A Very British Ending (Catesby Series)

by Edward Wilson

  ‘The sooner we act the better,’ said the colonel.

  ‘May I remind all of you,’ said the general, ‘that the purpose of this meeting is only to discuss contingency plans.’ The general smiled. ‘For events that will probably never happen. The last thing we want is rumours about a military coup. If you hear such rumours, dismiss them as nonsense and utter drivel. But may I also remind you that your oath of loyalty is to the Crown, not to the prime minister of the day.’

  The formal part of the meeting went on for another hour. Afterwards, the assembled officers availed themselves of the general’s hospitality. As the drink flowed, tongues loosened. The captain from the Intelligence Corps wasn’t particularly happy with the tone of what he heard.

  Pimlico, London: 25 January 1974

  It was an odd letter. Anonymous letters are usually odd – if not totally mad or just plain weird. Every few months Catesby got one from a nun urging him to discover love and forgiveness. Perhaps he was being too harsh on the nun and should have taken her advice. This most recent letter was a bit weird, but also oddly well informed and rational too – and had a postmark suspiciously near the Intelligence Corps depot at Templer Barracks in Kent. In addition to the postmark, the sender further botched his attempt at anonymity by writing in longhand. Or was it, thought Catesby, a double bluff? It was a difficult time and no one trusted anyone. Madness was in the air.

  Dear Mr Catesby,

  We’ve never met, but I know who you are through my job and via my access to JIC minutes.

  I recently attended a meeting where last month’s troop deployments at Heathrow were discussed. No mention was made of the terrorist threat or the SAM missiles that were cited in the press as the reason for the deployment. Normally, someone in my job would have been informed of the intelligence sources behind such a threat. But I have seen or heard nothing. In fact, the mood at the meeting suggested that whether the terrorist threat was true or false was totally irrelevant. I am also concerned about several senior military officers who seem to have political agendas. My next assignment is Northern Ireland. The squaddies call it ‘the Emerald Toilet’ – not an attitude that will gain the support of the local people. I’ll let you know what’s happening.

  Stay cool, Mr Catesby, OBE. Who knows what you really think and who you really are?

  Give peace a chance.

  Best wishes,

  Captain Zero

  PS: Have you heard about the internment camps on the Scottish islands?

  Catesby put the letter aside. He was sure it was genuine – and that Captain Zero was a lot more sane than many of his colleagues. Zero was also totally correct about the fact that there was no intelligence about terrorists equipped with anti-aircraft missiles. Catesby had already checked out the press report that Redeye missiles had gone missing from the Belgian Army base at Düren. The base was home to the Belgian Army’s 13th Missile Wing, but most of the security was provided by the Americans. The US Army had a much larger base, the Fifth Artillery Group, next to the Belgians, which was equipped with nuclear weapons.

  Part of the intelligence op was open, routine and straightforward. Using a NATO secure voice scrambler, Catesby telephoned the Belgian base commander who was a French speaking Walloon. They chatted amicably in French as the Belgian officer assured Catesby that no Redeyes were missing – and Catesby reassured him that it was just a routine call. Catesby then made a similar secure voice call to the American officer in charge of security at Duren. The American assured Catesby that the press reports were ‘undiluted bullshit’ and that, otherwise, he, the American, would be ‘hanging upside down by his balls in Fort Leavenworth Prison’. But, realised Catesby, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

  The verification part of the op was a Catesby special. He sent in a team of spivs, pimps and lonely people looking for sex with young men. The soldiers at Düren were bored out of their minds and looking for diversion. The drink and the sex provided it. The booze and the loneliness certainly loosened tongues, but there wasn’t the faintest squeak of a rumour about missing Redeye missiles. The press reports were not just the attempts of a journalist trying to juice up his copy with rumour. No, the press reports were calculated disinfo – deliberate lies fed to the media. But by whom?

  Century House, Lambeth, London: 4 February 1974

  The news left Catesby stunned and angry. A meeting had been convened in Henry Bone’s office to discuss what had happened the previous midnight and in what ways it might affect SIS. Strictly speaking, it was a criminal act that had occurred on the British mainland and as such was a matter for the police and the Security Service.

  Catesby picked up the newspaper and stared again at the headline: Soldiers and Children Killed by Coach Bomb. He then looked again at the hastily written confidential report, which differed little from the news coverage. A bomb had exploded on a coach that was ce passengers were off-duty soldiers and their families returning from weekend leave. The most sickening fact was that an entire family had been wiped out: a soldier and wife of twenty-three and their two boys aged five and three. Seven other soldiers had died and bodies and body parts had been scattered along 250 yards of the M62.

  ‘How, William,’ said Bone, ‘does this event tie in with your theories of disinformation and agents provocateur?’

  ‘It doesn’t tie in at all. It is clearly an IRA atrocity.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I fear the military and the Security Service will use it to justify their own actions – a perfect marriage of tragedy and cynicism.’

  The only other person at the meeting was the SIS officer in charge of liaising with the Security Service.

  ‘It will,’ said the liaison officer, ‘undermine the role of SIS in Northern Ireland. The Security Service will blame us for an intelligence failure and for not being sufficiently ruthless.’

  Whether or not, thought Catesby, SIS should be operating in Northern Ireland at all was a good question. As part of the UK, the province should be out of bounds for an intelligence service limited by statute to operating outside the UK. But boundaries were being fudged.

  ‘And,’ said Catesby, ‘they’ll use this to bash the trade unions as well. They’ll say the soldiers had to travel by coach because the railway workers were on strike. Any excuse for it, any excuse.’

  ‘Any excuse for what?’ said Bone.

  Catesby was reluctant to say it in the presence of another SIS officer, but the whispers and rumours had been rife for some time. ‘Any excuse for a military coup.’

  Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall, London: 6 February 1974

  There had been a family argument the previous evening that had left Catesby unsettled and not in the mood for what was going to be a very tense JIC. He and Frances were still living apart, but from time to time they met for supper with one or both of the stepchildren. On this occasion, there was only the daughter. She teased Catesby about his bowler hat and suit – and suggested that he buy a pair of flares. Catesby hated flares – and replied that he would rather ‘eat his lower colon raw than wear flares’. For some reason this got Frances going. She told him not to use such language in front of the children. Catesby replied by saying: ‘They are no longer children. They are twenty-eight years old.’ Then added, ‘And lower colon is not a swear word. If you want me to use a fucking swear word I’ll use a fucking swear word.’

  The daughter found it all amusing, but Frances rounded on him.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘do you always need to shock and show off? You’re fifty years old, nearly fifty-one, and still haven’t grown up.’

  ‘Shall we compare payslips? My immaturity doesn’t seem to have affected my career.’ Catesby’s grade in SIS was three civil service levels higher than Frances’s in the Security Service and he didn’t mind rubbing it in.

  Frances smiled with a steely glint. ‘It hasn’t affected your career yet. I hope you get a haircut before the JIC meeting.’

  ‘I think,’ said the daughter, ‘you should gro
w your hair even longer – and do get a pair of flares.’

  ‘I’m really hungry,’ said Catesby with a benign smile. ‘I love you both. Let’s give peace a chance.’

  Frances had left a lot unsaid. Her job at Five and the vicious infighting swirling around her was taking its toll. Her marriage to Catesby, even though they didn’t live together, put her under constant scrutiny – as did the radicalism of her children. Her daughter was an acclaimed architect, but one who lived in a squat and was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Her son was a barrister who specialised in controversial human rights cases. He hadn’t joined the CP, but often bought the Morning Star. It flustered judges when they saw the newspaper scattered among his legal briefs. Although Frances never made the accusation directly, she suspected that Catesby’s influence might have helped radicalise her children. Catesby would always reply that young people should be taught to stand up to bullies – and the JIC meeting was going to be a case in point.

  The M62 coach bombing was too recent to be included as an agenda item. Instead, the first item on the agenda was ‘Heathrow Deployment and Evaluation’, but the most contentious was ‘FLUENCY: Report and Evaluation’.

  Catesby hated FLUENCY with a passion. It was an interagency working party that had been set up to investigate allegations that the UK’s intelligence and security services had been penetrated by the KGB. FLUENCY had quickly turned into a paranoid witch-hunt. Catesby knew two FLUENCY victims who had been hounded to suicide. Another, who had since retired and died, was the very head of MI5 himself. The allegations were pure venom intended to destroy, and were largely based on the director having signed a chit to look at a file. According to EMPUSA, a copy of the file ended up in Moscow. Anyone, thought Catesby, who was going to copy a file to send to Moscow Central would never be so stupid as to sign a chit for the file.

  Catesby had decided to keep quiet on the Heathrow item unless he was asked questions. He had already prompted the number cruncher from Treasury with some useful lines of enquiry that he might pursue. As the meeting began, Catesby noticed that the Chief of Defence Intelligence had sent his apologies and was represented instead by his deputy. Discretion is indeed the better part of valour. Catesby thought the colonel standing in for his boss would be out of his depth. The soldier began by reading a report justifying the Heathrow deployment. ‘The decision was made with the highest possible level of certainty following an exhaustive review of intelligence reports plus diplomatic and open sources.’

  Catesby smiled. How easy it would be to chop the colonel’s report to shreds. ‘Diplomatic sources’ were a euphemism for chitchat that you half-heard at a drunken embassy party. And ‘open source intelligence’ is what you get from reading newspapers. And it’s easy to find what you want. Planting false stories and then harvesting them as truth is one of the best ploys in the trade. Basically, intelligence officers give off-the-record anonymous briefings to tame journalists. The briefings are often full of disinfo and smears. When the information, secretly provided by the intelligence officers, is turned into printed news or broadcasts, the intelligence agencies than glean the news reports as ‘open source intelligence’ which support the suspicions that the intelligence officers fed to the press in the first place. Another gambit is to covertly feed disinfo to double agents and defectors and have them playback the disinfo in ‘official’ debriefs to yourself and to other intelligence agencies.

  The colonel concluded, ‘…a clear pattern of terrorist threat and activity has therefore been established.’

  The Treasury member looked at Sir Maurice, the head of SIS. Maurice, bespectacled and plump, looked more inoffensive than he was. Underneath the round layers, he was hard and sharp.

  ‘What intelligence,’ said the Treasury member, ‘did SIS have about the likelihood of terrorist anti-aircraft missile attacks at Heathrow Airport?’

  ‘No more than normal,’ said Sir Maurice, ‘which is to say nothing specific. There is a possibility that SAM-7 missiles may have fallen into terrorist hands, but we have no firm intelligence anything like that has happened.’

  ‘Did not Defence Intelligence share their information about a threat of terrorist attacks with SIS?’

  Sir Maurice’s eyes crinkled behind his glasses. ‘Yes, we received their intelligence reports – just after midnight on the day of the Army deployment to Heathrow.’

  ‘How would you describe those reports?’

  ‘There’s nothing I have to add to the statement, which was just relayed to us, from the Chief of the Intelligence Staff.’

  There were sighs and a shuffle of feet. The Permanent Secretary to the Civil Service, the one they nicknamed ‘Deputy Prime Minister’, cleared his throat and shifted his bulk.

  The colonel came in first. ‘The armoured units that went to Heathrow are a rapid reaction force – and the essence of rapid reaction is just that. With all respect to our colleagues from SIS, military intelligence is a different animal. Military intelligence serves the rapidly shifting contingencies of the battlefield. A commander in the field does not have the luxury of waiting for raw intelligence to be processed, analysed and evaluated before acting.’

  The colonel nodded at Sir Maurice. ‘Nor can we wait for feedback, however considered and valuable, from our intelligence colleagues in other agencies. We perceive a suspicious shape in the fog, metaphorically of course, and react to deter a possible threat. We will never know for sure, but our presence at Heathrow may have saved lives.’

  Catesby realised that he had been wrong about the colonel. He wasn’t out of his depth – and was probably doing a better job than his boss would have. But there was also something sinister and too cocky in his manner. Catesby could imagine him on a BBC bulletin after normal broadcasting had been suspended.

  Sir Maurice smiled bleakly. ‘SIS face the same dilemma that stifled religious sceptics through the centuries. We cannot prove a negative. Just as a Renaissance sceptic, walking a tightrope between rationality and death by burning at the stake, could not offer definitive proof that the supernatural did not exist, we cannot prove that a terrorist armed with an anti-aircraft missile – or an atom bomb – does not exist. But we do have to operate within the limitations of budget and staffing – and, therefore, have to evaluate levels of risk with the detached professionalism of a triage doctor at a motorway pile-up.’

  The man from Treasury nodded approval.

  The Permanent Secretary didn’t seem pleased. ‘Terrorists are not imaginary demons dancing on the head of a pin. Monday’s coach bombing was bloody and real. And last month’s bomb attacks at Madame Tussauds and the Boat Show were just as real. We are a country facing a serious crisis. I fully endorse the measures taken by the Army – and hope they go much further.’

  The recent bomb attacks, as Catesby and everyone else around the table well knew, were the works of the IRA. But as he feared, the Troubles were being used as an excuse for security measures and spying that had nothing to do with Northern Ireland.

  The discussion of the Heathrow deployment droned on. Catesby closed his eyes and pretended to be listening intently, but was actually fantasising about a woman he desired and how nice it would be to disappear with her to a hotel with clean sheets. The Heathrow discussion ended with an agreement – largely cosmetic – on improved methods of intelligence sharing.

  As soon as the meeting passed on to the FLUENCY agenda item, Catesby was again fully alert and the adrenalin was flowing. There were three things to remember: no one believed anyone else; no one knew what the other one knew, and the war between Five and SIS was approaching fever pitch.

  There were two representatives from Five at the meeting: the DG and Ferret. The latter, like Catesby, was co-opted to JIC. The interesting thing was that the DG didn’t know all the secrets of Ferret and FLUENCY. But Sir Maurice and Catesby did know – and had decided to dance a carefully choreographed ballet around their rival service.

  The discussion began with the DG reminding JIC that FLUENCY was a
top secret committee set up ten years previously to investigate Soviet penetration of Britain’s security and intelligence services. The problem with FLUENCY, and the reason it was on the agenda, was its failure to catch a single mole. But, as Ferret would maintain, it depended on how you defined ‘catch’. He would claim that Soviet moles – including a former DG – had been caught and identified, but not prosecuted. And why not? Obviously, a cover-up instigated by other Soviet moles to protect their comrades. Madness beckoned. In Catesby’s view, FLUENCY was a dangerous and deadly American import concocted by FURIOSO – who was completely insane. And the person exploiting FURIOSO’s madness and orchestrating FLUENCY was the defector EMPUSA. But he couldn’t quite say that at JIC.

  After the Security Service DG had finished, Ferret began. He glanced hard at the JIC members from SIS and bowled the first ball. ‘FLUENCY will not succeed without the full and enthusiastic cooperation of other intelligence agencies – and that cooperation hasn’t always been forthcoming.’

  Catesby glanced at his own boss, ‘Should I answer that, Sir Maurice?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘One recurring complaint against us,’ said Catesby, ‘is our failure to publish and circulate FLUENCY conclusions in my section and others. May I remind JIC, that FLUENCY has no formal or statutory status. It is an informal working party that does not have the power to issue instructions, but only to make recommendations.’ Catesby paused. He could see that Ferret was boiling.

  ‘And you’ve consistently ignored those recommendations.’