by James Adams
Whitmore had already handled the battle to bring cruise missiles into Britain in the early 1980s. That had been a relatively small operation but one with high visibility and the MoD had formed committees, established secretariats and generally made the rest of Whitehall jealous of the prize and furious at the amount of extra work it generated. Whitmore was perfectly placed to seize the overseeing of the Tunnel with his background in defence, intelligence and the Cabinet Office, where he served during the Falklands war. He had successfully fought off bids from the Foreign Office and a less serious attempt by the parvenus at the Department of Transport.
His empire had grown as a result and he had relished the increase in power in the corridors of Whitehall and the clubs of St James’s. But all this manoeuvring had been predicated on maximizing peacetime advantage and not actually having to justify his role as supremo of Tunnel crisis management. Running exercises and running committees is one thing; chairing COBRA is quite another.
He was in a thoroughly bad mood as he took his seat in the centre of the rectangular table. Looking around, he nodded to Stella Rimington from Box, John Cassidy from the JOC, Sir Robin Butler from the Cabinet Office, Sir John Walsh from the Foreign Office, Geoff Dearth from SIS (Sir Colin McColl was on leave), Mike Williams from SB, John Witherow from S013 and representatives from Transport, the Environment and Treasury. Whitmore noticed that there was a chap lounging by the door whom he did not recognize. But he knew the type: Special Forces, here to pick up what intelligence he could to relay back to his masters. It always amazed him how they always seemed to hear about these meetings and quietly get a seat.
The room was crowded now, all the seats around the table taken. Whitmore cleared his throat to signal that the meeting was in session.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry you’ve had to be dragged in at such short notice but as you all will have heard, there is a crisis in the Tunnel.” He turned to his right to address Stella Rimington. “Perhaps I could ask Stella to open with a resume of what we know so far.”
Rimington glanced down at her notes which she had carefully written in pen in longhand on a plain white pad. “The attack took place just after nine this morning. The Tunnel control centre received a report of a fire. Contact was made with the driver who insisted that the train was being hijacked. However, the automatic emergency procedures took over and the trains evacuated the Tunnel leaving two carriages behind.
“A claim of responsibility was made to the PA at nine-fifty. This was in the name of the Provisional IRA and carried the usual code word. PA broadcast the message and that is what will be running in the Standard this afternoon and in the other papers in the morning.
“However, at 9.55 a second message was telephoned to the Foreign Office in fact to the Foreign Secretary’s private office — in the name of the Hong Kong Liberation Front. This stated that the IRA claim was a bluff and that they themselves were really responsible for the attack.
“That is what we know. The rest is what we think and what we can guess. First, we have never heard of the Hong Kong Liberation Front, so if it exists, we can assume it is a cover for something or somebody else. Second, we have no information that the IRA were planning an attack of this size. I am inclined to think it’s not them. They tend to go for high-value, low-risk targets. This is high value but very high risk and if they fail they would reckon on losing a large number of their best people. It just doesn’t seem their style.
“We have some other, incidental, intelligence that may support the Hong Kong theory. In the past few days we have picked up one of the major players in Chinese intelligence coming through Heathrow. We have also photographed Stanley Kung, the head of one of the Triads in Hong Kong, coming out of the Chinese military attaché building in Hampstead.
“The Chinese are here because they suspect that the Triads are going to carry out some kind of operation which will result in the British giving passports to Hong Kong residents, which they obviously want to prevent. It may be that this is the operation they have heard about.”
It is the convention that neither senior civil servants nor government ministers get briefed in detail on operations. They only get told the risks and the rewards, never anything about sources and methods. All those at the table knew the conventions, so there was no further probing. But Whitmore pressed harder.
“Do you have any information on the people in this country who are supposed to be involved?” he asked.
“Well, we do have something which may be of help,” Rimington replied. “Our Statics picked up some talk of a gentleman called Dai Choi who is apparently in this country in relation to this operation. And a man called Turnbull from the Hong Kong police has been seen going into the Chinese military attaché’s offices also. He met there with a senior figure from Chinese intelligence this morning. It’s possible he’s involved on the wrong side on this one.” She turned to Mike Williams from Special Branch. “He’s been helping you, hasn’t he, Mike?”
The question, so innocent in its phrasing, bared all the old wounds. Ever since Box began to take control of counter-terrorist operations in England from the Special Branch, old rivalries had become embarrassing sores. SB saw Box as a bunch of bureaucratic amateurs while MI5 viewed the SB as beer-swilling morons who were too stupid to catch any terrorists. As always in such rows, there was some truth on both sides but this had become lost in the sniping that had been going on since the takeover was announced. SB leaked every mistake by Box, added their own spin and watched the headlines. The Security Service had fewer contacts with the media and were less sophisticated in using them so they lost the public battles while struggling to control the Whitehall war. Now most of the SB Luddites had been fired and overall relations had improved, but still, for Stella, SB’s involvement with Turnbull was too good an opportunity to miss.
Mike Williams had always been embarrassed about his Yorkshire accent. Ever since he came to London twenty years earlier he had done his best to disguise what he still thought of as his hick origins. Once he had even toyed with taking elocution lessons but the terror of being exposed had stopped him. Instead he had tried to shorten the long vowels that gave him away. Most of the time he succeeded, but when he was excited, like now, he reverted to type. To these smooth bureaucrats he sounded faintly ridiculous but what he said got their attention.
“Bloody ‘ell,” he exclaimed. “Turnbull. Turnbull. You know,” he said, pointing at Rimington and then at Witherow. “A few days ago, that Customs boat out in the North Sea. The one that was attacked by those Chinamen. That was Turnbull. And Dai Choi too, now I come to think about it. Turnbull’s been working with the Met, not with us, Stella. I’ve seen a couple of reports. I read that they were intercepting a drugs shipment being brought in by this team from Hong Kong. The Customs people were killed trying to stop the shipment. I messaged Hong Kong about him and they gave him the all-clear. Said he’s got good connections on the Chinese side and is their best man on the Triads. Lost a son killed by them, apparently. This chap Dai Choi was involved and Turnbull’s become a bit obsessed. He sounds clean to me.”
“Well, maybe the ship he intercepted wasn’t drugs at all but something else. Perhaps it was guns or explosives for the Tunnel attack,” said Rimington.
“If I could just bring us back to centre stage for a moment,” interrupted Whitmore. “It seems we are agreed that the Hong Kong claim may be the right one. Do we know how many people are in the Tunnel? How many hostages or passengers?”
“We’re working on that right now, PUS,” said Bill Herman, the PUS at the Department of Transport. He was a florid man with a small pointed beard, not unlike that of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Inevitably he was known in the corridors as Herman the German or just The German. “All the carriages were full and judging by the average load there will be between 75 and 125 people in the Tunnel right now. We’ll have a complete breakdown once the passenger tickets are matched with the vehicles, which should be soon now.”
“Any
idea on terrorist numbers?” Whitmore asked.
“Not so far. And it’s going to be difficult for us to pin that down as they’ll have been travelling on different passports and under different names.”
“We’ve been doing a little work on that,” said Cassidy. In fact, as soon as the first PA message hit the screen the Special Forces cell had done nothing but model the attack, trying to understand how it might have been done, with how many people, using what equipment. It was the first step towards setting up a counter-terrorist operation. “By our reckoning they would have needed at least six to take the Tunnel out. Then they have set a deadline of three days so they’ve got to be prepared to guard the people and control the Tunnel working in shifts. We reckon that will need at least another six, making twelve in all.
“Of course, they might have killed the hostages by now, in which case our calculations might be a little off,” he added helpfully.
“Yes. Well, we’ll just have to work on the assumption that they’re not completely mad,” said Whitmore.
“There’s something else we need to consider, PUS,” said Witherow. “The French have got the train driver, a chap called Ritchie. The terrorists are holding his wife and kids. Apparently they chopped the finger off his little girl to force him to do what they want. They promised to release the family once the Tunnel was secure but there’s no sign of that happening. Kent police have moved some of their quick-reaction people into position and are keeping the house under observation.”
“They have no authority to move in, I hope?” Whitmore asked.
“Not at this stage,” replied Witherow. “From what the driver tells us, these are ruthless people and I think we should be prepared to go in and get the family out. I don’t think waiting will do much except result in them getting killed. They’ve already cut up the little girl and once the violence starts, it’s almost always a commitment to further bloodshed.”
“Does anyone disagree with that assessment?” Whitmore asked, looking around the table. There were only a few nods of acknowledgement. “Very well. I’ll advise my minister accordingly and let you know the result. Now what about the Tunnel itself,” he continued. “Do we sit this one out or go in?”
He turned towards Cassidy as the man with the military options. For John, the spotlight was unwelcome. He hated these political meetings where the sub-text was never revealed. Each of the people around this table had fiefdoms to defend, ambitions to satisfy and ministers to protect. Now they wanted a military appreciation where the enemy was unknown and the objective was unclear. It was a soldier’s nightmare. Better then to be completely honest.
“As you know, sir, the general policy in these matters is to wait it out,” he began. “But this one is time sensitive and if these characters are as ruthless as John suggests then we may have to move before the deadline runs out. Before I can do anything for you I need some hard information. Numbers involved, weapons, what counter-measures they might have employed, communications.” He shrugged apologetically. “Just about everything, really.
“I suggest that we mount a recce into the area and pick up what we can so that we can make a better judgment…I suppose there’s no chance that we might give these people what they want?”
The ball bounced in front of Walsh from the Foreign Office, who returned it smoothly. “We have no intention at this time of doing anything that might lead them to think negotiations are possible.”
So, Cassidy thought. The bastards are willing to do a deal if the price is right. Typical fucking FCO, always ready to compromise.
There was a brief lull in the conversation as the group dissected and digested Walsh’s statement. Each thought he or she knew exactly what was intended but no one was prepared to break cover and push him further on what exactly “at this time” meant.
Since Rimington had shifted responsibility for the attack away from the IRA, Whitmore had been mulling over what she had said, thinking about possibilities and opportunities. He remembered the meeting with her and Dickens a few days earlier and the humiliating performance his minister had given in Question Time. The IRA are running rings around us, and not for the bloody first time, he thought bitterly.
“But aren’t we missing a trick here?” he suggested tentatively. “As far as anyone knows, the IRA have claimed responsibility for this attack. That is the story that the press will write and it is the story the public will believe. Surely this is an opportunity for us. We can squeeze Adams and his friends so hard that the pips will squeak and then crack. In fact, we can do what we like and the public will ask us to do more.”
This could be the opportunity to apply the kind of pressure that’s needed to find the team operating here and put it out of business,” he added, warming to his theme. “With the gloves off, we can begin to make life pretty rough for our friends in the Provisional IRA.”
“I like it,” said Rimington, her enthusiasm clear. “We know that Adams has been having a tough time recently. The loss of his seat at Westminster has reduced his credibility. The fact that the team operating here has stayed at large for so long has strengthened the hand of the militants and Adams is getting worried that he’s going to be pushed aside. If we do this right, we might be able to drive a wedge between the politicos and the gunmen so that they’ll be too busy tearing each other’s throats out to worry about us.”
“Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves?” Mike Williams’s brogue cut through the civilized discussions. Two points. First, how can we be sure this is not PIRA? We have some pretty scanty information from Box, some intelligence from Hong Kong and not much else. All the security systems in the Tunnel were designed with the IRA in mind and now when something actually happens we just dismiss the possibility. For all we know the Hong Kong people could have done a deal with them so we could have not one but two problems on our hands.”
“We are, of course, still gathering our information and we continue to look at PIRA as a possibility,” Rimington interrupted. “But even if you’re right, doing what PUS suggests should not affect our policy towards the terrorists. If we find out more then we can change our emphasis as we go along.”
“What happens if the public find out they’ve been misled?” Mike Williams asked with the policeman’s concern for form and procedure.
“They won’t,” replied Whitmore. “But even if they do, the minutes will show that we have no clear idea who is carrying out the hijack. We are being prudent by pursuing all leads. Nobody could expect us to do any different.”
His hands spread open in front of him in a gesture of benediction and innocence which everyone understood and the minutes would never reflect.
“So, to sum up. I will consult about a rescue operation for the family of the train driver. We will do what we can to find out about what is going on in the Tunnel. We will explore the IRA angle.”
A sudden thought occurred to him.
“Surely we should bring this man Turnbull into the operation. He knows the Chinese, knows Hong Kong and apparently knows some of the people involved. Is there anyone else from outside who might help?”
Aside from the return volley, Walsh had been silent but now he saw a chance to make a modest contribution.
“Dame Mary Cheong is in town. She visited the Foreign Secretary yesterday and I know she plans to stay a few days. She would be invaluable with her contacts both in London and Hong Kong among the Chinese community.”
“Very well,” said Whitmore. “We have a plan. Let’s get to it.”
The Provisional IRA has no equivalent of COBRA. In one sense the organization is in a permanent state of crisis, so there is no need for a special management tool to deal with particular problems. There is also no real bureaucracy, thus the coordination is relatively simple even if on occasion the politics are labyrinthine in their complexity.
Adams heard about the attack on the Tunnel in his holiday caravan on the Cooley peninsula just over the border in the Irish Republic. Adams used to holiday in a suppo
rter’s cottage in the glens of Antrim north of Belfast but a death threat from the Protestants had sent him south.
He had installed a modest caravan near Dundalk, between Greenore and Carlingford. After the IRA shot a local farmer, Tom Oliver, Adams and all other Sinn Fein/IRA supporters were banned from the local pub. Despite the local enmity, Adams still enjoyed his private refuge. This was IRA country. They controlled it; even owned large chunks of it. Little happened around here without them knowing about it and the communities were sufficiently remote that strangers were always seen and reported. Adams was well defended and it was one of the few places in the world where he felt he could truly relax.
The caravan is in the yard of a farmer called Josie Donnelly and its side windows look out over the peninsula towards the Irish Sea. It is a beautiful spot with that lovely soft green behind, the sea immediately ahead and the Mountains of Mourne rising in the distance. Adams would spend hours walking along the beach, kicking the pebbles, occasionally spinning one into the sea and just thinking and reading.
He had come down with Eamon McCaughley and Frank Hartley, his two bodyguards, to get away from the pressure cooker of Belfast. The conversation with Gerry Kelly had depressed him. In fact, he had been depressed a great deal lately as he felt the struggle slipping away from him. He could recall with vivid resolution the late seventies when he was in control, the bullet and the ballot seemed to be working, the Sinn Fein vote was rising and he actually believed they could force the Brits out.
