Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

But today London seemed to be the home for all that was wrong with his business. Like so many others involved in intelligence in Northern Ireland he found that his good ideas had been broken on the back of entrenched interests and a process that was unwilling to countenance change. The dead hand of the Northern Ireland Office, where civil servants had successfully managed a career out of not solving the problems of the province, was the worst example of the rot that had set in.

  He knew that frustration was pretty much universal but it did not make it any easier to take. Now, the politicians were suffering one of their periodic spasms of indignation when they wanted something — anything — done to appease the cries of outrage from their constituents and the editorial writers of the Sun and The Times. As usual, he would be expected to pull some rabbit out of the intelligence hat so that the House of Commons could resound with platitudes about “winning the war against the IRA” and how Britain “will never give in to terrorism”.

  The truth was that Britain had given in to the fact of terrorism years ago. There had been an acceptance by the Army, the police and, above all, by the politicians that a certain level of violence was acceptable. The result was a decision by default to contain rather than eliminate the problem. Despite twenty-five years of warfare, there was still no strategy to deal with the terrorists, just a whole series of micro-managed tactics designed by people like himself which tinkered with the problem rather than tackled it head on.

  Now he had been summoned from Belfast to a meeting in the Home Office where he knew everyone present understood the real issues but where they all would simply try and find a crumb to throw back to the political table to keep their masters quiet. It was not a happy prospect.

  He came out of St James’s Park underground station on to Tothill Street, turned right and then crossed the road and headed through the revolving doors into the Home Office. The building, he thought sourly, was like so many of the people inside: born in the 1960s, developed in the 1970s and beginning to show signs of age in the 1990s. For a building close to Parliament Square and looking on to St James’s Park, the planners of the 1960s bore considerable responsibility for defacing the landscape with such a boring building as the Home Office headquarters. It is a rectangle of glass and pale grey concrete almost entirely devoid of personality. It is a standing joke to those inside that the architect actually thought he was designing a new prison for the Home Office and to save money it was made into their London headquarters instead.

  Taking the lift to the seventh floor, Bryan turned right and walked around the east side of the square to the comer leading to the north side. Strategically placed with a stunning view of St James’s Park is the office of Sir Clive Whitmore, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office. The senior civil servant in the Department, Whitmore is responsible for the police and for the Security Service, also known as MI5. Dickens had come across Whitmore some years earlier when they were both working in the MoD, Dickens with the Defence Intelligence Service and Whitmore as PUS. Then as now, Whitmore sat on the Joint Intelligence Committee which oversees all British intelligence.

  The JIC is not, as is popularly thought, simply a meeting of the heads of different branches of intelligence. Instead, it is the JIC that produces the assessments on which ministerial decisions are based. For the past two years, the vast amount of JIC work had focused on the problems posed by the former Soviet Union as well as helping formulate a future role for British intelligence both at home and abroad.

  The day-to-day activities of the IRA in England are not of interest to the JIC but devolve to the department responsible, which in Northern Ireland is the Northern Ireland Office and in England the Home Office. Hence, Whitmore’s involvement in a meeting to discuss terrorism was not that unusual.

  He is a silver-haired man of almost exquisite politeness who appears soft and sometimes diffident. But he is a legendary political infighter who mastered the intricacies of Whitehall through service in the Cabinet Office under Thatcher during the Falklands war and then in the MoD under Michael Heseltine during the shambles of the West-land business which brought Heseltine’s resignation.

  He is now in his late fifties, but is still young enough to have a son who plays in a punk rock band. So in discussion he can be relied upon to take a fairly liberal stand as long as it does not conflict with his first loyalty to his colleagues in the civil service or his second loyalty to the Secretary of State.

  The summons had come that morning and Dickens had caught the nine a.m. shuttle to make the noon meeting. As he entered the private secretary’s office he looked around to see if he was flying solo or if this was a group effort. One of the private secretaries waved him straight through and he entered Whitmore’s personal office.

  Like most of the Home Office, it was furnished in fading Habitat with none of the fine antiques that the government’s Property Services Agency seemed to supply so liberally to the Foreign Office. Instead Whitmore has a plain blue carpet, a pastel suite of sofa and armchairs to one side and a light oak conference table at the other. The Victorian watercolours on the wall were yet another example of the bad taste that seemed to be a requirement for employment at the PSA. Whitmore stood up and moved towards Dickens, hand outstretched.

  “Colonel Dickens, how nice to meet you again,” he said. “Come along in and take a seat.”

  Dickens saw that all but one of the six seats were taken and so he sat down between Stella Rimington, the Director General of MI5, and John Witherow, the newly appointed head of SO13, the counter-terrorist unit from New Scotland Yard.

  Whitmore resumed his seat at the top of the oval. “Let me introduce you, Colonel,” he began, and gestured to his right. This is Stuart Purnell, my private secretary; on his right David Bickford, the Security Service legal adviser; Stella you know; John you know; and Mike Williams, head of Met Special Branch, you also probably know.”

  Dickens looked around, marking the people and judging the atmosphere. This meeting spelled trouble. There were too many leaders from too many agencies for it to be anything but a crisis. Bryan’s hand reached into his jacket pocket for the solace of his pipe but as he brought it to his lips he saw the disapproval in Rimington’s face and set it aside.

  As always in the Home Office, his thoughts were backed by the air conditioning which seemed to give off a perpetual hiss. It was as if a hidden audience was permanently showing its displeasure at the goings on inside the building.

  Dickens immediately dismissed Purnell. He would take notes and stay silent, his job simply to record his master’s voice and make sure that a politically correct version of events went into the files. Apart from Whitmore, the most important player in the room was Stella Rimington, whose public claim to fame was her appointment as Box’s first female DG. Bryan had come across her in Northern Ireland when she headed G Branch, which handles counter-terrorism for the service. Back then, it had looked as if her career was going nowhere. Indeed, rumour had it that she had applied to be headmistress of Roedean, the girls’ public school. Not surprisingly she had been turned down, as a life in intelligence may teach many things but experience of real life and particularly teenage girls is not one of them.

  Then Margaret Thatcher had appointed Sir Antony Duff to reform MI5 and he had brought Stella in to be one of the five directors. When Patrick Walker took over as DG, he determined to elect Stella as his successor to keep the appointment inside the organization.

  Dickens had always found her a formidable operator. She had a quick mind and, like many intelligent people, had little patience with those of lesser intellect or who presented weak arguments. When Bryan had last met her, she had seemed younger than her fifty-five years, her hair cut in a pageboy style, her jewellery Victorian cameo and her skirts and blouses sensible Liberty prints. But the years of additional responsibility had aged her. Now just short of her sixtieth birthday, she looked it. The hair was still dark but the streaks of grey were more noticeable and the lines around her neck and wrists were deeper. H
er dark eyes had drawn back so that her face appeared even more impenetrable.

  It was interesting that she had chosen to come to the meeting with David Bickford, who was a largely unknown but very powerful figure in the intelligence world. He was the conscience of MI5, the man who made sure that everything the organization did was strictly legal. His appointment was in part a response to the criticism made by Peter Wright and others that MI5 was a loose cannon on the deck of English politics. While Wright had exaggerated wildly, there had been too many occasions in the past when decisions had been taken without due regard to the law. Today, like its counterpart in America, MI5 is so constrained by bureaucracy and legalities it is difficult to get anything done.

  In his late forties, Bickford had been brought in from the Foreign Office where he had done some pioneering work on devising ways to stop the laundering of drug money. He favoured well-cut suits, striped shirts and had a habit of sucking his lip between his teeth while he thought of answers to difficult questions. Dickens had met him once in Belfast and in searching for some common ground had been surprised to discover that he collected original scores from Gilbert and Sullivan operas. His full laugh, which he used often, was a poor disguise for a tough and at times ruthless mind. But he was a highly moral man and would always side with the law and principle.

  Mike Williams, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch, was a man who three years ago would have had real power. But today he was a bit player in the intelligence game and he knew it. The importance of SB had declined dramatically when a hundred years of tradition had been reversed by Kenneth Clarke, the Home

  Secretary, and MI5 was put in charge of countering IRA terrorism on the mainland. The change had been dressed up in plenty of weasel language but the truth was that SB was no longer up to the job and the change reflected a view that had been widely held for years.

  Dickens looked at Williams, remembering how he had once gone down to the police training college at Bramshill to lecture to the commanders’ course on counter-terrorism techniques. These were the high fliers in SB, the fast-track inspectors who were certain to rise to the top. It had been like talking to the wallpaper: no feedback, and when the questions came they displayed such ignorance that he had never again taken the organization seriously.

  For Mike Williams, the changeover had been particularly galling. He had been promoted to what would undoubtedly be the pinnacle of his career, only to have his power chopped from under him. He had fought a fierce rearguard action and lost. His drawn face had the yellowish tinge of a man who smokes too much, giving him a pinched and bitter look. He was clearly here to save face rather than make a serious contribution.

  Witherow was a different matter. He had inherited SO13 from George Churchill Coleman who had run the organization through much of the 1980s and into the 1990s. George, who looked rather like Farmer Giles but favoured better suits, had received a lot of the brickbats for the failure to catch the IRA teams operating in England. Much of this criticism was unfair as SO13’s job is to act on intelligence and not to gather it, to catch the criminals rather than prepare the ground for their capture. Even so, as the pressure mounted, George had tended to see his world in terms of SO13 rather than as part of a huge team. He distrusted Box, Six, the Army, everyone in fact except his own coppers. He had been glad to get shot of the lot of them and move on to a quieter life.

  Witherow was a different man. In Dickens’s experience police officers tended to fit into two categories. The first was the overweight, beer-drinking “copper’s copper and proud of it”; the kind of man who touched the side of his nose with his forefinger and muttered about “instinct” when asked what makes a good policeman. The second was the younger, serious man who came out of the training courses in the seventies and who talked a great deal about the social relevance of community policing and the importance of bridging the cultural divide with the Anglo-African community. It seemed to him that both groups were just as out of touch with the real world. Above all, he felt that people so singularly lacking in humour would never be good at anything. Fun was a vital part of the human condition.

  But Witherow at least seemed to laugh at life and himself occasionally, so Dickens tended to treat him as more of an equal. Such an attitude to the tall, rather shambling figure was common and may have accounted for Witherow’s thriving in the fast-track graduate programme. He was in fact one of the very few to have survived and prospered. Every other man of his intake — and most of those who followed — had left in disgust at the backward, entrenched attitudes that still prevailed in the police. Unlike any other branch of government, or even any other business, the police still believed that an officer had to be promoted through the ranks. A good copper had to have worked a beat. It was nonsense but no government was prepared to tackle such prejudices and be criticized for undermining law and order.

  Since taking up his post, Witherow had done what he could to bridge the barriers that existed between Box, the police and the Army and he had had some success. The regular Thursday morning meetings on the fifth floor at New Scotland Yard were no longer the cat fights between different branches of the counter-terrorist effort determined to protect their turf.

  “Thank you all very much for coming here at such short notice,” Whitmore began. The Minister is concerned about the IRA problem. We have questions in the House on Thursday and he’s going to get a rough ride. I had a meeting with him last night and he asked me to get together with all those involved to get a sense of where we’re going with this one.”

  Bryan stifled a smile. There was a certain type of civil servant who spoke in a particularly strangulated version of the British upper-class accent and Whitmore was one of them. All the Os came out in elongated form so “involved” became “invoalved”. Whitmore’s enemies, of whom there were many, said that it was an overcompensation for an education at Sutton Grammar School which he tried to disguise. The truth was that Whitmore was a Cambridge classics graduate and it is a mark of that university that Latin is always taught with the O pronounced long. For those in the know, it was a mark of a man with the right stuff. For the vast majority who didn’t understand the intricacies of the British class system, it merely sounded affected.

  “We seem to be in an accelerating pattern of violence. First the attack on Royce and now that dreadful business in Winchester. The violence is reaching levels where even the steadfast British public are getting restless. The Minister wants action and I have promised him some. And it is up to us to come up with some solutions. So all suggestions are welcome. Stella?” His gold-rimmed spectacles caught the light as he turned towards her, giving a brief impression of a spotlight.

  As always, Stella had prepared her ground methodically and presented an ordered resume of Box’s position. “You will recall, Clive, that we were only given control of the mainland problem recently and it takes time to put the necessary people in place to get the kind of information we want. What we have done is bring those people in, so that a structure is now in place and information — good information — is beginning to flow back. But I would stress that it is early days and if you are looking for instant answers from my department you’re not going to get them today.”

  “Is there really nothing?” replied Whitmore. “No crumbs for me to pass on to Secretary of State? No houses under surveillance, no suspects that could be arrested?”

  “You know we don’t discuss operational matters, Clive. We do, of course, have a number of operations ongoing but they are not about to come good. As far as arrests are concerned, I’m afraid that the days when arrests would happen just after an attack are long gone. Too many long-term surveillance operations were ruined and sources compromised because of that kind of stupidity. And we never managed to get evidence that held up in court. So no deal there either.”

  Good for you, Bryan thought to himself. The police habit of lifting a bunch of “suspects” immediately after a bombing or a killing was the worst possible example of knee-jer
k counter-terrorism. It gave the cops something to crow about and fed a few scraps to the politicians. But the suspects were invariably released when the fuss had died down, everyone got back to business as usual and nothing was gained in the long term.

  Both Mike Williams and Witherow appeared visibly to bristle under Rimington’s thinly veiled attack. It was Williams, a man who now had little to lose, who responded. “That’s not quite accurate, PUS,” he said, using Whitmore’s formal title. “We have two operations ongoing, one in Manchester and one in North London, which are ready to be wrapped up. My men could deliver you the arrests this afternoon and they could be charged tonight, in time for Question Time tomorrow.”

  The brazen nature of the offer and Williams’s willingness to sacrifice operational requirements for political needs infuriated Dickens. It was behaviour like this that had made sure that the fight against terrorism marked time for twenty-five years instead of moving inexorably towards the IRA’s defeat. He found himself talking, anger overcoming his usual caution, years of cynicism finally finding a voice.

  “It’s exactly that kind of rubbish that got us to this meeting today,” he began. “Years of policemen bending the rules to suit the political agenda. Decades of the politicians doing nothing unless the newspaper headlines and the evening news demanded it.

  “And just where has it got us? Every single terrorist jailed for the campaign in the 1970s freed as heroes because the police faked the evidence. No significant convictions of IRA terrorists in Britain in the 1980s and in the 1990s the police have such a rotten reputation that the courts no longer believe the evidence even when you have some that’s worth presenting.”

  Whitmore tried to speak but Bryan rode over the interruption.

  “You and the dreaded Northern Ireland Office are as much to blame, Clive. You set the agenda in the seventies for a policy of containment and so we’ve been happy basically to do nothing. We have so many different organizations combating the IRA it’s impossible to keep track, while they are one group and bloody good at what they do. The only thing that gives us an edge is our technology — the Army’s technology — and without that we’d get damn all either from forensics or signals.