by Gil Hogg
“What was the problem?”
“Inexperience.”
I was going to respond that that was what rookies would inevitably suffer from at C3, but instead I contemplated my own inexperience. “Was that anything to do with his death?”
“I think the file’s closed on Nick Stavros.” Gerry Clark’s doughy features showed no expression. He was preoccupied manoeuvering the car.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Right. You shouldn’t.”
It struck me that Clark had made an unintentional slip. He could have said Nick’s death was because of a one in a million physical infirmity. He could have denied outright that Nick’s death had anything to do with C3, but he didn’t… But my attention was now captured by the new apartment in Glover Park, which was at the top of a four-storey apartment house, and overlooked an old, now disused cemetery, quiet, high-ceilinged and light. Cemetery or not, the area was spaciously green with many trees and the occasional fine mansion; a stark contrast to my Greenwich Village pad.
“Reminds me of something, the cemetery,” I said.
Clark had no sense of humour and ignored me. “We’ll deck this out for you. You know, whatever you want within reason.”
“Regs, huh?” I guessed there was a thick book of regulations about the accommodation of personnel, as there was in MI6.
“We don’t bother too much with that stuff here.”
So far, for me in MI6, everything had been by the book, from the width of my desk to my economy class plane fares. I began to anticipate not only a fascinating assignment, but an enjoyable one, particularly when Clark rounded out my tour of inspection with an invitation to dinner at his apartment. What a contrast to my frigid colleagues in London and New York!
The Clark apartment was tucked away in a leafy lane near the campus of the Georgetown University, overlooking the Potomac. Carol Clark, Gerry’s wife, with her green eyes and below-the-shoulder fair hair, greeted me. She had an enveloping physical presence and immediately interested me. Inside, the apartment was airy and chic – definitely showing the hand of a skilled decorator with a generous budget. A glance at the dinner table through the glass doors of the dining room indicated that there would be a few guests.
Gerry Clark bustled into the lounge and introduced me to a man who had been hovering over the bookcase. “Otto, this is Roger Conway, our new recruit from England, Otto Reich. Otto has a visiting professorship at Georgetown. He’s a Harvard man.”
I recognised the smoothly groomed Dr Reich instantly as the tousled and slightly drunk party player at Wimpole Street, and more important, according to Carl Bolding, the man I could trust in the last resort. Reich offered a hand and a weak smile, but made no move to recognise me. And of course, I followed his cue. We were apparently strangers. It was the first crumb of cloak and dagger.
Harold and Felicity Kershaw arrived. Clark explained that I would be working with Harold. I instinctively disliked him. He had a long body, a beaten-up face, a thin layer of grey hair, small eyes, and large hands. He also proved to be boring and graceless. I guessed he was an agent who had spent a lot of time in foreign fields. His tiny, pleasant wife seemed to defer to him fearfully, and he had the misfortune to look cruel.
Carol Clark had a French cook, Mme Ducane, who served golden melon with prawns, Roquefort salad and filet mignon, with Cotes-du-Rhone, followed by strawberries with a Muscat de Beaume. At the table we discussed much except our common profession. In the shuffling between courses and afterwards, I had the opportunity to speak to Carol alone on the terrace.
“I’m looking forward to the Washington posting,” I said, I suppose hinting that my mind wasn’t entirely on the work I would be doing.
She searched the river, the breeze ruffling her hair and seemed depressed. She said, “Washington’s a great town, but that’s one of the problems for me. Gerry likes to stick to the firm when it comes to entertaining. Official dinners. Instead of having fun. We live quietly. I spend my time picking the kids up from school and ferrying them around to various clubs and games, under the hairdryer, on the massage table, or flexing my credit card in the boutiques.”
As we went inside, she said, “Are you married, Roger?”
“No. I have a girlfriend who visits DC every few weeks.”
Gerry Clark overheard us. “Why don’t you help Roger get his place in shape, Carol? Take him shopping.”
Carol agreed, and by the time we were on the third cognac, the arrangement was sealed.
My only contact with Dr Reich, table-talk apart, was a few words as we bumped into each other going to the bathroom. “When you leave tonight, don’t go by cab. Walk down the road, and pick up a cab later,” he said quietly.
When the time came to depart, I refused a ride with the Kershaws, let them get away, and then followed Reich into the tree lined street. He said he was staying nearby and we walked together silently for a hundred yards. We were now alone and out of sight of the Clark apartment.
“This is a number where you can reach me from a public phone by leaving a voice message,” Reich said, passing a slip of paper. “Memorise it and destroy the paper. The number is probably not secure. All you can do is give me the degree of urgency on a code between one and ten, and I’ll get back to you. For the moment, we’ll have one meeting place which I will use when needed – the steps of the John Adams Building on this campus. Your code name is Wolf.”
“Wolf?” I said, wonderingly, pleased at the connotations of the name. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold… his cohorts gleaming in purple and gold… I thought that was how it went.
“The most you should have to do, Conway, is to say ‘Five’ on the tape, or whatever the urgency is. I hope you don’t have to call me, ever. Most times, I’ll be in touch with you. The code name is for any other situation when you may need to identify yourself. When I want you, I’ll get through in a variety of ways depending on the circumstances, but if you receive a message with a nine in it, meet me in twenty-four hours at the Adams Building. Have you got that?”
“Certainly. Can you tell me anything about the… mission, sir?”
“This is where I’m staying, Conway. Goodnight.” Dr Reich slipped between the shrubs on a lawn, and disappeared behind a hedgerow fronting a large, detached house.
Later, I treated myself to another cognac from the minibar in my room at the Sheraton, and lay in bed thinking about the evening. Carol Clark added a certain frisson to the proceedings. Kershaw seemed almost threatening. Gerry Clark was a nonentity. Reich had set up a framework of contact without ever referring to the mission. In fact no clear task had ever been defined for me by Bolding, Reich or Clark. The core of the job was a black hole. And I naturally dismissed the mischievous ravings of Marius Jacob about suicide bombers. But, I had my controller, the mysterious Professor Reich, and my code name. Roger James Elliston Conway, Rugby and Oxford, ex-SAS, codenamed Wolf.
“Ahhwoooo… ” I howled out loud, as I settled down to a dreamless sleep.
8
I found the workplace at Georgetown congenial, having come from a functional glass-partitioned cage in New York, and a dark corner on a spotty couch in London. The thickly beige-carpeted room was lit by two tall, sunny windows with long, muted floral drapes. The three computer screens and three telephones at the side added a serious touch to the comfortably padded chairs around a long honey oak table. When I entered on the first morning, Yarham was waving a wand over the walls like a medicine man. He raised his finger to his lips for silence.
While I pondered whether this suspicion of our American cousins was justified, Yarham toured the surfaces of the room with his bug detector. Eventually, he waved to me. He pointed to the elaborate chrome central light fitting, and to one of the computers with a huge grin. The bugs were in there.
My expansive feelings subsided. For the benefit of our listeners, I confined myself to a short eulogy on the excellence of our welcome, the quality of the office arrangements made fo
r us, and what a friendly and personable man Gerry Clark was, and took Yarham for a walk around the library lawn off Wisconsin Avenue.
“What do you make of it?”
“They want to make sure you’re loyal, sir.”
“We can’t really remove the devices, or raise issues about them, can we?”
“Not without inviting them to bug us in some other way. Look on the bright side. We can communicate with them via the bugs.”
“Who is them, Yarham?”
Yarham turned to me, rolling his blue eyes. “Colonel Clark?”
“I guess so.” I was thinking that my apartment needed sweeping. Giving a more or less public performance from my bedroom, should Carol Clark happen to press her charms on me, was something to be avoided.
I knew from MI6 briefings that the euphemistically named Special Collection Service had a history going back to 1978. What the service collected was foreign cryptographic codes, ciphers and communication information. What was special about the service was that its methods were not restricted to surveillance, but included human intelligence, humint in the jargon of the spy world, gathered by unlawful means, often breaking and entering. The SCS operated worldwide, and Gerry Clark was head of the US operations. Although one would never have guessed it from his bearing or dress, Clark was having a distinguished military career, and had arrived at C3 from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Underneath the bacon was an acute mind.
Clark drove with Yarham and me to the SCS quarters at Beltsville in Maryland and showed us the live room where the electronic environment of target buildings is recreated to test surveillance equipment. But, as he explained darkly, “The wheel has turned. Interception of signals in air or space is being made more difficult each day by advancing technology. You’d think it would get easier as technology advances, but no, because the means to intercept signals advances at the same or a greater rate.”
“So we have to go back to the guy in the fedora and grubby raincoat,” I said.
“Yeah. You’ll be looking for information at rest in databases or hard copy files. It takes the intervention of a human being to capture it. There’s a lot of work out there for us, Roger.”
I had the feeling that Clark was forewarning me of the kind of clandestine operation in which I would be involved.
My briefings in London had prepared me, up to a point, for the immensity of the operations of the National Security Agency, the biggest and most penetrating listening system in the world, but I could not have truly comprehended Crypto City until the day Clark, Yarham and I drove further north up Interstate 95 in Maryland to visit it.
We first had to progress through shields of razor wire, past bomb-sniffing dogs, past barriers, personal checkpoints and signs with dire warnings, before emerging in the surveillance city. Clark waved at the forest of tall buildings. “There’s over thirty thousand specially cleared civilians, military and contractors here. The NSA have another twenty-five thousand in listening posts spread around the world. That’s not counting your GCHQ. ”
“I expect you can’t fart here without it being recorded,” Yarham said.
“You’re darn right,” Clark said, but he was on another wavelength, engrossed.
His eyes glinted behind his spectacles. The vastness of Crypto City still impressed him, like a kid meeting Santa Claus in a store. He was showing the place off and he loved it. “You’re one big palooka when you get near the top of this heap of shit,” he said.
Clark himself wasn’t all that far from the top, highly placed enough to feel big, and that might have been what he meant. He parked the car and took us to a building pretentiously fronted with white marble and red granite, which might have been an insurance company or a bank. We were entering through the Visitor Control Centre, the lobby dominated by a huge embossed version of the NSA seal on the wall, an eagle clutching the key of knowledge. While we were waiting for a clearance to enter (there were three separate barriers to penetrate, including one which operated on retina recognition and another on fingerprints) Clark remarked that there were seven hundred police in the local force, a SWAT team and a special operations unit of paramilitaries. “They call them The Men in Black. Bin Laden’s pals aren’t going to make it here. Feel safe, guys.”
Yarham and I were given special clearance through the barriers on an advance authorisation arranged by Clark. We pinned on our PV, privileged visitor badges and entered the throng of blue badges of the indoctrinated. We were in a reflective glass and copper-wrapped building sixty-eight stories high, shielded from all sounds and signals. Clark gave us guidance in a low monotone, every step of the way. We traversed long halls, passed many closed office doors with numbers and letters on them, but no comprehensible names or signs. The walls had a variety of notices all counselling the same behaviour: don’t talk.
Clark led us into a suite of small rooms with tan-coloured walls, each with a computer on the desk, bristling with cables and wires and a battery of monitor screens. He faced us with mirthless enjoyment, like a torturer, which is what he might have been at some stage in his espionage career.
“Polygraph. Compulsory for NSA employees at your level and includes secondees like you guys. You’ll be in this room, Roger, Herbie in the next. The operator has your personal file.”
The very word polygraph, or lie detector, makes intelligence people uneasy because we are all liars. However my fears of the great machine, much relied on by the Americans, had been put at ease by MI6, which gave an excellent course in how to beat the lie detector. MI6 thought it possible that the polygraph could be part of an interrogation by an unfriendly power, and we should therefore be prepared to defeat it.
When you are hooked up in the electric chair, a computer plots the anxiety around sensitive questions, and displays the level of anxiety on a graph; it takes its measurements from the skin, the blood pressure, the capillaries, the veins, the heart rate, the breath – everything that can change with anxiety.
I was packed into a padded seat, with electrodes attached to my fingers, straps around my chest and upper arm, like a candidate for execution. Now the examiner, a middle-aged woman wearing dark glasses (I think because she wanted to shield any emotions she might show), began to question me, and watch the reactions created by my answers on the various monitors. First, the routine about my name, address… and then more specific questions to test honesty, and political reliability. The MI6 theory, basically, was to lie back and think of England, to be as little involved as possible. I knew it worked, because I had already had practice tests and passed them all. My own life was such a rich tapestry of lies that there was no point in getting agitated about any particular one of them, starting with my name.
After the test, Yarham was confident; outwitting technical gadgets was his game, and Clark, without mention of the results, guided us to a more exclusive suite on the thirtieth floor, where we were again checked and identified. While we were waiting, Clark took a brief call. He gave us a humourless grin as he put the receiver down. “You know, we have a computerised assessment on the poly which only takes a few moments. You guys are both NSRs.” He didn’t elaborate, but I knew that meant No significant response.
We were shown into a small, luxuriously cushioned lecture theatre. Clark sat with us in the soft reclining seats, facing a stage with its curtain imprinted with the seal of the eagle and the key. Several other people came in and took seats at the back. Clark had not told me what to expect. After a minute, the doors closed automatically, the lights in the theatre dimmed, and the stirring sounds of the Marine’s Hymn rose to fill the auditorium. I was at the core of the most super-secret place on the planet, shielded by miles of security barriers, police and military, about to become privy to secrets upon which the survival of our way of life depended.
When the spotlight flicked on, a woman had materialised behind the lectern. She seemed to be about forty five, but it was hard to tell under the lights. She was tall, shapely and wore a black costume, a white blouse, and a ruffl
e at her throat. Her black hair was swept up imperiously. Her face was pale and her lipstick violently red. She exuded authority.
“Good afternoon. Let me introduce myself to those of you who haven’t met me. Rachel Fernandez, director of the SCS.” She seemed to pause for applause, but there was only respectful silence. “I want to show you a highly classified film which details some of our operations and I will take questions afterwards.”
The film which followed, with a Beethhoven music track and a voice over by the director herself, trumpeted the surveillance skills of the SCS, and emphasised the vastness and sophistication of the methods of collecting secret data, all kinds of antennae and receivers ingeniously hidden in a myriad of places. The film stressed the dangerous role of agents in collecting data from these sources. I had no questions after the showing, but others had, and I listened to the crisp responses of Ms Fernandez, more for their metallic certainty than the exact content. And then, when Fernandez pointed out the security and quantitative problems of converting online material to hard copy, Yarham stirred beside me.
“Is it true, Madam Director, that enough redundant hard copy intelligence reports are recycled every day to meet the entire daily needs of the nation for pizza containers?” he asked.
A silence fell, and so did the director’s face. Then her lips managed a suggestion of a smile. “There’s a lotta pulping going on, sure.”
Afterwards, Clark shepherded us into an office as big as a hotel lobby to meet the director herself in person. The room was empty and shaded. The director’s wide desk was on a raised platform. Backed by the US flag and the agency’s seal, the high-backed director’s chair might have been that of the Chief Justice.
Yarham leaned over and whispered to me as we settled ourselves. “Nice to be going backstage to meet the star of the show.”
“Now you’re in danger of getting ten years in a federal prison,” I said.
Clark’s spongy brow wrinkled at the impertinence. “The room is miked,” he mouthed quietly, pointing a discreet finger skyward.