The Steering Group

by M. J. Laurence

  I managed to secure a bunk down a quiet gulch away from the mess square with a deployed group of six SBS who were on board for the ride and no doubt anything else that came along. I soon found out I was to be their interpreter if needed and, yeah, I guess their plaything after a fashion. They just kept themselves to themselves really. They never complained about the noise of all the piss-ups that happen very regularly at sea and they never really joined in. I can remember spending many late nights lying in my bunk just talking shit with these guys when they were on board, teaching them Arabic and Russian. I think it went down well to pass the time with them in this way and as we made our transits from one zone to another. A mutual respect was to develop between us and it was just cool I guess to be with other guys who probably had more secrets than me and just didn’t feel the need to talk about any of it, so it was just sort of understood in both camps. I didn’t ask their names and we just called each other ‘mate’. Like with any military acquaintance you recognise the person but can’t remember the name so you just call them mate.

  I remember going to my assigned part of ship to see my section chief upon joining and, fuck me, knock me down, there was Spud. This was gonna be an interesting trip. I was beginning to believe it was all pre-planned – too many nice little coincidences. Spud had grown a beard and was looking older. Spud was a ginger, but I won’t hold that against him; he wasn’t a big guy, just sort of insignificant really. He was always well presented, but it was so obvious to me that all his navy kit had just been issued to him about a week ago, and probably in a hurry as this was a late-notice assignment and so his uniforms looked like cardboard nailed to a beanpole. Very polite and kind-hearted, he always had time for me and I appreciated him as my mentor. He was actually there as close protection in the first instance (following the Moscow trip) which was quite strange, as I never had felt threatened or in danger in any way, but the whole deal had the Steering Group a little nervous for a while and I suppose they just liked having Spud keep an eye on me.

  Prior to sailing for the Gulf from Portsmouth, the Berwick undertook sea trials, shakedown and Basic Operational Sea Training. It’s the navy’s way to train up a crew prior to an operational deployment. Starting with basic safety and readiness training, progressing through single-threat and multi-threat scenarios to advanced tactical training out at sea and all achieved through a structured system of relevant and focused operational training, with an emphasis throughout on realism, including battle-damage simulation and all aspects of war fighting. And of course, every Thursday was all-out war where Blue and Orange forces (some foreign navies were trained in the UK) would conduct the Thursday War, which inevitably meant lots of onboard fire and flooding drills, machinery breakdowns, gunnery exercises and all manner of naval skulduggery orchestrated by the FOST teams (Flag Operational Sea Training).

  For the crew of the Berwick it meant a long six weeks of training and exercises day and night that eventually becomes routine. I think everyone who has done shakedown and OST will always remember the days spent at Portland Bill doing the disaster exercises that do a fine job of simulating a hurricane-stricken island or some other similar disaster that leaves everything on fire, damaged and all the inhabitants displaced and injured but just well enough to give the crew a hard day out, screaming and pretending to be everything from pregnant to half mad. I think they had a hardcore of locals who just loved to act and come along for a big day out to give the matelots a hard time. It was the DISTEX (Disaster Relief Exercise) that concluded your time at Portland and, looking back, it was a great theme park they put on for the training – everything, including helicopter rides, burning vehicles and the best disaster movie sets found this side of Hollywood. Spud and I took every opportunity to explore all the scenarios and delve in deep where he thought it would benefit me. The engineers did really well under Spud’s leadership as he was just a born leader.

  The great thing about Portland was that it was an ‘away from home’ port; both the Guz crews and the Pompey crews were too far away from home to do the daily commute, so everyone lived on board at night and those with families didn’t disappear home when some random exercise was sprung on the duty watch. But more importantly, it meant everyone would be out on the piss in Weymouth or Portland every fucking night. I think it was part of the training as the hangovers we gave ourselves were the best way to simulate battle fatigue, and all the lads made sure they were all fully fatigued every morning.

  A typical night out would involve shooting a few cans of beer on board before jumping in a ‘Joe Baxi’ (taxi) bound for Weymouth. I was okay in Weymouth as I knew a few of the Booties (Royal Marines) from my previous training and steered the boys away from ‘Green Beret only’ pubs to avoid any punch-ups, and when we did run into them it wasn’t hard for me to talk us out of any bother, knowing a few of the lads from 45 Cdo or 42 Cdo. It was a great night out, usually starting at The Black Dog and then I can’t remember all the names of the pubs, but we all drank Newquay Steam beer washed down with gin or vodka chasers before heading back to the green shutters in Portland. All piss-ups were followed up with what was known as ‘BIG EATS’, which translates into anything greasy and fulfilling in the food department for a pisshead, which usually meant getting a chicken on your fist (literally) from the hole in the wall, or a burger from the greasy spoon, as you made your way back on board smashed out of your face at about 2am, always remembering not to take a shortcut across the local graveyard to take a piss on any of the headstones as that was where the local provost (military police) liked to hide in order to catch us pissed, fucked-up matelots and put us in a cell for the night. This would ultimately ruin the rest of the month, with extra duties and a fine for our troubles.

  It was on one such night out in Weymouth that I met Pierre, a guy from the hard at RM Poole just up the road. He was sitting in a bar on his own nursing a pint when Seth, Happy, George, myself and Spud poured into the otherwise deserted battlecruiser (boozer/pub). I bought him a pint for his sorrows as he was at the bar alone, whilst we played pool, fed the jukebox for an hour and entertained the barmaids. Never did think much of that meeting with Pierre until much later on in life. He was and remains an amazing guy. This is when I first met Keith, who had tagged along as a baby stoker with the lads on his first real piss-up off the ship. A strange cockney geezer that to look at you’d have thought had gotten lost on his way home from school. Keith and Pierre had just become two threads entwined into the hawsers of my life’s tapestry without me even acknowledging it at the time. The encounter was nothing other than part of a piss-up but a meeting that was of special significance in my life. I know now that Spud and Keith were also in the embryonic stages of something bigger for Keith, but that wasn’t to be realised for some time by me. Nevertheless, Keith ended up working for me and Spud on the Berwick for a short while. I thought he was fucking useless to be honest but he would later prove my initial assessment to be utter bollocks, becoming after training an invaluable member of the Steering Group toolbox.

  So, there we were, all assembled incognito on board the Berwick headed for the NAG (Northern Arabian Gulf), me, Spud and an SBS section aboard. I had been taken under Spud’s wing for my first attempt at going live into the Middle East. Over that six months Spud and I grew quite close and I think he did everything possible to keep my mind active, keep me sharp, but at the same time open my eyes to what life was to become and how to process everything, and more importantly keep it all in perspective. His temperament was just great and his teaching skills simply exemplary. It was so easy to get all the instruction I needed, both in engineering and in the hidden skills and methodologies of the hidden espionage operative – how to be all you can be without yourself or anyone else noticing. Spud was reporting directly to the Steering Group and was above the bullshit of the RN. It was obvious because he was absolutely carefree about his RN role, and the captain always came to Spud for a cigarette and a chat at about 4pm, which was always preceded by the captain’s steward bri
nging fresh cakes and nibbles at about 3.45pm. Spud always made out to everyone it was because he was doing some work in the wardroom but, trust me when I say, he never went to do any navy work on his visits to ‘the wardrobe’ as we called it.

  I received many letters from Anatoly (intercepted and analysed of course) which were passed on by the Steering Group whilst I was fucking around in Portland and in the early weeks and months of the deployment. They needed a personal response and were quite out of date before the Steering Group finally released them and the replies. Things had been going well for Anatoly and he wrote with such compassion and heartfelt sorrow at my absence. Evgeny wanted to know when I would return so we could go hunting together again with Anatoly and his father Alex. He had missed my comradeship and yearned for the three best friends to be back together like in the wolfpack story Alex had told us so many times after the boys had become like brothers. My mind wandered back to Moscow and I could almost hear the laughter above the sound of crap music in the apartment as everyone sat down for dinner. I wrote my letters and posted them to Wales. Fuck, I missed Moscow and I missed my friend Anatoly.

  Bound for the NAG and escort duties for merchant shipping down through the Strait of Hormuz, we had left Pompey on a Friday of all days. Our transit took us across the Bay of Biscuits (Biscay) and into Gibraltar for a run ashore before heading to Suez and then the Red Sea. It was the time just after the tanker wars, and the Iranians had threatened a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and we had to sail through the Iranian silkworm envelope each time we took up patrol. We dropped off the SBS boys at Suez, not to be seen again for a while, and then I guess for the most part it was a very quiet deployment. I guess boring for the most part.

  I continued working hard at getting promotion and picked up my next rank shortly after getting into theatre. I was preparing myself for further engineering qualifications, to secure a place on an engineering qualifying course – submariner – which would give me the basic understandings of a nuclear power plant and all the theory that I needed in order to possibly engage and understand a conversation around those involved in nuclear technology trading between the Soviets and the Middle East. It was all just mad science to me at this point in my career. I hadn’t figured out the connections, hadn’t joined all the dots why the Steering Group kept me in training on things I thought irrelevant. Spud kept me on track and focused on the bigger picture and the real promotions that I sought outside of the Andrew. The engineering was of course of significant importance to the group, a skill they wanted me to have. All operatives have at least two separate skills. Mine were language and engineering, Spud’s were engineering and ordnance. I was keen to pick up his skills and knowledge in the ordnance world, and it was an inevitable rub off.

  Gulf patrol is generally boring and no different around the time of the first Gulf War and Desert Shield, so don’t let anyone tell you any different. We were up and down the Gulf following merchant ships and occasionally observing a Russian escort doing the same as us, mirror imaging. I usually got called up to the EW office (electrical warfare) or to the operations room to translate or listen in, but it was usually very boring shit. Occasionally I was part of the boarding parties and went aboard merchant ships to say hi and all that bollocks but also to familiarise myself with merchant ship layouts and systems. I would always face in-depth questioning from Spud on my return from any such outings – everything from machinery layout to number of crew, nationalities, languages, ship’s particulars, and he always wanted a ship’s manifest. It was training beneath the training. I remember spending many nights drawing detailed deck plans from memory for Spud to examine in-depth and then interrogate my knowledge, or lack of, about everything I had seen and who I had talked to.

  On one such boarding operation I remember meeting the captain of the Maersk Navigator on that trip who I later bumped into on port state control (PSC) duties. It’s funny how the cloth of life is woven together. There was a lot of traffic from the NAG oil platforms, but the serious threat was still the Iranian terminals and further possible attacks from Iraq. Nothing really materialised. I remember spending Christmas at sea, as well as my 21st birthday, without a drop of alcohol – that’s how fucking boring it all was. Some nights the captain would take us into offshore waters to allow us to have a flight-deck BBQ and three beers but it just didn’t cut it. The runs ashore when they happened were mayhem and it always ended badly with one or more of the crew in trouble for drinking too much and getting lifted on the streets of Dubai, which was never a smart move.

  It was after Christmas, around February, when the ship was planning advanced leave which would allow approximately 30% of the crew to fly home so that the rest of the crew could take leave on arrival in Pompey. Spud had put my name on the list. But I wasn’t going home. A more carefully constructed departure from the ship had already been engineered and I guess I had been waiting for something more interesting to come into my circle for months as we were so close to all the piss-holes of the world.

  I was going ashore with Spud and the team to a compound in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia as intel had suggested that Rashid Asadi was staying in Saudi and was expected to have some other possibly familiar friends joining him for a business trip into Jordan or possibly Israel. It was an easy switch: pack everything up and store it at a US airbase in Jeddah before taking a trip into the sand with the team. I had a few nights in Dubai to get pissed up and sell the story that I was flying to Australia to be with family, hence why I wasn’t on the transport back to the UK with all the lads. It was a quick and welcome mental switch to get back into the intelligence role.

  It was a cool start to the day; it’s always the best temperature at around 6am in my opinion, and I remember as we prepared to leave for the airport the amount of equipment coming with us. Spud, the team and I went to Dubai Airport separately in a minibus and were taken over to a military apron for boarding a USAF flight to Riyadh on a simple C130 transport aircraft, nothing special. After a short flight sitting in cargo nets, we arrived unannounced but were later met by the American representative, a tall skinny guy who seemed a little flustered and unsure what to say to us except “Welcome, and how was your flight?” How was the flight? Seriously? It was a fucking C130 transport – there wasn’t any in-flight entertainment, refreshments or movie! He messed about asking for transport documents, to which we just smiled and Spud simply retorted, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and showed him an ID badge, at which time he quickly got on his radio. We were then quickly transferred and billeted in Eskan Village, about 20 miles south of the airbase. It was originally built for the local tribesmen but they never took up the offer by the Saudi Government, but the Yanks did. We were allocated a villa away from all the traffic, so to speak; it almost felt like we were on R&R or something. The villa had four en-suite rooms off a main lounge, all with sectioned sleeping areas. Two to a room and I was in with Spud. There was an expectant silent atmosphere, laced perhaps with some detailed preparation and nervous anticipation on my part. No one said much. I just copied Spud.

  Once we had settled into our temporary accommodation Spud called a meeting in the common room. We needed to break the ice. It was a weird first meeting with a brief introduction by Spud of the entire team. Spud introduced himself as our group combat commander and then introduced the six SBS guys as ‘Guns’, ‘Bombs’, ‘Tricks’, ‘Meds’, ‘Engines’ and ‘Chaos’. I let out a sarcastic laugh that was met with louder laughing. It broke the ice, and it was obvious that Spud and the team had worked together before. Spud made a grand gesture that I, the new fish, had been given promotion to NCO Intelligence. There was a round of applause and more sarcastic laughing, and comments like “Good luck with that, mate” and “Fuck working with you”. I’m sure the team was just happy to have a new plaything I guess. Spud beckoned me over and, after inhaling deeply on his cigarette, was gracious enough to fill me in that this was his team and I was his guest. I was then invited to invent a name for myself. ‘Thumper’ was unanimous
ly agreed by the team as I was known for my temper but it was more to do with some other joke about future jungle training. We poured more coffee and lit cigarettes. We had all sort of got to know each other quite well over the previous months on board even though we hadn’t worked together until now. Weird. I guessed that’s how things would roll from now on.

  Spud then proceeded to give a more serious brief received from the Steering Group. They had issued a kill list. It’s hard to hear those words when they’re said out loud for the first time, and I remember there not being any reaction to those piercing words from the other guys, just me looking at their faces hoping I wasn’t the only one with a ‘what the fuck?’ look on my face. We didn’t have the complete list but the Steering Group had activated Spud’s squad to infiltrate known and suspected arms deals that were taking place within the Middle East originating in Saudi Arabia and supplying the Iraqi Army in the prelude to the possible invasion of Kuwait. This was news to most of the team; we had been aware that Kuwait had been seriously pissing off the Iraqis as it was out pumping its quota by OPEC, preventing an increase in crude oil prices thus preserving its own downstream refining businesses. Plus, according to the former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, every US$1 drop in the price of a barrel of oil caused a US$1 billion drop in Iraq’s annual crude income, forcing a massive financial crisis in Iraq. Between 1985 and 1989, Iraq lost somewhere in the region of US$14 billion a year due to Kuwait’s oil price strategy. So, behind the news were all the familiar (to the team) undercurrents to change the Middle East map once again.