Unofficial and Deniable

by John Gordon Davis

  Harker looked at the older man. He really liked him. That was mutual. ‘But I’m a soldier, not a spy.’

  ‘Military intelligence is a very important part of soldiering.’

  ‘Of course. But I mean I’m a soldier, not a hit-man. I don’t want to have to kill anybody.’

  ‘You won’t have to get your hands bloody, Jack.’ General Tanner smiled. ‘You’ll be told all you need to know when you have agreed and signed up. But let me say this much: any actions will be military ones – against the sort of people you’ve killed plenty of on the battlefield, and who’ve tried to kill you. That’s a soldier’s job, to kill as many of the enemy as possible, isn’t it? But the responsibility will be entirely mine as head of Military Intelligence.’ He ended: ‘We are fighting a total onslaught by the communist forces of darkness, Jack. That’s why America is helping us. Openly. And Britain, secretly. To fight this total onslaught we need a total strategy. And the CCB is an important part of that total strategy …’

  3

  Harvest House was a nice old brownstone overlooking Gramercy Park on New York’s East Side. Harker bought it for the CCB in his first month in town, having found out how expensive conventional office space is. It was easily big enough for the staff he hired: one editor, two personal assistants, a sales director who doubled as publicity director, and a general clerk. He found these people, all experienced in publishing, quickly because he advertised salaries above the average. The building was a big old nineteenth-century house: the numerous bedrooms became offices, the dining room became the conference room – there was space to spare. Harker, as managing director, had the best office: the large living room with its old marble fireplace and bay window overlooking the park.

  When the building was remodelled, his staff in place, he hired a few of the catering trade’s leggiest waitresses and threw a large cocktail party for all the literary agents in New York to announce his start in business. ‘Why have we called ourselves Harvest?’ he said in his welcoming speech. ‘Because we want to gather up the bountiful talent that lies neglected by the other brainier-than-thou publishing houses …’ The literary agents responded: in the first year of business Harvest published eleven books, all by first-time authors, and made a respectable profit – partly because the production was done economically by another CCB enterprise, a printing works in Ottawa – enough to pay all salaries and overheads with some left over for reinvestment. Harker had a flair for publishing, a nose for a profitable book. And it was fun: there were boozy lunches with agents and authors, lots of interesting, intelligent people to meet. It seemed an easy living, the authors, agents and editors doing most of the work. It sure beat getting the shit shot out of you on the battlefields of Angola.

  And his covert work for the Civil Cooperation Bureau was not difficult either.

  ‘The CCB divides the world into regions,’ General Tanner had explained. ‘America is Region One, England Region Two, and so on. America itself is divided: Head Office is in Washington, Region One A, where Felix Dupont is the overall Regional Director – he’s your boss. New York, where you’ll be, is Region One B – your title is Regional Manager. You will also be responsible for our CCB business in Miami, Region One C, where a guy called Ricardo Diego is the Regional Sub-manager – he’s a South African Spaniard. His front-business is a bar in the Cuban exile community, which is very valuable to us. He has agents planted in Cuba itself, who give us a lot of information on military matters. You’ll remember a number of occasions in Angola where we suddenly knew exactly about Cuban reinforcements?’

  Harker nodded.

  ‘A lot of that was thanks to the CIA, of course, but also to Ricardo’s agents in Havana – who have agents in Luanda. Ricardo is very valuable. Trouble is, he’s not real management material. You’ll have to keep a close eye on him – Felix Dupont is too busy now, monitoring the Capitol scene and the rest of America. So Ricardo will report to you, and you report to Dupont. My orders will come to you through Dupont. As I said before, Dupont has a network of agents in place in New York, so you’ll inherit a going concern. Most of them don’t know each other, and only the “senior salesmen” will know you; you’ll probably never see the “juniors” – most of them don’t even know they’re working for us. Some think they’re working for the CIA, or for a European government, or for a firm of detectives. In fact, one of our senior salesmen is a private investigator, chap called Trengrove. We need all kinds of information about those United Nations nincompoops, not just hard military facts – who’s sleeping with who, who’s a homosexual, who’s got gambling debts, et cetera, so we can squeeze them. Another salesman has a very good whorehouse – one of the best in New York, I’m told. Anyway, as soon as you leave hospital you go to training school to learn all the general principles, then to London to get the hang of the publishing business, then you fly to Washington to stay with Felix Dupont for a few weeks, getting the nitty-gritty – he’s got a nice hotel. Did you ever meet Felix in the army?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Remarkable man in martial arts. Took a bullet through the knee. However, after a few weeks with Felix you’ll spend a week in Miami with Ricardo, getting his picture. Nice bar he’s got – and lovely strippers, those Cuban girls sure are well-nourished. And Ricardo serves the best steaks in town.’

  ‘What about weapons?’ Harker said. ‘I presume I can’t take my own.’

  ‘Certainly not. No, Felix will supply all the hardware. You’ll have one or two licensed firearms, but most of the hardware will be unlicensed and untraceable. If you ever have to use a gun, dump it in the river straight afterwards. And if anybody ever shoots you, you tell the cops it was just another robbery. But you’ll learn all this at training school.’

  ‘Shoot me? I thought I was through with all that strong-arm stuff.’

  ‘You are, you’re a Regional Manager, not a salesman.’ The general hurried over that one. ‘Anyway, after a week with Ricardo you go to New York, move into the apartment Felix’s got for you, and set up Harvest House, get yourself a girlfriend, and settle into the role of the shit-hot, wing-ding new publisher in town.’ He smiled. ‘Easy. Wish I were you.’ He added: ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls as in New York. And they outnumber the men six to one.’ He grinned. ‘You’re going to have a good time, Jack …’

  Yes, the CCB work was easy enough. The reports trickled in from his senior salesmen, by telephone, encoded fax, scrambled e-mail, dead-letter box, undercover meetings: Harker digested it, collated it, gave any instructions, re-encoded it and sent it on to Felix Dupont in Washington. The information was a mish-mash of facts and conjecture, but Dupont made sense of it all in his jigsaw of espionage – and so too, after a while, did Harker: the pieces fell into place, the gaps becoming clear, the necessary instructions to the salesmen becoming self-evident. Once a month, sometimes twice, he went to Washington for a conference with Dupont. He usually combined these trips with an onward journey to Miami to check on Ricardo. This was always fun: whereas Dupont was a self-satisfied, detribalized Englishman with a painful body who thoroughly detested his enemies, Ricardo exuberantly enjoyed life and only really hated Fidel Castro. He loved South Africans and Americans who were giving the bastard a hard time in Angola. The clientele of his bar-ristorante felt the same way: anybody who took a swipe at Castro, the robber of their plantations and businesses, was okay with Ricardo and his customers at Bar Casa Blanca in Little Havana. None of Ricardo’s noisy patrons, nor his silent salesmen, knew who Harker was, but there was never a shortage of the senoritas in his hotel bedroom at the end of the day spent debriefing Ricardo, trying to make sure he had understood all his communications in Spanglish.

  ‘Ricardo, do us all a favour – buy a good Spanish-English dictionary, to check your spelling, we’ll pay for it. And take some English lessons, because when encoded your information can be misleading if you misspell or get the idiom wrong.’

  ‘So we confuse the enemy too, huh, compadre! But enough of work now �
��’ he waggled his dark eyebrows – ‘we go back to Casa Blanca to las senoritas? Or maybe I send one up here to you, jefe?’ He thumped his hand on his chest: ‘Clean! Garantizada …’

  Yes, as General Tanner had promised, it was an easy job, and even satisfying once the jigsaw began to make sense. However, Harker’s jigsaw was usually incomplete because Dupont received information from the CIA direct and he only told Harker as much as he needed to know. Equally valuable was the detail coming out of the United Nations. Several of the delegations from African countries leaked information copiously to Harker’s salesmen, as a result of either blackmail or greed, but it was often only gossip about other delegates’ weaknesses or bad behaviour. Nonetheless, from time to time, important intelligence emerged about ANC bases in Angola, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, about scandals and rivalries within the exiled hierarchy. Dupont and General Tanner – the ‘Chairman’ – prized these snippets highly. And it was Harker’s United Nations salesman who first learned about atrocities committed in the ANC’s military camps in Angola, torture of their own soldiers by Mbokodo, the ANC’s security police, apparently condoned by the top leadership, which resulted in two full-blown mutinies: Dupont and the Chairman were cock-a-hoop about that intelligence. When the story was broken in the international press it did the ANC considerable harm.

  It was interesting, if often frustrating, and it certainly beat working in Military Intelligence headquarters in Pretoria. But Harker did not enjoy his work involving the anti-apartheid movement: keeping track of their plans, compiling dossiers on their activists, looking for ways to discredit them or minimize their impact. During the time Harker spent in Washington learning the ropes, Dupont ordered him to organize a burglary of the Anti-Apartheid League’s offices in New York, as a training exercise. The salesmen copied every computer disk, thus getting a mountain of information, then wiped the original disks clean, leaving the League’s administration and financial affairs in a shambles. Dupont and the Chairman were delighted with the information they got, but Harker studied it and couldn’t see what the excitement was about: sure, the burglary produced thousands of names of members, their addresses and telephone numbers, much correspondence between branches about fund-raising plans, proposed protest marches, lobbying of congressmen, reams of bank statements – but so what? There wasn’t mention of one spy, one arms cache, one target, one battle, let alone one revolution. Harker considered the Anti-Apartheid Leaguers a harmless bunch: they made a lot of noise but it was mostly a case of thundering to the converted. Indeed Harker sympathized with them – he didn’t approve of apartheid either. However, when he settled down in New York he studied the many dossiers on activists that Felix Dupont had compiled, updated them with new information received from his salesmen and passed it all back to Washington. He considered it a waste of effort, and found it distasteful to be prying into people’s private lives looking for peccadilloes with which to haunt them; but Dupont was very strict about keeping the files up to date. Dupont supported apartheid as vehemently as he hated communism and scorned blacks.

  ‘No, I don’t hate blacks,’ he once said, ‘I just have contempt for their politics and government. They cannot govern – look at the mess the rest of Africa is. Why? Three reasons. One, their culture – it’s totally different to ours, they see the civil service as an opportunity for power and enriching themselves – an opportunity for corruption. Two, Affirmative Action – they want to put black faces behind every desk to give jobs to their own race, so corporals become colonels overnight, constables become commissioners, clerks become magistrates. Stupid black pride makes them insist that black upstarts can do any job as well as any experienced white man. The result – shambles and corruption. And three: they then fuck up the entire economy by turning the country into a Marxist one-party dictatorship.’ Dupont snorted. ‘No black is ever going to rule me. And that’s what makes the anti-apartheid activists so important to us – they want the blacks to rule South Africa, which means that they are supporting the communists who want to ride to power on the backs of the blacks. Over my dead body! So keep those files strictly up to date, please.’

  So Harker did. And it was through this diligence that he again encounered Josephine Valentine.

  Security is always a problem for the spymaster: where does he keep the secret files so that nobody will find them or even suspect they exist? In his own country his office is in some government building, in foreign lands it is deep in the innards of his country’s embassy or consular office; but in the case of the Civil Cooperation Bureau no South African ambassador, consul or clerk even knew of its existence. So Harker’s spymaster office was off the basement boiler-room of Harvest House in Gramercy Park. On Dupont’s instructions Harker had installed a brand-new boiler that would not require attention for years and he hired a different company to install a steel door leading off it to a ‘storage room’. From that room another steel door, behind shelves of odds and ends, led to the Civil Cooperation Bureau’s New York espionage centre. Here Harker had a desk, a computer, filing cabinets, a telephone and fax line in the name of a fictitious insurance broker, and a shredding machine. There was no window: the walls were raw stone, the floor plain concrete. Standing orders required Harker to be in this neon-lit subterranean cell at seven o’clock every morning, before Harvest opened for business, to receive NTKs (Need-to-know Situation reports), to transmit SEEMs (Scrambled Encoded E-Mail reports), and to make any RTCs (Restricted Telephonic Communications) using codes or a litany of ENAVs (encoded nouns, adjectives and verbs) to report what the dark world of espionage had come up with in the last twenty-four hours.

  Harker found this regime no hardship: his military training caused him to wake naturally at five a.m. no matter how late he went to bed; he pulled on a tracksuit and for the next hour he jogged through the dark concrete canyons of Manhattan, taking it gently so as not to strain his damaged leg; six o’clock saw him having breakfast at his favourite ‘all-nite dinette’ off Union Square, seven saw him showered and besuited at his desk in his bleak cell ready to put in a couple of hours’ work for the South African Defence Force, even if it only meant ploughing through reams of boring and insignificant detail about the private lives of members of the devilish Anti-Apartheid League.

  But Harker did not find the fat dossier that Dupont had compiled over the years on Josephine Franklin Valentine boring. On the contrary, he found it fascinating, exotic. He felt as if he knew her personally. And hadn’t he saved her life? He had survived her furious attempted murder of him, had seen her thrust the pistol at her beautiful breast, seen the shocking splotch of blood, seen her blown backwards, arms outflung as if crucified. He had dragged himself over to her, blood pumping from his shoulder and thigh, put his ear to her bloody breast, heard her heart still beating; he had stuffed his field emergency dressing into her shocking wound, then plunged his mouth on to hers to force some air into her lungs – it was he who had yelled for the medics and ordered them to evacuate her on the first helicopter. Jack Harker felt he had saved her life even if in truth it was the medics who had done that. And what South African soldier would have let a white woman bleed to death on a black battlefield when medics were swarming around – particularly a beautiful half-naked, English-speaking woman who could obviously give her captors a lot of military intelligence about the Cuban enemy?

  But Josephine Valentine had not told anybody anything. Harker had tried to question her while the medics were loading her on to the stretcher, tried to find out how many tanks and armoured cars the Cubans had down the road, to discover the name of the dead Cuban officer she was so upset about, and she had repeatedly told him to ‘fuck off’ – even when he asked her for the name of her next of kin in case she died. She had even refused to tell him her blood group. ‘I don’t want you to save my fucking life, asshole, haven’t you noticed?’

  Nor did the Military Intelligence boys back at base camp in South West Africa have any success with her when she recovered consciousness after surgery, thou
gh her language improved. ‘Get lost,’ she said, ‘I demand to see the American Ambassador,’ and when the Intelligence boys had developed her numerous rolls of film and tried to question her about faces and equipment depicted therein she had demanded a lawyer, and told them she and her numerous high-powered publishers were going to sue the South African government to Kingdom Come. In short, Military Intelligence didn’t know how to squeeze information from a furious, beautiful American journalist with a wound in her breast – Military Intelligence was accustomed to black terrorist captives who quickly spilt the beans under a bit of robust interrogation and they didn’t have the nerve to third-degree information from a well-known American photo-journalist. General Tanner himself had flown out from Pretoria to try to deal with her; he had eventually called in the most senior CIA operative of the Angolan desk all the way from Lusaka, but even their formidable combined expertise failed to extract information and they had finally thankfully delivered her into the custody of the American Ambassador and her father, a big-wheel lawyer from Boston who arrived with a crack of thunder and placed her in a private clinic in Pretoria pending her deportation as an Undesirable Alien. She had refused even to divulge the identity of .her dead Cuban lover. Harker had felt almost proud of her when General Tanner had told him what a load of trouble she was. A very desirable Undesirable.

  That was over two years ago, and now here she was back in his life as he sat in his dungeon in Harvest House reading her thick file. The beautiful Josephine Franklin Valentine smiled at him ravishingly from the pages of many magazine and newspaper cuttings containing her war photographs and stories – wars in Israel, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola: wherever men made war Ms Josephine Valentine went in with her cameras blazing, her typewriter pounding out the staccato Hemingwayesque prose. Very good, lean, evocative writing – you could almost smell the blood and dust and cordite. She evidently loved the high drama of war, the strange business of going into battle, the extraordinary courage it required; she obviously deeply admired the men who did all this for a living when they could be making lots more money in a nice air-conditioned office. Yet she was very liberal, and a strict political analyst. She bitterly condemned the South African government but she was also condemnatory of the Russians for invading Afghanistan; she sympathized with the Israelis, admired their fighting men; she was dismissive of the Arabs as soldiers while very sympathetic to the Palestinians’ cause. She had a high opinion of the Egyptians for making peace with the Jews, and there was a splendid photograph of her sitting in Gaddafi’s ceremonial tent drinking camel’s milk, earnestly discussing his holy Jihad against the West, but in her story she blasted him as an enemy of mankind, particularly for the Lockerbie Disaster bomb. She had great admiration for the Rhodesians as soldiers, as Davids taking on the Goliaths of Russia and China, but she condemned most of their politicians as constituting a ‘cowboy government’. She applauded the Cuban army for fighting the South Africans in Angola – indeed it was she who had deeply embarrassed the President of the United States by revealing to the world that America was waging a secret war on the side of pariah South Africa against the communists, thus causing both countries to pull out of Angola for several years. But now the whole Western world was covertly on the side of the South Africans to drive the Cubans out of Africa, the war was at full blast again and Josephine Valentine was there, boots and all, sweat-stains on her khaki outfit, dust sticking to her face, blonde hair awry, stealing the show with her photographs and stories – until the Bassinga raid that Harker had led.