The Big Breach (17 page)

I found Bidde in his 12th-floor office chuckling to himself. He was analysing a plan proposed by TOS to bug the penthouse flat of a suspected Russian SVR officer in Lisbon. One of the Lisbon station secretaries had rented the flat three storeys below in the same ancient, rickety apartment block and TOS proposed to use this as a base for the recording equipment. They had identified a means of breaking into the loft above the target's flat, and reckoned that it would be easy to find a suitable place to mount and hide a small microphone. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, it would not be possible to link the microphone and recording equipment with the normal radiolink and they would need to be physically connected with a fine wire, running from the loft to the secretary's flat below. The only means of hiding it from view was to thread it down a convoluted drain-pipe which wound its way down the building. After experimenting with various mechanical crawling devices which had all proved unable to work their way down the pipes, TOS had hit upon the idea of using a mouse. They reckoned that by leaning out of one of the loft skylights under cover of darkness, using a fishing rod, they could dangle the mouse, harnessed to the end of the fishing line, into the top end of the drainpipe. They would then lower it down the vertical section of the pipe to the first right-angled bend. From there the mouse could scurry along the horizontal part of the pipe to the next vertical section and so on, down to the bottom of the pipe where it could be recaptured. The wire could then be attached to the fishing line and pulled through the pipe.

Clandestine night-time trials of the murine wire delivery system on the Century House drain-pipes, using three white mice borrowed from the chemical and biological weapons research establishment at Porton Down, proved reasonably successful. One mouse, nicknamed Micky, was a natural and scampered along the pipes enthusiastically. A second, Tricky, occasionally tried to climb back up the fishing line when dangled, but once in the pipe was reasonably competent. The last mouse, christened Thicky, had kept trying to climb back up the pipes and so had been sent back to Porton Down to continue his secret work on chemical-weapons antidotes. Micky and reserve Tricky were to fly covertly to Portugal in the S&D Hercules because they could not be overtly taken out of the country without special export licences. Bidde's dilemma was whether it was ethically correct to recruit animals to use in spying operations. `Thicky is probably lying bleary-eyed at the bottom of a jamjar by now,' giggled Bidde, `and the fate of Micky and Tricky is less unpleasant, so I guess it is ethical.' He squiggled an approval at the bottom of the minute and placed it in his burgeoning out-tray. I later learnt that Micky and Tricky carried out their mission successfully, were returned to the UK in the C-130, given an honourable discharge from duties at Porton Down, and went into comfortable retirement in a TOS secretary's London flat. The fate of Thicky remains a state secret.

Still chuckling, Bidde turned his mind to me. `What can I do for you, young man?' he asked benevolently. Trying to keep a straight face, I explained that his help was needed to devise a suitable cover story for NORTHSTAR's involvement in the Trufax operation. Bidde quickly invented a suitable legend. `He should claim to be a second-generation descendant of one of the Russo-Germanic families from the German colonies around the lower Volga River basin,' he suggested. `The Germans have recently given lots of them German passports,' Bidde explained. `You should get him a Germanic-sounding alias - how about Valery Ruben?' he suggested.

Valery Ruben was at work at the Trufax office in Conduit Street the following day. Within a week he had contacted nearly 20 journalists in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and had a steady stream of information flowing to his fax machine. None of it was CX, but it was early days. It would take a while to establish which journalists had good access and which were second-rate.

NORTHSTAR focused his relationship on to one promising Muscovite journalist. Pavel Felgengauer, a 40-year-old freelancer specialising in defence issues, appeared to have some of the characteristics that might just make him a good agent. He had excellent access, being close to Yeltsin's defence minister, Pavel Grachev. The reports that Felgengauer provided after his meetings with Grachev often came tantalisingly close to the CX threshold so we decided to cultivate him.

NORTHSTAR spoke to Felgengauer at length from the Trufax office. Bit by bit, we built up a character profile of his career, lifestyle and aspirations in the hope that we might find a motivation for him to spy for us. But cultivating him over a telephone line was a slow business. To make real progress we needed to meet him face to face, so we tried to persuade him to visit London. Although he would accept payments for his stories - we sent out several substantial lump sums to him by TNT courier - he would always have an excuse to cancel or postpone any tentatively arranged trips out of his country. Eventually, we reluctantly and disappointedly accepted that Felgengauer was most likely playing the line with us, possibly in collaboration with Russian intelligence. We had hooked him, but now he was just teasing us, accepting payments and throwing back morsels of quasi-intelligence to keep us interested. It was a classic disruption tactic, used many times by Russian intelligence to waste MI6 resources. Russel closed down Trufax after three months to NORTHSTAR's intense disappointment. In total, it cost around œ40,000 and did not produce a single CX report. Trufax, it would seem, had to be put down to `experience'.

Russel, meanwhile, was reorganising SOV/OPS. Unlike other natural cover sections which regularly mounted overseas operations into their target countries, SOV/OPS had hitherto limited its operations to Russians travelling outside Russia. Now that the KGB was reformed and weakened, Russel proposed to strengthen his department and start running natural cover operations into the heart of Russia. He renamed the section UKA, bringing its nomenclature in line with other natural cover stations based in Century House. Then he badgered personnel department for reinforcements. One of the first to join was Spencer. He was bored of his job as a targeting officer and wanted to get into natural cover work. Russel allocated him a desk in my office and put him to work running MASTERWORK. Platon Obukov, a Russian diplomat in his 20s, was the son of a former Soviet deputy foreign minister who had worked on the SALT II disarmament talks. MASTERWORK's own direct access at the Russian foreign ministry was not important, but his father was still influential in Moscow and MASTERWORK had indirect access to this. Spencer planned to meet MASTERWORK for debriefing sessions in Tallinn, capital of the new Baltic republic of Estonia. It was a safe location because Estonia was cosying up to the West, yet Russians could still travel there freely without a visa or passport. Spencer chose to travel as a journalist so went down to I/OPS to beef up his credentials. I/OPS looks after MI6's media contacts, not only to provide cover facilities but also to spin MI6 propaganda. For example, during the run-up to the 1992 UN Secretary General elections, they mounted a smear operation against the Egyptian candidate, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was regarded as dangerously Francophile by the CIA. The CIA are constitutionally prevented from manipulating the press so they asked MI6 to help. Using their contacts in the British and American media, I/OPS planted a series of stories to portray Boutros-Ghali as unbalanced, claiming that he was a believer in the existence of UFOs and extra-terrestrial life. The operation was eventually unsuccessful, however, and Boutros-Ghali was elected.

`Flippin' outrageous!' Spencer laughed as he came back from his visit to I/OPS. `They've got the editor of a magazine on the books. He's called SMALLBROW,' he chuckled. `He's agreed to let me go out to Tallinn undercover as a freelancer for his magazine - the only condition is that I have to write an article which he'll publish if he likes it. Cheeky bastard wants a story courtesy of the taxpayer!'

Russel's ambition to expand the role of UKA hinged on his ability to convince C/CEE that natural cover operations into Russia were practical and secure. To help persuade them that such operations could be carried out by a VCO (Visiting Case Officer) he asked me to research cover legends suitable for use in Russia. There would be no possibility of me actually using the cover in Russia - being fresh off the IONEC, such responsibility would not be entrusted to me. My job was just to do the groundwork for somebody else to take over later. Nevertheless, it was an interesting assignment.

No natural cover is unbreakable as no matter how carefully it is researched, it can never be as rich and varied as a real life. To plug every hole would be futile and expensive, so I needed to tailor the cover to match the likely inquisition by the Russian defences. This entailed first examining the sort of jobs that could be done in Russia under natural cover. The most likely would be one of the simple tasks which were time-consuming for a station officer to undertake, such as letter-posting. Posting an SW letter to an agent is fraught with risk because even after dry-cleaning for several hours, perhaps even a whole day, it cannot be guaranteed that surveillance has not observed the posting and dropped a marker letter on top. When the postbox is emptied, the letters immediately beneath the marker would be scrutinised, the addressees noted and traced, and any holding jobs with access to secrets would come under suspicion. Letter-posting is thus not a popular job with members of the station. But if a VCO could enter Russia without attracting surveillance, letter-posting would be simple and relatively cheap. We knew from defectors such as NORTHSTAR and OVATION that even the FSB did not have the surveillance resources to watch every British businessman visiting their country.

The FSB relied heavily on visa applications to screen visitors to their country, examining every detail against their records for discrepancies. The easiest to check was the birthdate because in the UK every birth is registered in a legend at St Katherine's House, which is open to public inspection. Each birth is entered consecutively when the child is born, so it is impossible to enter back-dated births and MI6 do not use `dead baby' aliases, as described in Frederick Forsyth's book
The Day of the Jackal
, for fear of legal action by angry relatives if the operation should go wrong and be publicly exposed. For most operations, this lack of birth registration is not a problem because the resources of the opposing counter-intelligence service were not that inquisitive, but to fool the enquiries of the FSB visa inspections a workaround was required.

The solution was simple. My own birth was not registered in St Katherine's House because, although a UK citizen, I was born overseas in New Zealand. Enquiries by the Buenos Aires station revealed that in Argentina they had no verifiable register of births, so if I claimed to have been born of British parents in Argentina, it would be difficult for the FSB to check its veracity.

I asked G/REP to forge me an Argentine birth certificate, based on a genuine one that they held in their files. Then through their liaison with the passport office, CF obtained me a British passport in the name of Alex Huntley, born in Buenos Aires on 13 January 1963. From the DVLA they got me a driving licence and then provided a robust ACA (alias cover address) keeper. ACA keepers are agents who act as a cover landlord for VCOs, providing a checkable home address. With an address, CF arranged a bank account and credit card with the Natwest Bank.

All DSS (Department of Social Security) files of Britain's 54 million inhabitants are computerised and held in Newcastle. CF occasionally used these records to obtain information on people of interest to us. But what if the FSB were able to hack into the DSS computer? It wouldn't be difficult as it was linked to every high street DSS office and the log-on procedure was not complicated. The only way to make my alias stand up to hacking was to falsely enter the details in the DSS central computer. This had not previously been done but, after a few weeks' negotiation with the DSS, Alex Huntley had a full DSS record with national insurance number and registration card.

The next task was to research a legend for my alias life. Every element would need to be plausible but uncheckable. A check through the
Public School Handbook
revealed that Scorton Grammar School in Richmond, North Yorkshire, had gone into liquidation in the late '80s, leaving no publicly available records of its ex-pupils, so I could safely claim to have studied there. The records of the University of Buenos Aires were hopelessly disorganised, so this is where Anglo-Argentine Alex Huntley claimed his economics degree, proved with a G/REP forged certificate. From my experience at MIT, I knew a small university in Boston, the Massachusetts Community College, which had gone out of business, and so awarded Huntley a MBA from there. Thereafter, drawing on records from Companies House, I invented a CV in a series of small companies and consultancies which all went bankrupt shortly after Huntley supposedly left, then fudged tax records in the DSS computer to match his career. Huntley needed a plausible current occupation. The usual practice is to front the BCA (business cover address) in a highstreet business-answering service; a modest subscription secures a mailing address and a receptionist to answer incoming calls. Their disadvantage is that they could be too easily checked by the FSB. For my purpose, a more robust BCA was needed.

CF maintained a list of small companies whose managing director was prepared to vouch that an MI6 officer was a bona-fide employee, and they suggested a small Sussex investment company, East European Investment, which worked in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, but not Russia. This gave perfect cover; they had no track record in Russia that I could be quizzed about, but it would be plausible if Alex Huntley were to start exploring business opportunities there. I went to see the managing director and he took me on as a consultant.