by Tom Marcus
He stood up quickly, holding the TV box, which made me stop in my tracks; this wasn’t typical behaviour of someone who was about to martyr themselves into paradise. The TV box was stretching this guy’s arms to full capacity as he struggled with the weight. I could see it now had a small hole in the bottom. As he walked away from me I knew he was not about to kill everyone. Watching him stagger, I stepped on what was clearly a security anti-theft device he’d ripped out of the TV box to allow him to walk through the scanners at the exit of the supermarket without setting any alarms off; fucking hell, this was bold to say the least. He continued walking back towards the escalator where he had originally split from his partner in crime. Trying to continue my walking pace naturally as if I wasn’t, a few seconds ago, about to kill someone for stealing a TV, mistaking them for a potential mass murderer, I caught a glimpse of the female, who was obviously running counter-security surveillance for him. She joined the male on the escalator going back down towards the exit with a receipt in her hand, clearly for deception purposes as if the couple had actually just bought this TV.
Dropping the stylus at the feet of the crowd, I worked my way through the supermarket, looking for my family. I was highly aware that my movements were caught on camera, but the good thing was that I knew in a store this size the cameras wouldn’t all be live-monitored, though they would be recording everything. Thankfully I didn’t actually kill this guy or make contact with him at all.
As I saw Lucy and my son playing near the bread and eggs, my wife noticed me approaching, and asked, ‘OK?’
‘Yeah, all good.’
I didn’t need to elaborate. My wife always knew if I wanted to talk about anything I would, but how on earth do you explain being twelve inches away from killing someone for stealing a TV? Especially to the woman who loves me enough to start a family with me, how am I supposed to explain that how I react to situations is normal and absolutely necessary to keep the public alive? Lucy is everything to me and is an incredible mother to our son, and I knew that with our background in Northern Ireland she would understand my hyper-vigilance to things like this, but as much as I wanted to explain, I didn’t want that side of me to impact our family life together. Most people would see the way I reacted to someone stealing a TV as extreme; some might even say I was out of control. I would, and always will, argue it’s people like me that keep you safe in your beds at night, that allow you to have the freedom to choose who you fuck, where you drink, or, in this case, the freedom to steal a 42-inch TV in broad daylight!
Ask yourself: those people in your office, even your family, what would they do if faced with the split-second decisions we have to make every day? Then ask how they’d switch from family mode into MI5 operator mode every single day without being able to fully explain how their day has been to those who’ll never fully understand. You can’t do it.
I openly admit I see things differently from the masses, but it’s not an over-reaction to things, it’s pre-empting mass murder. That’s one of the main differences between the intelligence officers who work on the desks in Thames House and operators like me on the ground. They react to intelligence they receive either from the surveillance teams, agent handlers or from electronic eavesdropping, whereas we provide the intelligence and have to react instantly to certain situations if we think something like a ‘hard stop’ is needed. Which is basically when we call in armed police or Special Forces to arrest a target with force, deadly if there is an immediate threat to life. By law, MI5 doesn’t have any powers of arrest, which to some people may sound daft, but it allows us to focus on our covert intelligence-gathering work and let the police and justice system arrest and prosecute our targets for us. The last thing the world needs is for spooks to be caught up in red tape and bullshit paperwork when we have terrorists and hostile foreign agents running around the country.
After our family big shop was done we travelled home by car, returning by a different route from the one we had taken here, as usual. We got held up at traffic lights waiting to take our next turning, and I noticed the couple who had stolen the TV only half an hour ago walking in the distance. A true sliding-doors moment. They will never know how close he had been to me ending him. I had a nice warm feeling that they had got away with stealing something as big as a TV in broad daylight. It took balls, and was probably caused by desperation in whatever personal situation they were facing, but I admired them for that. I knew what they must be going through to try to survive, and in my head I hoped they would continue to survive. It’s that understanding of survival, what people are prepared to do in order to make ends meet, that lets me live in the most deprived areas in the UK. Whether someone is a terrorist, mass murderer, career criminal or out-and-out fucking psycho, they recognize their own. Those willing to do extreme things to get them to their endgame, the same as me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ian Grey was my handler in Northern Ireland. He was responsible for running my covert counter-terrorism operations for nearly five years. He was the type of person you imagine when you think of someone from MI5. He could speak four languages fluently, was able to foresee the Islamic threat on the UK mainland before it really started to happen, and to top it all off he had a photographic memory.
Ian openly admitted he couldn’t operate on the ground like I did. He was always going on operations to oversee an arrest or an armed incursion but he had the wrong profile to work on the streets: very typical, elegant clean-shaven English gent. Distinguished-looking. Instead we needed people who’d blend in. People whose appearance didn’t draw a crowd.
Along with all the other MI5 handlers and desk officers in charge of our covert military unit, Ian was under an assumed identity, which is pretty standard practice. Even though every military operator had Top Secret clearance, officially called ‘Developed Vetting’, we all had ‘known-as names’ or aliases. This provided another, albeit thin, layer of protection to our personal lives. We were after all going after the hardest terrorists and killers in the world, who were actively looking for people like us. If one of us was caught we couldn’t compromise anyone else on the teams or from MI5 because we didn’t know anyone’s real name.
Ian recruited me to MI5. He was the closest thing I ever had to a dad. He gave me just enough feedback on debriefs so I knew I was doing a good job without over-fuelling my ego. He guided me through the intelligence world and always encouraged me to question everything I saw on the streets and ‘think of the picture’. It’s to officers like Ian that this country owes a huge debt; because of his actions and people like him, tens of thousands of people are walking around blissfully unaware that they could have been murdered years ago.
Most days he would ask for a debrief from me either in person or on the secure encrypted telephones. Some days even the most hardline terrorists don’t do anything of interest. Sometimes all they will do is jump in the car, go to the local takeaway and return home to watch a night of shit TV. But you try telling Ian that a target hasn’t done anything of interest. He would always ask me to think: What have I missed? What have I noticed but discounted?
He entrusted to me jobs no one else could do or wanted to do. He was, in short, a fucking legend, a true hero, and he played a crucial part in how I went on to operate with MI5 officially.
That particular day I was sitting in the operations briefing room in Thames House, which had a typical layout: a big screen at the front showing the Sky News reporting of David Cameron taking his place at Number 10 after Gordon Brown lost the election, with a lectern that controlled all the imagery shown to the operators about to deploy, a big atomic digital clock so everyone could sync their watches with the operations room officers, then approximately five rows of seating on an incline. Obviously I always wanted to sit at the back of the room. It was probably a combination of wanting to see everything without anyone being behind me, which is typical of surveillance operators of our background, and just being the naughty one in the team, always doing whatever I wanted to.
B
riefings usually start exactly the same way. ‘Good morning, team, please take a moment to sync your watches and I will begin the briefing on Operation GRANITE at 0901 hours.’
As the briefing officer started giving us the background history on the operation and what the job was, the frosted glass door half opened and the director in charge of our branch, known to us only as Director A leaned in just enough to catch my eye and signalled to me with a backwards head nod that he wanted to talk to me outside the briefing room, clearly in private. This was unusual to say the least; we’d have virtually little to no contact with the senior levels of MI5. The flow of intelligence was restricted on purpose; we were told to hunt the bad guys and either report back or stop them in their tracks, and only they know the true reasons why we were on the streets. The purpose was to keep surveillance operators like me objective and not allow us to be led by working theories. We had all the information we needed, like their potential endgame and attack planning targets, weapons, intentions, associates, etc. But we were never told, for example if agent runners were on our operation or if our target had a lot of CIA or MI6 interest.
As I made my way down towards the door of the briefing room, I could see the odd team member looking round at me; we’re all spooks, after all, we want to know what’s happening, nosy bastards, all of us. I was nervous: was a previous operation coming back to haunt me, had my wife called and something was wrong with my son? The director looked at me, then put his hand on my shoulder. He never showed compassion.
‘Ian was found dead yesterday,’ he said.
‘Get fucked, fuck off … FUCK YOU!’
I didn’t feel upset, nor did I cry. I wanted to beat the shit out of the director for telling me. He just looked at me as I knocked his hand off my shoulder and adjusted my footing, ready to floor him.
‘I’ve brought this personally to you before the whole service is told. I know …’
‘YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT!’
I was angry. If I wasn’t careful, I’d have my team pulling me off the director as I beat the living shit out of him.
His face went cold, like a portrait, instantly hardening up as he stepped away from me to lean against the corridor wall. He continued to look me in the eyes, probably expecting me to well up and break down into a sobbing mess on the floor.
I quizzed him intently without waiting for a full response: was it hostile action, was he suffering with a long-term illness, where and who found him? His face was ice-cold in response to my quick-fire questions; he knew I was furious. I wasn’t sure if I was angry at finding out that Ian had died or at the fact that I didn’t find out until a day afterwards.
‘Let’s walk, I want to show you something. You won’t deploy today.’
The director knew I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deploy operationally. Walking through the corridor maze that is Thames House, we went towards the stairs leading down to the canteen. The canteen was a fantastic facility and the food was actually very good and cheap. The service wanted to make sure the non-operational staff didn’t have to leave the building to eat, as a constant stream of MI5 employees going to and from the local coffee shop would make them easy targets for terrorists, foreign intelligence agencies or well-organized crime syndicates. The support staff, as we quite often referred to them, were great at their jobs behind the bomb-proof walls of Thames House, but they lacked the operational awareness on the ground that we relied on to stay alive.
‘Good morning. Two large lattes, please.’
Although the canteen was a nice place to be and a safe haven for employees to relax in, it wasn’t for me. I felt awkward there, not inferior but just out of place. Virtually every office-bound employee around had a degree, they were all highly intelligent and everyone was in typical smart office wear: shirts, ties, suits. Even though we all worked for the best intelligence agency in the world, I never felt these were my people. I felt like a caged animal in this building.
After we got our coffees the director led me to the furthest corner of the canteen, and when we finally arrived at the table, he muttered to me to sit down. I could feel myself stop and stare at him, expecting more respect: fucking telling me to sit like a dog. I never had a problem with authority but this guy was really starting to piss me off.
‘So, we have coffee, no one can hear us. Tell me what happened. No bullshit.’ I bowed my head slightly lower to make sure I had his eye contact before I continued.
‘Boss, what happened to Ian?’
Taking a slow drink of his coffee, he adjusted his seating position and held his cup with both hands as if he was seeking some comfort from the warmth of it.
‘OK. This is what we know to be fact. Yesterday morning Ian was found dead by his cleaner. Single shot to the side of his head, and a gun in his hand.’
Sensing I was about to interrupt with another barrage of questions he continued. ‘LISTEN! And do NOT push me on this, TC. You will not do any digging on this. This is not being investigated. It was suicide, his family will be told of the official cause of death, and that is the end of it.’
The fact that the director was using my Northern Ireland known-as name from the days when Ian recruited me showed me a degree of respect. I knew that, especially as he’d told me personally. He didn’t have to do any of this, which immediately raised my suspicions. Why tell me personally? The director didn’t owe me anything, and if this was a tragic event then the service would honour him properly, not shut someone down. This felt very much like I was being ring-fenced from enquiring into his death.
One thing I know about Ian: he wasn’t the type to kill himself. He and I shared the same opinion on suicide. I’d come across it a few times in my life: you kill the problem, not yourself. I sat back in my chair like some sort of despondent kid who’d just been told he can’t have the trainers everyone else at school had got. The director changed his tone, much softer, and he removed his focus away from my eyes. He shifted in his chair so he could see most of the people eating their mid-morning sausage sandwiches and drinking their very reasonably priced coffees.
‘I’ve seen the service change a lot over the years, TC. I miss the Cold War, fun and games with the Russians. They respected us. I’ve been stuck behind a desk too long now, I hate it. Fucking hate it. What do you love about being on the ground?’
Feeling as if I was in some sort of mad counselling session, I decided to play whatever angle the director was running. ‘I don’t do this for Queen and country, I don’t do it for you or even my team. It’s all I know, I couldn’t do anything else. I’m not one of these mega-brainy educated types from Oxford or Cambridge, I blend in on the streets, it’s my home.’
The director, still casually looking around at all the other service employees sharing light conversation with their colleagues, smiled thinly before he continued. ‘So you’re the saviour of our country, are you? The one person who can solve all our problems, simply because you’re the runt of the litter?’
‘I’m not the last resort, I’m the only option. I can’t do half the shit the people in here can do, but YOU need people like me to get alongside the scum of the earth. I don’t do it on my own, but what I do, I do extremely well. Could you do what I do? Could I do what you do? We’re all individual cogs and if I’m the dirtiest and cheapest cog in this machine then so be it.’
In truth, if someone else had been called a runt in such a disrespectful way they would have flipped out or broken down crying. It didn’t bother me though, at all. I know I’ve come from nothing. A filthy unwashed street kid who lived off cheap tins of beans for the majority of his childhood. But it’s that background that allowed me to filter into the hardest areas and terrorist groups in the world.
MI5 has a lot of different names, depending on whom you talk to. Its official name is the Security Service. However, worldwide it’s commonly known as MI5. You find the intelligence officers who generally sit behind the desks disseminating and prioritizing the targets on the grid refer to the service as ‘th
e office’.
People like me, and there’s probably only a handful still operational on the ground who have been recruited specifically, refer to the service as ‘Box’. This goes back to the days before it was officially recognized by the British government and simply refers to its Post Office Box 500 address. Most people who work under the direction of the service, for example when I was with the undercover military unit in Northern Ireland, would always refer to the officers we knew to be MI5 as ‘Box’.
I think it’s that mentality that has kept me alive on the streets all these years. After all, following an Islamic extremist down an otherwise deserted street in the dark hours of the night after he’d just purchased a crossbow from a local gang isn’t that safe, but because I didn’t think of myself as an MI5 officer, more someone who belonged on these streets, they were mine and I’d walk anywhere I wanted. That attitude and mindset kept me safer than most.
I was proud to be an MI5 officer, even more so a surveillance officer. The director knew that. He was still holding his coffee like it was a freezing cold day, relaxed and people-watching.
‘Why are we dropping it? You must know he wouldn’t do this,’ I said.
He took a last sip of his coffee, then placed the cup on the table before standing up and adjusting his suit jacket. ‘Everyone has their demons. He was in this game a long time. If nothing else, TC, at least we know he’s not suffering any more.’
As he turned to walk away, I knew I’d been shut down from asking any more questions about this. The director had one more thing to say before walking back towards the stairs at the entrance of the canteen. ‘Take the day off, go get drunk or whatever it is you operators do.’
I looked down at my coffee, which had now reached that stage of no longer being hot but not being quite cold. I started looking around, slowly sitting back in my chair. I had all my operational kit on. My service ID card and passport were in a Tubigrip around my right ankle. The last thing I was dressed for was a drinking session; ironically, though, if I were able to deploy with my team today I’d likely be drinking from a can of super-strength lager on a street corner watching for our target.
