The Falklands Intercept

by Crispin Black

  Bradshaw gave him a distinctly odd look but quickly summoned one of the women on the forensic team. Sure enough the tiny memory stick was still on her body – hung on a small gold chain, tucked sideways for extra security into her bra. It was a small thing, but in it had been wrapped up all the hopes of this young Cambridge don. Hopes for professional advancement and glamour and fame. All come to nothing now.

  There was some argument with poor Chief Inspector Bradshaw over Jacot taking possession of the memory stick, only resolved after another telephone call to the Chief Constable. Some might have got a kick out of invoking the Official Secrets Act or aggressively dropping Lady Nevinson’s name. Jacot just found it depressing. Ultimately, he didn’t approve of a secret official world and he hated the arrogance of the modern state – at its most arrogant in matters of state security. And he felt sorry for Bradshaw. After a little gentle toing and froing the deal Bradshaw laid down, quite rightly, was that Jacot could take immediate possession of a copy of the data made by the Cambridge Police’s computer laboratory but that the original belonged to the police investigation. Jacot readily agreed, adding that under no circumstances should the original be surrendered to anyone else – not even GCHQ. Of course Jacot meant “especially” not GCHQ. This triggered something in Bradshaw who appeared to realise that Jacot and the National Security Adviser had no intention of concealing anything or trying to change the course of the investigation. The memory stick was sent away to be copied at the police station a few hundred yards away and Bradshaw handed Jacot a copy before he left the crime scene.

  Jacot walked back to St James’. A police forensic team was already in attendance; no doubt forewarned by the newly co-operative Bradshaw, Jacot was waved through the cordon and allowed into Charlotte’s rooms accompanied by a policewoman. The rooms were not as grand as the sets allocated to Verney or even Jacot. There was no river view and no gilding. They were pleasant nevertheless and immaculately clean and tidy. Charlotte had decorated the room with six 18th-century prints of her college at Oxford. Her bed was covered in a dark blue duvet. As fellow of a Cambridge college she found it amusing to underline her Oxonian antecedents. The room was exactly as Jacot had expected it – a fairly ordinary junior fellow’s set with the personality and habits of its occupant imprinted on a neutral background.

  The police forensic team were clearly going through the motions. The rooms were neat and tidy and bore no traces of having been forcibly entered or thoroughly searched. They were much as Charlotte had left them before embarking on her last journey to the Scott-Wilson Institute. He spoke briefly to the policewoman in charge who confessed that, as the rooms were not technically a crime scene, they would seal them off for a few days until Detective Chief Inspector Bradshaw had had a good snoop around and then release them back to the college.

  Jacot was suspicious. It takes one to know one – the rooms had been searched meticulously and methodically by a team of professionals. He had carried out the same procedure himself in Northern Ireland years ago, against the clock. One man would remain on look-out outside. Two men would break into the house or office usually belonging to a senior IRA figure who would have been detained by the police for a few hours on some trumped up offence or other. The RUC’s favourite was usually “Thought to be in possession of illegally distilled alcohol”; ironic given that the police themselves distilled the best moonshine or poteen north of the border. The version made with pear drops was particularly prized by the British Army.

  The first action would be to take Polaroid photographs of the lay out of the room as an aide memoire. It was easy to forget small details when in a hurry – exactly how were the copies of An Phoblacht (The Republic) the IRA’s over-the-top but sometimes well written propaganda journal stacked by the filing cabinet, or the precise lay out of a tray of pipes, tobacco and pipe cleaners. They would also check for basic security measures – was there a hair or a small piece of paper laid in a certain way on the handle of a briefcase, say? The most popular defensive trick was to insert a small piece of paper inside a book on a certain page. Searchers in a hurry had a tendency to flip through books and it was easy enough for the piece of paper to slip out and be replaced between the wrong pages. Luckily, the British intelligence teams had been well-trained and were able to spot the techniques. They were useful even, as they contributed to a sense of false security among the IRA capos. But the biggest danger for even a highly trained, highly experienced team was the temptation to overtidy once the search was complete. When restoring a room, supposedly to the status quo ante the spooks breaking in, it was almost impossible to resist the temptation to impose order – squaring off magazines and books on tables for instance or straightening books on a shelf – like an obsessive housewife.

  Even the best-trained search teams made mistakes. The team that went through Charlotte’s room must have been under immense time pressure. Charlotte’s sitting room certainly had that overtidied look.

  But to confirm Jacot would look in the bathroom. It was small and the shelves were crammed with an immense array of scents, creams and potions. These were difficult to search properly without leaving a trace. The usual procedure would be to open each pot and insert a knitting needle, or something similar, to probe for anything concealed below. But the knitting needle invariably left a little bobble of disturbance on the surface of the cream or potion. Impossible for an unsuspecting layman to detect but glaringly obvious to the trained eye, particularly in an unused pot of cream or gel. The policewoman gave him some plastic gloves and Jacot unscrewed a pot of some kind of make-up remover. It was half-used but the bobble was there. Same detail in another pot.

  Just to be sure, he wanted to check the lavatory cistern. Search teams always checked the lavatory cistern. It was felt to be an excellent hiding place for guns or drugs. But there was one catch to taking the lid off a cistern – because it was so rarely done as part of the everyday cleaning of a bathroom there was usually dust beneath the rim which would then fall onto the water below. A really on the ball team would have known this and flushed it away. But Jacot would need one of the forensic team to help. Bradshaw by this time had arrived. He explained the procedure to the chief inspector who quickly instructed one of his Scenes of Crimes Officers. First she checked the cistern for fingerprints of which there were none, itself suspicious. Then she carefully but vigorously applied a small hand hoover to the underside of the cistern rim. Finally she set up a powerful fluorescent light in the room and lifted the lid off as carefully as she could. There was a thin barely discernible coating of dust on the surface of the water. With the fluorescent light you couldn’t miss it.

  Jacot was in a quandary. What he needed was not a Provincial Police Scenes of Crime team, however skilled, but a specialist search team from the intelligence services or The Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Lady Nevinson could have one despatched in minutes but could they be trusted? The army people almost certainly, but it would mean going through a couple of layers at least of leaky military bureaucracy. As for the intelligence people, they would ultimately be loyal to their own bosses and to them alone. If it was not in their interest to uncover evidence of the presence of another intelligence agency then they would find nothing, officially at least.

  The innocent and unworldly Charlotte Pirbright, her head full of romantic visions of her hero “Captain S”, had really belonged to another age. There was something trusting, enthusiastic and optimistic about her that would have suited Edwardian England. With those looks she would have married well and been free to pursue a private academic career. No doubt about that, thought Jacot. Poor child, she simply had no idea what she had got involved with once Verney began to share with her snippets of highly classified intelligence. Men and women could be murdered, tortured or worse “disappeared” for certain kinds of information. She would have known that. How could anyone not know in the years of the “911 Wars”, as one historian was already calling them.

  She had one fundamental naiveté, had made o
ne crucial mistake. She didn’t realise that the compromises even the good guys have to make in the intelligence world – the world the other side of the green baize door as Lady Nevinson liked to call it – could build up over time into something much more than a ruthless but proportionate operational pragmatism. Ruthlessness builds on and feeds off ruthlessness. Each time the intelligence cycle turned full circle it was spun with more energy and cruelty – to keep ahead of the other side. The process was the same in all countries. Those who considered themselves the guardians of freedom and democracy, and those who revelled in their reputations as brutal and feared secret policemen used the same time-honoured process: Direction – Collection – Processing – Analysis – Dissemination. And for both types the ultimate destination usually ended up the same: everyone an enemy, everyone a target – even Charlotte. Jacot pretty much had the picture now. He knew at last who he was up against.

  It was a small comfort that even in her innocence she had outwitted their opponents by carrying the memory stick on her person. The orders appeared to have been kill the girl and search her rooms for what they wanted, or wanted back. No one seems to have planned for the fact that what they wanted, or at least a copy of it, was actually on her person. She had pulled off the oldest intelligence trick in the book, hiding a high value item in plain sight. Jacot was re-assured that his opponents might not be quite as good as they thought they were. They made mistakes under pressure or out of over-confidence.

  Both these were factors in the basic error Jacot himself was about to make. He walked down the staircase into the court and took out his scarlet Cabinet Office iPhone. He punched an 11 figure code into the handset and waited a few seconds. The Magenta facility was enabled. It was the first time Jacot had used it. But he had to be absolutely sure that no one could hear what he was saying.

  He rang Lady Nevinson’s special number. When she replied he asked her a short question – just eight words in all. She replied with the single word ‘Yes’ and broke the connexion.

  Jacot was right to trust the Magenta facility. It was unbreakable. No outside agency could decipher written or voice messages in Magenta. He did not fully understand the technology behind it except that it had been a joint Franco-British venture. But not being able to understand a conversation is a very different matter from not knowing that the conversation is taking place at all. In a darkened room at an airbase not far from Cambridge a young signals operator alerted the officer supervising his shift – an individual in Cambridge and an individual in London were having a short conversation using a heavily encoded signal that their best analysts and most powerful computers could not decipher. The officer made a special entry under the ‘Unusual Occurrences’ paragraph of his daily report and despatched it up the chain of command, taking care to give it a higher classification than was normal.

  Back in her office overlooking Downing Street Lady Nevinson initially felt a wave of satisfaction that Jacot appeared at last to be coming to some solid conclusions about the murder of General Verney. And it was murder. She was also pleased at the existence of the Magenta facility. She had long felt uncomfortable about the so-called secure communications in Downing Street. Given that often we seemed capable of listening in to the most sensitive communications of other countries she could never quite believe that some of them weren’t able to do the same to us. But she knew that no one could break Magenta.

  If the Verney case was unfolding as she thought it might, she was going to be thankful for absolutely secure communications with the people she needed to speak to. She might have to issue some very austere and uncompromising instructions – bleak even. Illegal even. Worse, the instructions might have to contravene some of the basic ground rules of British intelligence work. And then a terrible feeling of foreboding overtook her. Who guards the guardians? Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? The phrase went round and round inside her head like the scrap of a pop tune or a jingle that just won’t go away. It was Juvenal she remembered from her undergraduate days and he used the phrase about trying to keep randy Roman wives faithful. If only it were about that today she thought. It was a simple question and it never went away. Suddenly she felt alone. What if Jacot was wrong? In a way she hoped he was.

  XX

  The Scott-Wilson Austral Studies Institute, Cambridge

  – Director’s Office

  The Scott-Wilson Austral Studies Institute had been founded with the excess money from the various popular appeals to help the relatives of those who died with Scott. Scott’s last written words had been after all ‘For God’s sake look after our people’ and those in authority certainly had done so. Jacot had an appointment with its director, another Cambridge professor, a Professor Stapley. Apparently, he had something of interest – he had certainly sounded excited on the telephone. Jacot left the warm fire in his rooms reluctantly and set off for his meeting.

  It was an icy night. A sharp wind from the east cut across Cambridge making it feel even colder – a good night to be abroad on Antarctic business. Jacot walked briskly towards the Institute, about half a mile from St James’. Looking up as he walked through the gate a few minutes later he saw the institute’s motto carved into the wall and illuminated by spotlights. Quaesivit Arcana Poli Videt Dei – translated it meant: “He sought the secret of the Pole but found the hidden face of God.” Part Edwardian sentimentalizing, part moving tribute to Captain Scott, it was certainly not the feeling Scott himself experienced at the Pole. His journal entry for Wednesday, January 17th 1912 the day they reached the Pole was bleaker altogether:

  “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”

  If anything, Scott found the power of humanity and comradeship in his Antarctic travels and the wonder of the natural world rather than any sense or glimpse of an Almighty. It is not at all clear who Scott’s “Great God” was. To be frank it was more likely some kind of oath than an address to any deity. Scott was a great man undoubtedly, but not a Christian in the conventional sense.

  Professor Stapley ushered Jacot into his office. On the back wall was a huge oil painting of the moment that Captain Oates staggered from the tent to his death. The tent looked tiny and insignificant against the immense white background of an Antarctic storm, but the artist had somehow managed to portray an identifiable human being – Oates’s handsome features were clearly there, half-hidden by his reindeer skin hood. His mother never forgave Captain Scott whom she, unfashionably then, blamed for the disaster.

  Professor Stapley shook Jacot by the hand and ushered him to a chair by the side of his desk. ‘Thank you for coming. Terrible business about young Charlotte Pirbright. Awful and here in the institute too. I hope the authorities find the culprit. I understand that you are sort of attached to the investigation. Hush, hush and all that because of Verney. Dreadful. She was a sweet girl. Awful. Do you have any idea who could have done such a cruel thing? First let me give you a glass of whisky. It’s a raw and grim night even for polar scientists. Whyte and Mackay – it’s the modern version of the stuff Shackleton took with him in 1909.’

  Stapley drank his whisky in one gulp and poured another. He looked pretty shaken up, poor man. Jacot looked him straight in the eye and said ‘I have a theory, yes. But if we are going to get to the bottom of this I need to know more about her research. There might be something about what they were looking into that could have contributed to both Verney’s, and now Charlotte Pirbright’s, deaths.’

  ‘I think I can help’, said Stapley drinking his whisky. ‘In general terms they were looking into the navigational instruments used by both Amundsen and Scott – the techniques, metallurgical properties, records and so on with a view to pronouncing on their accuracy. I have had a look at the documents recovered from the memory stick you gave me. They are extraordinarily interesting. I may have worked out what it was in their research that was so startling – but I can’t prove it and it’s only a theory. If I am right, then I can see
quite clearly why they went to some lengths to protect the information. They had stumbled upon one of the most stunning secrets or misunderstandings about Antarctic exploration. It was dynamite and would have made any book they had written a global bestseller. The historical importance of such a revelation would have led to fame and fortune.’

  ‘Would someone murder for it?’ asked Jacot.

  ‘That’s more difficult’, replied Stapley. ‘But let me take you through my theory. So Colonel Jacot, what do you know about Scott’s last expedition?’

  ‘Quite a lot, I think. Anyone who has travelled South feels the pull of the Antarctic and the heroic age of its first explorers. If you are a patriotic Englishman, Captain Scott is the logical man to look into. In any case, English boys born before the iron curtain of political correctness descended over our past would be familiar with aspects of the Scott epic – just about every preparatory school in the sixties and seventies had a dormitory or a house named after Scott. My particular institution certainly had one. Plus a Wellington, a Nelson, a Wolfe and a Havelock. I was in Wolfe I remember and rather proud of it. Most of us had seen the 1948 film with John Mills in the lead role. Not my idea of Scott at all – too tortured, too wooden. And casting James Robertson Justice as poor old Petty Officer Evans was a piece of vandalism.’

  ‘But the music was extraordinary, and the photography too’, said Stapley.

  ‘Yes, but watching it again as an adult I can see that there was no effort made to understand Scott. His character is at the heart of the tragedy and we come away from the film none the wiser. It wasn’t a heroic portrayal but there were no other signposts about what sort of a man he was. Most unsatisfactory. In some ways the enigma remains. You know as well as I do that despite private criticism at the time Captain Oates, whose last moments grace the back wall of your office, in particular, seemed to have fallen out with him. His letters to his mother were most uncomplimentary. Nevertheless, despite the torrent of aggressive revisionism since the 1960s it remains true that many of the heavy-weights on the last expedition were absolutely devoted to him, including Wilson and Bowers who perished alongside their leader. But anyway.’