After joining MI6 I discovered that the gangly fellow, Mark Freeman, was from the service. In Buenos Aires he was running what became quite a coup for MI6 against the Argentine navy.
Having failed to predict the invasion of the Falklands Islands in April 1982, the reputation of MI6 in Whitehall nosedived. MI6 set out to avoid repeating the same mistake and threw resources at the region, doubling the size of its station in Buenos Aires, building a chain of listening posts in the Chilean Andes to give early warning of Argentine aircraft movements and opening a new one-man station in Uruguay. Soon a steady stream of intelligence was coming from these efforts.
One piece of intelligence was of particular interest to the DIS (Defence Intelligence Staff) in Whitehall. The Argentines were developing a new and top secret naval mine, made of plastic, rendering it difficult to detect using conventional minesweeping techniques. It contained electronics which enabled it to distinguish the noise-signatures of British and Argentine ships. The DIS regarded the new mine as a dangerous threat and wanted details of its specification. MI6 learned of a French weapons technician who was working on the project in the Rio Gallegos naval base. They successfully recruited him, giving him the codename FORFEIT.
Smuggling the mine out of the Rio Gallegos base was not too difficult as FORFEIT had top-level security clearance and was trusted by the Argentine security guards. He loaded one of the mines into the boot of his car and drove it out of the base, claiming that he was taking it to another naval base in Commodore Rivadavia for sea trials. The hard bit of the operation was smuggling the mine out of Argentina.
Options for getting the mine to the UK were constrained by the need to ensure that the operation was deniable, so MI6 dared not use a submarine to sneak into one of the bays of Argentina's long, unpopulated coastline. MI6 considered recruiting a pilot to fly the mine across the River Plate to Uruguay in a light aircraft, and that was why Freeman had been disappointed to learn of the Luscombe's feeble capacity. In the end, an MI6 officer working under cover as a Danish chemical engineer rendezvoused with FORFEIT at a lockup garage in Buenos Aires, transferred the mine to the boot of his hire car and drove it to the Uruguay border. Prior reconnaissance revealed that the border police rarely searched vehicles but, just in case, the businessman had a cover story that the strange barrel-shaped piece of plastic in the boot of his car was nothing more sinister than a piece of chemical engineering equipment. In the event the cover story was not needed and he drove it without incident to Montevideo. From there it was clandestinely loaded on to a navy ship which was replenishing after a Falklands tour, and shipped to the UK.
Boarding a Swissair flight back to London in December 1987 at the end of an interesting year, I picked up a copy of La Nacion, Argentina's leading newspaper. Down on page five there was an article about a light aircraft which had crashed while making a night landing at a small grass airfield just outside Buenos Aires, killing the pilot. Police were investigating the wreckage among rumours that the plane was being used for smuggling. The pilot was unnamed but I knew it must be Rodolfo.
Back in London, without money, I needed a job, preferably one that satisfied my sense of adventure and desire to work overseas. I wrote to Pilchard asking if the offer he had made in 1984 was still open. He didn't reply directly, but a couple of weeks later a letter arrived on FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) crested paper signed by a Mr M.A. Halliday inviting me to an interview at 3 Carlton Gardens, London SW1.
Sitting on the low leather sofa in the reception hall of the elegant John Nash-designed house overlooking St James's Park in central London, I was curious and intrigued rather than nervous. The meter ticking next to my battered old BMW parked a block away was more worrying than the impending interview. I checked my watch and hoped it would not last long. Recent editions of The Economist and Financial Times were scattered in front of me on the low glass-topped table, and I picked one up to pass the time.
I heard soft footsteps descending the stairs from the mezzanine floor above and shortly a tall, pretty girl stepped out on to the marble floor, her high-heels clacking as she approached. I put down The Economist and stood. `Mr Tomlinson?' she asked, smiling. I nodded. `Mr Halliday will see you now. I'm Kathleen, by the way.' We shook hands and she escorted me up the stairs to the mezzanine floor where she showed me into one of the offices.
A small and slightly built man in a wide-lapelled brown suit with a string vest glimmering through an acrylic shirt awaited behind a desk. We exchanged greetings and shook hands. He urged me to sit down on a low armchair and sat down opposite me, a low table between us. He smiled. `Do you know what you are doing here?' he asked.
`Haven't a clue,' I replied cautiously.
`Well first, can I ask you to read and sign this?' He handed me a printed sheet of paper and a biro. It was an excerpt from the 1989 OSA (Official Secrets Act), headed `TOP SECRET’. He went over to the window and gazed over St James's Park while I read it. I signed it vigorously to signify that I was finished, and he returned with another file. `Now read this,' he ordered, handing me the green ring-binder.
Halliday returned to the window, leaving me to read the 30 or so plastic-wrapped pages. They explained that MI6 was Britain's overseas intelligence-gathering organisation, administered by the FCO, and that its objective was to gather intelligence from secret human sources on political, military, economic and commercial policies of rival foreign powers. A couple of paragraphs explained the selection procedure - almost identical to the FCO entry procedure, with one extra round of interviews. The positive vetting procedure - an inquisition into a candidate's private life - was described, then it outlined in general terms an MI6 career. Six months of training, a first overseas posting after a couple of years behind a desk in London, then alternate three-year home and overseas postings until compulsory retirement at 55. At the back was the payscale - not generous compared to salaries in the private sector, but still adequate.
I closed the file and put it down on the low table. Halliday got up from his desk and rejoined me. `What do you think?' he asked eagerly, as though I had just finished inspecting a second-hand car he was trying to sell.
`I'd like to know more,' I replied cautiously.
Halliday asked the usual interview questions with one unusual request. `One of the jobs we often have to do in MI6 is make a succinct character appraisal of a contact of the service - a pen portrait if you like. Could you describe somebody succinctly who you have come across in your life?' he asked. I thought for a moment, then described Rodolfo. A colourful character, it was not difficult. Halliday made it clear that he was seeking a long-term commitment to the service, in return for which there was a high degree of job security.
`That sounds fine,' I replied. `I'm looking for just that sort of thing.' The interview ended with Halliday assuring me that he would write to me soon. There were only a few minutes left on the parking meter.
Two weeks later a letter arrived inviting me for a second interview. It was flattering, but my priority was to get overseas quickly and the prospect of having to put in two or three years behind a desk in London first did not appeal. I screwed the letter into a ball and threw it away.
Though keen to go travelling, my debts obliged me to earn some money. Most of my friends from university were settled into steady careers in London in banking or management consultancy. Their lifestyle held no appeal, but pragmatically it offered the best way to save some money. It was the start of the Thatcher boom years and it was easy to get a highly paid job. Booz Allen & Hamilton, a management consultancy in Mayfair, employed me on a salary three times that on offer at MI6. But despite the welcome fat pay cheques, it was clear after a couple of weeks that it wasn't the career for me. Not replying to Halliday's letter was a mistake, and also rude. Writing back, I explained that having taken another job it would be wise to stick it out for a year, but would like to keep in touch. Halliday sent me a polite and understanding reply by return post.
Finding little stimulation in t
he sedentary consulting job, I needed a more challenging activity to occupy me. When I saw an advert in a newspaper to join the Territorial Army, Britain's reserve army corps, it seemed an ideal avenue in which to channel my spare energy. As it only required attendance at weekends and for two weeks' annual camp per year, joining up would not oblige me to leave the job that paid my bills. Flicking through the glossy recruitment brochure that arrived in the post a few days after my enquiry, I glanced at descriptions of the various reserve units, but the choice was clear: the Special Air Service volunteer regiment. When I rang the recruitment number, a gritty Scottish voice growled the instruction to report to the Duke of York's barracks on King's Road in central London the following Saturday with running shoes and tracksuit for a basic fitness test.
That first test was relatively easy for a fit young man - just five miles around the barracks running track in under 40 minutes. But that was just the start of the demanding selection process. The PT instructor who led the test said that we would need to attend every second weekend for the next year to undertake a series of daunting tests of endurance and stamina, plus a two-week intensive selection camp.
The following weekend just over a hundred other hopeful recruits turned up at the Duke of York's for the first stage of the selection process. Most were former regular army soldiers, or had experience in other parts of the Territorial Army. Some were condescending towards the few recruits, like myself, who had no previous military experience. `You won't get past the first weekend,' scoffed one shaven-headed former marine. We were briefly interviewed to assess our previous military experience and suitability for the course. Those with criminal convictions and the weirdoes who turned up equipped with black balaclavas or armed with knives were shown the gate. The quartermaster's store issued us with basic army clothing and equipment which we would have to use for the selection course - camouflage trousers, a pair of boots, a couple of hairy woollen shirts, a woolly pullover, webbing, water cans, sleeping bag, a waterproof poncho, a bergen to put it all in and, most importantly, a compass. We were given another running test - this time eight miles in one hour in our new boots. About 20 per cent immediately dropped out and were told to return their newly issued kit.
Soon passing selection became my only goal. My work at Booz Allen & Hamilton was unimportant - just something that had to be done between TA weekends to pay the rent. Every second weekend for the next five months, along with the other surviving candidates, I reported to the Duke of York's at 1930 on Friday evening after a boring but tiring day in the office. We were issued rations and our kit was checked by the DS (Directing Staff) to ensure that we were using only the original equipment issued to us. Anybody who tried to make the selection process easier by purchasing better-quality boots or goretex waterproofs was immediately `binned', the terminology for ejection from the course. At about 2130, we crammed into the back of a leaking canvas-roofed four-ton lorry and drove down the King's Road, past its thronging pubs, out of London and down the M4 motorway towards Wales.
We would arrive in the early hours of the morning at a remote forest location somewhere in the bleak Brecon Beacon mountains, often already soaked if it was raining. Using our standard army issue sleeping bag and poncho to make a bivouac, we slept for a few hours in a copse or by a mosquito-infested reservoir. Reveille would be at 0600 and the DS gave us an hour to eat a breakfast of dehydrated porridge, canned meat and boiled sweets, make a mug of tea, then pack away all our kit into our bergens. At 0700, the DS gave us a grid reference, usually a hilltop six or seven kilometres away. We set off at the double en masse, navigating to the control-point with our waterproofed ordnance-survey map and precious compass. The field rapidly strung out as the fittest and best navigators got to the front. On arrival at the checkpoint, another member of the DS, enviably curled up in his tent with a hot brew on, called out a new grid reference another ten kilometres or so away across difficult terrain. On arrival there, we would be given another grid reference, then another, and so on, never really knowing where or when the march would end.
At around 1800 the fastest runners reached the final checkpoint where we cooked some of the rations that we had been carrying all day and got some rest. The other runners would straggle in over the next few hours. The really slow candidates, or those who could not complete the course through exhaustion or injury, were binned. At about 2100 the DS would brief us on the night march, done in pairs, as the risk of navigating through the craggy mountain ranges in darkness was too great - candidates had occasionally died of exposure or made navigational errors and walked off cliffs. We normally finished this shorter march at about 0400, caught about two hours' sleep before reveille and breakfasted, then there followed an hour or so of hard PT, known as `beasting'. A `warmup' run of about four kilometres in our boots, with badly blistered and cut feet from the previous marches, half-killed us and and then a gruelling routine of press-ups and sit-ups finished us off. At about 1100, the torment was over and we collapsed into the lorry for the five-hour drive back to London.
Every weekend, the ratchet was tightened a bit more and the field of remaining candidates got smaller. The marches increased in length and difficulty of navigation and we had increasingly heavy loads to carry in our bergens. I was secretly pleased to see the marine who had sneered at me drop out of one of the harder marches, moaning about badly blistered feet.
The final and most dreaded selection weekend was the infamous `long drag'. We had navigated all over the Brecon Beacons and knew them too well, so long drag was held in unfamiliar territory in the Peak District of northern England. The goal was to cover a total of 65 kilometres cross-country in under 20 hours, carrying full webbing, a 501b bergen containing all our gear and rations, and an old FN rifle from which the sling had been removed. At the end of that test only 19 of the 125 who started the course remained of which I, proudly, was one.
Although the long drag endurance test was a major hurdle, there was still a long way to go before those of us who remained would be `badged' with SAS berets bearing the famous `Who Dares Wins' motto and accepted into the regiment. Every second weekend for the next six months was taken with `continuation' training, learning the basic military skills required of an SAS soldier. We were still under scrutiny, however, and any recruit who was deemed by the DS not to have the right attitude or aptitude was binned. Having had no previous experience of the army, even the most basic infantry skills were new to me: field survival, escape and evasion, long-range reconnaissance patrol techniques, dog evasion, abseiling from helicopters, foreign weapon familiarisation. The final two week selection took place at Sennybridge camp in Wales where these skills were put to the test in a long and arduous field exercise.
At the end of the exercise we were `captured' by the enemy - role-played by paratroopers - blindfolded, roughed up a bit, then taken in the back of a cattle truck to an old disused farm in the Welsh hills. There, still blindfolded, we were stripped and forced into `stress' positions - either hands spread against a wall, feet kicked back a metre or so and spread wide apart, or else squatting on the floor with back arched and fingers on our heads. After a few minutes either position became uncomfortable, and after 20 minutes cramps and muscle spasms set in. The discomfort was relieved every few hours when we were taken to be `interrogated' by officers from the Joint Services Interrogation Wing. We were only allowed to give away the `big four' permitted by the Geneva Convention - name, rank, date of birth and service number - and the interrogators used every ploy they knew to trick us into giving away more. Anybody who gave away the smallest extra detail, even merely admitting that they were thirsty, was immediately binned. After 20 minutes of that we were lead back to the cattle pen and put into a different stress position. Those who endured were finally released after 20 hours.
Finally, because we would shortly learn to parachute, we had to pass P-company, a brutal fitness test taken by the Parachute Regiment as a test of suitability for parachute training. It required explosive strength and power r
ather than the stamina of SAS selection and I was sorry to see that after going so far a couple of guys failed this last hurdle. The handful of us who remained were `badged' in a simple ceremony by the CO (Commanding Officer), a colonel in 22 SAS, and accepted into the regiment. It was a proud moment for me, but it needed to be kept in perspective. Our selection process was a stroll in the park compared to the far more arduous and drawn out selection of the regular army's 22 SAS regiment, and our standards of soldiering were much lower. We were awarded an identical beret, but that was about the only thing that was equal between the two regiments.
Between TA weekends, my first priority was to get fit enough to pass SAS selection. Most mornings I arrived at Booz Allen & Hamilton after running twice around Hyde Park, then clock-watched until the evening when I could escape to the nearby Lansdowne sports club for a couple of kilometres of swimming. My lifestyle priorities were very different from my colleagues', who dedicated their spare time to eating and drinking, and I felt little sense of identity with them, exacerbated by the sense of achievement in getting badged. Every morning at my desk I wondered what motivated them in their daily struggle to climb the corporate ladder. Ernst Goldstein was particularly inscrutable. He only had a few more years to wait to receive a fortune that was held in a trust fund until his 30th birthday and although he earned a hefty salary as a management consultant, he lived as if he had already inherited big money, borrowing heavily to support a lavish and extravagant lifestyle. He spent hours on the phone, mostly chatting to friends organising expensive parties and occasionally to clients whom he oleaginously addressed as `Sir'. Whenever his trimphone rang, his hand shot out like a striking cobra, reaching the receiver before the first `tring' had finished, and he answered `Goldstein speaking' with irritating eagerness. While the whole office was working late one night on a `vitally important' project, I sneaked over to his cubicle while he was absent and glued down his trimphone receiver with a couple of blobs of superglue. When he returned a few minutes later with the managing director and started enthusiastically discussing a cashflow spreadsheet, I rang him on the internal line. As usual, his hand shot out like a frog's tongue for the receiver, but this time it came back with the phone attached, clattering into the side of his head. Worse, because the cradle had not been tripped, the telephone would not stop ringing. Goldstein went berserk, waving the still-ringing phone around as if he were trying to shake a mad dog off his arm. At last, with a manic desperate yank, he ripped the receiver away - only it came away with the top half of the telephone, spilling wires and bells on to the desk. The office was in uproar by now, but Goldstein was oblivious. He put the receiver to his ear and, oleaginous as ever, replied, `Goldstein speaking.' The managing director stalked off, trying not to lose his dignity by bursting into laughter.
The Big Breach Page 3