Intelligence is broadly described as having four main phases: raw intelligence is first gathered or collected by a variety of means and technologies, then converted or collated into a form useable by analysts. It is then disseminated to the right people at the right time, and finally put to use – or, as we used to joke, misuse – by decision makers. In the army intelligence is used to enhance what military analysts, with their characteristic love of terminology incomprehensible to ordinary people, call battlespace visualisation.
The vocabulary of the Firm is different. I never once hear the words secret or agent. Raw intelligence is used to produce varying grades of CX – finely sifted intelligence reports – for the top feeders in the intelligence food chain. I never find out why it’s called CX, or why intelligence from the Security Service, better known as MI5 and whose members Seethrough calls the River Rats, is called FX. They sound like types of nerve gas to me.
Since its area of specialisation is the use of human assets, the Firm’s officers engage in four parallel tasks: targeting, cultivating, recruiting and then running their assets. Those in the know are said to be indoctrinated; Seethrough’s philosophy is to keep the number of people indoctrinated into an operation to a minimum, and is emphatic that I discuss the material he’s about to show me with no one but himself unless specifically instructed otherwise. My questions, he said, will go to him. My ideas will go to him, and my contact reports will go to him. I’m to write nothing down.
‘This one’s at the request of the Americans,’ he says, opening the uppermost file. ‘Provisional code name is Elixir.’ He pushes the opened file towards me with a laminated companion list of commonly used acronyms and code words with their explanations – from Actor, meaning the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, to Zulu, meaning Greenwich Mean Time. The contents of the file are divided into several sections, which we examine in turn.
The first is a description of three civilian airline crashes. Each plane has dropped out of the sky shortly after take-off, killing all on board. The three incidents have been briefly reported in the press, but none of the photographs I’m looking at has ever made it into the papers. They’re too gruesome. The debris from the first aircraft is strewn over a mile, along with the bodies of 200 passengers, many of whose charred and mutilated remains are still strapped into their seats. The second and third aircraft have crashed into water, and their wreckage has been gathered and secretly reassembled in long and dangerous recovery operations. Here too the passengers have been photographed as they were found, their bloated and limbless corpses still attached to their seats. In each case the accidents have been publicly blamed on engine failure, which official investigations have later confirmed. The most recent of them occurred only a few months ago.
‘Even the airlines don’t know this,’ says Seethrough, ‘but the culprit in all three is the same.’ He turns to another section in the file, and shows me a US Defense Department image of an FIM-92.
Better known by its common name: the Stinger missile.
‘Not a shred of doubt,’ he went on. ‘The Americans have verified it and we’ve double-checked at Fort Halstead. There’s a machine there that can identify the exact stock of explosive from a tiny fragment of wreckage. Stingers in every case.’
At the mention of Fort Halstead I think involuntarily of my strolls with the Baroness through the gardens of Chevening House, and I picture the incongruous-looking palm trees swaying above the rear porch. Fort Halstead, the secret research establishment labelled only as ‘works’ on ordinary maps, is over a mile away at the top of the hill that overlooks the village, but on a still day we could often hear the faint cry of the warning alarm, at the sound of which the Baroness’s finger would rise like a conductor’s in anticipation of the muffled thump of a subterranean explosion. Somewhere in the complex, more recently, white-coated technicians had identified residues of TNT from Stinger warheads, matching its chemical profile against a database of known explosive stocks.
‘Probably by spectrometric analysis of the isotopic ratios,’ I say because I know a thing or two about explosives.
‘Yes, quite,’ agrees Seethrough, looking up for a moment. ‘PTCP reckons they came through Iran but we don’t know for sure. And if you can’t stop the flow, you go back to the source.’
‘Afghanistan. Where we handed them out in the first place.’
‘To your old friends,’ he adds with a dark look.
‘Only some of them.’
‘Now they’re easy pickings for al-Qaeda, and you know what that means.’
‘Yes, I do. In Arabic it means base or capital or seat of operations. But the way you pronounce it, it sounds like al-qa’da, which means buttocks.’
‘I refer,’ says Seethrough, clearing his throat and choosing to overlook this impudence, ‘to the threat, not the etymology.’
The threat is an obvious one. If sufficient of the missiles are acquired by terrorists from Afghans willing to sell them, the potential for chaos and slaughter is impossible to contemplate. Governments will be held to ransom, says Seethrough. Anti-missile technologies are too costly to install on civilian airliners. The only solution is to recover the missiles themselves from the same people they were delivered to fifteen years earlier, when the Afghans were fighting the Soviets.
‘This is the update on the American buyback programmes,’ he says, turning the pages of the final section of the file. ‘There’ve been several initiatives, mostly relying on middlemen in Pakistan, and too many of the deals have come to nothing. Over the past couple of years they’ve had a final push and thrown a lot of cash around inside the country. Going rate is $100,000 apiece, sometimes more. In the north it’s been working quite well, where Massoud’s chaps have proved very willing. They get them across the border here.’ He points on a map of Afghanistan to the northern border with Uzbekistan. ‘But now that the Taliban control the rest of the country the Yanks haven’t got anyone they really trust who can move them. There’s a bloody great stash of Stingers but they can’t get them out. Somewhere down here.’ He points again to the map, north of Kandahar this time. ‘Too complicated. They need to be destroyed.’
‘Why can’t the Americans drop a bomb on them from a great height? They’re good at that,’ I say.
‘Too sensitive. The Paks won’t let them use their airspace for an offensive operation and the politics are too difficult. Imagine they hit the wrong target or the missiles are moved at the last minute. We need trusted eyes on the ground. There’s also a time factor. You’ve heard of bin Laden?’
‘Isn’t he wanted by the Americans for his role in financing the bombing of their embassies in Kenya and Tanzania?’
‘Yes. But now we’re hearing he’s looking for surface-to-air missiles. If he or his people get hold of the Stingers, God knows what he’ll try next. We’re asking you to go to Afghanistan and do the job yourself. Find a reason to be there, get a team together, verify the Stingers are where they say they are and blow the bloody things up so we can all go home.’
I don’t have to think too long. I feel a great sense of relief, in fact. The mission is a straightforward one. I have both the contacts and the know-how. I know how to move in and out of the country, and I know how to blow things up.
‘I think I can do that,’ I say.
‘Good,’ says Seethrough.
He leans back in his chair and runs his hands through his hair.
‘There’s a bit more,’ he says, then reaches for a different file, labelled TRODPINT. ‘Last month one of the Americans’ tribal int teams was approached by one of bin Laden’s chaps. Says he’s got top-grade time-sensitive CX on bin Laden’s plans and needs to get it to us. But he doesn’t identify himself and doesn’t show up for their next meet.’ He hands me a surveillance photograph taken in Afghanistan. It shows two dark-skinned heavily bearded men in conversation beside the roof of a car with a yellow plastic housing marked taxi in Persian letters. One wears a loose-fitting Afghan shalwar kameez, and the other an old army jacket.