by Jon King
The Cut-Out
By Jon King
© Copyright Jon King 2013. All rights reserved. The author hereby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover artwork: Jon King.
Cover image: © Depositphotos.com/Viktor Gladkov.
Cover font: Bebas (thanks to Ryoichi Tsunekawa,
Bagel & Co).
DEDICATION
For Casey
Without whom this book would be pointless
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
Epilogue
Addendum
The identities of some of the characters in this book have been changed to preserve their anonymity. And my life. Several locations, and several events, and to some small extent the chronology of events, have also been changed. Everything else is true.
CUT-OUT: A mechanism or person used to pass information from one agent to another; to create a compartment between members of a covert operation via which material or information can be passed. An intermediary. A go-between. A courier. In more general terms a cut-out is a person or agency used as an unwitting pawn by intelligence services.
CHAPTER 1
Private Members Club, Whitehall—October, 1996
The day Rob Lacey walked into the Sincerity Club on an overcast day in October 1996 was the day that changed my life.
Lacey was a career MI5 officer who specialized in counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation. He was old-school. He’d entered the Service more on principle than ambition: more to help combat the threat posed by the IRA and other terrorist organizations than to run his own, private little empire.
The man he’d come to meet here at this exclusive members’ club, on the other hand, was everything Lacey was not—a ruthless MI6 operative who for the past some years had been head of SIS Special Operations Europe, although his imminent posting to the British Embassy in Paris would officially log him as First Secretary Political, a common cover for undeclared MI6 agents in friendly territories. He was tall and fit with sharpened features and ice-cold eyes. His name was Richard Mason.
“Ah, Robert. Good of you to come.” Dressed in dark city suit and Oxford brogues, Mason stood up from the table and offered Lacey his hand. “Cognac?”
“No thank you.”.
“As you wish. Please, take a seat.”
Lacey would in truth have welcomed a cognac. But he didn’t like Mason. Declining the man’s offer was a point made.
Peeling off his gloves Lacey seated himself and threw a cursory glance around the room.
The twenty or so other members present were mostly nestled on their own, he noted, behind magazines, or broadsheets, or books: or some other form of reading matter. Elsewhere small groups of establishment types chatted surreptitiously among themselves. He felt decidedly out of place in here. The plush leather armchairs, the dark-wood panels, the smoke-veiled alcoves like the one he and Mason occupied now—all added to the air of conspiracy hanging over the musty old place. It was like walking into a John Le Carré novel, he decided, halfway through. It put him on edge.
“So,” he said, knitting his hands and eyeing the man opposite him. “I’m curious. It’s not every day I’m summoned by MI6 special operations.”
“We’d prefer if you thought of it as an invitation,” Mason replied. “Off the record.”
“In my reckoning everything you do is off the record. What is it you people say? No paper trails, no ghosts?”
“No recriminations, Robert. Only results. Nothing else is of any significance.”
“Quite.”
Downing the dregs of his cognac Mason set the empty glass on the table and beckoned to the waiter, who immediately left his duties behind the bar and made strides towards their table. “You’re sure I can’t offer you a cognac? Old times’ sake?”
Lacey gave a single shake of his head: No thank you.
While the waiter served Mason his second Cognac Grande Champagne Vintage 1885 Lacey pondered the old times to which his adversary had just referred.
It was a career-shaping secondment to MI6’s special ops unit some twenty years earlier that had first seen him cross paths with Mason. At the time both were junior officers of their respective agencies, but Mason’s ruthless ambition had been evident enough, even then, and Lacey had quickly grown to dislike the man. And the unit to which he was attached. Indeed, the same ungovernable air exuded by Mason, he’d soon realized, had been evident throughout the entire MI6 special ops unit, and he’d felt no disappointment at all when his secondment had finally ended and he’d been recalled to his post at MI5’s domestic counter-terrorism branch, known in-house simply as ‘T Branch’. The eighteen months he’d spent with MI6 had served his career well enough, he’d be the first to acknowledge that. But he’d been more than happy to put it behind him and move on.
Within six months of returning to MI5 Lacey was transferred to G Branch (MI5’s international counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation division). It was a move he’d been pushing for and one that, as it turned out, kick-started his career for real. Through the course of the following decade and even to the present day he’d scored considerable success in the prevention of weapons-proliferation in countries like Libya, Syria and Yemen, as well as restricting the acquisition of weapons by ‘hostile’ groups like the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah and others. And he’d won a number of recommendations and promotions for his efforts.
He’d also won enemies. In his decade and a half as a counter-terrorism ‘target officer’ he’d engaged virtually every core group within the Islamist mujahideen network, and on occasion had faced up some of its most notorious members. He still figured high on the Hezbollah ‘wanted list’.
But despite that he’d given death more than a second glance, and on more than one occasion; despite that he’d shared the same acre as some of the world’s most dangerous ‘terrorists’, he’d be the first to confess he’d known none more dangerous than the man seated opposite him now, Richard Mason—the man whose special ops mafia had not only fanned the flames of civil war in the former Yugoslavia: they’d also engineered more IRA bombings than Martin McGuinness, more terrorist attacks than Al Qaeda, and Lacey knew it. False flag operations, they called them: covert operations made to look like they’d been carried out by someone else—like the Provisional IRA, for example.
Or al Qaeda.
Oh yes, Lacey knew the dirty games on which Mason had built his career—the very reason he disliked the man with such intensity.
As the waiter made his way back to the bar, having just served Mason his second cog
nac, Lacey closed the door on old times and returned his attention to the present. Mostly, it was where he’d rather be.
“I’d appreciate it if we could get to the point,” Lacey said, as Mason raised his glass to his nose and savoured the complex aroma of its contents. “I take it there is one?”
Swallowing a measure of the vintage cognac, Mason said: “You received the memo?”
Lacey nodded. “It arrived yesterday.”
“Then you’ll know our dilemma.”
“Diana?”
“She’s a nuisance, Robert.”
“She’s always been a nuisance. That’s part of her appeal.”
“To some, perhaps. But the nuisance has become more than a simple irritation. She’s become a problem. That’s a very different matter.”
Lacey didn’t much like where this conversation was heading. “You know, if we put half as much effort into outflanking the Libyans and the IRA as we do harassing the Prince of Wales’ consort, this country would be somewhere to live.”
“I dare say. But she’s no longer the Prince of Wales’ consort, that’s the problem. In case it slipped your mind their divorce became final three months ago.”
The dark shadow that fell in Mason’s eyes as he emphasized those words confirmed what Lacey already knew: something very serious was brewing.
“And the point?” he said. “Why did you invite me here to discuss the Princess of Wales?”
Mason had just dipped his hand in his jacket pocket, and was now holding a regular-sized envelope, brown. He slid it across the table in Lacey’s direction. “We need a courier,” he declared. “Someone to circulate some information.”
“A cut-out?”
“In a sense. Your name came up specifically.”
“Well it shouldn’t have.” He picked up the envelope. “As naive as it may sound to someone of your unforgiving ambition, Richard, my pride as an MI5 officer is in protecting innocent people, not in setting them up.”
“Oh, we’re not asking you to set anybody up, old boy. We’re quite good at doing that, all by ourselves. You’ll see why you’re here when you’ve opened that.”
Cognac in hand, Mason sat back and watched as Lacey started to open the envelope, reluctantly at first, almost nervously, as though by instinct he knew its contents might bite him. He wasn’t wrong. In his hands now was a photograph of a man’s face, a chiselled face with ragged brown hair and bookish eyes, around 40 years of age. It was a face Lacey knew well enough.
“As you can see,” Mason said, draining the last of his cognac. “The person we have in mind—we believe he’s an acquaintance of yours. We believe he’s someone you know.”
CHAPTER 2
I’d known Rob Lacey for close on twenty years. We’d been introduced at one of the local bars in my home town of Sandhurst, and for whatever reason we’d got on pretty well from the outset. I considered him a friend—perhaps not a close friend, but I had his phone number, and he had mine. And in my world that meant we were friends.
On that first occasion, though, Lacey had been in town on business. I knew that. As did everybody else. But then the boundaries between business and pleasure in those days were perhaps less defined than they should have been, particularly when you consider the kind of business Lacey was in. It was the mid-1970s, the days when the West’s post-war superpowers were busy divvying up the spoils they were still pillaging from their former African colonies: the days when the British government in particular was busy recruiting hired hands to do its dirty work in the former Portuguese colony of Angola. Some twenty years later, of course, Angola would become the focus for Princess Diana’s massively publicized landmines campaign. But in 1976 it was making headlines for a different reason. Civil war was raging. Following the country’s recent declaration of independence, a feat achieved only by means of another war, a devastating ‘decolonisation war’ which had ravaged Angola for the previous nineteen years, the country was again in conflict. One war had given way to another. The decolonisation war had given way to civil war. There were resources at stake. Oil, mostly. Vast reserves of the stuff. Diamonds, too. In order to safeguard these interests the British government needed forces on the ground. Not regular forces, of course; no way could regular British soldiers have been seen to fight alongside the opposition forces in another country’s civil war. No. For this war the government needed mercenaries, soldiers for hire.
Which is the reason it sent Lacey to Sandhurst—
“I’m meeting Rob Lacey this morning,” I said to Katie. “He said he could help me out with a story I’m researching. There’s not much Lacey doesn’t know about Angola.”
I was in my office, at home, gathering up my papers, preparing to head up to London for my meeting with Lacey. Katie had just brought me in a cup of coffee.
“Thanks,” I said, kissing Katie on the cheek and gulping down several mouthfuls of sweet black coffee before snapping my attaché case shut and throwing on my jacket. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my…?”
“It’s in your case.”
“My Dictaphone?” I reopened my attaché case. She was right. Of course she was right. There, glaring back up at me from the midst of an unruly stack of papers and sundries, my Dictaphone. What would I do without her?
“What time will you be home?” she said.
“Around tea time.”
“It’s your turn to cook.”
“Then I’ll try and get back sooner.”
Another kiss, this one on the lips, and I swept up my case and headed for the door.
For London. To meet Lacey.
—By the end of the decolonisation war in 1975 Angola’s vast resources were the envy of Western governments, including my government: the British government. Trouble was, these resources were now controlled by the country’s new Marxist regime, the Soviet-backed MPLA. It was the MPLA who’d won power in the wake of the decolonisation war, and who’d won control of the country’s oil fields and diamond mines in the process. This meant that, in order to continue siphoning off cheap Angolan oil, and to maintain its thriving trade in Angola’s blood diamonds, the British government, like its French, South African and American counterparts, was forced to do business with the MPLA—the political faction it had so rigorously opposed during the decolonisation war; the political faction it continued to oppose now, in the civil war.
But here’s the twist. While Britain’s oil and diamond merchants were cosying up to the MPLA, teams of British mercenaries were secretly fighting to overthrow the new regime and hand the reins of power to the opposition forces, UNITA—the political faction the West had funded and armed during the decolonisation war; the political faction it continued to fund and arm now, in the civil war.
Simply put, the situation was a mess—way too messy for the government to openly involve itself; way too lucrative for it to turn its back.
Enter MI6 and its ‘black ops’ mafia. Enter a young, naïve MI5 officer seconded to MI6 to coordinate special ops logistics on behalf of his faceless masters. Truth be told, Lacey was little more than a ‘cut-out’ himself in those days, the government’s unofficial ‘runner’, its errand boy, its undercover liaison man tasked with brokering ‘black asset’ deals between Whitehall and the small group of private security firms on its payroll. One of these private security firms in particular had been set up specifically to supply mercenaries to fight the British government’s dirty war in Angola. This firm was called Security Advisory Services, or SAS for short, and was run out of my home town of Sandhurst by former special forces maverick and self-styled colonel, John Banks, someone I knew well enough.
In fact I knew several of the mercenaries contracted to SAS, largely through my friendship with their younger brothers, with whom I’d grown up. Like Lacey, most of the mercenaries, including Banks, were half a generation older than I was, but a number of them had younger brothers who’d been friends of mine from an early age. We’d hung out together, attended the same schools, the same haunts; we’d playe
d together as kids and partied together as teenagers. On any number of occasions I’d suffered the bragging rights of my friends’ older brothers as they’d recounted their stories of African conquest—of how they’d brought down this or that soviet-backed dictatorship, of how they’d fought in this civil war or brought about that military coup. It was something they seemed to delight in talking big about, especially to us younger boys. And of course, us younger boys took it all on like most young boys would: wide-eyed and awe-struck.
And the flow of information didn’t stop there. By my early twenties I was frequenting the same bars and hangouts as the mercenaries themselves, had actually come to know one or two of them quite well, and on occasion was even party to conversations one might expect would – and should – have been held in secret, behind closed doors.
But Sandhurst didn’t work like that. Sandhurst was a small town with big ears and loose tongues. And consequently, few secrets, especially in those days, before modernity encroached and turned what was then a small, socially incestuous community into the sprawling suburban town it is today. Everyone knew everyone and everyone knew their business—even the kind of business dealt by SAS and Lacey. Perhaps this is why the meetings were held so casually, often over a beer and a game of pool—but always with the unspoken proviso that all present kept schtum about what they might have heard. And needless to say, on pain of some very nasty consequence, all present did precisely that: kept schtum.
Of course, I had no idea back then that these stories, the information they revealed, would provide so much background to my understanding of Princess Diana’s landmines campaign and the can of deadly worms that campaign would threaten to spotlight. At the time the stories meant little to me except that they painted an exciting picture. But it was a picture full of surprises, as I would later discover.