by Vince Cable
Then, as usual, a group photo for social media. He was gratified that Mo’s group – which had become a little friendlier – edged themselves into the centre of the picture, alongside him. As Steve left, Shaida nodded acknowledgement at the door and prepared to go home with her brother. Tubby, who saw himself as some kind of bodyguard and protégé of Steve, ran after him, anxious to pass on information. ‘I’ve overheard some talk. People in the community know about this Indian contract. Some of them see everything as India versus Pakistan. They are saying this is like Blair and Bush attacking Iraq: a war on Muslims. They want to make trouble.’ This report left Steve more troubled than the fire-eating rhetoric of the young radicals. There were hundreds of jobs – including his own – on the line.
As they left the mosque complex, Steve saw another incident that alarmed him. There was an angry altercation between a powerfully built, bearded man who looked like a cleric, and a few of his supporters who were confronting a larger group trying to prevent them entering the mosque. There was no violence but voices were raised in anger and, whatever the language being used, it was abundantly clear that the bearded cleric was unwelcome.
Tubby was reluctant to talk but, after being pressed, he explained that the cleric was a well-known radical. ‘What the government calls a hate preacher,’ he explained. ‘He has never advocated terrorism and isn’t in one of the banned groups like Al Muhajiroun. But he praises the “martyrs” who have gone to Syria and Afghanistan and demands stronger action by the local mosques against “backsliders”, especially “loose women”, and people who fraternise with “kafirs”. Like us,’ he added, giggling nervously. ‘He has a growing local following. But the local mosque committees don’t want trouble; so they’ve banned him from preaching here.’
As they walked away, Steve noticed police officers at a discreet distance and in the next street a couple of vans full of police in riot gear. One of the policemen stopped him. ‘Evening, sir. I trust you and… your friend are not having any problems?’
‘No, officer, we’re fine.’
‘OK, just checking.’
On her return to London, Kate was on a high. The department, her personal team, No. 10, the High Commission all pronounced the visit a great success. No gaffes. Everyone was impressed by her grasp of the issues and her diplomatic skills. There were no obstacles remaining to the signing of a big defence contract of which Pulsar/Parrikar was part. It only remained to secure a high-level VIP visit that would be a fitting context. And she was also able to enjoy the warm glow of reflecting on her night out and her new friend, which brought into relief the lack of emotional and physical pleasures in her married life.
India receded into the background of departmental priorities. The routine work of a department minister came to the fore. She longed for the weekend, to catch up with family news and sleep. But there was one more obstacle to negotiate: the weekly advice surgery on Friday evening. Several Tory and Labour MPs had strongly warned against such diligence. ‘You only encourage the nutters and troublemakers’ was the gist of their distilled wisdom. MPs in marginal seats and Liberal Democrats – she was told – set great store by surgeries but she didn’t need to bother; perhaps once a month for form’s sake. She decided to ignore the advice, much to the fury of Stella who would have to attend, make notes and draft letters.
Kate valued the surgeries. She learnt a lot about people and their problems, which she had been shielded from in the election campaign and throughout her protected upbringing. She came to realise that in her very prosperous constituency there was a lot of financial distress, and real poverty, made all the worse by isolation and lack of neighbourly support. And there was a growing undercurrent of anxiety about rising unemployment. Last week had produced a sad family who could have stepped out of Jude the Obscure and for whom everything that could go wrong had gone wrong: redundancy, repossession, children with special needs. Then there was an export salesman who couldn’t travel because his passport had been mislaid somewhere in the Home Office and had lost his job; a mentally ill alcoholic who couldn’t get treatment for either condition until the other had first been cured; and a hopelessly overcrowded family whom the council had deemed ‘intentionally homeless’ after refusing to move to a corner of a council estate infested by drug dealers. She did her best for all of them but knew that these were mostly hopeless cases.
The desperate were randomly interspersed with the self-important and selfish. This week there was a delegation protesting over the decision of the local council to grant planning permission for a large home extension, wanted by a local teacher to house his expanding family (‘loss of light’, ‘traffic congestion’, ‘parking problems’, ‘out of character’). She explained with difficulty that planning law did not encompass their concerns about ‘loss of property value’.
Then, in came a young woman with a child who had obvious learning difficulties, bearing flowers and a box of chocolates: ‘I just wanted to say thank you. Freddie has got the special school you helped us find.’ Kate struggled to remember how she had performed this miracle, but eventually it all came back. A struggling single mum with three children: one physically and another mentally handicapped. She remembered, with a twinge of shame, how she had initially fallen back on her stereotypical assumptions about struggling single mothers. Several fathers? Actually, no: one father, a lovely man who had been killed in an industrial accident. On benefits? Actually, no: she was working but, thanks to a recalculation of her tax credits, could no longer afford proper childcare and was having to juggle babysitters. Dependency culture? Actually, no: whenever she had spare time she helped the old lady next door. Having heard all this, Kate had written a very supportive letter to the head of the county’s educational and social services departments. Maybe it had helped. Something gave way inside her when she was offered the flowers and chocolates. She burst into tears, to the embarrassment of Stella, sitting beside her, and the dismay of her constituent who left quickly, worrying about what she had done to upset this important woman.
Kate then had to recompose herself for her last visitors: a delegation from the Churches Together of Surrey Heights. Stella was convinced that they were here to deliver a blast of holy wrath after Kate’s last vote in support of gay adoption. Kate was prepared to tough this one out: she had never understood what all the fuss was about. She herself preferred men to women, having tried both, but had no problem with other people’s preferences. But, no, this was not what worried them.
The delegation was led by a large and cheerful young woman with a dog collar and improbably red cheeks who bore a more than passing resemblance to the Vicar of Dibley. She introduced herself and her team, saying: ‘We have come to talk to you about the arms trade. We want you to use your influence in government to stop the sale of weapons to governments that abuse human rights.’
She had a long, prepared speech and Kate did her best to listen politely. But the room was overcrowded and stuffy, she was tired and desperate to get away. She looked conspicuously at her watch but the vicar and her followers had been preparing for the visit for weeks and had no intention of going quickly or quietly. Kate tried to escape.
‘I have a lot of sympathy,’ she explained, ‘but I am new in the job and this is not my area of responsibility. And there are strict rules and processes governing arms exports.’
‘But we read in the press that you have just been to India. Promoting arms exports. Shouldn’t the Indians be spending their money on fighting malnutrition and illiteracy?’
‘Yes. They also have a democratic government with real security concerns. And shouldn’t we also be concerned about British workers and their jobs?’
An earnest member of the delegation launched into scripture –‘swords into ploughshares’ – and Kate could see that she could not win an argument based on textual analysis of the Bible. She managed to summon a graceful smile. ‘I know how much this means to you,’ she responded. ‘I admire your Christian spirit. I will dig out some facts on
the arms trade with India and send them to you to discuss at our next meeting.’
Stella looked aghast at this prospect. ‘Time wasting Guardian readers. They will never vote for you whatever you say,’ she muttered after the delegation had left offering Kate their prayers.
Iqbal Aziz drove his 500cc Bajaj motorcycle confidently to the entrance of the Parrikar Avionics factory. In his pocket he was carrying a letter from the head of human resources explaining that a vacancy had appeared that fitted his engineering qualifications perfectly. Please would he present himself and, subject to the necessary checks, take up a job that was waiting for him in the R&D unit?
His journey there had started a few weeks earlier. He had been at his desk in a secretive defence research institution near Islamabad. He received a summons to see the legendary General Rashid: battlefield hero, now mastermind of Pakistan’s covert operations overseas and head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency ISI. The General got quickly to the point: ‘We have a job for you. India. Mumbai. Give you a chance to meet your extended family.’
This wasn’t the first job the researcher had been asked to do. On business and academic visits to the US and Saudi Arabia he had been asked to obtain classified information in his field of radar linked to missile technology, beyond the limit of what their governments would release officially. Unlike most agents he had the advantage of knowing exactly what he was looking for and what was useful. He had shown himself adept at recruiting local helpers and mastering the technologies of copying, miniaturising, storing and transmitting sensitive data. His research superiors and his handlers at ISI were both delighted with his progress: he was destined for higher things that no longer involved risky trips in the field. But here was a big job that, with his family networks and travel experience in India, he was ideally qualified to carry out.
The briefing was specific: ‘There is a defence industry installation on the outskirts of Mumbai that we want to know more about. We think it is developing technology linked to their missile defence system. We need to know where the Indians have got to. The firm, Parrikar Avionics, works on the programme – we think – with a British firm and British government backing. We want you to get inside their R&D department and find out what you can.’
Several weeks later he was in India staying with cousins whose family had remained behind at Partition. They were encouraged to believe that he was a bona fide visitor with a valid Indian passport.
Aziz manoeuvred his bike to the allocated parking area amid hundreds of other Indian made mopeds and motorcycles. He had a good look around and assessed the level of vigilance. Security was visible but not oppressive. No one had checked the panniers on his bike. The man at the gate had looked at his letter but appeared to be reading it upside down. Not very impressive. The perimeter fence was high but scalable. There were a few CCTV cameras but to his knowledgeable eye there were too few and they were badly positioned. Compared to the US military industrial establishments he had visited, or even back home, it all seemed rather sloppy.
He followed the signs to the security office to submit his papers and obtain a pass. When he entered the office he was told to wait in a queue and, after fifteen minutes, was invited into a small cubicle to sit opposite a bald overweight man who was sweating profusely in his tight uniform. Behind him sat a man introduced as his assistant who was reading the sports pages of a Mumbai newspaper. The overweight man laboriously and slowly took Iqbal through the details of his original application form, checking dates and places and ensuring that all the certificates and references were in place. The questioning was thorough but pedestrian: a box-ticking exercise of the kind perfected in subcontinental bureaucracies. Iqbal panicked at one point when it was noticed that the date on one of the certificates didn’t tally with the date he had cited in his CV; but this was a genuine mistake and the man grumpily accepted it. After almost an hour he was pronounced security cleared and sent off to have his photo taken for a pass.
In fact, the interrogator was far from slow but an extremely sharp, US trained head of security. And his ‘assistant’ had flown down from Delhi for the interview, from Indian counter-intelligence. They were both well aware that Iqbal Aziz was not who he said he was and that his CV was largely a fabrication. He was Hussein Malik who had first appeared on the radar screens of intelligence agencies almost a decade earlier when he was pursuing his PhD at Stanford, as an overseas student from Pakistan. He had showed an unusual degree of interest in some of the avionics technology being developed at that time and in the heightened post 9/11 security his curiosity was noted, especially when he later reappeared at academic conferences and business negotiations, placing him near some very sensitive material.
But he was not caught doing anything untoward and went back home to a research establishment linked to the Pakistan military where the CIA kept close tabs on him, and, at one point, tried to recruit him. Subsequently he travelled widely to conferences dealing with avionics technology, and the interest of several intelligence agencies was aroused by the fact that he sometimes travelled with a false identity. There were several visits to India on an Indian passport that the Indian authorities had monitored but not aborted, hoping to find out what he was up to. Then, a few weeks ago, he had been spotted in Dubai and, after a series of flight changes, had ended up in Mumbai, staying with what appeared to be distant extended family.
The man from Delhi felt that he and his colleague had, so far, successfully hoodwinked Iqbal Aziz. No hint had been given that the watcher was being watched. He patted himself on the back for winning the argument in Delhi against those who questioned his recommendation to let Aziz into the country and into the factory in the hope he would lead them to a network of subversive contacts working for the enemy.
CHAPTER 8
TRISHUL
Press reports, Moscow, 5 July 2019:
President Putin paid a short informal visit to India, his third. He told a press conference that Russia ‘wanted to restore the excellent relations between the two countries that prevailed before the break-up of the Soviet Union’. The Indian Prime Minister, receiving him in Delhi, agreed that there was common ground in suppressing Islamic terrorism in the region. Russia will also press for India to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council and President Putin referred, without giving details, to a ‘sharing of competences’ in relation to nuclear technology.
Kate was in the office bright and early on Monday, refreshed after a family weekend spending time with her daughters. She was beginning to enjoy her new life and the office worked smoothly now that her excellent private secretary had established an efficient, but pleasant, routine. Susan was a find.
This morning Susan came in with some highly confidential papers. ‘Kate, I’m supposed to check that you have read these papers and then take them away. Not to be left lying around,’ she announced. This was Kate’s first exposure to papers marked ‘Top Secret’ and she was mildly titillated at the thought. Fascinated, she plunged into the first document. To her amazement it was a broadly accurate account and analysis of her India visit as presented to the Pakistan Security Council. They knew all about Pulsar and Parrikar Avionics and why they were important. Someone had risked their neck for this – or whatever part of the anatomy the Pakistan authorities severed when they uncovered secret agents.
There was, however, one sentence in the report that caused her to stop and reread it several times. Her head span as she grasped the significance of what she was reading: the Pakistan intelligence assessment of the kit to be provided by Pulsar was that it would destabilise the nuclear balance by giving India the potential to knock out the electronics of any Pakistani nuclear retaliation.
‘This is the opposite of what I was told,’ she said to Susan.
‘It isn’t my job to comment on policy,’ Susan replied, ‘but it may explain why my equivalent in the Foreign Office was anxious that you should see the report.’
‘So, what should I do?’ Kate asked.
&n
bsp; ‘My strong advice is to say and do nothing at this stage. You are new to the job and so am I. You can raise the matter with the Secretary of State or even the Prime Minister, but you need more than an uncorroborated opinion by an unnamed Pakistani analyst.’
Kate read a less confidential paper by the Foreign Office Research Department piecing together press and other published reports from India and Pakistan that, individually, were of no great significance and none of which had made it into mainstream Western media, but taken together led the analyst to conclude that the ‘threat level’ had been raised a notch or two to just short of red. Indian sources reported increased numbers of crossings of the Line of Control into Kashmir by Kashmiri separatist militant groups allegedly backed by Pakistan. Substantial numbers of Indian soldiers and infiltrators were reported dead. The Cabinet reshuffles in both India’s and Pakistan’s governments had brought forward ministers who were more aggressively hostile to their neighbour and with strong links to religious fundamentalists.
And a leading Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, reported that the Pakistan Defence Minister had flown to Beijing to discuss the deteriorating security situation in the subcontinent and to seek Chinese support for countering ‘illegal’ Indian encroachments on Pakistani air space. He further announced that he had authorised a military exercise in the Sind desert near the Indian border, saying: ‘We need to be prepared for all contingencies.’
None of this had been flagged up as a problem to Kate during her visit to India. It had all been ‘business as usual’. But clearly it wasn’t.
Calum called in his management team and union reps for a meeting in the boardroom.
‘Good news, bad news,’ he began. ‘Good news: the Indian contract looks as if it is now in the bag. Due diligence has raised no problems. Our investors are happy. I have some wee financial details to sort out. Not a problem. Thanks for helping me to get the project ready for launch.