I did not take Fish's proposal too seriously but a few days later, in his office again to sort out expenses from the Belgrade trip, he casually threw over a couple of sheets of A4. `Here, take a butcher's at this.' It was a two-page minute entitled `A proposal to assassinate Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic'. A yellow minute card was attached to the back, showing that it was a formal document rather than just a draft, and the right margin showed a distribution list of String Vest, C/CEE, MODA/SO (an SAS Major, seconded to MI6 as a liaison officer with the increment) and H/SECT, the assistant to the Chief himself. I checked the date on the top-left corner, established that it was not 1 April, then sat down at the visitor's chair beside his cluttered desk to read it. Fish's first page was a justification for the assassination, citing Milosevic's destabilising plans for a Greater Serbia, his illegal covert support for Radovan Karadzic and his genocidal plans for the Albanian population of Kosovo. The second page outlined the execution of the assassination.
Fish proposed three alternative plans for the attempt and gave advantages and disadvantages for each. His first proposal was to use the increment to train and equip a dissident Serbian paramilitary faction to assassinate Milosevic in Serbia. Fish argued that the advantage of this plan was its deniability, the disadvantage that it would be difficult to control. His second plan was to use an increment team to infiltrate Serbia and kill Milosevic with a bomb or sniper ambush. He argued that this plan would have a high chance of success but would not be deniable if it went wrong. The third proposal was to arrange a car `accident' to kill Milosevic, possibly while attending the ICFY (International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia) peace talks in Geneva. Fish proposed using a bright flashing strobe gun to disorientate Milosevic's chauffeur while the cavalcade passed through a tunnel. The advantage of a tunnel crash was that there would be fewer incidental witnesses and a greater chance that the ensuing accident would be fatal.
`You're off your trolley,' I muttered and passed it back to him. The audacity and ruthlessness of the plan was astonishing. Fish was serious about his career in MI6 and he would not send a suggestion like this up to senior officers out of frivolity. `This will never get accepted,' I added.
`What do you know?' Fish retorted, looking at me disparagingly as if I was an innocent schoolboy learning for the first time the facts of life.
I never heard anything more about the plan, but then I would not have expected to. An indoctrination list would have been formed, probably consisting only of the Chief, C/CEE, P4 and MODA/SO. Even Fish himself would probably have been excluded from detailed planning at an early stage. A submission would have been put up to the Foreign Secretary to seek political clearance, then MODA/SO and the increment would have taken over the detail of the operational planning. If the plan was developed further, it clearly did not come to fruition, as Milosevic remained very much alive and in power for many years.
As the war in Bosnia intensified and threatened to destabilise southeastern Europe, urgent demands were placed on MI6 for more intelligence. In mid-1992, the only officers in the FRY (Former Republic of Yugoslavia) were a one-man station in Zagreb, and two officers in Belgrade. A few other stations, notably Athens and Geneva, were producing some reasonable CX on the region from refugees and visitors, but there were still gaping holes in the intelligence coverage. MI6 urgently needed many more officers on the ground, but was hampered by lack of financial and personnel resources and by cover considerations. The FCO had no embassies in Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, so officers could not be inserted there under diplomatic cover. A more flexible approach was needed.
Colin McColl came up with an imaginative solution to fill quickly the holes in intelligence coverage, that was at first met sniffily by most senior officers. He proposed setting up, in each newly independent region of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, `shoe-box' stations of one officer armed with a laptop computer, encryption software and a briefcase-sized portable satellite facsimile machine. The shoe-box officer would be declared to the local secret police and would rely on this liaison for protection rather than the physical security of an embassy and diplomatic immunity. The shoe-box officers would not have the usual benefits of comfortable, free housing, car allowance or home leave of normal postings, so they would serve only for six months and be paid a generous hardship allowance.
The first shoe-box officer was sent to Tirana, the Albanian capital, in September 1992. Rupert Boxton was an ageing former parachute regiment officer who had just returned from a three-year posting in the backwater of Namibia. He was regarded as `a bit thick' and wasn't suited to administrative Head Office jobs. His task in Tirana was neither easy nor pleasant. Though the Albanian leader, President Berisha, was keen to improve relations with MI6, his secret police were stuck in the closed mind-set of the days of Albanian communist isolationism. They did not trust Boxton, did not want him in Tirana and refused to give him any worthwhile intelligence or targeting leads. In any case, the German BND (Bundesnachtrichtdienst) had got in first and built a strong relationship with the Albanians. MI6's attempts to belatedly muscle in went nowhere. Boxton was withdrawn after just a few months and forced into early retirement by personnel department.
The Tirana fiasco convinced the service that a shoe-box would only survive and prosper if the local liaison service were dependent on MI6 for money, training help and intelligence. Prospects for a shoe-box station in Skopje, the capital of the newly formed republic of Macedonia, seemed more promising. The Macedonian economy was in tatters. Trade with Serbia on its northern border had been stopped by the UN sanctions. To the south the Greeks had closed the border and access to the port of Thessaloniki over fears that the reemergence of the Macedonian nation would cause unrest in their own province of Macedonia; and communications with Albania to the west were poor because of the mountainous terrain. Relations with Bulgaria to the east were better, but even they were tempered by mistrust for the expansionist ideas of some Bulgarian factions. Macedonia was thus all but cut off from the outside world and urgently needed powerful allies.
The Macedonian secret police were underfunded, and so were vulnerable to financial inducement. MI6 saw the opportunity and stepped in before the BND or the CIA. After some paper shuffling in Whitehall, an emergency aid package was negotiated by FCO and ODA officials. Britain would supply urgently needed medical equipment and drugs; in return Macedonia would harbour an MI6 officer. The Macedonian secret police were further sweetened by a week-long training course at the Fort. All stops were pulled out to impress them. They were very taken by a demonstration of some advanced surveillance communication equipment, and MI6 reluctantly acceded to their requests for the system, even though they had no possible need for it.
Jonathan Small, an energetic and competent GS officer, was sent to Skopje to open the Macedonia shoe-box in December 1992. He had previous experience in one-man stations such as Valletta in Malta, so was well qualified for the job. He was declared to the Macedonian secret police, so there was no need for any cover story for them, but to stave off the curiosity of casual acquaintances he set himself up as a charity worker with credentials supplied by CF contacts. With his satellite dish on the balcony of his one-bedroom flat in central Skopje, Small was soon sending back a stream of reports, mostly on President Gligorov's dealings with Milosevic.
MI6 also set up two more shoe-box stations in the Balkans. One senior officer was sent to Kosovo for three months under cover as an OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) observer, but this was not a great success as the ruthless and omnipresent Serbian secret police made it too dangerous to attempt any agent-running. To cover Bosnia, MI6 drew on experience gained during OPERATION SAFE HAVEN, the allied operation to protect the Kurds from Iraqi reprisals in the aftermath of the 1990 Gulf War. Clive Mansell, a mid-career officer and Kurdish speaker, was attached to the Royal Marines in Kurdistan as their mysteriously entitled `civil adviser', mingling with the refugee population to obtain intelligence on the nascent Kurdish
nationalist movement. MI6 decided to try the same tactic in Bosnia and sent Mansell to Split with the British UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) contribution to set up a shoe-box station under the designation H/BAP.
By early 1993, all of these assets were in place and MI6's coverage of the Balkans was starting to meet some of the demands placed upon it. Meanwhile, String Vest assigned me to a role supporting Small in Skopje. Small's close liaison with the Macedonian secret police meant that he had no access to one of the main local intelligence requirements, the ethnic Albanian PRI party. The PRI, and the Albanian population in general, were deeply mistrusted by the Macedonian secret police. The intelligence on the PRI which they fed to Small was biased, so MI6 needed independent penetration. String Vest asked me to get together a cover to visit Skopje and cultivate the targets in the PRI leadership.
Now that Ben Presley had retired, CF issued a new alias name, Thomas Paine, and I got myself documented again as a freelance journalist. After my nerve-jangling Belgrade visit, SBO1 insisted I acquire better credentials: `Get yourself down to I/OPS section and see if they have got any contacts who can help.' I/OPS provided me with a letter of introduction from SMALLBROW, commissioning me to write an article for The Spectator on the effects of UN sanctions on Macedonia. `If anybody from the PRI rings to check you out, he'll vouch for you,' I/OPS/1 assured me. I was ready for my first trip to Skopje within a couple of days.
It was dusk as a tattered taxi with a single working headlight drove me the ten kilometres from Skopje airport to the capital, but I could still see the scars of the 1963 earthquake that destroyed most of the city. The clock on the central railway station was still stuck at ten to five, the time when the first tremors started, and even 30 years later there were swathes of open ground in the town centre where buildings had once stood. Though the war to the north had not directly touched Skopje, the signs of economic hardship were clear. Refuse lay uncollected in the streets, men hung around idle on corners and ragged Kosovo refugees kicked footballs outside the abandoned buildings they now occupied in the run-down Albanian quarter.
The relatively wealthy Macedonian-Bulgar quarter where Small lived was better, but I did not envy his lot. His flat was owned by the Macedonian secret police and lay in a grim concrete block a short distance from the Grand Hotel where I had a reservation. After checking in, I made my way over - Small had invited me for a drink to discuss the operational plan. Strictly I ought not to have been associating with him for security reasons. Skopje was not large and being seen together by officers of other intelligence services could conceivably compromise either or both of us. But String Vest and SBO1 had relented on this occasion. They decided that the risk was small and Small's posting was lonely and boring so an occasional visitor would be good for his morale. Besides, he had been en poste for nearly three months and his knowledge would be useful for me.
`Hi, come on up to the third floor,' Small greeted me enthusiastically on the intercom, which was still working. Stepping over the piles of human excrement which littered the floor, I made my way up the stairs. Small greeted me like a long-lost friend on his doorstep. `Welcome to sunny Skopje.' It didn't take him long to show me around the small, sparsely furnished flat and soon he cracked open a bottle of Scotch and we sat down and got to work. Small had a quick mind and was an excellent operational officer. His ability was wasted in the GS branch, but personnel department would not let him transfer to the IB. There was no point: keeping him in the GS meant that he could be posted to slots like Skopje which most of the IB did not want, and they could still pay him a GS salary. Small briefed me expertly on the various Albanian factions and personalities. Occasionally, when the conversation turned to more sensitive areas, he would sweep his hand through the air, reminding me that his hosts might have bugged his flat. As the evening drew to a satisfying close, he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and slipped it over to me. It was an invitation to accompany him the next day on a trip to the countryside to check out the station exfiltration plan.
`Sure, I'd love to come,' I answered, careful not to reveal more than was necessary to possible listeners.
The Skopje exfiltration plan differed from usual station plans in that its purpose was to not to smuggle out compromised agents, but to get Small out in case the Macedonian liaison turned against him. They were a brutish lot and the political situation was not stable enough to wholly trust them. If it suited their purpose to kidnap or imprison Small, he could not claim diplomatic immunity as officially he was not there. He would hope to get enough warning of the deterioration in the relationship to be able to get out of the country legally but, just in case, he had an escape route. Two members of the increment visited him earlier in the year to design and rehearse the plan. But then the winter snow lay thick on the ground, and Small wanted to check that he could still find the route now that spring had changed the landscape.
We left early the next morning in Small's Land Rover Discovery and drove out into the countryside. It was early May and the hedgerows were ablaze with the fierce yellow of wild forsythia. The exfiltration plan called for Small to hide out in the countryside until rescue arrived. In a small copse on a hillside a few miles south of Skopje, the location of which Small had carefully memorised, the increment had buried a cache which contained enough materials for Small to survive for a few days out in the open - food, water, clothing, a couple of torches with infra-red filters, materials to make a lightweight bivouac and sleeping bag, a set of false identification papers and passport, a moderate sum of Deutschmarks, a few gold sovereigns and a military EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon). We trudged a few hundred yards into the woods and, using a compass to get a bearing from a prominent tree stump, paced out a few yards and found the cache without too much problem. After carefully digging it up to check that it had not been tampered with, we reburied it making sure there was no sign of disturbance.
From the top of the hill behind the copse, Small pointed out a small disused airstrip. `That's where the plane will come in to pick me up,' he explained. `It used to be used by crop-spraying aircraft but they've all been grounded through lack of spares now.' We took the Discovery over to the runway to check that it was still serviceable. `It's just long enough for UKN to get their Piper Aztec on the ground,' Small explained. `They would come at night, wearing IR goggles, so I'd have to mark out the landing strip with the IR torches.' Flying below radar height, the plane would then make its way under cover of darkness across Albania and the southern Adriatic to the safety of Italy.
Small dropped me off outside the Grand Hotel after the enjoyable morning. It would be an unnecessary risk to spend much more time with him. Besides, later that evening I was to have my first meeting with the deputy leader of the PRI and the afternoon could be better spent preparing for the meeting. I went back up to my room, fished out my laptop computer from my briefcase and waited for it to graunch into life. The hard disk had been modified by TOS to carry invisible files which they guaranteed could not be detected by even the most capable expert. I typed in the password, the hard-disk graunched some more, and magically all my briefing notes were revealed on the screen. I read through them, reminding myself about the key CX requirements and shaping in my mind the sort of questions I would ask at the meeting.
The first meeting went smoothly and my contact in the PRI was delighted to find a western journalist so interested in him. He agreed to further meetings and over the next couple of months I made repeated trips to Skopje, building up the relationship, gaining his confidence and edging him closer to the CX threshold. It was slow work, made all the more irksome because air links to Skopje were few and far between, meaning that each trip required three or four days. The meetings yielded some intelligence but eventually it became obvious that my contact was holding back, afraid for his personal security. His concern was that the Macedonian secret police would make life difficult for him if they discovered that he was talking too regularly to a foreign journalist. Back in Century
House, both Bidde and String Vest agreed that the only way forward was to drop my journalistic cover and make the relationship completely clandestine. On my next trip out to Skopje, I used the line that we had practised so diligently on exercise on the IONEC. `I expect that you've already guessed that I am not really a journalist, but an officer from British Intelligence.' To my relief, my contact did not get up and run. Instead, he accepted my assurance that as he was dealing with a professional intelligence officer rather than a flaky journalist, the Macedonian secret police would never discover his contact with me. He thus became my first recruited agent, and I won my spurs in the office. Thereafter, with the relationship on a more secure and stable footing, he became a productive CX producing agent.
Back in London, between trips to Skopke, Fish was keeping me busy with a series of small but interesting tasks related to the Bosnian War. His job was to coordinate targeting leads to possible informers from other stations or UK-based assets such as BEAVER, and he was an energetic worker. Under various covers, I made trips to Strasbourg, Hamburg, Lisbon and Brussels to meet Bosnian and Serb journalists, dissidents and politicians. Every time I put my head into Fish's office he would offer another interesting task. `How'd you like to run BEETROOT?' he asked one day.
`OK,' I replied. `But who is BEETROOT?'
`He's a right-wing vegetable,' replied Fish. `A Tory MP, but surprisingly he's OK,' he added. `Here's his file - go and read it.'
The Big Breach Page 18