`We then followed you until 31 August, when you tried to go to New York,' continued Brandt. `But when we realised that you were not presenting any danger to Swiss interests, we decided to invite you here, to see if you could help us.'
Jourdain and Brandt were putting me into an awkward position. They wanted me to break the OSA by telling them about Britain's operations in Switzerland, which could lead to prosecution in Britain. On the other hand, since MI6's undeclared operations in Switzerland were illegal under Swiss law, refusal to help the police in a criminal investigation would be an offence for which I could potentially be imprisoned, and it would certainly scupper any chance of getting Swiss residency. Jourdain appeared to read my thoughts. `Failing to help us will not help your application for a residency permit,' he added menacingly.
I had to think of my long-term future. MI6 had used their influence to prevent me making a fresh start in New Zealand and Australia, despite Warren Templeton's and John Wadham's strenuous efforts to persuade them to negotiate an end to the pyrrhic dispute. I would have settled just for the return of my computer and for an Australian visa, but MI6 were set resolutely on a Thatcheresque, no-compromise, no-turning-back policy. Given their intransigence, I decided to pledge my future to Switzerland in the hope that I could get permanent residence status, a work permit, then find constructive and permanent employment.
`OK, how can I help?' I replied cautiously.
Over the next three months, the Swiss police convoqu‚'d me four times. Each time, I cooperated fully with their enquiries and I built up a good personal relationship with Jourdain and Brandt who even showed me MI6's increasingly irate requests to have me arrested and deported to Britain, or at least expelled from Switzerland. Jourdain assured me that they had ignored the letters, as I had done nothing against Swiss law.
`C'est vraiment vous?' laughed the French Douane incredulously, pointing out my description, which had flashed up on the screen in the border kiosk after he had tapped my passport details into the computer. In French, under my police mugshot, was written:
Name: TOMLINSON Richard John Charles
Nationality:British and New Zealand
Born: Hamilton, New Zealand, 13/01/63
Resident: No fixed abode
Details: Subject is former member of British Special Forces and Special Services, trained in firearms, explosives, unarmed combat, scuba-diving, pilots licence, parachutist, expert in cryptography. Subject is a menace to the security of France.
`Ridiculous,' I laughed. `It's a joke. The British are pulling your leg.'
`Sit down there,' the Douane replied, ignoring my protests. `Wait until the police arrive.' He indicated a chair in the corner of the kiosk
For the sixth time in a year, I was being detained at the request of MI6. It was late on the evening of Wednesday 6 January, and I had just picked up my parents in a hire car from Geneva airport. We were heading to a rented chalet in the French Alps, an hour's drive over the border, for a week's skiing holiday. But MI6 had learnt about the arrangements through their tap on my parents' phone and decided to spoil our holiday. They alerted the DST of my intended movements and DST notified the Douanes to stop us at the Swiss-French border. I now had to wait until the DST turned up from their regional headquarters in Grenoble. It was a bitterly cold evening, and although I was warm enough in the customs kiosk, my parents were waiting outside in the freezing car.
Four DST officers turned up at 10.30 p.m. Although the French Douanes had been happy to leave me unattended in their kiosk, confident I was not a troublemaker, the DST slapped on handcuffs the moment they arrived. `Alors, we have some questions for you, Monsieur Tomlinson,' announced the senior officer. They escorted me out of the kiosk into the main police building at the frontier, sat me down in an office and interviewed me for 90 minutes. They asked no questions relating to any form of criminal activity and all they were interested in were details of an MI6 officer who owned a chalet in the Haut-Savoie, on their home turf around Grenoble. I refused to help, so at the end of the interview they served me with papers banning me for life from entering French territory. Just like the US immigration officials, the DST had to find a reason under their regulations to justify the ban. On the standard entry-refusal proforma, there were four possible justifications. He could not tick the `lack of correct papers' box because my British passport entitled me automatically to entry. I could demonstrate that I had the funds to support myself in France, so that option was denied. I was not the bearer of any infectious diseases, so he could not select that. All that remained was `threat to the security of France'. He ticked the box with a flourish, stamped the document and handed it over to me. `You must go back to Switzerland,' he ordered. `If we find you in France, we will imprison you immediately for six months, no questions asked.'
Back in the hire car, two stern-faced officers stood blocking the route south just to ensure that I didn't try to dash for it. There was no choice but to turn around and return to my digs. It was too late for my parents to go to the chalet that evening, so they had to stay in a hotel in Geneva.
The DST were in blatant breach of European law by stopping a British passport holder entering France. MI6 and the DST were gambling that I would not have the legal backing to mount a challenge via the European courts, and if I did try, that it would take many years for my appeal to be heard. Two days before the first stage of my appeal came before the Grenoble district court on 5 May 2000, already over a year after the illegal order was served on me, the DST served an injunction to delay the hearing. I cannot take my case to the European courts in Strasbourg until all domestic remedies have been pursued, so I have no alternative but to spend more money on lawyers and wait.
Although I was enjoying life in Switzerland, had made some good friends and was earning some money with casual work, getting a work permit and permanent job was difficult. I therefore mounted an appeal against the Australian ban, using a firm of lawyers in Canberra. I suspected that MI6 had used their influence with ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation) to get me banned, though MI6 denied this, improbably claiming in a letter to me that they `would not interfere in the policies of another country'. A few months later, via the Australian Freedom of Information Act, my lawyers got proof that MI6 were lying. They obtained a copy of a telegram sent by MI6 to ASIO on 2 November 1998. Although many paragraphs were blacked out with the censor's ink, it was clear that it was a request for a ban, to which the Australians had complied limply. Moreover, the date of the request was two days after my arrest, but long before I was convicted of a crime; MI6 were not content to see me receive only the punishment deemed fit by British law and had decided to add to it by stopping me from emigrating to Australia. Getting an Australian visa became a major preoccupation but after spending thousands of dollars of my savings on legal fees, I realised that I was falling into the financial trap MI6 had laid for me.
Reasoning with MI6 was not working either, and the energetic efforts of Warren Templeton and John Wadham were futile. My only remedy was to use publicity again to bring them to the table. At the end of April, I bought some web-design software and learnt how to build internet pages. My first site was an amateurish and jokey affair and appeared on the Geocities server late on the evening of Saturday, 1 May. The pages contained nothing secret and were just a lighthearted poke at MI6. On the front page, there was a photograph of me in a silly hat superimposed against Vauxhall Cross, with the Monty Python theme tune playing in parody of MI6's absurd pursuit of me, and on the inside pages were copies of the documents served by the Australian, American and French authorities banning me from their countries at MI6's request. Nevertheless, on Monday morning the Geocities security officer, Mr Bruce Zanca, e-mailed me to say that they had received a complaint about my website from a `third party' and were therefore closing down the site. By late morning my pages had disappeared. I found another empty space on the Geocities server and re-posted them, including Zanca's e-mail. A few hours later I got another,
more irate, e-mail from Zanca telling me they had removed my new pages, and ordering me not to post anything else onto their server. I copied this e-mail into my pages and posted everything back. That came down a few hours later and Zanca got badly annoyed and threatened legal action. Fortunately, I didn't need to put them up again because word spread around the internet of the preposterous way that MI6 and Geocities were censoring me, and numerous `mirrors' of my site sprang up.
On 13 May, another site about MI6 appeared on Lyndon Larouche's website, publishing a list of 115 names purporting to be of serving and former MI6 officers. This news exploded onto the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Because of the publicity about my first site, I was immediately assumed to be the author.
To this day, I do not know who published the famous list, but it was not me. I have my suspicions, however, that it was MI6 themselves. They had a motive - to incriminate and blacken me. They had the means to make the list and the knowledge to post it onto the internet without leaving a trace. And, despite their protestations to the contrary, the list was not particularly damaging to them. Later I got the chance to study it for myself. I did not recognise most of the names and so cannot comment as to whether they were from MI6 or from the FCO. Of the names that I did recognise, all were retired from the service or were already widely blown. If MI6 had set out to produce a list that caused me the maximum incrimination, but caused them the minimum damage, they could not have done a better job.
The way the existence of the list was publicised to the world's press was also odd. The first announcement was made when the British government's official censor, Rear-Admiral David Pulvertaft, issued a `D-notice' to stop UK newspapers publishing the web address of the list or any of the names. There was no better way to generate publicity because immediately every journalist in Britain wanted to know what the D-notice was censoring, and foreign newspapers the world over, to whom the D-notice was irrelevant, published the web address and even the entire list. The next peculiarity was the manner in which the FCO announced the incident. If MI6 really wanted to limit the damage, they would have used a junior spokesperson to dismiss the list as a hoax. Instead, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced at a packed news conference that not only was the list accurate but, without presenting a shred of evidence, named me as the culprit. Both these tactics can only be explained by a plan to incriminate and discredit me.
They certainly succeeded if it was their intention. Until the list was produced, the press had been fairly sympathetic to me. But after Cook's accusation, the media turned on me with vitriol. In Britain, the Sunday Telegraph led the charge. They accused me of being a traitor who had recklessly endangered the lives of MI6 officers in a selfish pursuit of an employment tribunal and printed the I/OPS propaganda that MI6 sacked me for being `unreliable' and `going on frolics'. Their columnist Andrew Roberts, a contemporary at Cambridge but now an establishment toady and friend of MI6, wrote a petty personal attack on me, making absurd claims such as that I cheated to gain admission to MIT. The tabloid newsapers were equally hostile. The Sun tracked down Tosh, now out of 602 Troop and working in the City, and paid him œ500 to claim that I took the troop to a brothel in Split on his birthday. He e-mailed me afterwards to apologise and at least he had the guts to give the newspaper his name, unlike some of the anonymous worms they also dug up from my old TA regiment. The Sun also published my e-mail address and encouraged its readers to send me hatemail. I received over ten thousand e-mails over the next week, some of them amounting to death threats. Interestingly, however, by no means all of the e-mails were hostile, perhaps indicating the lack of judgement of the Sun's editor and the lack of public support for MI6. The majority of readers who e-mailed me thought that it was a good thing to publish the names of MI6 officers, one writing that I deserved an OBE for services to humanity and another stating that taking Tosh to a brothel was a good use of MI6 money.
The publication of the list had all the hallmarks of a classic I/OPS operation to winkle me out of fortress Switzerland, an objective that was accomplished three weeks later. On Monday, 7 June, Inspector Brandt rang to summon me to the Geneva police headquarters at Chemin de la GraviŠre for a meeting at 2 p.m. I arrived to find a stone-faced Commandant Jourdain, in no mood for small talk. `You must leave Switzerland immediately,' he told me. `You are banned from entering Swiss territory until 7 June 2004, and must be out of the country by 1800 this evening.' My protests that this was an unreasonably short period of notice fell on deaf ears. It would scarcely give me time to pack my suitcase. `And we don't want any publicity in the press,' continued Jourdain. `If you talk to the newspapers about this, we will increase the ban to ten years.'
`So where do you want to go to?' asked Brandt. `We will book the ticket for you.'
`I really don't know,' I replied angrily. Just about every reasonable option was closed off. All of the anglophone countries were out of the question and I feared that I would have legal problems if I stayed in Europe. `OK,' I replied, after some consideration, `get me a ticket to Moscow.' I didn't really want to go there, but I knew that Jourdain would be uncomfortable with expelling me from Switzerland at the request of the British only for me to seek refuge in Moscow.
Jourdain stared at me for a moment while the implication sunk in. `You don't want to go there,' he replied. `It's cold and you don't speak Russian.'
`OK, then I'll go to Havana. It's warm and I speak Spanish.'
From Jourdain's point of view this was no better, and he needed to seek advice from his superiors. `Wait here while I call Berne,' he announced. `All right,' announced Jourdain on his return a few minutes later. `Berne have given you an extension until 1800 tomorrow, so that you have more time to find a place to go,' he smiled weakly. `Telephone Inspector Brandt before 1200 tomorrow with your decision.'
I was very disappointed by the attitude of the Swiss authorities. They had a reputation as a neutral country who were prepared to shelter individuals harassed by foreign powers, and I had helped them a lot over the past six months. Now they were blatantly siding with MI6 and were expelling me for the publication of the list without any evidence that I was the culprit. Even with the extension, there was not much time to sort out my plans. I had become quite established in Switzerland, even though I did not yet have a resident's permit. My French was fluent, I had made some good friends and I was getting some serious job interviews and felt that it would only be a matter of time before one materialised into a job. The Swiss had dealt me a low blow in forcing me to start again from scratch somewhere else (I later discovered the full extent of their double standards: every time I went for a job interview, Jourdain rang the company afterwards and told them not to employ me). My threats to go to Havana or Moscow had bought me some extra time, but I did not really want to go to either of these cities. I would not be able to work there and guessed that after a few months I would be bored. Also, I was in no mood for a long journey. I rang up Geneva station and asked for a rail ticket to the nearest town not in France or Switzerland. They booked me onto a train leaving at 1735 the following evening, 25 minutes before my deadline, arriving at Konstanz in southern Germany at 2235.
`Herr Tomlinson?' The voice behind me was friendly, but still my anger flashed within. It was late in the evening, I had arrived in a strange town in a country I hardly knew and whose language I hardly spoke, it was raining outside, I had nowhere to stay and I had only struggled a few yards off the station platform with my two heavy suitcases, yet already somebody - presumably an official - wanted a word with me. I spun around, scowling with hostility. `Nein, Ich bin nicht Herr Tomlinson.' It was about the limit of my German.
A stone-faced uniformed police officer and two civilians, one male in his mid-40s, one a blonde female, stood before me. `Ausweis, bitte,' ordered the uniformed officer.
`What?' I replied impatiently and rudely.
`Your papers, please,' interpreted the civilian male.
`Oh fuck off,' I replied and picked up my luggage. I could
n't help my language. The Swiss must have tipped off the Germans and now, I presumed, I was about to be arrested. If they wanted to arrest me, I would not make it easy for them.
`No, no, wait, you're not under arrest, Herr Tomlinson.' The civilian grabbed me by the shoulder, as if to get my attention rather than to restrain me. `We just want to talk to you, Richard,' the female spoke for the first time, smiling sweetly.
I shifted to face my interlocutors squarely, still suspicious. `I am Herr Kugel, from the BfV (Bundesamt fr Verfassungsschutz), and this is my colleague, Fr„ulein Gajabski.'
`We guess you must be tired after your journey, and as it's so late, we've booked you into a hotel for the night,' Gajabski said in flawless English.
`We'll help you with your luggage,' added Kugel. He dismissed the uniformed police officer with a short command and whistled up a railway porter who scuttled over with a baggage trolley.
`Don't worry, you are not in any trouble,' Gajabski assured me. `We'll just have a quick drink tonight, then if it is OK with you, we'll have lunch tomorrow.'
Kugel and Gajabski escorted me in the drizzle over to the Halm Hotel opposite the station, the porter struggling behind with my heavy luggage. Kugel checked me in, paying the bill in advance, while Gajabski tipped and dismissed the porter. `We guess you'll want to go up to your room for a few minutes. We'll meet you at the bar at 11 p.m.,' Kugel said. It was more of a firm request than a direct order, but in any case I was intrigued to know what they wanted. Also, I needed a beer.
The Big Breach Page 39