The Big Breach (30 page)

Badger had entered the service later in his career than usual. He obtained a PhD in genetics at Imperial College, worked as a research scientist, then as a management consultant, before joining the service in his mid-30s. He was posted first to to Nigeria, then Costa Rica. Badger's enthusiasm and well-rounded work experience made him an effective officer but he was not destined to be a high-flyer in the office - he was not enough of a back-stabber. `I want you to take over the running of BELLHOP, the biggest operation in the section,' Badger told me enthusiastically.

After the 1985-89 Iran-Iraq war when Iraqi chemical weapons killed many thousands of Iranian soldiers, the Iranians wanted to build their own arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, but did not have the indigenous capability. They needed to acquire the technology, equipment and precursor chemicals from technically more advanced countries. Prohibitions on the export of such materials under international convention did not deter the Iranians from attempting to acquire the equipment clandestinely. Any Iranian national blatantly attempting to buy banned equipment would instantly attract attention from western intelligence agencies, so they ruled out that option. Instead, they set about recruiting a network of western traders and engineers who would do their dirty work for them, either unaware of what they were getting themselves into or turning a blind eye to its illegality. `Your task,' Badger explained, `is to inveigle your way into this network under cover then meet and cultivate the Iranian ringmasters.' From then on, I could take the operation where opportunity led. Badger's hope was to use the infiltration to gather intelligence, perhaps recruiting one of the Iranians if the opportunity arose, then disrupt and delay their programme. He tossed me a hefty pink dossier, labelled P/54248. `Read that and come back to me when you've got a plan.'

This was going to be fun, I thought to myself. Loads of freedom to design my own operation, a really worthwhile objective and a good boss to work under. I set about reading the file on BELLHOP enthusiastically.

Reading an MI6 file can be a slow and laborious job. The papers are arranged in chronological order but that is the extent of their organisation. They contain a vast jumble of information from many sources. Telegrams, letters, police SB reports, copies of military and DSS records of individuals mentioned in the file, titbits from GCHQ, contact reports, surveillance photographs. Many papers cross-reference to other files, so making sense of them means a trog down to the central registry to pull the file. One document in the file might be only peripherally relevant to the case, the next might be crucially important. It is easy to miss a vital titbit and so lose track of the big picture if not concentrating hard. It took me a week before I had ploughed through the six volumes of files and felt confident to design a plan.

The file opened with the detention at Heathrow airport in the late 1980s of Nahoum Manbar, a Nice-based Israeli businessman whom MI6 suspected had close but thorny links with Mossad. Customs and Excise, in a routine search of his briefcase, found papers and plans that appeared to describe a process to produce mustard gas. Manbar was handed over to police custody,. He claimed in his interview that he was an agricultural engineer and that the formulas related to the production of a new insecticide. Although these protestations of innocence were scarcely credible, there was not enough evidence of wrong-doing to charge him with any crime. He was denied entry to Britain, put on the first plane back to Nice and MI6 asked the DST (
Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French internal intelligence service
) to keep an eye on him.

Through telephone intercepts on Manbar's home and information from other sources, the DST established that in 1988 Manbar obtained the plans for a mustard gas plant which he sold at handsome profit to Dr Tehrani Fahd, a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat, who was in reality a senior Iranian intelligence officer and the ringmaster entrusted with the task of building up Iran's chemical weapons programme. These plans, however, were just the start. Fahd now wanted the bits of specialist equipment and chemicals needed actually to build the plant. He tasked Manbar to help.

Although Manbar was eager for the millions of dollars that completion of the deal would bring, he was initially reluctant to get further involved as he knew that he was getting into murkier and deeper legal waters. While he was considering his options, Mossad discovered Manbar's contacts with Fahd and, according to the DST's telephone transcripts, ordered him to a meeting at the Israeli embassy in Paris. There was no intelligence on what was said at the meeting but the upshot of it was that Manbar embarked on the project with Fahd with mysteriously renewed enthusiasm. He set about finding a cut-out, somebody he could rely upon to carry out unwittingly the possibly illegal work necessary to acquire the equipment requested by the Iranians.

Through one of his business contacts Manbar met Mrs Joyce Kiddie, a British businesswoman who lived in the village of Girton, just outside Cambridge. Kiddie had worked for most of her life as a secretary at a local stationery and office supplies company; but when the managing director, by coincidence a former MI6 agent, retired, he put the small company up for sale. Kiddie, by then in her 40s, twice married with a couple of daughters, daringly used her life savings and a bank loan to buy the company. She proved a natural businesswoman and within a few years started diversifying the business. Kiddie developed contacts in China, initially in the stationery business, but then in chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Manbar was impressed by her versatility and diligence, and set about cultivating her to become his cut-out. The DST picked up Manbar's increasingly frequent telephone conversations with Kiddie and tipped off MI6. PTCP obtained a FLORIDA warrant to intercept her telephone and an ACANTHA warrant to intercept her mail, and the Cambridgeshire SB were asked to keep an eye on her. Manbar started trusting her with increasingly bizarre jobs. Once he asked her to find and buy a suitable American-Jewish NBA basketball player who would be prepared to emigrate to Israel to bolster the Israeli national team. She passed this and other tests with flying colours. By the middle of 1993 Manbar was confident that she was reliable and trustworthy and was the right person to introduce to Fahd.

Kiddie was delighted with the introduction to a new and lucrative trading partner and flew to meet Fahd in Austria. In the Vienna Hilton, Fahd asked her to buy a couple of tonnes of thionyl chloride, a `building-block' chemical used in the manufacture of many legitimate products but also an essential basic ingredient for the manufacture of mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin. There was nothing illegal about the purchase - as long as it did not end up in the wrong hands it was not breaking any international laws.

After six months of research, phone calls and two trips to remote parts of China, Kiddie completed the thionyl chloride shipment to Iran. Fahd was delighted and decided to trust her with a bit more responsibility. Now that he had the plans and a proven source of the main ingredients, he asked her to procure some of the equipment for the plant. This, however, was not as easy as the relatively straightforward acquisition of the chemicals.

Chemical weapons plants are not complicated and need not be particularly large. A nerve gas plant can be built into a space the size of a living-room, or even into the back of a truck. A mustard gas plant requires a bit more space, but a facility the size of a small house could provide a militarily significant production capability. The liquid chemicals used in the recipe are very corrosive and must be contained entirely in glass-lined apparatus - similar to larger versions of the equipment used in school chemistry lessons. Just like in school chemistry apparatus, the glass components - stopcocks, tubes and flasks - clip together, then are physically supported by a scaffold framework. Because of the danger of leaks, the building in which the apparatus is contained must be sealed and force-ventilated with high-volume extractor fans. The extracted air is driven up scrubbers - basically polypropylene chimneys filled with glass marbles down which sodium hydroxide trickles. The gases are absorbed by the sodium hydroxide on the surface of the marbles and form a harmless liquid that can be disposed of safely. The sale of all equipment of this sort is subject to international controls and it is difficult for certain countries, especially Iran, Iraq and Libya, to openly purchase any of it, even if destined for entirely innocent purposes. Fahd gave Kiddie the blueprints for some of the simpler pieces of equipment and asked her to see what she could do.

Kiddie accepted the new assignment with relish but found that she was out of her depth. She had no technical training and was unable to understand the specifications and drawings of the equipment. She needed help from somebody with an engineering background, so she recruited Albert Constantine, a 60-year-old former merchant seaman and engineer and an old friend of her first husband. Constantine was one of life's unfortunate souls whose career seemed to disintegrate around him whichever way he turned. He had started work in the Durham coalmines at 16 but was made redundant when the mining industry started to falter. He obtained an apprenticeship in the Tyneside shipyards, but he'd picked another doomed industry and shortly after he was qualified he was made redundant again. He went to sea with the merchant navy and had just qualified as a First Mate when he was seriously injured in a car crash. As a result of his injuries, Constantine lost his merchant navy medical certificate and that career too. He drifted around doing simple engineering work for many years and then, in his late 50s, washed up as a commodity trader with a import-export trading company in London.

When Kiddie asked Constantine to help, he was delighted. He was struggling to make ends meet from his low-paid job, and the extra cash would come in handy. A few months later, in April 1994, Kiddie and Constantine met up in South Mimms motorway service station, just north of London. Unbeknown to them, their meeting was under surveillance. Two PTCP officers, posing as travelling salesmen, sat at an adjacent table, recording their conversation with a sophisticated directional microphone mounted in a briefcase. From that surveillance and the telephone intercepts of Constantine, it became apparent that he too was unable to understand the technical specifications provided by Fahd. But there was no way that he was going to let on to Kiddie just yet - he badly wanted to be in on the deal.

Normally if MI6 wanted to worm its way into a piece of quasi-criminal activity such as Kiddie's dealings with Fahd, they would try to cultivate and then recruit one of the key individuals, such as Constantine or Kiddie. But Badger was adamant that Kiddie would panic if approached by MI6 and pull out of the deal, denying us the opportunity of disrupting the Iranian operation. He ruled out cultivating Constantine, too. He was more level-headed, but was loyal to his friends and he would probably tell Kiddie. Badger was adamant that the only means to get into the operation was for me to approach Kiddie or Constantine under cover, win their confidence and trust, and hope that they would recommend me to Manbar and Fahd.

It would be difficult to get alongside Kiddie directly. First, she worked alone at home, so was not easily accessible via intermediaries. Secondly, telephone intercepts showed that she was wary of strangers and only trusted them if strongly recommended by somebody she knew. I would have to get alongside Constantine first, then hope that he would introduce me to Kiddie.

Delving into the files turned up Constantine's home address in Southampton on the south coast of England. A quick recce trip on my motorbike revealed that the house next door to his terraced cottage was vacant. `Why don't you rent it and get to know him as a neighbour?' Badger suggested. Returning to Southampton to visit the estate agent the next week, I found it was already too late; a young couple had just moved in. I had to find another plan.

Tracing Constantine's employer through the CCI computer fortunately threw up a positive lead - there was already a file on Bari Trading, a trading company in the posh London area of Mayfair. The managing director was being run by H/UKP, the head of the Iranian natural cover section. A quick call on the PAX and at their next debrief the managing director agreed to take me on temporarily in Bari Trading. He would be the only person in the company conscious to the operation, so I would have to get together a cover story which would deceive the other employees.

SBO5, the operational security officer for the PTCP section, agreed to let me use the Huntley alias that was developed for my trip to Russia. Strictly, a fresh alias should be used for every operation but this rule was relaxed to save time and money. SBO5 thought the Huntley alias was unlikely to have been compromised in Russia and the operations were geographically unrelated. Besides, Huntley already had a national insurance card, simplifying the paperwork for Bari Trading. SBO5 insisted that I put up a submission to the new Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, as the operation could be embarrassing if uncovered. Submissions were supposed to ensure that potentially sensitive operations were legally accountable, but there was no independent scrutiny and so the only check on the judgement and honesty of the drafting officer was the diligence of the Foreign Secretary. Writing submissions for Douglas Hurd was a time-consuming task, requiring flawless reasoning and perfect prose, but Rifkind was already renowned for looking favourably on whatever MI6 put in front of him.

Even back in my familiar Huntley skin, there was still a lot of preparatory work needed. From study of the telephone transcripts, we knew that Kiddie and Constantine needed a qualified chemical engineer, somebody who could easily interpret the technical drawings they had in their possession, and who would know where to source the components. Two weeks later, after a lot of study in Imperial University's chemical engineering library, I was working alongside Constantine in Bari Trading, just a stone's throw from the Hyde Park Hilton Hotel, with the cover that I was an Anglo-Argentine chemical engineer who wished to start a new career in chemical commodity dealing. My fictional father was allegedly the manager of a Bauer plant in Buenos Aires and friend of the Bari managing director, who had agreed to give me a six-week secondment so that I could learn the business of import-export trading. The story seemed to satisfy Constantine and the other occupants of the dingy, cluttered second-floor office: Patricia, a pretty young Guyanese-born Anglo-Indian and Fazad, a chain-smoking Iranian in his 60s. Constantine, a friendly and helpful character, loaded me down with books and papers on `Bills of Lading' and `Import Export Duties'. The work was tedious but I was not there for fun. My objective was to befriend Constantine and so, without going suspiciously over the top, whenever an opportunity arose for a chat, a tea break or an evening pint of beer with him, I would take it up.