A Very British Ending (Catesby Series) (35 page)

‘I have,’ said the captain, ‘compiled a list of what we can call, “acceptable union leaders”. This doesn’t mean that they are ideal at this moment, but faced with a winter interment in the Shetlands or a size-ten boot planted firmly on their testicles, they may become more than acceptable.’

‘How are the camps progressing?’ said the general.

‘The larger one at Unst should be ready soon. The one on Muckle Flugga, for the more important internees, is proving something of a challenge.’

‘I believe there are contingency plans to requisition the
QE2
as a floating and temporary internment facility,’ said the general.

‘Too good for them,’ growled the triangle-moustached colonel. Like many fighting men, the colonel had an engaging simplicity of mind.

‘It is important,’ said the general, ‘that we use code names when referring to actual military units.’ He revealed a chart on
the display board divided into two columns. ‘We’ve opted for champagne brands to identify certain regiments. Mine is the Bollingers; Jumbo’s is the Chandons and Tim’s, the Perignons. We have been probably less kind to our fellow warriors in the provinces. In any case, I’m sure that most of you will know who the Sheep Shaggers refer to as well as the Turnip Tossers. And the Mangelwurzels and the Swede Bashers are also regiments with a proud history.’

‘The sooner we act the better,’ said the colonel.

‘May I remind all of you,’ said the general, ‘that the purpose of this meeting is only to discuss contingency plans.’ The general smiled. ‘For events that will probably never happen. The last thing we want is rumours about a military coup. If you hear such rumours, dismiss them as nonsense and utter drivel. But may I also remind you that your oath of loyalty is to the Crown, not to the prime minister of the day.’

The formal part of the meeting went on for another hour. Afterwards, the assembled officers availed themselves of the general’s hospitality. As the drink flowed, tongues loosened. The captain from the Intelligence Corps wasn’t particularly happy with the tone of what he heard.

Pimlico, London:
25 January 1974

It was an odd letter. Anonymous letters are usually odd – if not totally mad or just plain weird. Every few months Catesby got one from a nun urging him to discover love and forgiveness. Perhaps he was being too harsh on the nun and should have taken her advice. This most recent letter was a bit weird, but also oddly well informed and rational too – and had a postmark suspiciously near the Intelligence Corps depot at Templer Barracks in Kent. In addition to the postmark, the sender further botched his attempt at anonymity by writing in longhand. Or was it, thought Catesby, a double bluff? It was a difficult time and no one trusted anyone. Madness was in the air.

Dear Mr Catesby,

We’ve never met, but I know who you are through my job and via my access to JIC minutes.

I recently attended a meeting where last month’s troop deployments at Heathrow were discussed. No mention was made of the terrorist threat or the SAM missiles that were cited in the press as the reason for the deployment. Normally, someone in my job would have been informed of the intelligence sources behind such a threat. But I have seen or heard nothing. In fact, the mood at the meeting suggested that whether the terrorist threat was true or false was totally irrelevant. I am also concerned about several senior military officers who seem to have political agendas. My next assignment is Northern Ireland. The squaddies call it ‘the Emerald Toilet’ – not an attitude that will gain the support of the local people. I’ll let you know what’s happening.

Stay cool, Mr Catesby, OBE. Who knows what you really think and who you really are?

Give peace a chance.

Best wishes,

Captain Zero

PS: Have you heard about the internment camps on the Scottish islands?

Catesby put the letter aside. He was sure it was genuine – and that Captain Zero was a lot more sane than many of his colleagues. Zero was also totally correct about the fact that there was no intelligence about terrorists equipped with anti-aircraft missiles. Catesby had already checked out the press report that Redeye missiles had gone missing from the Belgian Army base at Düren. The base was home to the Belgian Army’s 13th Missile Wing, but most of the security was provided by the Americans. The US Army had a much larger base, the Fifth Artillery Group, next to the Belgians, which was equipped with nuclear weapons.

Part of the intelligence op was open, routine and straightforward. Using a NATO secure voice scrambler, Catesby telephoned the Belgian base commander who was a French speaking Walloon. They chatted amicably in French as the Belgian officer assured
Catesby that no Redeyes were missing – and Catesby reassured him that it was just a routine call. Catesby then made a similar secure voice call to the American officer in charge of security at Duren. The American assured Catesby that the press reports were ‘undiluted bullshit’ and that, otherwise, he, the American, would be ‘hanging upside down by his balls in Fort Leavenworth Prison’. But, realised Catesby, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

The verification part of the op was a Catesby special. He sent in a team of spivs, pimps and lonely people looking for sex with young men. The soldiers at Düren were bored out of their minds and looking for diversion. The drink and the sex provided it. The booze and the loneliness certainly loosened tongues, but there wasn’t the faintest squeak of a rumour about missing Redeye missiles. The press reports were not just the attempts of a journalist trying to juice up his copy with rumour. No, the press reports were calculated disinfo – deliberate lies fed to the media. But by whom?

Century House, Lambeth, London:
4 February 1974

The news left Catesby stunned and angry. A meeting had been convened in Henry Bone’s office to discuss what had happened the previous midnight and in what ways it might affect SIS. Strictly speaking, it was a criminal act that had occurred on the British mainland and as such was a matter for the police and the Security Service.

Catesby picked up the newspaper and stared again at the headline:
Soldiers and Children Killed by Coach Bomb
. He then looked again at the hastily written confidential report, which differed little from the news coverage. A bomb had exploded on a coach that was ce passengers were off-duty soldiers and their families returning from weekend leave. The most sickening fact was that an entire family had been wiped out: a soldier and wife of twenty-three and their two boys aged five and three. Seven other soldiers had died and bodies and body parts had been scattered along 250 yards of the M62.

‘How, William,’ said Bone, ‘does this event tie in with your theories of disinformation and
agents provocateur
?’

‘It doesn’t tie in at all. It is clearly an IRA atrocity.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I fear the military and the Security Service will use it to justify their own actions – a perfect marriage of tragedy and cynicism.’

The only other person at the meeting was the SIS officer in charge of liaising with the Security Service.

‘It will,’ said the liaison officer, ‘undermine the role of SIS in Northern Ireland. The Security Service will blame us for an intelligence failure and for not being sufficiently ruthless.’

Whether or not, thought Catesby, SIS should be operating in Northern Ireland at all was a good question. As part of the UK, the province should be out of bounds for an intelligence service limited by statute to operating outside the UK. But boundaries were being fudged.

‘And,’ said Catesby, ‘they’ll use this to bash the trade unions as well. They’ll say the soldiers had to travel by coach because the railway workers were on strike. Any excuse for it, any excuse.’

‘Any excuse for what?’ said Bone.

Catesby was reluctant to say it in the presence of another SIS officer, but the whispers and rumours had been rife for some time. ‘Any excuse for a military coup.’

Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall, London:
6 February 1974

There had been a family argument the previous evening that had left Catesby unsettled and not in the mood for what was going to be a very tense JIC. He and Frances were still living apart, but from time to time they met for supper with one or both of the stepchildren. On this occasion, there was only the daughter. She teased Catesby about his bowler hat and suit – and suggested that he buy a pair of flares. Catesby hated flares – and replied that he would rather ‘eat his lower colon raw than wear flares’. For some reason this got Frances going. She told him not to use such language in front of the children. Catesby replied by saying: ‘They are no longer children. They are twenty-eight years old.’ Then added, ‘And lower colon is not a swear word. If you want me to use a fucking swear word I’ll use a fucking swear word.’

The daughter found it all amusing, but Frances rounded on him.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘do you always need to shock and show off? You’re fifty years old, nearly fifty-one, and still haven’t grown up.’

‘Shall we compare payslips? My immaturity doesn’t seem to have affected my career.’ Catesby’s grade in SIS was three civil service levels higher than Frances’s in the Security Service and he didn’t mind rubbing it in.

Frances smiled with a steely glint. ‘It hasn’t affected your career
yet
. I hope you get a haircut before the JIC meeting.’

‘I think,’ said the daughter, ‘you should grow your hair even longer – and do get a pair of flares.’

‘I’m really hungry,’ said Catesby with a benign smile. ‘I love you both. Let’s give peace a chance.’

Frances had left a lot unsaid. Her job at Five and the vicious infighting swirling around her was taking its toll. Her marriage to Catesby, even though they didn’t live together, put her under constant scrutiny – as did the radicalism of her children. Her daughter was an acclaimed architect, but one who lived in a squat and was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Her son was a barrister who specialised in controversial human rights cases. He hadn’t joined the CP, but often bought the
Morning Star
. It flustered judges when they saw the newspaper scattered among his legal briefs. Although Frances never made the accusation directly, she suspected that Catesby’s influence might have helped radicalise her children. Catesby would always reply that young people should be taught to stand up to bullies – and the JIC meeting was going to be a case in point.

The M62 coach bombing was too recent to be included as an agenda item. Instead, the first item on the agenda was ‘Heathrow Deployment and Evaluation’, but the most contentious was ‘FLUENCY: Report and Evaluation’.

Catesby hated FLUENCY with a passion. It was an interagency working party that had been set up to investigate allegations that the UK’s intelligence and security services had been penetrated by the KGB. FLUENCY had quickly turned into a paranoid witch-hunt. Catesby knew two FLUENCY victims who had been
hounded to suicide. Another, who had since retired and died, was the very head of MI5 himself. The allegations were pure venom intended to destroy, and were largely based on the director having signed a chit to look at a file. According to EMPUSA, a copy of the file ended up in Moscow. Anyone, thought Catesby, who was going to copy a file to send to Moscow Central would never be so stupid as to sign a chit for the file.

Catesby had decided to keep quiet on the Heathrow item unless he was asked questions. He had already prompted the number cruncher from Treasury with some useful lines of enquiry that he might pursue. As the meeting began, Catesby noticed that the Chief of Defence Intelligence had sent his apologies and was represented instead by his deputy. Discretion is indeed the better part of valour. Catesby thought the colonel standing in for his boss would be out of his depth. The soldier began by reading a report justifying the Heathrow deployment. ‘The decision was made with the highest possible level of certainty following an exhaustive review of intelligence reports plus diplomatic and open sources.’

Catesby smiled. How easy it would be to chop the colonel’s report to shreds. ‘Diplomatic sources’ were a euphemism for chitchat that you half-heard at a drunken embassy party. And ‘open source intelligence’ is what you get from reading newspapers. And it’s easy to find what you want. Planting false stories and then harvesting them as truth is one of the best ploys in the trade. Basically, intelligence officers give off-the-record anonymous briefings to tame journalists. The briefings are often full of disinfo and smears. When the information, secretly provided by the intelligence officers, is turned into printed news or broadcasts, the intelligence agencies than glean the news reports as ‘open source intelligence’ which support the suspicions that the intelligence officers fed to the press in the first place. Another gambit is to covertly feed disinfo to double agents and defectors and have them playback the disinfo in ‘official’ debriefs to yourself and to other intelligence agencies.

The colonel concluded, ‘…a clear pattern of terrorist threat and activity has therefore been established.’

The Treasury member looked at Sir Maurice, the head of SIS. Maurice, bespectacled and plump, looked more inoffensive than he was. Underneath the round layers, he was hard and sharp.

‘What intelligence,’ said the Treasury member, ‘did SIS have about the likelihood of terrorist anti-aircraft missile attacks at Heathrow Airport?’

‘No more than normal,’ said Sir Maurice, ‘which is to say nothing specific. There is a possibility that SAM-7 missiles may have fallen into terrorist hands, but we have no firm intelligence anything like that has happened.’

‘Did not Defence Intelligence share their information about a threat of terrorist attacks with SIS?’

Sir Maurice’s eyes crinkled behind his glasses. ‘Yes, we received their intelligence reports – just after midnight on the day of the Army deployment to Heathrow.’