side profile, I couldn’t get many facial features but she too was in her early twenties, European white, wearing a black hijab covering her hair. My wife recognized the look in my eye that indicates when I’ve spotted something, and gave me a knowing but disappointed glance as she took my son by the hand and continued towards the fruit and veg isle.
I hated the effect I had on my family sometimes. I wish I could be the husband and father my wife and children deserve, who would happily wander around the shops stopping at every single item that remotely looked like a toy, spending the next twenty minutes explaining to the children why they don’t need yet another action figure or toy gun. I wish I could be the type of guy who doesn’t have to know where all the exits are when I walk into an unfamiliar building, or weave in and out of traffic when taking my son to the park as if to avoid a situation that pins my car in without escape – otherwise known as normal commuter traffic. I wasn’t that person, I was the person who hunted the scum of the earth and was ready to eat their fucking faces off if they dared think about hurting my country.
I never feel duty bound to phone the police when I see people up to no good, if I spot someone shoplifting or dealing drugs; it’s a way of life for some people. I know that life because it’s how I survived as a kid, but when I see odd behaviour it draws me in. I had to know if these two were about to kill people or simply out on the rob. If they were stealing I couldn’t give a fuck, but getting close to the male would determine that either way. He was walking to a large group of people by all the TVs, laptops and general electricals.
His demeanour was focused, taking the odd glance to see where the uniformed security guards were stationed. He knew exactly where to go and was walking faster than normal. As he took his phone out of his pocket and started to make a call I was roughly fifteen metres behind him, knowing I needed to get close enough to understand the content of this call to make a judgement. His clothing was large and bulky, and that on an unusually hot day.
Using the unwitting shoppers, I got close enough to hear the call. ‘Yeah, I’m doing it now, get ready.’
OK, here we go. I had no other choice; this guy was about to do something illegal, whether terrorist-related or not, but this supermarket was busy and he was nearly in the centre of a massive crowd. There were nearly fifty people looking at the latest iPads and flatscreen TVs on the display stands. The problem I faced was that if this guy was about to try to blow himself up, I needed to kill him quickly enough so he couldn’t trigger anything, and I hadn’t seen any improvised switches or wires on him yet. Fuck me, my wife had my keys; they could have been useful right now. Lo
oking to my immediate right, I grabbed a thin but long stylus pen off the display cabinet, the type used on touch-screen tablets, and with a quick yank I ripped it away from the thin wire attaching it to the stand. It was made of a very soft blue plastic, but hopefully I wouldn’t be stabbing this fucker repeatedly with it, one quick puncture wound through the base of skull into his brain with this should do the job.
By the time I turned round with the stylus pen in my right hand, the male was kneeling down behind a large TV box. It looked like he was trying to remove something from either his socks or his trainers. I scanned the area for a second, looking for his partner, the female. No sign. I couldn’t see my family either. I needed to get them out of there before anything happened, but if I didn’t step in something bad was definitely going down. OK, we’re dead here no matter what. If I take him on and it goes wrong, he blows himself up, we die. If I go for my family and he blows himself up, we die. So we’re dead anyway, and whatever I manage to do now is a bonus.
My plan was to come over to him from behind and wait until the last possible moment to disable him. I still couldn’t be sure what this unknown male was up to, but worst case scenario was a lot of people were about to die, so if it came to it I’d have to shove the stylus into the base of his skull if I saw a weapon or anything resembling a detonator. I was five feet away from him now, still walking forward, stylus in my right hand with my thumb near the tip of the pen, trying to give it a bit of strength, ready to kill this guy, four feet, three feet, two feet. I started to lean over with my left hand outstretched to lift his chin up so I could control his body. Where the head went, the body would be forced to go, and it’d also give me the chance to make the puncture into the base of his brain, hopefully killing him instantly. I still didn’t know what this guy was going to do, but once I had control of his head I’d know for sure.