The Steering Group

by M. J. Laurence

  The ship had been in Trieste a few days before our arrival and rendezvous. Trieste was an interesting place to meet up with the ship and allowed me time to readjust and unwind. The team and I had commandeered an office building near the port for the purposes of consolidating our intel and monitoring traffic movements behind us, so to speak, to ensure we had a clean exit. I remember phoning Anna from the office with my feet up on the desk, forgetting that I had no need to monitor the time or ‘the cost’ of the call. It was good to speak with Anna and we were very much looking forward to our time together at Christmas. I suppose it fits the horrible description of clocking in, where all the guys would clock in with their partners and then appear to forget all about them as we all concentrated on the job in hand – a magnificent way to deal with your loved ones and a way that can’t be understood unless you have had to endure such situations where private lives cannot be allowed to enter and disrupt mission objectives. This is not to be callous or cold-hearted in any way but simply to preserve the integrity of the mission, the security of those involved and the very safety of the ones we actually love.

  Time passed quickly and I remember transferring back to the Eagle and refocusing on the fact that Christmas was to be spent in Malta. Life seemed to be normal back on the Eagle and the prospect of some downtime felt very welcoming. The ship eventually berthed in Valletta against a backdrop of stone architecture and history, which I left behind in the rush to get to the airport. Waiting at the airport in Malta for her to arrive was one of the first times I truly got that feeling I would marry Anna. I can remember watching for her arrival through the glass partitions. Anna was and still is a beautiful woman. I think what attracted me to her the most, apart from the obvious sexual stuff, was the fact she was normal, grounded and my best friend. Someone with whom time could pass comfortably in silence as well as having fun, and she was a great travel companion. We were soon to gain a healthy taste for travel and the finer things in life.

  Reunited once again after nearly five months apart. I picked up a hire car which we aptly named the foxy lady (VW Fox) and dropped off a friend and his girlfriend at another hotel before arriving at a shitty three-star hotel on the other side of the island away from the ship. Despite that hotel being probably the worst on the island, it had absolutely no impact on our time together. We were young and in love. With Anna I was able to briefly put the world to one side for those few days and have some fun and downtime.

  The hotel really was awful. It had very average rooms with crap balconies overlooking all the other crap rooms around a central atrium. It didn’t matter though. We were in love, and making up for lost time was definitely on the agenda from minute one. I had never been much of a ladies’ man and had never gone looking for just sex for pleasure, but Anna had an insatiable appetite and it was like running a marathon to keep up. I don’t think I was inexperienced or anything but it felt like a whole new experience with her, more intense, more exciting and definitely genuine. We gave each other pet names; I think we both ended up with many. Unlike our first time in The Montagu Arms this was totally undisturbed time together, despite the frequent fire alarms!

  We spent a week or so touring the island, having fun and sightseeing. We loved the time together exploring in the car. I think this is a true test of whether you are going to last as a couple if you can spend all your time together as we did on that holiday. We passed the test and knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. I have some very fond memories of our time in Malta. We were young, in love and carefree. It didn’t matter we had a shit hotel, a shit Christmas dinner in the hotel (which we walked away from) or a Chinese takeaway for New Year! Time together was the only thing that mattered.

  Always wanting to get out and explore, we spent hours zooming around in the hire car taking in all the sights. It was a great holiday. We never really ate in the hotel and managed to stumble upon a restaurant called the Roman’s Den after walking around hopelessly looking for somewhere to get a cold drink and get out of the sun and find a bathroom for Anna. I think it was in a town called Rabat. The restaurant door was not exactly inviting but the menu looked good. Pushed on ahead by Anna, who was and is very shy, we descended the stairs into an underground deserted restaurant filled with empty tables beneath brick arches and weird artwork. There was no one there and we sat patiently at the bar in the air conditioning for maybe 10 minutes. We were about to leave when a strange character by the name of Aiden appeared at the doorway from the kitchen, an explosion of curly black hair atop a beaming smile in chef’s whites covered in stains – this was our host. Delighted we had waited, he prepared a tasting plate free of charge and we sat and enjoyed an afternoon of conversation with him as well as a few drinks, promising to come back for dinner.

  We went back to Roman’s Den for dinner and New Year’s Eve. Back then there were no drink & drive laws so I was able to get plastered on champagne after eating the most amazing and, still to this day, best lobster thermidor ever. We each had a whole lobster tail taken out of its shell, cooked perfectly and re-inserted with a prawn thermidor sauce. I think it was maybe 2am when we emerged from the restaurant back onto the street and drove back to the hotel. Everyone was drunk and there was traffic chaos as people made their way home after the New Year celebrations.

  I remember during our tours of Malta ending up at the film set of Popeye and spending a joyful day lost in fantasy land; I have a great photo of Anna behind one of those wooden characters with a hole to put your face in – it was Anna as Olive Oil. A few days later I watched Anna ascend the escalator up to departures. She turned and waved and was gone. I returned to the ship in Valletta harbour, which looked completely out of place, the modern cold grey steel of the ship against the backdrop of the stone fortress and Grand Harbour. I had a day and a night in Malta to explore prior to the ship sailing and managed to enjoy the fantastic Maltese hospitality to its fullest extent.

  The ship sailed from Malta bound for Portsmouth, my first trip to Bosnia completed and a relationship still relatively intact. Heck, it was hard to adjust to having a person in my life who wanted to be with me all the time. It didn’t compute, it was alien to me, and I guess I was suspicious in a number of ways. Suspicious that anyone would be interested in me for any genuine reason but also afraid I was being trapped into marriage followed by kids, a mortgage and boredom. Usually it means it’s too good to be true. However, Anna was genuine to a fault which made the whole fucking situation harder to deal with. It would have been a damn sight easier to have ended it all at this early stage rather than go through the whole ordeal and the secrecy of the double life, not to mention the fact that I was actually in love which was a major curve ball, as it can be for anyone. Talk of buying a house in Portsmouth was simply crazy in my mind. I was always suspicious, and like all operatives I guess totally paranoid about anyone entering my life even if invited.

  I had the voyage home and a heap of time to consider all the options open to me. I managed to get on leave back up north and would travel (not as often as Anna would have liked) to see Anna. She was a home owner at least so I wasn’t a meal ticket! Fucking looking back, we should have just eloped and got married that leave, but it’s never that simple when you’re in the moment. Always in my left ear was my mother who found endless ways to make our relationship difficult: curfews and other ridiculous stipulations placed upon me whilst I stayed with my parents at the weekends. Then I had the demands of the Steering Group competing for my attention in the other ear. I know I should have just moved in with Anna, I know that now, but the fact is we do owe my mother a small debt of gratitude. She almost drove me to the point of literally squeezing the life out of her by gripping her throat after an argument over Anna. Believe me, I would have ended her life, but this moved our relationship to the point of no return, and I was certain that Anna was the woman for me. I would abandon my family for her if necessary, and that kind of certainty made other decisions regarding my relationship with Anna much easier. That was fam
ily dealt with, in my mind – well, one of them anyway – and now there was my second family to organise in my head. People, families and relationships, I find them all too difficult to understand sometimes.

  What no one, including Anna, understood or was even aware of was the complexities of having a partner whilst being involved with the Steering Group. A partner is a bigger security risk than the operative because should she be compromised in any way then it’s an open back door into the system, a breach that could open the doors right into the heart of the British Secret Service. The Steering Group had to put measures and resources in place whilst I was away to ensure everyone’s peace of mind. Any pathway to the Steering Group, which operated behind the firewalls of MI6/MI5 and N1, would be an unacceptable risk. To expose a more fundamentally silent service whose mission is to undertake (by use of intelligence) the quiet option preferred by members of the House (known as the executive branch) to manipulate events abroad in favour of the Crown would be a catastrophic political and security disaster. Of course, officially we didn’t exist. Funny, I still look for that resource outside my house today, however ridiculous that is now, as it’s been some years since I was an active member of the group. I guess all those months that Anna felt alone, she was never actually alone.

  Operation RIAR was set to remove any certainty I had of getting married, and all my domestic arrangements would have blowholes in them from every direction. My life’s sureties would start to fall apart in the coming 12 months as I traversed the minefields of love with absolute commitment to the person I loved whilst battling with utter contempt for the military forcing me to possibly end the relationship because of the risk and danger I was putting Anna and myself in. If I had ever been discovered, captured or my true identity released, Anna would have been in as much danger as me for reprisals or possible recruitment under extreme circumstances through blackmail or threats from the other side of the espionage coin. This mind-spinning reality was the catalyst for all the uncertainties and the appalling treatment I unleashed upon my future wife in order to see and test her ability to deal with my attachment to the Steering Group, and withstand it. Yes, I admit I was a bastard as I tested Anna right to the edge and beyond that coming year. The Steering Group was aware and approved – fuck, they were only interested in the business at hand and wanted the results on the other side of RIAR, not a security risk in the UK, but they needed me so Anna was in for the ride for as long as she could hold on.

  It was me who turned out to be the weak one as I saw my heart nearly break whilst continually trying harder and harder to push her away. But I sit here now believing that in the deepest corners of my heart I was, am and always will be Anna’s soulmate, revealing only now why I did what I had to do in order to protect us both, uncovering who I was and what I had become under the veil of secrecy embedded in all the double lives, lies and confusion of who I myself wanted to be. The subterfuge that I had to employ to protect Anna and my military family was a nauseating obligation that was the very weapon one would employ to destroy the very fabric, purity and trust of the love I had been so privileged to be offered. Espionage isn’t to be found in bed with love and trust, but yearns to be unmasked and set free when such purity enters its realm, yet it is too afraid to trust in return for fear of its masters.

  I then left Anna behind and alone as I embarked on Operation RIAR.

  Fuck, if only Anna had known what a fucking nightmare I was about to embark upon, could I forgive myself not only for my silence that I transmitted that coming year but for the whole fucking ordeal and aftermath that I’m still dealing with today? I still seethe with hatred for what happened in Bosnia. Motherfuckers, all of them. Bosnia was just another excuse for a racial hatred that saw Europe sit back and watch whilst genocide once again crawled out of the earth and into the darkest hearts of men beset on seizing power from those they knew could not resist or put up any kind of fight. Oppressing the weak and the vulnerable, then exploring and celebrating in the very filth and riches war brings to those whose desire is to immerse themselves in the quest for power beguiled by the very lies they have fabricated as the truth to obtain it.

  Plato said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” That guy knew what he was talking about.

  The Steering Group

  Chapter 9

  Operation RIAR

  It was back-to-back deployments for many of the British Armed Forces out to the Adriatic and the Bosnian crisis. I would hitch a ride aboard the various British naval platforms rotating watch out there, patrolling off the coast of Split. Although under the Steering Group’s control, I was also working for NATO now, still with my original team attached to me and my assignments. This rotation was to last on and off for just under three years for me and the team, which made home life really difficult.

  I can’t remember how shit I was at maintaining correspondence with Anna back home but I know it was bad, and if I’m honest I probably ceased communications for the entire time I was in theatre. It was probably for the best as an average day at the office was looking like 20 hours and there wasn’t much left in me after that which was any good. I’m quite certain it had been in my mind for some time to end the relationship, not only from a security point of view but as a kind of safety recoil in order to hide myself from Anna. My increasing activities overseas weren’t helping in any way either, making it very difficult to make the books balance between home and the service. Having children had been talked about but there was never any way I would have brought a child into the world in which I was operating at that time. The possibilities of that child becoming fatherless were officially given the odds of 80%, not something you want to discuss with your future wife. I sent a letter to Anna implying it was best to end the relationship on my return to England. It’s strange because some 20+ years later we have sort of admitted to each other that we regret not having children. We were better at good holidays, five-star hotels and fine wine.

  I spent some transit time aboard HMS Eagle on my second deployment, getting re-familiarised with the team, attending group briefings from the Steering Group via sat link, discussing the high-value targets, priorities and secondary objectives they wished to explore and a plethora of background material that bored the team and me to death. I also managed to get plenty of time in the engineering department clocking up time in the ‘chair’ training to become an officer of the watch (engineering). It was my penultimate step to becoming an SNCO in the navy, which was tied to promotion within N1. This was a task the Steering Group was very keen to see completed, not only because of their plans for me to work with Anatoly in the future if a defection could be pulled off but also because it would make the transitioning of identities, posts, appointments, etc. easier to manage between various units. I do believe now that it’s policy for any N1 operative to be of SNCO rank from any base unit. My time on the Triton had made this task easier as I had enjoyed endless study time. Gas turbines were easier to operate than a nuclear propulsion plant, so it was just a case of familiarisation and lots and lots of practice. It was a welcome distraction from the monotony of daily life aboard ship but one I really just wanted to tick off and move on from. There was no room for exceptions – to remain under the Steering Group umbrella, I needed to have two specialisations: language, which I already had; and engineering, which for me was an immense struggle.

  There were obviously other Russian intelligence functions to be undertaken beyond Op RIAR, with all the source indicators pointing towards Anatoly and the information I had extracted from him in Dubai. Someone in the doughnut had developed a taste for Russian technology after our last success and was obviously keen to explore this avenue to a more beneficial conclusion, and submarine propulsion systems and subsurface-launched ICBMs were high on their agenda. Anatoly had become more popular than he could ever have imagined. I was destined to gain a more in-depth knowledge of ship design and construction whether I liked it or not before undertaking the assignments that were being lined up for me in the f
uture involving Anatoly.

  The Eagle arrived on station in the Adriatic as part of the Yugoslavian task force and joined up with USS America and the Theodore Roosevelt. I transferred over by helicopter to the America on the first flight off the deck one morning after the SAR helo had gone airborne. Day one week one on station. Lynx helicopters are just flying taxis, and I always enjoyed riding with the side door open until I learned of an accident where the side door had come off one particular helicopter and ripped off the tail rotor, then it ditched and all aboard were killed. I always had the door shut after hearing about that. I attended briefings with Paul and the team aboard the America. They all looked exhausted at those briefings. Paul was keen to point out he had been chewed up in the five-sided puzzle (the Pentagon) for the better part of a month and was pleased to be away from the politics, and he would seriously be up for coming out in the field if he could. Baz just laughed at him, retorting that the team didn’t do combat tourism, not even for the Steering Group.

  It had become painfully clear from all the continued and elongated correspondence between myself and the family in Moscow that Alex urgently wanted me to join Evgeny this one time on that transport out of Drobeta-Turnu Severin in Romania (as previously agreed with the family in Dubai). Delivering this cargo, which Alex had now put all his personal guarantees on, to a place called Valjevo was of paramount importance to the family and Alex wanted me there to support Evgeny. I had to look it up in an atlas. Valjevo is a city in the Kolubara District in western Serbia, an area well known to be controlled by the Russians. Alex had made it clear that he controlled the entire route as it was in Russian-controlled Serbian territory, therefore Evgeny and I would be perfectly safe, but it had to be a personal delivery by the family as the customer was nervous following the disappearance of Mohammed and Ahmed after the last family gathering in Dubai. The letter and email exchanges danced around the issues in order to be non-specific, but it was pretty clear Alex was very much in the spotlight for this next exchange and no amount of bullshitting was going to allow him to sit this one out. The customer clearly didn’t want to be exposed to any risk without the family being present, and he needed to be the living on-site insurance policy.