by Tom Marcus
Alison took half a pace forwards, a folder in her hands. ‘Thanks Derek. Yesterday MAGENTA STOAT met a contact who was identified and confirmed as LAST DAWN.’
Derek didn’t have to dodge the rank structure of A4 and so he asked the question on all our minds. ‘Alison, LAST DAWN was identified on the net by who?’
Turning to address Derek specifically, Alison was obviously uncomfortable at giving away need-to-know intelligence, but she knew Derek would keep asking until he got his answer. ‘That was Director G.’
Raised eyebrows from Derek mirrored what we were all thinking. Director G Branch being in the operations room listening and watching the live feed from my camera footage was not normal at all.
Turning back towards our semi-circle, Alison continued.
‘Once it was confirmed LAST DAWN was your contact, the desk came across some intelligence, working with G Branch, to identify a potential plot involving LAST DAWN and MAGENTA STOAT. We have known for some time that MAGENTA STOAT was planning or at least trying to organize an attack on a government department. We just didn’t know what or which department.’
That was why he’s high priority. Take down the right part of the government and the country is wide open. The Russians think big, their aim to cause a huge amount of pain for as long as possible. Corrupting the power supply grids in order to profit from the energy they sell while simultaneously reducing our strength on the world stage, or collapsing the banking system so they can profit hugely, or disrupting the EU and our relationship with our allies.
Derek spotted the phrase that would open up the briefing further, ‘Didn’t know . . .?’
Alison took a deep breath, her grip on her file tightening. She tried to relax when she realized she was standing in front of two teams of surveillance operators watching her every move, but it was too late. Clearly this was not going to be good news.
Derek stood up. ‘It’s important the teams know absolutely everything.’
Alison nodded, like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. ‘We thought LAST DAWN was dead, killed in Chechnya fifteen years ago. When G Branch confirmed the video footage you got in the park as definitely being him they quickly linked it to another target called TURQUOISE FLAMINGO. To cut a very long story short’ – Alison pulled a small dictaphone from her pocket – ‘this is an intercept we got from a mobile phone inside Eel Brook Common connected to an office in Moscow.’
Pressing play, Alison quickly tapped the volume button so we could all hear it: lots of rustling around then clearly two separate male voices, both speaking in Russian. Now I’ve never been fluent in Russian but I could pick up some key words in the thirty-second recording; ‘secure’, ‘watch’, ‘area’, ‘park’ and ‘move’, alongside the odd ‘yes’.
‘For those of you who don’t speak Russian,’ Alison said, ‘the transcript is as follows, and for clarity Male 1 is in the UK, Male 2 is in Moscow and this intercept missed the first five seconds or so of the call.’
Male 1: . . . secure, yes?
Male 2: Yes.
Male 1: Start collecting now, we are all here.
Male 2: Yes. Getting everything.
Male 1: We do the practice, watch the area then move away from the park.
Male 2: Yes. We will see anything that moves with you.
Alison looked quickly around our teams. There was silence throughout the garage.
‘When we then got some intelligence that suggested the teams could have been compromised we had to take it seriously and pull you all out. But in fact, they didn’t have a lock on any of you. Your reputation is intact!’ she said, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
‘And their plan is?’ Derek piped up.
‘To plant remote access into the communications between us, Vauxhall and the West Country.’
‘Cheeky bastards!’ Derek stood up with a smile on his face; this was game on. The Russians, however they planned to do it, were trying to get unrestricted and hidden access to all the information shared between the three intelligence agencies here in the UK: MI5, GCHQ and MI6. Exabytes of secure intelligence shared back and forth daily, not just about the UK, but assessments and information from within Five Eyes (the intelligence-sharing alliance of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US), and top-secret intelligence being fed from deep-cover spies in hostile countries, including our assets in Russia.
‘As you can imagine, having our comms compromised wouldn’t just embarrass us politically, it would leave us wide open militarily too. We don’t just share information about terrorism between the three UK services. Intelligence is a big picture.’
What Alison was saying was sinking in among the team. One of the Blue Team operators called out from the back, ‘What about our team radios? Are they safe to use?’
Alison nodded confidently. ‘Yes. For now. But if they manage to pull this off it would almost certainly put us back decades. The financial cost to try and recover – if we ever could – would be astronomical. The human cost is what scares us though. If that flow of information has to stop, British citizens will die as a result. If we can’t talk to each other through fear of being heard, it will slow us down to a complete stop. Then there’s the residual fall out of that . . .’
‘Which is?’ Derek kept on Alison’s heels as she was forced to finish her statement.
‘Once they have access to the intelligence, they can find us. You. Remember, the landscape in Russia isn’t simple. This might not be Russian intelligence, it could quite likely be state-sponsored criminals. Russian intelligence wants access to a certain part of our intelligence, they back a civilian group to gain that access and provide them with the equipment and money to do so, but the SVR or FSB won’t be monitoring what else this group obtain. Selling secrets, locations of operators, agent handlers, absolutely everything like that will go directly into the hands of those who can pay the most, the quickest.’
‘What about our families?’ The question blurts out of me before I have time to think. Heads turn towards me then instantly back to Alison and Derek as all the other operators think the same thing. Are our families at risk? The very people above all others we try to protect. Have we brought this to their doorstep?
Alison holds her hand up, saying sincerely, ‘No. Everyone is fine. Look, is this bad? Yes. Very fucking bad.’
Great. Doing nothing for our confidence here, Alison.
‘BUT! We identified what they are trying to do quickly. We have other assets in this area providing overwatch, making sure no hostile surveillance is here.’
Alison didn’t say who was assisting us and even though we were in and around the training areas favoured by the UK’s special forces, it was more than likely we were keeping this in-house and using another surveillance team dug in around the hills to watch and monitor any activity surrounding the area.
Derek wanted to get back out on the ground. He was itching to go and it was starting to infect the rest of the team. Not one of us felt like running from this. Standing up, he got a large kit bag from the back seat of his car and was joined by two of the technical support teams.
Alison raised her voice slightly as we moved towards the tech guys, ready to get this job moving again.
‘I’ll give you a quick update and then you’ll deploy on MAGENTA STOAT and LAST DAWN respectively. Blue Team, you’ll be covering LAST DAWN. Green Team, you’ve got MAGENTA STOAT. We have Red Team taking on TURQUOISE FLAMINGO. The three targets are now our highest priority, making them the most dangerous people in the UK. Twenty-four-hour surveillance on all three, as you can imagine. We need to find out more about them. So anything and everything you can get.’
This is the difference between a normal intelligence-gathering agency and MI5. We could have had these guys immediately arrested and removed the problem. But what then? We couldn’t prosecute them because the methods we use are secret and the directors in Thames House wouldn’t want to run the risk of showing the Russians how we tracked them down if we couldn’t
be 100 per cent certain what they were trying to do. And arresting them would stop us identifying the real threat back in Moscow. The more we knew about them, the better equipped we would be to stop that threat permanently. We pushed the boundaries of what’s normally classed as acceptable risk.
11
NIGHT VISION
I finally got a chance to talk to Lucy while driving back towards London. When you’re doing this type of work, you have to memorize certain numbers, from a phone you can call in an outright emergency to access codes. The most important number for me was my wife’s mobile. How many people, especially now we all have smart phones, know their own number but not their loved ones?
‘Hello?’ Lucy’s voice told me she was expecting me to call and try to reassure her I was OK.
‘It’s me, sorry. How are you?’
‘Yeah, all good here, I’ve just got little legs into bed. Any idea when you’ll be back?’
Phoning home can be a killer sometimes. In the military, when you’re away from your loved ones on an operational tour, you can go days and even weeks without getting a chance to phone home. Here I was in the same country, a few hours’ drive away from my wife and because of the job I do, I couldn’t talk openly on the phone or give Lucy and my family a straight answer.
Sometimes it felt like I was renting my role as a dad and a husband, instead of fully owning it. I wanted to be the best I could be, I wanted to inspire my family and be a strong supportive pillar for Lucy, but here I was again, choosing my team over my family. I hated myself for it.
Swallow it Tom, Lucy will detect the stressors in your voice if you don’t get a grip. Take a second to compose yourself and for fuck’s sake don’t tell her you were hurt at a football stadium!
‘Sorry, just went under a tunnel. No idea yet, I’m hoping I’ll be back in the morning for breakfast. It’s overrun here. I’m really sorry, Lucy.’
Working away, intending to get home and not actually managing to do it, is normal in our life. I was lucky because Lucy understood this world already. She knew I needed stability and although she could tell something really wasn’t right, she didn’t push it. We ended the call on a happy note and I spent the remainder of the journey feeling guilty about my pathetic attempt to be the husband and father I’d always said to myself I should be.
As the team finally made it back into London, we started to shout our positions up. We’d already been given a starting point of Maze Hill in Greenwich.
It was gone midnight and the roads were quiet. This was either going to be a sit and wait job until the next team came in to take over or an incredibly busy night. You never can tell with surveillance operations, particularly with Russian and Chinese jobs. With extremists, if the target or group of targets came out into the open early on in our deployment, we knew we had a good chance of being busy all day and night. People are creatures of habit, which is easy to take advantage of. But Russian intelligence operators are as highly trained as we are, so they know to avoid the very things we are looking for.
‘Team Leader from Base, ready for quick update on Operation GIGANTIC?’
‘Yes yes, everyone is in the area now.’
‘Roger. Green Team, thank you for sticking with this. As you know, the other teams are out on the ground for this operation too. MAGENTA STOAT is expected to meet LAST DAWN again very soon. Although we don’t have a specific date or time, intelligence we have indicates they are going to do another dummy handover in the coming hours in the area of Greenwich Park.
‘We need video and imagery of MAGENTA STOAT and anyone connected to him so we can identify how they might be attempting to do a dead drop. It’s our intention to let them go as far as possible with the attempt to gain access to our communications and intercept it at the last minute with our own code.’
Another reason I love British intelligence. Other countries would react completely differently to a hostile attack on the secret communications of their intelligence agencies. The Americans would likely stop the threat as soon as they became aware and double the amount of their own operations in the hostile country. The Israelis would likely go on a very lethal offensive. Other powers might bring it up in the political arena; one or two might use it as a precursor to war.
Our plan (so far at least) was to intercept the device they would likely use to quietly observe our communications and replace the access they have with our own code, giving us a door into their own communications network while removing the route into ours. In short, quietly but brutally saying to the Russians, Nice try, but now you’ve given us the last secrets you ever had.
The briefing officer concluded with a few admin points about our expected handover times to the next team, and then Graeme took control.
‘Stations from Team Leader, we don’t have a solid fix on MAGENTA STOAT yet. What I’d like is to hedge our bets – have half of the team deployed around Greenwich Park and the rest in the vehicles.’
I would have loved to know where the intelligence for MAGENTA STOAT was coming from. I assumed it was probably G Branch or the intelligence officers on the Russian desk, as the teams out on the ground were only a small part of a very large operation. There were hundreds of people, not just within MI5 but in MI6, GCHQ and our allied agencies all around the world, who were potentially feeding into this one operation, whether they knew the full scale of it or not.
When Graeme asked for people to deploy on foot it was a mad rush for some of us to get out on the ground. There’s nothing wrong with staying in your vehicle as an operator. In fact, sometimes it’s harder to live your cover staying inside your vehicle because in the wrong circumstances it stands out a mile, but I always preferred to be out on foot. For me at least, it was where the fight was.
‘The call signs getting positions out on foot, can you look to get a long-term position please. Team Leader out.’
Graeme was probably one of the best team leaders around, he didn’t micro-manage because he knew he didn’t have to. Give him another ten years and he’d be a group leader like Derek. After that, who knows.
As I walked away from my car carrying a sports-style draw-string bag containing a different coloured hoody and my video camera, I already knew the position I was going to try and take up on the south-east corner of Greenwich Park. Before I got out I’d done a quick map study of the area, looking for obvious landmarks and easy travel routes. The things you’d look for as a foreign intelligence officer in a hostile country. The things the Russians would be looking for.
I always remembered something Ian Grey told me as a fresh-faced member of the Special Operations Group that MI5 were in charge of in Northern Ireland. He was mentoring me, although at the time I didn’t really know it, shaping how I should think and operate. ‘Tom, the only way to truly defeat hostile forces is to think like them. Understand what they look at, realize where their strengths lie and how they can exploit our weaknesses.’
From my map study I could see that this whole area had a lot of visual ‘lock-ons’, the Royal Observatory building in the middle of the park being the most obvious. There were also tennis courts, a cafe and the large flower garden. But they had already done a dummy run inside a park; if the intelligence was pointing at them doing another one then it was highly likely the handover of any equipment or information would be in a park of some sorts, but if I was MAGENTA STOAT I would want to test the exit routes.
Walking to my chosen spot, under the darkness the thick midnight cloud cover was giving me, I could just see the five-way road junction on the corner of the park with a very obvious octagonal-shaped building right next to the road. Visual features like this are extremely unlikely to change and very easy to locate.
My plan was really simple: get inside the yard just before the junction, find a place to tuck myself away and let the camera start rolling. There were enough of us here to cover the whole park, despite its size and the trees that tried to obscure our view. The vehicle crews would be positioned further out so it didn’t make the
area seem red hot when the Russians did turn up.
Continuing to walk down a path that followed the perimeter wall of the small commercial area, I looked for a way into the yard. The main access point would presumably be a gate of some sort – vaulting it would be too noisy and in any case it was likely to have a security camera positioned on it. A quick look over my shoulder confirmed I was still alone on the street. I edged over to the left-hand side of the pavement to give myself a better run-up and exploded towards the wall on the right. As I used the grip of my trainers to propel me up high enough to grip the top of the wall with my fingers, I was instantly reminded of army assault courses during basic training. I’m not the world’s tallest person, so I needed to rely on my speed and light frame to spring up.
A split second later I was on the wall, chest flat against the top to avoid creating a big dodgy silhouette. Spotting my landing point below me, I swung my legs down on the other side, lowering myself as quietly as I could. The smell of manure and animal piss instantly hit me.
This place was obviously connected to the park in some way, but to be honest I didn’t care what sort of site this was, it was quiet and as long as I stuck to the edges of the walled compound I was fairly sure I could get set up in a good position without being seen. And as long as I got out before first light no one would ever know I was there.
‘Stations from Team Leader, just had comms from Blue Team Leader. They have LAST DAWN with MAGENTA STOAT towards this area now, approaching from the east. If they come to the park have we got enough in position to take control of them both?’
Fuck, this was happening quicker than I thought. I had to get high, but the walls were completely solid and I couldn’t climb a tree as it would compromise the whole operation if I was seen. I spotted a partially derelict brick storage building with missing roof tiles. If I could get into the roof space, I could look out onto the corner of the park. God, I hope this is going to work!
